December 4, 1918

Even at this early stage of the diplomatic battle I have been drawn into the circle in which Venizelos, the Greek Premier, exercises his fascinating and, as many think, his dangerous influence. Last week he came to the Colonel, ostensibly to place before him some documents, very illuminating he thought, as to the actual conditions within the Reich. I was called in to test the translations and found that many of them were misleading. Sighing, the Greek leader said: “When you were studying at Heidelberg and Bonn, I was hiding from the Turkish zaptieh in the mountain caves of my native Crete. For months I never saw a book. What chance had I to study and to learn. What a handicap this is to my country.”

I consoled the great man by insisting that his years of guerilla warfare in the mountains had resulted in the reunion of Crete with Old Greece and that now “he was on the eve of achieving Greater Hellas, the dream of his people for centuries.”

[Eleutherios Venizelos, whose political fortunes rose and fell with sensational rapidity, bitterly opposed the pro-Bulgarian, pro-German sympathies of King Constantine. When that monarch was ousted in 1917, Venizelos formed a ministry and led Greece into the war on the Allied side. One of the most popular delegates to the Conference, he survived exile, death sentence, wars, and revolutions to die in 1936 still a controversial figure.]

When this was out of the way, the charming old buccaneer put his arm on my shoulder and said: “Alas, none of my staff knows German and I have come across an important volume in that language by a Herr Oppenheim. Some years ago he traveled in Asia Minor and he enumerates the purely Greek villages that he found there. His work is that of an impartial scientist and his researches were made to ascertain the truth, not for propaganda purposes. And now every night when my daily task is done with the aid of a French-German dictionary I dig out the facts which his travels have brought to light. Would you be so kind as to come to my apartment this evening and check up on the accuracy of the translations I am making under these difficult circumstances? ”

I went to his hotel in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe that night, and indeed the two following nights also found me busily engaged there. We extracted from the volume everything that was comforting to the Greek cause. We followed Oppenheim from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and along this path of empire his trail was dotted with the ruins of imperial cities which once were great and of vigorous Hellenic settlements that gave promise of a glorious renaissance. The Greek statesman was profuse in his thanks for my assistance but, as a matter of fact, the obligation, if any, was on my side. A few days later the resulting report, setting forth the extent and numbers of the Greek colonies in the disputed territory, was filed with the Supreme Council. In his compilation I thought that Venizelos stressed the Greek talking points and left out some information that was not helpful to his cause. But that was to be expected, and I have no doubt the members of the Council discounted it.

The charming Venizelos is greatly distressed at the present situation. He has most certainly the good will of all who know him, but is that really helpful? He enjoys the sympathy and the esteem of all the delegates and all the plenipotentiaries, but also they fear him because of his well-known and incontestable charm. Perhaps we shall all have to change our measure of success. Is charm as potent in securing results as nuisance values? This is the thought that is evidently uppermost in the mind of the great Greek as today he surveys the progress that has been made toward a Greater Rumania and the meager harvest that has been realized down to the present by himself and the advocates of a Greater Hellas. When the uncouth and beetle-browed Bratianu comes barging in, the plenipotentiaries seem to think that no price is too great to pay to get rid of the fellow.

But when Venizelos comes in, they say, “I must be very careful. This fellow can conjure a bird out of a tree.” And so they harden their hearts and turn a deaf ear to his pleas. In this instance at least nuisance value apparently does outweigh charm.