After the Mudros armistice in 1918, these Greeks in Asia Minor began to flow back to what remained of their homes, and the remnant of the broken Empire went back with relief to its peacetime pursuits. An unsurpassed commercial opportunity lay ahead of Asia Minor, for the Russian collapse had put an end to the great export of wheat from the South Russian ports. Constantinople, its population swollen by the Allied military and naval forces, now looked exclusively to Asia Minor for its sustenance. Western business men had followed the Allies into the capital in large numbers, and money was available in such quantities as Constantinople had never known. The Empire having been “liberated” from the “Ottoman blight,” American capitalists abounded in the capital, all of them anxious to get in on the ground floor of the boom. Under the Allied aegis, Western trade faced a prodigious opportunity and the peasantry of Asia Minor lost no time in seeking whatever small share of the melon might fall to them. The spring of 1919 found them back at the handles of their rude, ox-drawn plows.
But there were Greek battleships anchored among the Allied men of war in the Bosphorus, and a Turkish guard was quartered in the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul. Ottoman Greeks in the capital had gone wildly nationalist, finding their hero in Mr. Venizelos, the man who had brought Old Greece into the war. The Oecumenical Patriarch at the Phanar had turned likewise toward Mr. Venizelos, the deliverer of the “unredeemed” Ottoman Greeks. But Balkan wars break when the snow melts in the spring. Through the winter of 1918-’19, the Anglo-French command maintained an outward peace in Constantonople.
Three British high commands held the remnant of the Empire in Asia as firmly in the British grip as Persia was bring held. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Bagdad, had pushed its way up from the flatlands of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin into the rugged hills of southern Kurdistan, the Turkish administration of Mosul withdrawing in front of it to Diarbekr. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Cairo, had reached the top of the Syrian corridor at Aleppo and had flung out small detachments to establish contact with the Bagdad command to the east, and to occupy Cilicia and the Taurus tunnels of the Bagdad Railway to the west, the Turkish administration of Cilicia continuing in office pending an indication of British intentions. Armenian deportees, some of whom had been interned by the Turks in Syria and some of whom had made their way into Egypt to be interned by the British, were being run into Cilicia in large numbers and a few of them were being carried on along the Bagdad Railway as far as Konia, where the E. E. F.’s control ended. The British co-command of the Army of the Black Sea whose Anglo-French G. H. Q. was in Pera, had stationed control officers along the Bagdad Railway from Konia to its Constantinople terminus, along the railways in the hinterland of Smyrna and along the old Russian railways in Trans-Caucasia. The Bagdad Railway had been broken up into its two original parts. The Bagdad and Cairo commands had confiscated it from Konia east and their military trains were rapidly wracking it to pieces. Western Europe was not to be again permitted to escape the Suez Canal. The Pera co-command, however, was working the original Anatolian Railway from Constantinople to Angora and Konia for the Deutsche Bank, pending its permanent disposition in the peace treaty.
The collapse of Czarist Russia had enabled the British to establish control not only over Asia Minor but over all its approaches from north, south, east and west, and under the British aegis the secret treaties which had been drawn up during the war for its partition (with the exception of Czarist Russia’s share in them) were soon put into application. The French were admitted to Beirut whence they posted detachments to the Syrian and Cilician centers, remaining however under the British high command in Cairo. Italian forces were disembarked at Adalia and rapidly pushed their way into the hinterland as far as Konia, still keeping their eyes on Smyrna, the greatest of the Asia Minor prizes. Smyrna had been made over to Italy in the secret agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, but the Venizelos Government at Athens had entered the war after that agreement was signed. As for Czarist Russia’s share of the spoils, the United States Government might be persuaded to take the eastern provinces under the supposition that in this twentieth century they still constituted Armenia. As for Czarist Russia’s right to Constantinople, the High Church Party in the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with Orthodoxy from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar. Old Greeks and Ottoman Greeks are alike traders and British naval command of the Mediterranean served to reinforce the less worldly influences which moved Greece inevitably into the British orbit. The French who had brought Greece into the war as soon as Czarist Russia collapsed, only to be compelled to divide their Constantinople command with the British, quickly cooled toward the Greeks and waited for the great wheel to twirl again.
The Anglo-French command in Pera soon divided the Constantinople area, the British taking over the Galata and Pera suburbs, the French taking Stamboul itself, and the Italians taking the Asiatic suburbs. The Ottoman Navy was quickly disarmed and interned in the Golden Horn. With the French controlling the railways in Europe and the British controlling the Anatolian railways, the Ottoman Armies began demobilizing and disarming under Allied supervision, skeleton forces remaining for gendarmerie purposes. So the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire went back to the pursuits of peace and in the lack of Russian exports the Anatolian peasant enjoyed every prospect of a greater prosperity than he had ever known.
But to Mr. Lloyd George, it was an opportunity to impose alone upon Islam that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together. They were more than Balkan snows which began to melt when the Oecumenical Patriarchate broke off its relations with the Ottoman Government on March 9, 1919.
XIV
SMYRNA, 1919
KEMAL RETURNS TO CONSTANTINOPLE—TURKISH CONFUSION IN THE CAPITAL—THE TURKS ASK FOR AN AMERICAN MANDATE—HOW KEMAL AND RAUF BEY LEFT FOR SAMSUN AND SMYRNA, RESPECTIVELY—THE GREEK PONTUS PROGRAM—THE GREEK OCCUPATION OF SMYRNA—THE TURKS GO BACK TO WAR.