A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Ludendorff’s powerful offensives of the spring and early summer, which had once again threatened Paris, had been stopped, and the Germans were falling back; but by September 1918 Ludendorff had established a strong defensive line and there was no reason to believe that he could not hold it for a long time. The war in the East, too, seemed likely to drag on, for Enver’s forces driving toward the Caspian seemed poised to continue their offensive toward Persia, Afghanistan, or India.

  Suddenly—and unexpectedly—an Allied breakthrough came in Bulgaria, where General Louis-Felix-François Franchet d’Esperey, the new French commander of the Allied forces in hitherto-neglected Salonika in Greece, launched a lightning offensive at the end of the summer. Bulgaria collapsed and, on 26 September 1918, asked for an armistice. The request should have been forwarded to the Supreme War Council of the Allies in Paris, but Franchet d’Esperey dared not chance the delay. He composed the terms of an armistice himself, and had it signed within a matter of days so that he could turn immediately to mount a devastating offensive on the Danube against the Germans and Austrians, thus successfully executing the “Eastern” strategy that Lloyd George had been advocating in vain ever since the war began.*

  On 29 September Ludendorff, learning that a Bulgarian armistice had been concluded that day, advised his government that Germany would therefore have to sue for an armistice too: he had no troops with which to make a stand on the new southeastern front—the Danube front—that Franchet d’Esperey had opened up.

  The British Cabinet had not expected the enemy to collapse so soon or so suddenly, was not prepared for it, and did not entirely believe it. Armistice terms for the various enemy powers had not been drafted or even considered. A day after Franchet d’Esperey received the Bulgarian request for an armistice, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff inquired “what our Foreign Office was going to do if Turkey followed suit.”1 Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, replied—with complete candor—that he did not know.

  But the issue had to be faced immediately: it presented itself within a matter of days. Between 1 and 6 October both the government of the Ottoman Empire and several prominent individual Turkish leaders launched peace feelers. On the night of 3–4 October Germany, too, sent a note to President Wilson, inaugurating armistice negotiations that were to go on for several weeks, as fighting continued and as German troops successfully held on to a defensive line that ran through eastern France and Belgium.

  On 1 October the British War Cabinet decided to convoke a meeting of the Supreme War Council of the Allies in order to address the question of peace terms for Turkey. At the same time, however, the War Cabinet decided to send two British Dreadnought-class battleships to the Aegean to strengthen Britain against France in the waters off Turkey.

  The Cabinet was seized by a panicky fear that the war might come to an end before the British armed forces could occupy the vital Middle Eastern areas it hoped to dominate. Amery warned Smuts and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that only actual possession of the Middle East before a cease-fire went into effect would enable the Cabinet to bring the region into the British orbit.2 The armies of British India in Mesopotamia were still weeks away from strategically important and oil-rich Mosul; on 2 October its commander was advised by the War Office to “occupy as large a portion of the oil-bearing regions as possible.”3

  On 3 October the War Cabinet discussed at length the question of an armistice or peace agreement with the Ottoman Empire. The Prime Minister, who hoped to reduce France’s and Italy’s share in Britain’s winnings in Ottoman Asia, argued that in all fairness her Allies were not entitled to what they had originally been promised. According to an extract from minutes of the meeting,

  The Prime Minister said he had been refreshing his memory about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and had come to the conclusion that it was quite inapplicable to present circumstances, and was altogether a most undesirable agreement from the British point of view. Having been concluded more than two years ago, it entirely overlooked the fact that our position in Turkey had been won by very large British forces, whereas our Allies had contributed but little to the result.4

  It was specious reasoning, but Balfour, responding as though the Prime Minister were sincere in urging fair play, pointed out the fallacy in his reasoning.

  Mr Balfour reminded the War Cabinet that the original idea had been that any territories that the Allies might acquire should be pooled and should not be regarded as the property of the nation which had won them. The theory had been that the fighting in one theatre of war, where there was little to gain, might be just as important a contribution to the cause of the Allies as much easier fighting in other theatres where great successes were achieved. He believed that some statement of this kind had been made.5

  Bonar Law confirmed Balfour’s recollection.

  Lloyd George took another approach and argued that Britain and Turkey ought to conclude a peace agreement immediately, rather than a mere armistice. (It was evident that, with British armies in occupation of most of the Ottoman Empire, a peace treaty negotiated immediately was likely to favor Britain as the only power in a position to extract concessions from the Porte.)

  Lloyd George argued that the Ottoman Empire was unlikely to accept a mere armistice without knowing what peace terms were to be imposed later. Suspicion of French and Italian ambitions, he said, would drive the Porte to refuse such an arrangement. Therefore Turkey would fight on. This, the Prime Minister continued, would be intolerable, for it meant that the British would have to fight on, too, for the sake of securing purely French and Italian ambitions; and that ought to be out of the question. He said that he would present the matter in this light to the French and Italian premiers in Paris, and he expressed confidence that they would let him have his way.

  Nonetheless the Cabinet drafted the terms of a proposed armistice agreement, which the Prime Minister took with him to Paris to discuss with the other Allied heads of government toward the end of the first week in October. In Paris the Allies agreed on an armistice proposal based largely on the British draft and agreed that the armistice should be negotiated on behalf of the Allies by whichever power was approached by Turkey in the matter. However the Allied premiers dismissed out of hand Lloyd George’s scheme for an immediate peace treaty.

  A subject of increasing controversy between the Allied leaders was the question of who should exercise supreme military command in the several theaters of war against the Ottoman Empire. The French, who exercised supreme naval command in the Mediterranean, sought to displace the British commander of its Aegean wing, Vice-Admiral Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe, who claimed that the French were “on the whole incapable of running a sound naval campaign.”6 The issue was not merely military; for whichever country held the command would be first off the mark in getting to the spoils of victory.

  In Franchet d’Esperey’s command, the eastern flank (which faced Turkey) had been led by a British general, George Francis Milne. Franchet d’Esperey, flushed with success in Bulgaria, now proposed to break up his British contingent, to entrust the eastern flank to a French commander and to prepare an eventual triumphal march into Constantinople, led by himself. Lloyd George vetoed the triumphal entry, and succeeded in getting Clemenceau to order General Milne to be reinstated as commander of Salonika’s Turkish front. With the support of Marshal Foch, Lloyd George managed to change the Clemenceau-Franchet d’Esperey strategy of concentrating all land forces in the Balkan theater on the European campaign. Instead some forces were detached under General Milne to march on Constantinople in support of an Allied naval attack through the Dardanelles.

  Lloyd George proposed, in a letter to Clemenceau dated 15 October, that a British admiral should lead the triumphal entry into Constantinople by sea. On 21 October Clemenceau replied, refusing to agree; his counterproposal was that the Allied fleet steaming up the straits to the Ottoman capital should be under French command. Clemenceau argued that since a British general had been giv
en command of the Salonika campaign against Turkey, it was intolerable that a British officer should also be given command of the naval campaign. He pointed to the immense French investment in the Ottoman public debt as a significant national interest that required France to play a leading role in matters affecting Turkey.

  II

  In hiding, in a Greek home in Pera, the residential section of Constantinople, was Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart F. Newcombe. A British officer active in the Arab Revolt, he had been taken prisoner a year before while leading a daring diversionary attack during Allenby’s Jerusalem campaign. On his third attempt, he had succeeded in escaping from Turkish captivity, and from 22 September 1918 he had been hiding in Pera, where he soon learned that there were Ottoman politicians who were in search of an immediate armistice.

  Opinion in the Ottoman capital was at a turning point. Until mid-September, C.U.P. members by and large still believed in ultimate victory. Civilian members of the Cabinet had deferentially accepted Enver’s assurances that all was going well. Later they claimed to have believed the War Minister when he explained that the apparent German retreat in France was actually a brilliant deception: a maneuver by the German General Staff to trap the unwary Allied armies and destroy them. Enver went so far as to ask Cabinet members not to give Berlin’s game away, and to repeat in public—as though they believed it—that the Germans had been defeated and were retreating.7

  Talaat, the Grand Vizier, was better informed, knew that the Germans really were suffering defeats, and therefore advocated a German-Turkish bid for a compromise peace; but not even he believed that it had to be done urgently, for Enver had misled him, too, into thinking that the military situation was satisfactory for the moment and that it offered some new grounds for hope.8

  In September, Talaat went to Berlin and Sofia and learned something of the true situation from his allies there: on his way back he witnessed the collapse of the Bulgarian army and was officially notified that Bulgaria would seek a separate peace. Bulgaria was the land link to Germany; her defection—in Talaat’s judgment—doomed Turkey to defeat. He returned determined to seek a peace agreement. In concert with the Germans, his government promptly went ahead to sound out the American government on the possibility of surrendering to the United States on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Washington, not being at war with the Porte, inquired of Britain how to reply, but received no response from London; for whatever reason the British reply never reached Washington, which therefore was unable to respond to the Porte. In effect this meant that the benefit of the Fourteen Points was not available to the Ottoman Empire, for only a power that surrendered to the United States could expect American peace terms.

  It was at this point that Newcombe, from his hiding place, took a hand in matters. Enver, who was determined to go on with the war, felt that by continuing to fight Turkey could win better terms; and pointed to Turkish successes in the Caucasus and on the Caspian as proof that he could win victories in the east that would force Britain to concede favorable peace terms in 1919. These were the arguments that Newcombe assailed. He drafted notes for the Young Turk leaders in which he attempted to prove that just the reverse was true: that Britain would grant more favorable terms in 1918 than in 1919. Through his Turkish friends, Newcombe’s notes were circulated at the Porte, and he reported later that they had produced a profound effect. According to his informants, the notes had caused a split in the C.U.P. leadership.9

  Actually the split had been caused by the Cabinet’s realization—brought about by the collapse of Bulgaria and by Germany’s decision to sue for peace—that Enver had been deceiving it. Turkey’s allies were not (as Enver had claimed) winning the war; they were facing destruction—and would leave the Ottoman Empire isolated, cut off from its supplies of fuel, ammunition, money, and possible reinforcements, to face the victorious Allied Powers alone. Early in October the Finance Minister noted in his diary that “Enver Pasha’s greatest guilt is that he never kept his friends informed of the situation. If he had said five or six months ago that we were in so difficult a situation, naturally we would have…made a favourable separate peace at that time. But he concealed everything, and…he deluded himself and brought the country to this state.”10

  On the morning of 1 October, soon after Talaat learned that Germany was about to sue for peace, he called his Cabinet together to tell its members that they must resign. The Ottoman Empire was forced to seek an armistice immediately, he told them, and the Allies would impose far harsher terms if they thought that he and his C.U.P. colleagues were still in control.11 Enver and Djemal disagreed and argued that the Cabinet could secure better terms by holding on and holding out, but they were in the minority. Talaat prevailed, and informed the Sultan that he and his Cabinet intended to resign.

  The new Sultan, Mehmed VI, who had succeeded to the throne several months earlier on the death of his brother, was provided with a new Grand Vizier and Cabinet only with the greatest difficulty. The Sultan preferred a neutral Cabinet, or perhaps one drawn from the ranks of the political opposition, but Talaat and the Young Turkey Party still controlled the Parliament, the police, and the army, and demanded representation in the Cabinet to keep watch on the new regime. It took a week to find a statesman approved by the Sultan yet prepared to agree to Talaat’s terms. At last the distinguished Field Marshal Ahmet Izzet Pasha—a man believed to be acceptable to the Allies—formed a new Cabinet that included several members of the C.U.P. On 13 October Talaat and his ministers formally resigned. The next day Izzet Pasha drove through silent, gloomy crowds to the Porte to take office.

  The Ottoman situation was more grave than the Allied Powers realized. The fall of Bulgaria had severed the land route to Austria and Germany, cutting off hope as well as supplies. Within Turkey itself half a million marauding deserters from the Ottoman army brought chaos in their wake. Though he did not weaken his position by disclosing it, the new Grand Vizier felt that it was not possible to go on with the war. Two days after taking office, Izzet Pasha attempted to send Colonel Newcombe to Greece—the nearest Allied army headquarters—to try to bring the war to an end, but no airplane could be found in which to fly him there.

  The Porte therefore sent an emissary by sea: another British prisoner-of-war, General Charles Townshend. Townshend had surrendered to the Ottoman army at Kut in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1916, and had lived ever since under house arrest on an island off Constantinople. Entertained and lionized by the Ottoman leaders, he moved with relative freedom in the political society of the capital. Townshend became aware in the autumn of 1918 of rising peace sentiment and, like Newcombe, he decided to give events a push.12

  When Townshend learned that the Talaat ministry had fallen, he arranged an interview with the new Grand Vizier, and on 17 October went to the Sublime Porte carrying some notes that he had sketched out to indicate the sort of peace terms that might be asked by Britain. His notes suggested that Britain would be willing to leave the Ottoman Empire in possession of Syria, Mesopotamia, and perhaps even the Caucasus, so long as these regions were allowed local autonomy within a restructured empire that would resemble a confederation of states.

  Townshend offered to help Turkey obtain generous terms along these lines and offered to make immediate contact with the British authorities. The Grand Vizier told him that it was a crime for the Ottoman Empire to have made war on Britain, and that it was Enver’s fault. He accepted Townshend’s offer of help in securing honorable peace terms without letting Townshend suspect that he would accept whatever terms he could get.

  That evening Townshend met with the Minister of the Marine, who was his best friend in the new ministry, and who set out Turkey’s armistice terms, which were similar to those outlined in Townshend’s notes. Arrangements were then made to send Townshend out of Turkey through the port of Smyrna. Under cover of darkness, he left Smyrna on a tugboat.

  Early in the morning of 20 October, Townshend’s tugboat reached the Greek island of Mityle
ne, where it encountered a motor vessel of the British navy. From Mitylene, Townshend wired the details of the Turkish position to the Foreign Office in London. At his request, a fast vessel then took him to the British naval commander in the Aegean, Admiral Calthorpe, whose headquarters were at the Greek island of Lemnos.

  Townshend told London that the new Grand Vizier was willing to make peace on the basis of the sort of generous terms that he himself had sketched out in Constantinople. He gave London the impression that if such generous terms were not offered, the Ottoman Empire would continue to wage war. Above all, however, he indicated that the Porte wanted to deal with Britain rather than with the other Allies. (In fact—though Townshend did not know it—Izzet’s first attempt had been to establish contact with France, but his emissary had not yet been able to get through to French headquarters.13 For decades afterward the British continued to believe—as have most historians—that Turkey had insisted on surrendering to them rather than to the French.)

  Calthorpe, on 20 October, also cabled the news to London. He stressed (according to the Prime Minister) “that the Turks particularly wanted to deal with us, not with the French.”14 At the same time Calthorpe attacked the French plan of taking command of the fleet that would stream toward Constantinople. According to Calthorpe’s cable, “the effect of a Fleet under French command going up to Constantinople would be deplorable.”15 Of course no Allied fleet could enter the Dardanelles safely unless the forts on shore were turned over to the Allies. Calthorpe reported that Townshend said the Turks would make this concession, not to all of the Allied forces, but to Britain, if she would agree to protect them against whatever action might be taken by the German forces remaining in the vicinity. “General Townshend thinks that the Turks would be willing to send pleni-potentiaries now to treat for peace with British representatives and that they would allow the British to take over the Forts of the Dardanelles if they were assured of support against the Germans in Turkey and the Black Sea.”16