in sending to the front some 10,000 men. He explained to his Western
friends that he had failed to fulfil their expectations better because
the neutral zone barred the extension of his movement into Thessaly.[8]
He had respected that zone until now; but now that the Allies gave him
a free hand over the sea, he saw no longer any reason why they should
restrain him on land. Therefore, while the agents from Macedonia
goaded the inhabitants to seek rest in apostacy and provoked incidents
supplying an excuse for intervention, the advocates of M. Venizelos in
Paris and London laboured to clear his way by publishing reports which
told how the people of Thessaly prayed for liberation from the yoke of
King Constantine,[9] and exhausted their ingenuity in endeavours to
show the Entente publics how to break faith with honour and decency, as
well as with advantage.

The victualling of the Allied army in Macedonia, always difficult, had
become distressingly precarious with its own growth and the growth of
the enemy's submarine activity. Were the Allies to go on transporting
food and fodder from distant lands across dangerous seas, with the rich
cornfields of Thessaly within short and safe reach of their trenches?
The seizure of the Thessalian granary, besides {181} helping to keep
the Allies in plenty, would help to reduce the Royalists to despair by
robbing them of the harvest to which they looked forward with strained
eyes and tightened belts. In this wise both military and political
problems could be solved by one masterly stroke.

In April, General Sarrail obtained from his Government the orders he
had been soliciting since January, to go to Thessaly and seize the
crops; only, as the offensive against the Bulgars deprived him of
adequate means for the moment, he decided to put off the stroke until
the middle of May.[10]

Alarmed by these sudden, though not wholly unexpected, developments,
King Constantine dismissed Professor Lambros, and had once more
recourse to M. Zaimis; hoping that this statesman, the only
non-Venizelist Greek whom the slander of Germanophilism had left
untouched, might prove able to placate the Allies. M. Zaimis, as in
all previous crises, so now obeyed the call and set himself to discover
some path out of the wood (2 May). On the one hand, he opened
negotiations with the Entente Ministers; on the other, he tried to
bring about a reconciliation with M. Venizelos--the King being
understood to be wil