The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (46 page)

ONE SQUARE ON THE CHESSBOARD
where advocates of the separate peace landed with growing frequency was located in Switzerland. That country enjoyed “the distinction of being
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a sort of happy hunting ground for all the political malcontents and intriguers of Europe,” wrote Ronald Campbell of the Foreign Office, rather enviously, to his friend Horace Rumbold, who had just replaced Grant Duff as Britain’s envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Swiss Republic. Rumbold agreed. “This is the most
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interesting post in the service at the present moment,” he reported gleefully. “I sit in my room like a spider and attract every day news and information which would keep a diplomatist in prewar days going for months.” To Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office, he wrote: “This country is crammed
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full of spies and rascals of every description and it is incredible that such a small country should be able to hold so many of these gentry.” Increasingly the gentry with whom he had to deal were dissident Turks and British agents engaging in the pourparlers that could precede the negotiation of a separate peace between their two nations.

The son of a diplomat (also named Sir Horace) and the husband of a diplomat’s daughter (Ethelred Constantia Veitch Fane), Rumbold had gone into the family business. When he took the competitive entrance exam for the diplomatic corps in February 1891, he earned the top score. A series
of international postings followed. With the commencement of hostilites, he returned to London, where for two years he oversaw affairs having to do with prisoners of war. Then came the assignment in Berne. In old photographs he looks like an English diplomat of the ancien régime, with receding brown-blond hair and mustache, an impeccable three-piece suit and tie, a half-open mouth, and heavy-lidded, sleepy eyes. “He had trained
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himself,” wrote one who served under him in later years, “to appear more English than any Englishman had ever seemed before.”

He was a shrewd observer, an able organizer, and a capable representative of his country, but in some respects Rumbold not only looked like a caricature of an old Etonian but thought like one too. He commiserated with his mother about the lower orders back home: “Our
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 … servants did not for a moment admit that the War should make any difference to their diet and they always claimed large joints and the best butter.” He wrote about foreigners with equal disdain. Of the Italians, he once observed, “What can you expect
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from a nation the majority of which would be better employed selling ice-cream?” Of Britain’s eastern ally: “I always had doubts
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about the Russians.” Of Britain’s eastern enemy: “Talk about the clean-fighting Turk is moonshine. He is a brute and that is the end of it.” Of the German minister at The Hague, he recalled: “He is as clever
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as they make them … a Jew-dog.”

But he ran a network of informants capably enough, including impecunious Turkish refugees and disaffected Ottoman officials whom he had bribed. Such figures supplied him with a steady stream of more or less trustworthy information about conditions and attitudes in Turkey. He relied far more, however, upon a volunteer agent, Dr. Humbert Denis Parodi, a strikingly handsome, dark-skinned Swiss citizen of French and Italian descent, who had worked before the war for the Egyptian government as inspector general of public instruction in Cairo and who now served as overseer of the Egyptian student community in Switzerland. With the outbreak of war, Parodi offered his services to the British envoy at the time, Grant Duff. “My sole aim,”
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he later wrote, “has been to aid as best I can the triumph of right and justice over brutal force.” Equally at home in the café society of Egyptian students, some of whom nourished anti-imperialist and even anti-British sentiments, and in the Ottoman expatriate community, he proved an inspired agent and not only about Turkish matters. To give one example, in April 1916 Parodi learned that Swiss socialists were negotiating
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with German authorities to arrange passage through Germany of Russian revolutionaries who wished to return home. In this manner the British Foreign Office learned that Lenin was headed for the
Finland Station in St. Petersburg possibly even before the tsar’s ministers did.

When Rumbold arrived in Berne, he inherited this remarkable agent from Grant Duff. Parodi would prove indispensable to him in bringing together Britons and Turks who wished to discuss the separate peace. His services proved so valuable that Rumbold wished to reward him. Lord Hardinge at the Foreign Office agreed that Parodi deserved generous recompense. The agent seemed “to be really a good
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man, and much better than one could possibly conceive of a person of Syrian origins.” Rumbold responded indignantly at once: “He is not of Syrian
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origin: In fact he has not a drop of Oriental blood in him … I admit that he looks like an Oriental and that if you put a tarboosh on his head you would think that he was an Egyptian or a Turk. But there is nothing Oriental about him save his appearance, although he knows Orientals down to the ground.” Parodi got the money.

In the following instance of British and Turkish maneuverings in Switzerland, however, Dr. Parodi appears to have played no role.

One day during the summer of 1916 “a very old friend” of Lloyd George, a Mrs. Evans, asked an English businessman of her acquaintance, one J. R. Pilling, if he “could get Turkey out of the War.” Of Mrs. Evans, the historian can learn little except that she was “practically a member
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of the Lloyd George household.” Of Mr. Pilling, we may glean a bit more. At age sixty-seven, he was a Manchester solicitor, banker, and undischarged bankrupt, who during the 1890s had attempted, unsuccessfully, to build railroads in the Middle East, where he had formed the Syria-Ottoman Railway Company. He lived for a time in Constantinople at the Pera Palace Hotel with a German lady, Therese de Koelle, whom the British Foreign Office suspected of being a German agent. His business dealings brought him into contact with important Ottoman officials, including some among the Young Turk leadership. He may have been a member of the Anglo-Ottoman Society.
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At any rate he knew members; his employee Sir Douglas Pitt Fox, chief engineer of the Syria-Ottoman Railway Company, belonged to it. When the Foreign Office belatedly investigated Mr. Pilling some six months after Mrs. Evans first asked him about making peace with Turkey, it judged him to be “a ‘sharper’ and of very shady
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character.”

Mrs. Evans believed that all land and water frontiers should be internationalized and guaranteed by the Allies and the United States; that way Russia could gain access to the Mediterranean Sea without having to capture
Constantinople. That accomplished, Russia would have no reason to wage war against the Ottomans—and the Ottomans would have no reason to continue fighting Russia and her allies. “This plan appeared to me to constitute the perfect solution of the difficult Turkish question,” wrote Pilling. He realized that he could call upon his “long intimate acquaintance
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with Turkish Ministers and Turkish affairs” in order to propose Mrs. Evans’s plan to responsible parties in the Ottoman government. He may have thought that if he did so, and if his overture really did help launch discussions about a separate peace, these figures would help him to recoup some of his losses in the Syria-Ottoman Railway Company.

But first he must put the plan to responsible parties in London. Together he and Mrs. Evans polished the scheme. By October 1916 they felt sufficiently confident to take advantage of Mrs. Evans’s connection with the then—minister of war, David Lloyd George. When he met Mr. Pilling, Lloyd George “formed rather a low
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opinion of him,” according to Ronald Campbell of the Foreign Office. But the businessman must have struck a chord. “The day following”
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the interview, as Pilling remembered, “I was called to the War Office to give a full explanation of the reasons and mode of operation for securing this detachment of Turkey.” Here too, according to Campbell, Pilling made no very positive impression. Nevertheless he received the passport to travel abroad that had been denied to Marmaduke Pickthall only a few months earlier. On February 6, 1917, “I left London en route to Constantinople,” Pilling recalled, “with instructions to take such measures as I deemed desirable in order to lead the Turkish Government to apply to England for a separate treaty of peace.”

One may wonder why the failed businessman gained a passport to travel abroad when the transparently well-intentioned Pickthall did not. The answer must be that the latter never had an audience with Lloyd George. Sir Mark Sykes and others in the Foreign Office cut him off. But Lloyd George, the easterner, could not get the possibility of a separate peace with Turkey out of his head. That such a peace might jeopardize the possibility of a British protectorate in Palestine, which he was simultaneously encouraging Zionists to anticipate, apparently did not matter to him. Certainly it did not matter to him that Pilling might be a seedy character. In pursuit of a separate peace, Lloyd George would employ agents far seedier than Mr. Pilling.

Actually on February 6, Pilling embarked not for Constantinople but for Switzerland. Once arrived, he met Sir Horace Rumbold, who judged him “rather a muddle-headed
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person and I do not think he should be playing about … interviewing Turks.” But Pilling could refer, and often did, to the
mission entrusted to him by the government. “I … told Mr. Pilling,” Rumbold complained, “that I knew nothing whatever about him and that I had never received any message from the Foreign Office about his so-called mission.” The Foreign Office sympathized: “Altogether it would seem
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that Mr. Pilling might be summed up as something of a lunatic.” Only now was it scrambling to figure out who he was and what he was doing.

As to that, Pilling was holding meetings with the former khedive of Egypt, presently resident in Switzerland; with Rifaat Bey, former president of the Ottoman senate; with the ubiquitous Fuad Selim al-Hijari; and with many others. He wrote two letters to Talaat Pasha, which apparently were conveyed to Constantinople in the Ottoman diplomatic pouch. Later Eric Drummond, private secretary to Prime Minister Asquith and then to Foreign Ministers Grey and Balfour, worried that Pilling had “made proposals to the
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Turkish Government and … took the Prime Minister’s name in vain,” but that was not how Pilling described his activities. To the contrary, he reported that he made clear to the Turks that he had “no official status but
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 … they need have no hesitation in approaching His Majesty’s Government with any reasonable proposal for peace”; also that “it is they who must make the first move.”

By now Rumbold and the Foreign Office realized that Pilling really did have some connection with Military Intelligence and with Lloyd George; nevertheless they wanted to be rid of him. “These free lances are
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rather a nuisance,” Rumbold fretted. Lord Hardinge instructed him to tell the meddlesome businessman that “after careful reflexion the authorities at home … consider it undesirable that he should remain any longer in Switzerland.” Rumbold would have looked down his nose at the undischarged bankrupt in his best old Etonian manner. Pilling would have protested, wanting to wait in Berne for a reply from Talaat to his letters. Rumbold would have shown a bit of the iron that underlay his pompous manner. Pilling returned to London. He reported, however, not to Hardinge at the Foreign Office but to the War Office, where the director of Military Intelligence, Sir George MacDonagh, and others “thought him fairly reasonable and were not at all sure there was not something in what he said.” Pilling volunteered to go to Turkey to interview Djemal Pasha, if the British could smuggle him into the country. That was a nonstarter, but “I am afraid you have
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not seen the last of Pilling,” Campbell warned Rumbold: The War Office had given permission for him to return to Switzerland to pick up the letter from Talaat that he assured them would be waiting for him there.

By May 11 Pilling was back in Berne, and the next day saw him closeted
once again with Fuad Selim al-Hijari at the Turkish legation. Immediately afterward he wrote a letter to the prime minister, put it in an envelope addressed to Mrs. Evans, and put that one in a larger envelope addressed to a common acquaintance, one Mr. Sutherland. By this roundabout route the letter did eventually reach Lloyd George. It can be read today at the House of Lords Record Office, among the Lloyd George papers, and at the National Archive, which has the original.

Pilling reported that no letter from Talaat Pasha had yet arrived for him, but that Fuad Selim al-Hijari “told me he had a message for me from [him].” According to Pilling, Talaat had instructed Fuad to say that Turkey would cede to Britain both Mesopotamia and Egypt, “so securing British interests
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in the Persian Gulf, Egypt and Cypress.” She desired creation of an independent Armenian buffer state between herself and Russia. She would allow free passage through the straits to all nations, including Russia. Significantly, “the Minister in no wise made reference to Syria, Palestine or Arabia, save as to Mesopotamia. Nor did I, as I was a listener only.” From this we may deduce that if Fuad and perhaps Talaat Pasha and other Young Turks were really hoping to communicate with England through Fuad and Pilling, they were signaling that they expected to retain some Middle Eastern foothold after the war.

Then Fuad Selim al-Hijari broached subjects far beyond Pilling’s remit. “We went to war on account of the Russian danger,” he explained. “So did Austria.” But, referring to the revolution that had taken place recently in Russia, the ascension of Kerensky, and the new policy of “no annexations”: “This danger for both of us is passed. Neither ourselves nor Austria has any reason for going on with the war.” Therefore Austria would give up its claim to Serbia in return for an early peace. As Vienna held that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip had provoked the war in the first place, this was rather a large concession to make. But note that it was a Turk, not an Austrian, who made it.