A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  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.”37

  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.38

  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.”39 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

  was a worried, anxious man…He was responsible for the agreement which is causing us all the trouble with the French. We call it the “Sykes-P.” agreement. Sykes negotiated it for us with Picot, the Frenchman, who got the better of him. Sykes saw the difficulties in which he had placed us, and was very worried in consequence. I said something to him about the agreement, and at once saw how I had cut him. I am sorry. I wish I had said nothing. I blame myself. He did his best. I did not wish to emphasize his mistake or to make him more miserable.40

  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.41

  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,* 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.43

  PART IX

  THE TIDE GOES OUT

  40

  THE TICKING CLOCK

  I

  Victory in the First World War brought the British Empire to its zenith: with the addition of the territories it had occupied in the Middle East and elsewhere, it had become larger than it—or any other empire—had ever been before. Lloyd George, though his country was war-weary and tired of distant and expensive adventures, sought to hold on to as much as possible of what Britain had gained in the war. That was to be a chief objective in the negotiations he was about to begin with the other Allied and Associated Powers. But before turning to the Peace Conference, the Prime Minister chose to seek a mandate from the electorate.

  On the night that the armistice with Germany was signed, the Prime Minister asked only two other politicians to dine with him and with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, at Downing Street. They were Winston Churchill and Churchill’s best friend, the brilliant Attorney-General, F. E. Smith. In his diary, Sir Henry Wilson noted that “we discussed many things but principally the General Election!”1

  With his keen eye for political advantage, the Prime Minister saw a chance to win at the polls by calling an election in the immediate flush of victory. With a renewed and secure parliamentary majority, he hoped to gain time to carry through his programs. He sought his new mandate when his popularity was at its height. At the end of 1918 he was still “the man who won the war.” The leader of the Conservative Party spoke for many in saying that “He can be Prime Minister for life if he likes.”2

  The general election took place on 14 December 1918, though to allow time to receive soldiers’ ballots, the votes were not counted until 28 December. Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George and his political partner, the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, led the governmental Coalition. Asquith’s wing of the Liberals contested the elections; and Labour also dropped out of the Coalition to do so.

  The Coalition scored an overwhelming victory. Even Lloyd George was stunned by its magnitude. Almost 85 percent of those who took their seats in the new House of Commons were his supporters. Asquith’s Liberals were crushed by the Coalitionists and Asquith himself lost his seat, as did other prominent leaders of the prewar Liberal Party. The Asquith Liberals were overtaken by Labour, which for the first time could lay claim to be the official Opposition.

  The nature of the electorate had been radically transformed by wartime legislation that for the first time gave the vote to women (from the age of thirty) and to all men (from the age of twenty-one). Twenty-one million people were eligible to vote in 1918, as compared with a mere seven and a half million before the war; and both the new working-class and women voters seemed to have radically different ideas about such issues as paying the bills for imperial expansion abroad.

  For Lloyd George, a potentially disquieting feature of his spectacular triumph was that the electoral gains for the most part were made by Bonar Law’s Conservatives rather than by his own Liberals. Indeed the Conservatives commanded a majority in the new House of Commons. Many of the Conservatives were new men, taking their seats in the House of Commons for the first time; and, of these, many were businessmen who tended toward the right wing of their party. Their political agenda was not the same as the Prime Minister’s.

  For the moment, however, the Prime Minister received full support from Andrew Bonar Law and therefore felt politically secure. Lloyd George had formed a close working partnership with the Conservative leader that suited both men well. Modest and shy, Bonar Law was happy to let the exuberant and colorful Prime Minister take the lead and the limelight. “I tell you we must never let the little man go,” said Bonar Law to one of his lieutenants, in reference to the diminutive occupant of 10 Downing Street. “His way and ours lie side by side in the future.”3

  II

  Winston Churchill, a 45-year-old politician trying to live down his past, was asked by Lloyd George to serve as Secretary of State for War and for Air in the postwar Cabinet. The Prime Minister tendered his offer of the two ministries (“Of course there will be but one salary!”) on 9 January 1919.4 Churchill accepted the offer the following day. As Minister of Munitions he had not been a member of the War Cabinet, so his entry into the War Office marked his return to the inner circles of government. Predictably, the appointment aroused violent opposition.

  A Conservative newspaper commented that “we have watched his brilliant and erratic course in the confident expectation that sooner or later he would make a mess of anything he undertook. Character is destiny; there is some tragic flaw in Mr Churchill which determines him on every occasion in the wrong course…It is an
appointment which makes us tremble for the future.”5

  Churchill, who had to overcome a reputation—deserved or not—for squandering the resources of the country, set out to show that he could be economical: he argued that ambitious policies ought to be scaled back if the resources to support them were not available. But when he suggested that Britain might lack the money and the manpower to back up Lloyd George’s plans for Britain to replace the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the Prime Minister pointedly ignored him.

  The Prime Minister claimed that Britain was entitled to play the dominant role in the Middle East, recalling that at one time or another two and a half million British troops had been sent there, and that a quarter of a million had been killed or wounded; while the French, Gallipoli apart, had suffered practically no casualties in the Middle East, and the Americans had not been there at all.6 At the Peace Conference, Lloyd George argued that his claim was based on the 1,084,000 British and imperial troops occupying the Ottoman Empire.7 In the occupation forces, as he pointed out, there were no non-British contingents of meaningful size.

  During the war, according to the Secretary of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister had “never lost sight of the advantages he might hope to derive at the eventual peace conference from the acquisition of the territory of our enemies.”8 Lloyd George had said to a friend that “once we were in military possession it would make a great difference.”9

  What Winston Churchill insistently repeated was that this situation—the occupation of the Middle East by a million British soldiers—was only temporary; the troops demanded to be brought home. This was the first problem with which Churchill had to grapple as War Minister, and he contended that it imposed new priorities on the government as a whole.

  On 10 January 1919, Churchill’s first day in office as Secretary of State for War, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff urgently consulted him about a crisis in the ranks: soldiers had demonstrated, demanding immediate demobilization. Disorder was widespread, and Churchill feared that the unrest might lead to a Bolshevik uprising; later he wrote that such fears were valid at the time because “So many frightful things had happened, and such tremendous collapses of established structures had been witnessed, the nations had suffered so long, that a tremor, and indeed a spasm, shook the foundations of every State.”10 Churchill believed that the troops had to be brought home as fast as the railroads and troopships could bring them.

  A fortnight later 5,000 British troops at Calais mutinied to demand demobilization, but Churchill was ahead of them with his solution, for he had already prepared a demobilization plan of evident fairness; and under his direction it was rapidly carried into effect throughout 1919.

  But demobilization threatened to prejudice Britain’s chances of imposing peace terms. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in Europe, told Churchill on 15 January 1919 that the existing British army “was rapidly disappearing,” and unless an army of occupation was created, “the Germans would be in a position to negotiate another kind of peace.”11 The same would be true of the Turks. A few days later Churchill submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister in which he argued that “Unless we are to be defrauded of the fruits of victory and…to throw away all that we have won with so much cost and trouble, we must provide for a good many months to come Armies of Occupation for the enemy’s territory. These armies must be strong enough to extract from the Germans, Turks and others” the terms demanded.12

  To give the Prime Minister time to impose his peace terms, Churchill attempted to maintain armies of occupation with newly inducted troops, on the basis of Britain’s first peacetime draft; but the Prime Minister, mindful of domestic political realities, ordered a reduction in the size of Churchill’s armies. Later Churchill was obliged to promise that conscription would come to an end by March 1920. Though he warned the House of Commons, “Do not disband your army until you have got your terms,”13 political considerations forced a demobilization so rapid that, by October 1919, Churchill admitted that “the Army had melted away.”14 Yet in the East, as will be seen presently, Britain had still not got her terms. In 1914 Churchill had been the Cabinet minister most keenly aware that the timetables of mobilization were driving the Great Powers into a world war; in 1919 he was the Cabinet minister most keenly aware that the timetables of demobilization were forcing the empire to abandon the field before victory had been secured.

  He also saw that, in order for Britain to live within her means, the government urgently needed to cut expenses. Churchill promised the Commons that “I shall do my utmost to secure substantial reductions in military forces, for without those reductions good finance is impossible.”15 In fact in the years to come he slashed expenditures to a mere 17 percent of what they had been, from 604 million pounds in 1919 to 111 million pounds in 1922.16

  Another problem, he argued, had to be faced: bringing the British troops home left the Middle East in the hands of Indian soldiers. British India, during the 1914 war, had sent more than a million troops overseas, many of them Moslem.17 At the beginning of 1920 Churchill pointed out to the Cabinet the political consequences of the fact that these predominantly Moslem soldiers were the occupation troops who had been left in place, entrusted with the distasteful task of coercing fellow Moslems. Churchill wrote that “All our limited means of getting the Middle East to settle down quietly are comprised in the use of Indian troops. We must not do anything that will raise Indian sentiment against the use of these troops or affect their own loyalty.”18 Since Britain now had to rely on her Moslem troops, her policies in the Middle East would have to be modified so as not to offend Moslem sentiment; and he argued—though with little effect on the Prime Minister—that this pointed toward the need for a friendlier policy toward the Turks.

  III

  David Lloyd George, flowing with energy despite his arduous years of wartime leadership, formed his postwar Coalition government a week before his fifty-sixth birthday. The items on his immediate personal agenda were in the realm of foreign policy. He arranged to spend much of his time abroad, redrawing the political map of the world. To free himself to concentrate on foreign policy, he left the management of domestic policy and the House of Commons to Bonar Law.

  But Bonar Law proved unequal to the task; he failed to win time for the Prime Minister to concentrate on reconstructing the world undisturbed. It was not only that the war in Ireland had resumed, but that the social and economic conflicts within Britain had moved out of the polling stations and into the streets and factories. Management and labor, each trying to maintain its wartime gains even though the economy was shrinking, turned to industrial warfare a month after the election. Violence broke out. The government took counsel with the army and naval chiefs of staff on measures to suppress what they—haunted by Bolshevism—feared might be a working-class revolution.

  In 1920 and 1921 the British economy collapsed. Prices collapsed, exports slumped, companies went out of business, and the country was gripped by mass unemployment on a scale never known before. Politicians began to question whether Britain could afford foreign policy adventures in places like Palestine and Mesopotamia and began to question whether she could even afford measures that were designed to buy social peace at home. The Prime Minister had espoused a positive Liberal program of housing and social reform—in large part, it was in the hands of his principal parliamentary leader, Dr Christopher Addison—but he was driven to abandon the program, and Dr Addison, in the face of Tory attacks on government wastefulness. Yet it had always been Lloyd George’s view that “the way to prevent the spread of the revolutionary spirit was to embark at once on large schemes of social progress.”19 In his view, to give up such schemes was to leave the door open for agitation and violence; yet that is what he did rather than abandon his imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

  It was against this background of a disappearing army, a deteriorating economy, and a disintegrating society that the Prime Minister—a man wh
o had worked miracles during the war—concentrated on redrawing the map of the Middle East and of the world, while Winston Churchill, unheeded, continued to warn that time was running out.

  41

  BETRAYAL

  I

  The specific terms of the Middle East agreement upon which the Prime Minister and his Allied colleagues finally settled proved to be less important than the process by which they were reached. One aspect of that process was that it took a long time, during which circumstances, as will be seen, were to change for the worse. Friendly foreign leaders were replaced by others less cooperative; quarrels developed between former allies; defeated enemies regrouped and revived; and the British army—it was Churchill’s constant theme—was dwindling away and losing its ability to hold on to its conquests.

  Another aspect of the negotiations that was to weaken the eventual settlement was the general sense that they were conducted in bad faith. The negotiations—to be described presently—were shaped by the Prime Minister’s strategy of playing off the United States against Italy and France, while counting on the United States to protect Britain against possible future threats from Soviet Russia or from a revived and rearmed Germany. It was not until the 1918–19 negotiating season had given way to that of 1919–20 that Lloyd George discovered that the United States was not going to be Britain’s—or anybody’s—ally: she was going to withdraw from world affairs and “entangling alliances.” As will be seen, Lloyd George was then obliged to reverse course, seeking a French alliance since an American one was unavailable; and that, in turn, required him to reverse the course of his anti-French policy in the Middle East. But by then the damage to the Anglo-French alliance had already been done.