Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [283]
Atatürk had by now decided that the place to be was the interior, where there were troops and officers loyal to nationalist ideals. The problem was how to get there. His dilemma was solved inadvertently by the British occupation authorities, who insisted that the government send out an officer to restore law and order. Atatürk managed to get himself appointed with sweeping powers for the whole of Anatolia. He felt, he would later say, “as if a cage had been opened, and as if I were a bird ready to open my wings and fly through the sky.” The day after the Greeks landed in Smyrna, he left Constantinople with a visa from the British. Four days later, on May 19, he and his small party landed at the Black Sea port of Samsun. That day is now a national public holiday in the Turkey he created. Few people in Constantinople had any idea of what he intended, and it was to be many months before the first hints of what was brewing in Anatolia reached Paris. Lloyd George later claimed that “no information had been received as to his activities in Asia Minor in reorganising the shattered and depleted armies of Turkey. Our military intelligence had never been more thoroughly unintelligent.”15
Atatürk and his friends took a terrific gamble, one that might have failed had it not been for the help that the Allies unwittingly gave them in the next months. Allied policies were confused, inept and risky—and created the ideal conditions for Turkish nationalism to flourish. The decision to allow Italian and then Greek forces to land on the coast of Asia Minor, the indications that Armenia and Kurdistan would be set up as separate states, and the possibility that the whole area around the straits, including Constantinople itself, would be stripped away from Turkey, left Turkish nationalists with their backs to the wall. Their country was vanishing; they had little to lose by resistance. Every delay in Paris in settling the treaty with the Ottoman empire saw Allied forces grow weaker and Atatürk’s stronger.
Across the sun-baked Anatolian plateau that summer of 1919 Atatürk moved incessantly, sometimes in his old car, sometimes by train, more often by horseback, gathering like-minded officers about him and weaving the independent groups that had sprung up to protest the Allied occupation into the basis of a nationalist movement. “If we have no weapons to fight with,” he promised, “we shall fight with our teeth and nails.” In June, he announced the start of national resistance, against the Greeks in Smyrna, the French in the south and the Armenians in the east. “We must pull on our peasant shoes, we must withdraw to the mountains, we must defend the country to the last rock. If it is the will of God that we be defeated, we must set fire to all our homes, to all our property; we must lay the country in ruins and leave it an empty desert.” As reports filtered back to Constantinople, the British pressed the sultan’s government to recall their inspector-general. When Atatürk received the order on June 23 to return to Constantinople, he resigned his commission and called a congress at Erzurum, which issued what became the national pact. Its key provision was that the lands inhabited by Turks, including of course Constantinople, must remain a whole.16
From June 1919 onward, the fate of the remainder of the Ottoman empire depended less and less on what was happening in Paris and more and more on Atatürk’s moves. Two different worlds—one of international conferences, lines on maps, peoples moving obediently into this country or that, and the other of a people shaking off their Ottoman past and awakening as a Turkish nation—were heading toward collision. In Paris, the powers continued on their way, largely unaware of what was stirring to the east. The horse-trading of hypothetical mandates went merrily on.
On May 13, two days before the Greek invasion, Harold