English Translation

- 11 - In fact, weakness, when relations with another power are strained, is more likely to lead to a final break than firmness, as the history of "friction" has shown. Between Britain and France, tensions prevail during and after the war. When the Allies planned operations against Constantinople in October 198, and the French insisted that the Fleet Command would come to France, Lloyd George wrote to Clemenceau: "We have carried by far the greater part of the burden of war against Turkey in the Dardanelles and in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and Palestine.The British government has given its approval that a Frenchman took over the High Command over the Allied armies in France; it has also agreed that the Allied Army in the Balkans were led by a French general. I do not see any way of justifying to the people of the British Empire that, at a time when the final attack on Turkey is imminent, the command of the naval forces, most of which are British on a battlefield, which is closely linked to the most desperate and heroic battles of troops from almost all parts of the UK Empire, has also been handed over to a Frenchman. The reasons why the British government remained so firm were not only based on prestige or strategic considerations, they were also political, and so on. If, in the last war, Britain had always only paid tribute to the United States and France, it would have been tremendously disadvantaged at the end of the war and in the subsequent peace. It would not have been conducive to better relations between the three powers, but rather the opposite.