Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/342

 rivalry and its accumulated inheritance of suspicion and resentment. It is a bad mental background for the individuals who have to represent the two countries. The French are perhaps more affected by it than the English, because on the whole they have had the worst of the struggle in the Levant as well as in India, and failure cuts deeper memories than success."[7]

French statesmen were dissatisfied with the division of the spoils of war in the Near East. They had a feeling that here, as elsewhere, Britain had obtained the lion's share. They believed that Mr. Lloyd George had been guilty of sharp practice in his agreement of December, 1918, with M. Clémenceau, by the terms of which Mosul and Palestine were to be turned over to Great Britain.[8] Frenchmen were suspicious of British solicitude for the Arabs, which they believed was not based upon disinterested benevolence; in fact, self-determination for the Arabs came to be considered a political move to render precarious the French mandate for Syria. French patriots chafed at British emphasis upon the fact that "the British had done the fighting in Turkey almost without French help" and that "there would have been no question of Syria but for England and the million soldiers the British Empire had put in the field against the Turks." French pride was hurt by the rapid rise of British prestige in a region where France had so many interests. And prestige—diplomatic, military, religious, cultural, and economic—has always been an important desideratum in Near Eastern diplomacy.[9]

French dissatisfaction with the Turkish settlement was one of the issues of the San Remo Conference of April, 1920, at which were assigned the mandates for the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Exclusive control by Great Britain of the oilfields of the Mosul district was so vigorously contested that M. Philippe Berthelot,