A Peace to End all Peace (47 page)

The new Sultan, Mehmed VI, who had succeeded to the throne several months earlier on the death of his brother, was provided with a new Grand Vizier and Cabinet only with the greatest difficulty. The Sultan preferred a neutral Cabinet, or perhaps one drawn from the ranks of the political opposition, but Talaat and the Young Turkey Party still controlled the Parliament, the police, and the army, and demanded representation in the Cabinet to keep watch on the new regime. It took a week to find a statesman approved by the Sultan yet prepared to agree to Talaat’s terms. At last the distinguished Field Marshal Ahmet Izzet Pasha—a man believed to be acceptable to the Allies—formed a new Cabinet that included several members of the C.U.P. On 13 October Talaat and his ministers formally resigned. The next day Izzet Pasha drove through silent, gloomy crowds to the Porte to take office.

The Ottoman situation was more grave than the Allied Powers realized. The fall of Bulgaria had severed the land route to Austria and Germany, cutting off hope as well as supplies. Within Turkey itself half a million marauding deserters from the Ottoman army brought chaos in their wake. Though he did not weaken his position by disclosing it, the new Grand Vizier felt that it was not possible to go on with the war. Two days after taking office, Izzet Pasha attempted to send Colonel Newcombe to Greece—the nearest Allied army headquarters—to try to bring the war to an end, but no airplane could be found in which to fly him there.

The Porte therefore sent an emissary by sea: another British prisoner-of-war, General Charles Townshend. Townshend had surrendered to the Ottoman army at Kut in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1916, and had lived ever since under house arrest on an island off Constantinople. Entertained and lionized by the Ottoman leaders, he moved with relative freedom in the political society of the capital. Townshend became aware in the autumn of 1918 of rising peace sentiment and, like Newcombe, he decided to give events a push.
¹²

When Townshend learned that the Talaat ministry had fallen, he arranged an interview with the new Grand Vizier, and on 17 October went to the Sublime Porte carrying some notes that he had sketched out to indicate the sort of peace terms that might be asked by Britain. His notes suggested that Britain would be willing to leave the Ottoman Empire in possession of Syria, Mesopotamia, and perhaps even the Caucasus, so long as these regions were allowed local autonomy within a restructured empire that would resemble a confederation of states.

Townshend offered to help Turkey obtain generous terms along these lines and offered to make immediate contact with the British authorities. The Grand Vizier told him that it was a crime for the Ottoman Empire to have made war on Britain, and that it was Enver’s fault. He accepted Townshend’s offer of help in securing honorable peace terms without letting Townshend suspect that he would accept whatever terms he could get.

That evening Townshend met with the Minister of the Marine, who was his best friend in the new ministry, and who set out Turkey’s armistice terms, which were similar to those outlined in Townshend’s notes. Arrangements were then made to send Townshend out of Turkey through the port of Smyrna. Under cover of darkness, he left Smyrna on a tugboat.

Early in the morning of 20 October, Townshend’s tugboat reached the Greek island of Mitylene, where it encountered a motor vessel of the British navy. From Mitylene, Townshend wired the details of the Turkish position to the Foreign Office in London. At his request, a fast vessel then took him to the British naval commander in the Aegean, Admiral Calthorpe, whose headquarters were at the Greek island of Lemnos.

Townshend told London that the new Grand Vizier was willing to make peace on the basis of the sort of generous terms that he himself had sketched out in Constantinople. He gave London the impression that if such generous terms were not offered, the Ottoman Empire would continue to wage war. Above all, however, he indicated that the Porte wanted to deal with Britain rather than with the other Allies. (In fact—though Townshend did not know it—Izzet’s first attempt had been to establish contact with France, but his emissary had not yet been able to get through to French headquarters.
¹³
For decades afterward the British continued to believe—as have most historians—that Turkey had insisted on surrendering to them rather than to the French.)

Calthorpe, on 20 October, also cabled the news to London. He stressed (according to the Prime Minister) “that the Turks particularly wanted to deal with us, not with the French.”
¹⁴
At the same time Calthorpe attacked the French plan of taking command of the fleet that would stream toward Constantinople. According to Calthorpe’s cable, “the effect of a Fleet under French command going up to Constantinople would be deplorable.”
¹⁵
Of course no Allied fleet could enter the Dardanelles safely unless the forts on shore were turned over to the Allies. Calthorpe reported that Townshend said the Turks would make this concession, not to all of the Allied forces, but to Britain, if she would agree to protect them against whatever action might be taken by the German forces remaining in the vicinity. “General Townshend thinks that the Turks would be willing to send pleni-potentiaries now to treat for peace with British representatives and that they would allow the British to take over the Forts of the Dardanelles if they were assured of support against the Germans in Turkey and the Black Sea.”
¹⁶

The telegrams from Townshend and Calthorpe led to the longest British Cabinet meeting of the war. The Cabinet, still somewhat fearful that the war against Germany might drag on into 1919 or 1920, wanted to secure sea passage for the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea, where the fleet could move to the Rumanian coast to play a significant role in the final stages of the war in Europe. The Cabinet agreed, if necessary, to dispense with the rest of the twenty-four terms of the Allied armistice proposal so long as the Turks ceased hostilities, turned over the Dardanelles forts, and did everything possible to ensure safe passage for the fleet through the straits and into the Black Sea.

The Cabinet authorized Calthorpe to negotiate an armistice rather than a peace agreement because the latter would require consultation with the Allies and thus would cause delays.
¹⁷
The Cabinet told him to accept no less than surrender of the Dardanelles forts and free passage through the straits. The Cabinet also instructed him to ask for the rest of the twenty-four terms and to secure the adoption of as many of them as possible, but to give way if the Turks would not agree to them.

The French Foreign Minister protested on the ground that France had not been consulted before the Cabinet gave Calthorpe authorization to negotiate and to depart from the armistice terms upon which the Allies had agreed. Clemenceau was furious. It was not that the French Premier had changed his opinions and now harbored designs on the Middle East; it was that he did not want France treated as though she were a subordinate or defeated country.
¹⁸
The Cabinet quickly sent Lord Milner to Paris to explain matters to Clemenceau, and for the moment the French were mollified.

A new cause of contention arose as soon as the French became aware of the British interpretation of the inter-Allied agreement as to who should conduct armistice negotiations. The agreement provided that the first member of the Alliance approached by Turkey for an armistice should conduct the negotiations. Britain, having been approached by the Turks through Townshend, interpreted the agreement to mean that she should not merely conduct the negotiations, but should conduct them alone.

The British government instructed Admiral Calthorpe to exclude the French from the negotiations should they attempt to participate in them. Perhaps the British were afraid that the French, if allowed to participate, would insist on making demands on Turkey that would delay or prevent the concluding of an armistice.
¹⁹
Or alternatively, it may have been (as many in France believed) an overt opening move in the British campaign to deny France the position that had been promised to her in the postwar Middle East.

III

The armistice conference opened at 9:30 in the morning on Sunday, 27 October 1918, aboard the
Agamemnon
, a British battleship at anchor off the port of Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos. The small Ottoman delegation was headed by Townshend’s friend Rauf Bey, the new Minister of the Marine. The British delegation was headed by Admiral Calthorpe.

Calthorpe showed the Ottoman delegation a letter he had received from Vice-Admiral Jean F. C. Amet, the senior French naval officer in the area, stating his government’s desire that he should participate in the negotiations. He proposed to attend the meetings aboard the
Agamemnon
as the representative of Vice-Admiral Dominique M. Gauchet, the Allied naval commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and, as such, Calthorpe’s superior officer.

The Ottoman delegates explained that they were accredited only to the British, not to the French. Calthorpe replied that it would not have been desirable for the French to participate in any event. He refused to invite Admiral Amet aboard the
Agamemnon
.

The negotiations were conducted in the captain’s after-day cabin on deck. In a seemingly open spirit, Calthorpe began by reading aloud and discussing the proposed armistice terms one at a time. As the Ottoman delegates did not at first see the document in its entirety, they did not immediately comprehend the cumulative effect of its twenty-four clauses. Moreover, Calthorpe assured them that Britain meant no harm and intended only to be helpful. He explained what he supposed to be the Allied purpose in framing the various clauses in such a way as to suggest that they provided remedies for contingencies so remote that it was unlikely they would ever have to be invoked. At the same time, he managed to suggest that there was not much give in the Allied position: that if the Turks wanted an armistice, they would have to accept the Allied draft more or less in its entirety.

Seeing no alternative, on the evening of 30 October the head of the Ottoman delegation, Rauf Bey, signed an armistice little changed from the original Allied draft. It provided that hostilities should cease as of noon the following day. The armistice was in fact a surrender which permitted the Allies to occupy strategic points in the Ottoman Empire should their security be threatened: in effect the Allies were free to occupy any territory they wanted.

When Rauf Bey and his fellow delegates returned to Constantinople, they claimed that the armistice did not constitute a surrender and pictured its terms as far more lenient than they actually were.
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In doing so they sowed the seeds of later disillusion and discontent.

While the armistice negotiations were going on, Talaat convened a meeting of close political associates at Enver’s villa to found an underground organization designed to protect those Young Turkey leaders who were to remain in the country from possible Allied reprisals, in case there should be any, and also to lay the ground for armed resistance to Allied terms should that prove necessary. Underground cells were organized in Constantinople and thereafter throughout the provinces.

For themselves, Enver, Talaat, and Djemal made arrangements (of which the Grand Vizier was aware) to escape;
²¹
and on 2 November the ex-rulers of Constantinople fled with their German allies. The following day, 3 November, the Grand Vizier went through the motions of demanding that the Germans return the fugitives, but Germany was disintegrating and the fugitives had disappeared.

IV

Clemenceau, the French Premier, was enraged at Britain’s having made unilateral decisions at Mudros, and protested vehemently at a session of the Supreme War Council of the Allies at the Quai d’Orsay on 30 October. But Lloyd George, according to observers, gave back better than he got. Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson’s emissary, said of the two prime ministers that “they bandied words like fish-wives, at least Lloyd George did.”
²²

Lloyd George told Clemenceau and the others that

Balfour pointed out that Franchet d’Esperey had negotiated the Bulgarian armistice without consulting Britain, and that Calthorpe had been no less entitled to negotiate the Turkish armistice without consulting France. Clemenceau took counsel with his Foreign Minister and, in the end, agreed that as the Armistice of Mudros was already signed, there was nothing further to be done about it; he would consider the matter closed.

On 12 November 1918, almost two weeks after the Turkish armistice was signed and the day after the armistice on the western front, a squadron under the command of Admiral Calthorpe entered the straits of the Dardanelles, passing close to the ruined site of ancient Troy,
^*
and steamed in triumph toward Constantinople—under the British flag.

V

One of the British Prime Minister’s reasons for acting quickly in the Turkish matter was that he wanted to settle things before the United States intervened. An entry for 6 October in the diary of Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet, records an unusually frank statement by the Prime Minister of what he intended to do.