Constantine - King And Traitor by Vaka, Demetra - 1918

John Lane - The Bodley Head, 1918. 1st edition.. Hardback. Cloth, VG. xii+300pp+4pp publishers catalogue, b/w frontis, 30pp b/w plates, spine lettering dulled & cloth a little bumped & rubbed, page edges uncut, a nice copy. An account of a visit to Greece in 1917 by an American journalist of Ottoman Greek birth who wanted to find out the truth behind the Greek imbroglio at the end of the First World War. Vaka travelled to Greece thinking the Greek King had been maligned & that the Greek situation was not of his making, but the longer she stayed & the more she interviewed the King & his Ministers, the more she began to boubt his sincerity. She eventually managed to get General Dousmanis to admit that King Constantine was afraid of the Kaiser ( his brother in law ), and that before the war he had made an arrangement with Germany by which Greece was to share the spoils of a Europe under German dominon. Anti Constantine propaganda was rife at the time due to his insistence on Greece remaining neutral during the war & his opposition to affording the Allies assistance at Gallipoli.