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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
56 
as sufficiently in the wrong to stimulate greater British support for Greece. The 
peace treaty was indeed signed on 10 August but, now that the Straits crisis had 
passed, the British had no positive motivation to authorise further advances and were 
repelled precisely by the risk of being compelled to come to the assistance of the 
Greeks in the interior
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. The result was that the Greeks remained in their now over-
extended lines and nationalist strength remained largely unimpaired.
Whenever Poincaré was moved to make his joke about the aptness of signing the 
treaty of Sèvres in a porcelain factory
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, it was obvious both before and after 
signature that the nationalists were not going to accept its terms and that even the 
formality of a ratification by the no longer functioning Ottoman parliament was 
beyond achievement. The British (or at least some of their officials) seemed to 
continue in the belief that the terms of Sèvres were desirable and so, consequently, 
was the possibility of the Greeks, who were still thought by some to have a military 
advantage, enforcing them. Certainly desirable was Greek cover for the British 
position on the Straits: so much so that the possibility of a Greek withdrawal from 
Anatolia was some months later expressed as a point of concern. 
In the remaining months of 1920 the strategic balance changed substantially, in large 
measure as a consequence of developments further north. By the middle of that year 
the Bolsheviks were plainly winning the civil war in southern Russia and the 
Ukraine and were advancing towards the transcaucasian frontiers of the tsarist 
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Llewellyn Smith, 127-128 
93
It was printed in the 
Revue des Deux Mondes
on 1 September 1920 where he wrote “c’est lui même [the treaty] 
un object fragile, peut-être un vase brisé” (Ploumidis, 267, n 85). 

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