MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WE have all of us, since the victories of Hamman Lif and Bou Ficha, been poring over our maps of the Mediterranean, scanning with a fresh form of expectation the coasts and islands which spread from Samothrace to Narbonne. Places which in the past we approached from the north southwards we today approach from the south northwards ; and former associations with history, travel or literature have suddenly acquired the new and grim associa- tions of fighter-protection, landing-barges, and machine-gun nests. We see the great mass of Crete anchored there in the Aegean and our minds are filled with visions, not of Minos or Venizelos, but of parachutes and mines. Trapani no longer recalls to us Samuel Butler's engaging theory that it was here that Nausicaa composed the Odyssey, and when we trace the indentations of Mount Athos we picture movements more rapid and ferocious than those of monks chewing cuttle-fish under blue Byzantine colonnades. Each one of us has toyed with his own favourite conjecture or indulged in day-dreams regarding his own preferred area of liberation. Before long (perhaps even before these words appear in print) we shall know where the main blows are to be struck ; but during this expectant interlude it is permissible to frame one's own campaigns and to imagine the roar of battle crashing in a night upon gentle harbours which one has known in the past. There is one distant and rather forlorn group of islands which I wish, before the war is won, to see liberated from Italian sovereignty. To the east of the Cyclades, to the south of the Sporades, are spread the twelve islands nf the Dodecanese. I hope to see these islands freed from the tasce3, not only because they are lovely and deserving, but also because they represent the trickiest of many tricky chapters in the long and murky story of Italian diplomacy.
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The Dodecanese, lying off the Carian peninsulas of Asia Minor, have names as lovely as the Nereids who followed in the train of Thetis—Astypalaia, Calymnos, Carpathos, Chalki, Symi, Telos and Nisyros. They include large and important islands such as Rhodes and Cos and Leros. They include Patmos, in a cave of which the Revelation was written by St. John the Divine. In ancient days Cos, with its vines and roses, boasting the historic plane-tree of Hippocrates, was regarded as the most beautiful of all the islands of the Carpathian Sea. The Dodecanese possess a long and high tradition of wealth and culture ; Apelles was a Dodecanesian, and so was Chares who constructed the Colossus of Rhodes ; when Cassius looted the latter island he sent to Rome three thousand statues and two million pounds worth of gold. Sybaris, which was considered by the ancients to be the very symbol of luxury, was a Rhodian colony. Every island of the twelve was rich in timber, pomegranates and wine. But since the day when Villiers de l'Isle Adam, last of the Grand Masters of the Knights,pf St. John, sailed away to Crete, the islands decayed in prosperity ; the vast pine forests which clad their mountains were cut down and the vineyards trampled ; even the sponge fisheries of Symi and Calymnos, which produced the honeycomb sponges which we call "bath sponges," and the cup sponges which we call "face sponges," have sadly declined. The harbour of Rhodes today is dominated, not by Chares' huge statue to Helios-Apollo (which was to5 feet high and carried on its breast-plate a mirror which flashed out towards Egypt), but by the symbol of a Roman wolf. In the courtyard of the museum which the Italians have established in the Hospice there is a vast stone dolphin reminiscent of the old maritime power of Rhodes. The Italians, it must freely be admitted, have done much to beautify and cleanse the outward semblance of the islands. But at sun- down the cannon at the fortress thunders out the curfew hour, ad the Rhodians are reminded that they are subjected to foreign rule.
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It is opportune to recall by what tricks and subterfuges that rule was imposed. Of all modem wars of aggression perhaps the most dastardly was the sudden and wholly unprovoked attack which the Italians launched upon Tripolitania in iii. The Italian
Ambassador in Constantinople drove down one night to the Sublime Porte and informed the Grand Vizier that this important Turkish province was to be occupied at dawn the following morning. The Italian seizure of Tripoli and Cyrenaica did not, however, proceed according to plan. There were delays and disasters, and Italian
public opinion became avid for easier and more immediate rewards. Thus, on April 22nd, 1912, the Italian fleet appeared off Rhodes and troops were landed under General Ameglio under the pretence of liberating the ,Greek islanders from the Turks. "This occupation," wrote Guglielmo Ferrero, "was nothing but a device for propping up Italian public opinion, which was becoming enervated." Having promised the Rhodians their liberation and their autonomy, the Italians then proceeded to sign a Treaty with the Turks (the Treaty of Ouchy of October 15th, 1912) under which they agreed to restore the twelve islands to Turkish- sovereignty so soon as the Turkish troops had evacuated Tripoli and Cyrenaica. This under- taking they also evaded, on the excuse that certain Turkish officers were still in Libya assisting the Senoussi in his resistance to Italian infiltration. It thus happened that in the ensuing Balkan war the Greeks (who by their command of the sea were able to liberate all the other Greek islands under Turkish rule) were precluded from liberating the Dodecanese owing to the continued presence of the Italian forces. The Italians obstinately refused to leave, and when in 1915 we and France were seeking to bribe Italy to betray her allies Germany and Austria we recognised this occupation in a clause of the regrettable secret treaty known as the Treaty of London.
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When the United States entered the war President Wilson quite rightly refused to approve this secret engagement. The majority of the islanders were overwhelmingly Greek, and under the doctrine of self-determination there could be no excuse for placing them under Italian sovereignty. Meanwhile, moreover, the Italians had discovered that they also, and most ardently, desired the port of Fiume, which was one of the few things which had not been promised them by this Treaty of London. They thus staged a combinazione, so ingenious that they ended by obtaining both Fiume and the Dodecanese. They began by pretending that they were quite willing to surrender their claim to the Dodecanese if President Wilson would assist them in their claim to Fiume. Signor Tittoni signed an agreement with Venizelos under which all the twelve islands, with the exception of Rhodes, should be surrendered to Greece. This agreement was confirmed by a protocol annexed to the Treaty of Sevres. The Italians then waited until American isolationism and British lethargy furnished a further opportunity. When Venizelos fell from power they asserted that the basis on which the original agreement had been negotiated no longer existed. Lord Curzon refused to accept this interpretation of contractual obligations. In successive interviews with della Torretta, the Italian Ambassador in London, Lord Curzon poured cold and calculated scorn upon the Italian contention. But the day came when Lord Curzon also fell, and in the interests of "good relations" Mr. Ramsay MacDonald tacitly acquiesced in the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese and, in fact, handed over to Mussolini a large tract of Jubaland as well. This gesture of appeasement produced no lasting result.
* * * * Let us hope that on this occasion these sorry diplomatic dealings will not be repeated. The Turks have every right to claim that the proximity of the twelve islands to vital centres of Anatolian defence justify them in safeguarding their own future security. Difficulties such as these, if dealt with in a spirit of mutual confi- dence, he never insuperable. But the day will come when the wolf of Rome will disappear from the pier-head of Rhodes harbour ; when the curfew gun will cease to echo among the palaces and niinarets; and when freedom, and perhaps even some prosperity, will come again to the suffering islanders of Patmos, Astypalaia, Nisyros, Carpathos, and the rest.
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