Around 10 p.m. March 6 on his way home, Andreas Kavaphakes, the editor of the Venizelist Eleutheros Typos[Free Press], was shot and killed as he stepped down from his horse-drawn taxi to open the door to his home. At a luncheon the next day at the Peroglous, that was all anyone was talking about. Gilbert believed that the Epistratoi were responsible.
When Britain and France forced King Constantine to demobilise the Greek army in June 1916, the former soldiers regrouped as Reservists (Epistratoi). As a politicised militia, they were conservative paramilitary opponents of the Venizelists and fought to defend Athens when it was bombarded and invaded by the Allies in November-December 1916. They continued to persecute Venizelists violently even after King Constantine returned from exile in December 1920.
On his return from the USA, the newly elected Ecumenical Patriarch Meletios Metaxachis stopped in London to see British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Their conversation was published in Athens by Kavaphakes, quoting Lloyd George as saying that, if the Greeks really wanted help, they would have to replace the King. Kavaphakes published a ‘Democratic Manifesto’ calling for the removal of the King. Later that day he was murdered.
Gilbert attended his funeral and the subsequent Greek parliamentary session and wrote an article about the assassination. Gilbert then recalled the cold-blooded murder in June 1920 of the anti-Venizelist writer Ion Dragoumis by the police who arrested and killed him on orders by the chief of police, according to Gilbert.