The Western question in Greece and Turkey : a study in the contact of civilisations

Front matter

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THE LIBRARIES

Preface To Second Edition

Tue preface to the first edition of this book was written on the 22nd March 1922, the day on which the Foreign Ministers of the Principal Allied Powers met at Paris in a last vain attempt to arrive at a settlement with Turkey and Greece before the catastrophe. I am writing this preface to the second edition on the 20th November of the same year, the opening day of the Peace Conference at Lausanne. During the intervening eight months so much has happened that I must explain why I have not made greater changes in the text of my work.

On re-reading it, I find that I have comparatively little to correct, partly for the melancholy reason that I have been a true prophet of evil, and partly because the book is mainly a record of historical events which, having once happened, are irrevocable, and does not present a political programme coloured by the situation of the moment at which it was written, and therefore stultified by subsequent developments. In the final chapter, I ventured to draw some general conclusions (pp. 320-2) from the facts which I had passed in review, and to follow them up with some still more general suggestions. I have left these unaltered, since they appear to me to be if anything better founded now than they were when I originally put them forward.

Again, I have little to add, for the events with which I dealt possess a certain inner unity. I carried my history of the recent relations between Greece, Turkey, and the West down to the autumn of 1921, when Greece failed in vii

Viil THE WESTERN QUESTION her supreme effort to break the military power of Turkish Nationalism in Anatolia. I was writing during the ensuing period of stalemate, when the indifference of the West towards this Eastern tragedy was particularly profound. All the time, I was conscious of the shadow of the thundercloud, and was making the most of the unnatural lull which assuredly portended the bursting of the storm. My object was to put on record, for the benefit of Western readers, those facts and events in the East to which the majority of them had been, and were, giving little or no attention, but which might arouse their curiosity as soon as the lightning began to strike unpleasantly near their own houses. My subject, in fact, was the unnoticed antecedents of a catastrophe which was going to give people a shock when it came to pass.

This subject, I feel, remains of interest in itself. The fundamental problems of the ‘Western Question’ are illustrated by it a good deal better than they are by the subsequent melodramatic dénowement, in which the subtler lights and shadows are blurred, and in which almost every event has been merely an inevitable consequence of these previous developments that I have tried to analyse. Nor does this epilogue need a historian. The rest of the acts of my dramatis personae, are they not written, week by week, in the headlines of the Press and in the telegraphic despatches of a goodly company of special correspondents ? For once in a way, the indifference of the West has been broken through ; the pachyderm has been pricked into a momentary consciousness of the existence in his proximity of other varieties of the genus homo insipiens; and the unfortunate inhabitants of the regions which the storm has ravaged up to the moment—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Western residents—may at least congratulate themselves

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION ix that in the process of being destroyed by Western statesmanship they have shaken one or two of the mighty out of their seats and have given the Western public a bad quarter of an hour.

Who, indeed, would have believed beforehand that the tragedy in Anatolia would become good copy for a newspaper ‘stunt,’ or that the Conservative Party in Great Britain would be able to turn it to account for getting rid of Mr. Lloyd George? Certainly the British and French Governments imagined that they could make pretty much what mess they pleased in the East at the expense of the local peoples, and few observers expected that they would play their game so clumsily as to get themselves into serious - trouble with their constituents at home. Personally (I will confess it) I supposed, almost up to the last moment, that our respective statesmen, having been warned since May 1919 of the impending catastrophe by their able diplomatic, military, and naval representatives on the spot, would. be induced by the instinct of self-preservation to patch up some kind of a settlement before the worst occurred. I never dreamed that they would allow their rivalries and prejudices to paralyse them until the Greek moral broke, the remainder of Western Anatolia was devastated, the Entente was brought to the verge of rupture, and our own country came within an ace of a new Turco-British war. However, the incredible has happened, and it will not fail to leave its mark on the public memory.

I therefore feel myself absolved from overloading this book with a réchauffé of what everybody knows and will not forget in a hurry. Accordingly, I have contented myself with bringing up to date the table of dates at the end, which several students of Eastern politics have found useful (as they have been kind enough to tell me), and with x THE WESTERN QUESTION correcting errors which have been brought to my knowledge by reviewers and private correspondents. I have left the additional notes where they originally stood, in order to avoid the labour of re-indexing; and to make room for such matter as I have added, I have somewhat regretfully omitted the list of books, which was meant to lead on from my own essay to the wider aspects of my subject.

At the risk of taking myself too seriously, I must now turn to details and say something regarding such of my forecasts as have proved more or less correct, and other points which require some comment, addition, or modification. I must do this in order to justify myself for leaving my text practically as it stands, but I can honestly say that, so far as I have proved right, I get little satisfaction out of being able to say ‘I told you so.’ The reader will notice that all my prophecies of evil were made contingent upon the Powers failing to take the action necessary to avert them; and I did my best (though of course the political influence of private individuals without organisations behind them is infinitesimal) to render them abortive myself by speaking and writing, both while I was abroad and after my return, whenever I had the opportunity. During my journeys I acquired an affection not only for Smyrna (which had an indescribable charm of its own) but for Manysa, Bergama, Aivali, and other smaller places in the hinterland, and I made friends with a number of people of almost every denomination and nationality. These beautiful towns are now desolated, these amiable people killed, exiled, ruined, or tormented by the most appalling mental and physical agonies, and this through the wantonness of Western statesmen who hardened their hearts and stopped their ears against their own expert advisers. In these circumstances it gives me no satisfaction that in spite

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi of myself I have in many cases prophesied right, and my only feeling besides sorrow for the victims is one of indignation that the real criminals should have got off so cheaply. After causing hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings to lose everything that makes life worth living, they have themselves lost nothing more irretrievable than office and reputation. .

The following are, I think, the chief points on which, in the first edition, I anticipated developments which have come to pass—or, more frequently, have merely come into notoriety—in the interval, and in regard to which, changes in the text therefore seem unnecessary. Throughout (e.g. on pp. 44, 104, 106), I maintained that the ancient Anglo-French rivalry in the East was not only still in full vigour, but that it was one of the dominant and most dangerous factors in the present situation. I need not amplify this by describing here the tension between the two countries over Eastern Thrace and Chanak in the earlier stages of the present crisis. I emphasised (e.g. on pp. 56-60) the profound repugnance of the Western public (a repugnance which transcends the geographical frontiers between Italy, France, and Great Britain) towards fighting on in the East when once the fighting had ceased in Europe. At the time when I wrote, this repugnance had already produced the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement ; since then it has made it good business for English newspapers to conduct a ‘stopthe-war ’ agitation and has clouded the political prospects of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill. While the British Government, in a half-hearted way, have been taking the French to task for treachery, and the French the British for war-mongering, the public in the two countries has been actuated (and itself actuating the Governments, whenever it has come to the point) by the same fundamental xii THE WESTERN QUESTION determination to preserve the peace.

The only difference is that the French became conscious earlier than we did of our common state of mind—and this not at all because they are a cleverer or a more logical nation, but simply because the Turkish Nationalist Army made hostile contact with the French garrisons in Cilicia and Syria as early as January 1920, while the Greeks kindly interposed between them and the British garrisons at Chanak and Constantinople until September 1922. When the question ‘ Will you fight 2?’ was put in this concrete form, the British ‘No’ proved as emphatic as the French ‘No’ had been. There is not much to choose between our two nations in respect of common-sense, or between our two Governments touching the lack of it. I also prophesied that the game of using the local nationalities as pawns, to which both our Governments have had recourse, would prove very poor economy (p. 62). In the light of what has happened, would we not eagerly cancel the services which the Greek Army has rendered to us during the last four years, if only we could at the same time avoid the damage which the Turkish Army has inflicted or still may inflict upon us? It were better indeed for the British Empire that the Greek Army had never set foot in Anatolia rather than that the Turkish Army should thereby be restored (as it has been) to life; and it were better for the French Republic, with her economic interests in Turkey and her Islamic provinces in Africa, that Great Britain should have established her ascendency at the Straits rather than that both Powers should be bundled out of Constantinople, bag and baggage, by the victorious protégé of one of them.

The danger that Western civilisation may be frozen out of Anatolia (p. 155) has only given place to the actualities of a more rapid destruction by fire. The fate of Smyrna

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xiii hangs over Constantinople, and the Capitulations are laid upon the conference-table at Lausanne.

As for the Caliphate (pp. 29-31 and 182-5), I was right in pointing out the divergence between the policies of the Turkish Nationalists and of the Indian Muslims, and in hinting that they must sooner or later come into collision. The flight of the Sultan-Caliph on a British battleship from Dolma-Baghché to Malta and his installation there in the Artillery Mess is a welcome piece of comic relief, by which the disgruntled potentate has caused the maximum amount of embarrassment not only to both the sheep and the goats in his spiritual flock but to his Christian ‘ persecutors and/or protectors.’ Certain English publicists have dwelt with pardonable but blundering malice on the bétise which they imagine Angora to have committed and on the ludicrous position in which they conceive that this has placed the Indian Caliphate Committee. Undoubtedly the latter were ill-advised in selecting their somewhat academic war-cry without acquainting themselves with the realities of Turkish politics, and the Angora Government may possibly have been rash in ignoring Indian susceptibilities. But since a quarrel over the Caliphate between Turkey and India could not possibly work together for good to any party except the British Empire, while the two Muslim parties concerned at present decidedly prefer to work together for our undoing, it is childish to suppose that they will allow themselves to be frustrated by logic or consistency, which have never carried the day against sentiment or utility, either in Islam or in Christendom. The Turks and the Indians will certainly continue to feel themselves brothers because they have a common bugbear to hold them together and no common frontier over which to fall out, and their respective theories concerning the Caliphate will be xiv THE WESTERN QUESTION accommodated to these realities without undue difficulty or delay.

My readers are likely to agree with me now, if not before, that the Turkish National Pact is a more interesting—and, I may even venture to add, more important—document than the Treaty of Sévres (p. 188); and that the failure of the Greek campaign in Anatolia in the autumn of 1921 marked a turn in a tide which had been flowing for over 200 years (p. 211). On the technical military question, I conjectured that the Graeco-Turkish war would not be terminated by a military decision, but either by diplomatic intervention or by a break-down of moral, and that, in the latter event, the Greeks’ moral would break down first (pp. 212 and 239-46). This conjecture has, I think, been borne out. At any rate, my information is to the effect that the sudden expulsion of the Greek Army from Anatolia in the course of August and September 1922 was due to a failure of nerve and will rather than to inferiority in numbers, equipment, positions, generalship, or any other military factor.

I also prophesied (p. 299) that the Greek forces (regular and irregular) would eclipse their previous record of atrocities and devastations if they left the country under such conditions, and that—under the same conditions—a civilian Greek population numbering at least half a million would leave with them (pp. 241-2), partly in order to escape reprisals, and partly because national antipathies in the Near and Middle East have reached a point at which no nationality can go on living under the government of its neighbours. ‘These two forecasts, the most melancholy of all, have unhappily been more than fulfilled. The climax of misery has come at the end, and the philanthropists of the West are staggering under the burden which the states-

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XV men of the West have cast upon their shoulders. America alone has the resources for coping with the need, and she cannot and will not attempt this unless the political passions of the exasperated local nationalities and of the discordant West-European Powers are brought under restraint by some sense of decency, if not of humanity. Given a fair field, however, America might perform a noble and characteristic service by helping the survivors among the minorities, who have lost their homes through an all-pervading national fanaticism, to strike fresh roots within the frontiers of their respective national states. In this part of the world, at any rate, there are hardly any minorities left to protect in situ. The main hope for their survival now lies in intermigration and re-plantation, and these processes require time, capital, organisation, and the good offices of a neutral party trusted by both sides. If America does not assume this role, the work will be left undone, and hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children will perish —innocent Turks in the devastated Anatolian war-zone, innocent Greeks and Armenians in the refugee camps on the other side of the Aegean. Innocent the vast majority of these victims undoubtedly are, for the direct or indirect authors of atrocities are seldom overtaken by poetic justice and generally manage to deflect the reprisals for their misdoings upon the heads of those who have had no part or lot in them. The politicians and the chettés are unlikely to be found among these homeless and starving masses, and we cannot harden our hearts against their misery in the comfortable belief that they are suffering for their own crimes. Neither did they sin, nor their fathers, that the tower has fallen upon them ; but we shall not have clear consciences if we do not do our utmost to extricate them from the ruins and then to buttress the surviving buildings.

xvi THE WESTERN QUESTION

There are other points on which I must make some comments and additions. I was premature in suggesting that the Rumans, Serbs, and Bulgars had seen the last of Turkey and Islam (p. 27). The re-establishment of Turkish sovereignty in Eastern Thrace has restored the old Turco- Bulgarian frontier, and the Turkish claim to Western Thrace threatens to keep Bulgaria shut out from the open sea as effectively as she has been excluded from it during the last two years by the Greek occupation of the same province. The Greek break-down brought Bulgaria to a parting of the ways. She might have done what she did in 1915 and have thrown in her lot with Turkey in order to get her revenge upon her European neighbours. This policy had its attractions, for behind Turkey stood Slavonic Russia, and Bulgaria had a chance of making favourable terms for herself by acting as the strategic link between them—the position she occupied in 1915-18 between Turkey and the Central Powers. Instead of this, however, she has made overtures to the Little Entente, and this time it appears that she has not knocked at their door in vain. Rumania, at any rate, with Turkey at the Straits again and Russia threatening her on the Dniester, cannot afford to let Bulgaria go over into the enemy camp, and the reward for Bulgaria’s friendship will no doubt be the support of her claim to an outlet on the Aegean. Nor is this claim likely any longer to be opposed by Greece, to whom Western Thrace was chiefly of value as a corridor to the larger Eastern portion of the province. Now that Eastern Thrace is lost, it cannot pay Greece to prolong her feud with Bulgaria by denying her facilities in a strip of territory that is vital to Bulgaria and of secondary importance to Greece herself. On the contrary, it is to the advantage of Greece that a demilitarised zone should be interposed between

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XVii

European Greece and European Turkey. Probably Greece will now be less concerned to thwart Bulgaria than to follow her example ; for she, on her side, cannot afford to remain outside the Little Entente when Bulgaria has become a member of it. Thus the return of Turkey to Europe has brought the ideal of a South-East European union nearer towards realisation than would have been thought possible a few months ago, and this constructive (though quite unintentional) consequence of Turkey’s successes at least counterbalances the drawbacks of her return to the European side of the Straits. The most hopeful feature of this Balkan rapprochement is that it is a spontaneous product of Balkan statesmanship. One by one, the Near Eastern peoples are becoming wary of the Western wire-pullers. The naive attempt of British diplomacy to play off Rumania and Jugoslavia against France on the question of Eastern Thrace fell flat ; but these countries are reorienting themselves to the new situation in their own way and are providing for their mutual security without burning their fingers. In this part of the field, the prospects are distinctly brighter than they were when I wrote pages 43-4. My allusions to Cyprus (pp. 51 and 75) now need underlining. About 80 per cent. of the population of this island are Greeks in language and Orthodox in religion, and since the Armistice they have expressed in unmistakeable terms their desire for union with their National State. The late Coalition Government in Great Britain, which supported the claims of Greece to Anatolian territories containing a Turkish majority and encouraged her in the military adventure which has involved her in disaster, did not carry their ostentatious ‘ Philhellenism ’ to the length of granting self-determination to a Greek majority in a country recently annexed to the British Empire. Generous in giving away b

XViii THE WESTERN QUESTION what lawfully belonged to the Turks, they drew the line at surrendering what they themselves were holding with the slenderest legal title or moral right. For very shame, the British nation must redress this injustice. If we thought the Greeks of Athens fit to rule over a Turkish majority, we cannot profess that the Greeks of Cyprus are unfit to govern themselves, nor can we evade our obligations by a show of solicitude for the Cypriot Turks. If majorities are to have sovereignty over minorities, the principle must be applied all round ; and if we (as I hold, rightly, though belatedly) have given our sanction to the application of this rule in Anatolia to the detriment of the Greek minority there, we cannot honestly penalise the Greek majority in Cyprus by refusing to apply the same formula to their advantage. Cyprus, moreover, is the one place where we can genuinely protect a minority that is to come under foreign majority government. We are masters of the situation there, and in return for our evacuation we can exact what guarantees we like, including, if necessary, the whole charter that was laid by Professor Gilbert Murray before the Assembly of the League of Nations in September 1922. An enlightened policy cannot in this case be frustrated by the sovereign susceptibilities of Latvia.

Finally, I must say something about personalities. Since the publication of my first edition the Sultan-Caliph and King Constantine have both gone West (the latter not for the first time and possibly not for the last), Mr. Lloyd George has gone to the country and has not been returned to office, and Mr. Venizelos has gone to Lausanne.

In my criticism of Mr. Lloyd George’s Eastern policy, I merely anticipated the verdict of an overwhelming majority of the British electorate, and I should therefore not feel called upon to say anything further, if it were not that one

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xix or two admirers of the late Prime Minister have interpreted what I have written as a covert attempt on my part to put a spoke into the wheel of party politics at home. I cannot pass this over, because it is such an admirable instance of Western megalomania. The train of thought is as follows : ‘ Kastern affairs are of no intrinsic interest in themselves : therefore a Westerner who interests himself in them must be doing so for an extraneous motive. Who is the most prominent Western politician whom the writer attacks ? Undoubtedly Mr. Lloyd George. Ergo, all this paraphernalia about East and West is camouflage for the emplacement of a new battery against the Coalition. It only remains to decide whether this pamphlet called the ‘Western Question ” is Unionist, Liberal, or Labour.’ All that I can do is to assure any one whose mind works in this way that he is putting the cart before the horse. I did not interest myself in the ‘ Western Question’ in order to get at Mr. Lloyd George, but I interested myself in Mr. Lloyd George because he happened to pass across the stage of my historical drama. The ‘Western Question’ made mischief long before Mr. Lloyd George was heard of; and the relations between different civilisations will remain the most absorbing problem of human history long after English party politics have become an object of learned research.

I have more to say about Mr. Venizelos, for in September 1922 he performed one of the finest and most difficult acts of statesmanship in his career. I refer, of course, to his refusal to represent the interests of the Greek Revolutionary Government abroad unless they consented to surrender not only the territory previously assigned to them in Anatolia but also Eastern Thrace up to the line of the Maritsa. In so doing, he deliberately forbore to embarrass the Allies at a moment when any Greek had a right to feel bitter xx THE WESTERN QUESTION against each and all of them, and resisted the temptation of precipitating (as he almost certainly could have done) a new Turco-British war, in which Greece might have had a gambler’s chance of retrieving part of the disputed territories. At the moment when he took this far-sighted decision, he was the object of almost scurrilous attacks in a section of the British Press. It was natural, of course, that the British public, which had suddenly been brought by the late Government to the brink of war, should be alarmed at Mr. Venizelos’s appearance in London. At that moment, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill were still in office, and, several times since the Armistice, such improvised consultations between Mr. Venizelos and the moving spirits of the British Coalition had resulted in melodramatic coups, through which the British Empire had become still further entangled in Near and Middle Eastern politics. The public nervousness, therefore, was perfectly justified by the peril of the moment and by the memory of the past, and it was in its way a tribute to Mr. Venizelos’s potency in international affairs. The fault lay not in the feeling itself but in the un-English expression given to it by certain English newspapers. Mr. Venizelos and his nation were ‘down,’ largely because they had been ‘let down’ by our own Government, and, in these circumstances, while we were of course entitled to oppose the policy which we.

imagined him to be pressing upon our Government in opposition to what we considered to be our national interests, we ought to have had the good taste to conduct the controversy like gentlemen. When it turned out that Mr. Venizelos was insisting that his country should adopt a policy which was not only to their ultimate but to our immediate interest, nothing less than a formal apology was due to him, but, as far as I followed the Press, it was never made.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XXi

Having relieved my mind on this point, however, I must reaffirm what I have said in the first edition of this book (and have left unaltered in the second) regarding Mr. Venizelos’s initial responsibility, which he shares with Mr. Lloyd George, for the Anatolian disaster. It is rapidly becoming an established legend that the Greek adventure in Anatolia would have ended successfully and the Smyrna Zone have remained in the permanent possession of Greece, if only Mr. Venizelos had not been turned out by King Constantine in the autumn of 1920. This assumption, which is by nature incapable of proof, leaves me as sceptical as ever. I remain convinced that the crucial event in the tragedy was the landing of the Greek troops at Smyrna on the 15th May 1919, for which Mr. Venizelos and not King Constantine was responsible. That error set in motion the three formidable forces of Turkish patriotism, Anglo-French rivalry, and Anatolian military geography; and nothing, so far as I can see, could have prevented these forces from producing the resultant that they actually have produced. At the best, Mr. Venizelos could have hastened, and thereby mitigated the disastrousness of, the inevitable consummation by evacuating Anatolia without waiting for the final catastrophe. The letter which he wrote from Aix-les-Bains to General Dhanglis on the 3rd July 1921, when the Greek Army in Anatolia was at the high tide of its superficial success, shows (what no sensible person ever doubted) that he had not lost his intellectual acumen ; and if he had remained in office, he might have foreseen what was coming at an earlier stage. The fact remains, however, that failure was predictable from the beginning, and that, down to his fall, Mr. Venizelos either did not predict it or did not act upon his prognostications. On the contrary, he was the promoter of the Smyrna policy, and I have not xxii THE WESTERN QUESTION yet come across any denial of the motives which I conjecturally attributed to him on pp. 72-3. If these motives were operative, they would, of course, have told still more strongly against withdrawal from Anatolia than against the original decision to go there. Indeed, considering that Mr. Venizelos fell at a time when the Greek Army in Anatolia was still more than holding its own (though the subsequent turning of the tables was even then already predictable by those who had eyes to see), it is hard to understand how he could have retained office if he had attempted evacuation. Anyway, he did not attempt it, and to my mind his responsibility is undeniable. Nor do I think that his admirers really do him a service by trying to prove him impeccable, or by making out that the unfortunate ex-King Constantine was other than a cypher, for good or ill. A statesman of distinction who makes a capital mistake, admits it, and then does his best to retrieve it, is a much more human figure than that incongruous object, the statesman in a halo.

In a book entitled The Turk as he is,) but mostly concerned with myself as I confess that I do not feel myself to be, Major G. Melas, M.C., takes me severely to task for saying a good word on behalf of the late King of Greece, although the author describes himself on the cover as ‘formerly secretary’ to that monarch. Major Melas insinuates, though I think he nowhere openly declares, that I have written what I have because I have been paid to do so. I do not quite see how I am to prove my virtue, for no one has ever put the temptation in my way! In plain words, I have never yet been offered a bribe either by a Turk or bya Greek. Until that happens, I shall cherish the belief that I am not considered purchaseable, while Major Melas may believe, if it pleases him, that I am merely not con-