A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  The extent to which religion governed everyday life in the Middle East was something that European visitors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found remarkable; for religion had played no such role in Europe for centuries. Indeed, Europeans visited the Middle East largely to see the past. They came to see Biblical sites, or excavated wonders of the ancient world, or nomads who lived as they had in the time of Abraham.

  The Porte, too, appeared to live in the past. Ottoman officials continued to pretend, for example, that Bulgaria formed part of the empire long after losing control of that territory in 1878, and counted Egyptians as among its subjects even after Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. For this and other reasons, Ottoman statistics were unreliable, and it is only in the roughest sense that we can say that the empire’s population in the early twentieth century may have been about twenty to twenty-five million, in a territory—depending on how it is defined—about six times the size of Texas. It comprised, broadly speaking, most of the Arabian peninsula and what is now Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.

  Until the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was for most of the time under the absolute personal rule of the Sultan. In at least one respect he was quite unlike a European monarch: as the son of a woman of the harem, he was always half-slave by birth. Under his rule civil, military, and Holy Law administrations could be discerned in an empire carefully divided into provinces and cantons. But the appearance of orderly administration—indeed of effective administration of any sort—was chimerical. As Gertrude Bell, an experienced English traveler in Middle Eastern lands, was later to write, “No country which turned to the eye of the world an appearance of established rule and centralized Government was, to a greater extent than the Ottoman Empire, a land of make-believe.”2 There were army garrisons, it is true, scattered about the empire, but otherwise power was diffuse and the centralized authority was more myth than reality. Gertrude Bell, in the course of her travels, found that outside the towns, Ottoman administration vanished and the local sheikh or headman ruled instead. There were districts, too, where brigands roamed at will. The rickety Turkish government was even incapable of collecting its own taxes, the most basic act of imperial administration. On the eve of the First World War, only about 5 percent of taxes was collected by the government; the other 95 percent was collected by independent tax farmers.3

  Foreign countries exercised varying degrees of influence and control within the empire. It was not only that Egypt and Cyprus were in fact governed by Britain, which had occupied them in the late nineteenth century; and that the sheikhdoms along the Gulf coast were under British control. Lebanon, a separate canton under arrangements established in 1864, was governed by a Christian military governor directly serving under the Porte which, however, was obliged to act only in consultation with six European powers. Russia and France reserved to themselves the right to protect, respectively, the Orthodox and Catholic populations of the empire; and other powers also asserted a right to intervene in Turkish affairs on behalf of the groups they sponsored.

  What was more than a little unreal, then, was the claim that the Sultan and his government ruled their domains in the sense in which Europeans understood government and administration. What was real in the Ottoman Empire tended to be local: a tribe, a clan, a sect, or a town was the true political unit to which loyalties adhered. This confused European observers, whose modern notions of citizenship and nationality were inapplicable to the crazy quilt of Ottoman politics. Europeans assumed that eventually they themselves would take control of the Ottoman domains and organize them on a more rational basis. In the early years of the twentieth century it was reasonable to believe that the days of Turkish dominion were numbered.

  By 1914 the much-diminished Ottoman Empire no longer ruled North Africa or Hungary or most of southeastern Europe. It had been in a retreat since the eighteenth century that finally looked like a rout. For decades, in the Ottoman army and in the schools, discontented men had told one another in the course of clandestine meetings that the empire had to be rapidly changed to meet the intellectual, industrial, and military challenges of modern Europe. Stimulated but confused by the nationalism that had become Europe’s creed, intellectuals amongst the diverse Turkish-speaking and Arabics-peaking peoples of the empire sought to discover or to forge some sense of their own political identity.

  In the final years before the outbreak of the First World War, obscure but ambitious new men took power in the Ottoman Empire, relegating the Sultan to a figurehead position. The new men, leaders of the Young Turkey Party, were at once the result and the cause of ferment in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, as they tried to meet the challenge of bringing Turkey’s empire into the twentieth century before the modern world had time to destroy it.

  II

  Constantinople—the city originally called Byzantium and today known as Istanbul—was for more than eleven centuries the capital of the Roman Empire in the East, and then for more than four centuries the capital of its successor, the Ottoman Empire. Like Rome, Constantinople was built on seven hills and, like Rome, it was an eternal city: its strategic location gave it an abiding importance in the world’s affairs.

  Constantinople is a collection of towns located principally on the European side of the great waterway that links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, at a point where the channel separating Europe from Asia narrows to widths of as little as a half-mile. The site is a natural fortress, difficult to conquer or even to attack. A bay some four miles long, known as the Golden Horn, forms a magnificent natural harbor that provides shelter and protection for a defending fleet.

  In 1914 the population of Constantinople stood at about a million. It was a cosmopolitan and polyglot population: most residents of the city were Moslem, Greek, or Armenian, but there was also a considerable colony of European and other foreigners. A European influence was evident in the architectural style of the newer buildings, in the style of dress, and in such innovations as street lights.

  Rudimentary modernization had only just begun. In 1912 electric lighting had been introduced into Constantinople for the first time.4 A start had been made toward constructing a drainage system for the city’s narrow, filthy streets; and the packs of wild dogs that for centuries had patrolled the city were, by decision of the municipal council, shipped to a waterless island to die.5 Some work had been done on the paving of roads, but not much; most streets still turned to mud in the frequent rainstorms, or coughed dry dust into the air as winds blew through the city.

  Violent alternating north and south winds dominated the city’s climate, bringing sudden changes of extreme heat or cold. The political climate, too, was subject to sudden and extreme changes at the beginning of the twentieth century; and for many years prior to 1914 British observers had shown that they had no idea where the winds were coming from or which way they were blowing. Political maneuverings at the Sublime Porte, the gate to the Grand Vizier’s offices from which the Ottoman government took its name, were conducted behind a veil of mystery that the British embassy time and again had failed to penetrate.

  III

  The British embassy, like those of the other Great Powers, was located in Pera, the European quarter of the city, which lay to the north of the Golden Horn. Foreign communities had grown up in proximity to their embassies, and lived their own lives, separately from that of the city. In Pera, French was the language of legation parties and entertainments; Greek, not Turkish, was the language of the streets. Three theaters offered revues and plays imported from Paris. The Pera Palace Hotel offered physical facilities comparable with those available in the palatial hotels of the major cities of Europe.

  Most Europeans succumbed to the temptation to live in the isolation of their own enclave. Few were at home in the narrow, dirty lanes of Stamboul, the old section of the city south of the Golden Horn, with its walls and fortifications crumbling into ruin. One of the few who felt at ease on either side of the Golden Horn was an Eng
lishman named Wyndham Deedes, who had come to play an important role in the new Young Turkey administration.

  Deedes was from a county family of Kent: four centuries of English country gentlemen had preceded him. After Eton, he took a commission in the King’s Own Rifles, and for twenty-two years thereafter he remained a British officer. (When asked once about the horrors of the Boer War, he replied, “Well, anything was better than Eton.”)6 Early in his military career, Deedes volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Gendarmerie, a newly created Turkish police force commanded by European officers. Its creation was a reform forced upon the Sultan by the European powers, for the old police force had become indistinguishable from the robber bands it was supposed to suppress. Deedes and his European colleagues were commissioned as officers of the new force while, at the same time, retaining their commissions in their respective national armies.

  As viewed in old photographs, Deedes looked an oddity in the oriental surroundings in which service in the Gendarmerie placed him. Small, painfully thin, and light-complexioned, he did not blend into the Ottoman landscape. Ascetic and deeply Christian, he had little use for sleep, rest, or food. He worked fifteen hours a day, indifferent to comfort and careless of danger; nobody could have been more unlike the Turkish officers who, if European accounts were to be believed, were in many cases corrupt and cowardly. He made a success of his challenging assignment, and won popularity with the Turks.

  Deedes was an unknown figure when he entered the Gendarmerie in 1910. Four years later he had achieved such high standing that he was co-opted by the leading figure in the new Ottoman government to help run the Ministry of the Interior. By the time of his thirty-first birthday in 1914, Deedes, who had learned to speak Turkish fluently, was one of the few Englishmen who understood Turkish affairs. Yet his government did not make real use of his experience and knowledge. One of the continuous themes of the years to come was that Deedes was a Cassandra: his government chose to disregard his warnings and to ignore his accurate analyses of Turkish political motives.

  The minister under whom Deedes served in the Ottoman government in 1914 was Mehmed Talaat. Most of what the British government thought it knew at the time about Talaat and about the political party that Talaat led was erroneous; and at least some of it could have been corrected by Deedes. But the British embassy in Constantinople believed that it knew the truth about Ottoman politics already, and therefore that it did not have to inquire further.

  IV

  Mehmed Talaat, the Minister of the Interior and the leader of the largest faction within the governing political party, was a figure whom British diplomats did not regard as a gentleman. They believed that he lacked race and breeding; they scornfully reported that he was of gypsy origin. He had thick black hair, heavy black eyebrows, a hawk-like nose, and what one of the few sympathetic British observers described as “a light in his eyes, rarely seen in men but sometimes in animals at dusk.”7

  Talaat was the single most important figure in Turkish politics. He was very much a self-made man. Little is known of his origins and background except that they were humble. He began life as a minor employee of the Post and Telegraph Office and is believed to have been a Bektashi, that is, a member of the largest of the Turkish Dervish orders. (The Dervishes were Moslem religious brotherhoods.) He is believed to have joined a Freemason lodge, is known to have organized a secret political society, and to have been imprisoned for a time for his underground activities.

  Joining a secret organization was a common activity in the Ottoman Empire of Talaat’s youth. Under the autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, open political activity was dangerous. The Sultan, who suspended the constitution and disbanded Parliament, was intolerant of dissent and employed a secret police force to deal with it. The political life of the empire was driven underground, where secret societies proliferated. The earliest ones took their inspiration from nineteenth-century European revolutionary groups, especially the Italian carbonari, and organized themselves into cells of a handful of members, only one of whom, typically, would know a member of another cell. Many of them, including the forerunner of the Young Turkey Party, were founded by university and military academy students. The army, too, was an especially fertile breeding ground for such societies; its younger members were shamed by their empire’s disastrous showing on one battlefield after another.

  Abdul Hamid’s police forces succeeded in smashing the secret societies in Constantinople and elsewhere. Beyond their grasp, however, was Salonika, the bustling and un-Turkish Macedonian port in what is now Greece. Salonika is where a number of the secret societies established their headquarters, developing close relationships with members of the Ottoman Third Army, which had its headquarters there. The disorder and disintegration with which the Third Army had to deal in Macedonia—a frontier region of the empire—in itself was a formative experience that helped the secret societies to enlist recruits within the ranks of the army.

  Talaat, who lived and worked in Salonika, was one of the founders of one such secret society which eventually became the principal faction within a merged group that called itself the Committee of Union and Progress—the C.U.P. as it will be called hereafter. It was known, too, as the Young Turkey Party, and later its members were called the Young Turks. Upon joining it, initiates swore an oath on the Koran and a gun. Djemal Bey, a staff officer who later played a major role in Middle Eastern politics, was Talaat’s initial recruit among the leadership of the Third Army.

  One day in 1908 a junior army officer named Enver, who was stationed in Salonika and who had also joined Talaat’s group, was ordered to return to Constantinople. Afraid that his membership had been discovered by the secret police, he slipped out of Salonika and took to the hills, to which another Young Turkey army colleague had already escaped. Then another army officer followed his example, taking troops and ammunition with him. The Sultan sent troops against them, but the troops joined the rebels. There was a spontaneous combustion of a bloodless revolution in Salonika: the C.U.P. took control. The Young Turks seized control of the Telegraph Office—it may have been no coincidence that Talaat was one of its officials—and established contact with C.U.P. cells that honeycombed the army and the empire. When the smoke had cleared the constitution had been restored, parliamentary and party politics had resumed, and the following year the Sultan abdicated in favor of his brother.

  The old politicians took office, while the Young Turks remained in the background. But the C.U.P. had become a force with which to reckon, and not merely because of its strong representation in the officer corps of the army. In a disorganized society, the strength of the C.U.P. was that it had branches everywhere, criss-crossing the empire.

  The leaders of the successful uprising at first enjoyed a good-enough press in the western world so that in common parlance “Young Turks” came to mean any brash group of young people with dynamic ideas who rebel against an outmoded leadership. They were viewed with sympathy by the Foreign Office in London, but were disliked and disdained in the British embassy in Constantinople. The ambassador, Sir Gerard Lowther, seems to have fallen completely under the influence of Gerald FitzMaurice, his First Dragoman, or official interpreter and adviser on oriental affairs; and FitzMaurice detested the C.U.P. almost from the very outset.

  FitzMaurice’s interpretation of the events of 1908 was colored by the fact that they had occurred in Salonika, about half of whose 130,000 inhabitants were either Jews or Dunmehs (members of a Jewish sect that had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century). Salonika was also a city in which there were Freemason lodges. Emmanuel Carasso (or Karasu), a Jewish lawyer, had founded an Italian Freemason lodge in which he apparently allowed Talaat’s secret society to meet when it was in hiding from the Sultan’s secret police. FitzMaurice concluded that the C.U.P. was a Latin-influenced international Jewish Freemason conspiracy; and Lowther duly reported this to the Foreign Office in London. Lowther referred to the C.U.P. as “the Jew Committee of Union
and Progress.”8

  FitzMaurice later conducted an investigation of the C.U.P., the results of which were reflected in a confidential report sent by Lowther under his own name on 29 May 1910, to the official head of the Foreign Office, Sir Charles Hardinge. In his report, Lowther pointed out that “liberté, égalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity), words drawn from the French Revolution, were both the slogan of the Italian Freemasons (hence Karasu’s lodge) and of the Young Turkey movement. The Young Turks, he claimed, were “imitating the French Revolution and its godless and levelling methods. The developments of the French Revolution led to antagonism between England and France, and should the Turkish revolution develop on the same lines, it may find itself similarly in antagonism with British ideals and interests.”9

  In his detailed report of more than 5,000 words, Lowther alleged that Jews had taken over a Freemason network (“The Oriental Jew is an adept at manipulating occult forces…”) and through it had taken control of the Ottoman Empire. Amongst the ringleaders of the Jewish Freemason conspiracy, according to Lowther, was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Oscar Straus, whose brothers owned the New York department stores Macy’s and Abraham & Straus.

  The danger to England, wrote Lowther, is that “The Jew hates Russia and its Government, and the fact that England is now friendly to Russia has the effect of making the Jew to a certain extent anti-British…a consideration to which the Germans are, I think, alive.”10 Indeed, Lowther concluded, “I have reason to believe that my German colleague is aware of the extent to which Jewish and Latin Masonry inspires the Committee, and that he has confidentially kept his Government informed as to this feature of Young Turkey politics.”11