Germany would have proceeded to deeds without wasting words--beyond a casual "Necessity knows no law." But nations fighting for noble ideals could not imitate Germany's cynicism. A case had to be made out to {80} justify coercion. It was. Greece did not really wish to remain neutral. Misled by a Germanophile Court, she only waited for a chance of joining the enemy--of stabbing the Allies in the back. When this amazing theory--widely popularized by the French and English Press--was hinted to M. Rallis by "Our Special Correspondent," on 18 November, the Greek Minister could hardly credit his collocutor's sanity: "It is mad!" he cried out. "It is senseless to imagine such a thing--when you could have the guns of your fleet levelled on our cities!" The answer, however--an answer the conclusiveness of which a glance at the map is enough to demonstrate to the dimmest intelligence--fell upon deliberately deaf ears. The very journal which in one page recorded it, in another wrote: "Bulgaria has gone; Greece is trembling in the balance. Only a display of overwhelming force on our part can hold her steady and prevent the accession of another 500,000 men to the enemy's strength." That the publicists who argued thus and who, to give to their argument greater cogency, generously added to the Greek army some 200,000 men, were persuaded by their own reasoning, it is hard to believe without libelling human sense. Apart from the ocular refutation supplied by the map, what had Greece to gain by siding with the enemies of the Entente? That she would lose all her islands, have her coast towns pulverized and her population starved, was certain. What she could get in return, it needed a very robust imagination to suggest. The only countries at whose cost the Hellenic Kingdom could possibly compensate itself for these inevitable sacrifices were Turkey and Bulgaria; and those countries were Germany's allies. A moment's reflection raises a number of equally unanswerable questions: If the Greeks wanted to join Germany, why did they not do so when the Kaiser invited them at the very beginning of the War? Why did they not resist the landing of the Allies? Why did they not attack them when they had them at their mercy: 60,000 French and British, with the Germans and the Bulgars in front of them, and 150,000 Greeks between them and Salonica?[8] {81}