Gallipoli (15 page)

The security measures taken in Constantinople and the other cities, therefore, had not been excessive. Greeks and Armenians were deprived of their arms and were conscripted into the labour
battalions of the Army. In some cases their property was requisitioned but this was a fairly general thing, and it probably fell as heavily upon the Moslem peasant as upon anyone else, since his
stock and grain were seized to feed the Army. Bedri, the police chief in Constantinople, had gone out of his way to try and humiliate Sir Louis Mallet and the French Ambassador when they left the
country on the outbreak of war by holding up their special trains and making other difficulties. But some 3,000 British and French nationals who had made their homes in Turkey had remained behind
and they were not interned.

In Constantinople the street signs which for years had been written in French were obliterated; no shop could display a placard in a foreign language; merchants were required to dismiss their
foreign employees and take on Turks instead. There was a mild spy hunt. Nobody in time of war could have seriously objected to these and the other measures that were imposed, since very much the
same sort of thing, or worse, was happening in the other belligerent countries in western Europe.

But March 18 changed all this. Now at last the Turkish soldier was something in the world again. The British battle-fleet was the strongest armament in existence, its very name had been
enough to strike terror among its enemies in every ocean, and no one had given the Turks the ghost of a chance against it. Yet by some miracle they had driven it away.
Constantinople had been saved at the last moment. The Turk could hold up his head again.

Not unnaturally and perhaps not unfairly Enver and Talaat claimed the credit for all this, and indeed the victory of March 18 was for them absolutely vital. Up to this time they had never been
really secure in office, they had steered a breathless course from day to day, and they had been very largely driven by events. But now they found themselves borne up on a wave of popularity and
patriotic pride. The Army’s success was their success. At last they represented Turkey. It was even more than this: they stood for the Turk himself, for Islam with all its xenophobia and its
hunger for revenge on the patronizing, dominating foreigner.

And so in their elation—their sudden emotional transition from fear to not-fear, from weakness and doubt to strength and certainty—they did a thing which was nothing new in the East,
or anywhere else for that matter: they set about hunting down their racial and political opponents. They were now strong enough to express their hatred and they wanted victims.

At this stage there could be no question of attacking the British and French nationals: the American ambassador was looking after their interests, and in any case there was still the possibility
that the Allies might win the war. The Greeks too could count on some sort of protection from the neutral government in Athens. But the Armenians were in a very different case. In nearly every way
they fitted the role of the perfect scapegoat. The Armenians were Christians and yet there was no foreign Christian government which was responsible for them. For years they had hoped to set up an
independent Armenian state in Turkey, and no matter how quiet they might be lying at the moment, it was obvious that they staked their future on the victory of the Allies. Herbert probably went too
far when he said, ‘though the Armenians had a future before them in the development and the improvement of Turkey, they were seduced by Europe and flattered to suicide.’
Yet there were grounds for the Turkish belief that the Armenians were a fifth column inside the country, and that, no less than the Greeks, they had gloated over every Turkish reverse
in the Balkan wars.

Then too the Armenians were supposed to be rich: they lent money, a thing forbidden to the Moslems, and many of them handled commerce in the city while the Turkish peasant remained on the land.
They had a reputation for cleverness, for outwitting the lazier, less efficient Turks, and they had not always disguised the fact that they regarded themselves as a superior race, better educated
than the Moslems, more Westernized. A long skein of trivial jealousy was woven around these gifted people in every village.

These things applied of course in equal measure to the Greeks and the Jews, but the Turks had another particular grudge against the Armenians. It was thought that they had been disloyal in the
recent campaign in the Caucasus, that they had sent information across to the Russians, and that some of their young men had even crossed the border to join the Russian army. Soon a rumour spread
that the Armenians were secreting arms with the idea of raising a revolution.

There had been massacres in Turkey before this, but nothing could compare with the ferocity, the organized brutal hatred with which the Turks now launched themselves in their revenge. In some
places like Smyrna the massacres were comparatively mild; in others like Van, where the Armenians did put up a successful defence for a while, the slaughter was complete. The system used—and
it was entirely a system planned by Talaat and the Committee—was to goad the Armenians to the point where they attempted to resist. At first their goods were requisitioned, then the women
were molested, and finally the shooting began. It was customary, once an Armenian village had been quelled, to torture the men so that they would reveal where their arms and money were hidden, then
to take them out into the country, tied together in batches of four, and shoot them dead. In some cases the women were given the opportunity of becoming Moslems, but more
usually the attractive ones were simply taken off to the harems by the local Turkish garrison. The remainder, with the old men and the boys, were then assembled with what goods they
could carry and put on the road to the Mesopotamian deserts in the south. Very few of them arrived; those who were not waylaid and stripped naked by marauding bands soon died of hunger and
exposure.

To Morgenthau and other Western observers in Turkey who were confronted with the full horror of these events at the time it seemed that what they were witnessing was a reversion of the Turks to
their nomadic and barbaric ancestry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Now at last, after two hundred years of interference in Constantinople, the Russians, the British and the French were
out of the way, and the Germans, the only Christian people with any influence left in the country, soon made it clear that they had no intention of interfering. Indeed, it was believed that
Wangenheim, or at any rate someone on his staff, had suggested the refinement of adding wholesale deportation to local massacre. The Germans at this moment had a good interest in the Turkification
of Turkey, the doctrine of Pan-Turkism; it inflamed the Turks’ military spirit, it made them much more formidable allies in the struggle against Russia and the rest of Europe.

Protests by Morgenthau and even by the Bulgarians had no effect whatever upon the Young Turks. Talaat, who was so often reasonable on other matters, was ferocious on this subject. ‘I have
accomplished more towards solving the Armenian problem in three months,’ he said, ‘than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years.’ The Armenians were disloyal, be declared, they
had enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks, they had helped the Russians, they were plotting to set up a separate state.

Morgenthau pointed out that Talaat had even turned on his friends among the Armenians.

‘No Armenian,’ Talaat answered, ‘can be our friend after what we have done to them.’

Clearly there was some fundamental thing at work in the Turkish mind, something which was beyond all reason, some
terrible instinct that made them feel that they had to
persecute somebody in order to establish their own security. The very helplessness of the Armenians seemed to be an incitement. Having once raised their hand, the Turks appear to have felt, with a
crazed and guilty logic, that they must go on and on until the very enormity of their cruelty was its own justification. If they
could
do this thing then they must be in the right. This
was the only way to compensate for the unexpressed resentment of so many years.

‘The Turk,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote, ‘was unbusinesslike, placid, and lazy or easy-going. But when he turned in his rage he poured out death in a bucket, and guilty and innocent
suffered in his blind anger.’

Before March there were about two million Armenians in Turkey, and it was the Young Turks’ intention to exterminate or deport them all. This task, however, was never completed; barely
three-quarters of a million were dead or dying by the time the frantic rage of their tormentors had exhausted itself.

It would be absurd, of course, to argue that the Allies’ failure in the Dardanelles was the only cause of the Armenian massacre; the root instinct of the Turks to destroy this unprotected
minority was always there. But March 18 offered them the opportunity, the massacre followed the victory, and the psychological effect on the Turks was immense. From this time onwards the soldiers
felt that they were utterly committed; the traitors at home had been stamped out and now they were Moslems together in a common cause. There was no longer any question of surrender or defeat. It
was the defiance of the wounded wolf. He had wreaked his vengeance on the weak and now he stood at bay against the world.

Thus before ever the land battle had begun there were decisive influences at work on the Gallipoli campaign, and perhaps in the long run they counted for more than armaments and strategy; March
18 had brought the Turks together, and the
auto-da-fé
of the Armenian massacres had added a certain desperation, the desperation which presumably the outlaw feels. And it was one
more complication in this strange mental web that while the
Turks were now quite determined to resist the coming invasion they did not really hate the British and the
French—not at any rate in the intimate personal way in which they hated the Armenians and perhaps the Russians. It was opposition of a more dangerous kind. For the Turks the Allies were,
quite simply, invaders from outer space, and they prepared to meet them as one prepares to face some tremendous natural upheaval like an earthquake or a hurricane at sea. In other words, they got
ready to fight not with passion but simply to survive; they were Turks fighting for Turkey, Moslems against the infidel. The battle, as they saw it, was a straight clash of opposites, a trial of
strength and skill which could only end in their own extermination or in victory. Such opponents are probably the most formidable of all—and especially so in this case because these things
were not really understood in the Allied camp at the time.

The Turks were seriously underrated by the Allies. They had only been known in retreat and in battles outside their own country. They were expected to fight as they fought the Armenians,
recklessly and viciously but not as disciplined soldiers who knew the science of modern war. It was even hoped in the War Office in London that once the Allied expeditionary forces were ashore at
Gallipoli the enemy would turn tail and make for Constantinople. There might be moments of difficult guerrilla fighting, but it remained in effect for the British and the French a minor
operation.

These were very serious delusions, for the Turks in fact were making the most sensible arrangements for the defence of their country. Directly the bombardment of March 18 was over Enver sent a
message to Liman von Sanders saying he wanted to see him in his office. Arriving soon afterwards, he offered the Field Marshal the command of the forces at the Dardanelles.

It must have caused Enver some little heartburning to reach this decision, for his relations with Liman had been getting steadily worse from the moment when, three months before, the German
general had derided his plans for the invasion of the Caucasus. To Enver, no doubt, this foreign technician was a
solemn bore. In his capacity of Inspector-General of the
Turkish Forces Liman had been a persistent nuisance; one day it was a complaint about the hospitals (they were in an appalling state, with spotted typhus spreading everywhere), and the next it was
a demand for better food for the men, for rifles, for blankets, for uniforms. Enver at least had been able to settle the matter of the uniforms. Just a few soldiers in Constantinople were
presentably equipped, and as soon as it was learned that Liman was about to make an inspection this squad was hurried to the spot with freshly polished boots and shining buttons. But Liman soon
found out about this and complained again.

The real argument between the two men, however, had arisen over the disposal of the forces in the south. Enver, as commander-in-chief, had drawn a line through the Dardanelles and the Sea of
Marmara, and had set up a command on either side, one in Asia, the other in Europe. This arrangement might have been sound enough at the time when Xerxes crossed from east to west in his advance on
Europe, but to Liman’s mind it was precisely calculated to lead to the complete annihilation of the army as soon as an enemy attacked from the south. In short, the defences were placed
exactly the wrong way round; the line should have been drawn east and west through the Sea of Marmara and all the forces to the south of it should have been prepared, under one command, to meet an
invasion from the Mediterranean. When Liman advanced this view, Enver had replied calmly that he was wrong and the dispositions were going to stay as they were. By the end of February things had
drifted towards an open breach, and Enver had even been intriguing for Liman’s recall to Germany.

But now in March when a renewal of the Allied attack on the Dardanelles was expected any minute, it was another matter. Something had to be done quickly about the fortification of Gallipoli.

Liman lost no time in taking up his new command. Having asked for and got the reinforcement of an extra division, he set off on March 25 for the peninsula—the very day on which Hamilton
was sailing away from it to regroup his forces in Egypt. Liman’s departure indeed was so rapid that in many ways it
resembled Hamilton’s hurried exit from London
twelve days earlier; he waited neither for his staff nor his reinforcements, but took the first available boat and landed in Gallipoli town on the morning of March 26. There he set up his
headquarters in the bare rooms of the French consular agent’s house and got to work.