Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [258]
Coal had been the great fuel of the Industrial Revolution, but by 1919 it was becoming clear that oil was the fuel of the future. Tanks, aircraft, lorries and navies all needed oil. British petroleum imports alone quadrupled between 1900 and 1919 and most of the increase, worryingly, came from outside the British empire: from the United States, Mexico, Russia and Persia. Control of oilfields, refineries and pipelines was clearly going to be important in the future, as it had been in the Great War, when “the Allied cause,” according to Curzon, “floated to victory upon a wave of oil.” No one knew for certain whether Mesopotamia had oil in any quantity, but when black sludge seeped out of the ground and lay in pools around Baghdad, or gas fires flared off swamps in Mosul, it was easy to guess. By 1919, the British navy was arguing, without awaiting further evidence, that the Mesopotamian oilfields were the largest in the world. It seemed foolish to hand over control of any part to the French, whatever Sykes-Picot said. As Leo Amery, one of Lloyd George’s bright young men, wrote: “The greatest oil-field in the world extends all the way up to and beyond Mosul, and even if it didn’t we ought as a matter of safety to control sufficient ground in front of our vital oil-fields to avoid the risk of having them rushed at the outset of the war.”34
Clemenceau, who had once said, “When I want some oil, I’ll find it at my grocer’s,” had by now grasped the importance of the new fuel. He had given up formal control over Mosul but he insisted to Lloyd George that France should have its share of whatever was in the ground. Walter Long, the British minister of fuel, and Henry Bérenger, his French counterpart, a man who believed that oil was the “blood of victory,” were put to work. They produced an agreement under which France would have a quarter-share of the Turkish Petroleum Company and in return would allow two pipelines to be built across Syria from Mosul to the sea. Both sides agreed that they did not want the Americans, who were starting to take an interest in Middle East oil, muscling in. Unfortunately, what was a reasonable compromise got caught up in the confrontation over Syria. “There was a first-class dogfight,” Henry Wilson noted in his diary, “during which the Tiger said Walter Long had promised the French half the Mesopotamian oil! Lloyd George asked me if I had ever heard of this. Of course, never. Whereupon Lloyd George wrote at once to Tiger and said that arrangement was cancelled.” The Foreign Office did not find this out until some months later, which shows the confusion in British policymaking at this period. It was only in December 1919, after Britain and France had finally settled their dispute over Syria, that the oil issue was put to rest, on very much the same terms that Long and Bérenger had agreed. As part of the deal, the French government also agreed permanently to abandon France’s claim to Mosul.35
The British knew that they did not want the French to have Mosul, but beyond that their own policy toward Mesopotamia developed by fits and starts. The initial British campaign there in 1914 had been defensive, designed only to protect the Persian Gulf from the Turks. Once they had secured their bridgehead, they had been drawn north toward Baghdad. A young political officer, Arnold Wilson, wrote to his parents: “The only sound thing is to go on as far as possible and not try to look too far ahead.” Four years later the British had gone very far indeed, up to the Kurdish areas on the borders of Turkey, and Wilson was now head of the British administration. 36
Arnold Wilson was handsome, courageous, stubborn and stoical. His school report said: “He has fought his faults bravely