by Alan Palmer
Even before the final collapse of the army, Ambassador Lowther’s reports to the Foreign Office in London were anticipating yet another political coup during the summer months.27 There is no doubt that the British authorities in Egypt hoped to restore Kamil, trusting him as a ‘tried and convinced defender of the traditional friendship between Turkey and Great Britain’. But, though Kamil was smuggled back to Constantinople from his native Cyprus, he was hastily whisked away again, and it was the CUP who benefited from the next move in the ruthless power game. On 11 June Mahmud Shevket was shot dead in Beyazit Square as his car left the War Ministry for the Sublime Porte buildings. Cemal, as Military Governor, reacted swiftly. The murder was blamed on the political opposition, the Liberal Union Party, many of whose members were shipped off to Sinope under close arrest. Courts martial sentenced several Liberal leaders to death—often, as in the case of Prince Sabaheddin, in absentia. Now at last the CUP Young Turks seized power. The Committee’s General Secretary, Mehmed Said Halim Pasha—one of Muhammad Ali’s many grandsons—succeeded Shevket as Grand Vizier and was to hold office for more than three and a half years. But the real rulers of the empire were the famous triumvirate: Talaat, as Minister of the Interior; Cemal, as military governor of the capital; and Enver, who for the moment was content to enhance his authority by declining ministerial office, remaining a front-line soldier, and marrying the Sultan’s niece, Princess Emine Naciye. At the time of Shevket’s murder, the Princess was not quite fifteen years old.
Bulgarian folly, and his own boldness, completed Enver’s ascendancy and consolidated the CUP’s hold on power.28 Resentment at Graeco-Serbian gains, especially in parts of Macedonia which they considered their own, led the Bulgarians to launch a surprise attack on their former allies on the night of 29–30 June, 1913. After six days of heavy fighting, King Ferdinand’s troops were in a desperate position, made worse by the decision of Roumania on 11 July to seize the Dobruja, thus opening up a northern Front. Two days later the Ottoman army thrust westwards from the Enez-Midye line, encountering little resistance. As the army approached Edirne, Colonel Enver led his cavalry at the gallop ahead of the marching columns, and thus became the warrior-liberator of the city. He went at once to Sinan’s masterpiece, the Selimiye mosque and, as a good Muslim who always carried a copy of the Koran in his officer’s tunic, offered prayers to Allah for the city’s deliverance. Although far from popular with many brother-officers, Enver’s instinctive showmanship made him appear a hero-protector to some 200,000 bewildered refugees from the Balkan provinces who remained in or around the capital that summer.
Revised peace terms, settled in Bucharest, advanced the Enez-Midye frontier so as to return Edirne to Ottoman sovereignty. The CUP could thus claim some tangible fruits of victory in the Second Balkan War, an essential need if its propagandists were to rekindle the Young Turk enthusiasm of the 1908 Revolution. On paper, the achievements of five years of constitutional rule looked meagre. The Sultan’s powers remained clipped, there were more schools, more effective policing and better urban sewerage (especially in the capital); and in the more enlightened cities the professional status of women was improved, giving them for the first time opportunities to become doctors, lawyers or civil servants. In this respect, and through tentative experiments in economic nationalism, the Young Turks continued the work of the Tanzimat era, while providing the republican reformers of the next generation with guidelines on what might be developed further—and what should be left well alone. These successes were offset by the repressive statutes enacted in the early months of Mehmed V’s reign, and thereafter by a rapid diminution of parliament’s influence. There was something symbolic about the fire of January 1910 which, sparked off by an electrical fault, swiftly destroyed the parliamentary chambers newly created in the Çirağan Palace and forced the deputies to develop their political skills in the cramped galleries of the Fine Arts Academy. Although the Sultan’s male subjects were allowed to exercise their right to vote in the winter of 1913–14, military repression left the CUP as the only organized political party to contest the elections. By then Unionist candidates were narrowly Turkish in ideology, rather than advocating a racially egalitarian Ottoman commonwealth like many earlier Young Turks. Inevitably, in the absence of an alternative party, the Opposition (in so far as it existed at all by 1913) was also nationalistic in structure, with a large Arab group and smaller bodies representing the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities. Most deputies had been vetted by the CUP before even seeking election.29
A pride in Turkish language and culture had shown itself before the turn of the century. It was intensified, however, by the disastrous loss of territories in the five years which followed the Young Turk Revolution. In 1878–9 Abdulhamid II had been forced to cede two-fifths of his lands. Between 1908 and 1913 another 425,000 square miles—or over a third of the total remaining area of the Empire—passed out of Ottoman sovereignty; and, even after the recovery of Edirne, the Sultan’s foothold in Europe in 1914 still comprised no more than 4,500 square miles of what had for so long been the great imperial recruiting ground of Rumelia. If the CUP triumvirate was to prevent the crumbling away still further of the empire, it seemed essential to harness Turkish national pride to the service of the one institution which they understood, the Ottoman army. Shortly before his assassination Shevket had told the German ambassador that his country must have a special role in reshaping the Ottoman State: the army would be reformed ‘under the almost dictatorial control of a German General,’ he declared.30 Enver saw in the murdered Grand Vizier’s professed intention a testament of faith in two armies which he, like Shevket, held in high respect. On 30 June 1913 Kaiser William II appointed General Liman von Sanders to lead a new military mission to Constantinople.31
CHAPTER 15
GERMANY’S ALLY
FAMILIARITY WITH SUCH EPIC LEGENDS AS GALLIPOLI AND Lawrence’s Arab Revolt make it hard to appreciate that, even as late as midsummer in 1914, the Ottoman Empire remained outside the network of rival alliances, free to choose between the Central Powers and the Entente or to guard its neutrality. Throughout the July Crisis there was still no certainty which way Said Halim’s government would turn. Relations with Britain and France had improved considerably in the preceding twelve months; and both countries were better trading partners for the empire as a whole than Germany or Austria–Hungary. Much progress had been made towards international collaboration in the management of the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was registered in London in 1911–12 and committed to developing the oil resources of the vilayets of Mosul and Baghdad (Iraq). So unruffled were Anglo-Turkish relations that, a fortnight after the Sarajevo murders, the British ambassador returned home on leave. As late as 21 July, Ottoman Bonds went on sale in London to finance British enterprises on the Bosphorus.1
Yet no one questioned that Germany’s political influence there was considerable. Kaiser William II assumed that his empire still enjoyed a predominance which he, personally, was determined to uphold. In December 1913 he had urged the forty officers of General Liman von Sanders’s new Military Mission to ‘work unobtrusively . . . steadfastly and harmoniously’ for ‘the Germanization of the Turkish army’;2 and with realistic practicality he insisted that, while Goltz had managed with an annual 30,000 marks for baksheesh, Liman’s fund ‘to use as he thought fit’ might creep up to a million marks a year in what was becoming a highly competitive and inflationary market.
Few ministers or officials in Berlin shared the Kaiser’s confident enthusiasm for the mysterious East. Privately the German ambassador reckoned Turkey ‘worthless as an ally’.3 The Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which remained an obsessive interest of the Kaiser, could never serve as an axis of policy, for by 1913–14 the whole project was under strain. Completion of the line needed the injection of more capital, a grant of further privileges to its German investors, and the waiving of objections to its most southern route by the British (who, having settled disputes with the Ottoman authorit
ies in August 1913, were unable to complete parallel negotiations with Germany until the following June). Nor could Berlin rely on constant support from the ‘pro-Germans’ in Constantinople. Although the Kaiser welcomed the appointment of Enver as War Minister in January 1914, within ten weeks ‘Turkey’s last hope’ (as William had then called him) was quarrelling seriously with Liman. The hero-liberator of Edirne was infuriated by German attempts to secure key commands for Prussian gunnery experts in the forts of the Bosphorus. If Russian sources may be believed, already in March 1914 ‘German tyranny’ was so deeply resented in the Ottoman officer corps in the capital that some thought was being given to expedient ways of removing Liman by assassination.4
The CUP leaders themselves would not have sanctioned so rash an act, though they never became the pro-German puppets depicted by Entente wartime propaganda. Talaat, from 1913 to 1918 the most influential figure at the centre of Ottoman government, at first favoured closer relations with Russia, believing that he could strike a good bargain with the Tsar’s ministers alarmed by the mounting German military presence on the Straits. In February 1914 Talaat accepted Russian treaty proposals giving some protection to the Christian communities in the eastern Armenian vilayets; and in May he led an Ottoman delegation to the Crimea, where he was received in audience by Tsar Nicholas II at Livadia and tentatively put forward alliance proposals to the Russian Foreign Minister, Sazonov.5 Talaat’s colleague at the Ministry of Finance, Mehmed Cavit, favoured improved relations with France. Parisian nominees still dominated the Ottoman Public Debt Commission, and were ready to authorize a further loan, when bankruptcy again faced the empire. They shared control of the Ottoman Bank with the British, and gave shrewd advice to the Ministry of Finance; and French experts were also entrusted with organizing the gendarmerie in the capital and several other cities and ports. Nor was Cavit the only CUP leader to look to Paris. In the second week of July 1914 Ahmed Cemal visited the Quai d’Orsay, where he let it be known that, given the right conditions, the Ottoman government ‘would orientate its policy towards the Triple Entente’.6 Neither Russia nor France responded positively to these Young Turk initiatives.
While Enver inherited from Shevket’s policy a new and powerful German military mission, Cemal as Minister of Marine inherited an equally strong commitment to seeking more and more British aid for refurbishing the Ottoman fleet. In the spring of 1912 Rear-Admiral Arthur Limpus became the third flag officer of the Royal Navy in five years to be seconded to the Turks as a senior adviser, and by August 1914 Limpus had more than seventy British naval officers attached to his mission (an almost identical number to the German army officers who came with Liman von Sanders, although the size of the German mission increased rapidly with the outbreak of war in Europe). Limpus’s immediate predecessor, Admiral Williams, had already encouraged the purchase of a dreadnought, and the British-built Reshadieh was launched in September 1913, although it was some months before she could sail for Turkey. Before the end of the year Admiral Limpus scored two notable successes: Armstrong Whitworth and Vickers received contracts to build new naval dockyards; and Armstrongs also undertook to complete a second and even larger battleship, Sultan Osman I. Cavit and Cemal were certain they could raise the three and a half million pounds required for such prestigious symbols of imperial might as the two warships.
Public excitement over the new naval programme matched the equally well-orchestrated enthusiasm for the Hejaz ‘pilgrim’s railway’ in the later years of Abdulhamid’s reign. The CUP Clubs, set up in towns and large villages over the previous two years, supervised battleship fund-raising in local communities, emphasizing in reports for foreign consumption how even schoolchildren would bring in their contributions to so great a patriotic cause. A celebratory ‘Navy Week’ was planned on the Golden Horn, when it was proposed that the whole of the Sultan’s fleet should escort the new battleships through the Dardanelles to inaugurate the era of Ottoman Naval Power.7
So quickly were the two ships completed in British yards that four hundred Turkish officers and seamen reached Tyneside in July 1914 to sail them to Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean on their commissioning voyage to the Straits. The men’s arrival coincided with the mobilization of Britain’s resources for war: on 1 August, before the crescent flag could be run up, both vessels were seized by the Admiralty and ‘temporarily’ commissioned in the Royal Navy. News of the Admiralty’s action, telegraphed at once to Constantinople, caused dismay and consternation.8 The anger of the Turks was fed by an anti-British press campaign, financed by the German embassy, which understandably made much of the British failure to offer immediate compensation. The seizure of the ships discredited sympathizers with the Entente in Said Halim’s cabinet. For several weeks the ‘pro-Germans’ had argued that, if Germany and Austria–Hungary won a war from which the Ottomans stood aside, the victors would ruthlessly partition the Empire. Now the Entente Powers looked no less cynical: not only did they remain deaf to overtures for an alliance; they showed apparent contempt for the CUP’s hopes of restoring Ottoman pride in the empire. On 2 August Said Halim and Enver concluded a formal alliance with Germany, so secret that Cavit, Cemal and most of their cabinet colleagues were kept in ignorance of its existence for several weeks. The alliance treaty provided only for military action against Russia—in which case it was accepted that Liman von Sanders would have ‘an effective influence on the general direction of the [Ottoman] army’.
It has been claimed that the conclusion of the secret treaty ‘was a supreme blunder, which brought down the Ottoman empire’.9 Yet the alliance terms left the Porte with room to manoeuvre. Enver and Said Halim continued to press for definite promises of treaty revision in the Balkans before committing themselves to military action; Germany, they urged, should put pressure on Bulgaria and Greece to retrocede parts of Thrace and islands in the Aegean; but there was no response in Berlin. As late as the middle of August, the British ambassador was still emphasizing the pro-Entente dispositions of both Ahmed Cemal and Dr Nazim, and he urged the First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill) to send a ‘sympathetic and friendly message to the Minister of Marine’. Churchill had already telegraphed an appeal to Enver, whom he knew and admired, counselling him to avoid entanglement with Germany. Now he sent a further message, setting out clearly the compensation which Britain would provide for the commandeered battleships: £1,000 a day, payable each week so long as Turkey remained neutral, was proposed. Enver formally declined to accept a message which, though pleasantly phrased, carried with it a distinct insinuation of bazaar bargaining.10
The Germans could offer more than a hiring fee and ‘deep regrets’. They capitalized on Turkish resentment of Britain’s naval rebuff. On the evening of 10 August the battle-cruiser SMS Goeben and the light cruiser SMS Breslau entered the Dardanelles, after evading pursuit by the Royal Navy from the Straits of Messina eastwards. Goeben had attracted interest and envy a few months earlier when she became the largest warship ever to drop anchor off the Golden Horn. Now the fine prize was to be handed over to the Sultan—on 12 August it was announced in Berlin that Germany had sold both warships to the Turks: Goeben became the Jawuz Sultan Selim and Breslau was renamed Midilli. Although they were not so powerful as the dreadnoughts seized by the British, the two warships had one inestimable advantage: they could put to sea at once under the Ottoman flag, with German officers and crews aboard and ready for action. The British naval mission officially ceased to function on 15 August, although Admiral Limpus remained in Constantinople until the Admiralty ordered him to Malta on 9 September.11 By then Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the ‘droop-jawed, determined little man in a long ill-fitting frock coat’ whose seamanship had brought Goeben and Breslau to the Dardanelles, was flying his flag as Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman fleet; and the number of German workmen, sailors and coastal gunners on the Straits had risen to about eight hundred.12
In London it was assumed that the Ottoman Empire would soon enter the war as Germany’s all
y. There was, however, still some hesitancy in Said Halim’s cabinet and, as if to remind ministers of their duty, the German-subsidized newspapers continued to emphasize the virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice in service to the State. The effects of this press campaign were not always to Germany’s liking. An intensive Turkish nationalism, active during the Libyan and Balkan Wars and associated especially with the sociological secularist writer Ziya Gökalp, reached fever pitch that autumn. Early in September the popular mood encouraged the Young Turks to announce the abolition of Capitulations: all foreigners in the empire would henceforth be subject to Ottoman civil, criminal and commercial codes of law.13 Yet, although this move was intended in the first instance to penalize the British and French, it provoked a protest in Berlin since it also threatened the status of the increasing number of Germans serving within the Empire. Ardent Turks did not always bother to discriminate between one giaour and another. For the Young Turks in 1914, neutrality and reform would have been a wiser programme than the fulfilment of Enver’s alliance treaty.
The scale of the German victory at Tannenberg convinced both the Grand Vizier and Enver that, whatever happened on other fronts in Europe, Russia would never again possess the resources to mount a sustained offensive along any distant borders of the Tsar’s empire. The temptation to recover lost lands in the Caucasus was therefore almost irresistible. At the same time, the naval pressure from Russia’s British ally was becoming intolerable; better to seek a speedy decision by force of arms than risk slow strangulation. On 27 September Royal Navy warships patrolling off the Dardanelles stopped and turned back a Turkish torpedo-boat seeking to enter the Aegean—a less high-handed action than it sounds, for there were several Germans in the crew.14 The Turks responded by immediately closing the Straits and laying mines along the main channel. Trade between the Black Sea and the outer world at once came to an end, effectively closing the seaports of Bulgaria, Roumania, Russia and Turkey, except for coastal traffic. Thus, though Odessa and Constanza suffered from Turkey’s self-imposed blockade, so too did Trebizond, Samsun and Constantinople itself. To offset the financial loss to the empire, Germany made available from 21 October onwards the equivalent of £200 million of gold bullion, stipulating that it would be handed over to the Ottoman Treasury as soon as the Sultan declared war. On 28 October Admiral Souchon, flying his flag in Jawuz Sultan Selim, led his ships into the Black Sea and shelled Odessa, Nikolaev and Sebastopol. This raid by Souchon was decisive. A Russian ultimatum on 1 November was rejected; so, too, were British and French ultimata four days later. By the end of the first week in November the Ottoman Empire was at war. Despite the growing secularism among intellectuals in his capital, Mehmed V observed the traditional responses of a Sultan-Caliph. On 11 November he proclaimed a jihad, or Holy War, calling on all Muslims in British, Russian and French territories to rise up and smite the Infidel.15
