Eyoub's orders to cross the frontier with his solid column of thirty
to forty thousand men, and march straight to Athens if the attacks
persisted another day, were peremptory, and there was no force or
dispositions of defense to prevent his triumphal movement. There were
no defensive works, for the jingo Greeks ridiculed the idea of needing
a defensive preparation against an invasion of the Turkish army, which
they were confident of annihilating ten to one. There was no lack of
personal courage on the part of the Greek population, but there was no
efficient organization even of the so-called regular army, and there
was really nothing to prevent a Turkish walk-over as far as the old
frontiers of Greece, and even there there were no earthworks.
The sequence was disgraceful and humiliating. I wrote at the time that
"The wounded are not yet all in the hospitals when the attacks on
Tricoupi for having ordered the demobilization already begin in the
Chamber and the press. His happy arrival at the moment of danger has
saved Greece from, a disaster which, now that it is averted, the
Greeks in general will never believe to have been so near, and will
not accept as a lesson." And for the trifling part I had taken in the
final negotiations I was afterwards insulted in the streets of Athens
as having "prevented the Greeks from marching to Constantinople." They
got their lesson years after, when they were far better prepared for
war than on this occasion.
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