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I9I7 
LAND & WATKR 
11 
Venizelos and His Army 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
The presence of M. Venizelos in London makes this article 
dealinf; with him and the men he had rallied round him, 
when his fortunes were at the lowest ebb very apropos. There 
can be no question that this Greek statesman is the most 
outstanding personality in the Balkan States to-day. He 
h%s been faithful to his patriotic ideals through terrible 
crises and History will speak of him as the greatest Greek 
in modern times. 
M VENIZELOS and the Venizelists hqd been 
Jiaving a bad time of it from the first, but the 
blackest hours of all were those towards the 
, end of last April, when King Constantine was 
still strong in Athens, and before the Allies at Salonika had 
found it practicable or expedient to welcome them to a full 
brotherhood of arms. It was during this " darkest-before 
the-dawn " period that I had my first meeting with M. 
Venizelos, a conventional half-hour s interview in the suburban 
village midway along the curve of Salonika Bay, where the 
Provisional Government had its Headquarters. 
I had just come from Athens, where I had found the Allied 
diplomats still smarting under the memories of their 
ignominious experiences following Constantine's spectacular 
:oup of the December preceding, and it was by no means the 
. least of these who had told me point-blank that he could 
not conceive how it would be possible that Salonika should 
be returned to Greece after the war. Of course, it was the 
Royalist Government that my distinguished friend had had 
in mind when he spoke, but there was not much to indicate 
at that time that the Greece of Constantine and his minions 
was not also going to be the Greece of after-the-war. 
It was with this state of things in mind that I mustered up 
courage and asked M. Venizelos offhand— remembering 
his well-known ambitions to found a Greater Greece, by 
extending Epirus north along the Adriatic and bringing the 
millions of Greeks of Asia Minor at least under the protection 
of the Government at Athens— if he felt confident of being 
able even to maintain the integrity of his country as it existed 
before the war. 
" Not unless those of us Greeks who have remained faithful 
to the cause of humanity and our honour are ultimately 
able to lend the Allies material help in a measure sufficient 
to counterbalance the harm which the action of the Royalists 
has caused them," was the prompt reply. " And by material 
help I mean military aid. We must fight, and fight, and keep 
on fightmg, for it is only with blood--with Greek blood that 
the stain upon Greek honour can be washed away. It is 
only our army that can save us, and that is why we have been 
so impatient of the delay there has been in equipping it and 
getting it to the Front. The one division we have in the 
trenches now, and the two others that are ready to go, are 
not enough, but they are all we have been able to raise so far. 
Thessaly is for us, and would give us two more divisions at 
least ; but the Allies have not yet seen fit to allow us to go 
there to fetch them" 
M. Venizelos spoke of a number of other things before I 
left him (notably of the extent to which the Russian Revolu- 
tion and the entry of America had helped him in his fight to 
save Greece), but it was plain that the problem uppermost in 
his mind was that of wiping out the score of the Allies against 
his country by giving them a substantial measure of assistance 
in the field. 
" Do not fail to visit our force on the sector before 
you leave the Balkans," was his parting injunction. " There 
may be a chance of seeing it in action before very long, and 
if you do you will need no further assurance of the way in 
which we shall make our honour white before our Allies and 
all the world." 
The Serbian and two or three other Armies have been worse 
off materially, but no national force since the outbreak 
of the war has been in so thoroughly an unenviable a position 
on every other score as was the Venizelos Army at this time. 
The Serbs and the Belgians had at least the knowledge that 
the confidence and the sympathy of the Allies were theirs. Also, 
they had chances to fight to their hearts' content. The Veni- 
zelists had scant measure of sympathy, and still less of con- 
fidence ; and when their first chance to fight was at last 
given them, they were only allowed to face the foe after 
elaborate precautions had been taken against everything from 
incompetence and cowardice on their part to open treachery. 
That this was the fault neither of themselves nor of the 
.\llies, and had only come about through the perfidy of a 
King to whom they no longer swore fealty, did not make the 
5hame of it any easier to bear for an army of spirited volun- 
teers who had risked their a,ll for a chance to wipe out the 
dishonour of their country. 
What for a while made it so difficult for the Allies to knsw 
what to do with the Vcnizclist army was the almost ridiculous 
ease with which, under the peculiar circumstances of its 
recruitment, it lent itself to spying purposes. All the Royalists 
or their German paymasters had to do to establish a spy in 
the Salonika area was to send over one of their Intelligence 
Officers in the guise of a deserter from the Greek army to 
that of Venizelos, and there he was. To send back information 
or even to return in person, across the but partially patrolled 
" Neutral Zone " was scarcely more difficult. 
A Most Trying Position 
How trying the situation of the Venizelists was, however, 
I had a chance to see one day when I happened to be at their 
Headquarters in connection with arrangements for my visit 
to the Greek sector of the Tront. Their troops had acquitted 
thenisclves with great credit in some gallantly carried-out 
raiding operations, which must have made it doubly hard for 
them to put up with a new restricNve order then promulgated 
by the Supreme Command as a further precaution against 
the teakage of information to the enemy. 
As I was about to take my departure, a copy of the new 
order was delivered to the Staff Officer with whom I had been 
conferring about my visit to the Front. He read it through 
slowly, his swarthy face flushing red with anger. 
" Have you heard of this ? " he asked, handing me the 
paper and controlling his voice with an effort. " No man or 
officer of our army is to cross the bridge without a special 
permit from General Headquarters. It is only the latest 
in the long series of humiliations wc have had to put up with. 
Just look at the way we stand. In Athens our names are 
posted as traitors who can be shot on sight. Here it isn't 
quite like that but — well (he raised his hand above his head 
and let it fall limply in a gesture of despair). All I can say 
is that the only officers of the Vcnizelist army to be envied 
are those whose names are recorded here (indicating a file at 
his elbow)." It was the death-list of a day's fighting. 
♦ « » * > ° ° 
Owing to the delay in issuing xny pass in Salonika. I did not 
arrive at Greek Headquarters until the evening of the day on 
which the big attack had taken place, and it was daybreak 
of the morning following before I was able to make my wky 
up to the advanced lines. The troops of Venizelos had taken 
all of their objectives and held them with great courage 
against such counter-attacks as the siu"prised Bnlgars were 
able to organise against them. They had been busy all night 
" reversing " the captured trenches in anticipation of a deter- 
mined attempt on the part of the reinforced enemy to retake 
them in the morr^ing. The hilly but well-metalled cart-road 
along which I cantered with an officer of the Greek Staff by 
the light of the waning moon, had been thronged all night 
with the siu-ging current of the battle traffic — afi up-flow of 
munition convoys and reinforcements and back-flow of 
wounded and prisoners — but I could not help remarking the 
comparative quiet and absence of confusion with which the 
cotnplex movement was carried on. 
" Somehow this does not seem like the transport of a new 
army just undergoing its baptism of fire," I said to my com- 
panion ; " I have seen thingsV)n the roads behind the Western 
Front in far worse messes than any of these little jams we 
have passed to-night These men arc as business-like as 
though they'd been at the game for years." 
" So they have," was the quiet reply. " Our army, as 
recruited so far. is a ne\v one only in name. The men who 
attacked yesterday were of the famous S Division, 
which fought all through the last two Balkan wars and gained 
no end of praise from all the foreign military attaches for 
its great mountain work. It was this division which scaled 
the steep range beyond Doiran and drove the Bulgars out of 
the Rupel Pass." 
"The S Division "—" Rupel' Pass!" Instantly I 
recallei how a British General, over on the S*^ruma a few 
days previously, had pointed out to mc a steep range of 
serried snow-capped mountains towering agaiast the sky-line 
to the north-west, and told me that the feat of the Greeks in' 
taking a division over it at a point where even the wary 
Bulgar had deemed it impossible, was one of the finest ex- 
ploits in the annals of mountain warfare, 
" I never saw troops go over with such eUm," said a young 
French Lieutenant, after the first engagement in which 
Venizelos' men had taken part. " Some of them were so eai.er 
