A Peace to End all Peace (70 page)

The American consul in Baghdad was indeed opposed to British rule in Iraq, but Washington was not. Quite the reverse was true: both the Department of State and the oil companies were in favor of British hegemony in the area. The oil companies were prepared to engage in exploration, development, and production only in areas governed by what they regarded as stable and responsible regimes. The president of New Jersey Standard reported to the State Department that Iraq was a collection of warring tribes; according to him an Iraqi government dominated by Britain offered the only hope of law and order.
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Allen Dulles, chief of the Near Eastern Affairs Division of the Department of State, was one of the many officials who expressed dismay at the thought that Britain and France might relinquish control of their Middle Eastern conquests, and who expressed fear for the fate of American interests should they do so.
¹³
Dulles reported that Guy Wellman, attorney for the American oil companies that were seeking a share in Iraqi development, was of the opinion that his clients would be much better off negotiating a partnership with British interests rather than attempting to operate on their own.
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A solution to the conflict between Britain and America began to emerge in the summer of 1920 when geologists advised the British government that oil prospects in Iraq were more speculative than had been supposed.
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At the same time the Foreign Office was advised that the prospects—if they did materialize—were so vast that Britain lacked the capital resources to develop them by herself and would have to invite American participation.
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For these, and for political reasons, Sir John Cadman, an important figure in the British oil industry, was delegated to go to the United States to initiate discussions. On 22 June 1922 A. C. Bedford of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey called on the Department of State to report that on behalf of seven American oil companies he proposed to negotiate a participation in the British-owned concessionary corporation in Iraq. The Department of State responded that it had no objection to his doing so, provided no qualified American oil companies that wished to participate were excluded. Negotiations thereupon went forward.
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Thus the dispute with the United States was resolved. But the burden of imposing European control over the Middle East was left by America to Britain, unaided.

IV

France, Britain’s closest major ally, was the last to desert the alliance. The long quarrel about whether the Sykes-Picot Agreement would be honored had taken its toll, as had Britain’s sponsorship of the Hashemite family’s political claims. With the retirement of Clemenceau, Aristide Briand, a veteran left-wing politician who had served several times as Premier, was regarded as the leader of those who were loyal to the British alliance; yet, when he became Premier again in January 1921, the rupture between the two countries finally occurred.

It occurred because Briand saw no way to maintain his country’s position in Cilicia, the southern province of Turkey which then was still occupied by France. France’s 80,000 occupation troops were a drain on resources that could no longer be afforded; the French Parliament was unwilling to continue paying for them. Cilicia proved to be an awkward location for a French army to occupy, caught as it was between Kemalist Turks and troublesome Syria. In the spring of 1921, Premier Briand therefore sent the Turkophile Senator Henri Franklin-Bouillon on a mission to Angora to negotiate a way out. Franklin-Bouillon, a former president of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, was a leader of the colonialist group and strongly believed in the importance of Turkey as a Moslem ally.

On his second mission to Angora, in the autumn of 1921, Franklin-Bouillon succeeded in arriving at an agreement. It brought the war between France and Turkey to an end, and effectively recognized the Nationalist Angora regime as the legitimate government of Turkey. For the Nationalists, the Angora Accord was the greatest of diplomatic triumphs. According to Mustapha Kemal, it “proved to the whole world” that the Treaty of Sèvres was now “merely a rag.”
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The British saw it as a betrayal: it was a separate peace, and it freed the Turks to attack Britain’s clients—Greece and Iraq. As the British suspected, the French also turned over to the Angora regime quantities of military supplies.
¹⁸
Thus Turks supplied by France were at war with Greeks backed by Britain and the former Entente Powers found themselves ranged on opposite sides of the Ottoman war that they had entered together as allies in 1914.

On 26 October 1921, in a memorandum to the Cabinet alerting them to news of the aid France would provide the Kemalists, Churchill commented that “It seems scarcely possible to credit this information, which, if true, would unquestionably convict the French government of what in the most diplomatic application of the phrase could only be deemed an ‘unfriendly act’.”
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It should be understood that, according to a standard reference book, in the diplomatic lexicon “When a State wishes to warn other States that certain actions on their part might lead to war, it is usual to state that such action ‘would be regarded as an unfriendly act’.”
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Thus Churchill was making a very strong statement indeed; his words implied that the Angora Accord might lead to a war between France and Britain.

Churchill had feared for some time that Nationalist Turkey would turn east to attack Feisal’s fragile regime in Iraq, and believed that France—by allowing Turkey to use the Baghdad Railway section in Cilicia—was now about to facilitate such a move. According to Churchill’s memorandum, “clearly the French are negotiating, through M Franklin-Bouillon, a treaty designed not merely to safeguard French interests in Turkey, but to secure those interests wherever necessary at the expense of Great Britain. They apparently believe that we have a similar anti-French arrangement with the Greeks. They are, of course, very angry about King Feisal” having been placed by Britain on the throne of Iraq.
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According to Churchill, France would have liked nothing better than to have seen the collapse of Feisal and of British policy in the area, which also would have meant the destruction of his own handiwork.

Premier Briand failed to appreciate how strongly the Angora Accord would affect British policy in Europe. In 1921 Briand turned to Britain to guarantee France against a revival of the German challenge, having become aware that the American government was fundamentally out of sympathy with the whole trend of postwar French policy regarding Germany.
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Fearful that France might be isolated, he approached Lloyd George and Curzon with a proposal for a bilateral alliance between Britain and France to provide the latter with security against Germany. The British leaders refused to consider forming such an alliance unless France resolved the quarrel in the Middle East stemming from the Angora Accord. Following the British refusal, the Briand government fell.

Former President Raymond Poincaré took office as the new Premier. He represented the opposite pole from Briand; he was not a great friend of Britain. His diplomacy proposed doing without Britain and instead going it alone as a Great Power by creating a network of alliances with less powerful countries in central and eastern Europe that included Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. It estranged Britain further, by suggesting to Britain’s leaders that France aimed at establishing hegemony on the continent of Europe, as she had done under Louis XIV and Napoleon. The prospect of an alliance between Britain and France died in June 1922, when Britain suspended the negotiations; and the breach between the two countries widened thereafter.

V

To some extent the diplomatic isolation of Britain was the result of Mustapha Kemal’s adroit diplomacy. The Angora regime had deliberately played off one ally against another.

Fundamentally, however, it was Britain’s decision to impose European rule on the former Ottoman Empire that led to the break-up of the alliance or—to the extent that there were other contributing factors—at any rate caused the break-up to lead in such dangerous directions. It is here that the contrast between Britain’s Middle Eastern policy before and after 1914 can be glimpsed most vividly.

It was not merely that in the nineteenth century Britain had often kept conflict from flaring up between the European powers by securing mutual agreement that none of them would encroach on the Middle East. It was also the process by which she did so that contributed to the maintenance of international stability. The frequent reference of issues to the concert of the powers of Europe, and the habit of multilateral consultation and cooperation that it bred, helped to make world politics more civilized. In that sense the Middle Eastern question, despite its inherent divisiveness, contributed to international harmony.

But once the Asquith government agreed to Russian territorial demands in 1915, the Middle East became a source of discord. If the Czar were to control the Turkish-speaking northern part of the Ottoman Empire, then Britain—according to Lord Kitchener—would have to assume hegemony in the Arabic-speaking south. In turn, that brought into play French claims to Syria and Palestine. Thus one claim led to another, each power believing the others to be overreaching. Even if Britain, after the war, had immediately partitioned the Ottoman Empire among the Allies, along the hard-bargained lines of the pledges she had made to them, there would have been some risk of future conflict among them if any of them pursued future expansionist designs. But conflict was made inevitable when, instead, Lloyd George attempted not merely to renege on the pledges but to take everything for the British Empire. It was worse still that he tried to do so without having the resources to back up his move.

Alliances tend to break up at the end of a war. Moreover, the partners with whom Britain had worked toward international harmony before the war were losing control of world politics. Yet it was the Middle Eastern question at the end of the war that led to the first clashes between Britain and her former allies, Russia, Italy, France, and the United States. It was bitterness engendered by Middle Eastern policy that hampered British efforts to find common ground with her former allies on policy elsewhere in the world, and that eventually led to the alliances falling apart.

I

Lloyd George had been too proud in 1919 and 1920 to remember that his power derived from alliances and coalitions over which he presided, but which he did not control. Events now provided him with a reminder, and in 1921, as his foreign alliances fell apart, the Prime Minister found himself increasingly isolated within his own government in his war policy against Turkey. Bonar Law, after the change in monarch and government in Greece, in which the pro-Allied Venizelos was overthrown, was in favor of coming to terms with the Turks. Bonar Law could not be ignored; he led the party with a majority of seats in Parliament, and had he remained in the government he might have succeeded in forcing a change in policy. His supporters were pro-Turk and, so long as he served in the government, he reminded Lloyd George of their views. But Bonar Law retired from public life in the winter of 1921 due to ill health, depriving the Prime Minister of a political partner who could keep him in line. With Bonar Law’s departure, the Prime Minister drifted increasingly out of touch with sentiment in the House of Commons. Aware that Cabinet colleagues, the Foreign Office, and the War Office were also opposed to his Greek-Turkish policy, he disregarded their views.

As the London Conference adjourned in March 1921—the conference at which the Allies, the Greeks, and the Kemalists failed to arrive at any agreement—Lloyd George sent Maurice Hankey round to Claridge’s Hotel to tell the Greek leaders, who were staying there, that if they felt impelled to attack Kemal’s forces, he would not stand in their way.
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The Greek government took this as permission to resume the war, and launched a new offensive on 23 March 1921. Despite faulty staff work and stiff opposition, the Greek army moved up from the plain to the plateau.

Arnold Toynbee, the historian and scholar of international relations, accompanied the Greek army as a reporter for the
Manchester Guardian
. He reported that as his vehicle moved up from the plain “I began to realise on how narrow a margin the Greeks had gambled for a military decision in Anatolia, and how adverse were the circumstances under which they were playing for victory over Kemal.”
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At the end of the week, the Greeks were repulsed by Kemal’s General Ismet at the village of Inonu and retreated.

The Greek government blamed its military commanders and on 7 April Gounaris—now Prime Minister—and his colleagues met with Ioannis Metaxas, Greece’s outstanding military figure, to ask Metaxas to lead the next offensive in Anatolia. Metaxas refused and told the politicians that the war in Turkey could not be won. The Turks had developed a national feeling, he said, “And they mean to fight for their freedom and independence…They realize that Asia Minor is their country and that we are invaders. For them, for their national feelings, the historical rights on which we base our claims have no influence. Whether they are right or wrong is another question. What matters is how they feel.”
³

The politicians told Metaxas that it would now be politically impossible for their regime to abandon the war: with eyes open to the risk they would run, they felt compelled to gamble everything on the success of one last offensive, scheduled for the summer.

On 22 June the Allies sent a message to the Greek government offering mediation in the war, but Greece replied with a polite refusal. Preparations for an offensive were so far along, wrote the Greeks, that it would be impractical to call them off.

King Constantine and Gounaris had left themselves with no option but to launch their crusade, and Lloyd George’s fortunes rode with them. The British leader could do no more than watch and wait as foreign armies clashed in the obscure interior of Asia Minor. His secretary and mistress noted that he

On 10 July 1921 the Greek army launched a brilliantly successful three-pronged offensive. The Greek commanders had learned from the mistakes committed in January and in March, and did not repeat them. The offensive was crowned with the capture of Eskishehir, a rail center considered to be the strategic key to western Anatolia.

Lloyd George, jubilant, unleashed his powers of rhetoric and wit against his opponents. To his War Minister he wrote:

The Prime Minister saved his best salvo for last: “Have you no Department which is known as the Intelligence Department in your Office? You might find out what it is doing. It appears in the Estimates at quite a substantial figure, but when it comes to information it is not visible.”
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Near Eskishehir the overwhelmed Turkish commander, General Ismet, could not bring himself to retreat. Kemal took the burden from his shoulders. “Pasha is coming,” Ismet, relieved, told a companion, as a grey-faced Mustapha Kemal arrived to take personal responsibility for ordering the retreat.
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Kemal acknowledged that his people would feel a “moral shock” when they learned that he was going to abandon western Anatolia to the enemy.
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In the event, there was an uproar in the National Assembly, as political enemies, personal rivals, Enver’s followers, and defeatists joined hands against him. After a time, Kemal called the National Assembly into secret session, and proposed a Roman course of action: the delegates should elect him dictator for a period of three months, and that should he then fail as supreme commander, the blame would fall entirely on him. The proposal brought together those who believed in victory and those who were certain of defeat, and was adopted.

Kemal pulled his forces back to within fifty miles of his capital at Angora, and deployed them behind a great bend in the Sakarya river. In the time available to him he requisitioned resources from the entire population, commandeering 40 percent of household food, cloth, and leather supplies, confiscating horses, and preparing for total war. He ordered his troops to entrench in the ridges and hills that rose steeply up from the near bank of the river toward Angora. By mid-August his army had dug into this powerful natural defensive position, circling Angora for sixty miles behind the loop in the Sakarya, dominating from high ground the passage of the river.

On 14 August 1921 the Greek army started its triumphal march on Angora. At staff headquarters, the chief of the supply bureau had warned that the Greek army’s long line of communications and transportation would break down if it advanced beyond the Sakarya river; but his colleagues concluded that there was no cause for concern in as much as they did not intend to advance much further than that.
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The Greek commanders believed that they had beaten the enemy and were now about to finish him off. They invited the British liaison officers who accompanied them to attend a victory celebration in Angora after the battle.

The advancing Greek army made first contact with the enemy on 23 August and attacked all along the line on 26 August. Crossing the river, the Greek infantry fought its way foot-by-foot up toward the heights, driving the enemy from one ridge-top line of entrenchments to another above it. The savage combat went on for days and then for weeks, with the Greeks gaining ground on the average of a mile a day. Eventually they gained control of the key heights, but victory eluded them; they were cut off from their supplies of food and ammunition by Turkish cavalry raids, and succumbed to exhaustion. Unable to continue fighting, the Greeks descended from the heights and crossed back over the Sakarya river on 14 September and retreated back to Eskishehir, where they had started their march a month before. The campaign was over.

In Angora the grateful National Assembly promoted Mustapha Kemal to the rank of field marshal and endowed him with the title of “Ghazi”—the Turkish Moslem equivalent of “warrior for the Faith” or “Crusader.”

II

Between the summer of 1921 and the summer of 1922, a lull prevailed on the battlefield, during which Prime Minister Gounaris and his Foreign Minister journeyed west to seek aid from the Allies. On the continent of Europe they met with little sympathy. In London they sat in the ambassadors’ waiting room at the Foreign Office, hat in hand, waiting for Lord Curzon somehow to solve their problems. Lloyd George told them “Personally I am a friend of Greece, but…all my colleagues are against me. And I cannot be of any use to you. It is impossible, impossible.”
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The British Prime Minister no longer had anything to offer the Greeks, but exhorted them to fight on nonetheless. His policy (such as it was) was for Greece to stay the course in the hope that things would change for the better. In the spring of 1922 he told Venizelos (who was in London as a private citizen and had come to see him in the House of Commons) that, when King Constantine eventually disappeared from the scene, public opinion in the Allied countries would swing back toward support of Greece. “Meanwhile Greece must stick to her policy,” said Lloyd George, adding that, “this was the testing time of the Greek nation, and that if they persevered now their future was assured…Greece must go through the wilderness, she must live on manna picked up from the stones, she must struggle through the stern trial of the present time.” He said that he “would never shake hands with a Greek again who went back upon his country’s aims in Smyrna.”
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Lloyd George found himself increasingly isolated, even within his own government, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, took effective control of British efforts to resolve the crisis; in collaboration with the Allies, he moved toward an accommodation with Nationalist Turkey.

Fearing that the Allies were about to betray him that summer, King Constantine withdrew three regiments and two battalions from the Greek army in Anatolia and sent them to Thrace, the European province of Turkey opposite Constantinople. His government then announced that Greece would occupy Constantinople in order to bring the war to an end. His desperate calculation was that this threat would impel the Allies to take some action to resolve the Greek-Turkish conflict, presumably in a manner favorable to Greece. He gambled that, at the very least, the Allies would consent to let his forces in Thrace pass through Constantinople to link up with and rejoin his weakened armies defending the Anatolian coast. But, instead, the Allied army of occupation in Constantinople barred the road to the Greeks.

Constantine’s withdrawal of the Greek units from the Anatolian coast meanwhile prompted Kemal to hasten an attack on the weakened and overextended Greek defensive line there. Massing his forces in great secrecy, he launched an attack on the southern front at dawn on 26 August. After two days of fierce fighting the Greeks retreated in disorder. The commander-in-chief of the Greek army in Asia Minor “was almost universally said to be mad” (according to a British report from Athens) and later was termed a “mental case” by Lloyd George; whether or not these were exaggerations, he was incapable of coping with the situation.
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On 4 September the Greek government appointed a new commander-in-chief in his place, but so complete had been the breakdown in communications that it did not know that the general it now placed in supreme command was already a prisoner in Turkish hands; he is said to have heard the news of his appointment from Kemal.
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Lord Riddell was with Lloyd George on Sunday, 3 September, when the Prime Minister received a communication from friends of Greece

Greece assembled a fleet to evacuate her army from Asia Minor, and along the coast throngs of soldiers headed toward the ships in hopes of finding passage. The mass attempt at escape was a race against time: against the coming September rains and against the advancing, vengeful Turkish army.

The ancient Greek community of Asia Minor was seized with dread. The Archbishop of Smyrna wrote to Venizelos on 7 September that