To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  But between the outbreak of war and late autumn German priorities and perceptions had been fundamentally altered, first by Britain’s belligerence and secondly by the defeat on the Marne. Both suggested that the war would be long. The Kaiser and Tirpitz found an increasing number of adherents to their view that the real enemy was Britain, the economic hub of the Entente but extraordinarily difficult for Germany to attack. On both these counts the importance of a strike on the Suez Canal loomed ever larger in German calculations. In August the navy hatched a plot to sink a merchantman, the Barenfels, in the channel. It misfired, but Bethmann Hollweg was supportive of the intention.23 His priorities began to change. A telegram, dispatched by the chancellor to Wangenheim on 7 September, showed at once the transitional state of his thought and the confusion which it spelled for the strategy of the Central Powers: ‘We are forced to exploit every suitable opportunity to break England’s resistance. For the time being [zunächst] your excellency will do everything to demand the attack of Turkey on Russia.’24

  In August and September Wangenheim entered into direct negotiations with the Khedive of Egypt, Abbas Hilmi, who was holidaying in Constantinople when war began. The Germans advanced Hilmi 4 million gold francs. The Austrians were appalled—and not simply because of Germany’s progressive reorientation away from what, for Vienna, was the major threat. Success in Egypt could rouse Turkish and Islamic feeling to such a pitch as to threaten the precarious Italian foothold in Cyrenaica. The likelihood of Italy honouring its obligations to the Triple Alliance would be diminished. Zimmermann turned this argument on its head: if the Central Powers controlled Egypt, Italy would be less likely to respond to Entente overtures.25 In a major memorandum composed in October, Max von Oppenheim, perhaps reflecting the bias of his own expertise, summarized the shift in German thought. The first priority in a pan-Islamic holy war was to be an attack on the Suez Canal and a revolution in Egypt and India; a campaign in the Caucasus came second, and rebellion in French North Africa third.26

  Within Turkey, Germany’s new direction accorded with the hopes of the Young Turks. Enver, whose reputation rested in large part on his determined resistance to the Italian invasion of Cyrenaica, aspired to recover Egypt and Turkey’s other former North African provinces for the Ottoman empire. Provided the campaign was secured as a joint, and predominantly Turkish, venture, German and Ottoman objectives could coincide. On 2 August the mobilization orders of the 4th army embraced the possibility of an attack on Egypt. Liman von Sanders alone rejected the notion, recognizing its logistical difficulties and still favouring an expedition to Odessa. On 17 September he was told by Bethmann Hollweg and OHL to fall into line, and three days later Kress von Kressenstein was appointed chief of staff to VIII corps of the 4th army. Kress joined Curt Prüfer, a former dragoman in Cairo, who had arrived in Constantinople on 3 September. Prüfer’s task was to further Zimmermann’s plan for an Egyptian revolt against British rule. Secret agents were to infiltrate into Egypt in order to recruit terrorists and unleash a campaign of murder and sabotage. Thus, Britain’s forces would be committed to the maintenance of internal order and so scattered in advance of a Turkish attack from the east. Kress’s job during October was to reconnoitre the south Syrian approaches to the Sinai desert and to calculate the requirements for an attack on Suez.27 In the same month an impetuous young German officer was checked by Turkish gendarmes from breaching Turkish neutrality and making a dash to the canal, with a view to sinking a vessel and so blocking navigation.28

  On 22 October Enver sent to OHL the Turkish war plan. It contained six options. The fleet was to attack the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. A holy war was to follow against the enemies of the Central Powers. In the Caucasus the Turks would hold the Russians. In Syria, VIII army corps, possibly supported by XII army corps, would launch an attack on Egypt, although this would not be possible for a further six weeks. If Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Turkey would join it in a thrust on Serbia; such a combination might bring in Romania and thus enable Turkey to be part of a Balkan league against Russia. Sixthly, Enver included a possible expedition with three or four corps to Odessa.29

  Enver’s plan was, in truth, not a plan. It was a list of possibilities; there was no evidence of any staff-work to support the propositions; any rank order of priorities was implicit, not explicit. Odessa figured in it, although that had already been eliminated; the putative Balkan allies were notable for their absence; the Caucasus was mentioned as a limited operation but was already bulking larger in some quarters. On the other hand, the commitment to the offensive in general and to the Suez attack in particular could only please the Germans. If Turkey did not attack, it would not draw in sufficient British or Russian troops to render its belligerence of value to the Central Powers. By making the advance on Egypt the most specific aim in terms of timing and troops, Enver ensured that Turkish and German objectives remained in step. On 24 October OHL signalled its approval.

  What Enver’s war plan revealed was that Turkish strategy was shaped disproportionately by political factors rather than by operational considerations. Between August and October projects had been added without earlier ideas being taken away; to the original target of Russia was now grafted Germany’s concentration on Britain; the specific and limited focus of the alliance on 2 August had been turned into a grandiose array of schemes with shallow foundations, spanning three continents, and requiring a decaying empire to take on Russia and Britain simultaneously and virtually unaided. Enver gave no attention to either of the major areas of vulnerability, the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia; the two theatres of attack were at different apexes of the empire from the major areas of defence and from each other. Both embodied the political philosophy of the Young Turks more than they represented military sense. Enver’s strategy was at once pan-Turk, in that the Caucasus stretched its fingers towards Turan, and pan-Islamic, in its appeal to the Arab world and the recapture of Cairo.

  The confirmation of this policy came on 14 November, with the declaration of an Islamic holy war by the Sheikh-ul-Islam in the presence of the Sultan. All believers throughout the world were called upon to fight Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The first three were accused of enslaving Moslems. The Crimea, Kazan, Turkestan, Bokhara, Khiva, India, China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Africa were urged to make common cause with the Ottoman empire. The appeal was translated into Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Tatar; it was extended to Shi’ites as well as to Sunni Muslims.30

  In this call the religious and secular enjoyed a complex relationship. The Sultan claimed the Caliphate, a function inherited through the Abbasids of Egypt, and confirmed by the Ottoman empire’s custodianship of the holy cities Mecca and Medina. Implicit in the Caliphate was temporal authority over all the Muslims of the world; such a combination of spiritual and political authority had become unfamiliar to Christians.31 Enver had realized the value of the Caliphate for Ottomanism in Libya; he rallied the Arabs not by dint of his own authority but as the future son-in-law of the Sultan and Caliph.32 And it was in these terms that the Kaiser appealed to Enver to launch a holy war, or jihad, in August 1914.33

  Technically jihad concerned the spiritual striving of man to overcome his baser instincts. But the fatwas of November took ‘the form of general mobilization’. They set their demands in the context of universal conscription for all Ottoman subjects aged 20 to 45, but then added a summons to ‘the ulema, professors and teachers, and all students of the religious and profane sciences ... together with most officials, and the young men of the motherland who are the protectors of helpless families, [and] of frail old parents’.34 The language was reminiscent of one of the founding documents of the nation state, the French declaration of la patrie en danger of 1793. The secular and modernizing agenda of the Young Turks was thus grafted onto the appeal of Islam.

  There were up to 270 million Muslims in the world in 1914, about 170 million of them in Asia and 50 million in Africa. A jihad on this scale potentially doubled the impact
of the original outbreak of war in August. But only about 30 million Muslims were ruled by other Muslims. Almost 100 million were governed by Britain; Russia and France each had about 20 million; less than 2 million, most in East Africa, were ruled by Germany.

  Muslims in the empires of Britain, France, and Russia who opposed the Caliphate were promised ‘the fire of hell’, while those who committed the lesser offence of fighting Germany and Austria-Hungary would ‘merit painful torment’.35 Holy war was not, therefore, simply religious in its implications; it was also proto-nationalist, a counter to European imperialism.

  However, the declaration of holy war was not the key to unlocking pan-Islamic fervour that it seemed. The politics of its conception robbed it of doctrinal purity. This was not a war of believers against unbelievers. The Muslims under German and Austro-Hungarian rule were not enjoined to turn against their masters; the Italians, for all that they had given the greatest recent offence to Ottoman sensibilities, were exempted as enemies in reflection of the continuing Austrian hope that they would honour their alliance obligations. None of the 10 million Shi’ites and few Sunni Arabs recognized the Sultan’s claim to the Caliphate. The Young Turks, after all, had overthrown the Caliph, Abdul Hamid, and had downplayed Hamidian pan-Islamism in preference for pan-Turkism. The convenient revival of Islam in Ottoman interests smacked of expedience.

  The summons to holy war, although not unanswered, did not set Asia and Africa alight. For Turkish commentators in the 1930s and for most western historians until the 1980s the cause of its comparative failure was self-evident: nationalism, not religion, was the popular rallying cry of the twentieth century. The Committee of Union and Progress was a part of this process, the self-acknowledged agent of modernization, committed to Turkism and to Turkification. Its circular on the war to its local bodies, dated 11 November 1914, thus emphasized secular objectives rather than religious. ‘The national ideal of our people and our land’, it ran, ‘drives us toward destroying the Muscovite foe and toward achieving in this manner the natural frontiers of the state in which our brothers in race will be included and united.’ Only then did it add: ‘Religious considerations drive us toward liberating the Islamic world from the domination of the Infidel.’36

  And yet an explanation that discounts the strength of Islamic fundamentalism looked less satisfactory as the twentieth century closed than it did at its midway point. In 1914 the national identities of the Muslim world were confused and embryonic. The war itself and the peace settlements helped sharpen them. But nationalism did not thereby supplant religion. Instead, the two coexisted and even merged, allowing Islam to restate its political, social, and legal functions.

  The ambivalence of the Turkish appeal operated in another dimension. The pan-Islamic afterthought of the Committee of Union and Progress statement spoke of freedom. It suggested that interdependence of Muslim ethnic groups, probably through an alliance with Turkey, was the aim. The Turks themselves envisaged a Central Asian bloc of three sovereign states, Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan. But the pan-Turkish summons implied the reinvigoration of Ottoman imperialism, thrusting into the Trans-Caucasus, and inviting the Muslim peoples of the world to trade one domination for another. The blending of Turkism and Islam thus robbed the holy war of its political purity.

  The Turks, therefore, forfeited the advantages in propaganda with which in November 1914 they seemed so amply endowed. Despite the illiteracy of many to whom their appeal was directed, and despite the poverty and slowness of communications, Islam was a powerful means for spreading the message. The Sultan’s summons reached Yola in Nigeria; it was relayed through Zanzibar to Uganda, the Sudan, and the Congo; it was passed through German East Africa to Nyasaland.37 Furthermore, the Committee of Union and Progress had itself developed the arts and machinery of propaganda in the years immediately preceding the war. Much of the original effort was pan-Turkish in focus. The Committee had organized branches in the Caucasus and Turkestan by 1911; it had established contacts with Azerbaijan; it sent its first agents to Afghanistan in 1910. Pan-Islamic structures came later and were primarily a result of the Libyan war with Italy. Enver rallied the tribes, using the appeal of a jihad, and learning that pan-Islam could be exploited for political purposes. Italy’s shortsighted recognition of the Caliph’s continuing religious supremacy in their new North African colony confirmed the wisdom of this approach. The Benevolent Islamic Society (or Pan-Islamic League), founded in January 1913, ostensibly for educational and philanthropic purposes, was in reality dedicated to operations in countries where the Turkish army was not capable of direct intervention. It published a fortnightly magazine, Jihan-i Islam (’The World of Islam’) in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Jihan-i Islam was taken over by the Ministry of War in 1914. A parallel institution, the Society for the Progress of Islam, was set up on what would become neutral ground, in Geneva.38

  These threads were drawn together on 5 August 1914 when a secret order issued by Enver established the Teskilat-i Mahsusa or ‘Special Organization’. Although it was built on pre-existing secret groups, the Teskilat-i Mahsusa became specifically Enver’s creation, staffed by his nominees, free from the jurisdiction of the government or of parliament, and secretly financed by the Ministry of War. Propaganda was only one of its tasks; the others included subversion, terrorism, and sabotage. It served both pan-Turkism and pan-Islam, but its antecedents in the Libyan war and its success in that theatre put the weight on the latter rather than the former. The senior figures were mostly Turks, but the heads of regional cells were often locally recruited. About 700 of them were ranked as ‘brethren’, empowered to receive operational instructions and to distribute propaganda; they in turn controlled about 30,000 supporters.39

  Of primary concern to the Teskilat-i Mahsusa, and a principal motivation in sustained resistance to Italian rule in Libya, was the loyalty of the Arabs within the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman claim to the Caliphate rested crucially on their support; Arabic was the language of the Koran, Arabia was the land in which the Holy Places were situated. And yet the apparatus which Enver had developed by 1914 became preoccupied with the projection of Turkish and Islamic influences abroad, beyond Ottoman frontiers. Not until April 1916 were journals established specifically to put the Ottoman case to the Arabs. They were too late.40

  In fact, both Ottoman domestic opinion and Islamic world views received far more attention from Berlin than they did from Constantinople. Of seventeen enemy tracts circulating in French Algeria between October 1914 and December 1916, only three were printed in the Turkish capital; most of the rest emanated from Berlin or Berne.41 The Germans recognized the shaky foundations of the Sultan’s claim to the Caliphate, and appreciated that pan-Turkism could prove a two-edged sword to a multinational empire. However, the effect of their intervention proved equally ambivalent.

  The underlying problem was organizational confusion. The Germans knew that the Turkish War Ministry had a centralized propaganda agency: Enver told them so in September 1914, and claimed he had a network which stretched from India to Morocco, and from the Caucasus to the Yemen. But the Germans did not believe his claims. Moreover, they were not aware of the existence of Teskilat-i Mahsusa. Thus, their own efforts functioned independently of those of the Turks, and were always in danger of being wrong-footed by them.42

  Germany itself did not lack the tools in 1914 to influence opinion in the Ottoman empire. Its central dilemma was the choice of language in which to communicate its message. French was the language of the educated elite. This, as well as German, was the means of communication favoured by Osmanischer Lloyd, a newspaper founded by German commercial interests in the region and launched following the 1908 coup. After the outbreak of the war Osmanischer Lloyd tried to expand its appeal by publishing an exclusively French edition in print-runs of up to 10,000. But plans to produce separate Turkish and Arabic editions came to nought, not least because of shortages of paper. Supplied with material by the foreign office, Osmanischer Lloyd’s
reporting had to satisfy the censors of both powers. Thus, it generated a blandness unlikely to appeal to the intellects of its restricted readership. During the period of Ottoman neutrality the foreign office sought alternative outlets by pumping money directly into Turkish newspapers. The dissatisfaction of German businessmen was manifested in the private news services operated by the Anatolian railway and the German-run Ottoman Bank, both of which disseminated the dispatches provided by the Wolff Agency (the only government-approved press agency in Germany during the war).

  To compound Germany’s problems, the language issue became fused with that of religion. In 1911 the Prussian Ministry of Culture recognized the possibility of linking missionary activity to the promotion of German influence overseas. The foreign office was supportive, not least because it saw French missionaries in Syria and Palestine as agents of France rather than as promoters of Catholicism. Ostensibly the outbreak of war created the opportunity to oust the French. The driving force of the Zentralstelle für Auslandsdienst, founded to co-ordinate the overseas propaganda of the different departments of state, was the leader of the Catholic Centre party, Matthias Erzberger. But there was clearly a contradiction in using the opportunity of an Islamic holy war to promote Catholicism.

  The French language was too entrenched and the proclivities of the Young Turks too nationalistic for this religious dilemma to become really significant. In 1913 France had over 500 schools in Turkey, with 54,000 pupils, to Germany’s thirty schools with 3,000 pupils. On 11 February 1914 Jagow took the chair at a meeting to establish an organization to promote German culture, the Deutsche-Türkisch Vereinigung. Under the guidance of Ernst Jäckh, the DTV promoted German schools and German-language teaching in the schools of other nationalities. It backed a scheme, which also enjoyed foreign office patronage, for a Deutsch-Türkischen Hochschule. But in September 1915 the Turks banned foreign organizations from opening schools, and made further progress contingent on the principle of reciprocity and on the recognition of the abrogation of capitulations. Professor Schmidt, who had been attached by the Foreign Ministry to the Turkish Ministry of Education at the beginning of the year, recognized that Germany’s best hope for influence was through the medium of Turkish. The Hochschule scheme languished, but the German professors who were appointed to the University of Constantinople gained kudos precisely because they learnt the local language.43