A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  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.

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  A GREEK TRAGEDY

  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.1 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.”2 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

  has had a great fight in the Cabinet to back the Greeks (not in the field but morally) and he and Balfour are the only pro-Greeks there…[He] has got his way, but he is much afraid lest the Greek attack should be a failure, and he should have proved to have been wrong. He says his political reputation depends a great deal on what happens in Asia Minor…[I]f the Greeks succeed the Treaty of Versailles is vindicated, and the Turkish rule is at an end. A new Greek Empire will be founded, friendly to Britain, and it will help all our interests in the East. He is perfectly convinced that he is right over this, and is willing to stake everything on it.4

  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:

  I hear from Greek quarters that Eski Shehir has been captured and that the Turkish Army is in full retreat. Which ever way you look at the matter this is news of the first importance. The future of the East will very largely be determined by this struggle, and yet as far as I can see, the War Office have not taken the slightest trouble to find out what has happened…The Staff have displayed the most amazing slovenliness in this matter. Their information about the respective strength and quality of the two Armies turned out to be hopelessly wrong when the facts were investigated, at the instance of the despised politicians.

  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.”5

  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.6 Kemal acknowledged that his people would feel a “moral shock” when they learned that he was going to abandon western Anatolia to the enemy.7 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 requis
itioned 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.8 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.”9

  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.”10

  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.11 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.12

  Lord Riddell was with Lloyd George on Sunday, 3 September, when the Prime Minister received a communication from friends of Greece

  begging L. G. to do something for the Greeks. He explained…at length the impossibility [of doing anything] and strongly criticised the action of King Constantine, who, he said, was responsible for what had happened. Among other things he had appointed a most inefficient and unsuitable general. L.G. further said that as far as he could make out, he, Balfour, and Curzon were the only three people in the country who were in favour of the Greeks. He deplored the situation, but could do nothing.13

  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

  Hellenism in Asia Minor, the Greek state and the entire Greek Nation are descending now to a Hell from which no power will be able to raise them up and save them…I have judged it necessary…out of the flames of catastrophe in which the Greek people of Asia Minor are suffering—and it is a real question whether when Your Excellency reads this letter of mine we shall still be alive, destined as we are…for sacrifice and martyrdom…to direct this last appeal to you.14

  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