PARIS 1919 (64 page)

One look at a map (not something the great statesmen did often enough) would also have showed that Venizelos was proposing a very strange country, draped around the Aegean Sea. His Greece would stretch one finger northward up the Adriatic, and another thin one along the top of the Aegean toward Constantinople; then it would jump across a bit of Turkish territory and the Dardanelles to take in about two thirds of the coast of Asia Minor, with a big lunge inland at Smyrna. This Greece of the “two continents and the five seas” was a country turned inside out, a fringe of land around waters it did not control. It would have enemies: Turkey certainly, and probably Bulgaria, both of which were down to contribute land, and probably also Italy, which had its own plans for the Adriatic, Albania and Asia Minor. Yes, agreed Venizelos, the shape was inconvenient. “But for thirty centuries Greeks had lived under these conditions, and had been able to surmount great catastrophes, to prosper and to increase.”
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Yet how could a country with fewer than five million people take on such a burden? A country so poor that in the years before 1914 a sixth of the population, almost all vigorous young men, had emigrated? So divided that there had almost been a civil war in 1917? For all the talk of ancient Greece, the country at the Peace Conference was new and shaky. As in the dreams of the other Balkan countries, the glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.

Venizelos's arguments, so logically laid out before the Peace Conference, were as full of holes as the Greece he wanted. His statistics were as dubious as any in the Balkans, a mix of outdated Ottoman numbers and wishful thinking. In making his claim for southern Albania, for example, he argued that people who looked like Albanians and spoke Albanian were really Greek; if they were Orthodox, they were Greek to their very souls. Why, the Greek military was full of men who were Albanian in origin. Venizelos dealt with population figures like a conjurer: there were 151,000 Greeks in North Epirus, out of a total population of 230,000. Take away the purely Albanian districts, and that left 120,000 Greeks and only 80,000 Albanians. Majority Greek areas should of course go to Greece (self-determination) but so should all areas without a clear majority: “for it would be contrary to all equity that, in a given people, a majority which possesses a higher form of civilization should have to submit to a minority possessing an inferior civilization.” The Albanians, indeed, were fortunate that Greece was willing to take them on.
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Its past gave modern Greece a ready-made circle of supporters. Clemenceau, in a rare burst of unqualified enthusiasm, told his secretary, Jean Martet, that humanity had reached its summit in ancient Greece: “Immerse yourself in Greece, Martet. It is something which has kept me going. Whenever I was fed up with all the stupidities and emptiness of politics, I turned to Greece. Others go fishing. To each his own.” (Clemenceau had reservations about the modern Greeks, whom he found sadly ignorant about their own glorious history.
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) The Greeks were the descendants of Homer and Pericles and Socrates. Serene temples, noble discus throwers, the golden light thrown by classical Greece and the Byzantine empire floated between the statesmen in Paris and the reality of a small, faction-ridden, backward nation. From Berlin to Washington, national parliaments, museums and galleries, even the whitewashed churches in small New England towns, showed the continuing power of classical Greece over the imagination of the West. Indeed, the young United States had nearly adopted classical Greek as its official language. The foreign services and governments of Britain, France and the United States were staffed by the products of classical education, their love for ancient Greece unimpaired by any close acquaintance with the modern nation.

Moreover, the struggle of the Greek people for freedom from Turkish rule which had started in the 1820s had been one of Europe's great liberal causes. Lord Byron gave his life, Delacroix some of his greatest paintings. And as long as Greeks were under Turkish rule, the cause lived on. In 1919, in cities all over Europe and the United States, supporters of Greece and its claims met to pass resolutions and raise money. The
Daily Telegraph
published Rudyard Kipling's translation of the Greek national anthem, the “Hymn to Liberty.” For Jules Cambon, the Peace Conference brought “the best means of satisfying the ancient claims of the Hellenic nation and of at least completing the work of independence begun by the Liberal Nations of Europe a century ago.”
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If Greece was golden, Turkey was shrouded in darker memories: a tangle of ferocious riders from Central Asia; the crescent flags waving outside Vienna; the massacres of the Bulgarians in the 1870s and, much more recently, of thousands of Armenians. Its sultan was the heir to the great and ruthless warlords who had made Europe tremble. (In fact, he was a shambling middle-aged man with rheumatism.) One of the Allied nightmares during the recent war had been that the sultan, who as caliph was the spiritual leader of Muslims all over the world, would call on all those millions to fight against Britain in India, or France in North Africa. Ottoman Turkey stood for Islam against Christianity, and now there was a chance to win a victory in that centuries-long clash of civilizations. In Britain, the archbishop of Canterbury and other notables hastened to form a Santa Sophia Redemption Committee.
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The world saw only a decaying, brutal, inefficient power which should not continue to exist. Its Arab provinces had already gone, freed by their own efforts or liberated by the Great Powers, depending on your point of view; the remnants of the Armenians had proclaimed an independent republic in May 1918, and the Kurds on the eastern borders were agitating for their own country. As for the fate of the Turkish-speaking heartland, of Thrace in Europe and of Anatolia in Asia Minor, that could be sorted out at the Peace Conference after Greek and Italian claims had been satisfied.

The British, who for so long had propped up Ottoman Turkey, now needed an alternative partner to keep the eastern end of the Mediterranean safe for their shipping. Clearly they did not want an extensive French empire there, and they did not want to spend their own money if they could help it. That made Greece, a strengthened Greece, quite appealing. Principles and interests conveniently overlapped. Greece was Western and civilized, Ottoman Turkey Asiatic and barbaric. And Venizelos was so admirable, “the greatest statesman Greece had thrown up since the days of Pericles,” in Lloyd George's opinion. A stronger Greece, thought Lloyd George and many in the Foreign Office, would be a very useful ally. As Venizelos was quick to point out, Greece could provide ports for the British navy and airfields for what was clearly going to be an important new way of getting to India. Greek power could fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottomans. Only the military, whose job it was to look at maps and assess strengths and weaknesses, tended to be skeptical, about both Greek military power and the extent to which Turkey really was finished. When the British general staff were asked to comment on Greek claims in Asia Minor, they warned that a Greek occupation “will create a source of continual unrest possibly culminating in an organised attempt by the Turks to reconquer this territory.”
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Lloyd George, however, backed Venizelos as he backed few people. “He was,” said Lloyd George, “essentially a liberal and a democrat, and all the reactionary elements hated and feared his ideals, his legislation and his personality.” He could have been speaking of himself: the fighter, orator, iconoclast, the man who held out, as Lloyd George had done in the Boer War, against an unjust policy and his own government. The two men already knew and liked each other; at their first meeting, in 1912, it had been difficult to tell who had charmed the other more. To Venizelos, Lloyd George was like an Old Testament prophet, with “splendid capacities and clear insight of people and events”; to Lloyd George, his counterpart was “a big man, a very big man.” Together they spun entrancing visions of a strong alliance among Greece and France and Britain, controlling the eastern Mediterranean to the benefit of all. Greece would flourish, while Ottoman Turkey would be reduced to a client state.
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During the war, the two men kept in touch. Lloyd George later claimed that he and Venizelos had plotted Constantine's overthrow together. In October 1918, when the war was in its last stages, Lloyd George took time out from a frantic schedule to discuss Greek claims with Venizelos over lunch. The meeting was friendly, and Lloyd George was encouraging, although at this stage he did not firmly commit himself to supporting all Greece's claims. Venizelos followed up with a memorandum and a private letter in which he stressed how anxious Greece was to be cooperative. On the one issue where he might have caused trouble for Britain, that of Cyprus, which was about 80 percent Greek, Venizelos was tact itself. If the British wanted to hand it over to Greece, why that would be delightful, and of course Greece would always let British forces use the bases there; if Britain wanted to keep it, that was also understandable.
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When Venizelos made his case to the Supreme Council, he was sure that the British stood behind him. He thought he could probably count on the French as well: Greek troops were fighting with the French against the Bolsheviks. The Americans were sympathetic; the Italians were his only major worry. From time to time Lloyd George prompted him with gentle questions; Wilson asked for minor clarification on Turkish atrocities, Clemenceau said virtually nothing; and Orlando referred delicately to differences between Greece and Italy which, he hoped, would be speedily resolved. (On that, as so much else, Orlando was wrong.) Venizelos wrote back to Athens full of confidence: “I think that the impression created by my exposé was a favourable one. Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and even Orlando reassured me of this when taking leave of them.” The Greek foreign minister, who witnessed the performance, was equally delighted: “In principle we have all the Great Powers on our side—except Italy, who begins thinking of agreement and conciliation herself.”
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The Italians may have been thinking of conciliation but they were also thinking of Albania and Asia Minor, where they had their eyes on some of what Greece wanted. They also hoped to keep the Dodecanese islands, even though their inhabitants were overwhelmingly Greek. Italian newspapers demanded everything that Italy had been promised, and more. Writers inveighed against the barbarous Serbians and their friends the Greeks. The situation in Albania, where Greeks and Italians actually rubbed up against each other, made matters worse. Italy had occupied much of Albania during the war; local Greeks and the Greek government complained repeatedly about the behavior of the Italian forces. The Italians, it was said, were trying to win over the Albanians with extravagant promises, of no taxes for example. In Greece the papers carried lurid stories of Italian brutalities and rapes. “The whole population,” in the opinion of the British ambassador in Athens, “would flock to the colours if mobilisation were ordered against Italy.”
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During the war, Greece and Italy had talked in a desultory way about coming to a compromise, and early on in Paris, Sonnino and Venizelos, the charmless and the charming, met several times to see whether they could put together a deal. Sonnino suggested that Greece let Italy have all the coast of Albania and about half the interior; in return Greece could have the area around Korçë (Greek: Korytsa), the Dodecanese, and the area around Smyrna on the coast of Asia Minor. While the two men were prepared to bargain over Albania and the Dodecanese, neither would budge on Asia Minor. A deal would have saved much grief later on, but it never had a chance. Neither man trusted the other; both thought their countries could do better negotiating directly with the Great Powers.
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In February 1919 it looked as though Venizelos had been right to gamble. The only large question mark was the United States, and Venizelos had every reason to think that he could woo the Americans as successfully as he had wooed the British. He had long talks with House, who assured him that the United States would be helpful. Nicolson arranged for him to meet some of the younger Americans; “he is moderate, charming, gentle, apt. A most successful luncheon.” Venizelos was always good at judging his audience. Seymour, the American expert, described another meeting to his family: “Realizing that his strongest asset would be our belief in his honesty, he determined to lay his cards on the table and speak with absolute frankness, and I think that he did. This policy was almost Bismarckian in cleverness.” The Americans were sympathetic, but not blindly so. They had reservations about Greek claims in Albania and Thrace. When it came to Asia Minor, though, they preferred the Greek claims to the Italian. Even early on, American relations with Italy were deteriorating.
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As the Commission on Greek and Albanian Affairs began to meet in the second week of February, Venizelos kept up the pressure and his hectic pace of activities. He made another presentation: “He is overwhelmingly frank, genial, and subtle,” reported Nicolson. The lunches and dinners went on; the letters and memoranda flowed from his pen. In the United States and Europe his sympathizers organized meetings; in the Balkans and Turkey, his agents stirred up Greek communities to send in petitions to the Peace Conference demanding that they be made part of Greece. Professors urged that Greeks should not be left under the rule of Albanians, “the one race which Europe has not been able to civilise.” (For their part, Albanians begged the United States to take a mandate over their country.) Be careful, warned a member of the government back in Athens: “Trop de zèle can harm us.”
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From its first meeting, the commission fell out on national lines, with the British and the French supporting Greece's claims, the Americans taking a more detached and moderate view and the Italians for denying virtually everything. Italy did not want a stronger Greece just across the Adriatic. The narrowest part of the Adriatic was at the heel of the Italian boot; sixty miles east, on the Albanian coast, was the superb natural harbor of Vlorë, guarded by the island of Sazan (Italian: Saseno). If Italy held both island and harbor, it could reach across and squeeze shut the entrance to the Adriatic. If an unfriendly power, though, sat on that eastern shore, Italy would always be at its mercy. When Serbia put in its claim for a slice of northern Albania, Italy opposed that as well. Italy had other interests too: the Catholic minority in the north, ministered to by Italian schools and Italian priests. From the Italian point of view, it would have been easiest to take over directly, or at least turn much of Albania into a protectorate.