Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/145

 Czarist Russia's sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces of the old Ottoman Empire, and if that claim had been disposed of to the United States, not only would an effective barrier have been interposed in front of Russia's inevitable return to Trans-Caucasia but the remnant of Turkey would have been cut off from the rest of Islam.

By the summer of 1919, however, it had become plain that the United States Government, while anxious to see American relief extended to the Armenians, was unwilling to incur an inevitable quarrel with the future Russia, and General Milne in Constantinople announced that Italy would occupy Trans-Caucasia. Three months later, an Italian military mission on the spot followed the example which the United States Government had set and in September, 1919, the necessity of reinforcing his Constantinople garrison compelled General Milne to pull in his isolated packet of troops in Krasnovodsk and to evacuate Trans-Caucasia down to Batum. Will the Royal Army Service Corps ever issue another ration of caviare in Baku?

Mr. Lloyd George now began peddling Trans-Caucasia all over Europe, offering the Armenians in turn to Holland, Sweden, Rumania, to the League of Nations, to Canada and New Zealand, and even flirting with Turkish Pan-Turanianism. But the spectacle of Mr. Lloyd George bearing gifts to the world attracted the same scrutiny elsewhere as it had already attracted at Washington. Presumably anybody who was able to hold Trans-Caucasia could have had the Armenians in those days (except Denikin and Soviet Russia who alone were both able and willing to take them), for