The Allied blockade eventually renders the Greek king's position untenable.

In June 1917, when the British and French threaten to bombard Athens if Constantine remains, the king, passes his crown to his second son Alexander and leaves Greece on June 12, although he does not formally abdicate.

Venizelos, installed by the Allies as prime minister of a formally united but bitterly divided Greece, is now free to throw full Greek support behind the Allied cause.

Greece declares war on the Central Powers on June 27.

Venizélos naturally expects to reap the reward for his loyalty at the Paris Peace Conference.

Greece is permitted in May of 1919 to land troops in Smyrna (Izmir), the major port city in Asia Minor, with its large Greek population.

At the cost of splitting Greece, Venizelos had brought the kingdom into the war on the victorious side.

To justify the cost of this result and heal the wounds caused by the National Schism, he returns to the Megali Idea.

Venizelos goes to the Paris peace talks armed with the assurances he had received from the Allies during the war and focuses exclusively on territorial aggrandizement for Greece.

Venizelos shows all of his considerable diplomatic skills at the peace talks.

He woos the United States president, Woodrow Wilson, and Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Venizelos quickly offers the services of the Greek military as policing agents and as peacekeepers in occupied territory.

Foreign leaders are indebted to the wily Venizelos for this assistance, but the offer fosters domestic discontent.

The Greek armed forces have been mobilized almost continuously since 1912, and the nation is becoming war weary.

In addition, Venizelos neglects urgent domestic issues as he puts all of his energies into winning the peace talks.

He will eventually pay for this neglect.

Venizelos, dominating King Alexander and the Greek government, and having gained for the kingdom the territories of Smyrna and eastern and western Thrace from Turkey and Bulgaria, presents the twenty-seven-year-old monarch with the prospect of expanding Greece's frontiers farther into Anatolia.

Before Alexander is able to pursue that objective, however, he is bitten by a pet monkey and dies from blood poisoning on October 25, 1920, leaving the exiled Constantine as the only claimant to the throne.

King Constantine assumes personal command of the Greek army at Smyrna, where Dmitrios Gounaris, Venizelos’s replacement, has appointed inexperienced officers to senior commands.

The advancing Greeks meet little resistance, as the Turkish army manages an orderly retreat and avoids encirclement, but after the Turks halt the Greek advance for the first time at the Battle of Inönü on January 11, 1921, ...

The Greek army has met mostly with success through 1921, but Kemal has retreated skillfully to avoid major defeat.

Constantine himself has visited the front line, and his younger brother George remains there as a member of the high command.

However, Greece is now increasingly isolated from its wartime allies.

Britain and the United States urge caution and offer to mediate a solution.

France and Italy openly supply arms to the Turks.

When Britain and the United States withdraw loans to protest hostilities, Greece's cash resources, and soon ammunition and supplies, are seriously depleted.

Internally, the Greek army is fraught with divisions between Venizelists and royalists.

Five royalist politicians and the deranged commander of the Asia Minor forces are tried and executed on a charge of high treason after the “Trial of the Six” in Greece, although there is no evidence of deliberate treachery and their worst crime is incompetence.

The executions increase the ferocity of the rift between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, and the military becomes an independent political force.

The Plastiras government now turns to Venizelos to negotiate an acceptable peace with Turkey.

Venizelos, ending two years of a voluntary exile in Paris, assumes the leadership of the Greek delegation that negotiates the peace treaty with the Turks at Lausanne, Switzerland in January 1923.

The Greek public's disillusionment with the endless intrigues of the political world, which has been growing apace in the preceding years, is exacerbated when the news leaks that the main political blocs are secretly negotiating with the communists.

In this atmosphere, General Ioannis Metaxas emerges as a political force.

Metaxas, always a foe of Venizelos and a participant in several coup attempts, had been a minor character on the extreme right of the Greek political spectrum in the 1920s.

During that time, he had cultivated a close relationship with the royal house.

After his return to the throne in 1935, King George had searched frantically for an anticommunist political leader strong enough to bind together a working coalition and control the leftist factions but not strong enough to lead a coup against the throne.

The search had led the king to appoint Metaxas minister of war.

When the nonpolitical figure appointed by the king to head a caretaker government charged with overseeing the elections dies, Metaxas replaces him as prime minister, and immediately pressures parliament into a five-month adjournment.