A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  He gave Kitchener’s messages and promises a warm response. At the same time—at the end of 1914—when Djemal Pasha prepared to attack the British at the Suez Canal, Hussein wrote to him, promising to send troops to join in the attack; while Abdullah replied to Storrs in British Cairo that the Hejaz had decided to side with Britain in the war. Abdullah explained, however, that this would have to be kept a secret. For the moment, it was not possible for the Emir to reveal his intention of allying with Britain, nor could he take action. According to Abdullah and Hussein, the time was not yet ripe.

  II

  Storrs was pleased that his correspondence had placed the Residency, the office of the British High Commissioner, on terms of close cordiality with Mecca. On 27 January 1915, he wrote FitzGerald/Kitchener that “I am still in very friendly and intimate contact with the Sherif of Mecca, and am firmly convinced that he is a more paying proposition for our care and attention than any purely local Chieftain (however powerful in himself) who cannot enjoy the prestige of receiving the annual homage of the representatives of Islam throughout the world.”2

  For the moment all that Kitchener and the Residency really asked of Hussein was neutrality. Since Hussein’s desire was to avoid being drawn into the perilous war, the two parties to the correspondence were in accord. Hussein did nothing to associate himself or Mecca with the proclamation of a Holy War. For the Residency, the correspondence therefore had accomplished everything that could reasonably have been desired. The High Commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, reported to Kitchener on 2 February 1915, that “there is no need for immediate action…as all that is necessary for the moment, with the Sherif of Mecca—had been done.”3

  The War Minister was satisfied. He did not share Wingate’s belief that a tribal revolt in Arabia could affect Britain’s fortunes in the war; he gave no sign of disappointment when Hussein did not propose to lead such a revolt. Kitchener believed that Germany was the enemy that mattered and that Europe was the only battlefield that counted. His long-term plan to capture the caliphate was designed for the postwar world. In his view, he and it—and the Middle East—could wait until the war was over.

  PART III

  BRITAIN IS DRAWN INTO THE MIDDLE EASTERN QUAGMIRE

  13

  THE TURKISH COMMANDERS ALMOST LOSE THE WAR

  I

  At the time of his appointment as War Minister, Kitchener did not intend Britain to be drawn into any involvement in the Middle East during the war. When he started along the road that led to such an involvement, he was not aware that this was what he was doing. Later, in 1915–16, when he found his country fully engaged in the Middle East, he must have wondered how he had allowed such a situation to come about. From the outset of the war, it had been his unwavering doctrine to disregard the East while focusing on the western front.

  Kitchener’s opinion that Turkey and the Middle East could safely be ignored for the duration of the European conflict derived in part from the assumption that the Ottoman Empire did not pose a significant military threat. This was an assumption that was widely shared.

  British officials viewed Ottoman military capability with contempt; and the record of the first six months of warfare in the East confirmed them in their view. From October 1914, when the Goeben and Breslau opened fire on the Russian coast, until February 1915, when an avenging British fleet began its bombardment of the straits of the Dardanelles and then steamed toward Constantinople, the Ottoman armies blundered from one defeat to another.

  The Supreme Commander of the Turkish armed forces was Enver Pasha, who a week before the war began had proclaimed himself “vice-generalissimo.” In theory this placed him second only to the figurehead Sultan. In practice it placed him second to none.

  Enver had the qualities of a lone adventurer, not those of a general. Though audacious and cunning, he was an incompetent commander. Liman von Sanders, the Prussian army adviser with whom he frequently found himself at odds, regarded Enver as a buffoon in military matters.

  Enver, however, pictured himself as a leader of a wholly different character. He portrayed himself as an heir to the founders of the Ottoman Empire: the band of ghazis—crusading warriors for the Islamic faith—who in the fourteenth century had galloped from the obscurity of the Byzantine frontier onto the center stage of history.

  At the outset of the war, he hastened to attack the Russian Empire.1 There was an obstacle in his path: the forbidding Caucasus mountain range, which formed the land frontier between the two empires. Against the advice of Liman von Sanders, he determined to launch a frontal attack across that daunting natural frontier, which the Russians, in secure possession of the high ground, had heavily fortified—and to do so in the depths of winter. He proposed initially to group his forces along an enormous territory within Turkey, 600 miles long and 300 miles wide, through which there was no railroad to transport troops or supplies. The few roads were steep and narrow. The rivers could be crossed only by fording, the bridges having collapsed long before and having never been repaired. Because the nearest railhead was over 600 miles away, every bullet, every shell, had to be transported by camel—a journey of six weeks. Much of the territory was without track or habitation, unexplored and uncharted. Long winters and mountain snowstorms made whole sections of it unpassable much of the year.

  Enver’s plan, as he explained it to Liman von Sanders, was to then move out of this staging area, cross the frontier into Czarist territory, and attack the fortified Russian position on the Caucasus plateau by the sort of orchestrated movement pictured in military textbooks, with some columns attacking directly, and others moving out at an angle and then wheeling about to flank or encircle. He was unmoved by the reminder that, without railroads or other transport, the strategic mobility required for the military movements that he envisaged would be unavailable. He entertained no doubts of his success. Having crushed the Russians, said Enver, he would then march via Afghanistan to the conquest of India.

  On 6 December 1914, Enver left Constantinople and on 21 December took command of the Ottoman Third Army. He led the attack on the Caucasus plateau in person. The Russians were terrified and appealed to Britain to help somehow; they had no idea they faced a foe who was utterly inept.

  Enver left his artillery behind because of the deep snow. His troops were forced to bivouac in the bitter cold (as low as minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit without tents). They ran short of food. An epidemic of typhus broke out. With routes blocked by the winter snows, they lost their way in the tangled mountain passes. Enver’s plan was for his forces to launch a coordinated surprise attack on the Russian base called Sarikamish, which blocked the invasion highway; but, having lost touch with one another, the various Turkish corps arrived at different times at Sarikamish to attack and to be destroyed piecemeal.

  The remnants of what had once been an army straggled back into eastern Turkey in January 1915. Of the perhaps 100,000 men who took part in the attack,2 86 percent were lost. A German officer attached to the Ottoman General Staff described what happened to the Third Army by saying that it had “suffered a disaster which for rapidity and completeness is without parallel in military history.”3

  Yet even as he rode back from the catastrophe in the northeast, Enver ordered another ill-conceived offensive. In command was Djemal Pasha, the Minister of the Marine. Jealous of Enver, whose prestige and power had begun to overshadow those of the other Young Turks, Djemal took the field as commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, based in Syria and Palestine. On 15 January 1915, he began his march toward Egypt to launch a surprise attack across the Suez Canal.

  Again, the logistical problems were ignored. The roads of Syria and Palestine were so bad that not even horse-drawn carts could move along many of them;4 and the wastes of the 130-mile wide Sinai desert were trackless. The Ottoman soldiery nonetheless performed prodigies of endurance and valor. Somehow they transported themselves and their equipment from Syria to Suez. Kress von Kressenstein, a German engineering officer, dug wells along th
e route, which enabled them to survive the march through the desert. The time of year, for once, was well chosen: January is the best month in Egypt for avoiding the terrible heat.

  But when the Fourth Army reached the banks of the Suez Canal, Djemal discovered that most of his troops could not use the bridging pontoons that were meant to transport them to the other side. The German engineers had brought the pontoons from Germany, but the troops had not been trained in their use. Djemal ordered the attack to commence nonetheless. Early in the morning of 3 February, while the sky was still half-dark, it began. The British, from behind their fortifications, awoke to discover an Ottoman army on the opposite bank of the enormous ditch; and with their superior weaponry they opened fire upon it. In the battle and the subsequent rout, 2,000 Ottoman troops—about 10 percent of Djemal’s forces—were killed. Djemal ordered a retreat; and kept on going all the way back to Syria.5

  Turkish generalship became a joke. Aubrey Herbert wrote from Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo to his friend Mark Sykes that the latest Ottoman plan was “that the Turks are to bring thousands of camels down to the Canal and then set a light to their hair. The camel, using its well known reasoning powers, will dash to the Canal to put the fire out. When they have done this in sufficient quantities the Turks will march over them.”6

  In London the Prime Minister lightly dismissed the Ottoman invasion by saying that “The Turks have been trying to throw a bridge across the Suez Canal & in that ingenious fashion to find a way into Egypt. The poor things & their would-be bridge were blown into smithereens, and they have retired into the desert.”7

  II

  Enver had assumed that the war would be short, and that it would be decided in a few lightning campaigns. He had neither a plan for a war of attrition nor an understanding of what such a war might entail. He had no gift for organization, no head for logistics, and no patience for administration. As War Minister he thoughtlessly led his country into chaos.8

  He began by ordering all eligible men throughout the imperial domains to report for induction into the army immediately, bringing with them enough food for three days. When they reported as ordered—which is to say, all at the same time—their numbers dwarfed the conscription offices, which could not deal with so many at once. Having flooded in from the countryside, the draftees ate up their three days’ supply of food and then had nothing to eat. Soon they began to drift away, labeled as deserters, afraid to return either to the conscription offices or to their homes.

  Bringing in the manpower from the countryside ruined what would have been the bountiful harvest of 1914. It set a terrible pattern: throughout the war, the draft of men and pack animals brought famine in good years as well as bad. During the war years, the supply of draft animals fell, horses to 40 percent and oxen and buffaloes to 15 percent of what they had been. The shrinkage in agricultural activity was equally dramatic: cereal acreage was cut in half, and cotton fell to 8 percent of its prewar production level. Control of the scarce supplies of food and other goods became the key to wealth and power. In the sprawling metropolis of Constantinople, a Chicago-style political boss with gangland connections fought against Enver’s General Director of the Commissariat for effective control of the economy.

  The transportation system of the empire was also shattered by the war. In the absence of railroads and usable roads, in the past goods had been mostly shipped by sea. Now the empire’s 5,000 miles of coastline were under the guns of the Allied navies. In the north the Germans and Turks pulled back the Goeben and Breslau for the defense of the Dardanelles, abandoning the Black Sea to the newly built battleships of the Russians. The Mediterranean was dominated by the French and British navies. Allied ships cut off the Ottoman coal supply; thereafter the empire depended for its fuel on the meagre supplies that could be brought overland from Germany.

  On the eve of war, there were only about 17,000 industrial workers in an empire of 25 million people; for practical purposes, the country had no industry.9 All that it had was agriculture, which was now ruined. By the end of the war, the export trade was down to a quarter and the import trade down to a tenth of what they had been.

  The Porte ran up huge budget deficits during the wartime years, and helplessly ran paper money off the printing presses to pay for them. During the war prices rose 1,675 percent.

  Before long, the war had brought the Ottoman economy almost to its knees; and the Young Turk government had no idea what to do about it.

  14

  KITCHENER ALLOWS BRITAIN TO ATTACK TURKEY

  I

  The British government, too, encountered unexpected problems with which it had no idea how to deal. At the outset of war nobody in Britain had foreseen that the warring armies would dig trenches across western Europe. Now that they had done so, nobody in Britain had any idea of how to break through enemy lines.

  As 1914 turned into 1915, the British Cabinet became increasingly unhappy about the direction of the war. Lord Kitchener’s strategy of concentrating all forces in western Europe seemed to offer no hope of victory in the foreseeable future. The wiliest politician in the Cabinet—David Lloyd George—was conspicuous among those who looked for a way out.

  Lloyd George, after Asquith the most powerful politician in the Liberal Party and in the Cabinet, was not one who willingly goes down with a sinking ship. He was, above all, a survivor: years later it could be seen that he was the only British minister who succeeded in staying in the Cabinet from the outbreak of the First World War until its end.

  The glowing, dynamic political wizard from Wales was the supreme strategist—or, some would say, opportunist—of his time. “To Lloyd George no policy was permanent, no pledge final,” wrote one of his contemporaries; the zig-zags in his policy forced him to seek support first from one group then from another, so that “He became like a trick rider at the circus, as he was compelled to leap from one back to another…”1 His deviousness was a byword, so that even an admirer said that his truth was not a straight line but “more of a curve.”2 The way he himself put it was that, “I never believed in costly frontal attacks either in war or politics, if there were a way round.”3

  No minister felt more greatly frustrated than he did by the way Allied commanders were fighting the war in France and Flanders: hopeless direct assaults on entrenched enemy positions. Every time that he sought a way out or a way around, he found the route blocked either by the War Office on behalf of Britain’s generals, or by the Foreign Office on behalf of Britain’s allies.

  From the beginning, Lloyd George looked for a solution in the East. He was among those who favored entering into Balkan alliances, notably with Greece, in order to defeat the Ottoman Empire and to turn the German flank. Other Cabinet ministers agreed. So did Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Cabinet and most influential of the civil servants. Hankey’s memorandum of 28 December 1914, proposing an assault on the Dardanelles in collaboration with Balkan allies, cogently outlined the arguments underlining the Cabinet’s belief that “Germany can perhaps be struck most effectively, and with the most lasting results on the peace of the world through her allies, and particularly through Turkey.”4

  The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, blocked this approach. It was Grey, according to Lloyd George’s associates in the left wing of the Liberal Party, who had closed off Britain’s alternative of remaining neutral in the war; he had done this, they claimed, by his secret prewar arrangements with France.* (The philosopher Bertrand Russell later wrote: “I had noticed during previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he was committing us to the support of France in the event of war.”)6 Now again it was Grey, who had entered into secret prewar arrangements with Russia regarding the Dardanelles, who argued that Allied claims to postwar territorial gains precluded bringing the Balkan states into the war. It was the Foreign Office’s view not only that Bulgaria’s rivalry with Rumania and Greece rendered an alliance that included all three states unfeasible
, but that Greek help in capturing Constantinople was unacceptable because it would offend the Russians.

  Yet it was agreed by the Admiralty, the War Office, and the Cabinet alike that Constantinople could not be captured by the Royal Navy alone. An army, they argued, was needed as well. If the Greek army or another Balkan army were not to be allowed to help, then the British army would be needed; but Lord Kitchener supported those Allied field commanders who decreed that no troops should be diverted from the trenches of the western front until the war in Europe was won.

  Yet, notwithstanding the hopeful views of Allied commanders in the field, nothing in the first months and years of the war suggested to the leading members of the Cabinet that on the western front the war was being won or even could be won. As early as 7 October 1914, Asquith noted that Kitchener “thinks it is not improbable that…the big opposing armies may in some months’ time come to something like stalemate.”7 By the end of December, Winston Churchill (as he informed the Prime Minister) thought it “quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s lines in the Western theatre” while, at the same time, Lloyd George, in a memorandum to Cabinet colleagues, dismissed the prospects of a breakthrough on the western front as an “impossibility.”8

  History had seen nothing like the trench warfare that spontaneously emerged in the autumn of 1914; and Kitchener, though he quickly divined the problem, admitted that he saw no solution. The Entente Powers and the Central Powers manned parallel lines of fortifications that soon stretched all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Alps. Each side thus decisively barred the way to the other.

  Trench warfare began as an endurance contest and ended as a survival contest. Beneath the ground, in the perhaps 35,000 miles of trenches that they eventually dug, the opposing armies lived in bloody squalor and subjected one another to punishing and almost ceaseless artillery barrages, punctuated by suicidally futile charges against the other side’s barbed wire and machine guns. Alternately executioners and executed, one side played the role of the firing squad whenever the other side launched one of its frequent attacks. No ground was gained. It was a deadlock.