Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [284]
Later that afternoon, Nicolson’s map lay on the carpet in front of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George as its owner waited outside reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Inside, in Wilson’s study, Lloyd George sketched out an Italian mandate in southern Anatolia in glowing terms: “Where the Turks made a wilderness, the Italians can build roads, railways, irrigate the soil and cultivate it.” The French could take the north of Anatolia and the Greeks would have Smyrna and its surroundings, as well as the Dodecanese islands, and, said Lloyd George magnanimously, he would give them Cyprus as well. Clemenceau, who had been sitting silently by, expressed some doubts about the Greeks’ ability to run a mandate: “I covered the entire Peloponnese without seeing a single road.” Wilson was for giving them a chance: “By showing them our confidence, we will give them the ambition to do well.” Caught up in the spirit of things, Wilson even said that he felt hopeful that the United States would take the mandate for Armenia. Clemenceau said he assumed that the Americans would then take Constantinople as well. Nicolson was called in to take instructions. When Balfour saw these, he was moved to a rare display of anger: “I have three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with only a child to take notes for them.” He sent a strong memorandum to Lloyd George saying how dangerous it would be to partition Turkey.18
Lloyd George also heard from his military advisers, who were almost unanimously opposed. So were Churchill and Montagu, who rushed over from London to warn yet again that cutting up Turkey meant “eternal war” with the Muslim world, including that in India. Lloyd George agreed to receive an Indian delegation, but when it arrived posthaste from London by special train, it found that the prime minister had gone off on a motor tour. 19
The arrangements made on May 13 fell apart almost immediately. The Italians irritated both Lloyd George and Wilson with new troop landings. Lloyd George completely changed his mind on an Italian mandate: “I believe that to put the Italians into Asia Minor would be to introduce a source of trouble there.” He had also been impressed by Montagu’s warnings. “I conclude,” he told the other leaders when they met on May 19, “that it is impossible to divide Turkey proper. We would run too great a risk of throwing disorder into the Mohammedan world.” Wilson agreed that there was such a danger. He also worried that the mandates might look like a division of the spoils, and, as he pointed out, since the Turks themselves had made it clear that they wanted a single state, it would be awkward if not wrong to divide Anatolia between an Italian and a French mandate. There was no justification for destroying Turkey’s sovereignty: “I am forced to remind myself that I, myself, used this word in the Fourteen Points, and that these have become a kind of treaty which binds us.” Perhaps, he suggested, France could take on the responsibility for advising a Turkish state, and they might avoid the word “mandate.” They could even leave the sultan in Constantinople, without of course letting him have any power over the straits. Lloyd George was at first amenable