The Greek Government had no choice but to carry on the conflict under enormous disadvantages. As France anticipated, with foreign credits cut off and a progressive fall in the exchange, the expense of maintaining a large army on a war footing proved too heavy for the National Exchequer. And that was not the worst. France, who since the Armistice had betrayed a keen jealousy of England's place in a part of the world in which she claims special rights, presently concluded a separate agreement with Turkey--an example in which she was followed by Italy--and gave the Turks her moral and material support in their struggle with the Greeks; while England, though refusing to reverse her policy in favour of their enemies, contented herself with giving the Greeks only a platonic encouragement, which they were unwise enough to take for more than it was worth.
Everyone knows the melancholy sequel: our unhappy "allies," left to their own exhausted resources, were driven from the Asiatic territories which in common prudence they should never have entered; and the overseas Empire which M. Venizelos had conjured up vanished in smoke.
The rout in Asia Minor had its repercussion in Greece. For nearly two years the people, though war-worn and on the edge of bankruptcy, bore the financial as they had borne the famine blockade, trusting that England would at any moment come forth to counter the vindictiveness of France, and sturdily resisted all the efforts of the Venizelist party to shake the stability of the Royalist regime: Constantine again appeared in their eyes as a victim of the Cretan's intrigues. But the loss of Ionia and the danger of the loss of Thrace; the horror and { 235} despair arising from the sack of Smyrna, whence shiploads of broken refugees fled to the Greek ports; all this, reinforced by an idea that the maintenance of the King on the throne prevented the effective expression of British friendship and his fall would remove French hostility, created conditions before which questions of personalities for once faded into insignificance, and put into the hands of M. Venizelos's partisans an irresistible lever.
On 26 September an army of 15,000 insurgent soldiers landed near Athens and demanded the abdication of the King. The loyal troops were ready to meet force by force. But the King, in order to avert a fratricidal struggle which would have dealt Greece the finishing stroke, forbade opposition and immediately abdicated, "happy," as he said, "that another opportunity has been given me to sacrifice myself once more for Greece." In fact, once more Constantine was made the scape-goat for disasters for which he was in no way responsible--disasters from which he would undoubtedly have saved his country, had he been allowed to pursue his own sober course.