Every programme has ignored Turkey except when the Entente has had opportunity to favour Greece.  The Greece of Venezelos was the ward of the Entente almost more than Poland itself.  Having participated in the War to a very small extent and with almost insignificant losses, she has, after the War, almost trebled her territory and almost doubled her population.  Turkey was put entirely, or almost so, outside Europe; Greece has taken almost everything.  Rejected was the idea of fixing the frontier on the Enos Medea line, and the frontier fixed at Ciatalgia; Constantinople was under the fire of the Greek artillery, and Constantinople was nominally the only city which remained to Turkey.  The Sanjak of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, was the true wealth of Turkey; it represented forty-five per cent. of the imports of the Turkish Empire.  Although the population of the whole vilayet of Audin and the majority of the Sanjak of Smyrna was Mussulman, Greece had the possession.  The whole of Thrace was assigned to Greece; Adrianople, a city sacred to Islam, which contains the tombs of the Caliphs, has passed to the Greeks.

The Entente, despite the resistance of some of the heads of governments, always yielded to the requests of Greece.  There was a sentiment of antipathy for the Turks and there was a sympathy for the Greeks:  there was the idea to put outside Europe all Mussulman dominion, and the remembrance of the old propaganda of Gladstone, and there were the threats of Wilson, who in one of his proposals desired exactly to put Turkey outside Europe.  But above all there was the personal work of Venezelos.  Every request, without being even examined thoroughly, was immediately justified by history, statistics, ethnography.  In any discussion he took care to solliciter doucement les textes as often the learned with few scruples do.  I have met few men in my career who united to an exalted patriotism such a profound ability as Venezelos.  Every time that, in a friendly way, I gave him counsels of moderation and showed him the necessity of limiting the requests of Greece, I never found a hard or intemperate spirit.  He knew how to ask and obtain, to profit by all the circumstances, to utilize all the resources better even than the professional diplomats.  In asking he always had the air of offering, and, obtaining, he appeared to be conceding something.  He had at the same time a supreme ability to obtain the maximum force with the minimum of means and a mobility of spirit almost surprising.

He saw no difficulty, convinced as he was, of erecting a Greek Empire on the remnants of Turkey.  Every time that doubts were expressed to him, or he was shown data which should have moderated the positions, he denied the most evident things, he recognized no danger, and saw no difficulty.  He affirmed always with absolute calm the certainty of success.  It was his opinion that the Balkan peninsula should be, in the north, under the action of the Serb-Croat-Slovene State and of Rumania, and in the south of Greece.  But Greece, having almost all the islands of the Aegean, a part of the territory of Turkey and all the ports in the Aegean, and having the Sanjak of Smyrna, should form a littoral Empire of the East and chase the Turks into the poorer districts of Anatolia.