PARIS 1919 (72 page)

India, the reason the British were in Egypt at all, also worried the British in 1919. Indian nationalism was even further developed than Egyptian. What had once been polite requests for limited self-government had now turned into demands for home rule. During the war, Mohandas Gandhi had arrived from South Africa with the tools of political organization and civil disobedience which he had perfected to transform the largely middle-class Indian National Congress into a formidable mass movement. Rapid inflation, the collapse of India's export trade and the revelations of how British military incompetence had wasted the lives of Indian soldiers in Mesopotamia disillusioned even those Indians who had thought that at least British rule provided good government. Although Britain promised a gradual move toward self-rule in 1917, it was being outflanked and outwitted.

Indian nationalists noted President Wilson's talk of self-determination with approval but at first they paid little attention to the Peace Conference. India had no territorial claims, or at least not ones that the Indians themselves cared about. (The British officials in the India Office tried, unsuccessfully, to put in claims for Indian mandates over Mesopotamia and German East Africa.
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) It was represented not by its own leaders but by Montagu, the secretary of state for India, and two carefully chosen Indians: Lord Satyendra Sinha, a distinguished judge who was useful on committees, and the Maharajah of Bikaner, who said very little but gave nice dinner parties. The peacemakers were taken by surprise, and the British alarmed, when a seemingly minor matter—the abolition of the caliphate in Constantinople—suddenly became a major cause in India.

Indian Muslims, who made up a quarter of British India's population, had been quietly unhappy for some time at the prospect that the end of the Ottoman empire might bring the end of the spiritual leadership that the sultan exercised over the world's Muslims. Mosques throughout India prayed for him as caliph in their weekly observances. The war had pulled Indian Muslims in two directions. A small minority openly sided with the Ottomans and were put in jail for saying so; the rest, sullenly or sadly, remained quiescent. When rumors floated back from Paris to India in 1919 that the powers were planning to divide up the Ottoman empire, depose the sultan and abolish the caliphate, Muslim newspapers published articles beseeching the British to protect him, and local notables formed caliphate committees. Petitions poured in to the British authorities, claiming, inaccurately, that Wilson had promised to protect the caliphate. The government of India urged the British government to leave the sultan in Constantinople with some sort of authority over Muslim holy places throughout the Middle East. In Paris, Montagu warned his colleagues repeatedly of the risks of alienating a large group of Indians who had been notably loyal to the British. His warnings, and his prickly personality, merely produced irritation. Lloyd George wrote to him: “In fact throughout the Conference your attitude has often struck me as being not so much that of a member of the British Cabinet, but of a successor on the throne of Aurangzeb!”
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On May 17 Lloyd George grudgingly agreed to bring before the Council of Four a deputation, which included the Aga Khan, to ask that the Turkish parts of the Ottoman empire not be parceled out among different powers, and that the caliphate be allowed to continue. Lloyd George himself was impressed: “I conclude that it is impossible to divide Turkey proper. We would run too great a risk of throwing disorder into the Mohammedan world.”
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Unfortunately, four days later, on May 21, he and Clemenceau had their violent argument over the Middle East settlement and the whole issue, including the caliphate, was put off indefinitely.

In India, the Muslims were increasingly anxious. The local committees organized themselves into a central caliphate committee. The chief Muslim political organization, the Muslim League, sent a deputation to see Lloyd George. What was much more serious, Gandhi decided to throw his and Congress's support behind the movement. Skinny, introverted, obsessed equally with his bowels and his soul, attuned always to the political currents in India but listening as much to his own complicated heart, Gandhi was an unlikely political genius. In the caliphate agitation he saw an opportunity to build bridges between Hindus and Muslims and to embarrass the British authorities.

India was already uneasy. The great flu epidemic had carried off twelve million Indians (Gandhi used it as an example of Britain's moral unfitness to rule India). Muslims were incensed over the caliphate, workers were striking and peasants were protesting about their rents. The government of India made matters worse by introducing legislation to increase its arbitrary powers. In March and April, the big cities saw huge demonstrations and public meetings. On April 6 Gandhi called for a general strike across India. Although he urged his followers to refrain from violence, there were sporadic outbreaks of looting and rioting. The worst trouble came in the Punjab where, on April 13, at Amritsar, a panicking British officer ordered his troops to fire point-blank into a large crowd. The Amritsar Massacre, as it came to be known, galvanized even moderate Indian opinion against the British. The British, especially those in India, started to panic. Was there, a local English-language newspaper asked, “some malevolent and highly dangerous organization which is at work below the surface?” Were the disturbances caused by Bolsheviks? Infiltrators from Egypt? Or perhaps a worldwide Muslim conspiracy? Perhaps it was more than coincidence that a war had just broken out with Muslim Afghanistan and that Ibn Saud's forces, largely drawn from a puritanical Islamic movement, were sweeping across the Arabian peninsula.
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Their Egyptian and Indian troubles shook British confidence and brought home yet again the limits of British power. Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, had tried repeatedly to make his government aware of this; as he wrote to a friend in April 1919, “My whole energies are now bent to getting our troops out of Europe and Russia and concentrating all our strength in our coming storm centres, viz. England, Ireland, Egypt and India. There you are, my dear.” Even if they pulled troops back from areas such as the Caucasus and Persia, the military were not sure that they could deal with the “storm centres.” Britain's armies were melting away. In the Middle East alone, Allenby was demobilizing an average of 20,000 men a month during the spring of 1919.
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The troubles also brought home the costs. “Do please realize,” Churchill—now colonial secretary—wrote to his private secretary in the Colonial Office on November 12, 1921, “that everything that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense.” As Curzon reported gloomily to Balfour after a particularly inconclusive cabinet discussion in the summer of 1919: “This fact did emerge; the burden of maintaining an English and an Indian Army of 320,000 men in various parts of the Turkish Empire and in Egypt, or of 225,000 men excluding Egypt, with its overwhelming cost, is one that can no longer be sustained.” Lloyd George, who had seen no urgent need to make the peace settlement for the Ottoman empire, finally started to pay attention. In August 1919, just before he went on holiday, Balfour provided him with an admirably lucid summary of the problems although, typically, he offered no solutions: “The unhappy truth . . . is that France, England and America have got themselves into a position over the Syrian problem so inextricably confused that no really neat and satisfactory issue is now possible for any of them.” Lloyd George was also becoming uncomfortably aware of the depth of French anger.

To complicate matters further, Feisal had been displaying an unwelcome independence since his return to Syria in May. In one of his first speeches in Damascus, he told his Arab audience, “It now remains for you to choose to be either slaves or masters of your own destiny.” He was rumored to be talking to Egyptian nationalists about a common front against the British and to Turkish ones about a possible reunion with Turkey. His agents were spreading propaganda into Mesopotamia. In a conversation with Allenby, Feisal claimed that Woodrow Wilson had told him to follow the example of the American Revolution: “If you want independence recruit soldiers and be strong.” If Feisal did decide to lead an uprising, the British military authorities in Syria warned Lloyd George, they could not contain it.
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In September, Lloyd George, who moved quickly once he had made up his mind, decided that Britain would pull its troops out of Syria and let the French move in. After difficult conversations, Lloyd George and Clemenceau agreed on the handover of power. (There was still to be trouble over the border between Syria and Palestine, which was not finally settled until 1922.
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) The Americans protested weakly and talked of self-determination, but they were no longer a serious factor. By the end of 1919 the other outstanding issues between Britain and France had been settled: Mosul's oil was to be shared, more or less along the lines that had been agreed six months earlier.

At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, where the terms of the treaty with the Ottoman empire were approved, the British and French, their differences temporarily forgotten, awarded themselves mandates, the British for Palestine and Mesopotamia, the French for Syria. In theory these were not valid until they were confirmed by the League of Nations. Not surprisingly, a League dominated by Britain and France did this in 1922.

The Arabs were consulted, but only by the Americans. Wilson's Commission of Inquiry, which Clemenceau and Lloyd George had declined to support, had duly gone ahead. Henry King, the president of Oberlin, and Charles Crane, who had done so much to help Czechoslovakia's cause, doggedly spent the summer of 1919 traveling through Palestine and Syria. They found that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants wanted Syria to encompass both Palestine and Lebanon; a similar majority also wanted independence. “Dangers,” they concluded, “may readily arise from unwise and unfaithful dealings with this people, but there is great hope of peace and progress if they be handled frankly and loyally.”
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Their report was not published until 1922, long after the damage had been done.

In September 1919 Feisal was baldly informed that Britain and France had reopened their discussions on the Middle East. The British made sure that he did not arrive in London until after Lloyd George and Clemenceau had reached their agreement. Feisal protested; he was not going to submit to French rule. The British, perhaps with some embarrassment, merely urged him to talk to the French. From Oxford, Lawrence watched helplessly as his government abandoned his old friend and the Arabs. He read and reread a poem about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and often, his mother recalled, he sat in her house, “the entire morning between breakfast and lunch in the same position, without moving, and with the same expression on his face.”
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In Paris, Feisal got a cool welcome. “After having covered him with flowers and sung his praises in every key, the French press,” reported Mordacq, “practically drew him through the mud and heaped lies and insults on him.” Clemenceau was sympathetic but firm; the French would accept Feisal as ruler in Damascus, so long as he could maintain order. He would, of course, call on French troops in any emergency. Feisal, in a grand gesture, presented Clemenceau with his horses; two were beautiful Thoroughbreds, reported Mordacq, the rest only so-so. The Tiger, in any case, was on his way out, and French official views, never sympathetic to Arab nationalism, were hardening. French rule needed to be consolidated in Syria, especially with Turkish nationalists attacking French forces in Cilicia. The new government in France, elected in November 1919, was much more interested in empire than Clemenceau's had been. Poincaré's successor as president, Paul Deschanel, was later to assure a deputation of fellow colonialists that the Mediterranean and the Middle East were cornerstones of French policy. (Shortly afterward he was found talking to the trees in the gardens at the Elysée Palace.) Although Feisal lingered on in Paris until January 1920, he failed to get a firm agreement with the French. He went home to Damascus, disappointed not only in the French but also in the British; in his words, “he had been handed over tied by feet and hands to the French.”
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Back in Damascus, Feisal found a deteriorating situation. The French high commissioner, General Gouraud, the man who in happier days had given Feisal his decoration, believed in being firm with the Arabs. Arab nationalists themselves were increasingly belligerent, encouraged in part by the example of D'Annunzio in Fiume, who appeared to be getting away with defying the powers. In the wide Bekáa Valley with its great ruined Roman city at Baalbek, Arab irregulars sniped at French troops. (In the 1970s, radical guerrillas from around the world found the valley similarly convenient.) Behind the scenes, there was tremendous pressure on Feisal to make a declaration of independence, even if it meant war with France. Feisal reluctantly went along with the current. On March 7, 1920, the Syrian Congress proclaimed him king of Syria, and not of the circumscribed Syria agreed upon by Britain and France, but of Syria within its “natural boundaries,” including Lebanon and Palestine and stretching east to the Euphrates. There were clashes with French troops. Shortly afterward, another congress claiming to speak for Mesopotamians also met in Damascus. It declared independence, proclaimed Feisal's brother Abdullah king, and demanded that the British end their occupation.
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Even within Syria, however, Feisal did not have complete support. Lebanese Christians, who did not want to get caught in a dispute with France, proclaimed their separate independence at a huge meeting on March 20, 1920, and chose as a flag the French tricolor with a Lebanese cedar in the center.
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Meanwhile, Arab radicals accused Feisal of being too complaisant with the French. In July, Gouraud sent Feisal an ultimatum, demanding, among other things, unconditional acceptance of the French mandate over Syria and punishment of those who had attacked the French. Feisal appealed desperately to the other powers, who responded with nothing more than murmurs of sympathy. On July 24, on the road to Damascus, French troops swept aside a poorly armed Arab force. Feisal and his family went into exile in Palestine and then Italy.