PARIS 1919 (80 page)

As the situation deteriorated, the Allies, or rather the British, decided on a step that was ultimately to be fatal to their position in Turkey. Venizelos, who feared that his government would fall unless he could show some successes, and whose forces had been chafing in Smyrna under repeated nationalist attacks, finally got approval in June 1920 from Lloyd George to move inland. As a sort of quid pro quo, Venizelos also sent troops to support the occupying forces at Constantinople. The Supreme Council, which was still in existence, provided a thin cover of legality; Greek troops were simply responding, on behalf of the Allies, to Turkish attacks. The British high commissioner in Constantinople wrote angrily to Curzon: “The Supreme Council, thus, are prepared for a resumption of general warfare; they are prepared to do violence to their own declared principles; they are prepared to perpetuate bloodshed indefinitely in the Near East; and for what? To maintain M. Veniselos in power in Greece for what cannot in the nature of things be more than a few years at the outside.” Curzon agreed completely: “Venizelos thinks his men will sweep the Turks into the mountains. I doubt it will be so.”
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And so the last stage of peacemaking in Turkey started with war. Greek troops moved out of Smyrna on a wide front, up the valleys to the edge of the Anatolian plateau. The Turkish nationalists melted back into the interior. In Europe, another Greek army swept aside a weak and disorganized Turkish force in Thrace. Venizelos expressed great confidence; to Henry Wilson, he foretold the collapse of Atatürk's forces and the spread of Greek power inland, to Constantinople, even perhaps to Pontus on the Black Sea. Privately, the Greek prime minister had moments of panic but, by this point, he had little choice but to go on.
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By August 1920, the Greeks were 250 miles into the interior.

That same month, the Allies and Damad Ferid, representing the sultan's government, signed a peace treaty in a showroom at the Sèvres porcelain factory on the outskirts of Paris: not a thing of beauty, but as easily smashed. Allied military advisers warned that it would take at least twenty-seven divisions to enforce the terms, divisions they did not have. In Turkey, there was a national day of mourning; newspapers had black borders, shops were closed and prayers were recited all day. Atatürk fought on. By now he had most of the nationalist forces in Turkey under his control, and in the north he and the Bolsheviks were stamping out the troublesome Caucasian republics.
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In September 1920, less than a month after the Treaty of Sèvres had promised an independent Armenia incorporating part of Turkey, Atatürk's forces attacked from the south. Despite their best efforts and the attacks of their tiny air force of three planes, the Armenians were gradually forced back. When Aharonian, the Armenian poet who had spoken for his country in Paris, tried to see Curzon in London, he was brushed off with a letter. “What we want to see now is concrete evidence of some constructive and administrative ability at home, instead of a purely external policy based on propaganda and mendicancy,” wrote Curzon. On November 17, the Armenian government signed an armistice with Turkey which left only a tiny scrap of country still free. Five days later, a message arrived from President Wilson. Under the Treaty of Sèvres he had been asked to draw Armenia's boundaries; he decided it should have 42,000 square kilometers of Turkish territory.
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With his nation abandoned by the world and crushed between two enemies, the Armenian prime minister said, “Nothing remains for the Armenians to do but choose the lesser of two evils.”
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In December, Armenia became a Soviet republic; the Bolshevik commissar for nationalities, Joseph Stalin, was active in bringing it to heel. The following March, the Treaty of Moscow between Turkey and the Soviet Union confirmed the return of the Turkish provinces of Kars and Ardahan to Turkey. (Stalin was the negotiator for the Bolsheviks.) The border has lasted to this day.

Kurdistan was finished too. By March 1921 the Allies had backed away from the vague promises in the Treaty of Sèvres. As far as Kurdistan was concerned, they said, they were ready to modify the treaty in “a sense of conformity with the existing facts of the situation.”
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The “existing facts” were that Atatürk had denounced the whole treaty; he had successfully kept part of the Armenian territories within Turkey; and he was about to sign a treaty giving the rest to the Soviet Union. Kurdish nationalists might protest, but the Allies no longer had any interest in an independent Kurdish state.

Stability on his northern and eastern flanks enabled Atatürk to deal with the Greek invasion in the west. Here, too, the current of events was running in his favor. In November 1920, Venizelos, much to everyone's surprise (including his own), was defeated in an election. That left the way open for the return of his old enemy King Constantine, which in turn finished off what was left of the Allied policy on Turkey. Italy and France argued that they were no longer under any obligation to support Greece and that the Treaty of Sèvres must be revised. The Italians hinted that they would be willing to work with Atatürk to modify its terms.

The treaty was also unpopular in France, where the colonial lobby denounced it as a sellout. The French government, for its part, could no longer afford the 500 million francs per year for France's zone of occupation in the southern part of Asia Minor—or the losses. By the start of 1920 the Turks were waging an increasingly effective guerrilla war. Over 500 French soldiers were casualties in the first two weeks of February alone. The French were forced to abandon one post after another and this threatened their hold on Syria to the south. In October 1921, France signed a treaty with Atatürk's government which provided for the withdrawal of all French forces from Cilicia in the south. France got economic concessions, while Atatürk gained something much more important—recognition by a leading power. Curzon was furious: “We seem to be reverting to the old traditional divergence—amounting almost to antipathy—between France and ourselves, fomented by every device that an unscrupulous Govt and a lying Press can suggest.”
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In Greece, Constantine's return led to a purge of pro-Venizelos officers in the army, throwing it into confusion just as the spring campaigning season of 1921 opened in Asia Minor. The new Greek government nevertheless felt honor bound to try to hang on to what Greece had been promised. Lloyd George, over the objections of Curzon, encouraged the Greeks with many nods and winks to attack the Turks. That summer the Greek forces pushed far inland toward Ankara, an extraordinary military accomplishment across parched wastelands. It was the farthest extent of Greece's advance, and beyond its capacity to sustain. Along the 400 miles of Greek lines, the soldiers knew that they were done for. “Let us go home and to hell with Asia Minor,” they were saying the following spring.
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The Greek government, which had appealed in vain to its allies for money and military support, resigned itself to a negotiated peace with Turkey and the loss of at least some of the territory it was occupying. In April 1922 Atatürk refused an offer brokered by Britain, France and Italy. Turkey would accept an armistice only if Greece started to evacuate its forces at once from Asia Minor, something that was politically impossible for the Greek government. Throughout the summer, Greece's political and military leaders hesitated over what to do next. On the front lines, the Greek soldiers dug in and waited.

On August 26, 1922, the Turkish counterattack finally came toward Smyrna. The orders were simple: “Soldiers, your goal is the Mediterranean.”
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The Greek forces were shattered and on September 10, Atatürk rode in triumph into Smyrna. The city was packed with stragglers and refugees who had fled from Greek villages inland. On the quays a great crowd struggled to get onto the ships and to safety. In the back streets and alleys, the looting and killing had begun. The conquering soldiers and the Turks of Smyrna had many scores to settle. Like their masters in Rome, Paris and London, the representatives of the powers now abandoned the Greeks to their lot. As foreign troops watched from their ships, the city started to burn.

The first fire may have broken out by accident, but eyewitnesses later saw Turks going through the Armenian and Greek quarters with cans of petrol. “It was a terrifying thing to see even from a distance,” a British officer recalled. “There was the most awful scream one could ever imagine. I believe many people were shoved into the sea, simply by the crowds nearest the houses trying to get further away from the fire.” Atatürk watched the flames impassively; “a disagreeable incident” was his reaction.
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When the fires died out, Greek Smyrna was no more.

The collapse of the Greek army left the small Allied occupation forces in Constantinople and guarding the straits suddenly exposed. As Atatürk's forces advanced north toward the Sea of Marmara and Constantinople, the British government decided that it must stand firm at Chanak and Ismid on the Asiatic side. It called on the British empire and its allies, but little beyond excuses and reproaches came back. Of the dominions, only New Zealand rallied to the flag. The Italians hastily assured Atatürk of their neutrality. The French ordered their troops out of Chanak. Curzon rushed over to Paris and had a dreadful scene with Poincaré, now French prime minister, in which he talked of “abandonment” and “desertion.” When Poincaré shouted back, Curzon rushed out of the room in tears. He grasped the British ambassador's arm: “I can't bear that horrid little man. I can't bear him.” Only a stiff brandy enabled him to resume what proved to be fruitless negotiations.
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Lloyd George was for war, but cooler heads, including Curzon's and those of the military on the spot, finally prevailed. Atatürk was at last ready for negotiations. The armistice of Mudanya, of October 11, provided for the Turks to take over eastern Thrace from the Greeks. In return, Atatürk promised not to move troops into Constantinople, Gallipoli or Ismid until a peace conference could decide their fate.

All over Asia Minor and Thrace the Greeks were moving out, more than a million of them. Greek shopkeepers, farmers, priests, old men and women, Muslim Greeks, Greeks who did not speak a word of Greek, stumbled into a country unable to feed and house them. The young Ernest Hemingway, reporting for a Toronto newspaper, saw the Greek soldiers going home: “All day long I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers, hiking along the trails across the brown, rolling, barren Thrace countryside. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitos at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.”
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The Greek adventure in Asia Minor had already brought down Venizelos; now it destroyed his great patron, Lloyd George. The Chanak crisis was too much for a shaky coalition government. Curzon discreetly abandoned his old colleagues. When a new Conservative government under Bonar Law took office in November 1922, Curzon was reappointed foreign secretary. He left almost immediately for Lausanne, where the Turkish peace was now at last to be concluded.

A few of those who assembled there had been at the Paris Peace Conference—Curzon himself, Poincaré, a subdued Venizelos, who had been invited by the new government to represent Greece, Stamboliski of Bulgaria with his glamorous interpreter, the only woman at the conference. There were new faces too, among them Mussolini, in white spats and black shirt, ill at ease at his first major international conference, and Georgi Chicherin, the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, with his thin red beard and “furtive old-clothes-man slouch.” Turkey was now represented by the nationalists, led by Inönü Ismet, a trusted general of Atatürk. When the Allies had tried to invite the Constantinople government as well, Atatürk had simply abolished the sultanate. The Americans, in their new mood of detachment from European affairs, sent only observers: Richard Child, an amiable former journalist, and Joseph Grew, later American ambassador to Tokyo at the time of Pearl Harbor. Grew found, to his surprise, that Curzon was really quite charming: “Never have I enjoyed anything more than the small dinners of three or four which he appeared to love and where, after the table was swept and the port brought on, he would sit hour after hour telling stories, anecdotes, and experiences in a delightful vein seldom seen in present-day society.”
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Curzon had many things to try his patience in Lausanne: his drunken valet, who hid his dress trousers; his back brace, which broke and cut into him; above all, the French and the Italians, “overflowing with unctuous civility to the Turks and showing an inclination to bolt at every corner from the course”; and of course the Turks themselves. Ismet, “a little dark man, absolutely without magnetism,” who looked “more like an Armenian lace-seller than a Turkish general,” stonewalled, played up his deafness, and obstinately reiterated his demands. He had come with firm instructions from Atatürk: to negotiate an independent Turkey, free of outside interference. As a good soldier, he intended to follow them. “You remind me,” Curzon snapped one day, “of nothing so much as a music box. You play the same old tune day after day until we are heartily sick of it—sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.” With heavy sarcasm Curzon poked holes in Ismet's arguments. Ismet shrugged and simply ignored him. Curzon, he said, “treated us like schoolboys but we did not mind. He treated the French and the Italians just the same.” In the evenings the Turk took solace in his favorite green chartreuse; one of the Americans who unwisely joined him swore off the drink for life. Adding to Curzon's frustration with the Turks was his knowledge that he was struggling against an unseen adversary. Far off in Ankara, Atatürk was watching the conference closely and cabling his orders to Ismet.
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