LEADERS AT LAUSANNE

Evening Star, Issue 18256, 21 April 1923, Page 11

LEADERS AT LAUSANNE

SOME RACY IftIPRESSIOMS. POMP, PRIDE, AND ACERBITY. LORD QUEZON IS HUMOROUS. A writer in the New York ‘Herald’ gives some racy impressions of the delegates of a dozen races who assembled at the Lausanne Conference to give peace to the Near East. The Turkish delegation contained many interesting men, he states, one of whom told me of a conversation he had ■ recently enjoyed with the Archbishop of | Canterbury, in the course of which he | endeavored laughingly and in vain to conjvert the spiritual head of the established | church of Great Britain to Mohammedan- ' ism, but .the most fascinating person- ; ality was that of Ismet Pasha, the chief i of the mission. ISMET THE MILD. I Ismet the Terrible, the commander of the victorious Ken.alist armies in the i field that drove the Greeks headlong to the sea, the armies that burnt, ravaged jand massacred, Ismet tho Deliverer and ! recipient of ultimatums at the armistice 'conference of'Mudania, might for the first ■week at Lausanne have been called Ismet I the Vague, Ismet the Mild. He reminded ;me of those industrious people born atiyj where in the Levant whom you see all : over Europe seeking by an arduous I peddling of faked Oriental carpets to : make their living out of tho credulous tourist sitting on the terrace at Monte Carlo or at a marble-topped table along the boulevards of Paris. Ilia rounded, pendulous features add their drooping ■ pathos to the bewildered oleading in his large black eyes. lie looked frightened, j When it is remembered that a bowstring 1 or tho Keraalist substitute for that form j of execution awaits bun in Angora if he i disregards the dictates of the National As- : sembiy, his general air of wishing to be anywhere but at Lausanne becomes comprehensible. j He is short and rather plump, and is | possessed of an enormous diplomatic ad- i vantage at n conference. He is so deaf that, he seldom hears the arguments that | are developed to confound his policies. \Vhen he wants to hear he is accompanied by a giant secretary and interpreter, who | bellows right into his oar.” LORD CURZON AND GOUT.

Lord Curzon, whom this writer calls “ one of the few people who must be a hero even to his own valet,” was a personality naturally brought out by Ismet’s importance, and the clashing policies of Great Britain and Turkey. As for this important Englishman, we arc told irreverently: “In the benign majesty of his features, the rather prim pursing of his lips, in the broadly splendid sweep of his shoulders, the fine swelling of his chest, the precise articulation of his speech, the cathedral close or tho servants’ hall has lost a proud adornment. Only sheer grit and brain power can have saved him from the vestry or the pantry. As it is his merits have been recognised in other walks of life where a presence that is almost a port has had a fine field for use, Curzon suffers greatly from phlebitis and other_ painful maladies, relief from which, incidentally, he recognises to have obtained from tho miustrations of Cone. Yet, with a quiet and patient heroism, ho labors day after day, far into tho small hours of the morning, dealing as an expert with tho tangled complexities of the Near East and the equally complex personalities with whom he has to contend in tho committee work and in the full conferences of Lausanne. He sits with his bad leg resting on a curiously constructed stool, also covered, like the conference table, with the green baize of diplomacy. This had been described as a gout stool, and Lord Curzon, Tevcaliug a sense of humor little suspected by tho public, and showing very accurate knowledge of the picture popular fancy has drawn of him, said to me one evening as his valet was placing the stool in position after dinner: “There you are. I shall never live down my reputation as a pompous aristocratic prig. This rest of mine is described in the papers as a gout stool. Of course, if I, Lord Curzon, have anything the matter with my legs, it must, of course, be gout, tho proverbial aristocrat’s ailment. A * a matter of fact, I’ve got phlebitis. V hat could be more plebeian ?” ENTER THE BOLSHEVIKS.

When the Russians came to Lausanne, Lord Curzon had succeeded in his main object of removing tho distrust and dislike from the Turkish mind, but shortly after tho Bolshevik representatives appeared, reports tho writer ; The atmosphere underwent a distinct change, and it was not long before the extremists at Angora pulled the moderate Ismet up sharply and reminded him that ho was there to dictate terms of peace to tho world and not to accept them. Rukowsky was tho first Russian delegate to arrive. As a Soviet leader and dictator of the Ukraine he has quite a number of more or less judicial murders on his soul. At Genoa, whore I first mot him, he sought to justify what had happened at Russia, and at the same time to annoy the French by giving long and dreary lectures about tho French Revolution to the pressmen patient enough to listen to him in the uncomfortable lecture rooms of the University. He was then still the type of the intellectually intoxicated university professor, burning with a sense of his own cleverness, and more concerned in scoring a point than in pushing through a policy. At Lausanne lie made a different 1m-

prossion. For the first time 1 got from him a vague idea that Sovietiarn might perhaps last after all. His hair was hotter trimmed; be wore the diplomatic livery of a black morning coat; his face had filled out; quite unconsciously he had dropped the ebullience of the revolutionary for the poise and manner of a statesman. In a word, Comrade Enkowsky is become distinctly bourgeoiso in appearance. Tchitcherin arrived a few days afterwards, and this weazened, thin, furtive type of the old diplomacy of the Tsars, in which he started his career, brought the conference to full strength, j THE TERRIBLE MUSSOLINI. _ j The “enfant terrible” of the meeting i was easily, it appears, Mussolini, of Italy, : the meteoric and dramatic Fascisti Premier. Some little time ago, reports Mr , Adam : . ! Mussolini was expelled by the Swiss authorities from Lausanne on account of the redness of the shirt he_ was then wearing, and its hue was Russian and not ; Garibaldian red. Since then he has evolved. But, alas for romance ! Instead iof a black shirt, ill-fitting white spats ; were the distinctive feature of bis attire | when he returned to Lausanne as the j dictator of Italy. Mussolini is a terrifying figure to one I like myself, an observer of humdrum comI monplace folk, such as Clemenceau, Lloyd I George, Foch. He frightened me most not I because lie behaves like a movie villain I big men have done that before —but be--1 cause it was so difficult in the prosaic surj roundings of a, Swiss palace hotel to see I any outward traces of the magnetism upon i which he lias built up his power over the masses in Italy. I find it difficult to bclievA that the rudeness with which he treated everybody at Lausanne explains or justifies the delirious devotion that fills the hearts of his followers. Nor can it be entirely by his sense of the dramatic that ho has conqueredl tho hearts of his countrymen and yoked to his efforts the industrial and financial magnates of Italy. _ He is fond oi attitudinising, of rolling his black pupils around, of thrusting his hand 1 into the breast of his coat, as was Napoleon; of making sudden gestures of affection to those serving, as was Napoleon. _ But one cannot imagine that Napoleon, if he ever had attended a peace conference in an hotel', would have wasted such, bait for popularity as did Mussolini upon even tho elevator boys of the hotel. Shortly after his arrival at Lausanne Mussolini told the British Press to look alter their Labor people more .strictly. He has never been to England, speaks no English, and admits to .knowing nothing

whatever about the country except apparently how to run its labor problems, io the Swiss journalists this guest of the Swiss Confederation suggested' the right method of dealing with the printers’ strike, which had at that time tied up the Swiss Press. It was rumored, and I for one hope that rumor for once is true, that he a'so told Lord Curzon, the most successful Viceroy India ever had. how to run India. I can see Lord Curzon receiving this advice with much the same dignity that an elderly mountain might feel when scratched by an impertinent pebble. VENIZELOS. Among the purely Balkan delegates two figures stood out, in the writer's estimation, “if only by contrast—Venizelos and Stambolisky.” Mr Adam writes; There used to bo an old doggerel line in a vast survey of the world’s great men drawn up by an irreverent junior diplomat in the British Foreign Office, that declared roundly that From Dublin to Delos There’s none like Venizelos. That was in the days when Venizelos was still only the Cretan patriot struggling at times with and at times against the Powers for the union of the island vrith Greece. Sinco then what ups 3iid clowns of power and defeat that man has been through I The tragedy of it all has been that this quiet, resolute, white haired man has ideas that are larger than his country’s strength. Ho hat dreamed a greater Greece while Greece herself was thinking more about currants. If fate had but given him a tool or a weapon fit and worthy of his hand and imagination, what might he not have accomplished ! As it is. he is now an old man, who has carried' his life’s work to within roach of a triumphant conclusion, only to see it crumble away overnight in one of the worst national disasters in the history of bis country. Ho has become frailer than he used to be. His sharp eyes still neam with wise benevolence from behind their classes, bu* into his speech, which has always Icen passionate, there has crept a new note of the quwulouancss of old tge. A CONTRAST. Stambolisky, the Premier of Bulgaria, is quite a different type. Where Venizelos is sensitive, acute, and responsive to atmosphere and suggestion, Stambolisky likes tilings stated bluntly and done with rude strength. Venizelos is the rapier; Siam bolisky the battle mace. He remains a great, big, sturdy peasant, end looks upon life, as well he may in the Balkans, as being a very rough-and-tumble business. As a boy he was ill-treated by his stepmother and sent to watch the cows in the field, ill-fed and neglected in every way. It was only after his marriage to a well-to-do villa.-e girl that he was able to set about educating himself, and after finishing his studies at Halle University he entered polices and journalism in the agrarian interest, and played a great part in the struggle between‘the peasants against the Crown, whirii came to a head in 1915. When King Ferdinand decided to enter the war on the side of Germany he summoned Stambolisky and the other political leaders to the palace. Stambolisky, with the blunt courage which has never deserted him, voiced the general dissent from the Royal policy by saying^roundly to the King : " “ Your 'Majesty will answer with your head for the course you are about to adopt.” The King replied pointedly: “M. Stambolisky, you had better look to your own head,” and followed up the s giiificant threat by having him arrested and condemned to death for plotting ..cainst the country and the Crown. The sentence was afterwards commuted to one of penal servitude for life. There can be no aoubt that had Stambolisky remained at- libei ty it would not have been long before he would have led a revolution to success, as Venizelos did later on in Greece, and placed the strength of Bulgaria, on the side of the Allies.