A Peace to End all Peace (44 page)

Sir Mark Sykes, who had worked out the terms of the administrative arrangements with the French, persisted in believing that the Sykes-Picot Agreement met current needs. In the spring of 1917 he wrote to Percy Cox, chief political officer of the British administration in Mesopotamia, that one of its virtues was that it was framed in such a way as not to violate the principles that Woodrow Wilson’s America and the new socialist Russia espoused with respect to national self-determination and nonannexation. “The idea of Arab nationalism may be absurd,” he wrote, “but our Congress case will be good if we can say we are helping to develop a race on nationalist lines under our protection.” Hussein may not give much help in the war physically, he continued, but he gives moral help that France ought to recognize, and “I think French will be ready to co-operate with us in a common policy towards the Arab speaking people.”
²⁸

David Hogarth, head of the Arab Bureau, wrote to Gilbert Clayton at that time that nobody both took the Sykes-Picot Agreement seriously and supported it, except for Sir Mark Sykes.
²⁹
This was a slight exaggeration, because officials of the Foreign Office, which Sykes joined, also took the pact seriously, but it was not far from the truth.

Lord Curzon stated that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not only obsolete “but absolutely impracticable.”
³⁰
As chairman of the Eastern Committee, which was in charge of defining British
desiderata
for the postwar Middle East, he made it clear that Britain would like the French out of Syria altogether.
³¹
But a War Office representative told the committee that the only way to break the agreement was to operate behind “an Arab facade” in appealing to the United States to support Wilson’s theories of self-determination.
³²

Curzon said that “When the Sykes-Picot Agreement was drawn up it was, no doubt, intended by its authors…as a sort of fancy sketch to suit a situation that had not then arisen, and which it was thought extremely unlikely would ever arise; that, I suppose, must be the principal explanation of the gross ignorance with which the boundary lines in that agreement were drawn.”
³³

Lloyd George also felt that the pact had been superseded by events, but then, he had been against it from the start. As was his wont with his favorites, he made excuses for Sykes, and rewrote history to absolve him from blame. He wrote, decades later, that

In the opinion of Lloyd George, the Sykes-Picot Agreement “was a fatuous arrangement judged from any and every point of view.”
³⁵

Even Sykes himself finally came to agree: on 3 March 1918 he wrote to Wingate and Clayton that the agreement had to be abandoned because of such events as the United States’ entry into the war, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the publication by the Bolsheviks of the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement to an apparently indignant world.
³⁶
On 18 June 1918 he told the Eastern Committee that, while the Sherifians had no right to be indignant about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for he had fully informed Hussein of its terms, Britain should ask France to agree that the agreement no longer applied.
³⁷
A month later he told the committee that “The Agreement of 1916 was dead, although the French refused to admit it. What was required now was some modification of, or substitute for, that Agreement.”
³⁸
When the French refused to agree to modify the agreement, however, he went ahead to negotiate terms for the administration of occupied territories on the basis that the agreement therefore remained in force.

On 5 October 1918 Leo Amery noted in his diary: “Talk with Sykes about what to do with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. He has evolved a new and most ingenious scheme by which the French are to clear out of the whole Arab region except the Lebanon” and in return get all of Kurdistan and Armenia “from Adana to Persia and the Caucasus.”
³⁹
But the French did not agree.

Picking up on Feisal’s protest to Allenby “that a Country without a Port was no good to him” Sykes explored a possible compromise in which the Sykes-Picot Agreement would be modified by transferring one coastal port from the area of direct French control to the area in which Feisal would serve as ruler. General Allenby seemed hopeful about this approach. On 15 December he wrote to his wife that “Sykes is all for soothing the Arabs & giving them a port; & Picot is less Chauvinist than he was.”
⁴⁰
But nothing came of this approach either.

The French refused to waive any of their rights under the agreement; but there was a chorus of opinion from British officers serving in the field to the effect that it would be disastrous to attempt to enforce its terms.

The followers of the late Lord Kitchener, saying the same thing through many voices, as they so often did, had been arguing for some time that the Sykes-Picot Agreement had to be annulled in the interests of Jewish-Arab friendship in Palestine. Jewish-Arab friendship was a cause in which Sir Mark Sykes sincerely believed; whether his colleagues who raised the point shared his belief in it is doubtful.

Ronald Storrs, governor of Jerusalem, reported that the Arabs were ready to accept the Zionist program, but only under a British government for Palestine.
⁴¹
Gilbert Clayton reported that the Arab and Zionist causes were “interdependent,” and that both of them could be satisfied and would cooperate, but only if the French could be made to agree that the Sykes-Picot Agreement “is no longer a practical instrument.”
⁴²
Chaim Weizmann assisted in the campaign by writing to Balfour along the same lines, and added that French intrigues aimed at securing exclusive commercial concessions were obscuring the cause of self-determination for Jews as well as for Arabs.
⁴³
T. E. Lawrence told the Eastern Committee that “there would be no difficulty in reconciling Zionists and Arabs in Palestine and Syria, provided that the administration of Palestine remained in British hands.”
⁴⁴

If the agreement were to be abrogated with respect to Palestine, there was no reason why it should not be abrogated with respect to Syria as well—though Prime Minister Lloyd George repeatedly asserted that Britain had no desire to take over Syria for herself, and British officers in the field made the same claim. They asserted that they wanted France to relinquish her claims, not in favor of Britain, but in favor of an independent Arab nation led by Feisal. This was sheer dishonesty, for the Arab Bureau officers did not believe that Arabs were capable of self-government. By an independent country ruled by Feisal they meant a country guided by themselves as agents of Britain.

David Hogarth, the head of the Arab Bureau who succeeded Clayton as chief political officer in the field, reported from newly liberated Damascus that Feisal’s Arab administration was incompetent. He wrote that a European power
must
run things.
⁴⁵
If France were to be excluded, it was evident which European power (in his view) would be obliged to assume that responsibility.

V

Nearly a fortnight after his interview with Feisal at the Hotel Victoria in Damascus, Sir Edmund Allenby returned to Damascus to be the dinner guest of Prince Feisal. He reported to his wife that “He gave me an excellent dinner; Arab dishes, but all good, served in the ordinary ways of civilization. Water to drink; but good, fresh, cool water; not tepid barley water!” Allenby added that “You would like Feisal. He is a keen, slim, highly strung man. He has beautiful hands, like a woman’s; and his fingers are always moving nervously when he talks. But he is strong in will, and straight in principle.” As to politics, “He is nervous about the peace settlement; but I tell him he must trust the Entente powers to treat him fairly.”
⁴⁶

“Trust the Entente Powers”: Feisal could not have thought that was a particularly firm foundation on which to base his future prospects. The Entente Powers did not even trust one another. The French did not believe that the British were sponsoring Jewish and Arab aspirations in good faith, while the British discussed how, rather than whether, to break their agreements with France. Neither Britain nor France planned to honor wartime commitments to Italy. Neither Britain nor France was disposed to carry out the idealistic program of Woodrow Wilson with which, when Washington was listening, they pretended to be in sympathy.

Feisal was aware that only the year before, British leaders had contemplated behind his back a compromise peace in which the Russian rather than the Ottoman Empire would have been partitioned—thus abandoning him and his father to the mercies of the Turks. He knew, too, that Britain and France had secretly agreed two years before to divide the Arab world between them, and that they had revealed details of their agreement to him only when they were forced to do so.

Trust was not a part of the atmosphere in which Feisal lived. He himself had corresponded with the Turks that year about his changing sides in the war. His father had held similar correspondence with the Turks. Neither of them had kept faith with Britain, and Feisal had not kept faith with his father either.

His only regular troops were deserters from the enemy camp, who might as easily desert him, in turn, if his star waned. The Bedouin tribes that were his allies were notoriously fickle, often changing sides in Arabia even on the field of battle itself; and they were bound to him principally by the gold that was Lawrence’s, not his, to dispense. As for the Syrians, they accepted him only because he was placed over them by the British army.

Even his own body betrayed him; his worry-bead fingers gave him away. He was nervous—and had every reason to be.

I

Giddy with fatigue and caught up in the last hysterical convulsions of the war, the Ottoman and British empires launched themselves into far-off deserts and inland seas to fight a barely remembered series of final campaigns that produced no decisive result. Yet in the course of the military and political maneuvering two new developments arose that were to affect profoundly the future of the twentieth century. Western armies found themselves at war with Russia, their former ally; and oil became a crucial issue in the battle for the Middle East.

It all began because Enver Pasha, instead of attempting to deal with the losing situation in Syria, opened up a new theater of operations against a less formidable opponent. As a result, while the British were marching from success to success in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman forces to the north were marching from success to success in what used to be the Russian Empire. In the last half of 1918 Turkey and Britain were engaged in what appeared to be not so much one war as two parallel wars in which they pursued similar goals: to exclude their allies from a share in the winnings. Enver Pasha, like Lloyd George, was so captivated by the prospective spoils of victory that he could not bear to share them with other countries. The near-dictatorial Turkish leader, like his near-dictatorial British counterpart, therefore took the risk of endangering his alliances for the sake of imperial ambitions.

Lenin had it the wrong way around. Imperialism—defined as the quest for colonies—did not cause the war; the war engendered imperialism. Their staggering losses drove the belligerent powers to try to compensate by seeking new gains. The collapse of the Russian Empire answered the need for new worlds to conquer; its domains were there to be taken. Lord Milner worried that once Russia was out of the war Germany might be more difficult to defeat, and raised the possibility of a negotiated compromise peace in which Britain would be compensated by dividing the Russian rather than the Ottoman Empire. Germany, however, having smashed the Czar’s Empire, was in no mood to share her winnings with the Entente Powers. The Germans continued to pursue their campaigns of war and subversion against Russia. Their postwar goals of aggrandizement grew more far-reaching as the wartime need for agricultural products and raw materials became more pressing; and as they pursued those goals, they collided with their Turkish allies.

Enver Pasha had dreamed of one day uniting all the Turkish-speaking peoples of Asia under Ottoman leadership, but this became his operational political program only when the disintegration of Petrograd’s authority dangled that prospect in front of him. After the war, Winston Churchill, among others, fostered the legend that the Young Turks had been animated by pan-Turkish (“pan-Turanian”) ideology all along and had brought Turkey into the war in order to pursue expansionist plans in Central Asia. The evidence now available is to the contrary: the demands the C.U.P. made of Germany in 1914 and through 1917 show that the Ottoman leaders were thinking in essentially defensive terms at that time, hoping at most to shore up their existing frontiers in order to win a more complete independence within them. It was only in 1917 that Enver seriously planned to expand the Ottoman Empire eastward. Vast territories, no longer held by the Czar, seemed there for the taking, and could compensate for what Britain had taken in the Arabic-speaking south.

A British Intelligence report on the movement to unite all the Turkish-speaking peoples, the Pan-Turanian Movement, prepared by the Department of Information in the autumn of 1917, estimated that outside the Ottoman Empire more than seventeen million people in Asia spoke one or more of the Turkic languages. According to the report, “Turkish-speaking Central Asia is one of the largest continuous language areas in the world—larger than the Great Russian area and almost as large as the English or Spanish-speaking area in America.” While disdainful of pan-Turanianism as an ideology, the report pictured it as a dangerous instrument in the hands of the Young Turk leaders. “The whole population is Turkish; the whole population is Sunni; and the present possessor [i.e. Russia] is not an ancient Moslem State, but a recent Christian conqueror.” Were the C.U.P. to create a Turkish-Islamic state there, in alliance with Persia and Afghanistan, India would be directly threatened. “It would create a vast anti-British hinterland behind the anti-British tribes on the North-Western frontier.”
¹

Enver, though aware of these possibilities, made no precipitate move but allowed events to evolve favorably on their own. The overthrow of the Czar left a Russian army of half a million soldiers in northeastern Turkey, holding such major towns as Trebizond, Erzerum, and Kars. The troops, initially at least, were not Bolshevik in sentiment, but suffered from war weariness. As discipline disintegrated, they deserted and returned to Russia. In agreement with the German General Staff, the Ottoman forces did not attack the thinning Russian lines but allowed the Russian army to dwindle to nothing of its own accord.

By the time the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the autumn of 1917, practically all that remained was a volunteer force from the Transcaucasian areas across the frontier and a few hundred Russian officers.
²
Still Enver held back, expecting the Bolsheviks to sue for peace, as they did several weeks later.

The Turkish military situation on the eastern frontier with Persia also improved of its own accord. British forces in the south of Persia had been operating behind the shield of Russian forces in the north, but could no longer do so with assurance. As revolutionary fervor took hold of the Russian troops, they became increasingly friendly to the Persian nationalists whom they had hitherto held in check. On 27 May 1917 the pro-Allied regime in Teheran collapsed, and on 6 June was replaced by a government of nationalist hue which approached Petrograd with a view toward reducing the Russian military presence.

High-ranking officials in the War Office in London and in the Government of India feared that Turkey might attack through Persia toward Afghanistan
³
—although the Chief of the Imperial General Staff did not share these views. The Cabinet wavered between making concessions to the new Persian regime or allowing relations to deteriorate; dangers were apparent either way.

As the authority of the Kerensky government in Petrograd evaporated, the Russian army in the north of Persia appeared to British officials to be increasingly unreliable. On 31 October 1917 an interdepartmental committee in Whitehall decided to put the anti-Bolshevik segments of the Russian army in northern Persia on the British payroll; but the Russians nonetheless proved unwilling to do Britain’s bidding.

Once the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd the following week, matters rapidly came to a head. Within months, on 29 January 1918, Trotsky, as Soviet Commissar for External Affairs, renounced the Convention of 1907, which formed the basis of the Anglo-Russian occupation of Persia. Disclaiming responsibility for any anti-Bolshevik Russian troops remaining on Persian soil, he expressed the hope that the other foreign armies occupying Persian soil—the Turks and the British—would withdraw as well.

The British government feared that the Russian withdrawal would expose the Indian Army in Mesopotamia to an attack from behind by Ottoman armies wheeling through Persia; for despite the long conflict between the two empires in that area, Britain had come to rely on Russia to hold the line against the Turks in northern Persia, and was uncertain what course to pursue when that protection was abruptly withdrawn.

II

In March 1918 Germany imposed crushing armistice terms on the defeated Russians. As soon as they had signed the armistice with Russia, the Ottoman and German empires began to dispute possession of the provinces that the Russian Empire had ruled adjoining the Turkish frontier. Christian Georgia and Armenia, and Moslem Azerbaijan—the three states collectively called Transcaucasia—were now independent. Germany urgently needed the agricultural and mineral wealth and the railroad system of Georgia, and even more so the oil wells of Azerbaijan, to sustain her war effort. Thinking ahead to the postwar world, German leaders also intended to use Transcaucasia as a spearhead into the markets of the Middle East.

The Ottoman leaders also looked to the commercial uses of the provinces across their frontier. They thought in terms of restoring the old trade route with Iran, and of reviving their Black Sea and Crimean commerce. Enver, above all, aimed at the creation of a new Turkish empire that stretched into Central Asia, to which Transcaucasia would be the link.

Convinced that Germany had disregarded Turkish interests when she negotiated the terms of the armistice with Russia, Enver proceeded to disregard German interests in Transcaucasia, and sent the flower of his remaining armies across the frontier to conquer Georgia and Armenia and to march on Azerbaijan. For the purpose he created a special army corps, detached from the regular Ottoman army which was permeated with German officers. His new “Army of Islam” contained no Germans: it consisted only of Ottoman troops and Azerbaijani Tartars. Its orders were to march on the Azerbaijani metropolis of Baku, which had been taken over by a local Soviet. Baku, an industrialized city of some 300,000 people on the shores of the Caspian Sea, was only half Moslem and quite unlike the surrounding Tartar hinterland. At the time it was the great oil-producing city of the Middle East.

By 1918 the military importance of oil began to be generally recognized.
^*
Before the war, Churchill’s Admiralty had switched to oil as fuel for the navy’s ships and, during the war, the Allies came to rely heavily on fuel-consuming trucks for land transport. Tanks and aircraft had begun to come fully into their own in the last days of the war and they, too, consumed quantities of gas and oil. In 1918 Clemenceau’s government in France and the U.S. Department of the Navy both came to recognize that oil had become of cardinal importance.

Germany, beset by shortages, had counted on replenishing her resources from the captured south and west of Russia, and controlled much of the economy of Georgia during 1918; but in Berlin the resources of Georgia were not regarded as sufficient. Enver’s race to Baku, in Azerbaijan, threatened to deprive Germany of the oil she so desperately needed, and also threatened to wreck the armistice arrangement with Russia. The enraged heads of the German General Staff sent angry notes to Enver, which he disregarded.

The state secretary of the German Navy Department told the leaders of his country’s Foreign Office and General Staff that it was absolutely crucial for Germany to get hold of Baku’s oil and that the Ottoman attack on the city therefore had to be stopped.
⁵
The German leaders told the Russian ambassador in Berlin that they would take steps to stop the Ottoman advance if Russia gave assurances that she would supply at least some of Baku’s oil to Germany. “Of course, we will agree,” Lenin cabled to Stalin in reporting this development.
⁶

Baku was also important strategically. As a major port it dominated Caspian shipping and would enable Enver to move his armies by sea, if he chose, to the eastern shore of the Caspian, where the Moslems of Turkestan could be expected to rally to his standard and where he would avail himself of the railroad network that the Russians had built there to enable them to reach Afghanistan and attack India.

The British, keenly aware of the danger, viewed Enver’s progress with foreboding.

III

Two tiny British military missions in northern Persia watched these events from across the frontier with no clear idea of what role they should play in them.
⁷

Major-General L. C. Dunsterville was appointed chief of the British mission to the Caucasus in early 1918. Had he ever reached Tiflis, the Transcaucasian capital, he would have served as British Representative there as well, where his objective would have been to help stiffen the resistance of the Russian army in Turkey against an Ottoman advance.

Dunsterville’s convoy of forty-one Ford cars and vans traveled via Mesopotamia into Persia and headed toward a Persian port on the Caspian Sea then called Enzeli (later renamed Pahlevi) on the road to Transcaucasia. By the time the British arrived, most of Transcaucasia had fallen into Ottoman or German hands. A worried British government ordered Dunsterville to clear the road to Enzeli of a revolutionary band of Persian nationalists, allied to the Bolsheviks but also acting in the interests of the advancing Ottoman Army of Islam.

As Enver’s forces approached Baku, the British government debated what role Dunsterville’s tiny force should or could play in the unexpected battle for Central Asia in which Turks, Germans, Russians, and others were involved. The question also arose of what Major-General Wilfred Malleson’s mission ought to be. General Malleson was an officer in the Military Intelligence branch of the Indian Army, who had served for years on the staff of Lord Kitchener. Simla had sent him out with six officers to Meshed, in eastern Persia, to watch over developments in the vast lands of Russian Turkestan that were believed to be Enver’s next objective. Dunsterville was to watch over the lands to the west of the Caspian Sea, and Malleson was to watch over the lands to the east.

In Malleson’s area of responsibility, there were several matters that concerned the British military leaders. One of these was the large store of cotton which might fall into enemy hands. Another was the presence of some 35,000 German and Austrian prisoners-of-war who might be released either by the Bolsheviks or by Enver’s forces.

To the British leaders the intentions of the enemy forces at work west and east of the Caspian were obscured by the growing political fragmentation in those areas. Politically the Germans appeared not only to be hand-in-glove locally with the anti-Bolsheviks in Tiflis, but also to be involved with the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, while having fallen out with the Turks, who were their public allies but their secret enemies. Enver’s allied force of Ottoman and Azerbaijani Moslem Turks and Tartars was on the march toward Baku, which was governed by a divided Soviet that reflected a division within the city itself. The Azerbaijani half of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, while the Armenians, fearing massacre, were in favor of anybody but the Turks. The Social Revolutionaries and other non-Bolshevik Russians feared British intervention, but in the end grew to fear Turkey more. Stepan Shaumian, the Bolshevik chairman of the Soviet, while leading the resistance to the Ottoman-Azerbaijani allies, even preferred Turkish rule to a British intervention and, in any event, had received direct orders from Lenin and Stalin not to accept British aid.