A Peace to End all Peace (49 page)

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.”
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Lloyd George had said to a friend that “once we were in military possession it would make a great difference.”
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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 who 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.

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.

In the end the British leaders felt a sense of having been betrayed by the Americans, while the Americans felt that the British had cynically betrayed the ideals for which the world war supposedly had been fought. As a result of Lloyd George’s lack of scruple and Woodrow Wilson’s lack of skill, the negotiation of a Middle Eastern settlement began badly and ended worse.

II

So determined was Woodrow Wilson to play a personal role in formulating the provisions of the peace treaties that he came to Europe to negotiate them himself—the first American president to leave the western hemisphere during his term of office. His unprecedented move made the Allies uneasy; as Clemenceau observed, he and his fellow prime ministers, as heads of government, would be outranked by the President who also served as head of state. By right of precedence, the President therefore would be entitled to chair the Peace Conference.

Suggestions were made in the press and elsewhere that Wilson should stay home to devote himself full time to winning support in the Senate and in the country for his peace terms, leaving his adviser, Edward House, to represent him in Europe. The President rejected such suggestions and, perhaps because of them, began to question the good faith of Colonel House. Crossing the ocean on the liner
George Washington
in December 1918, Wilson and his many American advisers arrived at Brest on Friday the 13th.

Everywhere he went, Wilson met with a tumultuous welcome. John Maynard Keynes wrote that “When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history.”
¹
Nothing, however, could have provided a better description of what was going to happen at the Peace Conference than Wilson’s speeches about what was not going to happen. Peoples and provinces were indeed “bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game.” It was not the case that every settlement was “made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned” on the contrary such settlements were made (though Wilson said they would not be) in order to provide an “adjustment or compromise of claims among rival states” seeking “exterior influence or mastery.”
^*
Not even his own country was prepared to follow the path that he had marked out.

In November 1918, at roughly the time the Armistice agreements were signed, the President’s party had lost control of the United States Senate in the midterm elections. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee therefore passed into the hands of the President’s adversaries. Even before the Peace Conference began, the President accordingly was on notice that he would face problems in securing ratification of whatever terms he might negotiate. Nothing in the President’s unbending nature disposed him to make the concessions or to engage in the political deal-making that would have mitigated these political problems at home.

Abroad it became clear almost immediately that he had not thought through how he was going to carry into effect the generous and idealistic principles that he had articulated. He arrived in Europe with many general opinions but without specific proposals for dealing with the matters that were to be decided. In his memorable portrait of Wilson, Keynes pointed to what followed: “As the President had thought nothing out, the Council was generally working on the basis of a French or British draft.”
²
Lacking both detailed knowledge and negotiating skills, Wilson was reduced to an obstructive role, often refusing to be carried along by his colleagues, but unable to carry them along with him.

House advised compromise—with the Allies abroad, and with the Senate at home. Wilson spurned the advice, and turned against the intimate friend who offered it. The President broke with House; from mid-1919 on he refused to see him again.

III

Lloyd George’s Middle Eastern strategy was to direct the Americans’ anti-imperialist ire against the claims presented by Italy and France, distracting the President from areas in which he might make difficulties for Britain. Maurice Hankey, British Secretary to the Peace Conference, recorded in his diary even before the conference convened that Lloyd George “means to try and get President Wilson into German East Africa in order to ride him off Palestine.”
³
In fact much of the time no special effort was needed: European issues inevitably were given a high, and other issues a relatively low, priority. The question of Russia and the fear that Bolshevik revolutions would break out throughout Europe haunted the Peace Conference. The other great question was the future of Germany. The future of the Ottoman Empire ranked as a lesser issue and Wilson was too preoccupied to pay full attention to the Middle East. When Wilson did turn to these matters, Lloyd George adroitly excluded from the conference agenda questions about the British-occupied areas of the Middle East, placing them beyond the scope of the President’s scrutiny. At the same time, the Prime Minister diverted the President’s anti-imperialist energies into critical scrutiny of the ambitions of Britain’s rivals in the Middle East—her wartime Allies.

IV

Italy had agreed to come into the war on the Allied side in return for British and French promises of territorial gain that eventually included a share in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The promise of Turkish territory was embodied and defined in a treaty signed by Italy, Britain, and France, known as the Agreement of St Jean de Maurienne, concluded in the middle of 1917. By its terms, the agreement was subject to the assent of the Russians. Since the Russian government had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, the agreement had never come into effect. The Italians claimed the territories nonetheless, asking for equal treatment. As one Italian senator put it, “If the others have nothing, we will demand nothing.”
⁴

Italy had been promised a portion of Anatolia—Asia Minor, as it was sometimes called—if she came into the war, but there were no Italian communities there for her to protect, and no other communities whose interests she purported to sponsor. Indeed, in terms of Woodrow Wilson’s self-determination principles, there was no reason for Italy to occupy any part of Asia Minor at all. Prime Minister Emanuele Orlando seemed to recognize the difficulties of his case, but Italian public opinion was caught up in a gust of nationalist frenzy, as were Parliament and the Cabinet, as represented by Foreign Minister Baron Sidney Sonnino.
⁵
Orlando and Sonnino had reason to fear that a failure to persuade the Allies to honor wartime promises to Italy would undermine their political position at home, and felt driven to take action.

Starting in the middle of March 1919, Italian troops began a program of landing in southern Anatolia at Adalia (the present-day Antalya), supposedly to restore order, and then re-embarking. Eventually they stopped re-embarking, and after two months they had troops on a more or less permanent basis at Adalia and also, further up the coast, at Marmaris.
⁶
The Allies feared that, having landed, the Italians were about to march inland to occupy the entire section of Anatolia to which they claimed they were entitled.

Lloyd George pushed the United States into the lead on this question. Woodrow Wilson appealed to Italian public opinion to exert a moderating influence on Orlando’s territorial demands in Europe and the Middle East; whereupon, on 24 April 1919, the Italian delegation left the Peace Conference to return home to seek domestic support. In the absence of the Italians, the United States, France, and Britain turned against them. Italy, though yesterday’s ally, suddenly loomed as an imperialist aggressor posing threats to the peace; and as the Allies banded together against her, Clemenceau remarked: “What a beginning for the League of Nations!”
⁷

On 2 May 1919, outraged by reports of Italian ships being sent to Smyrna, President Wilson offered to send in the American navy, and spoke of the possibility of the United States going to war against Italy in order to defeat aggression.
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By 5 May, as Wilson and others told tales of atrocities they claimed were being committed by the Italians, the Allies were at fever pitch, and determined to reach a decision before the Italian delegation returned on 7 May. Following a suggestion by Lloyd George, they agreed to ask Greece, which was near at hand, to land troops at Smyrna, supposedly to keep order, but in fact to pre-empt the Italians. The Greeks landed their troops on 15 May.

Though intended by the Allies as a temporary measure directed solely against the Italians, the Greek landing assumed a different—and more permanent—character from the start. Maurice Hankey, head of the British secretariat at the Peace Conference, believed that the Smyrna enclave, where Greek troops had landed, ought to be detached from Turkey and incorporated into Greece.
⁹
In this view he was not alone; Lloyd George and Wilson were enchanted by Eleutherios Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, and were won over to his vision of Greece’s historic mission.

Venizelos had established an astonishing hold over the imaginations of his fellow Allied leaders; but even had he not done so, his case was strong where Italy’s was weak. His position was intrinsically appealing both to Wilson’s sense of America’s principles and to Lloyd George’s sense of Britain’s interests. Venizelos’s claims to Anatolia, unlike Italy’s, were based on population as well as history. Smyrna, the coastal metropolis, was a Greek city, and had been a center of Greek civilization since remotest antiquity. According to the then-current (1911) edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, of its population of 250,000, “fully a half is Greek.” The
Britannica
added that “Modern Smyrna is in all but government a Christian town…” The notion of transferring its government from Moslem Turkey to Christian Greece appealed strongly to Lloyd George’s Christian and Hellenist values. It appealed, too, to President Wilson’s principles of self-determination.

Like Italy, Greece had been late in entering the war on the Allied side but, unlike Italy, Greece had been regarded by the British as a client and protégé since the early days of the Great Game. The British navy, at the battle of Navarino in 1827, had won the war for Greek independence, and the two countries had traditions of friendship for one another. Lloyd George saw Venizelos’s Greece as Britain’s natural ally.
^*

Italy and Greece had advanced conflicting claims: they eyed essentially the same areas of the expiring Ottoman Empire. In sending in Greek troops, Wilson and the Allied leaders intended to keep the Italians from seizing these areas before a decision could be reached as to who should have them. But the effect of doing so was to deny the Italian claim and to favor that of Greece. On the British side there were those who were dismayed by this outcome, but it fitted with Lloyd George’s view of Britain’s interests and principles.

Accomplishing many purposes at once, Lloyd George was able to divert Woodrow Wilson’s attention from Britain’s designs to those of Italy, by letting the American President take the lead in imposing what was really Britain’s policy in Smyrna. At the showdown with the Italian leaders, Wilson castigated them for their “imperialist ambitions.”
¹⁰
Taking a friendlier line, Lloyd George instead appealed to their nobility, in a speech of such eloquence that it moved Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, to tears. Orlando went to the window and sobbed emotionally. Across the street, an observer who caught sight of him asked, “What have they been doing to the poor old gentleman?”
¹¹

What they were doing to him was presently made clear. On 19 June 1919, weakened by his failure to achieve Italy’s territorial ambitions at the Peace Conference, Orlando was obliged to resign as Italy’s Prime Minister.

V

Lloyd George’s second diversionary project for Wilson was to turn him against the French claim to Syria.

The American President was allowed to participate in the Ottoman negotiations even though the United States had never joined in the war against Turkey. Although Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were not applicable to the Ottoman settlement (unlike Germany, Turkey had not been allowed to surrender on the basis that any of the points would be applied), they were an expression of the political philosophy with which he approached public issues. Lloyd George recognized this; and when President Wilson turned to the Arabic-speaking Ottoman provinces, the British Prime Minister shrewdly diverted his attention from Britain’s designs to those of France by directing his attention to the French threat to Syrian independence—a threat that ran counter to Wilson’s points and principles.