To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The forty-two battalions which Lyautey returned to France did not represent a net saving in manpower. Their places were taken by the territorials and reservists who policed and developed the interior, while the Foreign Legion and Senegalese tirailleurs held the outer edge. The total number of French troops in North Africa during the war varied little from pre-war totals— approaching 200,000, with 100,000 in Morocco. But plan XVII had envisaged that XIX corps, at 55,000 men in 1911 the largest of France’s corps, would release twenty-nine battalions for service in France. In practice 104 battalions were sent. Of forty battalions of Algerian and Tunisian tirailleurs, thirty-two went to France, six to Morocco, and only two remained in Algeria. Of the European population of Algeria, 73,000—or 10 per cent of the total—were called up to serve in their land of origin.149

  French North Africa, therefore, probably gave more than it took. And certainly this is the case if local recruitment is added to the equation. Tunisia raised 63,000 soldiers and 29,000 labourers, Algeria 173,000 soldiers and 78,000 labourers, and Morocco 37,000 soldiers and 35,000 labourers. Lyautey justified his policies by what Morocco could do for France. On balance he was probably right. Certainly the French public thought so. The loyalty of the North Africans to France, the image of cheerful courage associated with the tirailleurs, helped transform French colonialism from a minority interest to one of national self-esteem.

  PERSIA AND AFGHANISTAN

  Throughout the nineteenth century Britain had made it abundantly clear that it took very seriously any threat to India’s north-west frontier. In 1904, a year in which the German general staff concluded that an invasion of India from Russia was out of the question, the Committee of Imperial Defence gave consideration to Kitchener’s calculation that Britain would have to send 135,614 men to ensure the security of the subcontinent.150 The method whereby the British Expeditionary Force could be divided and its concentration in Europe prevented was therefore clear enough. From 1912 on, Moltke’s staff developed an increasing interest in India. But the paradox that confronted them did not admit of an easy resolution. The defence of India was a military responsibility and could not rest on Britain’s major bulwark, the Royal Navy; hence its attraction. But without themselves possessing mastery of the seas, the Germans were unable to threaten India in the first place. The chances of revolution from within the subcontinent diminished as British rule solidified—or so at least von der Goltz and others reported. There remained the overland route. After all, Napoleon had tried it.151

  However ambitious Moltke’s proposals for extending the war on 2 August, they did not reach this level of unreality. He spoke of rebellion in India; he suggested, too, an alliance with Persia. But he did not connect the two: the former he saw as self-contained, the latter as a buttress to Turkey and a challenge to Russia.

  Responsibility for suggesting that the threat to India might be directed through the Khyber Pass belongs not with anybody in Germany but with Enver. On 11 and 14 August 1914 the Ottoman minister of war spoke in extravagant terms to Wangenheim of the Islamic fervour of Habibullah, the Emir of Afghanistan. He implied—falsely, the Germans subsequently concluded—that officers of the Turkish army were already in contact with the Emir and with Muslims in the subcontinent. A word to Habibullah would be sufficient to unleash an Afghan invasion of India. The German foreign ministry was almost totally devoid of expertise in, and information on, Central Asia. But those whom they consulted endorsed Enver’s encouraging scenario. Oppenheim, whose expertise lay in Egypt, and Professor Ernst Jäckh, retained by the foreign ministry since 1912 as an adviser on Turkey and the Near East, served only to reinforce each other’s optimism. The former told Bethmann Hollweg that Afghanistan had 50,000 troops ready to invade India, and a Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, said that Habibullah was ‘burning with desire to attack the British rule in India’.152 Significantly, Hans von Seeckt, a staff officer of considerable accomplishments who had visited the Khyber Pass in 1907/8, was not consulted. By 26 August the foreign office had collected a group of fifteen people to form a German mission to Afghanistan.

  They arrived in Constantinople disguised as a travelling circus. Enver was not impressed: the decline in Turkish enthusiasm for the scheme can be charted from this moment. The only member of the party who was a Persian speaker was Wilhelm Wassmuss, who had been a dragoman and a fomentor of anti-British tribes in Bushire.153 The foreign office had been unable to provide maps specifically of Afghanistan; those that had been issued were copied from W. and A. K. Johnston’s general atlas of the world. Some of the group imagined that they might drive to Kabul, using oil and petrol from Baku. The fact that its task was in the first instance diplomatic, and even commercial (its organizing committee contained representatives of shipping and of industry), was reflected in its equipment and structure. The Turks relieved the Germans of the two machine-guns with which they had been provided, leaving them only with small arms of varying calibres. Administration was in the hands of a committee of five. When the military attaché at Constantinople negotiated for Wassmuss to take over the command, the others objected. They bickered all the way down to Aleppo.

  By this time the party had been reinforced to twenty-five, the new participants including Oskar von Niedermayer. Niedermayer had travelled extensively in Arabia, Persia, and India before the war; he was also an officer in the army, convinced that military organization was essential if the expedition was to succeed. Wassmuss was instructed in October that Wangenheim, as ambassador in Constantinople, was responsible for the expedition. In December Wangenheim appointed Niedermayer to the command, in Wassmuss’s stead. But Niedermayer regarded himself as the leader of an independent military force, answerable to the general staff and not the foreign officer to Berlin and not to Constantinople.

  The conflict as to the ultimate responsibility, whether it was the army’s or the foreign office’s, and the friction between the leading personalities at the local level were exacerbated in April 1915 when Berlin decided on a second mission. In January 1915 Mohamed Barkatullah, an Indian revolutionary who had been resident in Japan and then the United States, presented himself at the German consulate in Geneva. Barkatullah claimed a friendship with Habibullah’s brother, Nasrullah. The foreign ministry agreed to send a group of Indians, including Barkatullah, Kumar Mahendra Pratap, and six erstwhile prisoners of war, under the management of Werner Otto von Hentig to Kabul in order to foment rebellion across the frontier. Hentig was a diplomat who had served in Teheran. As the creature of the Indian committee in Berlin, Hentig’s party was clearly the foreign office’s pigeon, not the general staff’s. But in June 1915 Hentig and Niedermayer met in Teheran and agreed to proceed together. Nobody could decide who was the senior. The foreign office preferred to treat the two as independent. All those in the joint expedition took sides in the ensuing squabbles. Pratap—considered by his German companion to be ‘fanatical, moody and egocentric’,154 and convinced that he himself was the real leader—took delight in stoking these disputes. Ultimately, the issue became that of the subordination of the military to political control. But, even on ostensibly neutral territory, practicality gave the weight to the former, not the latter. Whatever were the achievements of the mission to Afghanistan, the credit is Niedermayer’s.

  In the autumn of 1914, therefore, German policy focused on Afghanistan, not Persia. The German ambassador in Teheran had not encouraged Moltke’s proposed alliance with the Shah: Persia was a country ‘without patriotic energy and for the moment powerless’.155 It therefore became the high road to Afghanistan, not an end in itself.

  Germany’s assessment of Persia’s weakness was well founded and widely shared. Revolution in 1906 had destroyed the traditional bases of authority without creating a substitute. The Shah had accepted the election of an assembly (the Majlis) and the creation of a constitutional monarchy. But the liberalizing inclinations of the Majlis upset Islamic interests, and the two groups which had united to effect the revolution—the commercial classes and the
ulema—burst asunder. Muhammed Ali, who succeeded as Shah in 1907, exploited the clash to close the Majlis in 1908. Those democratic nationalists who escaped his purge rallied in Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan and the centre—by virtue of its trade with Russia and Turkey—of liberal as well as commercial activity. The siege of Tabriz was ended by Russian intervention. But the popular guard of Tabriz sallied forth along the Caspian shore, in an advance on Teheran. Simultaneously, the Bakhtiari tribe seized Isfahan and then marched on the capital from the south. In July 1909 the two forces converged, and the Shah fled to Russia.

  His successor and son, Ahmad, was a minor: he was crowned in July 1914, aged 17. Power, therefore, remained divided. Ahmad’s regent drove many educated liberals into exile; the authority of the mullahs waxed as that of the nationalists waned; and beyond the purlieus of Teheran, especially to the south, tribal independence multiplied.156

  Superimposed on this confused domestic picture, and interacting with it, was an international position that only confirmed the fissures. Throughout the nineteenth century Persia had served as, and profited from being, a buffer between Russian expansion into Central Asia and Britain’s defence of India. But in 1907 the two powers, while formally recognizing Persia’s integrity, had allocated each other spheres of interest, Russia’s to the north and Britain’s to the south. A central band remained unapportioned. In the decade between the revolution and the world war Russia became the most consistent authority in northern Persia. In addition to 5,000 troops who remained in Azerbaijan, Russians officered the Persian Cossack brigade in Teheran. Aided by their railway to Tabriz, Russian economic interests came to dominate Persia. In 1913–14 Russia’s imports from Persia were five times those of its principal rival in the region, Britain, and its own exports to Persia double. In 1911, when Persia struck out for independence by calling in a neutral American, Morgan Shuster, to reform its finances, Russia once again intervened in force, ensuring his dismissal and precipitating the dissolution of the Majlis. In June 1914 Sir Edward Grey described northern Persia, and specifically Azerbaijan, as ‘a Russian province ruled by Russian officials’.157

  Formally speaking, Britain had no interest in the domestic politics of Persia; London’s concern was India’s concern, to create a buffer in order to secure the subcontinent. But the Shah’s powerlessness in the south prompted the British to make independent bargains with local leaders. Thus, they too contributed to the undermining of central authority. Furthermore, the fact that real power came increasingly to be exercised by Russia meant that, despite the 1907 agreement, tensions between the two allies mounted. Russian intervention in 1911 had been prompted because Morgan Shuster wanted an efficient gendarmerie in order to ensure the collection of taxes. He proposed that it should have British officers, some of whom would have been deployed in the northern zone. The British agreed not to press the point, and Swedes were appointed instead.

  India’s security made Britain’s interest in Persia, however long-standing, indirect. But in the years immediately preceding the war commercial considerations began to mesh with strategic, so making British involvement more immediate. Britain owned the Imperial Bank of Persia and printed Persia’s money. In 1901 Britain was granted the oil concessions for all of Persia except the five northernmost provinces. In 1908 oil was found in the neutral zone. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company established a refinery at Abadan, and constructed a pipeline along the Karun river. HMS Queen Elizabeth, the super-Dreadnought laid down in 1912, was the first battleship to burn oil, not coal; in 1913 the company secured the contract to supply the Admiralty with fuel oil. The following May the British government became the company’s majority shareholder. Oil output that year reached 273,000 tons. Outwardly, Britain did not wish to partition Persia; privately, the Foreign Office had ceased to regard it as an independent nation.158

  The Shah’s cabinets were, therefore, seen as the tools of foreign powers. And indeed Russia and Britain constantly intervened in order to fashion a cabinet favourable to Entente interests. The result was chronic governmental instability. Sixteen cabinets were formed during the war. Nonetheless, the clique through whose hands power rotated was small. Three prime ministers held office more than twice, and Mustaufi ul-Mamalik did so four times. His attraction was his weakness, as he was able to compromise with more than one group at the same time. Thus, beneath the flux and the intrigue there was an underlying continuity. Its effect was to keep out the democrats and the nationalists, although they had a small majority in the Majlis, which reconvened in the autumn of 1914. The latter, therefore, turned to Berlin. Germany was the opponent of both of Persia’s major interventionist powers; it had no great stake in Central Asia; its victories in Europe might serve to oust Russia from Azerbaijan; at the least, it could be the means to resurrect Persia’s buffer status, so preserving independence.

  As early as October 1914 the German chargé d’affaires in Teheran (the ambassador was on leave) began to argue for the resuscitation of Moltke’s proposed alliance. He was persuaded that so positive were feelings in Persia towards Germany that only money and munitions were required to trigger a rising. Zimmermann promised 50,000 marks to fund the rebellion and an exiled Persian prince, Salar ad-Daula, to lead it. In Constantinople Wangenheim and the Turks knew Salar ad-Daula for what he was, an opportunist who had forfeited all credibility in his homeland. On 1 November the Shah responded to Turkey’s entry to the war by declaring Persia neutral. Perversely, the enthusiasm of the German embassy in Teheran for rebellion now waned and its hopes of persuading the Shah to reconsider increased. More logically, the Turks turned away from the Shah and became keener on an uprising. But they nonetheless interned Salar ad-Daula when he arrived in Constantinople. Germany’s precipitateness had weakened its credibility not only in Persia but also in the Ottoman empire.159

  Technically, Persia’s neutrality was a status which remained unchanged over the next four years. In reality, the statement was meaningless before it was issued. The Shah lacked an army able to ensure his country’s integrity. Belligerent forces were already deployed inside his frontiers. Russia refused to withdraw from Azerbaijan. Britain, for all its attempts to get its ally to comply with Persian requests, was guilty of a double standard. It had undertaken punitive action against the Gulf tribes in 1909, 1911, and 1913, and had stationed small bodies of Indian troops at Bushire and Bandar Abbas. Their presence became justified by the Turkish thrusts across the Mesopotamian frontier against the Karun pipeline.

  However, it was Azerbaijan’s geographical position and cosmopolitan status which marked most clearly the impossibility of Persia’s remaining untouched by war. Between 1906 and 1909 Tabriz became the home not only of Persian liberals but also of exiled Russian revolutionaries. Persian workers found seasonal employment in Baku and Elizavetpol. Furthermore, of the 2 million Turks reckoned to live in Persia (out of a total population of 9 million), the greatest concentration was in Azerbaijan. From this mixture emerged a pan-Azerbaijani sentiment, which looked to link Persian and Russian Azerbaijan, and which found echoes across the frontier in Baku with the formation of Musavat. Azerbaijani aspirations were nourished in Constantinople. Divisions between Sunni and Shi’ite were minimized, links with Turkism maximized.160

  The campaign in the Caucasus gave these trends a pressing relevance. On 6 November Sazonov justified Russia’s refusal to withdraw from Persia by arguing that the most accessible Turkish route into Transcaucasia lay though Azerbaijan rather than across the Caucasus mountains. The Turks, naturally enough, responded by pointing out that the Russians in Tabriz constituted a threat to their flank. Even before hostilities were formally announced, both sides began fomenting discord between the Armenians and the Kurds around lakes Urmia and Van.

  On 23 November the Russians appointed the former governor of Tabriz, Shuja ud-Daula, exiled as a result of his corrupt administration and disregard for the Shah’s government, governor-general of Azerbaijan. His task was to form a force under Russian auspices. The Shah’s pro
tests at Russia’s highhandedness were interpreted by Sazonov as evidence of Persia’s pro-Turkish inclinations. Therefore the Persian government, in a bid to regain control of the situation, declared that the task of Shuja’s troops was to defend Persian neutrality. In late December Shuja was defeated south of Lake Urmia by the Kurds, who then advanced on Tabriz and entered it on 8 January 1915. Enver saw the opportunity to offset the defeat of his pan-Turanian offensive at Sarikamish. He followed up the Kurds’ success with the Turkish divisions, commanded by his uncle, Halil, which had arrived from Mesopotamia too late to take part in the battle in the Caucasus. He also, in his customary grandiose fashion, named Omar Nadji, a hero of the revolution of 1906, inspector-general of Azerbaijan and the eastern Caucasus, thereby implying that the area was one and so capitalizing on pan-Azerbaijani sentiment. The Armenians fled north to Tiflis. Enver imagined that a popular rising was imminent and that it would sweep Turkish forces into Baku.

  In reality, the Turkish victory was more apparent than actual. On 30 December 1914, faced with the prospect of defeat at Sarikamish, Vorontsov-Dashkov had ordered the evacuation of all northern Persia, presenting the move as a concession to Persia’s protests. The Turks and Kurds had driven against an open door. Furthermore, when the situation in the Caucasus was restored the Russians had regular battalions available and intact with which to crush Halil’s weak and disorganized forces. Tabriz was retaken on 31 January, and the Turks driven back across the frontier.161