it had turned into a rout, with the bedraggled Greek forces hurriedly withdrawing to the coast. They evacuated Smyrna on 8 September and the ensuing Turkish occupation of the city was accompanied by a massacre of some 30,000 Greek and Armenian Christians, a great fire which only the Turkish and Jewish quarters survived, and the flight of more than a million Greek refugees. It was a national humiliation on an epic scale.
As the remnants of the Greek army regrouped on nearby Aegean islands, a handful of colonels took charge and called for revolutionary action to purge the national shame. Their leader was Nikolaos Plastiras, one of Andrea’s least friendly subordinates during the campaign.26 On 26 September an aeroplane flew over Athens demanding the resignation of the government and the abdication of King Constantine, a demand which Andrea advised his brother to accede to. Constantine was replaced by his eldest son, who ruled briefly and unhappily as King George II.
Andrea had been on leave in Athens as the disaster at Smyrna unfolded, and the British embassy reported that he had done his reputation with the Greek people no good by remaining ‘absent from his command in Epirus while such tragic events are happening to his country’.27 It was subsequently understood that Andrea would now accompany the king into exile, the British ambassador, Francis Lindley, warning that any delay would be ‘most dangerous to their lives’.28 However, when the king and queen slipped away from Greece in a grubby troopship bound for Palermo, Andrea was not with them.29
Instead he had returned to Corfu to be with Alice and the children on their return from Dickie’s wedding, the revolutionary government having assured him that, providing he resign his commission, he and his family would be safe at Mon Repos. They soon found themselves more or less under house arrest, however, their movements and conversations monitored by police, their post opened and scrutinized. As the hunt for scapegoats for the Greek defeat intensified, they all worried about what might happen to Andrea.30
In Athens, the new government set up a commission of inquiry into the disaster in Turkey, presided over by General Theodore Pangalos, Andrea’s old classmate from military college and now a ruthless staff officer ready to throw in his lot with the revolutionaries. The British embassy considered Pangalos ‘extraordinarily capable’ yet also ‘vindictive’, ‘a bad character’, ‘a fanatic’.31 Eight of those held responsible for the military debacle – including two former prime ministers, ministers of the interior, war and foreign affairs and two generals – were soon arrested and on 23 October it was announced that they would be tried by a special court martial.
Three days later one of the revolutionary colonels came to Corfu in a destroyer and took Andrea back to Athens with him so that he could give evidence at the court martial. Andrea was told that he would be away for two days but after two weeks he had still not returned. Alice received a smuggled pencil note from him to say that he was being kept ‘strictly alone’ and was probably now going to be accused rather than appear as a witness.32 He was being held under police guard at a private house and was allowed no visitors apart from his valet. All letters and parcels that arrived for him were confiscated and friends later reported that for three weeks ‘there was always the disagreeable feeling that death might come suddenly, perhaps in his quarters’.33 One old lady had sought to console him by sending a foie gras in aspic, but even that was hacked to pieces before he was allowed to eat it. His brother Christopher managed to smuggle in a letter on cigarette paper which he hid among other cigarettes in the valet’s case, and in reply he received ‘a short note, full of courage’ describing a conversation Andrea had just had with his former schoolfriend. Out of the blue, Pangalos had asked, ‘How many children have you?’ When Andrea told him, Pangalos shook his head and sighed, ‘Poor things, what a pity they will soon be orphans.’34
Meanwhile, the court martial of the other scapegoats began on 13 November 1922 in the parliament building in Athens, which was crammed with spectators, craning to catch a glimpse of the doomed men. They were all charged with high treason, for having ‘voluntarily and by design permitted the incursion of foreign troops into the territory of the kingdom’. In view of the very high probability that they would be shot, the British ambassador threatened to break off diplomatic relations if the revolutionaries failed to exercise clemency. At the Lausanne peace conference, the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, urged Venizelos, the former Greek prime minister, who was now an envoy for the revolutionary government, to do all he could to avert this ‘abominable crime’.35
Curzon also had very much in mind the grave danger now facing Andrea, first cousin of George V, and he would almost certainly have been made aware in their meetings of the discomfort that the king still felt over the way he had allowed expediency to prevent him from giving sanctuary to his other first cousin, the tsar, in 1918. While there seems to be no conclusive evidence that George V took the exceptional step of exercising the royal prerogative to order the rescue of Andrea – as has sometimes been suggested – the king nevertheless later expressed the view that his cousin’s life had been saved ‘through his [George V’s] personal action’.36 Whatever the precise nature of the king’s ‘personal action’, the result seems to have been that one Commander Gerald Talbot was soon on his way to Athens on a mission to reach an accord with the rebels.
This imperturbable forty-year-old naval officer, who had impressed Compton Mackenzie with his ‘great domed forehead’ and ‘the majestic stolidity of the demeanour it crowned’, had the crucial advantage of being a good friend of Venizelos.37 Talbot had got to know him well while posted to Athens between 1917 and 1920, ostensibly as British naval attaché although effectively a spy. Reputed to ‘know more about the tortuous channels of Greek politics than most Greek politicians’,38 Talbot was now part of Curzon’s delegation at Lausanne, with a specific brief to find out what his wily old Cretan friend was thinking.
When asked by Curzon what position he would be placed in, as the Greek government’s representative at Lausanne, if the threatened executions were carried out, Venizelos replied that he had already sent Talbot to Athens ‘to urge counsels of moderation on the revolutionary committee’.39 Talbot, though, was presumably answerable to the Foreign Office rather than Venizelos, and he himself later maintained that he had undertaken his mission on the instructions of Curzon’s adviser, Sir William Tyrrell.40
Wherever his orders came from, he was quickly on his way. When they got wind of this, the revolutionary government concluded the trial as quickly as possible, motivated partly by fears for their own safety if the defendants were not seen to be adequately punished.41 The court martial opened on Sunday 26 November and at midnight on the Monday it rose to consider its verdict, which was delivered at 6.30 the next morning. All eight were found guilty of high treason. Six were sentenced to death, two to life imprisonment. By the time Talbot arrived in Athens at noon that day, 28 November, the condemned men were already dead. Their impassivity was ‘absolute’, according to one account. One former prime minister stared attentively at the firing squad; the former foreign minister put on his monocle after wiping it with his handkerchief; a general stood to attention; none of the six agreed to have his eyes bandaged.42
Too late to save these wretched men, Talbot concentrated his efforts on Andrea, whose own court martial was due to begin on 30 November and whose position Lindley, the British ambassador, now deemed ‘much more dangerous’ since the executions.43 The ambassador left Athens that evening in accordance with his threat to break off diplomatic relations, but before going he met Talbot and they agreed that a show of force such as the presence of a British man-of-war would do more harm than good. Instead Lindley suggested that Talbot should consider the possibility of bribery.44
Talbot promptly went into a series of long and secret meetings with the rebel leaders, Colonel Plastiras and General Pangalos – by now minister of war. On 30 November the British counsellor was able to report that Talbot had obtained a promise from them ‘that Prince Andrew will not be executed but allowed to leave the country in the charge of Mr Talbot’. The
