Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/245

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two sons perched on precarious thrones, Feisal at Bagdad and Abdullah at Amman, and had himself been referred to as "Supreme Pontiff of the Islamic world and temporal ruler of Arabia."

On November 20, Lord Curzon finally opened the peace conference at Lausanne, with Ismet Pasha, now Foreign Minister in the Turkish Government, heading the only Turkish delegation. Negotiations went forward until Jan. 31, 1923, when Lord Curzon served a draft treaty on Ismet Pasha and on the night of February 4 abruptly left for London. This breach in the negotiations left British military and naval forces in occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek Army facing east along the Maritza; but the snows of the Balkans melted without incident. On April 23, Sir Horace Rumbold, British High Commissioner in Constantinople, took Lord Curzon's place at the resumed conference and the Treaty of Peace, together with a number of subsidiary documents, was finally signed at Lausanne on July 24.

We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr. Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in 1922 it