Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [230]
Moreover, the struggle of the Greek people for freedom from Turkish rule which had started in the 1820s had been one of Europe’s great liberal causes. Lord Byron gave his life, Delacroix some of his greatest paintings. And as long as Greeks were under Turkish rule, the cause lived on. In 1919, in cities all over Europe and the United States, supporters of Greece and its claims met to pass resolutions and raise money. The Daily Telegraph published Rudyard Kipling’s translation of the Greek national anthem, the “Hymn to Liberty.” For Jules Cambon, the Peace Conference brought “the best means of satisfying the ancient claims of the Hellenic nation and of at least completing the work of independence begun by the Liberal Nations of Europe a century ago.”20
If Greece was golden, Turkey was shrouded in darker memories: a tangle of ferocious riders from Central Asia; the crescent flags waving outside Vienna; the massacres of the Bulgarians in the 1870s and, much more recently, of thousands of Armenians. Its sultan was the heir to the great and ruthless warlords who had made Europe tremble. (In fact, he was a shambling middle-aged man with rheumatism.) One of the Allied nightmares during the recent war had been that the sultan, who as caliph was the spiritual leader of Muslims all over the world, would call on all those millions to fight against Britain in India, or France in North Africa. Ottoman Turkey stood for Islam against Christianity, and now there was a chance to win a victory in that centuries-long clash of civilizations. In Britain, the archbishop of Canterbury and other notables hastened to form a Santa Sophia Redemption Committee.21
The world saw only a decaying, brutal, inefficient power which should not continue to exist. Its Arab provinces had already gone, freed by their own efforts or liberated by the Great Powers, depending on your point of view; the remnants of the Armenians had proclaimed an independent republic in May 1918, and the Kurds on the eastern borders were agitating for their own country. As for the fate of the Turkish-speaking heartland, of Thrace in Europe and of Anatolia in Asia Minor, that could be sorted out at the Peace Conference after Greek and Italian claims had been satisfied.
The British, who for so long had propped up Ottoman Turkey, now needed an alternative partner to keep the eastern end of the Mediterranean safe for their shipping. Clearly they did not want an extensive French empire there, and they did not want to spend their own money if they could help it. That made Greece, a strengthened Greece, quite appealing. Principles and interests conveniently overlapped. Greece was Western and civilized, Ottoman Turkey Asiatic and barbaric. And Venizelos was so admirable, “the greatest statesman Greece had thrown up since the days of Pericles,” in Lloyd George’s opinion. A stronger Greece, thought Lloyd George and many in the Foreign Office, would be a very useful ally. As Venizelos was quick to point out, Greece could provide ports for the British navy and airfields for what was clearly going to be an important new way of getting to India. Greek power could fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottomans. Only the military, whose job it was to look at maps and assess strengths and weaknesses, tended to be skeptical, about both Greek military power and the extent to which Turkey really was finished. When the British general staff were asked to comment on Greek claims in Asia Minor, they warned that a Greek occupation “will create a source of continual unrest possibly culminating in an organised attempt by the Turks to reconquer this territory.”22
Lloyd George, however, backed Venizelos as he backed few people. “He was,” said Lloyd George, “essentially a liberal and a democrat, and all the reactionary elements hated and feared his ideals, his legislation and his personality.” He could