SMYRNA, 1922

ALLIED EFFORTS TO HITCH THE SEVRES TREATY TO TURKISH NATIONALISM—​GREEKS TRANSFER TROOPS FROM SMYRNA TO EASTERN THRACE FOR A MOVE ON CONSTANTINOPLE AND WHEN FETHY BEY IS REFUSED A HEARING IN LONDON, FEVZI PASHA LAUNCHES HIS ATTACK—​THE TURKISH RECOVERY OF SMYRNA—​MR. LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS AND THE OTTOMAN SULTAN FLEES—​LAUSANNE.

Through the winter of 1921-’22, the Angora scene was a busy one. In the little restaurant near the Assembly building, Cabinet Ministers, deputies and Army officers crowded the pine tables at the luncheon hour, glancing up from their small talk as the unpainted pine door opened to admit others of their number. The Bokhara Mission would be in tomorrow. Somebody had been newly named for the Mission to Kabul. The Minister of the Interior was to make an important statement to the Assembly shortly. From far away the staccato rat-tat of machine-gun practice knocked faintly at the ear without occasioning any more interruption than the squeak of the passing ox-carts outside. But the small talk paused in its flow when two young gentlemen of the Azerbaijan Legation entered and joined three young ladies of the Russian Embassy in a cigarette at their corner table. The small talk recovered slowly. So-and-so Bey, newly arrived from the Ritz in Paris, entered with the announcement that he had been unable to find a room in the town and had had to borrow a soldier and a bucket of whitewash to build himself a house. Could we come up to the housewarming tomorrow night? We could. For somebody else with whom we had promised to dine had had to cancel the invitation on further reflection, the wind being in the wrong direction and his stove smoking in consequence.

Outside the restaurant, the falling snow etched its white tracery across the street panorama of Angora. Peasant women in red ragged pantaloons, turbaned hojas robed in more somber colors, smart Turkish officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman days, Turkish soldiers in somebody’s cast-off khaki, Government officials in kalpaks and European dress, a Turkish policeman in the old Ottoman brilliance of red cuffs and brass buttons, six white-robed male nurses from a Red Crescent hospital bearing on their shoulders a heavy covered stretcher on its way to an empty grave outside the town—​these came and went through the veil of snow. Groups of men, sitting at their coffee around glowing braziers in front of the cafes, lifted their faces from the Constantinople papers at the approaching music of a military band (true, the Constantinople papers were ten days old by the time they reached Angora, but many of these men had left their homes and families in Constantinople, and all they possessed in the world was hidden somewhere in the old capital, awaiting their return). Out of a narrow sidestreet the band moved into sight with a withered little mad woman dancing in her rags beside it. She was fairly well known in Angora. They said that her father and two brothers had been killed in the Balkan Wars, her husband and three sons had been killed in the Great War, and her youngest son had been killed at Inë-Onü. But however these things might have been, she was dancing down the street beside the heavy-shod bandsmen, dancing as lightly as the snowflakes to the crashing rhythms of the Mustapha Kemal Pasha March.

In the wake of the band came the tramping shuffle of a long column of soldiers, stolid men, heavily accoutred, with khaki kalpaks, their rifles tipped with new bayonets. They marched away down the broad road which led past the Assembly building to the railway station, a wooden building with the single word “Angora” in Turkish and English script on its sign-board. A low pall of woodsmoke, belched from the stacks of half a dozen locomotives, hung over the railway yard. A long column of ox-carts was discharging its cargo of new rope-handled wooden boxes into freight cars. With the band playing, the column of soldiers broke ranks and scrambled up into another freight train alongside the station platform. They entrained within a half-hour, a rattle of couplings ran along the length of the train, and it moved out of the station toward the west, where the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar….

On Feb. 21, 1921, the Allied Governments had received delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora in London in an effort to reconcile the Treaty of Sevres and the new force of Turkish nationalism. The Angora delegates were received as technically members of the Constantinople delegation, but the latter delegated its leadership to Bekr Sami Bey, a huge sloping Circassian who was Foreign Minister at Angora. Bekr Sami Bey belongs to a type of leadership which is one of Turkey’s peculiar assets, a type which has enjoyed a long and rich experience in diplomacy and which as a result has developed a genius for stripping away non-essentials and holding fast to essentials. There is an old and true saying to the effect that what an Englishman is at sea, what a Frenchman is on land, a Turk is in diplomacy. It is a statement which closely characterizes men of the type of Bekr Sami Bey.

The Allied Governments offered to institute an international commission for the investigation of population statistics in Eastern Thrace and Smyrna, on condition that Turkey and Greece accepted its findings and that the remainder of the Sevres Treaty stood unaltered. Bekr Sami Bey accepted the offer, subject to certain conditions in the conduct of the investigation and certain reservations as to the remainder of the Sevres Treaty. The Greek delegation would accept no alteration in the Sevres Treaty of any sort.

On March 12, the Allied Governments proposed a series of modifications in the Sevres Treaty, undertaking inter alia that “the region called the Vilayet of Smyrna would remain under Turkish sovereignty and a Greek force would remain in Smyrna town, but in the rest of the sanjak order would be maintained by a gendarmerie with Allied officers and recruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution of the population as reported by an Inter-Allied Commission. The same proportional arrangement, equally according to the report of the Commission, would apply to the administration. A Christian governor would be appointed by the League of Nations and assisted by an elective assembly and an elective council. The governor would be responsible for payments to the Turkish Government of annual sums expanding with the prosperity of the province. This arrangement would in five years be open to review on the demand of either party by the League of Nations.” This pleased neither Greeks nor Turks and the 1921 Greek offensive put a speedy end to its consideration.

On June 21, the Allied Governments offered Greece their intervention, but the Royalist command behind Smyrna was preparing to resume its march toward Angora and intervention was refused.

In March, 1922, the Allied Governments summoned delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora, the Angora delegation headed by Yusuf Kemal Bey who had succeeded Bekr Sami Bey as Foreign Minister. On March 22, an Allied proposal for an armistice in Asia Minor was forwarded to Athens and Angora, and was followed on March 26 by an Allied Note making further modifications in the Sevres Treaty and proposing “the peaceful evacuation of Asia Minor by the Greek forces and the restitution of Turkish sovereignty over the whole of that region” within a period of four months after the armistice. The Greek Government accepted the proposal, but Yusuf Kemal Bey on April 7 stipulated that in his Government’s view an armistice could only be agreed to after the Greek evacuation. The Allied Governments replied on April 15 that the period of the Greek evacuation would be shortened but that it was conditional on a prior armistice. On April 22, Yusuf Kemal Bey offered to meet Allied delegates at Ismid in an effort to explore further peace conditions which the acceptance of the armistice proposal would impose on his Government, conditions which had been left “open to discussion” in the Allied Note of April 15. The Ismid proposal came to nothing and in June, Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior at Angora, was dispatched to Paris and London with the object of discovering the nature of the peace conditions which had not yet been defined by the Allies and effecting an agreement if possible.