A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  There are historians today who continue to support the claim of Enver and Talaat that the Ottoman rulers acted only after Armenia had risen against them.4 But observers at the time who were by no means anti-Turk reported that such was not the case. German officers stationed there agreed that the area was quiet until the deportations began.5

  At the German and Austrian embassies, the first reports of the deportations were ignored: officials clearly believed that massacres of Christians were about to take place, but did not want to know about them. They accepted Talaat’s reassurances eagerly.

  By May 1915 massacre reports were too persuasive to be ignored any longer. The Austrian ambassador told his government that he thought he ought to “alert the Turkish statesmen in a friendly manner” to the possible adverse repercussions of their proceedings.6 He later reported that he had in fact spoken with Talaat, had urged that the matter be handled carefully, and had suggested avoiding “persecution of women and children” because it would play into the hands of Allied propagandists.7 On 24 May the Allied governments denounced the Porte’s policy of “mass murder” to which the Porte replied that responsibility rested on the Allies for having organized the insurrection in Armenia.8 (Whether there had been such an insurrection, and, if so, whether Russia organized or merely encouraged it, remain, as noted earlier, controversial issues.)

  Reports poured in from German officials in the field with gruesome details of atrocities; von Wangenheim, the German ambassador, found it increasingly difficult to overlook what was going on. By the middle of June, he cabled Berlin that Talaat had admitted that the mass deportations were not being carried out because of “military considerations alone.”9 Though they received no guidance from their home governments, von Wangenheim and his Austrian counterpart, Pallavicini, communicated to the Porte their feelings that the indiscriminate mass deportations, especially when accompanied by pillagings and massacres, created a very bad impression abroad, especially in the United States, and that this adversely affected the interests that Germany and Turkey had in common.10

  In July, von Wangenheim reported to the German Chancellor that there no longer was any doubt that the Porte was trying to “exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish empire.”11 He and Pallavicini both concluded that attempting to interfere did no good. His recommendation to his government was to build a record showing that Germany was not responsible for what was happening.12 Other German officials disagreed, and tried to interfere, as did the German Pastor Johannus Lepsius, but the Wilhelmstrasse accepted von Wangenheim’s advice. In October it asked the Porte to issue a public statement clearing Germany of complicity and stating that German representatives in the Ottoman Empire had tried to save the Armenians.13 When the Porte refused, the Wilhelmstrasse threatened to issue such a statement on its own, but then backed down for fear of damaging the Turkish alliance.

  The Armenian Massacres provided useful and effective propaganda for the Allied Powers, as the German and Austrian ambassadors had feared.* Perhaps the massacres also affected Allied thinking about the terms of a future postwar settlement, for they reinforced the argument that the Ottoman Empire could not be left in control of non-Moslem populations, and possibly not even of non-Turkish-speaking populations.

  It was evident to neutral opinion that Talaat and Enver were happy to have rid themselves of the Armenians. Their public position was that they had foiled an attempt at subversion. Certainly they had succeeded in eliminating unrest; Armenia became as quiet as death itself.

  V

  The Allies did have one clear opportunity to subvert the Ottoman Empire, but they deliberately passed it up. It was offered to them by Djemal Pasha.

  Alone among the Young Turk triumvirs, Djemal took steps to distance himself from the Armenian Massacres. His apparent aim was to keep open his avenues to the Allied Powers. Since his defeat at the Suez Canal in early 1915, Djemal had settled in Damascus and had come to rule Greater Syria—the southwestern provinces that today comprise Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel—almost as his private fiefdom. At the end of 1915, while the Armenian Massacres were taking place, he proposed, with Allied help, to seize the Ottoman throne for himself.

  Making use of the representative of the dominant Armenian political society, the Dashnaktsutium (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), to convey his proposals, Djemal appears to have acted on the mistaken assumption that saving the Armenians—as distinct from merely exploiting their plight for propaganda purposes—was an important Allied objective. In December 1915 Dr Zavriev, a Dashnak emissary to the Allies, informed the Russian government that Djemal was prepared to overthrow the Ottoman government. This was the month that the Allied evacuation from Gallipoli began; in the wake of that disastrous expedition it could have been expected that the Allies would be willing to pay a price to bring hostilities with Turkey to an end.

  Djemal’s terms, as outlined by Sazanov, the Russian Foreign Minister, envisaged a free and independent Asiatic Turkey (consisting of Syria, Mesopotamia, a Christian Armenia, Cilicia, and Kurdistan as autonomous provinces) whose supreme ruler would be Djemal as Sultan. Djemal agreed in advance to the inevitable Russian demand to be given Constantinople and the Dardanelles. He also offered to take immediate steps to save the surviving Armenians. He proposed, with Allied help, to march on Constantinople to depose the Sultan and his government; and in return he asked financial aid to help reconstruct his country after the war.

  The Russians proposed to accept Djemal’s proposal, and Sazanov seemed confident that his allies would agree to do so.15 But, in March 1916, France rejected the proposal and insisted on having Cilicia (in the south of what is now Turkey) and Greater Syria for herself.

  Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, also showed himself to be unwilling to encourage revolt behind enemy lines if doing so meant foregoing the territorial gains in Asiatic Turkey that Britain had promised to her allies. In their passion for booty, the Allied governments lost sight of the condition upon which future gains were predicated: winning the war. Blinded by the prize, they did not see that there was a contest.

  Djemal’s offer afforded the Allies their one great opportunity to subvert the Ottoman Empire from within; and they let it go. Enver and Talaat never discovered Djemal’s secret correspondence with the enemy, and Djemal continued the fight against the Allies at their side.

  VI

  The Ottoman Empire benefited from the fact that it was not the principal theater of war for any of its opponents, all of whose forces and energies were concentrated elsewhere. Even so, its wartime performance was surprisingly successful. Engaged in a three-front war, the Ottoman Empire defeated Britain and France in the west in 1915–16, crushed the advancing armies of British India in the east at the same time, and in the north held off the Russian invasion forces.

  Behind enemy lines, the Ottoman performance was equally outstanding. Turkish and German subversion had made a shambles of the Allied-controlled Persian Empire. In striking contrast, as of mid-1916 Britain had failed in her efforts to win over the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and Russia’s appeal to the Armenians had been followed only by their dreadful massacre.

  Would Hussein’s imminent revolt in June 1916 turn the situation around? Would it prove any more successful than previous Allied efforts to stir up trouble behind Ottoman lines? On the basis of the record to mid-1916 the chances would have had to be rated as low, but Clayton and his colleagues were hopeful, and if they were right they stood to win a great prize. For Hussein’s imminent revolt was Cairo’s chance to win the war in the East, and to salvage the wartime reputation of its leader, Lord Kitchener.

  27

  KITCHENER’S LAST MISSION

  In London direction of the war was now entrusted not to the War Minister, but to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The Cabinet had reason to believe that Kitchener had lost his touch even in the area he was supposed to know best—the East. The only British military operation he had opposed there until the en
d—the evacuation from Gallipoli—was the only one to have proved a brilliant success.

  Asquith, who believed it politically impossible to let Kitchener resign and yet found it awkward to retain him in office, hit on the expedient of sending the War Minister away on another long mission—a mission to Russia. A trip there—he of course was obliged to travel by ship—would take most of the last half of 1916. A long, dangerous voyage in arctic seas was much to ask of the aging soldier from the tropics, but he accepted his new assignment and made his preparations to depart.

  His long run of luck had finally run out. If he had died in 1914 he would have been remembered as the greatest British general since Wellington. Had he died in 1915 he would have been remembered as the prophet who foretold the nature and duration of the First World War and as the organizer of Britain’s mass army. But in 1916 he had become the aging veteran of a bygone era who could not cope with the demands placed upon him-in changing times. “They expect too much of me, these fellows,” he is supposed to have confided to a Cabinet colleague; “I don’t know Europe, I don’t know England, and I don’t know the British Army.”1 His heart and mind remained with the colonial armies of Egypt and India that he had reorganized and that were trained to do his bidding. In modern Europe he was lost.

  Shortly before noon on Friday, 2 June 1916, Lord Kitchener went to the King’s Cross railroad station almost unattended and unnoticed. The train was a minute and a half late in starting, and he was seized with impatience; he hated delay. Once started, the train sped him to his port of embarkation.

  At Scapa Flow, the headquarters of the Grand Fleet off the northern tip of Scotland, Kitchener and the faithful FitzGerald boarded the armored cruiser Hampshire the afternoon of 5 June 1916, bound for the Russian port of Archangel. The departure route of the Hampshire had already been plotted, but should have been changed. Naval Intelligence, which earlier had broken the German radio code, intercepted a message to the German minelaying submarine U75 in late May. It indicated that the submarine was to mine the passage that the Hampshire intended to follow. Two further intercepts confirmed the information, as did sightings of the submarine. In the confusion at British headquarters at Scapa Flow, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the British naval commander, and his staff somehow failed to read or to understand the warnings that Naval Intelligence sent to their flagship. (At a court of inquiry that convened later in 1916 to look into the matter, Admiral Jellicoe succeeded in hiding the existence of these intelligence warnings, which were revealed only in 1985.)2

  The seas were stormy, but Kitchener refused to delay his departure. Admiral Jellicoe’s officers had misread the weather charts, which should have shown them that the storm would intensify, and they believed that it would abate. At 4:45 p.m. the Hampshire put out to sea into a raging gale. The weather proved too much for the destroyers assigned to escort duty; after two hours, they turned back. The Hampshire steamed ahead alone. Sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 it struck one of the U75’s mines and went down with almost all hands.

  As soon as the mine exploded, Kitchener and FitzGerald came out on the starboard quarterdeck, followed by officers of their staff. One survivor later recalled that the “Captain was calling to Lord K to go to a boat but Lord K apparently did not hear him or else took no notice.”3 Escape from the doomed vessel seemed out of the question, and the field marshal made no move to attempt it. He stood on deck, calm and expressionless, for about a quarter of an hour. The only survivor of the Hampshire who is still alive has never forgotten a last glimpse of him, dressed in a greatcoat, standing on deck and waiting impassively for the ship to sink.4 Then Lord Kitchener and his ship went down beneath the turbulent waves.

  FitzGerald’s body was washed ashore, but Kitchener disappeared into the depths of the sea. A popular legend sprang up in Britain soon afterward, according to which Lord Kitchener had escaped from death and would one day return.

  28

  HUSSEIN’S REVOLT

  I

  By a coincidence that often has been remarked upon, Lord Kitchener was lost at sea just as the Emir Hussein of Mecca proclaimed his rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Hussein ordered it when he discovered that the Young Turks intended to depose him. But British officialdom in Cairo and Khartoum, unaware of this, regarded the rebellion as an accomplishment of the school of Kitchener—of Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs—and of their tactic of dangling vague but grandiose prospects of future glory in front of the Emir’s eyes. The Residency had been working to generate the uprising for almost nine months. When the news of the desert uprising reached Cairo, Wyndham Deedes called it “a great triumph for Clayton.”1

  For Hussein, it was something closer to an admission of defeat; his policy had been to remain neutral and collect bribes from both sides. He moved to the Allied side reluctantly, forced to do so by the imminent danger that the Young Turks would overthrow him. Having already discovered that they intended to depose him eventually, he found himself exposed to new risks, starting in the summer of 1915, when Djemal Pasha began to crush dissent in the Arab circles with which Hussein (through his son Feisal) had been in contact in Damascus. Djemal acted on the basis of documents obtained from the French consulates in Beirut and Damascus that betrayed the names of Arab conspirators and of at least one key British agent. Arrests were made. Interrogations, torture, and trials by military court took place. On 21 August 1915 eleven persons convicted of treason were executed. In the following months there were more arrests and more trials. A number of those arrested were prominent figures in Arab life. Among those undergoing torture and interrogation in jail were people who could have revealed details of Feisal’s conversations with the secret societies al-’Ahd and al-Fatat, and of Hussein’s promises to Kitchener and McMahon. The Emir could not be sure that they would remain silent. He sent pleas to Djemal and to the Porte asking that they show mercy to the prisoners. The pleas only compromised him further.

  Then, in April 1916, Hussein learned from Djemal that a picked and specially trained Ottoman force of 3,500 men was about to march through the Hejaz to the tip of the Arabian peninsula, where an accompanying party of German officers planned to establish a telegraph station. The Ottoman force was sufficiently strong to crush Hussein as it marched through his domain. The news threw the Emir into hasty and improvised activity; it obliged him to strike first, and to seek the protection of the Royal Navy along his coast. On 6 May there were twenty-one new executions in Beirut and Damascus; the news was unexpected, and speeded up Hussein’s schedule.

  Prudently, Hussein had already obtained more than 50,000 gold pounds from the Porte with which to raise and equip forces to combat the British. To this he added the first installment of a substantial payment from Britain with which to raise and equip forces to combat the Turks.2 The revolt in the Hejaz was proclaimed sometime between 5 and 10 June 1916. The Royal Navy immediately moved along the Hejaz coastline, which deterred the German-Turkish force from advancing further.

  The Arab Bureau believed that the uprising would draw support throughout the Moslem and Arabic-speaking worlds. Most important of all, it believed that the revolt would draw support from what the British believed to be a largely Arabic-speaking Ottoman army. Feisal and Hussein reported that they expected to be joined by about 100,000 Arab troops.3 That would have been about a third of the Ottoman army’s fighting strength. According to other reports, Hussein expected to be joined by about 250,000 troops, or almost the whole of the Turkish army’s functional combat troops.4

  In the event, the Arab revolt for which Hussein hoped never took place. No Arabic units of the Ottoman army came over to Hussein. No political or military figures of the Ottoman Empire defected to him and the Allies. The powerful secret military organization that al-Faruqi had promised would rally to Hussein failed to make itself known. A few thousand tribesmen, subsidized by British money, constituted Hussein’s troops. He had no regular army. Outside the Hejaz and its tribal neighbors, there was no visible support for the revolt in any part of th
e Arabic-speaking world. The handful of non-Hejazi officers who joined the Emir’s armed forces were prisoners-of-war or exiles who already resided in British-controlled territories.

  An initial military problem was that the Emir’s small band of tribal followers were helpless against Ottoman artillery. Their attacks on the Turkish garrisons in Mecca and nearby Taif were repulsed, as were their attacks on Medina and on the port of Jeddah. British ships and airplanes came to the rescue by attacking Jeddah. Once the port was secured the British landed Moslem troops from the Egyptian army, who moved inland to help Hussein take Mecca and Taif. The port of Rabegh, defended by fewer than thirty Turks, was captured with ease, as was the port of Yanbo. Thus the British Royal Navy won control of the Red Sea coast of Arabia, and established a British presence ashore in the ports.

  Hussein would not allow Christian British military units to move inland. His expressed view, which the British found parochial, was that it would compromise his position in the Moslem world and would be deeply resented if non-Moslems were to enter the land that embraced the Holy Places.

  The problem was that Hussein on his own was no match for the Turks. The activist Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan, wrote to Clayton that Britain ought to send in troops whether Hussein wanted them or not. He noted that he had been in favor of sending a British expeditionary force to the Hejaz all along.5 But Wingate’s superiors disagreed with him, and it became British policy, insofar as it was possible, to supply professional military assistance to the Hejaz from among Moslem officers and troops. In a land of intrigue, this policy was also beset with difficulties.