Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [188]
18. The Italian prime minister,Vittorio Orlando, with stick in hand, leaves the Peace Conference. In April 1919, the Italians reached an impasse with their allies over Italy’s claims in the Adriatic, in particular to the port of Fiume (Rijeka).Wilson refused to give way. The Italian walkout threatened the whole conference, because the Germans were about to be summoned to receive their terms.
19. Fiume, a small port at the head of the Adriatic where Slavs slightly outnumbered Italians, became a major nationalist issue in Italy. Having seized the city in September 1919, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio remained there for fifteen months, defying his own government and making interminable nationalist speeches. Mussolini, the future Italian dictator, learned much from his example.
20. Eleutherios Venizelos, the Greek prime minister, who dreamed of a Greater Greece incorporating much of the old Ottoman empire. His enormous charm won him much support in Paris, especially from Lloyd George. As a result, Greece gained the European remnants of the Ottoman empire in Thrace and was allowed to send an army to occupy the largely Greek port of Smyrna (Izmir) on the coast of Asia Minor.
21. The peacemakers drew up a punitive treaty with the Ottoman empire, signed at Sèvres in 1921, but overlooked the awakening force of Turkish nationalism, which had by now found a leader in the distinguished general Kemal Atatürk.
22. Turkish crowds cheer the capture of Smyrna from the Greeks in 1922, which marked the end of Venizelos’s dreams and of the Greek presence in what became modern Turkey.
23. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary after September 1919, watched Lloyd George’s support for Greek ambitions with consternation and later had to negotiate a new treaty with the Turks to replace the collapsed Treaty of Sèvres.
24. The Turkish delegation to Lausanne in 1922–23. General Ismet, walking stick in hand, was Atatürk’s trusted representative; he drove Curzon to distraction with his refusal to budge from his negotiating position.A treaty was eventually signed in 1923 that left Turkey in its present form.
25. The Peace Conference drew up treaties with the defeated powers of Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, but that with Germany proved difficult. Because of disagreements among the Allies, what was to have been a preliminary meeting before negotiating with the enemy gradually turned into the Peace Conference proper. The German terms were not ready until May 1919. Count Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau (third from right) was Germany’s foreign minister and leader of its delegation.The Germans never forgave the Allies for simply imposing their terms and declining to negotiate seriously.
26. An enormous protest demonstration in Berlin.The Germans were horrified by the peace terms, which they saw as a betrayal of a pledge they felt they had received from the Allies at the time of the armistice: that the peace would be negotiated on the basis of Wilson’s new diplomacy, with no unjust retribution.The banner demands “Only the Fourteen Points,” a reference to Wilson’s famous speech.
27. The peacemakers made only a few minor changes in the terms in response to German objections and comments.They also gave the German government a deadline for signing, which plunged Germany into a political crisis. In Paris, Allied preparations for either the signing of the treaty or a resumption of the war went ahead. Here, French soldiers move furniture at the great palace at Versailles in preparation for the signing.
28. On June 23, 1919, shortly before the Allied deadline expired, the German government finally agreed to sign.The ceremony was scheduled for June 28 and there was a scramble for tickets. Some of those who could not get into the Hall of Mirrors were forced to peer through