The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made. Simon Ball

story,’ he was fond of saying.³⁸ The Greek government did nevertheless expect to profit from its titular alliance with the victorious powers at the expense of the Turks. As part of the Versailles process, the Allies had forced the Ottoman government to cede territory to the Greeks under the terms of the treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920. By that time the Sultan’s government was little more than a cipher. The Turkish war hero Mustapha Kemal had set up in Ankara a rival regime committed to the indivisibility of Anatolia and eastern Turkey. In March 1920, Britain, France and Italy had responded by occupying Constantinople. The High Commission that Crookshank joined thus had, as well as its diplomatic duties, executive responsibility for the administration of the city. The British were, however, in a precarious position. In March 1921 the Greek army attacked the Kemalists and were soundly beaten. Britain’s French and Italian allies, to say nothing of the Russian Bolsheviks, were keen to cut a deal with the martial nationalists.

      When Crookshank arrived, Constantinople was in turmoil. The two most important Britons in the city, charged with navigating through the crisis, were his boss, the High Commissioner, Sir Horace Rumbold, and the commander of British troops, General Tim Harington. As late as March 1921 Crookshank had been continuing his efforts to leave the Foreign Office for the Grenadier Guards.³⁹ Constantinople confirmed his view about the relative merits of soldiers and diplomats. ‘Tim Harington…is quite excellent and a tower of strength whereas Horace is only a mountain of flesh.’ He consistently found himself agreeing with Harington’s HQ rather than his own High Commission. He came to believe that Rumbold was a buffoon and that his number two, Nevile Henderson, was a snake. The diplomats did not compare well with the army officers in Turkey, such as ‘Alex’ Alexander, who had been part of Oliver Lyttelton’s party at the Somme and was now commanding a battalion of Irish Guards. Crookshank laid three main charges at Rumbold’s door. First, he seemed more interested in going on leave than doing his job; secondly, he was unnecessarily anti-French; and thirdly he was a yes-man who told London only what it wanted to hear. In Crookshank’s view he was entirely culpable when the Chanak crisis broke around the High Commission’s heads in September 1922.

      It was certainly true that Rumbold liked his leave. In May 1921, when the capital was rife with rumours of a nationalist attack, he asked the Foreign Office for two months off. Even Rumbold was aware that his superiors would find it rather odd that he wanted to leave his post at such a critical juncture. He pleaded sleeplessness, high blood pressure and general tiredness and argued, ‘I should work better after I had a bit of a rest.’ In the summer of 1922 he was at it again. He knew a crisis was brewing and agreed to take a holiday on the Turkish coast so that he could immediately return to the capital, but in the end he could not resist leaving for London. In his absence the Greeks threatened to attack Constantinople and had to be faced down by Harington and Henderson. Rumbold only arrived back for the denouement of the crisis at the end of July 1922. Having returned, however, he then impressed everyone with his sang-froid. ‘Horace groans and wishes he had stopped for a week in Switzerland!’ his wife wrote. ‘He remains most annoyingly calm! I believe if the last trump sounded he would gaze unperturbed through his eye glass and wish there were not so many damned foreigners about.’⁴⁰ Even Crookshank had to concede that it was an impressive display. ‘ “Horatio” returned with great gusto on the very day that the excitement was boiling up about the proposed Greek advance on Constantinople,’ he wrote in an account to his friend Paul Evans, ‘when asked to call a special meeting at once on arrival his only remark was that he must have lunch and a bath first.’⁴¹

      Rumbold did engage in constant disputes with the French. He distrusted his French opposite number, General Pellé, profoundly and considered, rightly, that he would always conspire with the Kemalists behind his back whenever the opportunity arose. The French were in his words ‘dreadful Allies’ and might well force Britain to ‘have to eat dirt to an unlimited extent’. They were ‘always “playing the dirty” on us’. Henderson seconded his chief’s views in spades: the French were ‘cads and apes’, ‘in the grip of the international financier or Jew who cares for French financial interests and nothing else’.⁴² When Rumbold returned from leave, he clashed with Harington over the latter’s attempt to cooperate with the French in taking a more hostile line to the Greeks and recognizing that the Ankara regime formed the true government of Turkey. On 8 August 1922 he vetoed plans to act against Greek shipping, deprecating ‘the interesting spectacle of Pellé…slobbering over Harington, telling him what a fine fellow he was’. Rumbold was very aware that Lloyd George had publicly expressed pro-Greek views. Although intellectually he acknowledged that it was ‘useless to regard Mustapha Kemal any longer as a brigand chief’, and that the treaty of Sèvres was a dead letter, he could not rid himself of a visceral dislike of the Turks. ‘I have never dealt with people who have so little political sagacity,’ he noted, and did not mind ‘confessing privately that I should be rather glad to see the Greeks give the Nationalists one big knock before hostilities come to an end’.⁴³ Once more his boss’s echo, Henderson, called the Turks ‘misguided barbarians’.⁴⁴

      Any hopes that Rumbold may have had of a stalemate in the Graeco-Turkish War were soon dashed. At the end of August 1922 the Kemalists opened their major offensive and routed the Greeks. By the second week in September they had captured the port of Smyrna. Not only did this pave the way to horrific ethnic cleansing, it also meant that nationalist forces directly threatened the straits zone held by the Allies. True to form, Pellé slipped out of Constantinople to negotiate directly with Kemal; on 20 September the French and Italians abandoned the British garrisoning Chanak on the Dardanelles. Three days later British and Turkish troops came into contact for the first time.

      On 26 September Harington cabled Lord Cavan, now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Losing a lot of lives in hanging on is what I want to guard against. Why not start at once and give Turkey Constantinople and [Eastern Thrace]…Remember Turks are within sight of their goal and are naturally elated.’ On the same day Crookshank wrote his private appreciation of the situation: ‘We have got into a nice mess here haven’t we!’ He placed the blame for his predicament squarely on the shoulders of his senior colleagues.

      I consider [Rumbold] a good deal to blame for the situation having arisen. He often I fancy sends telegrams which he thinks will please [Curzon] or [Lloyd George] rather than containing his own views. The last four or five months can be summed up as a world wide wrangle (short sighted) with France everywhere, owing to this very wicked anti-French feeling that has been brewing everywhere in the FO: as far as this part of the world is concerned it consisted in endless verbal quibbles in answering each others’ notes – if HR had any views of his own, he should have pushed them forward and gone on arguing for an immediate Conference. Instead precious months were wasted, whose bad fruit we are now beginning to taste. You can hardly believe [he concluded maliciously] what an atmosphere of gloom surrounds [Rumbold] and Henderson. My lighthearted flippancy, I can assure you, is far from appreciated.⁴⁵

      It was at this point that Crookshank had, to his delight, his first brush with high policy. He and the military attaché, Colonel Baird, ‘wrote an interesting and logical joint memorandum which was dished out with one of their meetings to Rumbold [and] the General…The General thought it wise and telegraphed the suggestions to the War Office…The suggestion was that in order to keep ourselves out of the war we should act with complete neutrality and allow the Turks to go to Thrace if they could. At present we are controlling the Marmora against them and so acting as a rearguard to the Greeks.’⁴⁶ In London Lloyd George’s government was puffing itself up with righteous indignation to face down the Turks.⁴⁷ When the Cabinet met at 4 p.m. on 28 September they had before them Harington’s dispatch of the Crookshank-Baird memorandum, which had arrived via the War Office. Rumbold had been