As for those who had played a role in the inundation, Thys returned to the Congo after the war. Umé became professor of electricity at the Belgian military academy and Nuyten eventually became Belgian chief of staff. Dingens returned to his work at the Nieuport locks and died in 1926. Cogge, who received the Order of Leopold, simply retired. Geeraert was drafted into the Belgian army's corps of engineers but, sadly, died in an asylum in 1925. King Albert, whose single-minded determination had preserved his army and his country against the odds, died while climbing alone in the Ardennes in 1934.
CHAPTER 2
THE WIDENING OF THE WAR
Turkey's Entry into the War, 29 October 1914
ONE OF the star attractions of Vienna's Heeresgeschichtliches (Military History) Museum is the motorcar in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a gunman in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. A 1910 open-top Austrian-built Gräf und Stift ‘Double Phaeton’, it is a vehicle that seems suitably grand for the occasion it represents. The only hint of its part in such a dramatic event, however, is a neat hole at the top of the rear offside passenger seat, through which passed the bullet that accounted for Franz Ferdinand's wife, Sophie. There is another car in the equivalent Turkish Military museum (Askeri Müze) in Istanbul, this one a rather more old-fashioned-looking 1909 French-built Laffly S20 TL. By no means as impressive a vehicle, it is riddled with bullet holes and, a trifle melodramatically, contains a wax dummy of the victim, the Ottoman Grand Vizier (First Minister) and Minister of War, Mahmud evket Pasha, assassinated by gunmen on 11 June 1913. While Franz Ferdinand had died when his car was brought to a halt by the driver taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo, evket's car had been stopped by road repairs as it passed through Bayezid Square in Constantinople: at least five assassins fired ten shots from another car. In its way, this was just as significant a murder as that of Franz Ferdinand. It is by no means clear who killed evket. It may well have been opponents of the ttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP) that had dominated Turkish politics since the revolution of the so-called ‘Young Turks’ in July 1908, and had increased their power by a military coup in January 1913. On that occasion, a group of ten army officers had stormed the previous Grand Vizier's office, shooting dead the then Minister of War, and forcing the resignation of the Ottoman Cabinet. evket, formerly commander of the Turkish III Corps, was installed as the new Grand Vizier. While sympathetic towards the CUP, evket had only loose connections to the movement, and there were only three CUP ministers in his government. His murder allowed the CUP to suppress the Liberal Party and the hard-line elements to marginalise its own liberal wing.
The effect of evket's assassination was to consolidate the CUP's influence. One of the three CUP ministers, former Foreign Minister Prince Mehmed Said Halim Pasha, replaced evket as Grand Vizier, and other prominent CUP figures joined the government for the first time. On 4 January 1914, Enver smail Pasha, who had led the attack on the Grand Vizier's office a year earlier, became Minister of War. It was Enver who would play a crucial role in bringing Turkey into the war in October 1914.
The war had become a global conflict immediately, by virtue of the participation from the beginning of the overseas colonial empires of Britain, France, Germany and Belgium. The war would widen further through the subsequent entry of other powers. Clearly, at the very least, the entry of any new belligerent would have potential diplomatic and political implications for the course of the war, even if it did not necessarily have any immediate or even longer-term military impact. Any choice to remain neutral had similarly potential political, diplomatic and economic significance. Thus, the entry of Japan (August 1914), Italy (May 1915) and, ultimately, the United States (April 1917) all had important consequences. The entry of other states such as Thailand and Liberia (both 1917), and a raft of Central American states, including Guatemala, Costa Rica and Honduras (all 1918), had far fewer consequences: the declaration of war on Germany by the Onondaga American Indian nation (July 1918) merely amuses.
Arguably, the most momentous turning point of all in these terms, however, was the entry to the war of the Ottoman Empire. David Lloyd George and Erich Ludendorff alike were to claim that Turkish entry prolonged the war by at least two years. In the short term, it meant new theatres of military operations. Apart from the disastrous Dardanelles expedition (April 1915–January 1916), by which the British and French hoped to knock Turkey out of the war, Turkish entry also brought an unsuccessful Turkish advance towards Egypt in February 1915. There was, too, the campaign waged by the government of India in Mesopotamia from November 1914 to the fall of Baghdad in March 1917; the British advance into Palestine in early 1916, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem in November 1917 and of Damascus in October 1918; and British promotion of the ‘Arab Revolt’, normally dated as beginning on 7 June 1916.
The CUP's ambitions to restore the Ottoman Empire as a great power also resulted in its ready acquiescence in what has been characterised as a German global strategy of subversion, intended to stimulate nationalism in India, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sudan, Morocco, and among the Turkomans of Persia: 140 million Muslims were ruled by Britain, France and Russia. In the event, the German and Turkish strategy was ineffective, but the consequences of the campaigns in the Middle East were profound. Turkish defeat, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, saw the partition of the Middle East between the British and French. The results, and the contradictory promises made during the war to Arabs and Jews, remain evident to this day. Imposition of the allied peace settlement helped forge the modern secular Turkish state, but also led to the Greco-Turkish war of 1920–22, with its own enduring legacy of uprooted peoples and mutual hatreds. At the same time, Turkish entry to the war opened a new front for the Russians in the Caucasus, and cut Russia's lifeline from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This arguably increased economic pressure on the Tsarist government and hastened its collapse. The war in the Caucasus also led directly to the genocide of the Armenian people, yet another lasting source of dispute in one of the world's most turbulent regions.
Turkish entry was a result of a protracted internal political struggle within the CUP or ‘Unionists’. The Unionists had first come to prominence as one of a number of reformist ‘Young Turk’ groups opposed to the conservative and repressive policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Their strength grew especially among young army officers in the Turkish II Corps and III Corps, based respectively at Monastir (now Bitola) and Salonika (now Thessaloniki). On the back of what was effectively a military revolt at Salonika, on 24 July 1908 the CUP forced the Sultan to concede the restitution of the liberal constitution of 1876. It created in effect a constitutional monarchy. In the newly elected Chamber of Deputies that met in December 1908, the CUP had the greatest number of seats, but it preferred influence to actual power. Following a supposed counter-revolution by a single battalion in Constantinople in April 1909, quickly put down by troops from the II Corps and III Corps, the Sultan was compelled to abdicate. The Sultan's First Eunuch was hanged from the city's Galata Bridge, but the Second Eunuch survived by wisely showing the CUP's leaders how to access the treasury in the Yildiz Palace. Abdülhamid was succeeded by his brother, Read, who was installed as Sultan Mehmed V. Unionist influence over the government fluctuated thereafter, with some of its nationalist policies provoking revolt among the empire's ethnic minorities. During the course of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12, when the Italians seized Libya and the Dodecanese islands, the CUP's power weakened temporarily despite its elaborate organisational network throughout the empire and its administration, and its strong support amongst army officers. Territorial concessions to the Balkan powers that attacked Turkey in October 1912, thereby initiating the First Balkan War, had then undermined the new government. Accordingly, Enver and his colleagues had launched their coup on 23 January 1913. Their objective was a progressive, secular, modernised and Westernised state, but also one free of the European political and economic control imposed on the Ottoman Empire
since the late nineteenth century. It would be a relationship of equality rather than subordination.
Tsar Nicholas I had characterised the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’ back in 1853. Greece had already won its independence in the 1820s, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro became so in 1878, and Bulgaria effectively so, though the Turks continued to claim sovereignty until 1908. Bosnia and Herzegovina were occupied by Austria-Hungary and then annexed in 1908. Cyprus and Egypt were effectively lost to Britain in 1878 and 1882 respectively, and Tunisia to the French in 1881. Crete passed under international protection in 1898. Ottoman public debt had been placed under European control in 1881 and, under the so-called Capitulations, foreign nationals enjoyed immunity from Turkish taxation and justice, and changes in customs duties required the consent of the great powers.
The CUP had then seen the influence of the Ottoman Empire further eroded during the First Balkan War, as the forces of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro pushed the Ottomans out of Macedonia, Albania, Epirus, most of Thrace and various Aegean islands. The Turks managed to hold the so-called Chatalja line just 30 miles from Constantinople, but it left just a tiny remnant of the former Ottoman possessions in Europe: 55,000 square miles of territory had been lost, representing 80 per cent of Turkey's remaining European territory, and equating to an area almost as large as England and Wales. Some 4 million people inhabited the lost territories. The victors soon fell out over the spoils, with Serbia and Greece fighting Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War of 1913–14, during which Enver managed to recapture Edirne (formerly known as Adrianople) in eastern Thrace from the Bulgarians in a lightning raid in June 1913. Serbia emerged as the greatest victor from the Balkan Wars, its territory doubling in size, and its population increasing by 1.5 million, but it was actually Greece and Bulgaria that most threatened remaining Turkish territory in Europe. Tsarist Russia appeared to retain its long-term interest in controlling the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, thus attaining free access to the Mediterranean. How then could the CUP attain its own objectives?
Between 1912 and 1914 some of the CUP leadership favoured long-term defensive alliance with one of the great powers as a means of advancing their aims, while others wished to reach accommodation with all the powers. Still others, of whom the most prominent was Enver, wished to overthrow the whole post-Balkan Wars settlement, though this would also require an ally. Just 32 years old when he became Minister of War, Enver was simultaneously promoted from colonel to brigadier general, though this was also partly in recognition of his achievement at Edirne. Shortly after assuming office, he married a niece of the Sultan. It was a rapid rise for someone of humble beginnings. Born at Adana near Turkey's Black Sea coast in 1881, Enver was largely brought up at Monastir, where his father was either a bridge-keeper or a minor railway official. Enver's mother was an ethnic Albanian of peasant origin, who, it was later said, earned a living from laying out the dead. Graduating from the military academy as a lieutenant in 1899, Enver was serving at Salonika when recruited into the CUP in 1906. Two years later, he was prominent in the revolt at Salonika that triggered the overthrow of Abdülhamid. After two years as military attaché in Berlin, Enver returned to fight against the Italians in Libya, distinguishing himself there as well as in the First Balkan War.
It has been suggested that Enver's leadership of the coup in January 1913 was born of frustration rather than personal ambition, but there is no doubt that he greatly profited from it in terms both of power and wealth. Winston Churchill, who had met Enver before the war, described him as a ‘charming fellow – vy good looking & thoroughly capable’.1 The American ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, noted Enver's almost feminine appearance, the pale face, and the delicate hands and the long tapering fingers. He characterised Enver as a ‘matinee idol’. Certainly Enver, who neither drank nor smoked and was regarded as having an impeccable private life, cut a dapper figure. Nonetheless, while the Austro-Hungarian ambassador described Enver as a dilettante, Morgenthau remarked on Enver's audacity, cold-blooded determination and remorseless lack of pity.2 Notably vain, Enver clearly believed himself a ‘man of destiny’, and had developed a distinct manner while in Berlin, often striking consciously Napoleonic poses. Certainly, in April 1915, the American chargé d'affaires in Constantinople, Lewis Einstein, contrasted the relatively modest young man he had first met in 1908 with the altogether more ambitious figure seated behind a desk, with photographs of Napoleon and Frederick the Great on either side, something also mentioned by Morgenthau.3 But for his small stature, of which he was always conscious, Enver's Napoleonic pretensions were to prove greatly misplaced.
As Minister of War, Enver immediately set out to purge the officer corps of potential rivals, though, to be fair, he also continued essential military reforms originally started by evket. Enver's familiarity with many German officers from his time in Berlin further strengthened his hand, for key military appointments were gifted to officers from the German military training mission led by Otto Liman von Sanders, which had been appointed in October 1913. Liman was originally supposed to command the Turkish I Corps at Constantinople but, in the face of Russian objections, this was converted to a wider yet less threatening advisory role.
Whatever Enver's precise role in the decision to enter the war, it should be borne in mind that the CUP leadership was a collective one. The wealthy and Egyptian-born Said Halim was something of a figurehead as Grand Vizier. Born in 1865, he was a nephew of a former Khedive of Egypt, and had been privately educated, speaking both English and French well. Foreign diplomats, however, had found him somewhat uncommunicative as Foreign Minister. Einstein described him as a ‘rather pompous little man who speaks as if he ruled the Empire, where he is only a figurehead, ignores business, and takes orders from Talaat’.4 The latter, Mehmed Talât Bey, was one of two further key figures, the other being Major General Ahmed Cemal Pasha. A former postal clerk, Talât was alongside Enver during the January 1913 coup, and became Interior Minister at the age of 39. Talât enjoyed considerable sway over the CUP committees and branches. The 42-year-old Cemal was first appointed Minister of Public Works, then Navy Minister in March 1914. Like Enver he had support in the army, and was somewhat resentful of the number of posts occupied by the Germans
Talât, born in 1874, was originally from Edirne, northwestern Turkey, his father an examining magistrate. British diplomats thought the black hair, heavy black eyebrows, swarthy complexion and beaked nose betrayed what was generally supposed to be his mother's gypsy roots. He was powerfully built – Morgenthau recalled that he had ‘rocky biceps’ and ‘gigantic wrists’ – but was famously glutinous and paunchy as a result.5 To such foreign observers, Talât appeared more Turkish than his CUP colleagues, a ‘bold and hearty’ peasant, not without spontaneous good humour, but with an evidently cruel streak. One British diplomat, who had known him well before the war, recalled, after his death, that Talât was an ‘engaging villain’.6 Another noted that Talât had ‘a light in his eyes, rarely seen in men but sometimes in animals at dusk’.7
Cemal had been born in 1872 on Mytilene in the Aegean. A serious rival to Enver, their relationship was one of mutual loathing. Highly ambitious, ruthless and opportunistic, Cemal was just as vain as Enver, though less popular. Morgenthau found even his laugh ‘unpleasant’, leaving a memorable pen portrait of a stumpy and stoop-shouldered figure, whose eyes – ‘black and piercing, their sharpness, the rapidity and keenness with which they darted from one object to another, taking in apparently everything with a few lightning-like glances’ – suggested ‘cunning, remorselessness, and selfishness to an extreme degree’.8
Others, however, also had some influence within the CUP. The speaker of the lower chamber of deputies, the genial Halil Bey, had gained great respect among CUP's parliamentary deputies for his integrity. Known later in life as Halil Mentee, he had been born at Milas on Turkey's Aegean coast in 1874. The expertise of the independently minded, bespectacled 39-year-old
Finance Minister, Medmed Cavid Bey, a former economics teacher, was also widely recognised. Born in Salonika in 1875, Cavid's background was a particularly interesting one, for he was said to be of a sect commonly called Dönmeh (literally ‘turncoat') by Turks, but Ma'min ('faithful') by its members. Originally Jews expelled from medieval Spain in the late sixteenth century, the Dönmeh had largely followed their messianic leader in converting to Islam in the mid-seventeenth century. Many had remained covert Jews in their private religious practice for a considerable period. Having been assimilated over time, the majority subscribed, by the late nineteenth century, to a kind of mystical Islam with a distinctive Judaic element. The sect was especially strong in Salonika, and had identified readily with the radicalism of the CUP. In theory, no minister could act without majority support in the CUP's central committee, but in practice a great deal was decided by small groups meeting wholly informally behind closed doors. Broadly speaking, Said Halim and Talât leant towards forging an alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but were not averse to reaching an accommodation with Britain, France or Russia. Cemal appeared to favour the British and French, while the Francophile, but essentially neutralist, Cavid wanted none of either alliance. As already indicated, Enver clearly favoured Germany.
Enver has often been associated with the ‘Pan-Turanian’ idea that Russia's Turkic territories in the Caucasus and Turkestan might be won for the Ottoman Empire with the support of Germany and Austria-Hungary. In addition, Enver, Talât and Cemal all associated themselves primarily with areas now lost to Turkey. Talât and Cemal, of course, had been born in the lost territories, while Enver had been brought up there. Equally, some of the party's main ideologues were from territories within the Tsarist Empire; another, Ziya Gökalp, was actually a Kurd. In many respects, however, it was a resurgent Turkish nationalism that most appealed to the CUP leadership as a whole. They desired to consolidate the Turkish state on its heartland in Anatolia, which could be suitably purged of alien elements to ensure greater ethnic homogeneity. Ethnic minorities generally were viewed with suspicion as posing a threat of foreign-backed unrest. Some exchange of population had already taken place in the Balkans through mutual expulsion. ‘Turkification’ also accorded with the prevailing intellectual climate, newspapers and periodicals fuelling a wider public mood of revisionism. Islam offered a degree of shared identity in this vision, but it was actually the Germans who were to prove keenest on a ‘Pan-Islamic’ war. Enver and his colleagues, therefore, were more interested in their own national identity than a wider Islamic identity. Enver, indeed, was careful to counsel the Germans against the proclamation of a general jihad (or holy war) that would apply to all infidels, including Germans, offering instead a call for Muslims under Entente rule to rise in rebellion. It was in this sense, therefore, that jihad was promulgated in November 1914.
The Making of the First World War Page 5
