A Peace to End all Peace (71 page)

Appeals, however, were in vain. Venizelos was powerless to give aid, and two days later the archbishop was sent to the martyred death that he foresaw: the local Turkish commander turned him over to a mob of several hundred knife-wielding Moslems who took him to a barber’s shop and mutilated him before killing him.
^*

All-consuming religious and national tensions met their rendezvous with history in Smyrna, the greatest city of Asia Minor, at summer’s end in 1922. Hatred ignited into flame in the Armenian quarter of the city on Wednesday, 13 September. Later the fires spread—or were spread—to the Greek and European quarters. Between 50 and 75 percent of the ancient metropolis was destroyed; the Turkish quarter, however, remained untouched. Hundreds of thousands of people had lived in the Christian city, and it proved impossible to calculate how many of them died in its final agony. A correspondent of the Chicago
Daily News
was the first to pound out the story on his portable typewriter amidst the ruins: “Except for the squalid Turkish quarter, Smyrna has ceased to exist. The problem of the minorities is here solved for all time. No doubt remains as to the origin of the fire…The torch was applied by Turkish regular soldiers.”
¹⁸
Pro-Turkish scholars to this day continue to deny this widely believed accusation.
¹⁹

American, French, British, and Italian naval vessels evacuated their respective nationals from the burning quay. At first the Americans and the British refused to aid anyone else, while the Italians accepted on board anyone who could reach their ships and the French accepted anyone who said he was French—so long as he could say it in French. Eventually, though, the British and Americans came to the aid of refugees without regard to nationality. In the next few weeks Greece and the Allies, in response to a threat by Kemal to treat all Greek and Armenian men of military age as prisoners-of-war, organized the evacuation of masses of civilians as Greece completed her military evacuation as well.

By the end of 1922 about 1,500,000 Greeks had fled or been driven out of Turkey. Ernest Hemingway,
^*
then a war correspondent for the Toronto
Star
, wrote that he had watched a procession of destitute Greek refugees that was some twenty miles long and that he could not get it out of his mind. His Croatian landlady, who was more familiar with such sights, quoted a Turkish proverb to him: “It is not only the fault of the axe but of the tree as well.”
²⁰
It was an easy saying, and in the weeks to come it was followed by a number of others, equally easy, as Allied statesmen searched their consciences and discovered, each in his own way, that blame for the catastrophe should be placed on somebody else.

In Britain, it was common to blame France, Italy, and Bolshevik Russia, but, above all, the United States. As the British ambassador in Washington explained to the American Secretary of State in October, the Allies had agreed to partition the Middle East in the novel and time-consuming form of receiving Mandates from the League of Nations—and had done so solely in order to please the United States, which then had withdrawn from the Middle East peace process entirely. The United States had also agreed to accept Mandates to occupy and safeguard Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and Armenia, and then had gone back on her word two years later. By implication, the ambassador indicated that the Allies could have imposed their own kind of settlement in 1919 and would then have had done with it; but to accommodate and secure the cooperation of the United States, Britain had waited for years, and had assumed novel responsibilities, and now was left entirely on her own to carry the heavy burden of having to defend the American idea of Mandates.
²¹

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes replied that

Behind the mutual recrimination was the fundamental shift in American foreign policy that occurred when President Woodrow Wilson was replaced by Warren Gamaliel Harding. A principal object of President Wilson’s Middle Eastern policy had been to support Christianity and, in particular, American missionary colleges and missionary activities; but President Harding did not share these interests. When the Turks advanced on Smyrna, such American church groups as the conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church called for the American government to send troops to stop the massacre of Christians; but President Harding told Secretary of State Hughes, “Frankly, it is difficult for me to be consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of the contending religion…”
²³

The other principal object of Woodrow Wilson’s Middle Eastern policy had been to ensure that the peoples of the region were ruled by governments of their choice. President Harding did not share these concerns either. He limited his administration’s efforts to the protection of American interests. In the Middle East, that mostly meant the protection of American commercial interests which were primarily oil interests. In Turkey the Kemalist government was prepared to grant oil concessions to an American group, and seemed likely to be able to provide the internal security and stable business environment that oil companies require. Turkish willingness to open the door to American companies was welcomed by the Department of State and may well have colored its perception of the Kemalist regime.

The plight of Greek, Armenian, and other Christians in the wake of Smyrna’s destruction was addressed by the Secretary of State in a speech he delivered in Boston in October. “While nothing can excuse in the slightest degree or palliate the barbaric cruelty of the Turks,” he said, “no just appraisement can be made of the situation which fails to take account of the incursion of the Greek army into Anatolia, of the war there waged, and of the terrible incidents of the retreat of that army, in the burning of towns, and general devastation and cruelties.” Having noted that atrocities had been committed by both sides, the Secretary of State rejected the contention that the United States should have intervened. He pointed out that the entire situation was the result of a war to which the United States had not been a party; if the Allies, who were closely connected to the situation, did not choose to intervene, it certainly was no responsibility of America’s to do so. He told his audience that the United States quite properly had limited its efforts to the protection of American interests in Turkey.
²⁴

III

Constantinople and European Turkey—eastern Thrace—were the next and final objectives on Kemal’s line of march. The supposedly neutral Allied army of occupation stood between him and his objectives. As the Nationalist Turkish armies advanced to their positions, the Allies panicked. Hitherto the war had been far away from them; but if Kemal attacked, they themselves would have to fight.

In Britain the news was startling for the same reason. As late as 4 September,
The Times
had reported that “The Greek Army unquestionably sustained a reverse, but its extent is unduly exaggerated.” But on 5 September, a headline read “G
REEK
A
RMY’S
D
EFEAT
” on 6 September, a headline read “A G
RAVE
S
ITUATION
” and from mid-September on, the headlines “N
EAR
E
AST
P
ERIL
” and “N
EAR
E
AST
C
RISIS
” appeared with terribly insistent regularity. Photos of burning Smyrna took the place of society weddings, theater openings, and golf championships. Britons, four years after the armistice, were shocked to be suddenly told that they might have to fight a war to defend far-off Constantinople. It was the last thing in the world that most Britons wanted to do, and an immediate inclination was to get rid of the government that had got them into such a situation.

But Constantinople and the Dardanelles, because of their world importance for shipping, and eastern Thrace, because it is in Europe, were positions that occupied a special status in the minds of British leaders. Winston Churchill, hitherto pro-Turkish, again came to the rescue of Lloyd George’s policy and told the Cabinet in September that “The line of deep water separating Asia from Europe was a line of great significance, and we must make that line secure by every means within our power. If the Turks take the Gallipoli Peninsula and Constantinople, we shall have lost the whole fruits of our victory…”
²⁵
Lloyd George voiced his strong agreement, saying that “In no circumstances could we allow the Gallipoli Peninsula to be held by the Turks. It was the most important strategic position in the world, and the closing of the Straits had prolonged the war by two years. It was inconceivable that we should allow the Turks to gain possession of the Gallipoli Peninsula and we should fight to prevent their doing so.”
²⁶

By mid-September the last Greek troops standing between the Turks and the Allies had disappeared and a direct armed clash seemed imminent. The Cabinet met in a series of emergency sessions commencing 15 September, when Churchill told his colleagues that “The misfortunes of the Allies were probably due to the fact that owing to the delay on the part of America in declaring their position, their armies had apparently melted away.” Armies were needed, in his view, for he “was wholly opposed to any attempt to carry out a bluff without force.”
²⁷
He stressed the necessity of securing support from the Dominions
^*
and from France in reinforcing the British troops facing Kemal’s armies.

On 15 September 1922 the Cabinet instructed Winston Churchill to draft—for Lloyd George’s signature—a telegram to the Dominions informing them of the British decision to defend the Neutral Zone in Turkey and asking for their military aid. Shortly before midnight the telegram, in cipher, was sent to each of the Dominion prime ministers.

The Cabinet decided that the public also ought to be informed of the seriousness of the situation; and to this end Churchill and Lloyd George prepared a press release on 16 September that appeared that evening in the newspapers. No members of the Cabinet other than Lloyd George and Churchill had seen it prior to publication. The communiqué expressed the desire of the British government to convene a peace conference with Turkey, but stated that no such conference could convene under the gun of Turkish threats. It expressed fear of what the Moslem world might do if comparatively weak Moslem Turkey could be seen to have inflicted a major defeat on the Allies; presumably the rest of the Moslem world would be encouraged to throw off colonial rule. The communiqué made reference to British consultations with France, Italy, and the Dominions with a view toward taking common military action to avert the Kemalist threat.
²⁹

The belligerent tone of the communiqué alarmed public opinion in Britain. The
Daily Mail
ran a banner headline: “S
TOP
T
HIS
N
EW
W
AR
!”
³⁰
The communiqué also caused alarm abroad. Furious that the British government appeared to be speaking for him, French Premier Poincaré ordered his troops to be withdrawn from the front line of the Neutral Zone; the Italians followed forthwith, and the British forces were left alone to face the enemy.

The Dominion prime ministers were also offended. The communiqué—which was of course written in plain English—was published in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand newspapers before the prime ministers had a chance to decode the ciphered cables they had received. It suggested that Churchill and Lloyd George were trying to rush them into something without giving them time to think. In reply, Canada and Australia refused to send troops. A revolution had occurred in the constitution of the British Empire: it was the first time that British Dominions had ever refused to follow the mother country into war. South Africa remained silent. Only New Zealand and Newfoundland responded favorably.

On 22 September Lloyd George called upon Churchill to take charge as chairman of a Cabinet Committee to oversee military movements in Turkey.
³¹
Churchill’s brilliant friend, F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead and serving as Lord Chancellor, had previously been critical of Churchill for changing over to an anti-Turkish position, but at the end of September joined Lloyd George and Churchill as a leader of the belligerent faction. It was a question of prestige, Birkenhead felt; Britain must never be seen to give in to force.
³²

In Britain the press campaign against the war continued. Public protest meetings were held. Trade union delegates went to Downing Street to deliver their protest to the Prime Minister personally.

The Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, crossed over to Paris to attempt to concert a strategy with the Allies. On 23 September he finally agreed with Poincaré and Sforza on a common program that yielded to all of Kemal’s demands—eastern Thrace, Constantinople, and the Dardanelles—so long as appearances could be preserved; it was to appear to be a negotiated settlement rather than a surrender. It was not a happy meeting for the British Foreign Secretary; after being exposed to Poincaré’s bitter denunciations, Curzon broke down and retired to the next room in tears.