Gallipoli (4 page)

‘Sir Louis Mallet, the British Ambassador,’ says Morgenthau, ‘was a high-minded and cultivated English gentleman: Bompard, the French Ambassador, was a singularly charming
honourable Frenchman, and both were constitutionally disqualified from participating in the murderous intrigues which then comprised Turkish politics. Giers, the Russian Ambassador, was a proud and
scornful diplomat of the old régime. . . . It was apparent that the three ambassadors of the Entente did not regard the Talaat and Enver régime as permanent, or as particularly worth
their while to cultivate.’

There was one other man who was extremely influential in the Allied camp. This was Fitzmaurice, the Dragoman of the British Embassy. T. E. Lawrence had met Fitzmaurice in Constantinople before
the war and wrote the following note about him:
¹

‘The Ambassadors were Lowther
²
(an utter dud) and Louis Mallet who was pretty good and gave fair warning of the trend of feeling. I blame much of
our ineffectiveness upon Fitzmaurice,
the Dragoman, an eagle-mind and a personality of iron vigour. Fitzmaurice had lived half a lifetime in Turkey and was the Embassy’s
official go-between and native authority. He knew everything and was feared from end to end of Turkey. Unfortunately he was a rabid R.C. and hated Freemasons and Jews with a religious hatred. The
Young Turk movement was fifty per cent crypto-Jew and ninety-five per cent Freemason. So he regarded it as the devil and threw the whole influence of England over to the unfashionable Sultan and
his effete palace clique. Fitzm. was really rabid . . . and his prejudices completely blinded his judgment. His prestige, however, was enormous and our Ambassadors and the F.O. staff went down
before him like nine-pins. Thanks to him, we rebuffed every friendly advance the Young Turks made.’

With Baron von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, however, it was quite different. After two world wars it is becoming a little difficult to focus this powerful man, for he was the prototype of
a small group of Junkers which has almost vanished now. He was a huge man, well over six feet in height, with a round cannonball of a head and staring arrogant eyes, and his belief in the Kaiser
was absolute. He was not a Prussian, but his character and attitudes were almost a caricature of what foreigners imagine a Prussian aristocrat to be: an utter ruthlessness, an ironclad and noisy
confidence in himself and his caste, a contempt for weakness and, underneath the heavy dignity, a childish excitement with his own affairs. He spoke several languages with fluency, and was
possessed of a certain gargantuan good humour. He was a man at once dangerous, accomplished and ridiculous: the animal in a tight sheath of manners.

Wangenheim stood very high in the Wilhelmstrasse. He had more than once been to stay with the Kaiser in his villa at Corfu, and he could speak for Germany with some authority. It was now his
mission so to cajole, flatter and bewitch the Young Turks that they could see nothing in the political horizon but the vast technical might of the German army. Wangenheim’s argument seems to
have run as follows: Russia was the immemorial enemy of
Turkey, and since Russia was the ally of Britain and France there was no question of their coming down on that side of
the fence. Moreover, Germany was bound to win the war. The British might control the seas, but this was to be a land battle, and if there were to be a revolution in Russia—a thing that might
easily happen—then France alone could never withstand the concentrated weight of the Wehrmacht. Turkey’s only hope of regaining her lost provinces—of recovering Egypt and Cyprus
from the British, Salonika and Crete from the Greeks, Tripoli from the Italians, of subduing Bulgaria and driving back the Serbs—was to join Germany now when she was about to show her
strength.

Wangenheim’s trump card was the German Military Mission. In the summer of 1913 the Young Turks had asked for this mission, and by the beginning of 1914 it had arrived in overwhelming
measure. German officers, technicians and instructors began to appear at first in scores and then in hundreds. They took over control of the munitions factory in Constantinople, they manned the
guns along the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and they reorganized the tactics and the training of the infantry. By August 1914 the Mission had already been able to produce a sample of what it
could do: a regiment of Turkish soldiers, newly equipped with uniforms and rifles, went goose-stepping across a parade ground before an admiring group of the Sultan’s court, the Young Turkish
cabinet, and such foreign ambassadors as did not find it embarrassing to be present.

Liman von Sanders, the head of the Mission and the author of these drastic changes, was an inspired choice for the Germans to have made in sending a general to Turkey. He was a calm and steady
man with all the impressive authority of an intelligent soldier who has the trained habit of command. The army was his life, and he did not look beyond it; not being distracted by politics he was
genuinely absorbed in the technique of tactics and strategy. He might not have been considered brilliant, but he was not easily to be upset, and by holding fast to his excellent teaming he was not
likely to make mistakes. Watching him at work it is not surprising that the Young Turks were more than ever convinced that if war
should break out with Germany and
Austro-Hungary on the one side, and Britain, France and Russia on the other, it was not Germany who would lose.

Enver certainly needed very little persuading. As a military attaché in Berlin he had been much cultivated by the German General Staff, and there was something in the awesome precision of
the Prussian military machine and the ruthless
realpolitik
of the German leaders that fulfilled his need for a faith and a direction. He had learned to speak German well, and even the
mannerisms of the country seemed to captivate him; by now he had begun to affect a fine black Prussian moustache with the ends turned upward, and a punctilious air of cold wrath on the parade
ground. He was determined, he said, upon the Germanization of the army; there was no other way.

Talaat was not quite so sure about all this. He could see that a resuscitated Turkish army gave them a strong bargaining point against both the Germans and the Allies, but he would rather have
waited a little longer before entirely committing himself. He hesitated, and while he hesitated Enver prodded him on. Finally, in that odd state of apathy and half fear which seems to have
overtaken him in all his dealings with Enver, he submitted; it was secretly agreed between them that, if they were to go to war at all, it would be on the German side.

The other members of the cabinet were less easy to handle. At least four of them said that they did not like this growing German encroachment, and if it ended in bringing them into the war they
would resign. Djemal, the Minister of Marine, was still looking to the French who had been very friendly to him on a recent visit to Paris. Djavid, the financier, could see no way out of bankruptcy
through war. And behind these there were others, neither pro-German nor pro-Allied, who floated vaguely in a neutral fear.

Enver dealt with this situation in his usual fashion. In the Ministry of War he was quite strong enough to go ahead with his plans without consulting anybody, and it was soon observed that
Wangenheim was calling there almost every other day. The
activities of the German Mission steadily increased, and by the beginning of the summer had become so marked that the
British, French and Russian ambassadors protested. Enver was quite unmoved; he blandly assured Mallet and Bompard that the Germans were there simply to train the Turkish army, and when they had
done their work they would go away—a statement that became increasingly dubious as more and more technicians and experts continued to arrive by every train. Presently there were several
hundreds of them in Constantinople.

It was the Russians who were chiefly concerned. Ninety per cent of Russia’s grain and fifty per cent of all her exports came out through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and a
corresponding volume of trade came in by this route from the outside world. Once hostilities broke out there would be no other outlet, no other place where she could join hands with her allies,
England and France; Archangel was frozen over in winter, Vladivostok lay at the end of 5,000 miles of tenuous railway from Moscow, and the Kaiser’s fleet was bound to blockade the Baltic.

Up to this time it had suited Russia very well to have the Turks as neutral caretakers of the straits at Constantinople, but a Turkey dominated by Germany was another matter. Giers, the Russian
Ambassador, felt so strongly that at one moment, apparently on instructions from Moscow, he threatened war. But he subsided. One by one they all subsided as the hot summer weeks of 1914 dragged by.
A European war was unthinkable, and even if it did come then Turkey was still too corrupt and weak to make much difference either way. Sir Louis Mallet went off on leave to England.

While he was away—it was the last uneasy month of peace that followed the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Serajevo at the end of June—Enver and Wangenheim prepared their
final plans. Enver seems to have had very little trouble with the reluctant members in cabinet; he is said to have laid his revolver on the table at the height of their argument, and to have
invited the other members to continue with their protests. Talaat did nothing but watch and wait. On August 2, two days before Britain presented
her ultimatum to the Germans,
a secret alliance was signed between Turkey and Germany. It was directed against Russia.

This still did not commit Turkey to war, and there was still no real feeling of belligerence anywhere in the country. But now in the charged atmosphere of these last few hours of European peace
there occurred one of those incidents which, though not vitally important in themselves, yet somehow contrive to express and exacerbate a situation and finally push peoples and governments to the
point where, suddenly and emotionally, they make up their minds to commit all their fortunes regardless of what the consequences are going to be. This was the incident of the two warships Britain
was building for Turkey.

To understand the importance of these two vessels one has to cast one’s mind back to the conditions of 1914, where air-power was virtually non-existent and road and rail transport in the
Balkans was limited to a few main routes. Overnight the arrival of one battleship could dominate an enemy fleet and upset the whole balance of power among minor states. With the Russian Black Sea
fleet to the north of them, and Greece in the south negotiating with the United States for the possession of two dreadnoughts, it had become urgently necessary for Turkey to acquire warships of her
own, and of at least equal strength to those of her neighbours. The order for the two vessels was placed in England, the keels were laid down, and something of a patriotic demonstration was made
out of the whole affair.

In every Turkish town people were asked to contribute to the cost of this new venture. Collection boxes were put up on the bridges across the Golden Horn, special drives were made among the
village communities, and no doubt in the end there was a warm feeling among the public that this was its own spontaneous contribution to the revival of the Turkish Navy. By August 1914 one of the
ships was completed at Armstrong’s on the Tyne, and the other was ready for delivery within a few weeks.

At this point—to be precise on August 3, the eve of the outbreak of war—Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty,
announced to the Turks that he could
not make delivery; in the interests of national security the two ships had been requisitioned by the British Navy.

One does not need much imagination to understand the indignation and disappointment with which this news was received in Turkey: the money had been paid, the two ships had been given Turkish
names, and Turkish crews were actually in England waiting to man them and bring them home. And now suddenly nothing. Rarely before had von Wangenheim been allowed such an opportunity. He lost no
time in repeating to Enver and Talaat the warning he had been giving them all along—the British were not to be trusted—and he came out with a dramatic offer: Germany would make good
Turkey’s loss. Two German warships would be dispatched to Constantinople at once.

The ensuing adventures of the
Goeben
can be told very briefly. Possibly by accident but much more probably by design she was in the Western Mediterranean with her attendant light
cruiser, the
Breslau
, on this vital day. She was a battle-cruiser recently built in Germany with a displacement of 22,640 tons, ten 11-inch guns and a speed of 26 knots. As such she could
dominate the Russian Black Sea fleet and, what was more important at the moment, she could outdistance (though not out-gun) any British vessel in the Mediterranean.

The British knew all about the
Goeben.
They had been watching her for some time, for they feared that on the outbreak of war she would attack the French army transports coming across
from North Africa to the continent. On August 4 the British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean signalled the Admiralty in London: ‘
Indomitable
,
Indefatigable
, shadowing
Goeben
and
Breslau
37º 44
'
North 7º 56
'
East’, and the Admiralty replied, ‘Very good. Hold her. War is imminent.’ Throughout that
afternoon the two British battleships continued closely in the
Goeben’s
wake. At any moment they could have knocked her out with their 12-inch guns, but the British ultimatum to
Germany did not expire until midnight, and the cabinet in London had expressly forbidden any act of war until that time. It was an unbearably tantalizing situation.
Churchill
has related that at five o’clock in the evening Prince Louis of Battenburg, the First Sea Lord, observed to him at the Admiralty that there was still time to sink the
Goeben
before
dark. But there was nothing to be done but to wait.