A Peace to End all Peace (48 page)

Balfour took a much different point of view. When the French suggested doing what Lloyd George had in mind—settling matters before the Americans arrived—Balfour thought the suggestion little short of insane. “Their deliberate effort to exclude the Americans from any effective share in the world settlement is…neither in our interest nor in that of the French themselves…House is undoubtedly anxious to work with us as closely as he can and it would be fatal to give him the impression that we were settling or had the least desire to settle great questions behind his back.”
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Balfour believed that the stability of the peace settlement would require American participation. Unlike the Prime Minister, he was not only sincere in offering the United States the mandate for Palestine, but believed it vital that she should be made to accept it.

Leo Amery, of the War Office and the War Cabinet secretariat, who had become politically close to the Prime Minister, feared rather than hoped that the United States might accept such an offer if it were made. He wrote to the Zionist leader Dr Chaim Weizmann to ask him to work against a U.S. trusteeship, and secured a statement from Dr Weizmann that he agreed with Amery that Britain would be a better choice as the mandatory power.
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However, Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet and Amery’s immediate superior, was in favor of a U.S. trusteeship as a way for Britain to secure the strategic benefit of excluding any potential enemy from Palestine without assuming the burden of doing so herself. He told Lloyd George that he wanted the United States to have Palestine “with the object of creating a buffer state to cover Egypt.”
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Implicit in his suggestion was the old Kitchener notion that Palestine was of no value in herself. Lloyd George, of course, disagreed.

VI

On 1 December 1918 Clemenceau met in London with Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street. It was a month after the armistices, and a couple of months before the peace conferences were to open in Paris. It was not until the end of December that the President of the United States was to visit London and outline his idealistic vision of the future; there was time to reach private agreements before then. The two prime ministers met alone and neither took notes. An account of what occurred was supplied in writing to the British Cabinet some eight months later by Balfour, who presumably had it from Lloyd George. Later it was confirmed in Lloyd George’s memoirs of the peace treaties.

In the course of a conversation that began with European questions, the subject of the Middle East was raised. Clemenceau asked what modifications of the French claims were desired by Britain. Lloyd George replied: “Mosul.”
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Clemenceau said, “You shall have it. Anything else?” Lloyd George replied, “Palestine.” Again Clemenceau said, “You shall have it.”
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A man of his word, Clemenceau kept to it through all the bitter wrangling of the peace conferences, despite the fact that there was no written confirmation of his concessions and even though the British did not recognize that he expected to receive compensation for them.
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Throughout his long political life, it had been Clemenceau’s policy to defer to Britain in the Middle East in order to secure her support in Europe against Germany; and that is what the French Premier seems to have believed that he had accomplished on 1 December. Apparently Clemenceau believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that he had obtained at least the tacit agreement of Lloyd George to support France’s claims in Europe in return for Clemenceau’s express agreement to grant Britain’s claims in the Middle East.

But in fact the two prime ministers had not even reached an agreement about the Middle East on 1 December. It transpired over the course of the next few months that Lloyd George had not presented all of his Middle Eastern claims when asked by Clemenceau to do so on 1 December; in addition to those he mentioned, he also wanted France to relinquish her claim to Syria.

In this Lloyd George was not pursuing a purely personal foreign policy; on 2 December—the day following the Lloyd George-Clemenceau meeting—Lord Curzon told the Eastern Committee of the Cabinet that he believed it was imperative to exclude France from Syria. Curzon, who was chairman of the committee—which the Cabinet had entrusted with the task of redefining Britain’s goals in the Middle East—fell back on the logic of the Great Game in which he had earlier played so conspicuous a role. Former Viceroy of India and traveler along the then-expanding Russian frontier, he had believed earlier, and now had come to believe again, that Britain’s strategic goal was to prevent any Great Power from cutting the road to India. There was no reason to believe that France, Britain’s European partner, had any intention of interfering with Britain’s road to the East. But possession of Syria would put France in a
position
to do so; and indeed would make France the only Great Power that could mount such a threat.

As the General Staff argued in a memorandum of 9 December 1918, “It is difficult to see how any arrangement could be more objectionable from the military point of view than the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, by which an enterprising and ambitious foreign power is placed on interior lines with reference to our position in the Middle East.”
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That was Curzon’s view, too.

Lord Curzon told the Eastern Committee that

Curzon took an especially spacious view of the area from which France therefore had to be excluded in Asia. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, who saw things similarly, wrote that, “from the left bank of the Don to India is our interest and preserve.”
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Balfour was skeptical; the gateways to India, he remarked, were “getting further and further from India, and I do not know how far west they are going to be brought by the General Staff.”
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The Prime Minister was not of a mind to ground his policies in any such geopolitical theory. So far as one can tell, Lloyd George was simply trying to keep as much captured territory as he could; in the Syria matter, he appears to have been merely an opportunist indulging in unsystematic overreaching.

VII

Support for the Prime Minister’s objectives came from the Kitchener loyalists in the Middle East, who had been saying for more than a year that Britain had to have Palestine, using the pretext that she needed it in order to reconcile Arabs and Jews. A few months after the Armistice of Mudros, General Gilbert Clayton enlarged on this line of argument. In a memorandum that appears to have reached the Prime Minister’s desk, he claimed that after some months of experience in occupation of former Ottoman territories, it had become clear to him that in practice the commitments made by Britain to France—not merely in Palestine, but also in Syria—had become incompatible with those made to Arabism and Zionism. Friction was bound to continue and to create dangers for Britain. A choice, he wrote, had to be made. Clayton argued that if Syria had to be given to France, then Britain should renounce interest in Palestine in favor of the United States or some other country willing to assume the burden. The better alternative, however, would be for Britain to take over the government both of Palestine and Syria, with due regard to both Jewish and Arab aspirations, and to reward France elsewhere, perhaps by giving her Constantinople.
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In the winter of 1919 the office of the Prime Minister distributed to the British press a confidential background memorandum purporting to show that Feisal’s forces “materially assisted” General Allenby in the conquest of Syria and that they entered “the four great inland towns of Syria [Damascus, Horns, Hama, and Aleppo] ahead of General Allenby’s other forces” and did so, according to the memorandum, not as foreign invaders from the Hejaz, but as a native force. “The great majority of the Arab troops who thus assisted in liberating Syria were natives of the province.”
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The tendency of the memorandum was to demonstrate that Arabic-speaking Syria had risen up and freed herself, and that it would be contrary to the principles professed by the western democracies to attempt to re-impose foreign rule.

Feisal’s Arab corps in the Palestine and Syria campaigns was composed of approximately 3,500 men, but Lloyd George obtained from Feisal a public statement that the Arabs who at one time or another during the war had served or allied with him or his father numbered about 100,000; and in his argument against the French that is the figure the Prime Minister used. Lloyd George knew the figure to be wildly inflated (“Eastern arithmetic is proverbially romantic,” he later wrote) and indeed he believed the Arab contribution to the conquest of Palestine and Syria “was almost insignificant.”
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As against the French, however, the Prime Minister argued that he was placed in a difficult position when asked by them to act against his other great ally, Feisal. Feisal and a large army of Syrians had liberated their own country, he claimed, and now administered it, under General Allenby, and Britain could hardly be expected to allow France to move against them. Britain was released from her alliance obligations to France (he was saying in effect) by her alliance obligations to Syria.

At the end of the winter of 1919, Allenby came to lunch with Lloyd George and his secretary, Frances Stevenson, and the latter noted in her diary that “D. [Lloyd George] was urging him to give the French the facts about Syria, that the French would not be tolerated there. I believe he did at a subsequent meeting between P.M. [the Prime Minister], Clemenceau & Winston. The French are very obstinate about Syria & are trying to take the line that the English want it for themselves.” She noted that Lloyd George’s comment about this was that “France is a poor winner. She does not take her victories well.”
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Shortly before the Allenby lunch, Lord Milner had written from Paris to the Prime Minister to describe his conversations with Clemenceau. Milner wrote that he told the French Premier “quite frankly that, while we were dissatisfied with the Sykes-Picot scheme which he himself recognized the need of radically altering, we had no desire to play the French out of Syria or to get Syria for ourselves…The Syrian difficulty was not our doing, but was due to the fact that the French had unfortunately fallen foul of the Arabs. This put us in a very awkward position…” because the Arabs under Feisal “contributed materially to our victory.”

Milner knew that he was not being frank with Clemenceau about British motives and intentions, for he added that “I have almost every other Government authority military and diplomatic against me. I am totally opposed to the idea of trying to diddle the French out of Syria.”
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Of course Lloyd George claimed—as did Milner in conversation with Clemenceau—that he did not want Syria for Britain, and indeed would refuse a British mandate for it; he was supporting the Arab cause of Feisal. But the Arab cause was a mere façade behind which Britain expected to rule, for, as Clemenceau told Milner—who did not deny it—Feisal did what his British advisers told him to do.
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Milner pointed out to Lloyd George that Clemenceau was far more liberal on the Middle Eastern issue than were the government and bureaucracy behind him. It was implicit in Milner’s observation that if the French Premier failed to obtain satisfactory terms, he might be replaced by someone with whom it would be far less easy to deal.

In the autumn of 1919 Alfred Mond, the industrialist of Imperial Chemicals whom Lloyd George had brought into his government as Commissioner of Works, reported that Baron Edmund Rothschild had told him in Paris that French opinion would be alienated by Britain’s favoring the Arabs against the French. Mond stressed the “enormous importance of keeping the Anglo-French Alliance intact.”
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But the Prime Minister seemed blind to the danger that he might place that alliance in jeopardy.

Even Sir Mark Sykes, who for years had labored to show that there was room for all to have a fair share in the future of the Middle East, returned from Syria in an apparently changed frame of mind (if Lloyd George’s private comments soon afterward are to be believed—and perhaps they should not be). The Prime Minister said that Sykes

In a similar vein, T. E. Lawrence concluded that Sykes now wished “to atone” for his previous willingness to share the Middle East with Britain’s ally.
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If so, Sykes had run out of time. He died in Paris on 16 February 1919, in his room at the Hôtel Lotti, a victim of the world-wide influenza pandemic of 1918–19,
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whose outbreak was attributed by France to Spain, by Spain to France, by the United States to eastern Europe, by western Europe to America, and by Allenby’s armies to the retreating Turks.
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