They All Made Peace – What Is Peace?
The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order
Edited by Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci
First published in 2023 by Gingko
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Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial material, Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci; individual chapters, the contributors
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The title of the book is taken from a poem by Ernest Hemingway who attended the first few weeks of the Lausanne Conference in his capacity as the Paris-based foreign correspondent of the Toronto Star.
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Contents
Introduction 1
Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci
Part 1: From One Imperial Order to Another
1. From The Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic: International Law and Minority Rights before and after Lausanne 29 Aimee M. Genell
2. Britain’s Plans for a New Eastern Mediterranean Empire, 1916–1923 53 Erik Goldstein
3. On the Margins of the Lausanne Conference: The Soviet Union and the Exclusions of the Post-World War I International Order 77 Samuel J. Hirst and Étienne Forestier-Peyrat
4. The Lausanne Treaty in the Contested Narratives of World Politics 97 Cemil Aydın
Part 2: Absent Presences
5. Debates over an Armenian National Home at the Lausanne Conference and the Limits of Post-Genocide Co-Existence 119 Lerna Ekmekcioglu
6. Iranian Attempts to Participate in the Lausanne Conference 143 Leila Koochakzadeh
7. Arab Exclusion at Lausanne: A Critical Historical Juncture 163 Elizabeth F. Thompson
Part 3: Making Concessions
8. Oil over Armenians: The 1920s ‘Lausanne Shift’ in US Relations with the Middle East 189
Andrew Patrick
9. The Mosul Question: Lausanne and After 213
Sarah Shields
10. Turkey and the Division of the Ottoman Debt at Lausanne 235
Patrick Schilling and Mustafa Aksakal
Part 4: Moving the People
11. International Law and the Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Turkish Population Exchanges 259
Leonard V. Smith
12. A Capitalist Peace? Money, Labour, and Refugee Resettlement in the Lausanne Accords 277
Laura Robson
13. At the Crossroads of History: Thanassis Aghnides, Ayrilios Spatharis and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange 297 Haakon A. Ikonomou and Dimitris Kamouzis
Part 5: Framing Lausanne
14. Framing Pasts and Futures at the Lausanne Conference 327
Hans-Lukas Kieser
15. Lausanne in Turkish Official and Popular Historiography: A ‘War of Identities’ in Turkey 357
Gökhan Çetinsaya
16. Diplomacy, Entertainment, Souvenir? Guignol à Lausanne (1923) and the Lausanne Conference in Caricature 381 Julia Secklehner
Introduction
Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci
They All Made Peace
Founded in 1961, the War of Independence and Republic Museum (Kurtuluş Savaşı ve Cumhuriyet Müzesi) in Ankara is housed in the building of the first Turkish National Assembly. An object lesson in patriotic commemoration, the museum tells the story of the nation’s resistance to the Entente Powers’ attempted partition of Anatolia after the First World War. In 1920 the defeated Ottoman Empire seemed doomed to be reduced to a small Anatolian rump under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). Within two years that diktat had been rendered a dead letter, thanks not only to the defeat of Greek, Italian and French military forces by the nationalist army of Mustafa Kemal (hereafter Atatürk), but an equally significant (and equally violent) exercise in reorienting political, religious, ethnic and class loyalties towards a new, secular Republic of Turkey. And so the museum’s medals and weapons jostle with prayer beads and identity cards. The prize exhibit is a table, displayed in the second room on the left, in the old Legal Commission room.
Measuring 360cm long and 76cm wide and covered with a dark red broadcloth, this was the table on which the Lausanne Treaty was signed in 1923.1 It was brought to Ankara in 2008 as part of a state visit by the President of the Swiss Confederation, travelling in the luggage of the Swiss Army Orchestra. The Lausanne table was formally presented to then Turkish President Abdullah Gül on 11 November, at a concert given at Türk Ocağı Sahnesi (the Turkish Hearth Stage). As well as demonstrating that ‘the Swiss Army can both carry a table and make
1 We would like to thank Fatma Hicret Un, the Director of the War of Independence and Republic Museum in Ankara, for this information.
[good] music,’ for President Pascal Couchepin the sturdy table symbolised the strength of this bilateral relationship.2
Eighty-six years before, Couchepin’s predecessor Robert Haab formally opened proceedings at the Near East Peace Conference summoned to the Swiss resort of Lausanne on 20 November 1922. For Haab, the battles of Sakarya and Dumlupınar were immediate and yet remote: even as he ‘bowed’ to those Greeks and Turks who had patriotically given their lives ‘up to some weeks ago’, their valour evoked heady tales of earlier ‘innumerable and bitter fights, recounted to us in the legends of ancient times and the chronicles of the Middle Ages.’ It had been war, and it had been ruinous. But now it was time to make peace. As a neutral country, helping conclude international agreements was ‘an attitude and a policy which are for us [the Swiss] a holy tradition.’3
Lausanne had not been the first choice of venue. The Ankara government had proposed Izmir (Smyrna), a symbolic yet, as British Foreign Secretary George Nathaniel Curzon noted, somewhat impractical suggestion. Much of that great Ottoman entrepôt’s core had recently been incinerated as the Turks drove the Greek Army into the sea. Beykoz (at the northern end of the Bosphorus), Rhodes, Istanbul, Venice and Paris were considered.4 Experience of negotiating in Paris in 1919 had left many British diplomats disgusted with what they perceived as a venal French-language press. To this Curzon added a distaste for the ‘Levantines’ populating some of these cities. Venice emerged as an ideal option due to its location. But then, like Venice, Lausanne was on the route of the Simplon Orient Express, allowing easy access from Istanbul. Unlike Venice, which would give nominal leadership to Italian Prime Minister Luigi Facta (busy with Benito Mussolini’s fascists), Lausanne would not favour any one delegation.
For all Haab’s rhetoric of neutrality, Lausanne was hardly an Archimedean point. Foyers Turcs and their Armenian, Syrian and other equivalents not only served expat communities living and working inside Switzerland. They supplied a focus for continental diasporas. Switzerland’s universities had provided education and networking opportunities to generations of Pan-Islamists, Young Ottomans, socialists and communists, from Lenin and Mussolini to the Young Turks and the Armenian revolutionaries. Swiss banks provided boltholes, too. During the war, Deutsche Bank stashed its Bagdadbahn and associated oil interests in the
2 ‘İsviçre’den Lozan masası jesti’, Milliyet, 11 November 2008.
3 Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs, 1922–1923: Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace, 1923 (hereafter Lausanne Conference), 1–2.
4 Henderson to Balfour, 23 July 1922, Documents on British Foreign Policy (hereafter DBFP), Vol. 17, 890; Rumbold to Curzon, 13 and 14 August 1922, DBFP, Vol. 17, 923–924.
Zurich-based Bank für Orientalische Eisenbahnen.5 To this day the funds (and archives) of the famed Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the party which seized power in Istanbul in 1908 and led the Ottoman Empire into World War One, may well slumber in another of the city’s many banks, silently earning interest for unknown (and probably unconscious) beneficiaries.6
As the history of Nestlé shows, however, Switzerland was not just a provider of education and financial services to Middle East elites: it was a source of consumer goods and, eventually, direct investment. Swiss neutrality certainly helped Nestlé escape pre-1914 Ottoman embargoes of other European manufacturers and win army contracts to supply Ottoman forces with condensed milk. In 1927 Nestlé opened a chocolate factory in Istanbul, which allowed it to exhibit its wares at trade fairs alongside signs urging visitors to ‘Consume Local Goods!’, parroting a mantra of Turkish economic nationalism.7
Though highly distasteful to career diplomats like Curzon, master of ‘old diplomacy’, one of the aims of this volume is to tear down the barriers between diplomatic history and other sub-disciplines: to view the press, faith groups and humanitarians, bankers and multi-national enterprises as more than interlopers. Our focus is trained here not only on the statesmen and diplomats that sat around the negotiation table: the Turkish, British, French, Greek, American (as ‘observers’), Italian, Romanian, Yugoslavian and Japanese plenipotentiaries, joined on occasion by Belgian, Soviet, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Bulgarian delegates. What happened beyond and below the table, in the rooms next door, which teemed with a plethora of non-governmental actors, is also discussed in the following pages. We will highlight how economic and financial considerations informed political, legal, diplomatic and humanitarian decision-making processes, and vice versa.
In addition to highlighting these inter-sectoral diplomatic dynamics at Lausanne, we offer a contrapuntal reading of the episode, to expose the ‘absent presences’, the unheard as much as the heard, their manifold interests, expectations, frustrations and resentments.8 Even though their delegations were not officially granted an audience, Lausanne was thronged with figures claiming to speak for Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, Iraqis, Egyptians, Kurds, Nestorians, and
5 Werner Plumpe et al., Deutsche Bank 1870–2020: The Global Hausbank, 2020, 225–226.
6 Ozan Ozavci, ‘Honour and Shame: The Diaries of a Unionist and the Armenian Question’, End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism, 2019, 219–220.
7 Yavuz Koese, ‘Nestlé in the Ottoman Empire: Global Marketing with Local Flavor, 1870–1927’, Enterprise & Society 9/4, 2008, 755.
8 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993, 50.
other communities. As Laura Robson observes, surprisingly few of these aspired to their own Western-style nation-states (‘national homes’), such as those promised to Armenians and Kurds under the Treaty of Sèvres.9 Sarah Shields’ contribution to this volume argues that some Kurds sought to resist inclusion in any nation-state or empire, content to remain within ‘borderlands’. While all these communities looked to make peace, peace meant different things to different groups, and many communities were internally divided on what peace looked like to them.
The observations of the caricaturist Emery Kelen, who found himself in Lausanne in 1922 almost by accident, are particularly telling here. This Jewish ‘boy from Györ’ (Austro-Hungary) had been thoroughly worked over by history, then cast adrift with ‘three and a half years of world war in my bones, and three revolutions, pink, red, and white’ – as well as a salami, Kelen’s principal means of support until an Egyptian journalist, Mahmud Azmi, spotted him sketching Mussolini in Lausanne’s Beau Rivage. Buying the sketch for his satirical weekly Al-Kashkul (literally ‘The Begging Bowl’), Azmi Bey started Kelen on a career as court jester to the corps diplomatique. As Julia Secklehner demonstrates in this volume, Kelen and his partner Alois Derso (also in attendance at Lausanne) proved adept at interpreting Lausanne diplomacy for audiences across the world. Looking back forty years later, Kelen described an epiphany others shared, but failed to express so evocatively:
It seems to me that I can spy the very spot where Britain’s glory began to seep away into the dark; and I was there. It was in the third-rate hotels and crumbly family pensions of Lausanne, where the scent of insecticide and dust blended so happily with that of poulet rôti, pommes rissolées. There a penny-pinching caricaturist found his natural home among others of wobbly social status: Shi’ite mullahs from Persia, Sunnis from Iraq, Wahabis from the Hejaz, Zionists from Palestine, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Macedonians, Gurkhas, Laks, and Lurs, who milled, swarmed, and plotted in an incessant rumbling, grumbling, undershudder to history. Each afternoon they would come to the surface and continue their sinister conspiracy to the tune of music at the thé dansant in the lobby of the Lausanne Palace Hotel.
Like a viceroy reviewing native troops, Lord Curzon progressed through the lobby, staring with glassy eyes past the ragtag and bobtail that cluttered the plush-carpeted floor. Yet, in three decades, how many of these scrubby
9 Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 2017, 107.
characters were to become sparkling ambassadors, or prime ministers of independent countries … holding appalling fate in their hands!10
Kelen sketched those gathered around the famous Lausanne conference table, but also peeked below, spotting ‘the little brother of the conference table’: the green baize footstool provided for the chief British delegate Curzon’s gout. A towering physical presence loomed above the table while, below, rebellious extremities were painfully propped up. Curzon really was a synecdoche for an empire then facing unrest in Egypt, Iraq, and India, thanks to the efforts of Saad Zaghloul, Simko Shikak and Mahatma Gandhi.
As Curzon noted to a colleague, ‘hitherto we have dictated our peace treaties’. Yet at Lausanne he found himself ‘negotiating one with the enemy who has an army in being while we have none, an unheard of position.’11 Though all agreed that Lausanne witnessed a dramatic shift in the perceived balance of power, there was little consensus on who exactly the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ were. For Kelen it marked the beginning of the end for Britain. For Basil Mathews of the London Missionary Society, it was ‘the old authority of the white man’ which had received its ‘coup de grâce’ at Lausanne, as ‘the Turkish people (totalling little more than the population of Greater London) … dictated terms to the world-powers’, a process allegedly followed closely ‘in every bazaar in India, by the night-fires of Arab sheiks, and in student debates from Cairo to Delhi, Peking and Tokyo.’ Lausanne was a story of ‘the clash of civilisations’: ‘white man’ on one side, ‘Young Islam’ on the other.12 The British historian A.J. Toynbee preferred ‘contact’ to ‘clash’ but was equally persuaded that Lausanne represented a turning point in the history of ‘civilisations’: the point where the ‘Eastern Question’ became The Western Question, where orientalist sifting of empires into nation states gave way to recognition of the barbarous occidentalism visited upon the ‘East’ in the name of this ‘Westernisation’.13
10 Emery Kelen, Peace in Their Time: Men Who Led Us In and Out of War, 1914–1945, 1963, 98–99.
11 Curzon to Viscount d’Abernon, 20 December 1922, cited in David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman, 1994, 556.
12 Basil Mathews, The Clash of Colour: A Study in the Problem of Race, 1924, 30–31. For ‘Young Islam’, see Basil Mathews, Young Islam on Trek: A Study of the Clash of Civilizations, 1926.
13 A.J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: a study in the contact of civilisations, 1922. See Georgios Giannakopoulos, ‘A World Safe for Empires? A.J. Toynbee and the Internationalization of Self-Determination in the East (1912–1922)’, Global Intellectual History 6/4, 2021, 484–505.
Within Turkey the legacy of Lausanne was immediate as well as enduring. From the moment the Turkish delegation signed the treaty on 24 July 1923, a Tuesday, at nine past three in the afternoon, it has been used as a trope to further political ends at the hands of Kemalist and (neo-)Ottomanist writers. As HansLukas Kieser has noted in this volume (and in other publications), four members of the Turkish delegation later joined the Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti (Turkish Historical Society) established in 1930.14 ‘[Lausanne] not only contributed to rewriting contemporary history,’ but laid the foundations of the Turkish History Thesis of the 1930s, that in turn presented the Turks as “proto-European” originators of human civilisation. Building on previous work by Fatma Müge Göçek, Gökhan Çetinsaya’s discussion here ranges across historical as well as political discourse since 1923, showing how Turkish perceptions of Lausanne lurched from one extreme to the other, from a heroic victory marking the end of five hundred years of European meddling to ‘Turkey’s unconditional surrender to the West’.15 When the Lausanne table arrived in Ankara, the conservative paper Vakit (Time) deplored it as an ‘execution table’ on which the Turks ‘lost an empire!’16 Here we trace the origins of today’s conspiracy theories (espoused by 48% of Turks, according to a 2018 survey), which claim 2023 will see the revelation (and expiration) of Lausanne’s ‘secret clauses’. Though entirely without foundation, the authority enjoyed by analogous theories in many other nations makes the exploration of their origin and function especially urgent, a task in which social anthropologists and historians can usefully collaborate.17
Outside Turkey (and to a lesser extent Greece), Lausanne has received little scholarly attention from historians. This in contrast to anthropologists such as Renée Hirschon, whose study of Ottoman Greek refugees in Piraeus led to groundbreaking works such as Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe (1989) as well as an edited volume Crossing the Aegean (2003), which included important contributions
14 For a similar argument that traces the origins of the Turkish official historiography and the ‘History Thesis’ to Lausanne, also see Suavi Aydin, ‘Resmi Tarihin Temeli: Ulusal Tarih Yazımı ve Resmi Tarihte Mitlerin Kaynağı’, in Resmi Tarih Tartışmaları 1, F. Başkaya ed., 2008, 59.
15 Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘The Politics of History and Memory: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Lausanne Peace Conference, 1922–1923’, in Israel Gershoni et al., eds., Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions, 2002, 224.
16 Vakit, ‘İşte İnfaz Masası’, 12 November 2008.
17 Zeynep Oğuz, ‘Matters of Conspiracy: oil prospects, geological knowledge, and temporality in Turkey’, accepted paper, 2018 Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK & Commonwealth.
from historians as well as anthropologists.18 In 2011–2012 the Benaki Museum in Athens curated a series of exhibitions, films and other projects exploring the legacy of the exchange.19 In his comparative analysis of modern international systems Eric Weitz nonetheless laments that ‘it is barely known today except to specialists on the region.’20 Though Zara Steiner echoes earlier British diplomatic historians in noting that Lausanne ‘proved to be the most successful and durable of all the post-war settlements’, her magisterial study of inter-war diplomacy only grants the conference two pages.21 Other than Sevtap Demirci’s 2005 monograph, itself focussing on the strategic calculations of Britain and Turkey, there is no scholarly volume dedicated to Lausanne in the English language. 22 Indeed, the much less significant 1922 Genoa Conference has received more attention from scholars.23 Scholarship seeking to re-examine the familiar narratives of 1914–
18 Renée Hirschon, ‘The Social Institutions of an Urban Locality of Refugee Origin in Piraeus’, DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, Oxford, 1976; idem, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, 1989; idem, The Creation of Community: Well-being without Wealth in an Urban Greek Refugee Locality, 2000; idem, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, 2003; idem, ‘History’s Long Shadow: the Lausanne Treaty and Contemporary Greco-Turkish Relations’ in O. Anastasakis, K. Nicolaidis and K. Oktem, eds., In the Long Shadow of Europe: Greeks and Turks in the Era of Postnationalism, 2009.
19 Anna Ballian, Relics of the Past: Treasures of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Population Exchange, 2011; Benaki Museum and the British Council, Twice A Stranger, temporary exhibition, 18 September to 25 November 2012.
20 Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, The American Historical Review 113/5, 2008, 1338.
21 Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933, 2005, 120, 122. For similar estimates of Lausanne see Michael L. Dockrill and J. Douglas Goold, Peace Without Promise: Britain and the Peace Conferences, 1919–23, 1981, 236; Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919, 1991, 174. Lausanne receives similarly short shrift in Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End the War, 2001, and Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931, 2014.
22 Sevtap Demirci, Strategies and Struggles. British Rhetoric and Turkish Response: The Lausanne Peace Conference, 1922–1923, 2005. See also Demirci, The Lausanne Conference: the evolution of Turkish and British diplomatic strategies, 1922–1923, 2014, a reprint of her 1997 LSE doctoral thesis. See also Salahi Ramsdan Sonyel, Turkish Diplomacy, 1918–1923: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish National Movement, 1975; Mustafa Yılmaz, British Opinion and the Lausanne Peace Conference and Treaty, 1994.
23 Carole Fink, The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921–1922, 1984; Stephen White, The Origins of Detente: the Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921–1922, 1985; Carole Fink, Axel Frohn and Jürgen Heideking eds., Genoa, Rapallo, and European Reconstruction in 1922, 1991.
1918 by situating them within a ‘greater war’ that began in 1911 (with the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania) and ‘failed to end’ in 1918 – to cite Robert Gerwarth’s landmark The Vanquished (2016) – has entirely passed Lausanne by. This is so despite the fact that, as Gerwarth notes in his book, Lausanne ‘fatally undermined cultural, ethnic and religious plurality as an ideal to which to aspire and a reality with which – for all their contestations – most people in the European land empires had dealt with fairly well for centuries.’24
Accounts of the ‘making’ or ‘creation’ of ‘the modern Middle East’ usually devote only a few lines to the Lausanne Peace Conference: David Fromkin ignored it entirely.25 As Elizabeth F. Thompson underlines in her chapter, it is equally commonplace to overlook Lausanne’s part in ending ‘the political moment towards popular democracy in Greater Syria and elsewhere in the former Arabic-speaking territories of the Ottoman Empire.’ Frederick Anscombe and Michael Provence are notable exceptions to this cleavage between Arab and Ottoman history, emphasizing a shared legacy of what the latter refers to as ‘Ottoman modernity’.26 This volume seeks to provide an equivalent for the raft of volumes addressing Versailles, Trianon and other post-war settlements.27 It also seeks to restore Lausanne to the historiography of the wider Middle East, that ‘post-Ottoman’ space that Einar Wigen has dubbed ‘an area studies that never was’.28
24 Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 2016, 246. See also Jörn Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden: Versailles und die Welt, 1918–1923, 2018.
25 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, 1989. See also D.K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958, 2006; T.G. Fraser, Contested Lands: A History of the Middle East since the First World War, 2021; Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, 2013.
26 Frederick F. Anscombe, State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands, 2014; Michael Provence, ‘Ottoman Modernity, Colonialism, and Insurgency in the Interwar Arab East’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 43/2, 2011, 205–225; Michael Provence, ‘Stateless Revolutionaries and the Aftermath of the Great War’, Journal of Modern European History 13/3, 2015, 401–418; Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 2017. See also L. Carl Brown ed., Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and Middle East, 1996.
27 Monographs on other post-war settlements include: Ann Byers, The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, 2018; Michael S. Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History, 2017; Istvan Bethlen, The Treaty of Trianon and European Peace, 1934; Arnold Suppan, The Imperialism Peace Order in Central Europe: Saint-Germain and Trianon, 1919–1920, 2019; C.A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences, 1919–1937, 1968; Georgi P. Genov, Bulgaria and the Treaty of Neuilly, 1935; Patrick J. Treanor, Britain, Bulgaria and the Paris Peace Conference, 1918–1919: A Just and Lasting Peace?, 2020.
28 Einar Wigen, ‘Post-Ottoman studies: an area studies that never was’, in Éva A. Cstató et al., Building Bridges to Turkish: Essays in Honour of Bernt Brendemoen, 2018, 313–324.
What is Peace?
A Paris-based correspondent of the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway spent three weeks (22 November–16 December 1922) in Lausanne covering the conference. He had already encountered many of the conference’s protagonists earlier in the year, either at the Genoa Conference or in Istanbul, which he found ‘packed with uniforms and rumors’.29 Hemingway’s despatches revelled in the incidental, seeking to capture the superficial detail that would, he hoped, reveal more profound truths. A poem he wrote at Lausanne, published in an American magazine The Little Review tested this ‘iceberg method’ to its limits.30 Apparently assembled from snatches of conversation and snippets of copy, ‘They All Made Peace – What is Peace?’ affords a powerful if gnomic multi-sensory portrait of the seething press pack and corps diplomatique at Lausanne.
Hemingway’s question, ‘What is Peace?’, is one many of our contributors have found themselves debating, with each other and (in the case of those with family ties to communities relocated under Lausanne’s terms) with themselves as well. Did Lausanne end the ‘Great War’ of 1914–1918, the ‘Greater War’ of 1911–1923, or the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–1922? Was the peace of Lausanne merely the result of inter-state bargaining, or did it seek to reflect or resist internationalism –whether in the shape of the Bolshevik threat or the League of Nations, itself torn between legalism and technocracy? Did it involve settling past scores or trying to establish an order that would, at whatever cost to present and past, prevent future outbreaks of violent score-settling? To borrow from Martin Luther King Jr., was it merely the ‘absence of tension’, or the ‘presence of justice’?
The head of the Turkish delegation at Lausanne, İsmet İnönü (hereafter İsmet) knew more of making war and signing ceasefires than making peace and signing treaties. A thirty-eight-year-old officer, İsmet had been at the battlefront, fighting the Turks’ ‘independence war’ just sixty days before his arrival in the Swiss resort. As commander of the Western Anatolian Army, he had signed the Mudanya ceasefire on 11 October.31 At Mudanya his taciturn manner and diminutive stature had ‘not at all impressed’ his opposite number in the Allied Occupation Army, General Charles Harrington. İsmet’s appointment to lead the delegation surprised both the
29 David Roessel, ‘New Information on Hemingway’s “3 very fine weeks” in Constantinople in 1922’, Resources for American Literary Study 34, 2009, 107–128. For his despatches see William White, ed., Dateline: Toronto. Hemingway’s Complete Dispatches for The Toronto Star, 1920–1924, 1985, 211.
30 James Gifford, ed., ‘In Our Time’ and ‘They All Made Peace – What is Peace?’ by Ernest Hemingway, 2015.
31 İsmet İnönü, Defterler, Vol. II, 2001, 40–42.
British and İsmet’s own colleagues.32 It reflected the importance Atatürk placed on having someone he knew would obey instructions, which consisted solely of a thirty-line brief and an expanded (fourteen-points, rather than six) version of the Misâk-ı Millî (National Pact), the set of guiding principles for peace-making hammered out by the last Ottoman parliament in February 1920.33 Although the skill with which İsmet turned his lack of experience and savoir-faire to his and Turkey’s advantage soon became evident, even in his memoirs (written much later) he played up his lack of savoir-faire amid the ‘coquetry’ of diplomacy.34
The head of the British delegation, George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess of Kedleston, was twenty-five years older, a graduate of Eton and Oxford, a former Viceroy of India (1898–1905) and the proverbial embodiment of hauteur (though he could be charming in private). İsmet had only been to Europe once before 1922.35 Curzon had set off around the world in 1887, exploring Central Asia and publishing two studies of Eastern ‘problems’. In 1919 Curzon and David Lloyd George divided British peace-making between them: as Foreign Secretary Curzon (a Conservative) focused on Eastern questions while the Welsh Liberal prime minister focused on Europe. Unfortunately, Lloyd George’s philhellenism had led him to push through plans for Greek occupation of Smyrna over Curzon’s resistance. The resulting fiasco of Greek defeat and the Anglo-Turkish confrontation at Çanakkale (Chanak) in October 1922 had freed Curzon from Lloyd George (who was forced out of power by Conservative members of parliament), though leaving Curzon the resulting mess. Curzon was nonetheless confident of bringing negotiations to a quick and satisfactory conclusion (at least to Britain), realizing a grand vision of Mediterranean Empire that Erik Goldstein reconstructs in his chapter, complete with heady dreams of restoring Hagia Sophia to the Christian faith.36 He felt he had got the measure of the Turks years before, in an 1889 tussle with Turkish customs officials during his circumnavigation of the globe. 37
This was the new system he hoped Britain could establish in place of the
32 Rıza Nur, Lozan Hatırları, 1992, 21–24.
33 Abdi İpekçi ed., İnönü Atatürk’ü Anlatıyor, 1976, 32; cf. Metin Heper, İsmet İnönü, 1998, 68.
34 İnönü, Hatıralar, Vol II, 114–115; cf. Heper, İnönü, 68.
35 Heper, İnönü, 53.
36 See also Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920, 1991; Sean Kelly, ‘How Far West?: Lord Curzon’s Transcaucasian (Mis)Adventure and the Defence of British India, 1918–23’, International History Review 35/2, 2013, 274–293; Daniel MacArthur-Seal, Britain’s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923, 2021.
37 Harold Nicolson, ‘Curzon,’ Foreign Affairs 7/2, 1929, 9–10.
crumbling empire of the sultans. But that would happen not without making significant concessions, both strategic and economic, and not without cushioning the differences with the Turks and the rival powers first. The old imperial order in the wider Middle East and the Balkans had come to an end post-haste, after successive wars lasting nearly a decade. A new imperial order was unfolding in its place as a new arrangement was to be concluded between the winners (of the war of 1914–1918) and the winners (of the war of 1919–1922), i.e., the Allied Powers and the Turks. The rest could hardly make their voice heard. As Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Sarah Shields and Elizabeth F. Thompson have shown in their respective chapters, much of what the silenced voices (Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, etc.) said at the time still maintains its relevance today.
The conference at Lausanne opened on 20 November 1922, and was divided into two phases, separated by a short hiatus (4 February–23 April 1923) that resulted when İsmet refused to let Curzon bounce him into signing a draft treaty. Negotiations were held through three commissions: the first was for Territorial and Military Questions, the second on the Regime of Foreigners, and the third on Economic and Financial Questions. Several sub-commissions were tasked with researching the details and drafting the resultant treaty, conventions, protocols and declarations.
The First Commission (led by Curzon) saw the most heated discussions during the conference. Negotiations began with the territorial issues of Thrace and the Turkish Straits. Both regions had seen heavy fighting and remained a potential flashpoint, thanks to Greek and Turkish troops positioned either side of the Maritsa (Meriç) river, the pre-1914 border between Greek-controlled Western Thrace and Turkish-controlled Eastern Thrace. Thrace provided İsmet and his Greek counterparty Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) with ample opportunity to accuse each other of precipitating the war and to trade population and refugee statistics, as Bulgarian premier Aleksandar Stamboliyski sought room for a port on the Aegean (Dedeağaç, recently renamed Alexandropouli, was offered), reclaiming some of the territory Bulgaria (another defeated ally of the Central Powers) had lost in the Treaty of Neuilly (1919). Curzon intervened, asking İsmet to ‘justify their demands by historical, geographical, political and ethnographical arguments.’38 But the Turkish delegation was unprepared for such a request. The Ankara government’s two-sentence-long instructions (points 5 and 6) about Thrace were limited to maintaining the 1914 borders. In Western Thrace they would seek a plebiscite.39
The proceedings of the first session show that, as an experienced statesman,
38 Lausanne Conference, 21.
39 Bilal N. Şimşir, Lozan Telgrafları (hereafter LT), xiv.
Venizelos was better equipped for the opening of the conference. It was he who had developed a foreign policy on the premise of the irredentist Great Idea (Megali Idea), a vision of Hellenic expansionism in Asia Minor first propounded by Ioannis Kolettis some seventy-five years earlier.40 Encouraged by Lloyd George as well as France and Italy, in May 1919, as Prime Minister, Venizelos put this plan into implementation by landing Greek troops in Izmir.41 The following year, however, his position began to weaken.42 Under Alexandre Millerand, France’s policy shifted, pulling French occupying forces out of Cilicia in the wake of defeat at the Battle of Marash. Instead of grabbing the extensive ‘Blue Zone’ granted it under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in October 1921 France signed a separate peace with Atatürk (the Ankara or Franklin-Bouillon Agreement), to the disgust of Ottoman Armenians who had looked to Paris as a protector, as well as to Curzon, who saw it as rank betrayal by an ally.43
After the Greek King Alexander died from a monkey bite in October 1920, the prospect of the return of his exiled father, Venizelos’ old nemesis ‘Tino’ (Constantine I), led to Venizelos’ election defeat in November.44 Out of office, Venizelos opposed the subsequent purge of army officers as well as plans by his successor as Prime Minister, Dimitrios Gounaris, for a further offensive into the Anatolian heartland. Disregarding Venizelos’ calls for peace, Gounaris and Constantine pressed on into Anatolia, where the tide turned against them at the 21-day Battle of the Sakarya in August-September 1921. The following flood of Greek soldiers and Ottoman Greeks pouring west went down in Greek history as the ‘Catastrophe’. It cost Gounaris his life and Constantine the throne.
Venizelos’ international stature notwithstanding, at Lausanne the Greeks found themselves in a weak position.45 His wife Elena Venizelou wrote after Venizelos’ departure for Lausanne that the seasoned Greek diplomat had little hope of a satisfactory peace.46 Venizelos himself admitted that they had ‘not only lost Northern Epirus, but also Western Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, from the moment that
40 Michael Llewellyn Smith, ‘Venizelos’ Diplomacy, 1910–23: From Balkan Alliance to Greek-Turkish Settlement’, in Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship, P.M. Kitromilides ed., 2008, 135.
41 Ibid., 161.
42 Andrew Dalby, Eleftherios Venizelos, 2010, 128–129.
43 Vahé Tachjian, La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mesopotamie: aux confins de la Turquie, de la Syrie et de l’Irak, 2004; Vincent Duclert, La France Face au Génocide des Arméniens: Une nation impériale et le devoir d’humanité, 2015.
44 Dalby, Venizelos, 125.
45 Çağla Derya Tağmat, Lozan Konferansı’nda Yunan Diplomasisi, 1922–1923, 2018.
46 Arheio Sofokli Venizelu, Fakelos 1, 226.01.041.1; cf. Tağmat, Lozan, 99.
the three Great Powers, formerly our allies, decided to return them to Turkey.’47
During the negotiations he justified Greek administration of Western Thrace on grounds of ‘superior administrative capacity’, even though the region held a Muslim majority. He quickly rallied, as he anticipated, the support of Curzon, as well as that of the other Balkan states and Romania, who all wanted the Turks kept to the other side of Maritsa.
The invocation of Wilson’s mantra of ‘self-determination’ led a weary Curzon to question whether, ‘though in many ways a great man’ the US President had not ‘dealt a considerable blow to the peace of the world’ in ‘inventing the phrase’.48 If European troops had been powerless to stop bloodshed during the Silesian plebiscite of March 1921, what hopes for disputed borderlands like Thrace or Mosul, Curzon wondered? Seeing that a Balkan bloc was emerging before him, İsmet reported back to Ankara that he would not allow talks to break up over Thrace.49 Thrace as well as the Aegean and Dodecanese Islands were the lesser concerns of the Ankara government. If sacrifices were to be made for further gain in other domains, they could be made on these issues. Yet, as Sevtap Demirci reminds us, this was an early breach of the National Pact at Lausanne.50
The Russian delegation were invited to Lausanne late, and hence the Turkish Straits were only brought on the tapis in December 1922.51 This was only the second international conference the Soviets had attended. At Genoa ‘The Unworldly Russians’ (as Hemingway dubbed them) had fascinated and frustrated the press pack, and excited local Communists. At Lausanne they once again elected to maintain ‘an air of mystery’.52 The seventh point in İsmet’s instructions was that no foreign armed forces were to be accepted in the Turkish Straits.53 This sat well with the claims of the Russian delegation: the Turkish Straits had been a crucial route by which the Allies had supplied White (anti-Soviet) Russian forces, right down to 1921.54 Under the 1841 London Straits Convention, the Turkish
47 Smith, ‘Venizelos’ Diplomacy’, 170.
48 Lausanne, 1st Comm, 5th Meeting. For a broader discussion see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, 2007.
49 İsmet to the Council of Ministers, 22 November 1922, in LT, 121.
50 Sevtap Demirci, Strategies and Struggles, 85.
51 A.V. Borkov and A.V. Loshkarev, ‘Sovetskaya diplomatsiya i obcyzhdenie problem statusa chernomorskih prolivov na Lozanskoi Mezhdunarodnoi Konferensii, 1922–1923 gg.’, 242.
52 White, ed., Dateline Toronto, 130, 153, 159.
53 Şimşir, LT, xiv.
54 L. N. Nezhinskiy and A.V. Ignatiev eds., Rossiya I Cernomorksie prolivi (XVIII-XX stoletiya), 365; Maharramova, 183; Borkov, 243.
Straits had been closed to all warships, something Tsarist Russia viewed as guarantee of imperial security. Now the Allies sought free passage for all warships, only to find the Bolsheviks maintaining Tsarist-era policy. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, cited the Kemalists’ National Pact in support of closing the Turkish Straits entirely to all foreign armed vessels. Curzon replied that he felt he was listening to one of İsmet’s kalpaks (generals), rather than the head of the Russian delegation. Chicherin was unperturbed: as he noted to a member of the American delegation, Joseph Grew: ‘Every rebuke Lord Curzon addresses to me across the conference table strengthens me just so much with the Soviet Government, and strengthens the Soviet Government proportionately.’55 As Samuel J. Hirst and Étienne Forestier-Peyrat note in their chapter, Soviet policy at Lausanne signalled a return to a Commissariat of Foreign Affairs’ strategy of consolidating anti-colonialist partnerships with Middle East leaders, rather than the Comintern’s preferred policy of fomenting revolution.56
Though Atatürk had ceded claims in Turkey’s far east and accepted Russian financial and military aid under a convention signed on 16 March 1921, he was (contrary to rumour) far from being a communist stooge. The question of whether the Turkish Straits should be subject to tonnage restrictions (limiting the displacement of armed vessels allowed to transit) and the surrounding territory demilitarised was passed to a sub-commission. Even when packaged as a fillip towards wider naval disarmament (a cause popular with the French), neither the other Black Sea littoral states nor anyone else supported complete closure of the Turkish Straits to foreign warships.
The issue of ‘the minorities’ (used to refer to non-Muslim communities within Turkey) was next on the agenda, and one of the most sensitive issues addressed at the conference.57 When it came to Ottoman Greek communities in Western Anatolia, Atatürk’s instructions to İsmet were only two words: ‘esas mübadeledir’ (the principal [course of action] is population exchange).58 As Rıza Nur, one of İsmet’s aides in the Turkish delegation, wrote in his memoirs, it was paramount to ‘Turkify’ Asia Minor and ‘save’ it from elements that had been ‘a cause of its
55 Joseph Grew, ‘The Lausanne Peace Conference of 1922–1923’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98/1, 1954, 4.
56 On this subject, also see Alp Yenen, ‘Internationalism, Diplomacy and the Revolutionary Origins of the Middle East’s ‘Northern Tier’’, Contemporary European History, 2021, 8–10.
57 For context see Carole Fink, ‘The Minorities Question at the Paris Peace Conference’ in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: a Reassessment After 75 Years, 1998, 249–274.
58 Şimşir, LT, xiv.
frailty’, elements that had revolted against Ottoman rule and served as ‘an instrument of foreign powers’ for centuries.59
Mathew Frank argues that Venizelos was the first to propose a Greek-Turkish population exchange, to Talât in 1913. Venizelos’ international prestige purportedly played a key role in turning population exchange from a ‘marginal idea propagated by a handful of political fantasists and extreme nationalists into an acceptable and a ‘progressive’ instrument of state policy, as amenable to bourgeois democracies and Nobel Peace Prize winners as it was to authoritarian regimes and Fascist dictators.’60 Well aware that the Turks had insisted on a total, compulsory exchange in talks with him held earlier in Ankara, Rıza Nur found it both fortunate and bizarre (tuhaf) that a concrete plan for such an exchange was first mooted officially by the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.61
It was in Lausanne in November 1922 that Nansen first heard he had been awarded the Peace Prize for his refugee work. On 1 December 1922 he delivered a statement pleading for rapid Greek-Turkish action along the lines of the 1913 Ottoman-Bulgarian exchange, noting that ‘the economic aspect of the matter’ was a ‘most important aspect’. A swift exchange would enable newly transferred communities to plant for harvest in 1923.62 Convention or no, Venizelos had been urging Nansen to start the exchange since October.63 Curzon reluctantly agreed to this plan, even as he warned that ‘the world would pay a heavy penalty’ for such a ‘thoroughly bad and vicious solution’.64 As Leonard V. Smith shows in his chapter, such statements were anything but ‘rhetorical crocodile tears.’ It seems prudent to conclude that the compulsory Greek-Turkish population exchange in fact had many fathers, few of whom were willing to avow paternity.
The idea of an autonomous zone for ethnic Armenians in Eastern Anatolia was of similar, if not older vintage. Denied a hearing at the conference, the Armenian delegation at Lausanne did have an interview with İsmet and did address a (unofficial) meeting of delegates, held in the absence of any members of the Turkish
59 Rıza Nur, Lozan Hatırlaı, 99.
60 Matthew Frank, Making Minorities History: Population Transfers in Twentieth Century Europe, 2017, 1 (quote), 32, 38. Article 143 of the Treaty of Sèvres refers to a separate ‘arrangement relating to the reciprocal and voluntary emigration of the populations of Turkish and Greek race.’
61 Rıza Nur, Lozan Hatırlaı, 100.
62 Lausanne Conference, 115.
63 Smith, ‘Venizelos’ Diplomacy’, 171.
64 Lausanne Conference, 212.
delegation. The Armenians also enjoyed strong American support founded on decades of Protestant missionary activity in the Empire. As Andrew Patrick notes in his chapter, this proved a hollow reed. The Armenian mission wanted a ‘foyer arménien en Turquie’ (Azkayin Dun) for Ottoman Armenians who had escaped Turkey’s wartime policy of extermination, a crime known since the 1940s as the Armenian Genocide. As an Armenian delegate put it to İsmet: ‘Even a dog, after you’ve beaten him ten times over, goes back to his kennel’. This arresting (not to say devastating) quote is just one of the important records of the Armenian Mission’s work at Lausanne revealed for the first time by Lerna Ekmekcioglu in her chapter.
For his part Curzon reminded İsmet of the call of the inviting Powers (Britain, France and Italy) issued on 23 September 1922, promising the return of Eastern Thrace to Turkey in return for Turkey putting in place measures for the protection of racial and religious minorities in Turkey. The Turks had accepted this call on 4 October. The Greek government had furthermore undertaken ‘to leave alone’ the 124,000 Turks in Western Thrace, Curzon noted, provided the Greek population of Istanbul was ‘also left undisturbed’. He pointed to the ‘deep interest’ Britain, France and the United States took in ‘the important group of Nestorian or Assyrian Christians’ in Eastern Anatolia, and he hoped that the Turks would consider the question of an Armenian National Home ‘in a humane spirit.’65
The first article of the instructions submitted to İsmet ruled out an Armenian National Home.66 His speech in response to Curzon pinned the blame for the past ‘sufferings of the minorities’ on foreign interventionism, notably by Tsarist Russia and the British Premier William Gladstone. Foreign powers had exploited such minorities to advance their own interests, as well as encouraging the latter ‘to liberate themselves in order to constitute independent States.’67 İsmet repeatedly cited Ottoman Jews in support of his metanarrative of Ottoman toleration, one in which the Ottomans had ‘invented minority rights’: the Jews were a model ‘minority’ which had not dallied with foreign patrons, so the argument went, and so had been left alone to prosper.
Of course, İsmet was not alone in seeking to present his nation’s record in a positive light at Lausanne. To give just one example, the French diplomat Camille Barrère claimed that French efforts ‘to better the lot of all the peoples of the East have always been compatible with most friendly relations with the Ottoman
65 Lausanne Conference, 175–179, 183.
66 Şimşir, LT, xiv.
67 Lausanne Conference, 202.
government,’ a remarkable statement that omitted French aggressions in Ottoman Egypt (1798–1801), Algiers (1830) and Tunis (1881).68 Turkish newspapers such as Tevhid-i Efkâr knew enough of the Ku Klux Klan to remark on similar hypocrisy in American claims to the moral high ground: as İsmet put it to American diplomat Richard Washburn Child, would the United States government be willing to consider a plan to ‘set aside Mississippi and Georgia as a national home for the Negro’?69
As Christmas 1922 approached, Curzon’s patience grew thin. In addition to his partial (tactical?) deafness, İsmet’s repeated invocation of ‘independence and sovereignty’ grated, as did his delegation’s fondness for delaying strategies, whether they involved trying to recycle notes already circulated in text form as speeches, or suddenly circulating an entirely new Russo-Turkish text for a Turkish Straits convention, when all parties were still working on a joint text. Curzon seemed to be preparing to break off talks on the Armenian National Home question, making pointed references to how ‘the feelings of justice and humanity of the civilised world’ would view Turkey’s decision to refuse such a modest proposal.
By late January 1923, Greek and Turkish delegations had drafted a separate bilateral agreement on population exchange, and a convention was finally signed on 30 January 1923. Disagreements over the Ottoman debt led to the break-up of the conference a few days later. Despite a flurry of eleventh-hour activity by the Americans and others to delay his train long enough to rescue talks, Curzon left for London on 4 February 1923. When negotiations resumed in April 1923, the chair of the First Commission was filled by Horace Rumbold, British High Commissioner at Istanbul (i.e., one of the administrators of the Allied Occupation of the Turkish Straits Zone, 1918–1923).
Compared to the twenty-three exhausting meetings racked up by the First Commission, the second (‘Regime of Foreigners’) and third (‘Economic and Financial Questions’) commissions had met only four and five times respectively, under the presidency of two diplomats-turned-senators, the Italian Camillo Garroni and the Frenchman Maurice Bompard. The Italians had convened an unofficial ‘Ottoman Congress’ in Rome back in January 1921 to canvass Turkish views on revising Sèvres. At Lausanne the Italian head of the sub-commission on Minority Rights, Giulio Cesare Montagna, proved a talented ‘diplomatic fixer’, repeatedly mediating between Greek and Turkish delegations in the prickliest questions.70 Although
68 Lausanne Conference, 181.
69 For a discussion, see the chapters by Patrick and Ekmekcioglu.
70 Jay Winter, The Day the Great War Ended. 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War,
Garroni and former Italian Prime Minister Luigi Facta were overshadowed by Mussolini (who succeeded the latter just before the conference opened), the latter departed after a couple days in Lausanne, and did not change Italian policy on the only other area of concern, the Italian claim to the Dodecanese Islands, which they had occupied since 1912.71
Garroni’s commission sought to establish a replacement for the so-called ‘Capitulations’, that web of bilateral agreements which granted foreign citizens extra-territorial legal status. Prior to their abolition by the CUP in September 1914 many native Ottomans, especially members of the Ottoman Greek and Ottoman Armenian mercantile elite, had acquired foreign nationality as a means of protecting themselves from the vagaries of the Ottoman legal system, as well as for its tax benefits. Debate now centred on whether the Turkish legal system had developed far enough to reassure non-Turkish residents that they no longer needed to have recourse to special courts or conseils mixtes, courts of arbitration with the involvement of non-Ottoman judges.
Ever willing to draw on what he perceived as strong analogies between Japanese and Turkish history, Baron Hayashi Gonsuke noted that Japan had found that it took two decades to create a new legal system able to replace extraterritorial systems. İsmet could point to several decades of reform, including wholesale adoption of ‘Western’ codes. For Curzon, however, Turkish law was tainted at its root: its principles were ‘the product of theological jurists’ and it was ‘based in last resort on Moslem religious law ’ The Capitulations remained another red line for the Ankara government.72
Bompard’s financial commission provided more opportunities for Venizelos and İsmet to trade figures for reparations, refugees and relative shares of the Ottoman debt. For the French, the subject was particularly sensitive. On 1 August 1914, the Ottoman debt stood at 158,045,327 Ltq.73 But the war cost the Ottomans, as the Minister of Finance Mehmed Cavid announced in May 1918, an additional 250 million Ltq, around 210 million Ltq of which was borrowed from the Germans.74 Ten months later, the French calculated the deficit as 209,944,588 Ltq, leaving aside the Ottoman Public Debt Administration’s cash and reserves. Oxford, 2022.
71 See Alan Cassels, Mussolini’s Early Diplomacy, 1970, 21–45; Dilek Barlas, ‘Friends or Foes? Diplomatic Relations Between Italy and Turkey, 1923–36’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36, 2004, 231–252.
72 Simsir, LT, xiv.
73 Duparc to Pichon, 2 March 1919, AMAE 51CPCOM/346/8.
74 Defrance (French Minister in Egypt) to Pichon, 16 May 1918, AMAE 51CPCOM/342/24.
The Allies also demanded 20 million Ltq (reduced from 50 million Ltq) in occupation expenses. As at Genoa, so here the French position reflected their dominance among bondholders, combined with suspicions that those nations less exposed to sovereign debt might allow the French rentier to receive a heavy haircut, releasing capital for foreign direct investment in the ‘New Turkey’, an opportunity British and American enterprises were better placed to seize.
By late January 1923 the Turks’ share of Ottoman debt had been reduced to 87 million Ltq: under any such settlement, Bompard noted, Turkey would become the only state to emerge from the general conflagration with less debt than she had at its start. Turkey’s wartime debts to Germany and Austro-Hungary had been cancelled under the terms of the treaties of Versailles and St Germain. The commission also considered the status of concessions promised (but not quite awarded) in 1914: one for oil in the two Ottoman vilayets (provinces) of Mosul and Baghdad, promised to the Anglo-German condominium, Turkish Petroleum Company, in June 1914, the other a joint venture for naval shipyards negotiated with the British armaments giant Vickers.75
Whereas İsmet could cite the National Pact in support of the Turkish claim to the Ottoman vilayet of Mosul as an integral part of a Turkish National Home, Curzon was well aware of the risks of being seen to maroon negotiations in a grubby oil deal, even before the Turks raised the ante by reviving another, equally shaky pre-1914 claim, the vast Chester Concession, whose original concessionaire had been a retired American rear-admiral. Hand-dug oil ‘wells’ (actually shallow holes in the ground) had operated in this corner of northern Mesopotamia for generations. During the First World War, the German militarized oil survey (Brennstoff Kommando Arabien) had been the first to bring modern drilling equipment to the region, confirming there was oil to be found. In 1922 all American and European newspapers were filled with speculation surrounding an AngloAmerican ‘oil war’ as well as reports of oil company executives roaming the halls of Lausanne hotels disguised as Turkish typists. Curzon’s claim that Mosul belonged to Iraq on ethnographic as well as military grounds alone, as well as his insistence that oil executives’ influence on British policy was ‘NIL’, failed to
75 Jonathan Conlin, ‘Debt, Diplomacy and Dreadnoughts: the National Bank of Turkey, 1909–1919’, Middle Eastern Studies 52/3, 2016, 525–545; Jonathan Conlin, ‘“Our Dear Resadiye”: the Legend and the Loans behind Ottoman Naval Rearmament, 1908–14’, International History Review, published online 22 June 2021.
persuade.76 Turkish cartoons in Karagöz were not the only satires to tie Curzon to a kerosene can.77
Up until February 1923, commission meetings seemed to consist of delegates lining up to pummel İsmet. Curzon would begin by urging İsmet to be reasonable, warning against making a fetish of ‘sovereignty’ when future ‘development’ would necessitate foreign assistance. Barrère or Bompard would then express similar sentiments, with Hayashi or Child chipping in occasionally as amici curiae. Curzon would then quote their ‘moving statements’ in turn, and a fresh turn of the screw would begin. This routine could not continue forever, however. With the collapse of inter-Allied negotiations over German reparations (taking place in Paris) and the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr (11 January), French Premier Raymond Poincaré became determined to end the Lausanne talks at whatever price.
In Turkey news of the talks’ collapse in early February 1923 was received cautiously. The conference was said to be on ‘temporary holiday’ so that the delegates could ponder the propositions at home. The Turkish delegates and Prime Minister feared that the word ‘collapse’ could provoke opposition groups in the parliament. Though the Turkish press blamed the situation on the Italians and particularly the French, the Turkish government struggled to secure the Great National Assembly in Ankara’s approval of counterproposals to the draft treaty İsmet had rejected in early February. Prime Minister Hüseyin Rauf saw them as a ‘softened version’ of the Treaty of Sèvres.78 Atatürk sent one of his bodyguards to murder the most obstreperous MP, Ali Şükrü of Trabzon, and even considered sending in the army to ram his proposals through the Assembly. The announcement of a snap election on 1 April achieved the same result without too much violence, delivering a new Assembly more amenable to Atatürk.79 Talks in Lausanne resumed on 23 April and ran for another three months.
Under pressure from Athens to strike a separate, bilateral agreement with İsmet, Venizelos improvised (with Montagna’s help), developing a face-saving solution on Thrace and reparations, under which the Turks would waive their demand
76 Lausanne Conference, 359. See also John A. DeNovo, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900–1939, 1963; Fiona Venn, ‘Oil, Anglo-American Relations and the Lausanne Conference’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 20, 2009, 414–433.
77 ‘Mosul Oil Stream’, Karagöz, 3 January 1923. Our thanks to Ilkim Büke Okyar for this reference.
78 Taha Akyol and Sefa Kaplan, Açık ve Gizli Oturumlarda Lozan Tartışmaları: TBMM’de Lozan Müzakereleri Tutanakları, 2021, 341.
79 Sonyel, Turkish Diplomacy, 212–214.
for reparations from Greece in exchange for a small corner of territory around Karaağaç and (in lieu of any payment) a formal statement that Turkey had a moral right to receive compensation for the Greek army’s invasion. A further Greek ultimatum threatening to leave Lausanne bounced Italy and France into dropping their own demands for reparations. Both İsmet and Venizelos were over-committed, having advanced ahead of what their respective governments and domestic public opinion were willing to swallow. Meanwhile international opinion would not, Rumbold and Curzon (in London) recognized, support any final stand by the British or French in support of ‘rights of foreigners’, or French rentiers’ right to be reimbursed in gold rather than (inflating) francs. Poincaré’s proposal to yoke Allied evacuation to the debt issue risked creating a second Ruhr crisis, this time on the Bosphorus. Even a delay over such matters increased the risk of the Turks and Greeks reaching a separate peace. As Patrick Schilling and Mustafa Aksakal explain in their chapter, the eventual partition and renegotiation of the Ottoman Debt left rentiers with little choice but to accept a significant haircut.
To the relief of the Americans and Turks, the Turkish Petroleum Company was jettisoned, and the Mosul dispute kicked down the road, the topic of separate, bilateral talks (which failed, sending the dispute to the League of Nations). After all the public speculation, neither the Chester Concession nor any of the other rumoured side-deals allegedly struck by İsmet and various American (or French, or British) concession hunters materialized. By 17 July all outstanding questions had been resolved. After a nervous week awaiting approval from Ankara, the treaty was signed on 24 July. It would subsequently be ratified by a freshly elected Turkish Grand National Assembly on 21 August. It is worth noting that this treaty, the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange Agreement and the Turkish Straits Convention were three separate conventions: all were negotiated at Lausanne, however. None was conceivable without the others, and hence this volume will follow custom in conflating them.
Syndromes and Histories: Settling the Eastern Question
The respect accorded to the aforementioned Lausanne table in Ankara contrasts jarringly with the display of similar artefacts in equivalent museums in other European capitals. In Budapest’s Military Museum the flag flown at the Grand Trianon Palace during the Allies’ negotiations with another defeated empire (the Austro-Hungarian) is certainly on show – but under a reinforced glass bridge, to allow visitors to perform their own ritual humiliation of ‘trampling’ it. The Treaty of Trianon awarded large parts of the Empire to a ‘Greater Romania’, as well as
to Austria and Czechoslovakia. The Treaty was perceived as a national disgrace: throughout the Hungarian Republic the state flag was flown at half-mast until 1938, another ritual ‘humiliation’.80 Although German resentment at the diktat of the Treaty of Versailles would be cauterised by another world war, in Hungary ‘Trianon Trauma’ continues to this day.
The Ottomans formed the third of the First World War’s defeated imperial Central Powers Yet the story of Lausanne is represented as a victory in Ankara’s War of Independence and Republic Museum. The Japanese delegate Baron Hayashi was arguably right when he observed that ‘it seems to me that Turkey will be almost the only Power among our ex-enemies that has come out without loss of prestige and has emerged with a full promise of peaceful development.’ The Treaty has been dubbed the ‘birth certificate’ of the Republic of Turkey.81 The scope of the ‘unmixing’ ordained by Lausanne (as well as its perceived ‘success’) made it a point of reference in post-WW2 peace settlements, as well as the partition of India. This being said, over the past two decades this normalisation of ‘unmixing’ as a peace-making tool has been radically reinterpreted and is now viewed by many scholars as ‘ethnic cleansing’.82 For Michael Mann and Benjamin Lieberman, the victims of this ‘Lausanne Trauma’ are hiding in plain sight.83
Yet the ‘traumas’ and ‘syndromes’ of the interwar era and its aftermath did more than linger in diplomatic and political memory. Some of them continue to typify long-existing wounds from a deeper past, looking back to previous decades, or even centuries. They harness histories to political ends. In the Ankara museum, the Lausanne table is accompanied by an excerpt from Atatürk’s 1927 ‘Great Speech’, observing that the 1923 Treaty ‘informs [us] that a great assassination
80 Gerwarth, The Vanquished, 207–208.
81 Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘The Politics of History and Memory: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Lausanne Peace Conference, 1922–1923’, in Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem, Ursula Wokock eds., Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions, 2002, 208.
82 Benjamin Lieberman, ‘Ethnic Cleansing in the Greek-Turkish Conflicts from the Balkan Wars through the Treaty of Lausanne: Identifying and Defining Ethnic Cleansing’, in Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley eds., Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, 2003; Benjamin Lieberman, ‘“Ethnic Cleansing” versus Genocide?’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses eds., Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2010, 51; Matthew Frank, Making Minorities History: Population Transfers in Twentieth Century Europe, 2017.
83 Benjamin Lieberman, ‘Ethnic Cleansing in the Greek-Turkish Conflicts from the Balkan Wars through the Treaty of Lausanne’, in S.B. Vardy and T.H. Tooley eds., Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, 2003; Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing and the Making of Modern Europe, 2006; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, 2004.
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“Dan grew joyful as we sped along.
“‘Lizzie is mine,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t marry him now.’
“He told me how fond they had been of each other until they got accomplishments an’ began to put up the price o’ themselves. He said that in their own estimation they had riz in value like beef an’ ham, an’ he confessed how foolish he had been. We were excited an’ movin’ fast.
“‘Something’ll happen soon,’ he says.
“An’ it did, within ten minutes from date. We could see a blue car half a mile ahead.
“I’ll go by that ol’ freight-car o’ the Henshaws’,’ says Dan. ‘They’ll take after me, for Sam is vain of his car. We can halt them in that narrow cut on the hill beyond the Byron River.’
“We had rounded the turn at Chesterville, when we saw the Henshaw car just ahead of us, with Aleck at the wheel an’ Lizzie beside him an’ Sam on the back seat. I saw the peril in the situation.
“The long rivalry between the houses of Henshaw an’ Pettigrew, reinforced by that of the young men, was nearing its climax.
“‘See me go by that old soap-box o’ the Henshaws’,’ says Dan, as he pulled out to pass ’em.
“Then Dan an’ Aleck began a duel with automobiles. Each had a forty-horse-power engine in his hands, with which he was resolved to humble the other. Dan knew that he was goin’ to bring down the price o’ Alecks an’ Henshaws. First we got ahead; then they scraped by us, crumpling our fender on the nigh side. Lizzie an’ I lost our hats in the scrimmage. We gathered speed an’ ripped off a section o’ their bulwarks, an’ roared along neck an’ neck with ’em. The broken fenders rattled like drums in a battle. A hen flew up an’ hit me in the face, an’ came nigh unhorsin’ me. I hung on. It seemed as if Fate was tryin’ to halt us, but our horse-power was too high. A dog went under us. It began to rain a little. We were a length ahead at the turn by the Byron River. We swung for the bridge an’ skidded an’ struck a
telephone pole, an’ I went right on over the stone fence an’ the clay bank an’ lit on my head in the water. Dan Pettigrew lit beside me. Then came Lizzie an’ Sam—they fairly rained into the river. I looked up to see if Aleck was comin’, but he wasn’t. Sam, bein’ so heavy, had stopped quicker an’ hit in shallow water near the shore, but, as luck would have it, the bottom was soft an’ he had come down feet foremost, an’ a broken leg an’ some bad bruises were all he could boast of. Lizzie was in hysterics, but seemed to be unhurt. Dan an’ I got ’em out on the shore, an’ left ’em cryin’ side by side, an’ scrambled up the bank to find Aleck. He had aimed too low an’ hit the wall, an’ was stunned, an’ apparently, for the time, dead as a herrin’ on the farther side of it. I removed the ten one-thousand bills from his person to prevent complications an’ tenderly laid him down. Then he came to very sudden.
“‘Stop!’ he murmured. ‘You’re robbin’ me.’
“‘Well, you begun it,’ I says. ‘Don’t judge me hastily. I’m a philanthropist. I’m goin’ to leave you yer liberty an’ a hundred dollars. You take it an’ get. If you ever return to Connecticut I’ll arrest you at sight.’
“I gave him the money an’ called the officer, who had just come up. A traveller in a large tourin’ car had halted near us.
“‘Put him into that car an’ take him to Chesterville,’ I said.
“He limped to the car an’ left without a word.
“I returned to my friends an’ gently broke the news.
“Sam blubbered. ‘Education done it,’ says he, as he mournfully shook his head.
“‘Yes,’ I says. ‘Education is responsible for a damned lot of ignorance.’
“‘An’ some foolishness,’ says Sam, as he scraped the mud out of his hair. ‘Think of our goin’ like that. We ought to have known better.’
“‘We knew better,’ I says, ‘but we had to keep up with Lizzie.’
“Sam turned toward Lizzie an’ moaned in a broken voice, ‘I wish it had killed me.’
“‘Why so?’ I asked.
“‘It costs so much to live,’ Sam sobbed, in a half-hysterical way. ‘I’ve got an expensive family on my hands.’
“‘You needn’t be afraid o’ havin’ Lizzie on your hands,’ says Dan, who held the girl in his arms.
“‘What do you mean?’ Sam inquired.
“She’s on my hands an’ she’s goin’ to stay there,’ says the young man. ‘I’m in love with Lizzie myself. I’ve always been in love with Lizzie.’
“‘Your confession is ill-timed,’ says Lizzie, as she pulled away an’ tried to smooth her hair. She began to cry again, an’ added, between sobs: ‘My heart is about broken, and I must go home and get help for my poor father.’
“‘I’ll attend to that,’ says Dan; ‘but I warn you that I’m goin’ to offer a Pettigrew for a Henshaw even. If I had a million dollars I’d give it all to boot.’
“Sam turned toward me, his face red as a beet.
“‘The money!’ he shouted. ‘Get it, quick!’
“‘Here it is!’ I said, as I put the roll o’ bills in his hand.
“‘Did you take it off him?’
“‘I took it off him.’
“‘Poor Aleck!’ he says, mournfully, as he counted the money ‘It’s kind o’ hard on him.’
“Soon we halted a passin’ automobile an’ got Sam up the bank an’ over the wall. It was like movin’ a piano with somebody playin’ on it, but we managed to seat him on the front floor o’ the car, which took us all home.
“So the affair ended without disgrace to any one, if not without violence, and no one knows of the cablegram save the few persons directly concerned. But the price of Alecks took a big slump in Pointview. No han’some foreign gent could marry any one in this village, unless it was a chambermaid in a hotel.
“That was the end of the first heat of the race with Lizzie in Pointview.”
II
THE TIDE TAKES A HAND
B R B
From “The Iron Trail”, copyright, 1913, by Harper & Brothers. By special permission from the publishers.
The ship stole through the darkness with extremest caution, feeling her way past bay and promontory. Around her was none of that phosphorescent glow which lies above the open ocean, even on the darkest night, for the mountains ran down to the channel on either side. In places they overhung, and where they lay upturned against the dim sky it could be seen that they were mantled with heavy timber. All day long the Nebraska had made her way through an endless succession of straits and sounds, now squeezing through an inlet so narrow that the somber spruce trees seemed to be within a short stone’s throw, again plowing across some open reach where the pulse of the north Pacific could be felt. Out through the openings to seaward stretched the restless ocean, on across uncounted leagues, to Saghalien and the rim of Russia’s prison-yard.
Always near at hand was the deep green of the Canadian forests, denser, darker than a tropic jungle, for this was the land of “plenty waters.” The hillsides were carpeted knee-deep with moss, wet to saturation. Out of every gulch came a brawling stream whipped to milk-white frenzy; snow lay heavy upon the higher levels, while now and then from farther inland peered a glacier, like some dead monster crushed between the granite peaks. There were villages, too, and fishing-stations, and mines and quarries. These burst suddenly upon the view, then slipped past with dreamlike swiftness. Other ships swung into sight, rushed by, and were swallowed up in the labyrinthine maze astern.
Those passengers of the Nebraska who had never before traversed the “Inside Passage” were loud in the praises of its
picturesqueness, while those to whom the route was familiar seemed to find an everfresh fascination in its shifting scenes.
Among the latter was Murray O’Neil. The whole north coast from Flattery to St. Elias was as well mapped in his mind as the face of an old friend, yet he was forever discovering new vistas, surprising panoramas, amazing variations of color and topography. The mysterious rifts and passageways that opened and closed as if to lure the ship astray, the trackless confusion of islets, the siren song of the waterfalls, the silent hills and glaciers and snow-soaked forests—all appealed to him strongly, for he was at heart a dreamer.
Yet he did not forget that scenery such as this, lovely as it is by day, may be dangerous at night, for he knew the weakness of steel hulls. On some sides his experience and business training had made him sternly practical and prosaic. Ships aroused no manner of enthusiasm in him except as means to an end. Railroads had no glamour of romance in his eyes, for, having built a number of them, he had outlived all poetic notions regarding the “Iron horse,” and once the rails were laid he was apt to lose interest in them. Nevertheless, he was almost poetic in his own quiet way, interweaving practical thoughts with fanciful visions, and he loved his dreams. He was dreaming now as he leaned upon the bridge rail of the Nebraska, peering into the gloom with watchful eyes. From somewhere to port came the occasional commands of the officer on watch, echoed instantly from the inky interior of the wheelhouse. Up overside rose the whisper of rushing waters; from underfoot came the rhythmic beat of the engines far below. O’Neil shook off his mood and began to wonder idly how long it would be before Captain Johnny would be ready for his “nightcap.”
He always traveled with Johnny Brennan when he could manage it, for the two men were boon companions. O’Neil was wont to live in Johnny’s cabin, or on the bridge, and their nightly libation to friendship had come to be a matter of some ceremony.
The ship’s master soon appeared from the shadows—a short, trim man with gray hair.
“Come,” he cried. “It’s waiting for us.”
O’Neil followed into Brennan’s luxurious, well-lit quarters, where on a mahogany sideboard was a tray holding decanter, siphon, and
glasses, together with a bottle of ginger ale. The captain, after he had mixed a beverage for his passenger, opened the bottle for himself. They raised their glasses silently.
“Now that you’re past the worst of it,” remarked O’Neil, “I suppose you’ll turn in. You’re getting old for a hard run like this, Johnny.”
Captain Brennan snorted. “Old? I’m a better man than you, yet. I’m a teetotaler, that’s why. I discovered long ago that salt water and whiskey don’t mix.”
O’Neil stretched himself out in one of Brennan’s easy chairs. “Really,” he said, “I don’t understand why a ship carries a captain. Now of what earthly use to the line are you, for instance, except for your beauty, which, no doubt, has its value with the women? I’ll admit you preside with some grace at the best table in the diningsalon, but your officers know these channels as well as you do. They could make the run from Seattle to Juneau with their eyes shut.”
“Indeed, they could not; and neither could I.”
“Oh, well, of course I have no respect for you as a man, having seen you without your uniform.”
The captain grinned in thorough enjoyment of this raillery. “I’ll say nothing at all of my seamanship,” he said, relapsing into the faintest of brogues, “but there’s no denying that the master of a ship has many unpleasant and disgusting duties to perform. He has to amuse the prominent passengers who can’t amuse themselves, for one thing, and that takes tact and patience. Why, some people make themselves at home on the bridge, in the chart-room, and even in my living-quarters, to say nothing of consuming my expensive wines, liquors, and cigars.”
“Meaning me?”
“I’m a brutal seafaring man, and you’ll have to make allowances for my well-known brusqueness. Maybe I did mean you. But I’ll say that next to you Curtis Gordon is the worst grafter I ever saw.”
“You don’t like Gordon, do you?” O’Neil queried with a change of tone.
“I do not! He went up with me again this spring, and he had his widow with him, too.”
“His widow?”
“You know who I mean—Mrs. Gerard. They say it’s her money he’s using in his schemes. Perhaps it’s because of her that I don’t like him.”
“Ah-h! I see.”
“You don’t see, or you wouldn’t grin like an ape. I’m a married man, I’ll have you know, and I’m still on good terms with Mrs. Brennan, thank God. But I don’t like men who use women’s money, and that’s just what our friend Gordon is doing. What money the widow didn’t put up he’s grabbed from the schoolma’ams and servant-girls and society matrons in the East. What has he got to show them for it?”
“A railroad project, a copper-mine, some coal claims—”
“Bah! A menagerie of wildcats!”
“You can’t prove that. What’s your reason for distrusting him?”
“Well, for one thing, he knows too much. Why, he knows everything, he does. Art, literature, politics, law, finance, and draw poker have no secrets from him. He’s been everywhere—and back —twice; he speaks a dozen different languages. He out-argued me on poultry-raising and I know more about that than any man living. He can handle a drill or a coach-and-four; he can tell all about the art of ancient Babylon; and he beat me playing cribbage, which shows that he ain’t on the level. He’s the best informed man outside of a university, and he drinks tea of an afternoon—with his legs crossed and the saucer balanced on his heel. Now, it takes years of hard work for an honest man to make a success at one thing, but Gordon never failed at anything. I ask you if a living authority on all the branches of human endeavor and a man who can beat me at ‘crib’ doesn’t make you suspicious.”
“Not at all, I’ve beaten you myself!”
“I was sick,” said Captain Brennan.
“The man is brilliant and well educated and wealthy. It’s only natural that he should excite the jealousy of a weaker intellect.”
Johnny opened his lips for an explosion, then changed his mind and agreed sourly.
“He’s got money, all right, and he knows how to spend it. He and his valet occupied three cabins on this ship. They say his quarters at
Hope are palatial.”
“My dear grampus, the mere love of luxury doesn’t argue that a person is dishonest.”
“Would you let a hired man help you on with your underclothes?” demanded the mariner.
“There’s nothing criminal about it.”
“Humph! Mrs. Gerard is different. She’s all class! You don’t mind her having a maid and speaking French when she runs short of English. Her daughter is like her.”
“I haven’t seen Miss Gerard.”
“If you’d stir about the ship instead of wearing out my Morris chair you’d have that pleasure. She was on deck all morning.” Captain Brennan fell silent and poked with a stubby forefinger at the ice in his glass.
“Well, out with it!” said O’Neil after a moment.
“I’d like to know the inside story of Curtis Gordon and this girl’s mother.”
“Why bother your head about something that doesn’t concern you?” The speaker rose and began to pace the cabin floor, then, in an altered tone, inquired, “Tell me, are you going to land me and my horses at Kyak Bay?”
“That depends on the weather. It’s a rotten harbor; you’ll have to swim them ashore.”
“Suppose it should be rough?”
“Then we’ll go on, and drop you there coming back. I don’t want to be caught on that shore with a southerly wind, and that’s the way it usually blows.”
“I can’t wait,” O’Neil declared. “A week’s delay might ruin me. Rather than go on I’d swim ashore myself, without the horses.”
“I don’t make the weather at Kyak Bay. Satan himself does that. Twenty miles offshore it may be calm, and inside it may be blowing a gale. That’s due to the glaciers. Those ice-fields inland and the warm air from the Japanese Current offshore kick up some funny atmospheric pranks. It’s the worst spot on the coast and we’ll lose a ship there some day. Why, the place isn’t properly charted, let alone buoyed.”
“That’s nothing unusual for this coast.”
“True for you. This is all a graveyard of ships and there’s been many a good master’s license lost because of half-baked laws from Washington. Think of a coast like this with almost no lights, no beacons nor buoys; and yet we’re supposed to make time It’s fine in clear weather, but in the dark we go by guess and by God. I’ve stood the run longer than most of the skippers, but—”
Even as Brennan spoke the Nebraska seemed to halt, to jerk backward under his feet. O’Neil, who was standing, flung out an arm to steady himself; the empty ginger ale bottle fell from the sideboard with a thump. Loose articles hanging against the side walls swung to and fro; the heavy draperies over Captain Johnny’s bed swayed.
Brennan leaped from his chair; his ruddy face was mottled, his eyes were wide and horror-stricken.
“Damnation!” he gasped. The cabin door crashed open ahead of him and he was on the bridge, with O’Neil at his heels. They saw the first officer clinging limply to the rail; from the pilot-house window came an excited burst of Norwegian, then out of the door rushed a quartermaster.
Brennan cursed, and met the fellow with a blow which drove him sprawling back.
“Get in there, Swan,” he bellowed, “and take your wheel.”
“The tide swung her in!” exclaimed the mate. “The tide—My God!”
“Sweet Queen Anne!” said Brennan, more quietly. “You’ve ripped her belly out!”
“It—was the tide,” chattered the officer.
The steady, muffled beating of the machinery ceased, the ship seemed suddenly to lose her life, but it was plain that she was not aground, for she kept moving through the gloom. From down forward came excited voices as the crew poured up out of the forecastle.
Brennan leaped to the telegraph and signaled the engine-room. He was calm now, and his voice was sharp and steady
“Go below, Mr. James, and find the extent of the damage,” he directed, and a moment later the hull began to throb once more to the thrust of the propeller. Inside the wheelhouse Swan had
recovered from his panic and repeated the master’s orders mechanically.
The second and third officers arrived upon the bridge now, dressing as they came, and they were followed by the chief engineer To them Johnny spoke, his words crackling like the sparks from a wireless. In an incredibly short time he had the situation in hand and turned to O’Neil, who had been a silent witness of the scene.
“Glory be!” exclaimed the captain. “Most of our good passengers are asleep; the jar would scarcely wake them.”
“Tell me where and how I can help,” Murray offered. His first thought had been of the possible effect of this catastrophe upon his plans, for time was pressing. As for danger, he had looked upon it so often and in so many forms that it had little power to stir him; but a shipwreck, which would halt his northward rush, was another matter. Whether the ship sank or floated could make little difference, now that the damage had been done. She was crippled and would need assistance. His fellow-passengers, he knew, were safe enough. Fortunately there were not many of them—a scant two hundred, perhaps—and if worse came to worst there was room in the lifeboats for all. But the Nebraska had no watertight bulkheads and the plight of his twenty horses between-decks filled him with alarm and pity. There were no life-boats for those poor dumb animals penned down yonder in the rushing waters.
Brennan had stepped into the chart-room, but returned in a moment to say:
“There’s no place to beach her this side of Halibut Bay.”
“How far is that?”
“Five or six miles.”
“You’ll—have to beach her?”
“I’m afraid so. She feels queer.”
Up from the cabin deck came a handful of men passengers to inquire what had happened; behind them a woman began calling shrilly for her husband.
“We touched a rock,” the skipper explained briefly. “Kindly go below and stop that squawking. There’s no danger.”
There followed a harrowing wait of several minutes; then James, the first officer, came to report. He had regained his nerve and spoke with swift precision.
“She loosened three plates on her port quarter and she’s filling fast.”
“How long will she last?” snapped Brennan.
“Not long, sir. Half an hour, perhaps.”
The captain rang for full speed, and the decks began to strain as the engine increased its labor. “Get your passengers out and stand by the boats,” he ordered. “Take it easy and don’t alarm the women. Have them dress warmly, and don’t allow any crowding by the men. Mr. Tomlinson, you hold the steerage gang in check. Take your revolver with you.” He turned to his silent friend, in whose presence he seemed to feel a cheering sympathy. “I knew it would come sooner or later, Murray,” he said. “But—magnificent mummies! To touch on a clear night with the sea like glass!” He sighed dolefully. “It’ll be tough on my missus.”
O’Neil laid a hand upon his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault, and there will be room in the last boat for you. Understand?” Brennan hesitated, and the other continued, roughly: “No nonsense, now! Don’t make a damned fool of yourself by sticking to the bridge. Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Now what do you want me to do?”
“Keep those dear passengers quiet. I’ll run for Halibut Bay, where there’s a sandy beach. If she won’t make it I’ll turn her into the rocks. Tell ’em they won’t wet a foot if they keep their heads.”
“Good! I’ll be back to see that you behave yourself.” The speaker laughed lightly and descended to the deck, where he found an incipient panic. Stewards were pounding on stateroom doors, halfclad men were rushing about aimlessly, pallid faces peered forth from windows, and there was the sound of running feet, of slamming doors, of shrill, hysterical voices.
O’Neil saw a waiter thumping lustily upon a door and heard him shout, hoarsely:
“Everybody out! The ship is sinking!” As he turned away Murray seized him roughly by the arm and thrusting his face close to the other’s, said harshly:
“If you yell again like that I’ll toss you overboard.”
“God help us, we’re going—”
O’Neil shook the fellow until his teeth rattled; his own countenance, ordinarily so quiet, was blazing.
“There’s no danger. Act like a man and don’t start a stampede.”
The steward pulled himself together and answered in a calmer tone:
“Very well, sir. I—I’m sorry, sir.”
Murray O’Neil was known to most of the passengers, for his name had gone up and down the coast, and there were few places from San Francisco to Nome where his word did not carry weight. As he went among his fellow-travelers now, smiling, self-contained, unruffled, his presence had its effect. Women ceased their shrilling, men stopped their senseless questions and listened to his directions with some comprehension. In a short time the passengers were marshaled upon the upper deck where the life-boats hung between their davits. Each little craft was in charge of its allotted crew, the electric lights continued to burn brightly, and the panic gradually wore itself out. Meanwhile the ship was running a desperate race with the sea, striving with every ounce of steam in her boilers to find a safe berth for her multilated body before the inrush of waters drowned her fires. That the race was close even the dullest understood, for the Nebraska was settling forward, and plowed into the night head down, like a thing maddened with pain. She was becoming unmanageable, too, and O’Neil thought with pity of that little iron-hearted skipper on the bridge who was fighting her furiously. There was little confusion, little talking upon the upper deck now; only a child whimpered or a woman sobbed hysterically. But down forward among the steerage passengers the case was different. These were mainly Montenegrins, Polacks, or Slavs bound for the construction camps to the westward, and they surged from side to side like cattle, requiring Tomlinson’s best efforts to keep them from rushing aft.
O’Neil had employed thousands of such men; in fact, many of these very fellows had cashed his timechecks and knew him by sight. He went forward among them, and his appearance proved instantly reassuring. He found his two hostlers, and with their aid he soon reduced the mob to comparative order.
But in spite of his confident bearing he felt a great uneasiness. The Nebraska seemed upon the point of diving; he judged she must be settling very fast, and wondered that the forward tilt did not lift her propeller out of the water. Fortunately, however, the surface of the sound was like a polished floor and there were no swells to submerge her.
Over-side to starboard he could see the dim black outlines of mountains slipping past, but where lay Halibut Bay or what distance remained to be covered he could but vaguely guess.
In these circumstances the wait became almost unbearable. The race seemed hours long, the miles stretched into leagues, and with every moment of suspense the ship sank lower. The end came unexpectedly. There was a sudden startled outcry as the Nebraska struck for a second time that night. She rose slightly, rolled and bumped, grated briefly, then came to rest.
Captain Brennan shouted from the bridge:
“Fill your life-boats, Mr. James, and lower away carefully.”
A cheer rose from the huddled passengers.
The boiler-room was still dry, it seemed, for the incandescent lights burned without a flicker, even after the grimy oilers and stokers had come pouring up on deck.
O’Neil climbed to the bridge. “Is this Halibut Bay?” he asked Captain Johnny.
“It is. But we’re piled up on the reef outside. She may hold fast—I hope so, for there’s deep water astern, and if she slips off she’ll go down.”
“I’d like to save my horses,” said the younger man, wistfully. Through all the strain of the past half-hour or more his uppermost thought had been for them. But Brennan had no sympathy for such sentiments.
“Hell’s bells!” he exclaimed. “Don’t talk of horses while we’ve got women and children aboard.” He hastened away to assist in transferring his passengers.
Instead of following, O’Neil turned and went below. He found that the water was knee-deep on the port side of the deck where his animals were quartered, which showed that the ship had listed heavily. He judged that she must be much deeper by the head than he had imagined, and that her nose was crushed in among the rocks. Until she settled at the stern, therefore, the case was not quite hopeless.
His appearance, the sound of his voice, were the signals for a chorus of eager whinnies and a great stamping of hoofs. Heads were thrust toward him from the stalls, alert ears were pricked forward, satin muzzles rubbed against him as he calmed their terror. This blind trust made the man’s throat tighten achingly. He loved animals as he loved children, and above all he cared for horses. He understood them, he spoke their language as nearly as any human can be said to do so. Quivering muscles relaxed beneath his soothing palm; he called them by name and they answered with gently twitching lips against his cheek. Some of them even began to eat and switch their tails contentedly.
He cursed aloud and made his way down the sloping deck to the square iron door, or port, through which he had loaded them. But he found that it was jammed, or held fast by the pressure outside, and after a few moments’ work in water above his knees he climbed to the starboard side. Here the entrance was obstructed by a huge pile of baled hay and grain in sacks. It would be no easy task to clear it away, and he fell to work with desperate energy, for the ship was slowly changing her level. Her stern, which had been riding high, was filling; the sea stole in upon him silently. It crept up toward him until the horses, stabled on the lower side, were belly-deep in it. Their distress communicated itself to the others. O’Neil knew that his position might prove perilous if the hulk should slip backward off the reef, yet he continued to toil, hurling heavy sacks behind him, bundling awkward bales out of the way, until his hands were bleeding and his muscles ached. He was perspiring furiously; the commotion around him was horrible. Then abruptly the lights went
out, leaving him in utter blackness; the last fading yellow gleam was photographed briefly upon his retina.
Tears mingled with the sweat that drained down his cheeks as he felt his way slowly out of the place, splashing, stumbling, groping uncertainly. A horse screamed in a loud, horribly human note, and he shuddered. He was sobbing curses as he emerged into the cool open air on the forward deck.
His eyes were accustomed to the darkness now, and he could see something of his surroundings. He noted numerous lights out on the placid bosom of the bay, evidently lanterns on the life-boats, and he heard distant voices. He swept the moisture from his face; then with a start he realized his situation. He listened intently; his eyes roved back along the boatdeck; there was no doubt about it—the ship was deserted. Stepping to the rail, he observed how low the Nebraska lay and also that her bow was higher than her stern. From somewhere beneath his feet came a muffled grinding and a movement which told him that the ship was seeking a more comfortable berth. He recalled stories of explosions and of the boiling eddies which sometimes accompany sinking hulls. Turning, he scrambled up to the cabindeck and ran swiftly toward his stateroom.
II
O’Neil felt for the little bracket-lamp on the wall of his stateroom and lit it. By its light he dragged a life-preserver from the rack overhead and slipped the tapes about his shoulders, reflecting that Alaskan waters are disagreeably cold. Then he opened his travelingbags and dumped their contents upon the white counterpane of his berth, selecting out of the confusion certain documents and trinkets. The latter he thrust into his pockets as he found them, the former he wrapped in handkerchiefs before stowing them away. The ship had listed now so that it was difficult to maintain a footing; the lamp hung at a grotesque angle and certain articles had become dislodged from their resting places. From outside came the gentle lapping of waters, a gurgling and hissing as of air escaping through the decks. He could feel the ship strain. He acknowledged that it was not pleasant
thus to be left alone on a sinking hulk, particularly on an ink-black night—
All at once he whirled and faced the door with an exclamation of astonishment, for a voice had addressed him.
There, clinging to the casing, stood a woman—a girl—evidently drawn out of the darkness by the light which streamed down across the sloping deck from his stateroom. Plainly she had but just awakened, for she was clothed in a silken nightrobe. She had flung a quilted dressing-gown of some sort over her shoulders and with one bare arm and hand strove to hold it in place. He saw that her pink feet were thrust into soft, heelless slippers—that her hair, black in this light, cascaded down to her waist, and that her eyes, which were very dark and very large, were fixed upon him with a stare like that of a sleep-walker.
“It is so dark—so strange—so still!” she murmured. “What has happened?”
“God! Didn’t they waken you?” he cried in sharp surprise.
“Is the ship—sinking?” Her odd bewilderment of voice and gaze puzzled him.
He nodded. “We struck a rock. The passengers have been taken off. We’re the only ones left. In Heaven’s name where have you been?”
“I was asleep.”
He shook his head in astonishment. “How you failed to hear that hubbub—”
“I heard something, but I was ill. My head—I took something to ease the pain.”
“Ah! Medicine! It hasn’t worn off yet, I see! You shouldn’t have taken it. Drugs are nothing but poison to young people. Now at my age there might be some excuse for resorting to them, but you—” He was talking to cover the panic of his thoughts, for his own predicament had been serious enough, and her presence rendered it doubly embarrassing. What in the world to do with her he scarcely knew. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were grave as they roved over the cabin and out into the blackness of the night.
“Are we going to drown?” she asked, dully.
“Nonsense!” He laughed in apparent amusement, showing his large strong teeth.
She came closer, glancing behind her and shrinking from the oily waters which could be seen over the rail and which had stolen up nearly to the sill of the door She steadied herself by laying hold of him uncertainly. Involuntarily he turned his eyes away, for he felt shame at profaning her with his gaze. She was very soft and white, a fragile thing utterly unfit to cope with the night air and the freezing waters of Halibut Bay.
“I’m wretchedly afraid!” she whispered through white lips.
“None of that,” he said, brusquely. “I’ll see that nothing happens to you.” He slipped out of his life-preserver and adjusted it over her shoulders, first drawing her arms through the sleeves of her dressing-gown and knotting the cord snugly around her waist.
“Just as a matter of precaution!” he assured her.
“We may get wet. Can you swim?”
She shook her head.
“Never mind; I can.” He found another life-belt, fitted it to his own form, and led her out upon the deck. The scuppers were awash now and she gasped as the sea licked her bare feet. “Cold, isn’t it?” he remarked. “But there’s no time to dress, and it’s just as well, perhaps, for heavy clothes would only hamper you.”
She strove to avoid the icy waters and finally paused, moaning: “I can’t! I can’t go on!”
Slipping his arm about her, he bore her to the door of the main cabin and entered. He could feel her warm, soft body quivering against his own. She had clasped his neck so tightly that he could scarcely breathe, but, lowering her until her feet were on the dry carpet, he gently loosed her arms.
“Now, my dear child,” he told her, “you must do exactly as I tell you. Come! Calm yourself or I won’t take you any farther.” He held her off by her shoulders. “I may have to swim with you; you mustn’t cling to me so!”
He heard her gasp and felt her draw away abruptly. Then he led her by the hand out upon the starboard deck, and together they made their way forward to the neighborhood of the bridge.
The lights he had seen upon coming from the forward hold were still in view and he hailed them at the top of his voice. But other voices were calling through the night, some of them comparatively close at hand, others answering faintly from far in-shore. The boats first launched were evidently landing, and those in charge of them were shouting directions to the ones behind. Some women had started singing and the chorus floated out to the man and the girl:
Pull for the shore, sailor, Pull for the shore.
It helped to drown their cries for assistance.
O’Neil judged that the ship was at least a quarter of a mile from the beach, and his heart sank, for he doubted that either he or his companion could last long in these waters. It occurred to him that Brennan might be close by, waiting for the Nebraska to sink—it would be unlike the little captain to forsake his trust until the last possible moment—but he reasoned that the cargo of lives in the skipper’s boat would induce him to stand well off to avoid accident. He called lustily time after time, but no answer came.
Meanwhile the girl stood quietly beside him.
“Can’t we make a raft?” she suggested, timidly, when he ceased to shout. “I’ve read of such things.”
“There’s no time,” he told her. “Are you very cold?”
She nodded. “Please forgive me for acting so badly just now. It was all so sudden and—so awful! I think I can behave better. Oh! What was that?” She clutched him nervously, for from the forward end of the ship had come a muffled scream, like that of a woman.
“It’s my poor horses,” said the man, and she looked at him curiously, prompted by the catch in his throat.
There followed a wait which seemed long, but was in reality of but a few minutes, for the ship was sliding backward and the sea was creeping upward faster and faster. At last they heard a shuddering sigh as she parted from the rocks and the air rushed up through the deck openings with greater force. The Nebraska swung sluggishly with the tide; then, when her upper structure had settled flush with
the sea, Murray O’Neil took the woman in his arms and leaped clear of the rail.
The first gasping moment of immersion was fairly paralyzing; after that the reaction came, and the two began to struggle away from the sinking ship. But the effect of the reaction soon wore off. The water was cruelly cold and their bodies ached in every nerve and fiber. O’Neil did his best to encourage his companion. He talked to her through his chattering teeth, and once she had recovered from the mental shock of the first fearful plunge she responded pluckily. He knew that his own heart was normal and strong, but he feared that the girl’s might not be equal to the strain. Had he been alone, he felt sure that he could have gained the shore, but with her upon his hands he was able to make but little headway. The expanse of waters seemed immense; it fairly crushed hope out of him. The lights upon the shore were as distant as fixed stars. This was a country of heavy tides, he reflected, and he began to fear that the current was sweeping them out. He turned to look for the ship, but could see no traces of her, and since it was inconceivable that the Nebraska could have sunk so quietly, her disappearance confirmed his fears. More than once he fancied he heard an answer to his cries for help—the rattle of rowlocks or the splash of oars—but his ears proved unreliable.
After a time the girl began to moan with pain and terror, but as numbness gradually robbed her of sensation she became quiet. A little later her grip upon his clothing relaxed and he saw that she was collapsing. He drew her to him and held her so that her face lay upturned and her hair floated about his shoulders. In this position she could not drown, at least while his strength lasted. But he was rapidly losing control of himself; his teeth were clicking loosely, his muscles shook and twitched. It required a great effort to shout, and he thought that his voice did not carry so far as at first. Therefore he fell silent, paddling with his free arm and kicking, to keep his blood stirring.
Several times he gave up and floated quietly, but courage was ingrained in him; deep down beneath his consciousness was a vitality, an inherited stubborn resistance to death, of which he knew nothing. It was that unidentified quality of mind which supports one
man through a great sickness or a long period of privation, while another of more robust physique succumbs. It was the same quality which brings one man out from desert wastes, or the white silence of the polar ice, while the bodies of his fellows remain to mark the trail. This innate power of supreme resistance is found in chosen individuals throughout the animal kingdom, and it was due to it alone that Murray O’Neil continued to fight the tide long after he had ceased to exert conscious control.
At length there came through the man’s dazed sensibilities a sound different from those he had been hearing: it was a human voice, mingled with the measured thud of oars in their sockets. It roused him like an electric current and gave him strength to cry out hoarsely. Some one answered him; then out of the darkness to seaward emerged a deeper blot, which loomed up hugely yet proved to be no more than a life-boat banked full of people. It came to a stop within an oar’s-length of him. From the babble of voices he distinguished one that was familiar, and cried the name of Johnny Brennan. His brain had cleared now, a great dreamlike sense of thanksgiving warmed him, and he felt equal to any effort. He was vaguely amazed to find that his limbs refused to obey him.
His own name was being pronounced in shocked tones; the splash from an oar filled his face and strangled him, but he managed to lay hold of the blade, and was drawn in until outstretched hands seized him.
An oarsman was saying: “Be careful, there! We can’t take him in without swamping.”
But Brennan’s voice shouted: “Make room or I’ll bash in your bloody skull.”
Another protest arose, and O’Neil saw that the craft was indeed loaded to the gunwales.
“Take the girl—quick,” he implored. “I’ll hang on. You can tow me.”
The limp form was removed from his side and dragged over the thwarts while a murmur of excited voices went up.
“Can you hold out for a minute, Murray?” asked Brennan. “Yes—I think so.”
