The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (48 page)

The military occupation of Constantinople was not a joint Allied operation: neither the French nor the Italians made any move on the first day. Early in the morning of 16 March 1920 British
soldiers, marines and seamen took over the principal buildings of Stamboul and Pera, while their armoured cars patrolled the streets. The Turkish War Office was occupied and searched by British
officers, thereafter remaining jointly under the control of the three Allies. Eighty-five parliamentary deputies and some sixty army officers or senior bureaucrats were arrested. The Ottoman
Parliament was formally dissolved on 18 March, never to meet again. Martial law prevailed throughout the Sultan’s capital. The odium for interfering so drastically in Turkey’s internal
affairs was directed at the British.

A few weeks earlier Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, had urged his cabinet colleagues to seek the end of Ottoman rule in
Constantinople and thereby
‘settle once and for all a question which more than any single cause has corrupted the public life of Europe for nearly 500 years’.
¹⁷
His
memorandum, which runs to more than eight pages of close print in the published British documents, was prompted by two developments: a visit to Downing Street by the French Prime Minister,
Clemenceau, who favoured the retention of Ottoman rule in the city; and claims by the Indian Secretary, Edwin Montagu, that the expulsion of the Sultan-Caliph from his palaces in Europe would
provoke grave unrest among the Muslims of the sub-continent. ‘There never has been till in the last two or three years any pronounced feeling among Indian Moslems in favour of Constantinople
as the seat of the Khalifate or the capital of Islam,’ Curzon declared, with all the authority of a distinguished ex-Viceroy. ‘Personally I think that if we rob the Turks of Smyrna we
shall do more to fan the flame of racial religious animosity in Turkey in Asia than by any steps we might take with regard to Constantinople.’
¹⁸
He therefore recommended some form of international status for the city and the Straits. But Curzon failed to carry the cabinet with him: Montagu’s fears of what might happen in Muslim India
if the Caliph were to be unceremoniously booted across the Bosphorus prevailed. Far better, it was felt, to have a temporary occupation of the city, followed by the appointment of a career diplomat
as High Commissioner, someone who would convince the Sultan of his need for ‘the friendship of England’: Admiral de Robeck was succeeded by Sir Horace Rumbold in November.

The burdens assumed by these British High Commissioners were considerable. They became responsible for policing and administering a city which faced bankruptcy and was troubled by the constant
arrival of refugees fleeing from Bolshevik vengeance across the Black Sea; sixty ships, with 12,000 Russian refugees aboard, were moored in the crowded waters of the Sea of Marmara in the week
Rumbold reached Constantinople. For almost three years a British colonel, Colin Ballard, commanded the Inter-Allied Police Commission in the Sultan’s capital, and when the Ottoman authorities
could not find the money to pay their gendarmerie it was the High Commissioner who had to safeguard their monthly salaries. Presiding ineffectually over what remained of his empire was Sultan
Mehmed VI, who had reappointed Damat Ferid
Pasha as Grand Vizier early in April 1920. A strong Sultan would have slipped away from the capital and put himself at the head of
the Turkish Nationalists in Anatolia; a wily Sultan might have pursued a policy of passive non-compliance; but Mehmed and Damat were so weak in character that they collaborated as closely as
possible with the High Commissioners. Even the pusillanimous
ş
eyhülislâm
proclaimed Kemal and his Representative Committee to be faithless betrayers of the
ş
eriat
who might
be shot dead on sight.
¹⁹

Such fulminations did not unduly disturb Kemal. In Ankara he established a Grand National Assembly to continue the work of the Ottoman Parliament. On 23 April the Assembly confirmed
Kemal’s status as executive president of a Council of State, although no formal constitutional act was presented to the Grand National Assembly for another nine months. ‘The
Sultan-Caliph’, Kemal ambiguously proposed, ‘shall take his place within the constitutional system in a manner to be determined by the Assembly as soon as he is free from the coercion
to which he submits.’
²⁰
No member of the Assembly dissented.

While the Grand National Assembly was in session, the Allies met in conference at San Remo to decide on the final terms of the peace treaty. It had been drafted by British, French and Italian
experts, some of whom knew the Middle East well. Bargains were struck, notably concessions by Britain to France over the Mosul oilfields, an agreement giving the French favourable treatment and the
right to draw on the yield of the oilfields to service their development of Syria. Repeatedly Lloyd George’s cabinet colleagues and expert advisers tried to dissuade the Prime Minister from
backing the demands of Venizelos for a permanent Greek zone around Smyrna. It ‘would be a canker for years to come, the constant irritant that will perpetuate bloodshed in Asia Minor probably
for generations,’ Admiral de Robeck wrote to Curzon in the second week of March.
²¹
The Foreign Secretary agreed with him, even though he was
basically sympathetic to the Greek cause; he would have liked to see the Greeks holding the Gallipoli peninsula, thus making the Dardanelles a frontier as well as a channel between Europe and Asia.
No arguments could persuade Lloyd George to change his policy; he remained a staunch champion of Venizelos.

The peace terms were presented to the Sultan’s delegates in the second week of June 1920.
²²
Soon afterwards they
became public knowledge, through leaked information in Athens. The treaty was harsher than the Turks had anticipated. They were resigned to the loss of the Sultan’s Arab lands, but were
shocked by the proposed border in Europe; by advancing the Greek frontier eastwards to include Edirne and the whole of Thrace up to the Lines of Chatalja, the new map would leave Constantinople
with only twenty-five miles of hinterland in Europe. At the same time, Greece was to gain eight islands in the Aegean, while Smyrna would be placed under Greek control but nominal Ottoman
sovereignty for five years, after which there would be a plebiscite to decide whether the region should remain Greek or Turkish. Rhodes and the Dodecanese were ceded to Italy. An independent
Armenian state, with access to the Black Sea, was to include most of the six disputed vilayets, together with Russia’s Armenian provinces; Woodrow Wilson—or those Americans acting in
the stricken President’s name—accepted an offer to determine the state’s boundaries after arbitration, and astonished even the turcophobe Lloyd George by assigning the fortress of
Erzerum and the port of Trebizond to the Armenians. The treaty also proposed an autonomous Kurdistan east of the Euphrates, with the Kurds having the right after twelve months to choose
independence. The Straits were to be demilitarized, and controlled by an international commission; the Ottoman Army would be limited to 50,000 men and the navy restricted to coastal defence
vessels; the Capitulations were restored, to benefit foreign traders; Britain, France and Italy would jointly control the Ottoman state budget and public loans.

Marshal Foch thought the proposed treaty a threat to peace. To enforce such terms on a reluctant Turkey the Allies would need an army of 27 divisions (about 325,000 men), he warned in
April.
²³
No war-weary government would contemplate such a commitment. When, a few months later, Sir Charles (‘Tim’) Harington was given
the high-sounding post of ‘General Officer Commanding the Allied Forces in Turkey’, he found he could call on no more than 8,000 British soldiers to hold Constantinople and the Straits.
Only Venizelos was prepared to authorize a campaign in Anatolia to try to crush the Nationalists. For the
moment the Allies held him back, awaiting the reaction of the
Turks—which, when it came, was bad. The proposed frontiers aroused such resentment among Turkish soldiers hitherto loyal to the Sultan that they deserted to Kemal, whose troops advanced to
the Sea of Marmara. There they were halted by shellfire from Allied warships and fell back into the hinterland, beyond the range of naval guns.

At this point the Allies lifted their veto on a Greek campaign. Venizelos proposed that the Greek army should advance into Thrace and stamp out any Kemalist guerrilla forces operating in Europe,
while the main Greek expeditionary force based upon Smyrna should be used to clear Kemal’s Nationalists from western Anatolia. On 22 June the Greek regiments went forward and met only
sporadic resistance. Within two and a half weeks they had forced the Kemalists back into the mountains and cleared the whole of south-western Anatolia. A month later the Sultan’s
plenipotentiaries, having failed to achieve any revision of the settlement, signed the peace treaty in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres. But, even as they signed, they protested strongly at the
harsh terms laid down by the Allies. It would be several months before the Porte could ratify the treaty, thereby making it effective. Before then, the Sultan’s ministers had every hope of
securing the annulment of the treaty’s more vindictive terms.

Long negotiations, constant bargaining, elaborate exchanges between viziers and ambassadors, the playing off of one Great Power against another—all these ploys were familiar features of
Ottoman diplomacy. And the published documents confirm that Ahmed Tevfik, the last Grand Vizier, and his ministers were skilled players of this traditional game.
²⁴
But the decisive contest took place not on the Straits, but in Anatolia; and it followed other rules. Kemal did not, for example, simply protest at the proposed establishment
of an Armenian state. Seven weeks after the Treaty of Sèvres was signed, Nationalist forces advanced through the Armenian vilayets and captured Kars while, soon afterwards, the Soviet Red
Army established a puppet Armenian republic at Erivan. By the first week of December the Ankara Government and the Soviet authorities had signed the Treaty of Gümrü, thereby establishing,
across a divided Armenia, a Russo-Turkish frontier which was to survive
longer than the Soviet Union itself. Not only did Kemal safeguard his eastern flank, he was able to
count on Russian arms and equipment in his fight against ‘western imperialism’. By January 1921 he was better placed to withstand a Greek offensive than in the previous summer. That
month four Greek infantry divisions advanced from Bursa along the main Anatolian railway, through difficult mountain terrain towards the important junction at Eskisehir. They were checked near the
small town of Inönü, on the last ridge before road and railway descend to the Eskisehir plain. Two months later a second battle was fought at Inönü, to coincide with a Greek
thrust inland from Smyrna. Once more the Kemalists held their ground, and the Greeks failed to make progress.
²⁵

The French and Italians never felt so strongly committed to the Sèvres settlement and the maintenance of the Sultan’s government as did the British; and in March both France and
Italy concluded agreements of their own with Kemal’s representatives. Ironically, these understandings were reached in London, where Curzon had invited representatives of both the
Sultan’s government and the Nationalists in Ankara to meet the three Allied Powers and discuss possible modifications of the Treaty. By now the British were wavering in their support of the
Greeks, for Venizelos was no longer in office and the sudden death of the young King Alexander of the Hellenes had brought back to the throne his father, King Constantine I, whom the British and
French had forced into exile in 1917 as an alleged ‘pro-German’. Yet, though Lloyd George mistrusted Constantine, he was too heavily committed to the Anatolian venture to follow the
example of the French and Italians.
²⁶

More and more the Sultan was being forced to appear to be a British puppet, a state of servility the Foreign Office had never wanted; better far that he should be seen to reign as an enlightened
autocrat. Soon after his arrival in Constantinople, Sir Horace Rumbold set out on the traditional task of strengthening the Ottoman government through the Sultanate; this, as Rumbold telegraphed to
Curzon, involved the use of ‘the Sultan as corner-stone. . . . giving him definite and whole-hearted assistance with a view to reconstruction of administration on sound financial
basis’.
²⁷
But Mehmed VI Vahideddin was too brittle for such a task. Rumbold’s first audience with the Sultan left the High Commissioner
puzzled and disappointed. ‘He remained absolutely silent for a considerable time, his mouth twitching nervously,’ reported Rumbold to King George V a week
later.
²⁸

There were moments when Mehmed impressed foreign officers in his capital by a sudden assertion of the Islamic sovereignty he had inherited: towards the end of his life General Tim Harington
recalled how, on the holiest night of Ramadan, the
Leilat al-Kadir
, the Sultan arrived at the Ayasofya mosque resplendent on a white horse, while ten thousand worshippers bent in prayer
beneath the vast dome of the old basilica.
²⁹
But these occasions were rare. For much of September 1921, a critical period in the war between
Kemal’s Nationalists and the Greeks, no minister or foreign diplomat could transact business with the Sultan. On the first of the month, so Mehmed’s friend Šerif Ali Hayder
recalls, ‘he had taken a new wife, who so demanded his attention that he refused to see any visitors’. Mehmed was sixty; his ‘new wife’, Nevzad, was nineteen.
³⁰

Not surprisingly, Rumbold’s dispatches to London paid increasingly detailed attention to the qualities of the Nationalist leaders, even if he could not travel to Ankara to meet them. Both
the High Commissioner and the military commander were impressed by reports of the resilient spirit of the Turks in Anatolia. Harington irritated Lloyd George by reiterating his conviction that,
though the Greek army was impressive during an offensive, there would be little resistance if Kemal once successfully broke the Greek lines. As early as the first week in April 1921 Harington was
assessing the prospects of holding the approaches to Üsküdar and the Sea of Marmara, should the Kemalists pursue the Greeks back down the railway route from Eskisehir to
Haydarpaša.
³¹