CHAPTER XXXIII
On 18 January 1919–two months and one week after the armistice–the Paris Peace Conference held its opening session. It was, rather surprisingly, a Saturday, but that was the date insisted upon, with a fine sense of irony, by the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, as being the forty-eighth anniversary of the coronation of Wilhelm I as Kaiser of Germany. The primary task facing the delegates was to forge a new Europe; and so, after a fashion, they did. Their success can be measured by the fact that exactly twenty years later their new Europe began–just like the old one–to tear itself to shreds.
Where the Mediterranean was concerned, the countries lining its southern shore were still under foreign control: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia looked to France, Libya to Italy, Egypt to Britain (which had proclaimed a protectorate in December 1914). All those along the northern–with the single exception of Spain, which had somehow succeeded in preserving its neutrality–had been to some degree involved in the hostilities; all had seen fighting on their soil; and all those that had ended on the winning side hoped that the Conference would provide them with substantial benefits of one kind or another in or on the Middle Sea. These hopes all centred on a single fact: the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. France–which had lost a quarter of her male population between the ages of eighteen and thirty, with twice as many again wounded–was naturally concerned above all else with Germany, but she was also keeping a covetous eye on Syria and Lebanon, on which she had long had political designs. Italy, delighted as she was by the demise of her old enemy Austria–Hungary, was always anxious about what went on across the Adriatic, and was distinctly worried by the prospect of a unified state of the southern Slavs–comprising Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia– Herzegovina and northeastern Macedonia–which seemed likely to replace the Sultan’s Balkan dominions. How much better it would be if she could emerge from the Conference with the land ‘from Trento to Trieste’, the Dalmatian coast as far as Albania and finally the islands of the Dodecanese, with–just possibly–a little of the Anatolian mainland thrown in.
Greece, as we saw in the last chapter, was already in a state of extreme exuberance when the war ended, but Venizelos’s ambitions were perhaps higher than those of any other statesman present in Paris. His mind was set, as it had been throughout his life, on the Great Idea: Byzantium revived, with a Greek Asia Minor, St Sophia returned to the Orthodox faith and a Greek basileus once more on the throne in Constantinople. Of course he could not voice such demands in so many words at the Conference; all he asked for was northern Epirus, Thrace, a few islands and a vast tract of Asia Minor from the Sea of Marmara to Smyrna (Izmir). He did not include Constantinople (although, as he laughingly suggested to his friends, once the Turks were dispossessed of it the city would inevitably fall into Greek hands sooner or later). Inside and outside the plenary sessions, Venizelos impressed everyone he met. The sheer impact of his personality made him one of the most dazzling stars of the Conference, and his conversation did the rest. Western Europe had never seen–or heard–anything like him. The young diplomat Harold Nicolson described him in wonderment as ‘a strange medley of charm, brigandage, weltpolitik, patriotism, courage, literature…above all this large muscular smiling man, with his eyes glinting through spectacles, and on his head a square skull-cap of black silk’.
Great Britain for her part could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as a Mediterranean country. She possessed, however, the three still vitally important bases of Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus, and her part ownership of the Suez Canal had, as we have seen, long given her an intense interest in Egypt and the Levant. Thus, since she had already got a good deal of what she wanted–the German navy and merchant marine now safely in her hands, the German colonies in Africa surrendered, the collapse of Russia spelling the end of that threat to northern India and what was known as the Great Game–she could now afford to concentrate her energies on the eastern Mediterranean. At its northeast corner, she was anxious to prevent hostile warships passing through the straits to and from the Black Sea. She was also increasingly concerned about her allies, the French. The two countries had stuck together throughout the war, but the peace would bring new stresses and strains–not the least of which would be caused by the need to safeguard the increasingly important oil supplies from Mosul in northern Iraq and from Persia. As early as 1916 Sir Mark Sykes and M. Georges Picot had secretly agreed that when the time came to slice up the Sultan’s Levantine dominions France would take Syria, the Lebanon and a good deal of southern Anatolia while Britain would acquire, along with most of modern Iraq, the Mediterranean ports of Acre and Haifa. Outside these two ports an area corresponding roughly to the present state of Israel would–thanks to its special, delicate status as the Holy Land–be reserved for a special international regime of its own. Already, however, it was clear that the partitioning was not going to be so easy, and Allenby’s recent entry into Jerusalem had done little to reassure Catholic France. In short, the two major European powers in the Middle East did not trust each other an inch–and both were perfectly right not to do so.
On the other hand, they had both made the same mistake: they had reckoned without the Arabs. The arrival at the Conference of the Emir Feisal, proudly introduced by Lawrence (also in full Arab dress), soon changed all that. Feisal was a Hashemite, a member of the noblest of all Arab families, since it traced its descent in the male line back to the daughter of the Prophet. In 1915 Feisal’s father, the Sherif of Mecca, had been promised by the High Commissioner for Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, that if the Arabs were to rise up against the Turks they would be given all assistance by the British and, after the war, gain their independence.283 With the help of Lawrence–who had repeated these promises, though on no authority but his own–Feisal had performed his part of the bargain; he had now come to Paris to claim his reward.
He got it, in a way. In that same year Allenby installed him as head of a military administration in Damascus. The French assumed responsibility for the coast, with Beirut as their centre, while the British took over Palestine. But these proved to be only interim measures. In March 1920 a Syrian Congress met in Damascus and proclaimed Feisal king of a united Syria, including Palestine; only a month later, however, the Allied Conference of San Remo decided that both should be put under a new mandate system, with France taking on the mandate for Syria. The French began as they meant to continue. In June they issued an ultimatum demanding Syrian recognition of their new authority, after which they marched in and expelled Feisal; finally, in July 1922, the League of Nations approved the mandate for Syria and Lebanon, which had declared itself a separate state. Feisal had meanwhile been made King of Iraq, while his older brother Abdullah assumed the crown of Transjordan–since 1949 known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Jordan and Iraq are no concern of ours; Palestine, however, is. The last visitor to the Peace Conference who deserves special mention here is Dr Chaim Weizmann–shortly to be appointed president of the World Zionist Organisation. Weizmann, who had already been largely responsible for the Balfour Declaration, addressed the Supreme Council on 27 February with an energetic appeal for the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. As an observer, he was also present at the San Remo conference which confirmed the Declaration and awarded the Palestine mandate to Great Britain. Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, his negotiating skills were to be severely tested as Britain–confronted by increasing civil disorder resulting from nascent Arab nationalism–lost her early enthusiasm for Zionism and tried to retreat from her commitments. But he won through in the end, and lived to become, in 1948, the first President of the state of Israel.
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and the Treaty of Versailles which followed it, marked the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. In 1914 five great empires were centred on European capitals. Five years later three–the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian–were gone, and one–the Ottoman–was on its deathbed. Only the last–the British–survived. The world, henceforth, was to be a very different place.
And so our story is told–so far, at least, as this book is concerned. Obviously, the history of the Middle Sea will never be over until that sea itself runs dry; but whereas an account of a specific period can be rounded to an elegant close, one which takes as its subject merely a given region of the world can be brought only to an arbitrary termination, and this particular example of the latter genre is more than long enough already. With every day that passes, life becomes more eventful. History not only becomes longer; it moves at a faster pace. In the early chapters of this book, a century could be covered in a page or two; towards the end of it, an entire chapter may barely accommodate a decade. To have continued through the Second World War and its consequences to the end of the second millennium would probably have resulted in a volume at least twice as long as this, and would have constituted a penance for author and reader alike.
Some six or seven thousand years ago the Mediterranean gave birth to Western civilisation as we know it. Its relatively small size, its confined shape, the gentleness of its climate, the blessed fertility and the manifold indentations of its European and Asiatic shores, all combined to provide a uniquely protective environment in which its various peoples could develop and flourish. Even the light played its part, giving those peoples a clarity of outlook unmatched in less favoured regions. In gods they believed, as no less than three great religions attest, but in the sunlit Mediterranean world there was no place for the ghosts and the giants, the goblins and the trolls, that feature so prominently in the folklore of the misty and lugubrious north. For all this, and much else besides, we owe an immense and incalculable debt. One important question, however, remains to be answered: now that the contribution has been made, how important still is the contributor? Does the Middle Sea of today retain the significance that it enjoyed when the world was young?
Alas, the answer must be no. When the world was young it was limitless; now it has shrunk pitiably, and the Mediterranean has shrunk with it. Today it is easier to fight a war in Iraq or even Korea than it was a century ago to transport an army from England to Italy or Spain. The flight from Gibraltar to Istanbul takes little more than three hours. Trade routes no longer exist. Transport ships and tankers continue to ply to and from the pipeline terminals of the Middle East, but the sea itself is rapidly being taken over by a new and terrible phenomenon: the monster cruise ship, prowling ceaselessly from port to port, from island to island, vomiting out on to each more people than many of them would in former days have seen in a lifetime.
At the start of the third millennium, therefore, it is becoming increasingly clear that its old raison d’être is lost for ever, and that the prime purpose of today’s Mediterranean is pleasure. This is not, perhaps, in every respect a bad thing; it could be argued that waters which were in the past all too often stained with blood are a good deal better off under a thin film of ambre solaire. One tends to forget, too, the miseries of former days at sea–days when the backs of galley slaves bled under the lash, when ships were stricken by plague and obliged to remain offshore until no man on board was left alive, when a sudden summer storm could be tantamount to a death-warrant for an entire crew. What is sad is the loss of dignity: that the world’s most historic body of water should be so taken for granted, so polluted; that many of its shores should be so littered with old plastic as to be practically unvisitable; and that many others are maintained only through the efforts of thousands of sweepers, working all day to keep them clean.
Here, perhaps, is yet another reason for this book to end where it does. It has chronicled many disasters, and not a few tragedies. It has considered the Middle Sea by turns as a cradle and a grave, a bond and a barrier, a blessing and a battlefield. How sad to watch it decline into a playground, as the old harbours are converted into yacht marinas and the triremes are replaced by jet-skis. How much better to draw the curtain while it was still essentially the Mediterranean it had always been, of which every wave told a story, and every drop was noble.