PARIS 1919 (77 page)

In Smyrna itself the mood was tense. Agents of the Greek government had been there since the end of the war, trying to stir up popular enthusiasm for Greek rule. The British and French representatives watched sympathetically, the Italians with hostility. The Turkish minority was deeply uneasy. When news spread that the Greeks were coming, the city erupted with demonstrations. Several thousand Turks banged drums during the night in protest; a much larger number of excited Greeks gathered along the waterfront on the morning of May 15. The Orthodox bishop stood ready to bless the soldiers. The blue-and-white flag of Greece flew everywhere. As the first Greek troops marched into town, the crowds cheered and wept. It was like a holiday, until suddenly a shot was fired by somebody outside a Turkish barracks. Greek soldiers started firing wildly, and when Turkish soldiers stumbled out of the barracks in surrender, the Greeks beat them and prodded them along toward the waterfront with bayonets. The Greek onlookers went wild and joined in. Some thirty Turks died. All over Smyrna mobs sprang up, killing and looting. By the evening, between 300 and 400 Turks and 100 Greeks were dead. The disorder spread out into the surrounding countryside and towns in the following days.
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It was a disaster for the Greeks and Greek claims, and a foretaste of what was to come.

Throughout Turkey the news of the landings was received with consternation. They seemed to many a first step to the partition of the Turkish parts of the Ottoman empire. “After I learned about the details of the Smyrna occupation,” a woman who was an early supporter of Atatürk remembered, “I hardly opened my mouth on any subject except when it concerned the sacred struggle which was to be.” In Constantinople, crowds marched with black flags. A delegation of upper-class women made an unprecedented call on the British high commissioner. “A slice had been cut,” said their spokeswoman, “from the living body of the Ottoman Empire of which she was a member and by that act a bleeding member.” In his palace, the sultan wept. His ministers talked impotently about making a protest. Atatürk, who happened to be there, asked, “Do you think your protest will make the Greeks or the British retire?” When the ministers shrugged, he added: “There are perhaps more definite measures that might be taken.”
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Atatürk had by now decided that the place to be was the interior, where there were troops and officers loyal to nationalist ideals. The problem was how to get there. His dilemma was solved inadvertently by the British occupation authorities, who insisted that the government send out an officer to restore law and order. Atatürk managed to get himself appointed with sweeping powers for the whole of Anatolia. He felt, he would later say, “as if a cage had been opened, and as if I were a bird ready to open my wings and fly through the sky.” The day after the Greeks landed in Smyrna, he left Constantinople with a visa from the British. Four days later, on May 19, he and his small party landed at the Black Sea port of Samsun. That day is now a national public holiday in the Turkey he created. Few people in Constantinople had any idea of what he intended, and it was to be many months before the first hints of what was brewing in Anatolia reached Paris. Lloyd George later claimed that “no information had been received as to his activities in Asia Minor in reorganising the shattered and depleted armies of Turkey. Our military intelligence had never been more thoroughly unintelligent.”
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Atatürk and his friends took a terrific gamble, one that might have failed had it not been for the help that the Allies unwittingly gave them in the next months. Allied policies were confused, inept and risky—and created the ideal conditions for Turkish nationalism to flourish. The decision to allow Italian and then Greek forces to land on the coast of Asia Minor, the indications that Armenia and Kurdistan would be set up as separate states, and the possibility that the whole area around the straits, including Constantinople itself, would be stripped away from Turkey, left Turkish nationalists with their backs to the wall. Their country was vanishing; they had little to lose by resistance. Every delay in Paris in settling the treaty with the Ottoman empire saw Allied forces grow weaker and Atatürk's stronger.

Across the sun-baked Anatolian plateau that summer of 1919 Atatürk moved incessantly, sometimes in his old car, sometimes by train, more often by horseback, gathering like-minded officers about him and weaving the independent groups that had sprung up to protest the Allied occupation into the basis of a nationalist movement. “If we have no weapons to fight with,” he promised, “we shall fight with our teeth and nails.” In June, he announced the start of national resistance, against the Greeks in Smyrna, the French in the south and the Armenians in the east. “We must pull on our peasant shoes, we must withdraw to the mountains, we must defend the country to the last rock. If it is the will of God that we be defeated, we must set fire to all our homes, to all our property; we must lay the country in ruins and leave it an empty desert.” As reports filtered back to Constantinople, the British pressed the sultan's government to recall their inspector-general. When Atatürk received the order on June 23 to return to Constantinople, he resigned his commission and called a congress at Erzurum, which issued what became the national pact. Its key provision was that the lands inhabited by Turks, including of course Constantinople, must remain a whole.
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From June 1919 onward, the fate of the remainder of the Ottoman empire depended less and less on what was happening in Paris and more and more on Atatürk's moves. Two different worlds—one of international conferences, lines on maps, peoples moving obediently into this country or that, and the other of a people shaking off their Ottoman past and awakening as a Turkish nation—were heading toward collision. In Paris, the powers continued on their way, largely unaware of what was stirring to the east. The horse-trading of hypothetical mandates went merrily on.

On May 13, two days before the Greek invasion, Harold Nicolson was summoned with his map to Lloyd George's flat in the Rue Nitot to explain to him how much he could offer to the Italians. Orlando and Sonnino arrived and the party sat around the dining room table. Nicolson said, “The appearance of a pie about to be distributed is thus enhanced.” The Italians asked for land to the south of Smyrna. “Oh no!” said Lloyd George, “you can't have that—it's all full of Greeks!” Nicolson realized with consternation that Lloyd George had mistaken the colors indicating contours for population distribution. “Ll.G. takes this correction with great good humour. He is as quick as a kingfisher.” When someone pointed out that mandates must be with “the consent and wishes of the people concerned,” there was great jollity. “Orlando's white cheeks wobble with laughter and his puffy eyes fill up with tears of mirth.”
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Later that afternoon, Nicolson's map lay on the carpet in front of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George as its owner waited outside reading
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Inside, in Wilson's study, Lloyd George sketched out an Italian mandate in southern Anatolia in glowing terms: “Where the Turks made a wilderness, the Italians can build roads, railways, irrigate the soil and cultivate it.” The French could take the north of Anatolia and the Greeks would have Smyrna and its surroundings, as well as the Dodecanese islands, and, said Lloyd George magnanimously, he would give them Cyprus as well. Clemenceau, who had been sitting silently by, expressed some doubts about the Greeks' ability to run a mandate: “I covered the entire Peloponnese without seeing a single road.” Wilson was for giving them a chance: “By showing them our confidence, we will give them the ambition to do well.” Caught up in the spirit of things, Wilson even said that he felt hopeful that the United States would take the mandate for Armenia. Clemenceau said he assumed that the Americans would then take Constantinople as well. Nicolson was called in to take instructions. When Balfour saw these, he was moved to a rare display of anger: “I have three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with only a child to take notes for them.” He sent a strong memorandum to Lloyd George saying how dangerous it would be to partition Turkey.
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Lloyd George also heard from his military advisers, who were almost unanimously opposed. So were Churchill and Montagu, who rushed over from London to warn yet again that cutting up Turkey meant “eternal war” with the Muslim world, including that in India. Lloyd George agreed to receive an Indian delegation, but when it arrived posthaste from London by special train, it found that the prime minister had gone off on a motor tour.
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The arrangements made on May 13 fell apart almost immediately. The Italians irritated both Lloyd George and Wilson with new troop landings. Lloyd George completely changed his mind on an Italian mandate: “I believe that to put the Italians into Asia Minor would be to introduce a source of trouble there.” He had also been impressed by Montagu's warnings. “I conclude,” he told the other leaders when they met on May 19, “that it is impossible to divide Turkey proper. We would run too great a risk of throwing disorder into the Mohammedan world.” Wilson agreed that there was such a danger. He also worried that the mandates might look like a division of the spoils, and, as he pointed out, since the Turks themselves had made it clear that they wanted a single state, it would be awkward if not wrong to divide Anatolia between an Italian and a French mandate. There was no justification for destroying Turkey's sovereignty: “I am forced to remind myself that I, myself, used this word in the Fourteen Points, and that these have become a kind of treaty which binds us.” Perhaps, he suggested, France could take on the responsibility for advising a Turkish state, and they might avoid the word “mandate.” They could even leave the sultan in Constantinople, without of course letting him have any power over the straits. Lloyd George was at first amenable but two days later, after meeting with appalled members of the British cabinet, who had come over to Paris especially, he came back with a suggestion for American control, rather than French, over the whole of Anatolia, as well as the straits and Armenia.
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This infuriated Clemenceau, who had been watching with some bewilderment. He was already angry with Lloyd George over Syria. “You say that France mustn't be in Asia Minor because that would displease Italy: do you think there is no public opinion in France? France is, moreover, of all Europe, the country with the greatest economic and financial interests in Turkey—and here she is thrown out to please first the Mohammedans, and then Italy.” He and Lloyd George got into a furious argument about the division of not just Turkey but the whole of the Middle East. “Both lost their tempers violently and made the most absurd accusations. Clemenceau tried hard to recover his temper at the end, and when they parted said ‘You are the very baddest boy.'” At one point, so it has been claimed, Clemenceau, who after all had considerable experience in such matters, offered Lloyd George a choice of pistols or swords.
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Wilson tried to smooth things over. “Perhaps,” he said, “we have the impression today of a greater disagreement than actually exists.” But he had little to offer by way of a solution. He doubted that the United States would be able to take on a mandate for Anatolia, although he still hoped that it might do so for Armenia, and, as with other issues, fell back on the hope that further study would provide a solution. His fellow peacemakers let the matter drop: the treaty with Germany was far more urgent.
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The Ottoman empire was discussed only once more before President Wilson sailed back to the United States at the end of June. The discussion came in response to the appearance of representatives of the sultan's government. Perhaps to while away the time as they waited for the German response, the powers did what they had not done with Germany and allowed a defeated nation to appear before they had drawn up its treaty. It was an indication of how casually the powers were treating the fate of the Ottoman empire. On June 17 three representatives of the Ottoman Turks spoke to a group that included Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and their foreign ministers. Damad Ferid, the Turkish prime minister, an amiable, rich man whose main achievement had been to marry the sultan's sister, made Turkey's plea. He threw the blame for Turkey's entry into the war and responsibility for the horrific slaughter of Armenian Christians on his predecessors, and he assured his listeners that his country's fondest hope was to become a useful member of the League of Nations. He begged them to leave the Ottoman empire intact. He also had a written statement, which, unfortunately, was not quite ready. Clemenceau offered him little encouragement. “There is no case to be found either in Europe or Asia or Africa,” he said, “in which the establishment of Turkish rule in any country has not been followed by a diminution of material prosperity, and a fall in the level of culture; nor is there any case to be found in which the withdrawal of Turkish rule has not been followed by a growth in material prosperity and a rise in the level of culture. Neither among the Christians of Europe nor among the Moslems of Syria, Arabia and Africa, has the Turk done other than destroy wherever he has conquered.”
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The peacemakers agreed that Damad's performance was pathetic. Wilson thought he had “never seen anything more stupid.” He suggested that the delegation be sent packing: “They had exhibited a complete absence of common sense and a total misunderstanding of the West.” Lloyd George found it “the best proof of the political incapacity of the Turks.” The delegation and its memorandum were jokes. No one could suggest how a reply to them could be worded; Wilson wondered whether it was necessary to reply at all. Lloyd George was for drawing up peace terms that sorted out the Arab lands, Smyrna and Armenia but left aside the Turkish territories in Thrace and Anatolia; those could be dealt with when the Americans had made up their minds about what mandates they would take on. He assumed this would happen in the next couple of months. Wilson confined himself to saying that he now had come around to thinking that the Turks should be removed from control of Constantinople. Clemenceau commented merely: “As for the way we will dispose of the territories of the Turkish Empire, after our last conversations, I must say I no longer know where we are.” The three abandoned the subject, with Lloyd George saying, “If we could only make peace summarily and finish with it.” “I fear,” said Clemenceau, “that is not possible.”
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