liadnan

Hurrah. Glastonbury tickets have arrived, and the hearing someone booked in for the morning of Thursday 24th before I remembered to book it out has now gone away because I'm too expensive, apparently. Such is life.

I've been reading a book about the Greek-Turkish war in 1919-1922, a coda to the First World War, recently: fascinating, particularly when read alongside Fromkin's Peace to end all peace, which deals with the Allies squabbly attempts to rebuild the middle east out of the Ottoman Empire in some compromise between the different images that suited them, thus landing us all in the shitty place we now are. (It's also amazing to think about just how many different balls Lloyd George was keeping in the air in those years. His attitude of encouraging the Greeks, against the advice of Churchill, Curzon, and most of the rest, while refraining from giving them any actual help, was the root cause of the mess the Greeks eventually found themselves in.)

Anyway, like most such tales of high level diplomacy behind the scenes, there are moments of mordant humour. Lloyd George, in a memo of 21st July 1921 sent to the Minister of War, was obviously unimpressed to learn major news from the Greeks rather than from British sources:

"Have you no department which is known as the Intelligence Department in your office? You might find what it is doing. It appears in the Estimates at quite a substantial figure but when it comes to information it is not visible. Please look into this yourself."