This brings the relations of the Entente Powers with M. Gounaris's Government to an end. It is a strange record. We have, to begin with, the curious reception of his first offer--the whole Greek Army, the intervention of which might have turned the Gallipoli tragedy into a victory. Doubtless, there were reasons for declining so considerable a reinforcement. We know that, although Russia had modified her objection to Greek participation, she still regarded the presence of a large Greek force in European Turkey with disfavour; that the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was not agreeable to France; that the Allies could not at that time afford the military contingents stipulated by the Greek General Staff. There will be no disposition to underrate the complexities of the situation, or want of sympathy for those upon whom fell the task of finding a solution satisfactory to all the Powers concerned. But, though these complexities might be good reasons for not accepting the Gounaris offer, they were hardly reasons for not acknowledging it, even in the interest of ordinary courtesy. Then came the sterile pourparlers through Paris. Here, again, political difficulties explain without justifying the attitude of the Entente Powers. Their refusal of the guarantee demanded by Greece as an essential condition of her entry into the war was, of course, a natural result of their Bulgarian policy--a policy for which very little could be said. Time perhaps was, at the beginning of the War, when Bulgaria might have been won; for it is not necessary to adopt the Graeco-Servian view that she had from the first decided to join the enemies of the Entente and that no amount of reasonable concessions would have satisfied her ambition; the Bulgars are a practical people, and there was at Sofia a pro-Entente party which might have prevailed, if the Entente Powers had, without delay, defined the proposed concessions and proceeded to press Greece and Servia to make them--to expect from either {44} State a voluntary self-mutilation was to expect a miracle. By not doing so, by shilly-shallying at Athens, Nish, and Sofia, they only lost the confidence of Greeks and Serbs without gaining the confidence of the Bulgars, who could hardly take seriously proposals so vague in their formulation and so uncertain of their fulfilment. If, on the other hand, the Allies were unable to define the concessions or afraid to shock public opinion by forcing them upon Greece and Servia, then they ought to have dropped their hopeless scheme, without wasting valuable time, and worked on the lines of Graeco-Servian co-operation against Bulgaria. Instead, they squashed, as we saw, every attempt which the Greek General Staff made to that end. But it is not the only aberration with which history will charge our statesmen and diplomats.