The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made. Simon Ball

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СКАЧАТЬ with the French. He distrusted his French opposite number, General Pellé, profoundly and considered, rightly, that he would always conspire with the Kemalists behind his back whenever the opportunity arose. The French were in his words ‘dreadful Allies’ and might well force Britain to ‘have to eat dirt to an unlimited extent’. They were ‘always “playing the dirty” on us’. Henderson seconded his chief’s views in spades: the French were ‘cads and apes’, ‘in the grip of the international financier or Jew who cares for French financial interests and nothing else’.⁴² When Rumbold returned from leave, he clashed with Harington over the latter’s attempt to cooperate with the French in taking a more hostile line to the Greeks and recognizing that the Ankara regime formed the true government of Turkey. On 8 August 1922 he vetoed plans to act against Greek shipping, deprecating ‘the interesting spectacle of Pellé…slobbering over Harington, telling him what a fine fellow he was’. Rumbold was very aware that Lloyd George had publicly expressed pro-Greek views. Although intellectually he acknowledged that it was ‘useless to regard Mustapha Kemal any longer as a brigand chief’, and that the treaty of Sèvres was a dead letter, he could not rid himself of a visceral dislike of the Turks. ‘I have never dealt with people who have so little political sagacity,’ he noted, and did not mind ‘confessing privately that I should be rather glad to see the Greeks give the Nationalists one big knock before hostilities come to an end’.⁴³ Once more his boss’s echo, Henderson, called the Turks ‘misguided barbarians’.⁴⁴

      Any hopes that Rumbold may have had of a stalemate in the Graeco-Turkish War were soon dashed. At the end of August 1922 the Kemalists opened their major offensive and routed the Greeks. By the second week in September they had captured the port of Smyrna. Not only did this pave the way to horrific ethnic cleansing, it also meant that nationalist forces directly threatened the straits zone held by the Allies. True to form, Pellé slipped out of Constantinople to negotiate directly with Kemal; on 20 September the French and Italians abandoned the British garrisoning Chanak on the Dardanelles. Three days later British and Turkish troops came into contact for the first time.

      On 26 September Harington cabled Lord Cavan, now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Losing a lot of lives in hanging on is what I want to guard against. Why not start at once and give Turkey Constantinople and [Eastern Thrace]…Remember Turks are within sight of their goal and are naturally elated.’ On the same day Crookshank wrote his private appreciation of the situation: ‘We have got into a nice mess here haven’t we!’ He placed the blame for his predicament squarely on the shoulders of his senior colleagues.

      I consider [Rumbold] a good deal to blame for the situation having arisen. He often I fancy sends telegrams which he thinks will please [Curzon] or [Lloyd George] rather than containing his own views. The last four or five months can be summed up as a world wide wrangle (short sighted) with France everywhere, owing to this very wicked anti-French feeling that has been brewing everywhere in the FO: as far as this part of the world is concerned it consisted in endless verbal quibbles in answering each others’ notes – if HR had any views of his own, he should have pushed them forward and gone on arguing for an immediate Conference. Instead precious months were wasted, whose bad fruit we are now beginning to taste. You can hardly believe [he concluded maliciously] what an atmosphere of gloom surrounds [Rumbold] and Henderson. My lighthearted flippancy, I can assure you, is far from appreciated.⁴⁵

      It was at this point that Crookshank had, to his delight, his first brush with high policy. He and the military attaché, Colonel Baird, ‘wrote an interesting and logical joint memorandum which was dished out with one of their meetings to Rumbold [and] the General…The General thought it wise and telegraphed the suggestions to the War Office…The suggestion was that in order to keep ourselves out of the war we should act with complete neutrality and allow the Turks to go to Thrace if they could. At present we are controlling the Marmora against them and so acting as a rearguard to the Greeks.’⁴⁶ In London Lloyd George’s government was puffing itself up with righteous indignation to face down the Turks.⁴⁷ When the Cabinet met at 4 p.m. on 28 September they had before them Harington’s dispatch of the Crookshank-Baird memorandum, which had arrived via the War Office. Rumbold had been too slow off the mark to register his dissent. His telegram did not reach London until 8.15 p.m. As a result the Cabinet believed that he in some way concurred with Harington. Curzon signalled a rebuke to them both. According to London the proposal

      would involved [sic] consequences which Harington has not fully foreseen…The liberty accorded to Kemal could not in logic or fairness be unilateral. If he were permitted to cross into Europe to fight the Greeks and anticipate the decision of peace conference establishing his rule in Eastern Thrace, Greek ships could not be prevented from using non-neutral waters of Marmora at same time, in order to resist his passage…In this way proposed plan might have consequence of not only re-opening war between Turkey and Greece but of transferring theatre of war to Europe with consequences that cannot be foreseen.⁴⁸

      Crookshank cared not one whit that his plan had been shot down in flames. He was simply delighted that ‘Rumbold…got his fingers smacked for not having sent his comments at once’ and that ‘little Harry…[had] caused a Cabinet discussion and a slight flutter’.⁴⁹ In fact his memorandum was the high point of the crisis as far as Crookshank was concerned. Harington and Rumbold put aside their differences to thwart London’s desire to provoke a shooting war with the Kemalists. As Crookshank was writing up his part in the proceedings, Harington left Constantinople to open direct negotiations with the Kemalists. Early on the morning of 11 October he signed the Mudania Convention: the British, French and Italians would remove Eastern Thrace from Greek control and in return the Turks would retire fifteen kilometres from the coast at Chanak.

      The Chanak crisis was an exciting time for Crookshank at its epicentre. It also had profound reverberations for British politics. Indeed, the crisis did much to create the political arena which he and Macmillan subsequently entered. The Dominions had refused to support Britain in its potential war with the Turkish nationalists. The majority of Conservative MPs became convinced that they could no longer support a coalition led by Lloyd George. On 7 October the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, publicly criticized government policy in a letter to The Times. If the French were not willing to support Britain, the government had ‘no alternative except to imitate the Government of the United States and to restrict our attention to the safeguarding of the more immediate interests of the Empire’.⁵⁰ No one stationed in Constantinople in the autumn of 1922 could hope for a sudden collapse of the British position – Crookshank feared ‘an internal pro-Kemal and anti-foreign outbreak in [Constantinople] itself…we have very little strength to cope with that, and one day we may find ourselves like the Legation did at Peking in Boxer times…how ignominious it would be to be killed by a riotous mob, after all the battles one has been through.’ Once the immediate threat of anarchy was averted at Mudania, however, Crookshank could not have agreed with Bonar Law more: ‘I am quite convinced,’ he wrote at the beginning of November, ‘that having made a stand in October, having refused to be browbeaten and having been vindicated we should now wash our hands of the whole thing.’⁵¹

      Chanak convinced Crookshank that politics rather than diplomacy was the career to be in. Junior diplomats did not get the opportunity to fight for great causes. One incident further finally soured him on a diplomatic career. He despised Nevile Henderson, who was left in charge of the Commission when Rumbold departed to act as Curzon’s adviser at the conference convened at Lausanne to draw up a new peace treaty with Turkey. ‘Henderson goes on, with his temper fraying more and his long-winded words in СКАЧАТЬ