A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  The state secretary of the German Navy Department told the leaders of his country’s Foreign Office and General Staff that it was absolutely crucial for Germany to get hold of Baku’s oil and that the Ottoman attack on the city therefore had to be stopped.5 The German leaders told the Russian ambassador in Berlin that they would take steps to stop the Ottoman advance if Russia gave assurances that she would supply at least some of Baku’s oil to Germany. “Of course, we will agree,” Lenin cabled to Stalin in reporting this development.6

  Baku was also important strategically. As a major port it dominated Caspian shipping and would enable Enver to move his armies by sea, if he chose, to the eastern shore of the Caspian, where the Moslems of Turkestan could be expected to rally to his standard and where he would avail himself of the railroad network that the Russians had built there to enable them to reach Afghanistan and attack India.

  The British, keenly aware of the danger, viewed Enver’s progress with foreboding.

  III

  Two tiny British military missions in northern Persia watched these events from across the frontier with no clear idea of what role they should play in them.7

  Major-General L. C. Dunsterville was appointed chief of the British mission to the Caucasus in early 1918. Had he ever reached Tiflis, the Transcaucasian capital, he would have served as British Representative there as well, where his objective would have been to help stiffen the resistance of the Russian army in Turkey against an Ottoman advance.

  Dunsterville’s convoy of forty-one Ford cars and vans traveled via Mesopotamia into Persia and headed toward a Persian port on the Caspian Sea then called Enzeli (later renamed Pahlevi) on the road to Transcaucasia. By the time the British arrived, most of Transcaucasia had fallen into Ottoman or German hands. A worried British government ordered Dunsterville to clear the road to Enzeli of a revolutionary band of Persian nationalists, allied to the Bolsheviks but also acting in the interests of the advancing Ottoman Army of Islam.

  As Enver’s forces approached Baku, the British government debated what role Dunsterville’s tiny force should or could play in the unexpected battle for Central Asia in which Turks, Germans, Russians, and others were involved. The question also arose of what Major-General Wilfred Malleson’s mission ought to be. General Malleson was an officer in the Military Intelligence branch of the Indian Army, who had served for years on the staff of Lord Kitchener. Simla had sent him out with six officers to Meshed, in eastern Persia, to watch over developments in the vast lands of Russian Turkestan that were believed to be Enver’s next objective. Dunsterville was to watch over the lands to the west of the Caspian Sea, and Malleson was to watch over the lands to the east.

  In Malleson’s area of responsibility, there were several matters that concerned the British military leaders. One of these was the large store of cotton which might fall into enemy hands. Another was the presence of some 35,000 German and Austrian prisoners-of-war who might be released either by the Bolsheviks or by Enver’s forces.

  To the British leaders the intentions of the enemy forces at work west and east of the Caspian were obscured by the growing political fragmentation in those areas. Politically the Germans appeared not only to be hand-in-glove locally with the anti-Bolsheviks in Tiflis, but also to be involved with the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, while having fallen out with the Turks, who were their public allies but their secret enemies. Enver’s allied force of Ottoman and Azerbaijani Moslem Turks and Tartars was on the march toward Baku, which was governed by a divided Soviet that reflected a division within the city itself. The Azerbaijani half of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, while the Armenians, fearing massacre, were in favor of anybody but the Turks. The Social Revolutionaries and other non-Bolshevik Russians feared British intervention, but in the end grew to fear Turkey more. Stepan Shaumian, the Bolshevik chairman of the Soviet, while leading the resistance to the Ottoman-Azerbaijani allies, even preferred Turkish rule to a British intervention and, in any event, had received direct orders from Lenin and Stalin not to accept British aid.

  In Turkestan a Bolshevik-controlled Russian Soviet was in control of the oasis town of Tashkent, but its forces had been beaten by the native Turks of Bukhara, and had been obliged to recognize the Emir of Bukhara—whose domains had fallen under Russian sway during the Great Game in the nineteenth century—as once again an independent ruler. Rumors reaching London indicated that the newly independent khanates of Bukhara and Khiva might be entering into alliance with the Porte.8

  As viewed from London, the chaos in Central Asia was a source of danger and promise. The danger was that it might permit an assault on India, and on the Indian Army in Persia and Mesopotamia, that could ignite flames impossible to extinguish. According to a General Staff memorandum:

  [Germany] will make use of the Pan-Turanian movement and of Mohammedan fanaticism to fan into a flame the ever glowing embers of a religious war, in order to let loose on India the pent-up tide of a Moslem invasion…While Russia was healthy and while Persia was under control we were able to deal with this difficulty, but if German agents had free access to the lawless tribes of Afghanistan and the frontiers of India, bred as they have been on tales of the legendary wealth of loot which might be theirs, innumerable hordes of savage warriors could swarm into the plains, ravaging, murdering, destroying. The institutions built by long years of careful government would be swept away in a few short weeks and the attenuated garrison of the country would have to be largely reinforced from troops badly needed elsewhere. None but White* troops could be trusted.9

  Since British policy-makers believed the Russian Bolshevik government was in the pay of imperial Germany, and were not aware of the extent to which the Porte and the Wilhelmstrasse had parted company, it appeared in 1918 that the Germans had taken control of northern Asia, were in process of taking over the center of Asia, and were preparing to mount an attack on British positions in southern Asia. It fitted in with the wartime view that Germany aimed at a world empire and with the fear that, when the war was over, all of Asia might be left as a vast slave colony in Germany’s possession, and its wealth and raw materials would fuel German industry and allow it to dominate the globe.

  Leo Amery proposed to Lloyd George that Britain should adopt a strategy to counter that threat. If Britain were to capture the center of Asia, then the partition of Russia between Germany and Britain, which Milner had proposed the year before, would in effect be achieved. At the end of 1917 Amery noted in his diary that “The war is going East with a vengeance and we shall find ourselves fighting for the rest of it to decide where the Anglo-German boundary shall run across Asia.” The French, looking to eastern Europe for their postwar gains, would fail, he predicted, “while we poor meek British will probably find our non-aggressive little Empire at the end of the war including Turkestan, Persia, and the Caucasus!”10

  This represented yet a further enlargement of the vast section of the globe that Amery regarded as properly falling under British hegemony. Like Milner’s other associates, his essential focus was on “the whole of the great semi-circle which runs from Cape Town to Cairo, thence through Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia to India and so through Singapore to Australia and New Zealand.” Within that area, he wrote to the Prime Minister of Australia in late 1917, “What we want…is a British Monroe Doctrine which should keep that portion of the world free from future interference of ambitious powers…”11

  By June of 1918 Amery had come to feel (and to advise Lloyd George) that, if German expansion in Asia were not stopped, this “Southern British World” could not “go about its peaceful business without constant fear of German aggression.” He wrote that “as soon as this ‘little side show’ in the West is over…we shall have to take the war for the mastery of Asia in hand seriously.”12 This harked back to his view that British foreign policy was flawed by giving Britain’s interests in Europe priority over her interests elsewhere. He wrote in 1917 that “The great danger to my mind is that the Foreign Office and
the public…take too European a point of view about peace terms, instead of looking at them from the perspective of an Empire which is distributed all over the world…”13 He also thought that they were taking too European a point of view about the war. He discerned fresh dangers in Asia.

  He wrote to Smuts on 16 October 1917, warning that Enver would gain “some five million” Turks who dwelt in Transcaucasia and then would link up with the Turks of Turkestan.14 Events early in the following year seemed to confirm this view.

  Amery, like other British military and political leaders in the first half of 1918, was persuaded that the German and Ottoman conquest of Transcaucasia demonstrated that Germany was in process of executing the “Grand Design” outlined in John Buchan’s Greenmantle. In Buchan’s adventure novel, the Germans were planning a sweep through Islamic Asia to and across the Indian frontier to destroy the British Empire in the east and replace it with their own.15 Thus in waging war as in making peace, according to Amery, British forces should be moved up to a defensive line running all the way across the former Russian Empire from the Urals in the west to Siberia in the east.16

  Neither the War Office nor the Government of India was willing to make available the forces for such large schemes in distant places; and Amery went so far as to propose that Japan and the United States should be invited to associate themselves in the enterprise of occupying the Urals to Siberia line.17 British and Allied military leaders also urged that Japan should be asked to send armies through Siberia and across Asia to join battle with Enver’s forces west of the Caspian Sea.18

  But Lloyd George and Lord Milner were so completely occupied with the war in Europe and Palestine that Amery could not attract their attention; and in the absence of their leadership, their subordinates failed to develop a coherent policy. Breathtakingly ambitious geopolitical goals were outlined by Amery and by general officers of the high command, but no resources were allocated and no strategy was put in motion to achieve them.

  So, without guidance and without support, the tiny missions sent out by the British Government of India headed into the interior of Asia.

  IV

  Baku, the oil capital of Central Asia, was a focus of activity in the summer of 1918, as Bolshevik leaders fled the city. A new non-Bolshevik government was hastily formed, which called in the British. Dunsterville asked and received permission from his superiors to enter and defend Baku. His advance guard arrived in Baku 4 August, thwarting German hopes of obtaining Baku’s oil, whereupon the Germans decided that Turkey was a lesser danger than Britain just as the Bolsheviks were reaching the opposite conclusion.19 The Germans asked permission of the Bolshevik government to launch an attack on British-held Baku, either alone or in combination with Enver’s Army of Islam. The Bolshevik government agreed to accept a German occupation of Baku, but not in combination with the Army of Islam; for even the British, according to Petrograd, were preferable to the Turks. But the German force in Georgia was too weak to spare troops in time for a campaign against Baku—and that left the Army of Islam and the British mission as the only contestants in the field.

  Dunsterville’s force amounted to about 900 officers and men according to one source, or about 1,400 according to another.20 The Army of Islam was estimated to be ten or twenty times greater. When it attacked Baku, the British were on their own; local forces proved to be of little help. On 14 September Dunsterville evacuated his forces from the city and withdrew to Persia, having occupied the city—and deprived the enemy of oil—for six weeks. A British Reuters’ dispatch described the Baku evacuation as one of the “thrillingest chapters” of the war.21

  At about the time that Dunsterville marched to the relief of Baku, General Malleson, also by invitation, marched to the relief of Turkestan, whose government had been formed by anti-Bolshevik Russian Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries with the aid of railroad workers. The Turkestan government proclaimed its independence from the Bolshevik Russian authorities; and, in responding to its appeal, Malleson in effect was intervening in a Russian civil war—an act prompted by fears that Germany would get Turkestan’s cotton supplies, and that the German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war would be freed.

  The Turkish-speaking native population of Turkestan, while opposed to both the Bolshevik and the anti-Bolshevik Russian settlers, threw their support behind the latter when forced to choose between the two. It was expected that once Enver’s Army of Islam arrived, they would support it.

  There on the plains of Turkestan—in the middle of nowhere, as far as the western world was concerned—the confused armies clashed. On the battlefields of Dushak, Kaakha, and Merv, General Malleson’s British-Indian forces fought alongside Enver’s Turkish supporters against Soviet Russians aided by imperial German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war who had been released and armed by the Bolsheviks. Alliances had been reversed: it was now Britain and Turkey versus Russia and Germany.

  General Malleson did not withdraw from Central Asia until April 1919, half a year after the war ended; and he withdrew only when the anti-Bolshevik White armies of General Denikin occupied the area. His intervention, which initially was aimed at stopping the progress of the Ottoman and German empires, in the end was directed against the Bolsheviks.* At the time the British authorities did not distinguish clearly among the three; all of them seemed to be ranged together on the enemy side in the world war.

  The Government of India had also sent out a third mission, consisting of three officers who were unaware of the Dunsterville and Malleson forays into former Russian territory. They were sent to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan to observe developments from across the border. Once there they decided to cross into Russian Turkestan and to proceed to Tashkent—the seat of the local Soviet government—in an attempt to win the cooperation of the Bolshevik authorities in the matters of the prisoners-of-war and of the cotton. Only when they arrived in Tashkent did they learn that Malleson had intervened on behalf of the rival government.

  Two of the three officers returned to Kashgar. The third, Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey, decided to remain in Tashkent to represent British interests in the event that the local Bolshevik regime collapsed. When he learned that the local authorities were preparing to take measures against him, he disguised himself and disappeared. In hiding he took many identities, among them those of a Hungarian cook, a Rumanian coachman, and an Albanian butterfly collector. He remained undercover until 1920, gathering information as events unfolded. At the end he posed as an agent of Bolshevik Russian counterintelligence. Soviet authorities, greatly exaggerating, credited him with being the mastermind of vast intrigues against them.

  London and Petrograd, having been wartime allies not long before, were now enemies. Between 1917 and 1918, the political world had turned upside down.

  V

  As Ottoman fortunes prospered in the east, they crumbled in the south and west. A secret report to David Lloyd George in 1918 indicated that Enver was talking of an Ottoman empire from the Adriatic to India; yet at other times he supposedly spoke of surrendering. Enver was reported to have predicted gloomily that “if the Germans won this War, Turkey would be Germany’s vassal.”22

  Ludendorff, the presiding genius of the German General Staff, claimed that the Porte could not be trusted. The oil of Baku was essential to Germany, he stated, but the Turks had shown that they intended to keep all the resources of Transcaucasia for themselves.23 In response to an inquiry from the Wilhelmstrasse to the General Staff, Ludendorff reported in September 1918 that the military authorities had been studying the consequences should Turkey betray Germany and go over to the Allied side.24

  The close collaboration between Germany and Bolshevik Russia infuriated the Porte. Against a background of Turkish press criticism of German meddling in Transcaucasia, Talaat sent word to Berlin that if Germany continued to make arrangements with Russia—the “enemy of yesterday and the enemy of tomorrow”—at Turkey’s expense, the Ottoman government might have to go its own way in the war
.25 On 7 September 1918 Talaat went to Berlin to argue for organizing the Turkish-speaking millions of Central Asia for a military crusade against Britain—and Russia.26

  At the same time Britain, too, moved closer to war against Russia. Malleson remained in Central Asia, where the execution of a group of Bolshevik commissars by his anti-Bolshevik allies was blamed on Britain by the Petrograd government. On the other side of the Caspian, a sudden collapse of the Central Powers followed by the soon-to-be-discussed armistices of autumn 1918, led British forces to return through Baku to replace Ottoman and German troops in the independent republics of Transcaucasia. Thus the southern stretches of the former Russian Empire on both sides of the Caspian Sea appeared to be in the hands of anti-Bolshevik or separatist groups under British protection.

  A significant observation was made by a British participant in the first battle between Malleson’s force and the Bolsheviks in Central Asia. Both the anti-Bolshevik troops and the Bolshevik troops, he noted, were wearing the same uniforms. “At close quarters,” he wrote, “it was difficult to distinguish friend from enemy.”27 By the autumn of 1918 that was true not merely in Central Asia but all across the Middle East.

  39

  BY THE SHORES OF TROY

  I

  In the summer of 1918 the Chief of the Imperial General Staff advised the Imperial War Cabinet in London that victory in Europe could not be won before the middle of 1919 and was far more likely to be won in the summer of 1920. Commanders in the field took a more hopeful view of the prospects for an early victory, but they had frequently been wrong in the past, and in London their cheerful predictions were viewed with considerable skepticism.