The other members of the Club were in no position to deny or check any of Wangenheim’s stories; they had no wireless stations of their own and the Turkish newspapers told, them nothing that they could believe. Without Wangenheim’s daily bulletins they were forced to fall back on the small change of local gossip. The surprising thing about this gossip is not that it should have been so cynical, so entertaining and so futile in itself, but that it was so very nearly accurate. Thus someone would report that his doorman—or his cook or his butler—had positive information that the Italian Ambassadress had booked sleepers on the Orient Express; and this surely was a firm sign that Italy was about to declare war at last. Or again it would be some devious story of how Enver had quarrelled again with Liman von Sanders and was about to replace him at the front. There was much talk of peace: the Germans, it was said, had made a secret approach to Russia offering her Constantinople if she would abandon the Allies. Bulgaria, with her army of 600,000 men and her traditional hatred of Turkey was, naturally, very much on their minds, and there was a flurry in the foreign colony when it was learned that the Bulgarian students at the Robert College outside Constantinople had been recalled home by their Government. This, they argued, could hardly have happened unless Bulgaria, too, was about to come into the war. But on whose side? And when? Or was it just another move in the game of bargaining with her neutrality?
On such matters Wangenheim was always ready to comment, to correct and to inform. He was like the boy who has the crib with all the answers in it, and he spoke with a large air of frankness that seemed to put an end to all doubts and speculations.
As the spring advanced he developed the habit of sitting at the bottom of his garden at Therapia, on the Bosphorus, within nodding distance of all who passed by. He liked to stop his acquaintances when they were out walking in the morning and read them tit-bits from his latest telegrams. Soon Morgenthau noticed that when things were going well for the Germans the Ambassador was always there in his accustomed seat by the garden wall, but when the news was bad he was nowhere to be found. He told Wangenheim one day that he reminded him of one of those patent weather gauges equipped with a little figure that emerged in the sunshine and disappeared in the rain. Wangenheim laughed very heartily.
And, in fact, up to the middle of May, there were no reasons for the Germans to be apprehensive about Turkey. Instead of weakening and dividing the Government as in England, the Gallipoli landing had knitted the Young Turks together and made them stronger than ever. Unlike the Allies, the Turks were not obliged to advance in the peninsula; so long as the line held it was unlikely that Bulgaria or Rumania or even Greece would come in against them. The very strain of the war itself was useful; it gave them the right to requisition whatever property they liked, to call up more and more men for active service, to get a tighter control on everybody’s lives. There were now over half a million Turks in the Army, and this force was becoming steadily stronger as the threat from Russia died away; already in May divisions were being withdrawn from the Caucasus to strengthen the front at Gallipoli. The Germans, too, were increasing their garrison in Constantinople and in the peninsula. They had various means of smuggling men and munitions through Bulgaria and Rumania; it was even said that on one occasion a bogus circus was sent from Germany by rail, and the clowns on arrival turned out to be sergeants and their baggage filled with shells. Taube aircraft were flown across from Austria, refuelling at secret landing-places on the way. Soon there was another munitions factory working at Constantinople under German supervision, and guns from the old Turkish warships were dismantled and sent down to the front. Wangenheim in his role of local Kaiser in the German garrison took good care not to expose the Goeben to the British fleet in the Dardanelles; occasionally she went off hunting the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, but for the most part she rode at anchor in the Bosphorus.
Enver, the chief sponsor of the Germans, had great credit for all this. As Minister for War he somehow contrived to make it appear that he personally was responsible for the successful resistance in the peninsula just as he had been responsible for the defeat of the Fleet on March 18. There was not very much that Wangenheim, Talaat or anybody else could do to correct this impression. The young man ballooned up before them. However incredible it might be, the truth was that this boy, who had been born of a fifteen-year-old peasant girl on the Black Sea only thirty-five years before, was now virtually dictator of Turkey. He assumed all the trappings of dictatorship with apparent ease—the sudden tantrums and rages, the personal bodyguard, the uniform (the sword, the epaulettes and the black sheepskin fez), and the ring of subservient generals. Even the Germans in Turkey were becoming a little afraid of him, especially when he went over their heads and corresponded directly with the Kaiser.
There was a macabre incident about this time which shows very clearly how far Enver had travelled and how high he still hoped to go. Early in May he sent for Morgenthau and with a great show of anger told him that the British were bombarding helpless villages and towns in the Gallipoli peninsula. Mosques and hospitals had been burned down, he said, and a number of women and children had been killed. He proposed now to take reprisals; the 3,000 British and French citizens who were still living in Turkey were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps in the peninsula. Enver desired the Ambassador to inform the British and French governments through the State Department in Washington that henceforth they would be killing their own people at Gallipoli as well as Turks.
It was useless for Morgenthau to protest that towns like Gallipoli, Chanak and Maidos were military headquarters and that the Allies had a perfect right to bombard them; the best he could do was to get the women and children excluded from the order. A few days later, when the arrests began, an hysterical horde of French and British civilians descended on the American Embassy. Most of these people were Levantines who had been born in Turkey of British or French parentage and who had never seen either England or France. They gathered in hundreds round the Ambassador whenever he appeared, gesticulating and crying, clutching at his arms, imploring him to save them. After several days of this Morgenthau telephoned to Enver and demanded another interview. Enver replied smoothly that he was engaged in a council of Ministers but would be delighted to see the Ambassador on the afternoon of the following day. The hostages were due to be sent off to the peninsula in the morning, and it was only when Morgenthau threatened to force his way into the council room that Enver agreed to receive him at the Sublime Porte at once.
For one reason or another—perhaps because the Bulgarian Ambassador had just been in to protest against the arrests—Enver was excessively polite when Morgenthau arrived. He agreed after a while that perhaps he had made a mistake in this matter but it was too late to do anything about it: he never revoked orders. If he did he would lose his influence with the Army. He added, ‘If you can show me some way in which this order can be carried out, and your protégés still saved, I shall be glad to listen.’
‘All right,’ Morgenthau said, ‘I think I can. I should think you could still carry out your orders without sending all the French and English residents down. If you would send only a few you would still win your point. You could still maintain discipline in the Army and these few would be as strong a deterrent to the Allied Fleet as sending all.’
It seemed to Morgenthau that Enver seized on this suggestion almost eagerly. ‘How many will you let me send?’ he asked.
‘I would suggest that you take twenty English and twenty French—forty in all.’
‘Let me have fifty.’
‘All right, we won’t haggle over ten,’ Morgenthau answered, and the bargain having been made Enver conceded that only the youngest men should go. Bedri, the Chief of Police, was now sent for, and these arrangements did not suit him at all. ‘No, no, this will never do,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the youngest; I must have the notables.’
The point was still unsettled when Bedri and Morgenthau drove back to the American Embassy where
the selection was to be made. It was with some difficulty that they made their way through the frantic crowd to Morgenthau’s office.
‘Can’t I have a few notables?’ Bedri repeated.
There was an Anglican clergyman named Dr. Wigram, who, Morgenthau knew, was determined to be one of the hostages. ‘I will give you just one,’ he said.
Bedri had his eye on a Dr. Frew and several well-known men in the French colony, and he insisted, ‘Can’t I have three?’
‘Dr. Wigram is the only notable you can have.’
In the end Bedri with a fairly good grace settled for the clergyman and forty-nine young men, but he gave himself the pleasure of telling them that the British were in the habit of regularly bombing the town of Gallipoli to which they were to be sent. On the following morning, amid frenzied scenes, and accompanied by Mr. Hoffman Philip, the American counsellor, and a quantity of American food, the party set off.
Morgenthau at once began to agitate for their return, and his task was not made easier by the arrival of a message from Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stating that Enver and his fellow Ministers would be held personally responsible for any injury to the hostages.
‘I presented this message to Enver on May 9th,’ Morgenthau writes. ‘I had seen Enver in many moods, but the unbridled rage which Sir Edward’s admonition now caused was something entirely new. As I read the telegram his face became livid, and he absolutely lost control of himself. The European polish which Enver had sedulously acquired dropped like a mask; I now saw him for what he really was—a savage, bloodthirsty Turk. “They will not come back,” he shouted, “I shall let them stay there until they rot. I would like to see those English touch me.” And he added, “Don’t ever threaten me.” In the end, however, he calmed down and agreed that the hostages could come back to Constantinople.’
For a day or two this incident was the talk of Constantinople, but it was soon swallowed up in the general tide of half-truths and gossip, in the long, weary ennui of waiting for something definite to happen. Constantinople had a strange drifting existence at this time; it was in the war but not of it. It heard nothing and saw nothing and yet was ready to fear everything. The third week of May went by and still very few people had any real inkling of what was happening at the Dardanelles beyond the barren fact that the Allies were neither advancing nor being driven away. Nothing was published in the newspapers about the disastrous attack on the Anzac bridgehead on May 19, and the Ministry of War was careful to see that the increasing numbers of wounded returning from the front were taken through the city in the middle of the night when the streets were deserted. One quiet, uneasy day followed another, and it was not until May 25 that in the most unexpected and alarming way Constantinople was made to realize at last that the war was very near and very threatening. A British submarine surfaced in the Golden Horn.
The submarines in the second world war did far more damage than in the first, but they never re-created quite the same sort of helplessness, the sense of unfair lurking doom. In 1915 there were no depth charges and no asdic, and unless the submarine surfaced and exposed itself to ramming or to gunfire there was no sure means of detecting or destroying it. The unwieldy nets that were hung around the battleships were only a gesture of defence, and after the sinking of the Lusitania no merchantman ever felt safe, even in convoy, even at night.
Yet in 1915 the submarine service had still to prove itself. Everything about it was experimental, the size and armament of the vessel, its shape and speed, the way it should be used, and, perhaps most important of all, the endurance of the crews. How much could the men stand of this unnatural and claustrophobic life beneath the sea? And beyond this there was thought to be something ethically monstrous about the whole conception of submarines, a kind of barbarism which would end in the destruction of them all. The ‘Submariners’, in fact, were in much the same position as the young men in the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe in 1940; they were apart from the rest of the serving forces, a minority group with a strange, esoteric excitement of its own, and they were about to prove that they were capable of adventures which no one had ever dreamed of before. Far from cracking under the strain, they relished it; it was a new brand of courage, a controlled recklessness, a kind of joy in the power of the inhuman machine. It was not really a question of how much these men could stand, but of how far you could meet their demand for more speed, longer hours in action and more deadly gadgets.
But all this lay in the future in the early months of the first world war, and the submarine itself was still undergoing basic changes in design. The periscope, for example, was originally fixed in one set position, and its mirrors produced an inverted image, so the commander was obliged to bring the whole vessel close to the surface before he attacked, and his outlook was upon a strange world in which ships were for ever floating upside down. Even when the periscope became movable it was an unhandy device: as it rose upward the commander rose with it, beginning from a squatting position and ending on the tips of his toes. By 1915, however, most of these primitive inconveniences had been overcome, and the British E class (whose dispatch to the Dardanelles had so angered Lord Fisher) was a formidable instrument. It was a vessel of 725 tons, equipped with four torpedo tubes and oil engines which achieved a surface speed of about fifteen miles an hour. Submerged and running on its electric batteries it was capable of proceeding at ten knots for an hour, or even for periods of twenty hours at more economical speeds. In deep waters it descended by flooding its tanks until it had about a ton of buoyancy in hand, and the vessel, with its horizontal rudders depressed, was then driven down by its motors. Directly it stopped moving it rose to the surface again.
In shallow waters—and the E Class could descend to over 200 feet—the commanders had no fear of flooding their tanks entirely and of lying on the bottom so long as the air in the boat remained reasonably fresh—a period of some twenty hours. As they were not then moving there was still enough power in their accumulators to drive them to the surface again. The submarine’s time of greatest danger was, of course, during the three or four hours when it was obliged to cruise about on the surface to replenish its batteries.
At Gallipoli these submarines were faced with an objective which was entirely new and fantastically dangerous. If they could once get through to the Sea of Marmara they knew that they could do pretty much what they liked with the Turkish shipping, more particularly with the vessels that were bringing down reinforcements and supplies to Liman’s army on the peninsula. But how to get there, how to penetrate the Dardanelles?
The straits were swept all night by searchlights, and as soon as a submarine surfaced, as it was practically bound to do in the course of the forty-mile journey, it was not only fired on but ran the risk of being caught by the various currents that set towards the shore. Ten lines of mines off Kephez Point had to be negotiated, and beyond these there were the Narrows, under a mile wide, with guns on either side and patrol boats on the watch. There was another hazard: a stratum of fresh water about ten fathoms deep poured down the Dardanelles from the Sea of Marmara, and it was of much lighter density than the salt water below. This made a kind of barrier in the sea, and as they passed through it the submarines were thrown violently out of control. It was not unlike the experiences of the first supersonic aircraft when they met the sound barrier in the sky; no one could make out why this strange, deadly disturbance should occur, and the commanders were forced to rise to the surface where they at once came under the fire from the enemy batteries on the shore.
Up to the time of the landing every attempt to force the Narrows had failed, and even the Australian E2 was to last only a few days before she was caught on the surface and sunk. A French submarine, the Joule, was destroyed before she even reached Chanak. Yet the exploit still seemed possible, and the young commanders of the E Class submarines who came out from England during April were eager to try again. Many of them had fought under Roger Keyes’s command in the North Sea during the
early months of the war, and their morale was very high. They believed they had only to try new tactics and they would get through.
For the German U-boats the problem at Gallipoli was quite different. Their target—and it was a superb target, almost a sitting duck—was the British battle fleet cruising along the shore of the peninsula in the open Ægean, and they were withheld from it not by the Narrows but by the wide expanse of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. In April there was no German U-boat at Constantinople and none in the Mediterranean. The only way for the Germans to reach the scene of action was to sail round northern Europe and enter the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar; and this meant running the engines until almost the last ounce of fuel was gone. There was, it was true, a scheme for sending small U-boats in section by rail to Pola on the Adriatic coast, but nothing had come of this as yet.
And so at the opening of the campaign both sides were baulked in their undersea offensive. Each could see the prize plainly before it: for the British it was the helpless Turkish shipping in the Marmara, for the Germans the unprotected Allied battleships in the Ægean; and neither so far had been able to strike.
But now, at the end of April, there began a series of events which were to alter the whole character of the campaign. On April 25, the very day of the landing, Lieut.-Commander Otto Hersing, in the German U-boat 21, set out from Ems on the long journey around the north of Scotland for the Mediterranean. Two days later at Gallipoli, Lieut.-Commander Boyle, in the British E 14, slipped quietly into the Dardanelles and headed for the Narrows. From this moment both the Allied Fleet and the Turks on Gallipoli were in extreme danger.
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