‘Sir Louis Mallet, the British Ambassador,’ says Morgenthau, ‘was a high-minded and cultivated English gentleman: Bompard, the French Ambassador, was a singularly charming honourable Frenchman, and both were constitutionally disqualified from participating in the murderous intrigues which then comprised Turkish politics. Giers, the Russian Ambassador, was a proud and scornful diplomat of the old régime. . . . It was apparent that the three ambassadors of the Entente did not regard the Talaat and Enver régime as permanent, or as particularly worth their while to cultivate.’
There was one other man who was extremely influential in the Allied camp. This was Fitzmaurice, the Dragoman of the British Embassy. T. E. Lawrence had met Fitzmaurice in Constantinople before the war and wrote the following note about him:1
‘The Ambassadors were Lowther2 (an utter dud) and Louis Mallet who was pretty good and gave fair warning of the trend of feeling. I blame much of our ineffectiveness upon Fitzmaurice, the Dragoman, an eagle-mind and a personality of iron vigour. Fitzmaurice had lived half a lifetime in Turkey and was the Embassy’s official go-between and native authority. He knew everything and was feared from end to end of Turkey. Unfortunately he was a rabid R.C. and hated Freemasons and Jews with a religious hatred. The Young Turk movement was fifty per cent crypto-Jew and ninety-five per cent Freemason. So he regarded it as the devil and threw the whole influence of England over to the unfashionable Sultan and his effete palace clique. Fitzm. was really rabid . . . and his prejudices completely blinded his judgment. His prestige, however, was enormous and our Ambassadors and the F.O. staff went down before him like nine-pins. Thanks to him, we rebuffed every friendly advance the Young Turks made.’
With Baron von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, however, it was quite different. After two world wars it is becoming a little difficult to focus this powerful man, for he was the prototype of a small group of Junkers which has almost vanished now. He was a huge man, well over six feet in height, with a round cannonball of a head and staring arrogant eyes, and his belief in the Kaiser was absolute. He was not a Prussian, but his character and attitudes were almost a caricature of what foreigners imagine a Prussian aristocrat to be: an utter ruthlessness, an ironclad and noisy confidence in himself and his caste, a contempt for weakness and, underneath the heavy dignity, a childish excitement with his own affairs. He spoke several languages with fluency, and was possessed of a certain gargantuan good humour. He was a man at once dangerous, accomplished and ridiculous: the animal in a tight sheath of manners.
Wangenheim stood very high in the Wilhelmstrasse. He had more than once been to stay with the Kaiser in his villa at Corfu, and he could speak for Germany with some authority. It was now his mission so to cajole, flatter and bewitch the Young Turks that they could see nothing in the political horizon but the vast technical might of the German army. Wangenheim’s argument seems to have run as follows: Russia was the immemorial enemy of Turkey, and since Russia was the ally of Britain and France there was no question of their coming down on that side of the fence. Moreover, Germany was bound to win the war. The British might control the seas, but this was to be a land battle, and if there were to be a revolution in Russia—a thing that might easily happen—then France alone could never withstand the concentrated weight of the Wehrmacht. Turkey’s only hope of regaining her lost provinces—of recovering Egypt and Cyprus from the British, Salonika and Crete from the Greeks, Tripoli from the Italians, of subduing Bulgaria and driving back the Serbs—was to join Germany now when she was about to show her strength.
Wangenheim’s trump card was the German Military Mission. In the summer of 1913 the Young Turks had asked for this mission, and by the beginning of 1914 it had arrived in overwhelming measure. German officers, technicians and instructors began to appear at first in scores and then in hundreds. They took over control of the munitions factory in Constantinople, they manned the guns along the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and they reorganized the tactics and the training of the infantry. By August 1914 the Mission had already been able to produce a sample of what it could do: a regiment of Turkish soldiers, newly equipped with uniforms and rifles, went goose-stepping across a parade ground before an admiring group of the Sultan’s court, the Young Turkish cabinet, and such foreign ambassadors as did not find it embarrassing to be present.
Liman von Sanders, the head of the Mission and the author of these drastic changes, was an inspired choice for the Germans to have made in sending a general to Turkey. He was a calm and steady man with all the impressive authority of an intelligent soldier who has the trained habit of command. The army was his life, and he did not look beyond it; not being distracted by politics he was genuinely absorbed in the technique of tactics and strategy. He might not have been considered brilliant, but he was not easily to be upset, and by holding fast to his excellent teaming he was not likely to make mistakes. Watching him at work it is not surprising that the Young Turks were more than ever convinced that if war should break out with Germany and Austro-Hungary on the one side, and Britain, France and Russia on the other, it was not Germany who would lose.
Enver certainly needed very little persuading. As a military attaché in Berlin he had been much cultivated by the German General Staff, and there was something in the awesome precision of the Prussian military machine and the ruthless realpolitik of the German leaders that fulfilled his need for a faith and a direction. He had learned to speak German well, and even the mannerisms of the country seemed to captivate him; by now he had begun to affect a fine black Prussian moustache with the ends turned upward, and a punctilious air of cold wrath on the parade ground. He was determined, he said, upon the Germanization of the army; there was no other way.
Talaat was not quite so sure about all this. He could see that a resuscitated Turkish army gave them a strong bargaining point against both the Germans and the Allies, but he would rather have waited a little longer before entirely committing himself. He hesitated, and while he hesitated Enver prodded him on. Finally, in that odd state of apathy and half fear which seems to have overtaken him in all his dealings with Enver, he submitted; it was secretly agreed between them that, if they were to go to war at all, it would be on the German side.
The other members of the cabinet were less easy to handle. At least four of them said that they did not like this growing German encroachment, and if it ended in bringing them into the war they would resign. Djemal, the Minister of Marine, was still looking to the French who had been very friendly to him on a recent visit to Paris. Djavid, the financier, could see no way out of bankruptcy through war. And behind these there were others, neither pro-German nor pro-Allied, who floated vaguely in a neutral fear.
Enver dealt with this situation in his usual fashion. In the Ministry of War he was quite strong enough to go ahead with his plans without consulting anybody, and it was soon observed that Wangenheim was calling there almost every other day. The activities of the German Mission steadily increased, and by the beginning of the summer had become so marked that the British, French and Russian ambassadors protested. Enver was quite unmoved; he blandly assured Mallet and Bompard that the Germans were there simply to train the Turkish army, and when they had done their work they would go away—a statement that became increasingly dubious as more and more technicians and experts continued to arrive by every train. Presently there were several hundreds of them in Constantinople.
It was the Russians who were chiefly concerned. Ninety per cent of Russia’s grain and fifty per cent of all her exports came out through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and a corresponding volume of trade came in by this route from the outside world. Once hostilities broke out there would be no other outlet, no other place where she could join hands with her allies, England and France; Archangel was frozen over in winter, Vladivostok lay at the end of 5,000 miles of tenuous railway from Moscow, and the Kaiser’s fleet was bound to blockade the Baltic.
Up to this time it had suited Russia very well to have the Turks as neutral
caretakers of the straits at Constantinople, but a Turkey dominated by Germany was another matter. Giers, the Russian Ambassador, felt so strongly that at one moment, apparently on instructions from Moscow, he threatened war. But he subsided. One by one they all subsided as the hot summer weeks of 1914 dragged by. A European war was unthinkable, and even if it did come then Turkey was still too corrupt and weak to make much difference either way. Sir Louis Mallet went off on leave to England.
While he was away—it was the last uneasy month of peace that followed the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Serajevo at the end of June—Enver and Wangenheim prepared their final plans. Enver seems to have had very little trouble with the reluctant members in cabinet; he is said to have laid his revolver on the table at the height of their argument, and to have invited the other members to continue with their protests. Talaat did nothing but watch and wait. On August 2, two days before Britain presented her ultimatum to the Germans, a secret alliance was signed between Turkey and Germany. It was directed against Russia.
This still did not commit Turkey to war, and there was still no real feeling of belligerence anywhere in the country. But now in the charged atmosphere of these last few hours of European peace there occurred one of those incidents which, though not vitally important in themselves, yet somehow contrive to express and exacerbate a situation and finally push peoples and governments to the point where, suddenly and emotionally, they make up their minds to commit all their fortunes regardless of what the consequences are going to be. This was the incident of the two warships Britain was building for Turkey.
To understand the importance of these two vessels one has to cast one’s mind back to the conditions of 1914, where air-power was virtually non-existent and road and rail transport in the Balkans was limited to a few main routes. Overnight the arrival of one battleship could dominate an enemy fleet and upset the whole balance of power among minor states. With the Russian Black Sea fleet to the north of them, and Greece in the south negotiating with the United States for the possession of two dreadnoughts, it had become urgently necessary for Turkey to acquire warships of her own, and of at least equal strength to those of her neighbours. The order for the two vessels was placed in England, the keels were laid down, and something of a patriotic demonstration was made out of the whole affair.
In every Turkish town people were asked to contribute to the cost of this new venture. Collection boxes were put up on the bridges across the Golden Horn, special drives were made among the village communities, and no doubt in the end there was a warm feeling among the public that this was its own spontaneous contribution to the revival of the Turkish Navy. By August 1914 one of the ships was completed at Armstrong’s on the Tyne, and the other was ready for delivery within a few weeks.
At this point—to be precise on August 3, the eve of the outbreak of war—Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, announced to the Turks that he could not make delivery; in the interests of national security the two ships had been requisitioned by the British Navy.
One does not need much imagination to understand the indignation and disappointment with which this news was received in Turkey: the money had been paid, the two ships had been given Turkish names, and Turkish crews were actually in England waiting to man them and bring them home. And now suddenly nothing. Rarely before had von Wangenheim been allowed such an opportunity. He lost no time in repeating to Enver and Talaat the warning he had been giving them all along—the British were not to be trusted—and he came out with a dramatic offer: Germany would make good Turkey’s loss. Two German warships would be dispatched to Constantinople at once.
The ensuing adventures of the Goeben can be told very briefly. Possibly by accident but much more probably by design she was in the Western Mediterranean with her attendant light cruiser, the Breslau, on this vital day. She was a battle-cruiser recently built in Germany with a displacement of 22,640 tons, ten 11-inch guns and a speed of 26 knots. As such she could dominate the Russian Black Sea fleet and, what was more important at the moment, she could outdistance (though not out-gun) any British vessel in the Mediterranean.
The British knew all about the Goeben. They had been watching her for some time, for they feared that on the outbreak of war she would attack the French army transports coming across from North Africa to the continent. On August 4 the British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean signalled the Admiralty in London: ‘Indomitable, Indefatigable, shadowing Goeben and Breslau 37º 44' North 7º 56' East’, and the Admiralty replied, ‘Very good. Hold her. War is imminent.’ Throughout that afternoon the two British battleships continued closely in the Goeben’s wake. At any moment they could have knocked her out with their 12-inch guns, but the British ultimatum to Germany did not expire until midnight, and the cabinet in London had expressly forbidden any act of war until that time. It was an unbearably tantalizing situation. Churchill has related that at five o’clock in the evening Prince Louis of Battenburg, the First Sea Lord, observed to him at the Admiralty that there was still time to sink the Goeben before dark. But there was nothing to be done but to wait.
As night fell the Goeben increased speed above 24 knots and vanished. It was not until two days later, when the war had already begun, that the British discovered that she was coaling with the Breslau at Messina, in Italy, and they still did not know that Admiral Souchon, who was in command of the vessel, had there received a message instructing him to proceed directly to Constantinople. At 5 p.m. on August 6 the Goeben and the Breslau emerged from Messina with their bands playing and their decks cleared for action. Still under the impression that they would either turn west to attack the French transports or north to the friendly port of Pola, the British fleet had disposed itself to the west of Sicily and at the mouth of the Adriatic. The Goeben and the Breslau turned south-east, and when the British light cruisers of the Adriatic squadron failed to engage they got clean away. Two days later, still undetected, they were hanging about the Greek islands waiting for permission from the Turks to enter the Dardanelles.
The excitement in Constantinople was now intense. To allow the German vessels to pass through the straits was virtually an act of war. But Wangenheim was ready with a solution: once the ships arrived in Turkish waters they would cease to be German and instead become part of the neutral Turkish Navy. But would they arrive? That was the point. On August 8 there was still no news of the two vessels in Constantinople, and it seemed possible that they had been sunk by the British Fleet.
Curiously it was Enver who lost his nerve, and he attempted to restore the situation by performing a simple double-cross. He sent for the Russian Military Attaché and proposed to him the terms of a Russian-Turkish alliance which would have cancelled out the agreement with Wangenheim which had been signed only a week before. Indeed, under one clause, Liman von Sanders and all German officers were to be dismissed from the Turkish service.
The Germans were quite unaware of this duplicity when on the following day one of the officers on Liman’s staff arrived at the Ministry of War with the news that the Goeben and the Breslau were outside the Dardanelles and waiting to enter. Enver said he must consult his colleagues. The German officer, however, insisted that an answer must be given at once. There was a slight pause. Then Enver said, ‘Let them come in.’ The following evening the Goeben and the Breslau steamed through the Dardanelles and the proposed alliance with Russia was forgotten.
But it was not the end. Germany still had no wish to bring Turkey actively into the war, since, as a friendly neutral, she was performing a very useful purpose in tying up a British squadron at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and in threatening the British lines in Egypt. Moreover, if, as everyone expected, the war was going to be over in a few months there was no point in contracting additional obligations to Turkey.
For the Russians, the British and the French, on the other hand, the situation was becoming intolerable. Here was the Goeben anchored in the Bosphorus, here was Admiral Souchon and his crew
going through the farce of dressing-up in fezzes and pretending that they were sailors in the Turkish Navy, and here was Liman von Sanders with his Military Mission re-organizing the Turkish Army. At night the cafés in Pera and Stamboul were filled with roistering Germans; staff cars embellished with the Kaiser’s eagles drove ostentatiously through the streets, and Enver’s Ministry of War became every day more like a German military headquarters. A rueful pun went round the foreign colony: ‘Deutschland über Allah’.
Sir Louis Mallet protested repeatedly about the Goeben but he was assured that she was now a Turkish ship. Then, he argued, the German crews should be dismissed. But they were no longer Germans, Enver told him, they were part of the Turkish Navy; and in any case Turkey was short of sailors. Her best men had been sent to England to man the two British-built battleships which were never delivered. Nothing could be done until these men returned. The Turkish crews returned, but still nothing was done, beyond putting a handful of them on board the Goeben; the German crew remained.
The Allies were now thoroughly alarmed, for they desired, even more than the Germans, that the Turks should remain neutral. For a time Mallet and his Russian and French colleagues kept pointing out to Enver and the war party that Turkey had been exhausted by the Balkan Wars and that she would be ruined if she took up arms again so soon. Then towards the end of August they adopted a much stronger line: they proposed in return for Turkish neutrality that Britain, France and Russia should guarantee the Ottoman Empire from attack.
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