A Peace to End all Peace (72 page)

Meanwhile, the British and Turkish armies confronted one another at Chanak (today called Canakkale), a coastal town on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles that today serves as the point of departure for tours to the ruins of Troy. The French and Italian contingents having retired to their tents, a small British contingent stood guard behind barbed wire, with orders not to fire unless fired upon. The first detachment of Turkish troops advanced to the British line on 23 September. The Turks did not open fire, but stood their ground and refused to withdraw. A few days later more Turkish troops arrived. By the end of September, there were 4,500 Turks in the Neutral Zone, talking through the barbed wire to the British, and holding their rifles butt-forward to demonstrate that they would not be the first to fire. It was an eerie and unnerving confrontation. On 29 September British Intelligence reported to the Cabinet that Kemal, pushed on by Soviet Russia, planned to attack the next day. The report, though false, was believed. With the approval of the Cabinet, the chiefs of the military services drafted a stern ultimatum for the local British commander to deliver to Kemal, threatening to open fire.

The local British commander, disregarding the instructions from London—which could have led Britain into war—did not deliver the ultimatum. Instead he reached an agreement with Kemal to negotiate an armistice—and so brought the crisis to an end. For many reasons—including fear of what Lloyd George and Churchill in their recklessness might do—Kemal was prepared to accept a formula that allowed the Allies to save face by postponing Turkey’s occupation of some of the territories she was eventually to occupy. Had Kemal invaded Europe it would have meant war. The belligerent posture of the British leaders appeared to have stopped him. Given the actual weakness of their position, this represented a brilliant triumph for Lloyd George and Churchill.

After much hard bargaining, negotiations for an armistice were concluded at the coastal town of Mudanya on the morning of 11 October, to come into effect at midnight, 14 October. Significant substantive issues remained; consideration of them was put off until a peace conference could convene. Essentially, Kemal obtained the terms he had outlined in the National Pact and had adhered to ever since: an independent Turkish nation-state to be established in Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Before long, Kemal’s Turkey took physical possession of Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and eastern Thrace from the departing Allies.

In November 1922, the Kemalist National Assembly deposed the Sultan. The Sultan fled from Constantinople into exile. Thus in 1922 the centuries-old Ottoman Empire came to an end; and Turkey, which for 500 years had dominated the Middle East, departed from Middle Eastern history to seek to make herself European.

IV

Two aspects of the crisis and of the armistice negotiations made an especially marked impression in Britain. One was that the French representative at the armistice conference had played an adversary role by urging the Turks to resist British demands. This proved to be the climax of a line of French conduct throughout the Turkish crisis that was regarded in Britain as treacherous. Just as Britain’s Middle Eastern policy had led France to re-evaluate and eventually to repudiate her alliance with Britain, so now France’s policy caused the leaders of the British Empire to look at France through new and apprehensive eyes. A short time later the Prime Minister of South Africa wrote to the then Prime Minister of Britain that “France is once more the leader of the Continent with all the bad old instincts fully alive in her…The French are out for world power; they have played the most dangerous anti-ally game with Kemal; and inevitably in the course of their ambitions they must come to realise that the British Empire is the only remaining enemy.”
³³

Another unnerving aspect of the crisis was the apparently reckless conduct of the inner group in the Cabinet: Lloyd George, Birkenhead, Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Robert Horne, and the Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain. Not merely to the public and to the press, but also to their political colleagues, they gave the impression of being anxious to provoke another war. The First Lord of the Admiralty said that he had the feeling that “L.G., Winston, Birkenhead, Horne, and even Austen positively
want
hostilities to break out.”
³⁴
Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Cabinet, recorded in his diary on 17 October 1922, that Winston Churchill “quite frankly regretted that the Turks had not attacked us” Lloyd George agreed with Churchill about this, Hankey believed.
³⁵

Attacking the Cabinet ministers as “Rash and vacillating and incapable,”
The Times
on 2 October had warned that “if this country once begins to suspect them, or any among them, of any disposition to make political capital at home out of a course which would land us in war, it will never forgive them.”

Stanley Baldwin, a junior Conservative member of the government who privately had come to view the Prime Minister as “demoniacal,” confided to his wife that “he had found out that…L.G. had been all for war and had schemed to make this country go to war with Turkey so that they should have a ‘Christian’…war
v
. the Mahomedan…On the strength of that they would call a General Election at once…which, they calculated, would return them to office for another period of years.”
³⁶
Bonar Law expressed the opposite fear: that the Prime Minister would make peace in order to win the elections, but that once he had been re-elected he would go back to making war.
³⁷

Lloyd George’s friend Lord Riddell told the Prime Minister “that the country will not stand for a fresh war.” “I disagree,” said the Prime Minister. “The country will willingly support our action regarding the Straits by force of arms if need be.”
³⁸
Decades later, writing of the Chanak crisis in his memoirs, Lloyd George avowed that “I certainly meant to fight and I was certain we should win.”
³⁹

V

As the Chanak crisis moved toward its denouement, a military revolution broke out in Greece, launched by a triumvirate of officers in the field: two army colonels and a naval captain. There was much confusion but, in the end, no resistance. The government resigned on 26 September. King Constantine abdicated the following morning; his son mounted the throne as George II that afternoon. The main body of revolutionary troops marched into Athens on 28 September.

The triumvirate of revolutionary officers assumed authority, and at once ordered the arrest of the leaders of the previous government. Gounaris and several other ex-ministers were brought before a military court martial on 13 November, despite protests from the British government. The lengthy charges, though clothed in legalistic language, were of little legal validity. Essentially, they amounted to a political indictment of Gounaris and his associates for having brought about a national catastrophe.

At dawn on 28 November the president of the court martial announced its verdict. All eight of the accused persons were convicted of high treason. Two of them were sentenced to life imprisonment. The other six, including former Prime Minister Gounaris, were sentenced to death. The six condemned men, within hours, were driven to an execution ground east of Athens, in the shadow of Mount Hymettus. Small burial holes had already been dug at intervals of twelve metres. In front of each of the condemned men, at a distance of fifteen paces, stood a firing squad of five soldiers. The execution took place before noon. Having refused to wear bandages, Gounaris and his associates went to their death with their eyes open.
⁴⁰

VI

On 8 October 1922 Andrew Bonar Law, the retired leader of the Unionist—Conservative Party, wrote a letter to
The Times
and the
Daily Express
—published the next day—in which he appeared to express support for the strong stand the Lloyd George government had taken against Turkey at Chanak. On the other hand, he pointed out that the interests that Britain appeared to be defending, such as the freedom of the Dardanelles and the prevention of future massacres of Christians, were not uniquely British interests but world interests. Therefore, he wrote, “It is not…right that the burden of taking action should fall on the British Empire alone.” He claimed that “We are at the Straits and in Constantinople not by our own action alone, but by the will of the Allied Powers which won the war, and America is one of those Powers.”

In much-quoted sentences, Bonar Law argued that if the United States and the Allies were not prepared to share the burden of responsibility, Britain should put it down. “We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world. The financial and social conditions of this country make that impossible.” He proposed to warn France that Britain might walk away from enforcing the settlement with Germany, and might imitate the United States in retiring into an exclusive concern with her own national interests, if France failed to recognize that a stand had to be taken in Asia as well as in Europe.
⁴¹

Read as a whole, Bonar Law’s letter did not call into question the policy pursued until then by the government; it merely offered advice for the future. Its isolationist tone, however, and the sentence about not being the world’s policeman—which was often quoted out of context—struck a responsive chord in the ranks of those who found Lloyd George’s policies dangerous and overly ambitious. Moreover, Bonar Law’s willingness to take a public stand suggested that, with his health apparently restored, he might be persuaded to re-enter politics—which threatened to alter the delicate balance of forces within the Conservative Party and endanger the Coalition.

Bonar Law had chosen his foreign policy issue shrewdly. Tory sentiment was traditionally pro-Turk and had been alienated by the Prime Minister’s pro-Greek crusade. “
A good understanding with Turkey was our old policy
and it is essential…” (original emphasis), wrote the chief of the recalcitrant Tories on 2 October.
⁴²
It was yet another instance in which rank-and-file Conservatives found that their principles and prejudices were being disregarded by the Coalition government. Coming after the concession of independence to Ireland and after the recognition of Bolshevik Russia, Lloyd George’s anti-Turkish policy threatened to be one instance too many. The Prime Minister had dissipated his credit with them. He had done so at a time when the collapse of the economy, mass unemployment, a slump in exports, scandals concerning the sales of honors and titles to political contributors, and a series of foreign policy fiascos culminating in the Chanak crisis had left him a much diminished electoral asset. The Conservatives no longer felt compelled to follow him in order to survive at the polls.

The Prime Minister viewed matters differently. His government’s firmness at Chanak had brought Turkey’s armies to a halt; it was, in his view, a personal triumph for him and for Churchill, and he mistakenly believed that the electorate recognized it as such. On this erroneous assumption he proposed to call a snap election in the flush of victory, as he had done at the end of 1918 after the First World War had been won.

Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead, the Conservative leaders in the government, agreed to join with Lloyd George in fighting the elections once again on a coalition basis. To defend that decision, Chamberlain, as leader of the party, summoned the Conservative members of the House of Commons and of the government to a meeting the morning of Thursday, 19 October, at the Carlton, the leading Tory club.

Bonar Law was the person best placed to oppose Chamberlain, bring down the Coalition, and replace Lloyd George as Prime Minister. He hesitated; yet there was a strong press campaign urging him on, led by
The Times
and by the Beaverbrook newspapers.

Lord Beaverbrook was Bonar Law’s most intimate political friend. He was largely responsible for having created the Lloyd George Coalition government during the war; now he acted to bring it down. On 11 October Beaverbrook wrote to an American friend that

Beaverbrook succeeded in overcoming Bonar Law’s doubts and in making sure that the former Tory leader actually attended the decisive meeting at the Carlton Club. At the meeting, Law spoke against the Coalition, and though he spoke badly his intervention proved decisive. By an overwhelming vote of 187 to 87, the caucus decided to contest the coming elections on a straight party basis.

Upon receiving the news, David Lloyd George immediately tendered his resignation to King George. Soon afterward Andrew Bonar Law took office as Prime Minister and called elections for 15 November.

The popular vote on 15 November was close, but in the winner-take-all British parliamentary system the results were a triumph for the Conservatives, who won a majority of seats in the new House of Commons. Lloyd George was repudiated; neither he nor Asquith commanded a large enough following to qualify even as Leader of the Opposition, for Labour had beaten the Liberals to take second place.

During the electoral campaign, the Beaverbrook press mounted a fierce attack on the Middle Eastern policy of the Coalition government, and demanded that Britain withdraw from her new acquisitions: Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan. Although Beaverbrook’s crusade was in fact launched without Bonar Law’s sanction, it seemed to implicate the new administration in a blanket condemnation of Britain’s postwar policy in the Middle East. It also called into question Britain’s commitment to continue to support Arab and Jewish aspirations there.