Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [287]
He had been given much. Yet there was also something missing: a toughness, perhaps, common sense, balance. His feelings were too easily bruised and his self-pity too readily aroused. He worked too hard, at the wrong things. At the height of an international crisis he sat up into the night adding up his bills. Montagu, his colleague in the War Cabinet, wrote to a friend: “He amuses me, interests me, irritates me. Extraordinarily easy to deal with in the upshot, but, Oh!, what a process!” Curzon bombarded them all with questions and letters. “It will amuse you that on a day when I know that he had two meetings of the War Cabinet and a meeting of the Eastern Committee, every paper relevant to all three of which he had read, my wife said that she discovered him at Harrod’s Stores registering for tea!” He drew up the timetables for his daughters’ lessons and questioned their nanny closely on the cost of their bloomers; he told the gardeners how to weed and the foresters how to cut down trees; he insisted on hanging his own pictures. Servants in London put him on a blacklist. 28
He never quite achieved what he wanted. His time in India should have been glorious, but it ended in ignominy when he was forced out by Lord Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of the Indian army. Even when he finally became foreign secretary in the autumn of 1919, he had to play second fiddle to Lloyd George. When Lloyd George fell, he waited in vain for the summons to be prime minister. People found him difficult to work with, especially his subordinates. “He suffered,” said one, “from absurd megalomania in regard to his knowledge of art, his worldly possessions and his social position: but I have seen him display a humility about people and things, which was almost pathetic.” He was wildly inconsistent: “He abused us like pickpockets one day and wrote us ecstatic letters of appreciation the next.”29
Curzon devoted his life to the service of Britain and its empire, both of which he saw as forces for good in the world. Like many British statesmen, he saw Europe as dangerous only when its balance of power was disturbed. “His ideal world,” said Nicolson, who came to know him well, “would have been one in which England never intervened in Europe and Europe never intervened in Africa or Asia. America, as a distant, even if rebellious, plantation, was in either case not expected to intervene at all.” He disliked most foreigners, especially the French. He preferred, at least in the abstract, simple peasants like the Turk of Anatolia, “a simple-minded, worthy fellow . . . who would much prefer living his own simple existence detached from Europe.” He knew the world east of Suez well; he had traveled from the old Ottoman empire to Japan and written massive studies of central Asia, Persia and India. His colleagues in the cabinet were often reminded that he was the only one present who had been to some remote place. He was brilliant, if overbearing, in discussion; less successful in coming up with concrete policies.30
The dilatory proceedings in Paris in 1919 drove Curzon nearly mad. He had no love for the Ottoman empire but he warned repeatedly against stirring up Turkish nationalism:
That the Turks should be deprived of Constantinople is, in my opinion, inevitable and desirable as the crowning evidence of their defeat in war; and I believe that it will be accepted with whatever wrathful reluctance by the Eastern world. But when it is realized that the fugitives are to be kicked from pillar to post and that there is to be practically no Turkish Empire and probably no Caliphate at all, I believe that we shall be giving a most dangerous and most unnecessary stimulus to Moslem passions throughout the Eastern world and that sullen resentment may easily burst into savage frenzy.
He strongly opposed mandates for Italy either in the south of Anatolia or anywhere else, as well as the award of Smyrna to Greece, “who cannot keep order five miles outside the gates of Salonika.” The landing in Smyrna, he said a few months later, “was the greatest mistake that