The Toronto Daily Star
NOVEMBER 3, 1922
MURADLI, EASTERN THRACE.—As I write, the Greek troops are commencing their evacuation of Eastern Thrace. In their ill-fitting U.S. uniforms, they are trekking across the country, cavalry patrols out ahead, the soldiers marching sullenly but occasionally grinning at us as we pass their strung-out, straggling columns. They have cut all the telegraph wires behind them; you see them dangling from the poles like Maypole ribbons. They have abandoned their thatched huts, their camouflaged gun positions, their machine-gun nests, and all the heavily wired, strung-out, fortified ridges where they had planned to make a last stand against the Turks.
Heavy wheeled baggage carts drawn by muddy-flanked buffalo with slanted-back horns drag along the dusty road. Some soldiers lie on top of the mounds of baggage, while others goad the buffalo along. Ahead and behind the baggage carts are strung out the troops. This is the end of the great Greek military adventure.
Might-have-beens are a sad business and the end of Greek military power is sad enough as it is, but there is no blame for it to be given to the Greek common soldier. Even in the evacuation the Greek soldiers looked like good troops. There was a sturdy doggedness about them that would have meant a hard time for the Turk if Kemal’s army would have had to fight for Thrace instead of having it handed to them as a gift at Mudania.
Captain Wittal of the Indian cavalry, who was attached to the Greek army in Anatolia as an observer during the Greek war with Kemal, told me the inside story of the intrigue that led to the breakdown of the Greek army in Asia Minor.
“The Greek soldiers were first-class fighting men,” Captain Wittal said. “They were well officered by men who had served with the British and French at Salonika and they outclassed the Kemalist army. I believe they would have captured Angora and ended the war if they had not been betrayed.
“When Constantine came into power all the officers of the army in the field were suddenly scrapped, from the commander-in-chief down to platoon commanders. These officers had many of them been promoted from the ranks, were good soldiers and splendid leaders. They were removed and their places filled with new officers of the Tino [Constantine] party, most of whom had spent the war in Switzerland or Germany and had never heard a shot fired. That caused a complete breakdown of the army and was responsible for the Greek defeat.”
Captain Wittal told me how artillery officers who had no experience at all took over the command of batteries and massacred their own infantry. He told about infantry officers who used powder, face powder not gun-powder, and rouge, and about staff work which was criminal in its ignorance and negligence.
“In one show in Anatolia,” Wittal said, “the Greek infantry were doing an absolutely magnificent attack and their artillery was doing them in. Major Johnson [the other British observer who later acted as liaison officer with the press at Constantinople] is a gunner, you know. He’s a fine gunner too. Well, Major Johnson cried at what those gunners were doing to their infantry. He was wild to take over the artillery. But he couldn’t do a thing. We had orders to preserve strict neutrality—and he couldn’t do a thing.”
That is the story of the Greek army’s betrayal by King Constantine. And that is the reason the revolution in Athens was not just a fake as many people have claimed. It was the rising of an army that had been betrayed against the man who had betrayed it.
The old Venizelist officers came back after the revolution and reorganized the army in Eastern Thrace. Greece looked on Thrace as a Marne where she must fight and make a final stand or perish. Troops were rushed in. Everybody was at a white heat. Then the Allies at Mudania handed Eastern Thrace over to the Turk and gave the Greek army three days to start getting out.
The army waited, not believing that their government would sign the Mudania convention, but it did, and the army, being soldiers, are getting out.
All day I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers hiking along the trails across the brown, rolling, barren Thracian countryside. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.