Gallipoli (3 page)

And so by August 1914 things had drifted into a compromise that was rather weighted on the German side. The British Naval Mission continued to serve at Constantinople, but it was
counterbalanced—perhaps over-balanced—by the German Military Mission which was actively filtrating through the Turkish army; and while the British and the French continued to give their
tacit support to the older more conservative politicians in Constantinople, the Kaiser firmly nobbled the younger and more aggressive leaders of the Committee. It was, then, very largely a question
of which side had backed the right horse: if the Young Turks were turned out the Allies could count on a friendly neutral government in Constantinople and the end of the German threat in the Near
East. If on the other hand the Young Turks remained in office then the British and the French would be in the uncomfortable position of having to switch, of being obliged to try and get their money
on the winner before the race was over.

It was a situation which had extreme attractions for the oriental mind, and the Young Turks made the most of it. Moreover the setting could hardly have been better for the complicated intrigues
that now began: the foreign ambassadors, installed like robber barons in their enormous embassies along the Bosphorus, the Young Turks in the Yilditch Palace and the Sublime Porte, and everywhere
through the sprawling decaying beautiful capital itself that hushed and conspiratorial air which seems to overtake all neutral cities on the edge of war. It was the atmosphere of the high table in
the gambling casino very late at night when every move takes on a kind of fated self-importance, when everyone, the players and the watchers together, is engrossed, and when for the moment the
whole world seems to hang on some chance caprice, some special act of daring, the turning of a card. In Constantinople this false and artificial excitement was all the more intense since no one
really knew the rules of the game, and in the uncertain jigsaw of ideas which is created by any meeting between the East
and the West no one could ever look more than a move
or two ahead.

But it was the personalities of the protagonists that counted, above all the personalities of the Young Turks. Even in a place with so lurid a reputation as Constantinople it would be hard to
imagine a stranger group of men. There is a dramatic quality about the Young Turks, a wild and dated theatricality, which is familiar and yet quite unreal. One tends to see them in the terms of a
gangster movie, half documentary and half extravagant make-believe, and it would be very easy to dismiss them to that convenient limbo that envelops most political adventurers had they not, just
for this instant, had such power over so many millions of men.

Sir Harold Nicolson, who was then a junior secretary in the British Embassy, remembers them all coming to dinner at his house one day. ‘There was Enver,’ he wrote, ‘in his neat
little uniform, his hands resting patiently upon his sword-hilt, his little hairdresser face perked patiently above his Prussian collar. There was Djemal, his white teeth flashing tigerish against
his black beard: there was Talaat with his large gypsy eyes and his russet gypsy cheeks: there was little Djavid who spoke French fluently, and who hopped about, being polite.’

The odd thing, of course, was that they should have been there at all, that power should ever have reached them in a world which still knew nothing of Nazis and Fascists in uniform, of communist
officials at a banquet.

Talaat was an extraordinary man: yet there is a certain earthiness about him that makes him rather easier to understand than any of the others. He is the party boss, gross, hard and
good-tempered, who has his tendrils everywhere, and in place of faith possesses an instinctive understanding of the weaknesses of human nature. He began life as a post office telegraphist, and he
never really made much of an outward show of being anything more. Even now when he was Minister of the Interior, a post for which he might have been designed by nature, and virtually controller of
the Committee machine, he still had his telegraphist’s keyboard on
his desk, and, with his enormous wrists on the table, he liked to tap out messages to his colleagues
on it. Long after the others, with their uniforms and their bodyguards, had moved into splendid villas along the Bosphorus, Talaat continued to live in a rickety three-storied wooden house in one
of the poorer districts of Constantinople. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador, called upon him there unexpectedly one afternoon, and found him in thick grey pyjamas with a fez on his head.
He was surrounded by cheap furniture, bright prints on the walls, worn rugs on the floor; and his Turkish wife kept peeping nervously at the two men through a latticed window while they talked.

Most of those foreigners who knew Talaat during this summer regarded him highly and even with some liking. Morgenthau always found it possible to make him laugh, and then the animal craftiness
would subside, the dark gypsy face would relax, and he would talk with great frankness and intelligence. He had, Aubrey Herbert says, ‘strength, hardness and an almost brutal bonhomie, and a
light in his eyes rarely seen in men, but sometimes in animals at dusk’. Yet Talaat with all his sagacity and his powers of unemotional concentration seems to have felt the need of men of
action like Enver.

Enver was the prodigy of the group, the terrible child who shocked and bewildered them all. He was distinguished by the kind of dark and composed good looks that never seem to age or reveal the
mind beneath; and indeed, if Talaat is represented by Wallace Beery of the silent films, then Enver most certainly, for all his pertness, is Rudolph Valentino.

He was born at Adano on the Black Sea coast, the son of a Turkish father who was a bridge-keeper and an Albanian mother who followed one of the lowest occupations of the country—that of
laying out the dead. It is possible that the boy’s exceptional good looks descended to him from a Circassian grandmother, but his other qualities seem to have been peculiarly his own, and
were in a state of remarkable balance with each other. He was extremely vain, but it was a special kind of vanity which was overlaid by an air of shyness and modesty, and his reckless bravery in
action was
offset by an appearance so cool, so calm and unhurried, that one might have thought him half asleep. In office he exhibited this same quiet distinction of manner,
so that no disaster ever appeared to flurry him, and no decision, however important, caused him more than a few moments’ hesitation. Even his ambition was disguised by a certain ease with
which he moved among people who belonged to a much more cultivated society than his own. With this fluency and this charm it was no wonder that he was made so much of by the hostesses of the time;
here was the young
beau sabreur
in real life, an unassuming young hero. All this was a most effective cover for the innate cruelty, the shallowness and the squalor of the megalomania that
lay beneath.

From the age of twenty-five or so, when he had graduated from the military staff college in Constantinople, Enver’s career had been tumultuous. His speciality was the overturning of
governments by physical violence, the sudden armed raid on cabinet offices. In later wars he would have made an admirable commando leader. In 1908 he was one of the small band of revolutionaries
who marched on Constantinople and forced Abdul Hamid to restore the constitution, and a year later when Abdul had defaulted in his promises, Enver was back again in the capital, storming the
barricades in a torn uniform, with a four days’ growth of beard and a bullet wound on his cheek; and this time Enver and his friends disposed of Abdul forever.

Then in the following years, when half the countries of Eastern Europe were demohshing the carcase of the Ottoman Empire, there was no front, however remote, at which Enver did not appear,
dramatically and suddenly, to lead the counter-attack. From his post of military attaché in Berlin he rushed to the Libyan desert to fight the Italians outside Benghazi. Then in 1912 he was
back on the Continent again holding the Bulgars off Constantinople. Nothing dismayed him, no defeat exhausted his endless energy. At the end of the first Balkan war in 1913, when everything was
lost and Constantinople itself in danger of falling, Enver was the one man who would not accept an armistice. He led a band of two hundred followers into the capital, burst in
upon the peace-making cabinet at their deliberations, shot dead the Minister for War, and then, having established a new government which was more to his liking, he returned to the
front again. Finally he emerged gloriously at the end of the second Balkan war leading the tattered Turkish battalions back into Adrianople.

As an administrator his methods were very similar. In the summer of 1913, when he was at the Ministry of War, he dismissed 1200 officers from the Turkish army in a single day, among them no
fewer than 150 generals and colonels. In Enver’s view they were politically unsound.

There were other leaders among the Young Turks who were probably just as able as Enver: Mahmad Shevket, who led the 1900 march on Constantinople, Djavid, the Jewish financier from Salonika,
Djemal, the Minister for Marine, and several others; but none could compete with Enver’s peculiar brand of political audacity. He out-manœuvred them by doing the outrageous, the
impossible thing. By the summer of 1914, when he was thirty-four and looking as youthful and composed as ever, he had reached a position of great power in Constantinople. He had married a princess
and was settled in a palace with a personal bodyguard and a retinue of attendants. He was Minister for War and Commander-in-Chief of the army. In cabinet and in the Committee of Union and Progress
not even Talaat cared to oppose him, and it was becoming increasingly evident that he had even larger designs for his own future. Foreign ambassadors coming to call on the young minister in his
office would find him sitting there in his uniform, very spruce and smiling. On the wall behind his desk there were portraits of Frederick the Great and Napoleon.

There was one name, more important than all the rest, that is missing from the list of guests at Harold Nicolson’s dinner party. Indeed, it could hardly have occurred to the British
Embassy to have invited Mustafa Kemal, for he was still unknown in Turkey. Yet there is a striking parallel in Kemal’s and Enver’s lives, and it can only have been by accident—the
accident of Kemal’s solitary and introverted mind—that he was not already a member of the
group. The two men were of the same age; Kemal like Enver had been born
in a poor family, had entered the army, had joined the revolutionary movement, and had been in all the wars. But a uniform greyness hangs over this early part of Kemal’s career. He had none
of Enver’s flair, his quickness and spontaneity. A private rage against life seemed to possess him, and he had no talent for compromise or negotiation. Being contemptuous of other
people’s opinions and impatient of all authority he seems somehow to have been trapped within his own mind. He waited in a resentful claustrophobia for the opportunity that never came, and
while he waited the others so easily outstripped him.

From 1909 onwards Kemal had been constantly in Enver’s shadow; he took part in the revolutionary march on the capital that year, but was in the rear planning the administration of the army
while Enver was rushing over the barricades. He served under Enver in the Tripoli campaign and again in the Balkan wars. He was even present at Enver’s triumph at Adrianople. At every stage
the two men quarrelled, as they were inevitably bound to do; for while Kemal was a military commander of genius, Enver must surely be judged as one of the most inept and disastrous generals who
ever lived. It is not evident that Enver ever learned the first principles of warfare or ever profited by the experience of any of the appalling disasters which he so confidently planned. Through
all these chaotic years it was Kemal’s galling fate to take orders from this man.

By 1913 Kemal had reached the low point in his career; he was an unemployed lieutenant-colonel in Constantinople, and Enver had gone far above his head. As yet there was no sign whatever of the
strange reversal which was shortly to take place in their fortunes; and no one in his wildest dreams would have imagined that half a century later Kemal’s name would be reverenced all over
Turkey, that every child at school would know by heart the gaunt lines of his face, the grim mouth and the washed eyes, while his spectacular rival would be all but forgotten. Indeed it is even
remarkable that either of them should have survived the five years that lay immediately ahead.

The Young Turks were surrounded by hatred. They were hated by the older politicians of the Abdul Hamid régime whom they had displaced. They were hated by the army
officers whom Enver had expelled; and, beyond anything, they were hated and feared by the foreign minority groups in Constantinople, the Armenians, the Greeks and to some extent the Jews. Any one
of these factions would have done anything, would have accepted any foreign domination in Turkey, in order to have got the Young Turks out of office.

For the moment, however, Talaat and Enver and their friends had control and they were determined to keep it by any kind of ruthlessness, by any kind of bargaining.

These then were the young men who in August 1914 were putting Turkey up to auction, and they were opposed—perhaps abetted is an apter word—by the group of
professional western diplomats who were making the bidding. Unlike the Young Turks, the men at the foreign embassies in Constantinople were not strange at all. Here everything was perfectly
distinct and familiar. One knows at sight the Ambassador, the Dragoman (the political adviser), the Military Attaché, the head of Chancery, and the swarm of secretaries, just as one knows
the pieces in chess and what moves they are capable of making. All is in order and the different nationalities are as easily distinguished as red is from black.

Yet in one respect at least the Ambassador of 1914 differed from his counterpart of the present time: he had more authority, much more freedom of action. It was not often that he was
overshadowed by the sort of international conferences which now occur every other week, nor was his work being constantly overlooked by cabinet ministers and politicians coming out from home. His
brief may have been prepared for him, but he interpreted it in his own way. It was a long journey from Western Europe to Turkey, and the approaching war had made Constantinople doubly remote. It
really was possible for an ambassador by some gesture, by some decision taken on his own authority, to
alter the balance of things, perhaps even to retard or to accelerate
Turkey on the path to war. Then too the ‘eastern-ness’ of the Ottoman Empire, its differences of every kind in religion and in manners and culture, were much more exaggerated then than
they are now. The Embassy became an outpost, a stronghold, the one really solid physical symbol of a nation’s place in the world. It had to be large—larger if possible than the other
rival embassies—and the ambassador must have the presence of an important man. He must have his flag, his servants in livery, his yacht in the Golden Horn, and his summer embassy at Therapia
in addition to his more formal palace in Constantinople. All this tended to set the diplomats in Constantinople very much apart from Turkey, and no doubt they felt more at home with one another
than they did with the Turks. The ambassadors and their staffs, indeed, were often to be seen together at the international club: and the attitudes which they took towards the Turks were much as
one would have expected.