Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [293]
As the situation deteriorated, the Allies, or rather the British, decided on a step that was ultimately to be fatal to their position in Turkey. Venizelos, who feared that his government would fall unless he could show some successes, and whose forces had been chafing in Smyrna under repeated nationalist attacks, finally got approval in June 1920 from Lloyd George to move inland. As a sort of quid pro quo, Venizelos also sent troops to support the occupying forces at Constantinople. The Supreme Council, which was still in existence, provided a thin cover of legality; Greek troops were simply responding, on behalf of the Allies, to Turkish attacks. The British high commissioner in Constantinople wrote angrily to Curzon: “The Supreme Council, thus, are prepared for a resumption of general warfare; they are prepared to do violence to their own declared principles; they are prepared to perpetuate bloodshed indefinitely in the Near East; and for what? To maintain M. Veniselos in power in Greece for what cannot in the nature of things be more than a few years at the outside.” Curzon agreed completely: “Venizelos thinks his men will sweep the Turks into the mountains. I doubt it will be so.”55
And so the last stage of peacemaking in Turkey started with war. Greek troops moved out of Smyrna on a wide front, up the valleys to the edge of the Anatolian plateau. The Turkish nationalists melted back into the interior. In Europe, another Greek army swept aside a weak and disorganized Turkish force in Thrace. Venizelos expressed great confidence; to Henry Wilson, he foretold the collapse of Atatürk’s forces and the spread of Greek power inland, to Constantinople, even perhaps to Pontus on the Black Sea. Privately, the Greek prime minister had moments of panic but, by this point, he had little choice but to go on.56 By August 1920, the Greeks were 250 miles into the interior.
That same month, the Allies and Damad Ferid, representing the sultan’s government, signed a peace treaty in a showroom at the Sèvres porcelain factory on the outskirts of Paris: not a thing of beauty, but as easily smashed. Allied military advisers warned that it would take at least twenty-seven divisions to enforce the terms, divisions they did not have. In Turkey, there was a national day of mourning; newspapers had black borders, shops were closed and prayers were recited all day. Atatürk fought on. By now he had most of the nationalist forces in Turkey under his control, and in the north he and the Bolsheviks were stamping out the troublesome Caucasian republics.57
In September 1920, less than a month after the Treaty of Sèvres had promised an independent Armenia incorporating part of Turkey, Atatürk’s forces attacked from the south. Despite their best efforts and the attacks of their tiny air force of three planes, the Armenians were gradually forced back. When Aharonian, the Armenian poet who had spoken for his country in Paris, tried to see Curzon in London, he was brushed off with a letter. “What we want to see now is concrete evidence of some constructive and administrative ability at home, instead of a purely external policy based on propaganda and mendicancy,” wrote Curzon. On November 17, the Armenian government signed an armistice with Turkey which left only a tiny scrap of country still free. Five days later, a message arrived from President Wilson. Under the Treaty of Sèvres he had been asked to draw Armenia’s boundaries; he decided it should have 42,000 square kilometers of Turkish territory. 58
With his nation abandoned by the world and crushed between two enemies, the Armenian prime minister said, “Nothing remains for the Armenians to do but choose the lesser of two evils.”59 In December, Armenia became a Soviet republic; the Bolshevik commissar