THE NEW EUROPE
hyphenated Greeks, like the Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Streit (grandson of one of Otho's courtiers), the Athenian advocate, M. Hesselin, M. Schliemann (son of the great excavator), and others of foreign descent. The Queen, it is true, was a Prussian, but her relations with the Kaiser's court had not been uniformly friendly, and the young Greek princes were more at home in England. The King, half Dane, half Russian, had, indeed, astonished the world in 1913 by his speech to the Prussian Guard at Potsdam, in which he politely attributed to German example the successes of his troops in the Balkan Wars. But this "gaffe" was so transparently illogical as to be ridiculous. Like all soldiers, Feld-Marschal King Constantine could not but admire German military organisation, but it was unthinkable that a Dano-Russian prince, born and bred in Greece, could ever put this admiration above the acknowledged ties of interest and sentiment which indissolubly bound Greece to her historic friends.
Greece, for the first nine months of the war, offered, apparently, a poor prospect to the German propagandist. It was not till about May, 1915, that Baron Schenck, who had exchanged Krupp's for Wolff's wares as his stock-in-trade at Athens, was able substantially to influence Greek opinion. It is true that, on 13 June, the Greek electorate returned Venizelos to power by a large majority, but public opinion was already appreciably affected by the failure at the Dardanelles and the Russian retreats. For the first time the Greek king and Greek nation began to contemplate the probability of a final victory for the Central Powers. It was during the two months that elapsed between Venizelos's victory at the elections and his return to power in August that the Ghounaris Government, in collusion with the court and general staff, came to an understanding with Germany on the basis of the desertion of Serbia.
It was during these two months that the anti-Venizelist press first began to adopt a definitely neutral and vaguely anti-Entente attitude — beginning with tirades against Italy's and Russia's aims on Greek territory, and subsequently specialising in abuse of British "navalism." The explanation is two-fold. Ghounaris and his colleagues, repulsed by the Entente when they proposed — whether in good faith or not — an invasion of neutral Bulgaria, and subsequently defeated at the elections, saw
310
