XXVIII THE TREATY OF LAUSANNE[12]
The vanquished have returned to their spiritual home at Angora throwing their fezzes in the air. The victors have returned with their tails well between their legs. All tragedies have their scenes of comedy, and the Lausanne Conference is one of those amusing episodes interpolated by fate to relieve the poignancy of one of its greatest tragic pieces—the Turk and civilisation.
The Turk may be a bad ruler, but he is the prince of anglers. The cunning and the patience with which he lands the most refractory fish once he has hooked it is beyond compare. What inimitable play we have witnessed for six months on the shores of Lake Leman! Once the fish seemed to have broken the tackle—that was when the first conference came to an abrupt end. It simply meant, however, that the wily Oriental was giving out plenty of line. Time never worries him, he can sit and wait. He knew the moment would come when they would return with the hook well in their gullets, and the play begin once more—the reeling in and the reeling out, the line sometimes taut and strained but never snapping. Time and patience rewarded him. At last the huge tarpon are all lying beached on the banks—Britain, France, Italy, and the United States of America—high and dry, landed and helpless, without a swish left in their tails, glistening and gasping in the summer sun.
It is little wonder that Ismet had a smile on his face when all was over. Reports from Angora state that the peace is hailed there as a great Turkish triumph; and so it is. The Turk is truly a great fisherman. If he could govern as well as he angles, his would be the most formidable Empire in the world. Unfortunately he is the worst of rulers, hence the trouble—his own and that of those who unhappily have drawn him as governor in the lottery of life.
The able correspondent of the Daily Telegraph at the Lausanne Conference has supplied us from time to time with vivid pen pictures of the four greatest Powers of the world struggling in the toils of the squalid and broken remains of an Empire with an aggregate population equal to that of a couple of English counties that I could name. This is what he wrote about this conference, which constitutes one of the most humiliating incidents in the history of Western civilisation:—
"The records of the present Conference present an even more marvellous series of concessions and surrenders. What was frayed before is threadbare now. The Allies have whittled away their own rights with a lavish hand in the cause of peace. They have also—and this is a graver matter, for which it seems they will have to give an account in the not distant future—gone back on their promises to small races, which are none the less promises because the small races have not the power to enforce their performance. The figure that the European delegates are cutting in Lausanne, and the agents of the concessionnaires in Angora—all alike representatives of the West—has been rendered undignified as much by the manner as the matter of their worsting."
Since those distressing words were written the Powers have sunk yet deeper into the slough of humiliation.
The Times correspondent wiring after the agreement writes in a strain of deep indignation at the blow inflicted on the prestige of the West by this extraordinary Treaty. In order to gauge the extent of the disaster to civilisation which this Treaty implies it is only necessary to give a short summary of the war aims of the Allies in Turkey.
They were stated by Mr. Asquith with his usual succinctness and clarity in a speech which he delivered when Prime Minister at the Guildhall on November 9th, 1914:—