Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (6 page)

Every village in Anatolia had a Greek grocery store that dominated the life of the community. As these grocers accumulated more and more wealth, they found themselves becoming banker and moneylender to their Turkish neighbours. ‘The Greek grocer offers his services with one hundred per cent credit,’ noted Deschamps, ‘with the Turk’s property as guarantee. In this way, he is skilfully managing to recover all the land that the infidel conquered from him.’

Parish priests spared no effort in reminding their flocks of their neglected heritage. ‘Religion provides the link for all the Greeks in Turkey,’ wrote Louis de Launay. ‘The ostentatious display of their Christian faith is the best way in which they can express legally their most fervent desire . . . their future reunion into one vast and powerful Hellenic empire.’

As William Childs traipsed his way across the barren plains of central Anatolia – pausing each morning for his hearty cooked breakfast – he found the Greek revival in full swing. Some 2,000 high schools had been opened and he discovered that families who until recently had spoken only Turkish were now conversing freely in Greek. American mission schools were also playing an important role in educating the Greeks. They were run by a highly professional corporation in Massachusetts and their work was a multi-million-dollar enterprise. Many of the schools were equipped with the latest imported technology.

When Childs had set out on his extended hike, he had been filled with enthusiasm for a land that was home to scores of different nationalities. By the time he reached Anatolia’s southern coastline, he was rather more sanguine. He had seen with his own eyes the tensions between these competing nationalities and had been told grim tales of ill-treatment and massacres.

Nor had his voyage been quite as comfortable as he had hoped. He finished his Cambridge sausages within a few weeks of setting out and had no option but to forgo the daily English breakfast he had promised himself.

His spirits were temporarily raised when he reached Adana and had the good fortune to be invited to a picnic hosted by the local British consul. In a delightfully bucolic setting, the consular servants ‘spread a spotless table-cloth, set with table napkins, polished silver and bright glass’. As Childs regaled the consul with his experiences among the Greeks of Anatolia, a succession of platters were brought to the makeshift table. ‘Roast quails, salad and wine were merely the surprises of this wayside meal.’

In spite of this end-of-voyage feast, Childs’ long walk had left him with a lingering feeling of indigestion. He reported back to Whitehall that Turkey’s different nationalities were close to being at loggerheads and he felt certain that any intervention by Greece in Turkey would drag the country towards catastrophe. ‘You can have no idea of racial hatred,’ he concluded, ‘until you have seen it in this land.’

William Childs’ warning of the troubles ahead fell on deaf ears. Although his footsore trudge was rewarded with a desk job in Whitehall, few seem to have heeded his call for caution. Ministers had little compunction about meddling in the internal affairs of another country and even less intention of listening to a member of their own security service. Most had made up their minds about the ailing Ottoman empire long before Childs returned from his travels.

At a dinner party held in Downing Street on 10 November 1912, Turkish affairs dominated the conversation for much of the evening. The guests at the meal table included some of the leading lights in Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government, as well as the newly appointed Greek consul in London, John Stavridi. The host was Asquith’s fiery Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George.

Lloyd George’s dinner-table discourse was as indiscreet as it was revealing and it would have remained secret had it not been for the fact that Stavridi was making a note of everything that was said that night. Lloyd George was to reveal a passion for Greece that would ultimately leave Smyrna a smouldering ruin.

At the time of the dinner party, he was still four years away from ousting Asquith from office and replacing him as prime minister, yet it was clear to everyone that his star was in the ascendant. ‘My supreme idea is to get on,’ he had written when still young. ‘To this idea I shall sacrifice everything – except, I trust, my honesty.’

His time at the Treasury provided an inkling of what was to come. He had spent his time tearing apart discredited policies and injecting radical reform into Britain’s antiquated tax system. He seemed to relish the constitutional crisis that was provoked by his People’s Budget of 1909. He harangued his critics with searing clarity, making inflammatory speeches about the greed and rapacity of the landowning class. His National Insurance Act of 1911 was no less radical and provided the foundation stone of the welfare state.

His private life was even more tumultuous than his political one and could easily have brought an abrupt end to his political ambitions. He had enjoyed a string of lovers before marrying his wife, Margaret, and saw no reason to stop his infidelities while serving in government. While Margaret lived in Wales with the children, Lloyd George enjoyed the company of his lover-cum-secretary, Frances Stevenson. It was an arrangement that suited him perfectly. In the guise of a working relationship, Lloyd George was able to spend all his time with Frances.

Lloyd George would win the ultimate political prize in December 1916, seizing the post of prime minister in controversial circumstances. He would hold it until disaster struck in 1922, when his catastrophic policy towards Smyrna would abruptly terminate his political career.

On the evening of the dinner party, Stavridi arrived punctually at 7.30 p.m. and was ushered into the dining room of Number Eleven, Downing Street. He found Lloyd George in full flow, speaking with great animation about the ongoing Balkan conflict. For more than a month, Greece and her allies had been at war with Turkey and the Greek army had trounced Turkey in several major battles. Lloyd George had watched their progress with great interest and expressed his hope that Greece would emerge greatly strengthened from the war.

As the food was being served, he turned to the footman and called for champagne. Once everyone’s glass had been charged, he proposed a toast. ‘I drink to the success of the allies,’ he said, ‘the representative of one of whom we have here tonight, and may the Turk be turned out of Europe and sent to . . . where he came from.’ The exact expletive he used has been lost to history. Even in his private diary, Stavridi declined to record Lloyd George’s more scandalous turns of phrase.

As the champagne flowed, Lloyd George grew less and less guarded in his comments. ‘[He] said his one hope was that the Turk would now be cleared out of Europe entirely,’ recalled Stavridi. ‘Personally, I don’t want him even to keep Constantinople.’ He also praised the fighting qualities of the Greek army, whose battlefield victories had taken everyone by surprise.

The importance of Lloyd George’s rhetoric was not lost on the Greek consul; he sent a transcript of the entire conversation to the Greek prime minister. Stavridi was hopeful that Lloyd George’s influence would bring about a reversal of British foreign policy, which had traditionally favoured the Turks.

Lloyd George’s contemporaries were withering in their criticisms of his attachment to Greece. The historian, Arnold Toynbee, dismissed it as ‘uninformed religious sentiment on behalf of Christians in conflict with non-Christians, and romantic sentiment towards the successors of the Ancient Greeks’.

There was more than a grain of truth in this and Lloyd George’s ‘sentiment’ was made all the more reckless by the fact that he rarely listened to wiser counsel. ‘[He] has no respect for tradition or convention,’ observed the newspaper magnate, George Riddell. ‘He is always ready to examine, scrap or revise established theories and practices. These qualities give him unlimited confidence in himself . . . he is one of the craftiest of men.’

Riddell admired Lloyd George but was quick to point out his defects. ‘Fondness for a grandiose scheme’ was one of his habitual traits. He liked extravagant gestures and would always value boldness above caution. Another weakness was his dislike for small print: ‘he is not a man of detail.’ This was to have most unfortunate consequences when he came to formulate his policy regarding Smyrna.

Lloyd George was anxious to change government policy towards Greece while she had the upper hand in the Balkan War. He urged Stavridi to persuade Greece’s prime minister to come to London in order that the two men could meet face to face. ‘The future of Greece will be decided in London, not Athens,’ he declared. ‘It is a question of life or death for you.’

Lloyd George’s persuasiveness soon wove its magic. Just four weeks after the Downing Street dinner party, he found himself hosting one of his famous breakfasts in honour of Greece’s premier, the dazzlingly charismatic Eleftherios Venizelos.

It was to prove a most convivial meeting of minds, for there was an instant and magnetic attraction between both men. Like Lloyd George, Venizelos had a physical presence that commanded attention. He was imposing, broad-shouldered and handsome, and his wire-framed spectacles and pointed beard gave him the air of a bookish don. Lloyd George confessed that in all his years in politics he had never met anyone who left such a profound impression. ‘He is a big man,’ he confessed. ‘A very big man.’ He would later be even more exuberant in his praise, describing Venizelos as ‘the greatest statesman Greece had thrown up since the days of Pericles’.

Lloyd George was fond of hyperbole, yet on this occasion his praise was shared by all who met Venizelos. Frances Stevenson was also bowled over by his charm. ‘A magnificent type of Greek,’ she wrote, ‘cast in the classical mould, mentally and physically.’ His traits were dynamism, extraordinary energy and a gift of oratory that enabled him to turn almost any argument on its head.

Venizelos’s revolutionary youth provided colourful copy for the journalists of Fleet Street. He was born into a wealthy merchant family in Crete – then under Turkish rule – and had been christened Eleftherios or Liberator. The liberator spirit was certainly in his blood; his father had fought for Greece’s independence and three of his uncles had died for their country.

Venizelos soon found himself following in their path, fighting with bravado for Crete’s liberation from the Turk. Once this was accomplished, he turned his thoughts to the large number of Greeks scattered across Asia Minor. Their plight, which was to dominate his political career, had long troubled him. When training to be a lawyer in Athens, he startled his friends by outlining his vision for a Greater Greece. On a map of the Byzantine empire that hung on his wall, he drew the boundaries of the Greece that he hoped one day to create. It included large portions of Asia Minor, with the great city of Smyrna at its heart.

This, in a nutshell, was the so-called Megali Idea – the Great Idea – that had inspired Athens’ intellectuals for decades. They, like Venizelos, looked forward to the day when all the Greek-speaking peoples of Asia Minor would be brought under the rule of a newly revived Greek empire. It was the stuff of dreams, a foolish fantasy – and a most dangerous one at that. The word ‘megalomania’ comes from the same Greek root.

The Downing Street breakfast meeting was one of several in which Venizelos spoke with great passion about his ideas of a new Greek empire. Lloyd George listened carefully and pondered how to make it a reality. He wanted a close union between the two countries and requested that ministers should keep ‘in constant and intimate touch with each other’. More alarmingly, he suggested that each country should be able to ‘call upon the other to assist in case of difficulties or war’.

For the next three weeks, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and other ministers in Asquith’s government thrashed out a dynamic new foreign policy. By mid-January, most of the key elements were in place. When John Stavridi went to meet Venizelos at the end of his stay, he found him in ebullient mood. Venizelos told him that ‘Greece’s future would be very different to her past, when she had to stand absolutely alone . . . with not a single friend to care what happened to her’. Now, with Lloyd George’s backing, she ‘would become a power in the East which no one could ignore’.

Venizelos was full of praise for Lloyd George, who had proved a most ingratiating host. ‘He compared [Venizelos] with the old prophets of the Ancient Testament,’ recalled Stavridi, ‘and expressed his great admiration for his splendid capacities and clear insight of people and events.’

Venizelos’s weeks in London, in which he wooed senior politicians and delighted the British press, were a triumphant success.
The Times
heaped praise upon ‘the ablest of Greek statesmen’, stating that his vision of creating a mighty Greek empire in Asia Minor was breathtaking in scope and touched with genius. ‘Large, bold and eminently practical, it pays homage to the exalted ideals and the glorious aspirations of Hellas, while it bears steadily in mind the most urgent and obvious of her material interests.’

No one seemed troubled by the fact that Venizelos was proposing a high-wire strategy of extreme danger – one that involved the complete dismemberment of the ailing Ottoman empire. Nor did anyone pause to consider how Smyrna’s myriad nationalities would feel about being yoked to a new Greek heteronomy. The British press was far too blinkered to realise that it was the Ottoman system of government – with all its idiosyncrasies – that had allowed this great Levantine city to flourish. Instead, they chose to play on old stereotypes, reminding their readers of the cruelty and barbarism of the Turkish race.

Venizelos left London knowing that he had found a champion in Lloyd George. It is tempting to imagine him returning to Athens and unravelling the map of the Byzantine empire that had once adorned the walls of his student lodgings, gripped by the thought that his vision of the Great Idea now stood a chance of becoming a reality. He was prepared to invest everything in securing its success, vowing to create ‘a great and powerful Greece, such as not even the boldest optimist could have imagined a few years back’.