Papers of the War Cabinet's Eastern Committee [‎253v] (506/544)

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There is the last suggestion of all, which is strongly favoured by the War Office in
their paper, and which also, 1 gather, is the view of the Government of India, and that
is to leave the Turk alone, internationalise the Straits, knock down the forts,
leave the Sultan, leave the Seraglio, leave the Sublime Porte, leave all the venerable
relics of the last five hundred years in Constantinople, deprive him of all real military
power, and assume that, chastened by disaster and incapacitated by weakness, he will
be a relatively respectable man in the future. That is a solution which the W ar
Office recommend, and which, on grounds partly political and partly sentimental, a
good many others favour. I confess that I am entirely against it. I do not believe in
the regeneration of the Turk under any circumstances whatsoever. I think that once
you leave the Turk in Europe as a governing force he will go on doing exactly the same
as before. There will be a revival of the old intrigues, and he will presently begin his
old game again of trying to set the Powers at loggerheads with each other and profiting
by their squabbles.
Therefore, so far as I am competent to give an opinion, I am in favour of the clean
cut; but in what I have said I have been more concerned w ith trying to do justice to
the various views put forward than I have been to urge any individual opinions of
my own.
MR. MONTAGU : I feel very strong dissent from your conclusion, and therefore
perhaps you would not mind me, in a few words, stating the reasons of that dissent,
because it seems to me that before we discuss who shall be the mandatory Power there,
the first thing to decide is whether the Committee agrees with your very powerful
argument for turning the Turk out, bag and baggage, or could be induced to agree
with the argument I am going to put forward. The view of the military authorities
and of the Admiralty is that the Turk should be left where he is. I would point out
you did not seem enamoured of any of the resultant plans with which you dealt on the
exclusion of the Turk. You “ hypothetically ” eliminated him, and the greater Powers
and the smaller Powers, and you were then left either with a condominium, which you
disliked, or with the United States, which the Admiralty dislikes, and which in our
discussions at the Cabinet it was very clear that some of our colleagues very much
disliked. I would suggest that, if there was no better reason, the fact that you cannot
find a Power that you really like to replace the Turk would lead one to hesitate to
remove the Turk in order to embark upon a scheme which may not be any more
satisfactory than the Turk himself. I assume that we are all agreed on the inter
nationalisation and the neutralisation of the Straits and Marmora. What are the
reasons that you allege most str ongly for removing the Turk ? First of all you said
that it was not the homeland of the Turk, and that the Prime Minister had been
historically inaccurate in using that phrase. I think that it is the homeland of the
Turk. The fact that he has only gone there to live of comparatively recent years does
not prevent its being Iris home. You would be depriving the Turk of that country
which is now his main home and of his capital at a time when you are depriving him
of very large portions of his territory in Asia.
Is it not fair to state that many of the abuses, due to the existence of the Turk in
Constantinople, are due to his control over the Straits, and to his rule of such countries
as Armenia, which you are going to deprive him of? Is it not possible that Turkish
rule in Constantinople would be much less intolerable when these great powers were
removed from him ?
I look at this much more from the point of view of the Indian Mahommedan. I
would like to say a few words in amplification of what Sir Hamilton Grant has written
on that subject. Do let us remember that, whether you could have conquered the
Turk without the Indian Mahommedan or not, it was the Indian Mahommedan that
conquered him. It is open to argument (it certainly has been argued in some of the
more scurrilous Indian newspapers) that you failed to conquer the Turk when you did
not use any large number of Indian troops, but that you did conquer him when Indian
troops took up the burden of the work in Mesopotamia and in Palestine.
LORD CURZON : You say that we conquered him by the aid of the Mahommedan
troops. Is that borne out by the figures ? If you take the Indian forces fighting the
Turk in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and elsewhere, do you mean to tell me that the larger
proportion were Mahommedans ?
MH. MONTAGU : The best of them would be Punjab Mahommedans. With the
Indian Mahommedan the Turk was conquered. The best province for recruiting
purposes during the war was the Punjab, which is wholly Mahommedan.