A Peace to End all Peace (16 page)

Only Fisher remained skeptical for a few days more. “
The more I consider the Dardanelles, the less I like it
!” (original emphasis), he wrote.
²²
But on 10 March, even he was converted when intercepted German wireless messages revealed that the remaining Dardanelles forts, including the key ones dominating the Narrows, were about to run out of ammunition. Shifting suddenly to great enthusiasm, Fisher proposed to go out to the Aegean and personally assume command of the armada. The rush to take credit for the impending victory was on.

One evening after dinner—a rare social occasion for the War Minister—Violet Asquith spoke with Lord Kitchener, and told him that it was Churchill who would deserve the accolades of triumph. She said that “If the Dardanelles comes off W. will deserve full and almost sole credit. He has shown such courage and consistency in taking the responsibility throughout all the vacillations of Fisher and others.” In her diary she recorded that “Lord K. replied indignantly: ‘Not at all—I was always strongly in favour of it.’”
²³

I

It was at Russia’s urging that Kitchener and Churchill had launched the expedition to the Dardanelles, but when it looked as though that expedition might succeed, the Czar’s government panicked. An Allied victory at the Dardanelles might seem an occasion for rejoicing; but it would mean that Constantinople would fall into British hands—and suddenly a century of Great Game fears and jealousies revived in Russian minds. The Russian government worried that once the British captured Constantinople they might decide to keep it.

On 4 March 1915 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazanov, sent a secret circular telegram to London and Paris conveying a message from Czar Nicholas II, demanding that the Allies turn over Constantinople and the straits—and also adjacent territories—to Russia. In return, the Czar and Sazanov promised to listen with sympathetic understanding to British and French plans to achieve their own national ambitions in other regions of the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere.

In Paris the Russian demand was received with dismay. Afraid that possession of Constantinople would enable Russia to become France’s rival in the Mediterranean, the French government attempted to put off the Russians with vague expressions of “goodwill.”
¹
Delcassé suggested that a detailed territorial settlement should await the eventual peace conference.

Sir Edward Grey undercut the French position. In his sympathy for the susceptibilities of his country’s Allies, Grey, who had allayed French suspicions of British intentions in Syria, now moved to allay Russian suspicions of British intentions at the Dardanelles. In doing so he opened Pandora’s box. If Russian claims were granted in advance of the peace conference, then France would be moved to submit her claims, and Lord Kitchener would be moved to submit his. However alive he may have been to such dangers, Grey gave priority to the need to reassure Russia.

II

According to the British Foreign Office, the position of the pro-Allied ministry in Petrograd might be undermined by pro-German opponents if Russia were not given satisfaction in the Constantinople matter.

Grey later explained how pro-German elements at the Russian court—whom he seems to have genuinely feared—would misrepresent British military operations at the Dardanelles if such an assurance were not given:

Grey and Asquith, the leaders of the Liberal administration, were, in any event, disposed to make the concession that Britain’s wartime ally requested. Heirs to the political tradition of Gladstone, they were anti-Turk and sympathetic to Russian aspirations; and they could point to the conclusion of the Committee of Imperial Defence, arrived at in 1903 during a Conservative administration, that to exclude Russia from Constantinople was no longer a vital British interest. At the outset of the Ottoman war, the Prime Minister wrote that “Few things wd. give me greater pleasure than to see the Turkish Empire finally disappear from Europe, & Constantinople either become Russian (which I think is its proper destiny) or if that is impossible neutralised…”
³
In March 1915, when the issue arose, he wrote of Constantinople and the straits that “It has become quite clear that Russia means to incorporate them in her own Empire,” and added that “Personally I have always been & am in favour of Russia’s claim…”
⁴

Unbeknownst to the rest of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Grey had already committed the country to
eventual
Russian control of Constantinople, having made promises along these lines to the Russian government in 1908.
⁵
His view was that if Russia’s legitimate aspirations were satisfied at the straits, she would not press claims in Persia, eastern Europe, or elsewhere.

The month before, Grey had refused to encourage an anti-German
coup d’état
in Constantinople, aimed at taking Turkey out of the war, because it would have prevented him from giving Constantinople to Russia.
⁶
What he had done was in line with British decisions regarding Greece and the Balkan states, not bringing them into the war on the Allied side because doing so might have meant, in Grey’s words, “the unsettlement of Russia’s wholeheartedness in the war.”
⁷

Churchill dissented. He was opposed to issuing anything more than a general statement of sympathy for Russian aspirations, and wrote to Grey that he had instructed the Admiralty to undertake a study of how Russian control of Constantinople and the straits would affect British interests. He urged looking beyond immediate wartime concerns: “English history will not end with this war,” he cautioned.
⁸

Despite Churchill’s counsel, the government, moved by an overriding fear that Russia might seek a separate peace, agreed to the terms proposed by Sazanov and the Czar. The British (12 March 1915), belatedly followed by the French (10 April 1915), formally accepted the secret proposal, reiterating that their acceptance was conditional on their own desires with respect to the Ottoman Empire being realized, and on the war being prosecuted by all of them to a final successful conclusion.

In an additional British memorandum, also dated 10 March 1915, Grey provided Sazanov with a number of other British comments and qualifications. Observing that Russia had originally asked only for Constantinople and the straits but was now asking for adjacent territories as well, Grey also pointed out that before Britain had been given a chance to decide upon her own war goals, “Russia is asking for a definite promise that her wishes shall be satisfied with regard to what is in fact the richest prize of the entire war.” Grey repeatedly emphasized that in agreeing to the Czar’s proposals, the British government was giving the greatest possible proof of its friendship and loyalty to Russia. It would be impossible, wrote Grey, for any British government to do any more than Asquith was doing in meeting Russia’s desires, for the commitment into which he had just entered “involves a complete reversal of the traditional policy of His Majesty’s Government, and is in direct opposition to the opinions and sentiments at one time universally held in England and which have still by no means died out.”

Grey went on to outline what Russia might be expected to concede in return. He made it clear that his government had not yet formulated most of its own objectives in the East, but that one of them would be revision of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Agreement so as to give Britain the hitherto neutral third of Persia in addition to the third she already occupied. He emphasized, too, that the Constantinople agreement they had just reached was to be kept secret.

The agreement was to be kept secret because Grey was worried about the effect on Moslem opinion in India if its terms were revealed. He feared that Britain would be seen as a party to the destruction of the last remaining independent Mohammedan power of any consequence. Accordingly, Grey told the Russians that if the terms of their agreement were to become known, he would want to state publicly “that throughout the negotiations, His Majesty’s Government have stipulated that the Mussulman Holy Places and Arabia shall under all circumstances remain under independent Mussulman dominion.”
⁹

As Grey viewed it, Britain would have to compensate Islam for destroying the Ottoman Empire by establishing a Moslem state elsewhere, and Mecca and Medina made it unthinkable from a religious point of view that it should be established anywhere but in Arabia. Besides, the promise was an easy one to make; it was a territory that none of the Great Powers coveted. David Lloyd George later wrote that “no one contemplated that foreign troops should occupy any part of Arabia. It was too arid a country to make it worth the while of any ravenous Power to occupy as a permanent pasture.”
¹⁰
It was not then known that there were immense deposits of oil in the region.

III

Arabia did, however, play a role in the postwar plans of the powerful British Secretary of State for War. Russia’s demands of 4 March 1915, and their acceptance by Britain on 12 March, led Lord Kitchener to warn the Cabinet in a memorandum dated 16 March that after the war “old enmities and jealousies which have been stilled by the existing crisis in Europe may revive” and that Britain might be “at enmity with Russia, or with France, or with both in combination.”
¹¹
What he anticipated was no less than a revival of the Great Game. He, too, urged the creation of an independent Arabian kingdom to include Mecca and Medina, but he added that it should exist under British auspices. It was essential that it should do so in order to give Britain a hold on the spiritual leadership of the Moslem world.

In Kitchener’s comprehensive design for the postwar Middle East, Britain, from its recently annexed Mediterranean island of Cyprus, would control a convenient land route to India safe from disruption by France or Russia. The War Minister’s plan was for Britain to take possession of Alexandretta,
^*
the great natural port on the Asian mainland opposite Cyprus, and to construct a railroad from it to the Mesopotamian provinces (now in Iraq), of which Britain would also take possession. It was generally believed (though not yet proven) that the Mesopotamian provinces contained large oil reserves which were deemed important by Churchill and the Admiralty. It was believed, too, by Kitchener and others, that the ancient Mesopotamian lands watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers could be developed so as to produce agricultural riches; but in Kitchener’s view the principal advantages of his proposal were strategic. The British railroad from the Mediterranean to the head of the Persian Gulf would enable troops to move to and from India rapidly. The broad swath of British-owned territory it would traverse would provide a shield for the Persian Gulf, as well as a road to India. If Britain failed to take possession of it, he feared that Russia would.

Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office wrote a similar memorandum at about the same time, with one significant difference in emphasis: he urged that the Mesopotamian provinces should be incorporated into the Indian Empire.
¹²
He viewed it as an area that could be irrigated and made rich by colonists from India. In his scheme, the administration of the area would be entrusted to the Government of India and would fall within the jurisdiction of the India Office. It was becoming increasingly clear that in London two of the contending rival powers fighting one another for a share of the Ottoman Empire were the British High Commissioner in Cairo and the British Viceroy in Simla.

Underlying both Hirtzel’s and Kitchener’s memoranda was the assumption, shared by most members of the government, that it was now in Britain’s interest to carve up the Ottoman Empire and to take a large piece of it. The Prime Minister was practically alone in seeing a need to examine that assumption in a critical light. He admitted, however, that politicians such as Churchill, who felt that Britain ought to do as well out of the war as her allies, spoke for practically everybody else on this issue.

Asquith wrote:

The Prime Minister told members of his Cabinet that when they discussed the future of the Ottoman territories, their “discussion had resembled that of a gang of buccaneers.”
¹⁴
But it was typical of him that he did not take a stand against them. What he told the Cabinet was that, while he was in sympathy with Grey’s view “that we have already as much territory as we are able to hold,” he did not regard himself and his colleagues as “free agents” who were entitled to hold back from taking more. If “we were to leave the other nations to scramble for Turkey without taking anything ourselves, we should not be doing our duty.”
¹⁵

In the correspondence that comprised the Constantinople agreement, Russia in effect had challenged the western powers to formulate their own territorial demands. Asquith took up the challenge: he appointed an interdepartmental group under the chairmanship of a career diplomat, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, to study the matter and to recommend what Britain ought to ask from an Ottoman peace settlement.

Largely unnoticed and undiscussed, another major step had been taken. In the 100 days between the outbreak of the German war and the outbreak of the Ottoman war, Britain had overturned the foreign policy of more than a century by abandoning any commitment to the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Now, in the 150 days since the outbreak of the Ottoman war, the Asquith government had come around to the view that dividing up the Ottoman Empire was positively desirable, and that Britain would benefit from taking part in it.