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The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1923

I

I.

"Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow."

—Shelley.

"The lives of all those boys whom I saw go marching up the roads of France and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid, so lovely in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little higher than the barbarity which was let loose in Europe. They will have been betrayed if the agony they suffered is forgotten, and the war to end war' leads to preparations for new, more monstrous conflict." So wrote Sir Philip Gibbs in 1920, in the concluding passages of his "Realities of War," and yet, not three years after the conclusion of the "war to end war," once again the statesmen of the Home Country have attempted to commit the peoples of the British Empire to the devastation and the horrors of another world conflict.

What are the facts? In 1920 a solemn promise to the Mohammedans of India, a deliberate pledge, was given to the peoples of the British Empire as a clear and specific declaration of war aims—that we would not deprive Turkey of Thrace, and that we would not dismember the Turkish Empire—this in order to induce still more men to participate in the business of killing people of another race. The end achieved, 14,000 graves on the hills of Gallipoli, and then the revelation that while all these open declarations were being made, secret treaties were being entered into which committed the country to a policy diametrically opposed to every pledge that had been given. The promises which had induced men to fight, deliberately and cynically ignored, Thrace torn from Turkey, the city of Adrianople, of peculiar sacredness to the Turks, given to Greece, until at last the Prime Minister is driven to declare, "We are full up; we have got Constantinople. We have got Mesopotamia. We have got Palestine."

Could any course of events lead more certainly to "war and still endless war?" The recent crisis was an inevitable and certain retribution for such a policy. But dismissing that aspect of the question, how many hundreds were prepared to believe once again that war would solve the problem, in spite of these proven facts, how many, even in this College, were willing to be persuaded by similar pledges and similar assurances into a course that threw into the balance not merely their own lives, but also the whole future of civilisation, and the happiness of generations to come? This time the declared war aim was the "Freedom of the Straits," and once more the same story has to be told. One of the most astounding revelations that have since been made is the fact that, in September a month before the incident, Mustapha Kemal sent his Minister of the Interior—Fethi Bey—to London with proposals for the demilitarisation and neutralisation of the Straits under the perpetual inspection of the League of Nations. The Turish Envoy was re page 42 ceived neither by the Cabinet nor by individual Ministers, and the fact and purpose of his mission were deliberately suppressed by Cabinet. So that the youth of this country were being asked to throw away their lives in order to secure something from the Turks which the Turks themselves for months had been willing and anxious to give peacefully! Dean Inge has described the Great War as a "colossal stupidity." In heaven's name, what language would he have employed to describe this war of it had eventuated?