The telegrams from Townshend and Calthorpe led to the longest British Cabinet meeting of the war. The Cabinet, still somewhat fearful that the war against Germany might drag on into 1919 or 1920, wanted to secure sea passage for the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea, where the fleet could move to the Rumanian coast to play a significant role in the final stages of the war in Europe. The Cabinet agreed, if necessary, to dispense with the rest of the twenty-four terms of the Allied armistice proposal so long as the Turks ceased hostilities, turned over the Dardanelles forts, and did everything possible to ensure safe passage for the fleet through the straits and into the Black Sea.
The Cabinet authorized Calthorpe to negotiate an armistice rather than a peace agreement because the latter would require consultation with the Allies and thus would cause delays.17 The Cabinet told him to accept no less than surrender of the Dardanelles forts and free passage through the straits. The Cabinet also instructed him to ask for the rest of the twenty-four terms and to secure the adoption of as many of them as possible, but to give way if the Turks would not agree to them.
The French Foreign Minister protested on the ground that France had not been consulted before the Cabinet gave Calthorpe authorization to negotiate and to depart from the armistice terms upon which the Allies had agreed. Clemenceau was furious. It was not that the French Premier had changed his opinions and now harbored designs on the Middle East; it was that he did not want France treated as though she were a subordinate or defeated country.18 The Cabinet quickly sent Lord Milner to Paris to explain matters to Clemenceau, and for the moment the French were mollified.
A new cause of contention arose as soon as the French became aware of the British interpretation of the inter-Allied agreement as to who should conduct armistice negotiations. The agreement provided that the first member of the Alliance approached by Turkey for an armistice should conduct the negotiations. Britain, having been approached by the Turks through Townshend, interpreted the agreement to mean that she should not merely conduct the negotiations, but should conduct them alone.
The British government instructed Admiral Calthorpe to exclude the French from the negotiations should they attempt to participate in them. Perhaps the British were afraid that the French, if allowed to participate, would insist on making demands on Turkey that would delay or prevent the concluding of an armistice.19 Or alternatively, it may have been (as many in France believed) an overt opening move in the British campaign to deny France the position that had been promised to her in the postwar Middle East.
III
The armistice conference opened at 9:30 in the morning on Sunday, 27 October 1918, aboard the Agamemnon, a British battleship at anchor off the port of Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos. The small Ottoman delegation was headed by Townshend’s friend Rauf Bey, the new Minister of the Marine. The British delegation was headed by Admiral Calthorpe.
Calthorpe showed the Ottoman delegation a letter he had received from Vice-Admiral Jean F. C. Amet, the senior French naval officer in the area, stating his government’s desire that he should participate in the negotiations. He proposed to attend the meetings aboard the Agamemnon as the representative of Vice-Admiral Dominique M. Gauchet, the Allied naval commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and, as such, Calthorpe’s superior officer.
The Ottoman delegates explained that they were accredited only to the British, not to the French. Calthorpe replied that it would not have been desirable for the French to participate in any event. He refused to invite Admiral Amet aboard the Agamemnon.
The negotiations were conducted in the captain’s after-day cabin on deck. In a seemingly open spirit, Calthorpe began by reading aloud and discussing the proposed armistice terms one at a time. As the Ottoman delegates did not at first see the document in its entirety, they did not immediately comprehend the cumulative effect of its twenty-four clauses. Moreover, Calthorpe assured them that Britain meant no harm and intended only to be helpful. He explained what he supposed to be the Allied purpose in framing the various clauses in such a way as to suggest that they provided remedies for contingencies so remote that it was unlikely they would ever have to be invoked. At the same time, he managed to suggest that there was not much give in the Allied position: that if the Turks wanted an armistice, they would have to accept the Allied draft more or less in its entirety.
Seeing no alternative, on the evening of 30 October the head of the Ottoman delegation, Rauf Bey, signed an armistice little changed from the original Allied draft. It provided that hostilities should cease as of noon the following day. The armistice was in fact a surrender which permitted the Allies to occupy strategic points in the Ottoman Empire should their security be threatened: in effect the Allies were free to occupy any territory they wanted.
When Rauf Bey and his fellow delegates returned to Constantinople, they claimed that the armistice did not constitute a surrender and pictured its terms as far more lenient than they actually were.20 In doing so they sowed the seeds of later disillusion and discontent.
While the armistice negotiations were going on, Talaat convened a meeting of close political associates at Enver’s villa to found an underground organization designed to protect those Young Turkey leaders who were to remain in the country from possible Allied reprisals, in case there should be any, and also to lay the ground for armed resistance to Allied terms should that prove necessary. Underground cells were organized in Constantinople and thereafter throughout the provinces.
For themselves, Enver, Talaat, and Djemal made arrangements (of which the Grand Vizier was aware) to escape;21 and on 2 November the ex-rulers of Constantinople fled with their German allies. The following day, 3 November, the Grand Vizier went through the motions of demanding that the Germans return the fugitives, but Germany was disintegrating and the fugitives had disappeared.
IV
Clemenceau, the French Premier, was enraged at Britain’s having made unilateral decisions at Mudros, and protested vehemently at a session of the Supreme War Council of the Allies at the Quai d’Orsay on 30 October. But Lloyd George, according to observers, gave back better than he got. Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson’s emissary, said of the two prime ministers that “they bandied words like fish-wives, at least Lloyd George did.”22
Lloyd George told Clemenceau and the others that
except for Great Britain no one had contributed anything more than a handful of black troops to the expedition in Palestine…The British had now some 500,000 men on Turkish soil. The British had captured three or four Turkish Armies and had incurred hundreds of thousands of casualties in the war with Turkey. The other governments had only put in a few nigger policemen to see that we did not steal the Holy Sepulchre! When, however, it came to signing an armistice, all this fuss was made.23
Balfour pointed out that Franchet d’Esperey had negotiated the Bulgarian armistice without consulting Britain, and that Calthorpe had been no less entitled to negotiate the Turkish armistice without consulting France. Clemenceau took counsel with his Foreign Minister and, in the end, agreed that as the Armistice of Mudros was already signed, there was nothing further to be done about it; he would consider the matter closed.
On 12 November 1918, almost two weeks after the Turkish armistice was signed and the day after the armistice on the western front, a squadron under the command of Admiral Calthorpe entered the straits of the Dardanelles, passing close to the ruined site of ancient Troy,* and steamed in triumph toward Constantinople—under the British flag.
V
One of the British Prime Minister’s reasons for acting quickly in the Turkish matter was that he wanted to settle things before the United States intervened. An entry for 6 October in the diary of Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet, records an unusually frank statement by the Prime Minister of what he intended to do.
L1 G took a very intransigeant attitude and wanted us to go back on the Sykes-Picot agreement, so as to get Palestine for us and to bring Mosul into the
British zone, and even to keep the French out of Syria. He also had some subtle dodge for asking America to take Palestine and Syria, in order to render the French more anxious to give us Palestine, so that they might have an excuse of [for] keeping Syria. He was also very contemptuous of President Wilson and anxious to arrange the division of Turkey between France, Italy, and G.B. before speaking to America. He also thought it would attract less attention to our enormous gains in the war if we swallowed our share of Turkey now, and the German colonies later.24
Balfour took a much different point of view. When the French suggested doing what Lloyd George had in mind—settling matters before the Americans arrived—Balfour thought the suggestion little short of insane. “Their deliberate effort to exclude the Americans from any effective share in the world settlement is…neither in our interest nor in that of the French themselves…House is undoubtedly anxious to work with us as closely as he can and it would be fatal to give him the impression that we were settling or had the least desire to settle great questions behind his back.”25 Balfour believed that the stability of the peace settlement would require American participation. Unlike the Prime Minister, he was not only sincere in offering the United States the mandate for Palestine, but believed it vital that she should be made to accept it.
Leo Amery, of the War Office and the War Cabinet secretariat, who had become politically close to the Prime Minister, feared rather than hoped that the United States might accept such an offer if it were made. He wrote to the Zionist leader Dr Chaim Weizmann to ask him to work against a U.S. trusteeship, and secured a statement from Dr Weizmann that he agreed with Amery that Britain would be a better choice as the mandatory power.26
However, Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet and Amery’s immediate superior, was in favor of a U.S. trusteeship as a way for Britain to secure the strategic benefit of excluding any potential enemy from Palestine without assuming the burden of doing so herself. He told Lloyd George that he wanted the United States to have Palestine “with the object of creating a buffer state to cover Egypt.”27 Implicit in his suggestion was the old Kitchener notion that Palestine was of no value in herself. Lloyd George, of course, disagreed.
VI
On 1 December 1918 Clemenceau met in London with Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street. It was a month after the armistices, and a couple of months before the peace conferences were to open in Paris. It was not until the end of December that the President of the United States was to visit London and outline his idealistic vision of the future; there was time to reach private agreements before then. The two prime ministers met alone and neither took notes. An account of what occurred was supplied in writing to the British Cabinet some eight months later by Balfour, who presumably had it from Lloyd George. Later it was confirmed in Lloyd George’s memoirs of the peace treaties.
In the course of a conversation that began with European questions, the subject of the Middle East was raised. Clemenceau asked what modifications of the French claims were desired by Britain. Lloyd George replied: “Mosul.”* Clemenceau said, “You shall have it. Anything else?” Lloyd George replied, “Palestine.” Again Clemenceau said, “You shall have it.”28 A man of his word, Clemenceau kept to it through all the bitter wrangling of the peace conferences, despite the fact that there was no written confirmation of his concessions and even though the British did not recognize that he expected to receive compensation for them.**
Throughout his long political life, it had been Clemenceau’s policy to defer to Britain in the Middle East in order to secure her support in Europe against Germany; and that is what the French Premier seems to have believed that he had accomplished on 1 December. Apparently Clemenceau believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that he had obtained at least the tacit agreement of Lloyd George to support France’s claims in Europe in return for Clemenceau’s express agreement to grant Britain’s claims in the Middle East.
But in fact the two prime ministers had not even reached an agreement about the Middle East on 1 December. It transpired over the course of the next few months that Lloyd George had not presented all of his Middle Eastern claims when asked by Clemenceau to do so on 1 December; in addition to those he mentioned, he also wanted France to relinquish her claim to Syria.
In this Lloyd George was not pursuing a purely personal foreign policy; on 2 December—the day following the Lloyd George-Clemenceau meeting—Lord Curzon told the Eastern Committee of the Cabinet that he believed it was imperative to exclude France from Syria. Curzon, who was chairman of the committee—which the Cabinet had entrusted with the task of redefining Britain’s goals in the Middle East—fell back on the logic of the Great Game in which he had earlier played so conspicuous a role. Former Viceroy of India and traveler along the then-expanding Russian frontier, he had believed earlier, and now had come to believe again, that Britain’s strategic goal was to prevent any Great Power from cutting the road to India. There was no reason to believe that France, Britain’s European partner, had any intention of interfering with Britain’s road to the East. But possession of Syria would put France in a position to do so; and indeed would make France the only Great Power that could mount such a threat.
As the General Staff argued in a memorandum of 9 December 1918, “It is difficult to see how any arrangement could be more objectionable from the military point of view than the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, by which an enterprising and ambitious foreign power is placed on interior lines with reference to our position in the Middle East.”29 That was Curzon’s view, too.
Lord Curzon told the Eastern Committee that
A good deal of my public life has been spent in connection with the political ambitions of France in almost every distant region where the French have sway. We have been brought, for reasons of national safety, into an alliance with the French, which I hope will last, but their national character is different from ours, and their political interests collide with ours in many cases. I am seriously afraid that the great power from whom we have most to fear in future is France.30
Curzon took an especially spacious view of the area from which France therefore had to be excluded in Asia. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, who saw things similarly, wrote that, “from the left bank of the Don to India is our interest and preserve.”31 Balfour was skeptical; the gateways to India, he remarked, were “getting further and further from India, and I do not know how far west they are going to be brought by the General Staff.”32
The Prime Minister was not of a mind to ground his policies in any such geopolitical theory. So far as one can tell, Lloyd George was simply trying to keep as much captured territory as he could; in the Syria matter, he appears to have been merely an opportunist indulging in unsystematic overreaching.
VII
Support for the Prime Minister’s objectives came from the Kitchener loyalists in the Middle East, who had been saying for more than a year that Britain had to have Palestine, using the pretext that she needed it in order to reconcile Arabs and Jews. A few months after the Armistice of Mudros, General Gilbert Clayton enlarged on this line of argument. In a memorandum that appears to have reached the Prime Minister’s desk, he claimed that after some months of experience in occupation of former Ottoman territories, it had become clear to him that in practice the commitments made by Britain to France—not merely in Palestine, but also in Syria—had become incompatible with those made to Arabism and Zionism. Friction was bound to continue and to create dangers for Britain. A choice, he wrote, had to be made. Clayton argued that if Syria had to be given to France, then Britain should renounce interest in Palestine in favor of the United States or some other country willing to assume the burden. The better alternative, however, would be for Britain to take over the government both of Palestine and Syria, with due regard to both Jewish and Arab aspirations, and to reward France elsewhere, perhaps by giving her Constantinople.33
In the winter of 1919 the office of the Prime Minister distributed to the British
press a confidential background memorandum purporting to show that Feisal’s forces “materially assisted” General Allenby in the conquest of Syria and that they entered “the four great inland towns of Syria [Damascus, Horns, Hama, and Aleppo] ahead of General Allenby’s other forces” and did so, according to the memorandum, not as foreign invaders from the Hejaz, but as a native force. “The great majority of the Arab troops who thus assisted in liberating Syria were natives of the province.”34 The tendency of the memorandum was to demonstrate that Arabic-speaking Syria had risen up and freed herself, and that it would be contrary to the principles professed by the western democracies to attempt to re-impose foreign rule.
Feisal’s Arab corps in the Palestine and Syria campaigns was composed of approximately 3,500 men, but Lloyd George obtained from Feisal a public statement that the Arabs who at one time or another during the war had served or allied with him or his father numbered about 100,000; and in his argument against the French that is the figure the Prime Minister used. Lloyd George knew the figure to be wildly inflated (“Eastern arithmetic is proverbially romantic,” he later wrote) and indeed he believed the Arab contribution to the conquest of Palestine and Syria “was almost insignificant.”35 As against the French, however, the Prime Minister argued that he was placed in a difficult position when asked by them to act against his other great ally, Feisal. Feisal and a large army of Syrians had liberated their own country, he claimed, and now administered it, under General Allenby, and Britain could hardly be expected to allow France to move against them. Britain was released from her alliance obligations to France (he was saying in effect) by her alliance obligations to Syria.
At the end of the winter of 1919, Allenby came to lunch with Lloyd George and his secretary, Frances Stevenson, and the latter noted in her diary that “D. [Lloyd George] was urging him to give the French the facts about Syria, that the French would not be tolerated there. I believe he did at a subsequent meeting between P.M. [the Prime Minister], Clemenceau & Winston. The French are very obstinate about Syria & are trying to take the line that the English want it for themselves.” She noted that Lloyd George’s comment about this was that “France is a poor winner. She does not take her victories well.”36
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