Papers written by Curzon on the Near and Middle East [‎157v] (314/348)

which M. Gcmnaris had given me of the unfavourable military position in which the
Greek army then stood. It would have been singularly ungracious to answer such a
note with any harsh and unsympathetic language. But the purport of my answer was
in no sense equivocal, in that it informed the Greek government, as, indeed, I had
personally informed M. Gounaris four months earlier, that the moment had arrived
when they must submit to the diplomatic mediation of the Powers rather than invite
further military disaster. No one should be better aware of this than M. Poincare
himself, since on my return in January 1922 from Cannes, where I had arranged loi an
almost immediate conference at Paris in order to press Allied mediation equally upon
Turkey and Greece, with the view of securing the prompt but peaceful retirement ot
the Greek armies from Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. , I had the pleasure of seeing M. Poincare, who had
just become President du Conseil, and of concerting with him an early meeting of the
proposed conference—a meeting which was in fact only delayed till the latter part ol
March owing to the retirement of the Italian Premier, Signor Bonomi, who was to have
represented Italy, at it. The suggestion therefore, which is directly made in
M. Poincare’s note that the adventurous policy of Greece received support irom me, is
not only contradicted by the known facts of the case, but is wholly without
justification.
6 . The essential importance of M. Poincare’s note lies, however, not so much in
the recriminations which he has chosen to address to His Majesty’s government in
respect of the past, as in the warning which he utters regarding the future. His
language appears to admit of no other interpretation than one which implies a formal
repudiation by France of the pact of September 1914. It is difficult to follow the
reasoning by which he arrives at the conclusion that this pact no longer applies.
7. The stipulations contained in the agreement of the hth September, 1914, were
absolutely precise; and it is to be noted that they were textually re-affirmed,
subsequently to the entry of Turkey into the war—at the time when Italy had joined
the allies—by the Declaration of the 20th November, 1915. By these stipulations, the
allied governments mutually engaged “ not to conclude peace -separately during the
present war,” and agreed “ that when terms of peace come to be discussed, no one of
the allies will demand conditions of peace without the previous agreement of each of
the other allies.”
K. There is no question here of a “ period necessary for the negotiation of peace,”
which M. Poincare now categorically announces, on his own authority, to have
terminated—“ Ce temps est passe.” How “the present war,” which, according to the
agreement, is the period during which no separate peace is to be made, can be declared
to have ended before peace has in fact been concluded, is not understood. At none of
the numerous allied conferences at Paris between the representatives of France, Great
Britain and Italy, which I have had the honour to attend in the time both of
M. Poincare and his predecessors, has it ever been suggested that the war with Turkey
was over, or that the period necessary for the negotiation of peace had passed. On the
contrary, every one of those conferences was directed to bringing the unterminated
war to a termination and to adapt the allied conditions of peace to the altered
circumstances of the hour. Why were the three great allies thus continually and
earnestly collaborating, except upon the assumption that peace could only be concluded
by them in common ? If all the while the fatal hour was approaching when collective
responsibility was to cease and individual initiative was to take its place, why was no
hint of the impending revulsion ever given ? It cannot, surely, be argued that the
words “the present war,” in the Declaration of 1915, do not cover the war between
the allies and Turkey, and that we are now dealing only with what M. Poincare terms
the separate w r ar (“ guerre particuliere ”) between Greeks and Turks. No doubt the
treaty which the allies have been endeavouring to conclude at Lausanne was to put an
end to the war between Greece and Turke} 7 . But much more was it intended to
establish peace between Turkey and the allies and to substitute for the unratified
treaty of Sevres an instrument which should definitely terminate the state of hostility
still existing between the Turkish State and the Powers who declared war against
Turkey in 1914. How then can it be maintained that the Declaration of 1915 does
not preclude France from entering into a separate peace with Turkey ?
9. Furthermore, to revert to the explicit proviso that when terms of peace come
to be discussed, no one of the allies will demand conditions of peace without the
previous agreement of each of the other allies : when M. Poincare now says that the
time necessary for the peace negotiations has passed, it is not understood how this
position can possibly be sustained. Has not M. Poincare himself insisted with great
force, in another note, to which I have already had the honour to reply—in my despatch