ling to meet the Cretan half-way.

M. Venizelos, on his part, alarmed by the prospect of a _rapprochement_
between Athens and the Entente Powers, set himself, as on all similar
occasions, to impugn the Hellenic Government's sincerity. At a signal
from the Conductor, all the instruments of the orchestra broke into the
familiar chorus. The whole Press of France and England rang again with
calumny and fairy-tale. Out they came again in regular sequence and
with unvarying monotony: plots and secret letters, weird stories of
German intrigue, constant repetition of names compromised or
compromising; all ready, cut and dried, for burking any attempt at
accommodation that did not include the return and domination of the
Great Cretan.

It was maintained that the formation of a Government under M. Zaimis
was but a new artifice of King Constantine, adopted at the Kaiser's
suggestion, to temporize by ostensibly throwing over a few of his
Germanophile favourites. During more than five months he had contrived
{182} to checkmate the blockade by drawing on the reserves of food he
had laid up at his depots. Now those reserves were exhausted: he
needed the Thessalian corn to replenish his magazines, to feed and
increase his army, so that in the fullness of time he might bring it
out of the Peloponnesus against the Allies.[11]

Even more sinister were the motives which prompted the King's advances
to the Cretan. While holding out the right hand to M. Venizelos,
Constantine with the left aimed a dagger at his heart: a band of eleven
assassins had just been arrested at Salonica on a charge of conspiring
to murder him--to murder him in the very midst of his own and his
allies' military forces, and under circumstances which made detection
certain and escape impossible. Even thus: "their plan was to arrange a
banquet to which M. Venizelos would have been invited. _They are said_
to have confessed that they were sent from Athens to kill the Head of
the National Government and were promised 4,000 pounds for the murder."
[12]

Day by day it became increasingly clear that the question of Thessaly
formed only part of the larger question of Greece; that behind the
campaign for the crops lurked the conspiracy against the King. A
"radical solution" was demanded, on the ground that so long as he
reigned at Athens we could not consider Greece a friendly neutral. The
Greek organ of M. Venizelos in London now openly described the Cretan
as