GREECE AND THE ALLIES, 1914-1922. By G. F. Abbott. (Methuen.
7s. 6d. net.) GREECE AND THE ALLIES, 1914-1922. By G. F. Abbott. (Methuen. 7s. 6d. net.)
Mr. G. F. Abbott, who is well acquainted with the Near East, has thought it worth while to state at length the case for ex-King Constantine during the War. One may admit that the Allies, differing among themselves and continually changing their minds, handled Greece very tactlessly and yet decline to believe that the Greek King was an honest neutral ; Mr. Abbott has not given, still less disproved, the well-known evidence of the King's bad faith, as in the case of Fort Rupel or the surrender of the Greek troops at Cavalla to the Germans. Mr. Abbott states the Greek Royalist view of M. Venizelos and his policy, and this part of his book will be new to many English readers. But Mr. Abbott errs, we think, in assuming that the Greek people had any settled preference for the King or the Minister. The recent revolution, overthrowing the King and restoring the Venizelists once more to power, suggests that Greek public opinion is even more unstable than that of most VVestern democracies. Mr. Abbott closes with some candid remarks on French policy in the Near East, where, he thinks,
" France pursues now the plan laid down by Louis XIV., con- tinued by Napoleon, fitfully carried on throughout the nineteenth century and facilitated by her installation in Syria—the equivalent of the German Drang nach Osten I a plan incompatible with the safety of the British Empire in the East."
We hope that Mr. Abbott is wrong in attributing such projects to the French Government, though it is true that M. Franklin- Bouillon and a few other Turcophile French politicians appear to cherish very ambitious and dangerous schemes in the Levant.
Previous page
