Papers of the War Cabinet's Eastern Committee [‎256v] (512/544)

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view has any military or naval force at all, but I should very much like to hear what
the soldiers say about that.
GENERAL THWAITES : The question of the use of howitzers has been very
freely demonstrated in this war. You can use a howitzer in exactly the same way as
you can use a gun. You can put it behind a wall. But in every case of the use of
artillery you must be able to see from some point of view or other the object that you
are going to hre at. Therefore, you must have a position of observation; and although
you may be able to put your howitzers well back, you must have positions from which
your artillery officers must be able to see the object. The persons controlling the fire
wdl have to be sitting somewhere very close to the waterway to be able to see the
ships.
MR. BALFOUR: They will. I suppose that there is nothing difficult in that,
is there ?
GENERAL TH WAITES : You must have all the usual communications.
LORD ROBERT CECIL : If you are going to have batteries put back for the
defence of this waterway, you will probably have installed telephone arrangements
and all these things beforehand.
LORD CURZON : Would not that point be met by some arrangement by which,
the forts being knocked down and the Straits internationalised, the Turks, whether
they were on the northern shore or the southern shore or on both, would have to
submit to certain conditions as regards a zone of territory, say five, six, seven, or eight
miles from the sea on both sides, which would be liable to examination, and so on ?
LORD ROBERT CECIL : You would have to have some kind of international
force to watch this.
MR. BALFOUR: Yes, on both sides of the Sea of Marmora and both sides
of Gallipoli, and both sides of the Straits. I think that it has been marked out.
LORD CURZON : Yes, on one of the maps.
SIR EYRE CROWE : There is a suggestion that the Turks should be asked to
have no armed force.
GENERAL MACDONOGH : Just before coming over here I had a talk with
General Milne, who is over here on leave. He had not seen any of the papers at
all; but he told me that he thought that the very worst possible solution of the
problems would be to establish any kind of international condominium in Constantinople.
He said th^t the intrigue that that would give rise to would be absolutely appalling.
He said that he considered that the next worst solution would be to hand over the
place to the Greeks. He said that he had seen a great deal of the Greeks during
the three-and-a-half years he had been in Salonica, and they were absolutely rotten,
and the Government was worse even than that of Turkey. He considered that the
second worse way of dealing with the matter. The way which he would prefer
himself would have been if Great Britain could have been given a mandate to rule
Constantinople for the Turk. I told him that we could not paint the whole map red,
and therefore that must be ruled out. His opinion was much the same as Lord
Robert Cecil’s, that if you could not get America to go there as a mandatory Power
the best solution would be to keep the Turk there at present.
SIR LOUIS MALLET : The solution I would like would be to turn the Turk
out; but 1 see great difficulty about it.
LORD CURZON : What does Sir Eyre Crowe say about it?
SIR EYRE CROWE : I take the point of my memorandum that there was a
general agreement that the American solution was the best; but failing the American
solution, internationalisation of some sort is inevitable.
The Admiralty has referred to the analogy of the Danube Commission, which I have
myself also quoted. Admiral Hope will probably know that the fact that Galatz is a
Roumanian town has very much hampered the work of the Commission. It is one of
the difficulties with which they have to deal that the seat of their activities is a foreign
town. From that point of view any Commission which would be established would
function better if the town was under their own control. I therefore would borrow the
analogy of the Panamd Canal. The Americans control Panamd,, and the Americans