Gallipoli (11 page)

With this bad news Keyes returned to de Robeck in the
Queen Elizabeth
which was lying just outside the straits. The captains of both the
Irresistible
and the
Ocean
had
already been taken off their ships and were with the Admiral when Keyes arrived. A sharp discussion ensued. Keyes said exactly what he thought about the loss of the
Ocean
and her failure
to take the
Irresistible
in tow, and he asked for permission to go back and torpedo the
Irresistible.
The
Ocean
, he thought, might be salvaged. De Robeck agreed, and
after a quick meal Keyes set off again in one of the
Queen Elizabeth’s
cutters. It was now dark and he was unable to find the
Wear
but fell in with the
Jed
instead,
and in this destroyer he steamed back into the straits.

The scene in the Dardanelles now was extremely eerie. All was silent on either shore, and except for the Turkish searchlights that kept sweeping back and forth across the water there was no sign
of life anywhere. For four hours the
Jed
cruised about hunting for the two lost battleships. She crept close in to the Asiatic shore, and with the aid of the enemy searchlights probed into
every bay where the
Irresistible
and the
Ocean
might have gone aground. But there was nothing to be seen or heard: nothing but this extraordinary silence, the utter lassitude of
the battlefield after the day’s fighting is done. To Keyes it was an exhilarating experience.

‘I had,’ he wrote later, ‘a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 p.m. I knew he was beaten at 4 p.m.—and
at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting
mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting must,
and could, be overcome.’

In the early hours of the morning Keyes, in this uplifted state of mind, steamed back to the
Queen Elizabeth.

T
HE
attack on the Dardanelles could hardly have happened at a worse time for the Turks. In the five months that had elapsed since they had gone to war
nothing had gone well with them. In the south Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, had fallen to the British, and the expedition into Egypt had ended in a miserable fiasco; a few exhausted and
bewildered troops managed to reach the Suez Canal but they were easily driven off and not many of them got back to the oases of Palestine alive.

In the east things were even worse. It was Enver’s notion that Turkey should launch an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus with the Third Army stationed at Erzerum, and he decided to
lead the expedition himself. Before leaving for the front he discussed his plan with Liman von Sanders, and the antagonism between the two men seems to have gathered impetus from this moment. Liman
pointed out that Enver was proposing to take his troops across the mountains at Sarikamish in mid-winter, when the passes were blocked with snow, and that he had made no arrangements for his lines
of supply. All this had no effect whatever upon Enver; he would proceed according to his plan, he said, and after the Russians had been defeated he would advance upon India through Afghanistan.
Liman von Sanders has written a sober account of his experiences in Turkey, and he rarely permits himself an emotional expression. This last piece of information, however, undermined his calm.
‘Enver,’ he said, ‘gave utterance to fantastic ideas.’

The details of the battle of Sarikamish, on January 4, 1915, have never been fully known, for there was no one to record them and the news of what had happened was suppressed in Turkey at the
time. The official figures, however, reveal that of the ninety thousand Turks who set out on the expedition only twelve thousand
returned. The others were killed, captured,
died of hunger or were frozen to death. Enver, a sad travesty of the Napoleon he so longed to emulate, abandoned what was left of the army in the field and came back through the winter snow across
the Anatolian plain to resume his post at the Ministry of War in Constantinople. Outwardly he remained as calm as ever, and nothing was said about the disaster at Sarikamish or the subsequent
outbreak of typhus in the broken army.

There followed in Constantinople a ludicrous attempt to proclaim a Jehad—a Holy War—against all Christians in the Near East (Germans and Austrians excepted), and German missions were
sent as far off as Afghanistan to intrigue against the British. But nothing now could disguise the fact that Turkey’s war effort had come to a standstill. The Treasury was empty, the
Army’s requisitions of private property were becoming more and more severe, and among civilians there was apathy everywhere. According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister, the Germans
were in some considerable anxiety that at the next blow the Turks might start negotiating in secret for a separate peace.

It was in these low circumstances that the news of the bombardment of the Dardanelles arrived.

In a time of crisis the morale of the civilians in a city which has not yet been touched by war is seldom as high as it is among the soldiers in the frontline; but in March Constantinople
excelled itself. In the absence of any reliable information from the Dardanelles rumours began to spread, and they gathered an astonishing virulence as they went along. Forty thousand British
soldiers were about to land on the Golden Horn. The women would be raped. The whole city was about to go up in flames.

‘It seems so strange now,’ Henry Morgenthau wrote later on, ‘this conviction in the minds of everybody then—that the success of the Allied Fleets against the Dardanelles
was inevitable, and that the capture of Constantinople was a matter of only a few days.’

For two centuries the British Fleet had gone on from one victory to another, it was the one wholly unshakeable power in
the world; what hope was there that a handful of old
guns on the Dardanelles could hold it back?

In early March the exodus from Constantinople began. The state archives and the gold in the banks were sent to Eski-Shehr, and some attempt was made to bury the more valuable art treasures
underground. The first of two special trains, one for the Sultan and his suite, the other for the foreign diplomats, stood ready at Haidar Pasha on the Asiatic shore, and the more well-to-do Turks
began to send their wives and families into the interior, by every means they could find.

They were hardly to blame for these precautions, for Talaat himself was utterly despondent. As early as January he had called a conference of Liman von Sanders, Admiral Usedom, the German who
was in command of the coastal defences, and Bronsart, the German chief-of-staff of the Army. All had agreed that when the Allied Fleet attacked it would get through. Now in March, Talaat had
requisitioned a powerful Mercedes car from the Belgian Legation, and it was packed and equipped with extra petrol tanks, ready for his departure. Since the distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople
was only 150 miles it was judged that the first British warships would appear off the Golden Horn within twelve hours of their arrival in the Sea of Marmara.

Among the diplomats too there was much apprehension. The German Embassy, a huge yellow pile of stone, stood on a particularly exposed point at the head of the Bosphorus, and Wangenheim, all his
earlier courage gone, was convinced that it would be shelled. He had already deposited some of his baggage with Morgenthau for safe keeping on neutral American ground. ‘Let them dare to
destroy that Embassy,’ he exclaimed to Morgenthau one day. ‘I’ll get even with them. If they fire a single shot at it we’ll blow up the French and the British Embassies. Go
tell the British Admiral that, won’t you? Tell him also that we have the dynamite ready to do it.’

Wangenheim was in an awkward position. If he retired with the Sultan into the interior of Asia Minor and the Turks signed a peace with the Allies he would be cut off from Germany and the
West. For a time he had tried to persuade Talaat to move the government to Adrianople, whence he would have an opportunity of escaping across the Bulgarian border; but Talaat
had refused on the grounds that it was more than likely that Bulgaria would attack Turkey once Constantinople fell.

Next Bedri, the Chief of Police, came to Morgenthau to arrange for the departure of the American Embassy. Morgenthau told him that he was not going to move, and suggested instead that they
should draw up a map of the city showing the areas which were likely to be bombarded. It was agreed that the two ammunition factories, the powder mills, the offices of War and Marine, the telegraph
office, the railway stations and a number of other public buildings were all legitimate targets. These were marked off, and Morgenthau telegraphed the State Department in Washington with a request
that the British and French should be approached and asked to spare the other purely residential districts.

This plan, however, was hardly more than a straw in the wind, for the more ruthless of the Young Turks had already made their own arrangements for destroying the city rather than let the Allies
have it. If they themselves had to go then all should go. They cared nothing for the Christian relics of Byzantium, and regarded patriotism as a higher thing than the lives of the hundreds of
thousands of people who lived in the tumbledown wooden houses in Galata and Stamboul and along the Golden Horn. If one did not remember the burning of Moscow by the Russians after Borodino, and
Hitler’s last days in Berlin, it would be difficult to credit the arrangements that were now made. Petrol and other inflammable material were stored in the police stations. St. Sophia and
other public buildings were made ready for dynamiting.

Morgenthau pleaded for St. Sophia at least, but Talaat answered him, ‘There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress who care for anything that is old. We all like new
things.’

The truth was that by March the Young Turks had something to fear which was even worse than the approach of the Allied Fleet.
Placards had begun to appear in the streets
denouncing their government. With every day that went by it became more evident that a great part of the population—and not only the Greeks and the Armenians—looked upon the arrival of
the Allied warships, not as a defeat but as a liberation. Bedri was able to do something to check this increasing unrest by deporting a number of men whom he judged to be dangerous, but it was
perfectly clear that rioting would break out directly the British and French ships appeared.

For the rest, all was concealed muddle and a silent confusion. Outwardly the city was quiet and normal, inwardly it was possessed by a coma of suspense. The shops were open, the government
departments at work; but everyone, with divided hopes and different fears, had fixed his attention on the Dardanelles, and even the great mass of minor people who aspire to nothing but their own
safety and who submerge their imaginations in the routine of their daily lives were eager for the latest rumour, the least scrap of information from the front.

It was that ominous quietness that precedes a riot. Everywhere in Constantinople soldiers were marching about or standing at the street corners, and they had that curious appearance of
aimlessness, of menace that has not yet quite decided upon its target, that seems to overtake armed forces in a city when the officers have no orders, when nothing certain is known and each new
rumour cancels out the last. The
Goeben
made ready to steam out into the Black Sea before the
Queen Elizabeth
arrived.

‘These precautions,’ Liman remarks dryly, ‘were justified.’ Turkish General Headquarters, he says, were convinced that the Fleet would break through, and meanwhile the
orders issued by Enver for the disposition of the troops along the Dardanelles were such that a successful defence against an Allied landing there would have been impossible. ‘Had these
orders been carried out,’ Liman goes on, ‘the course of the world war would have been given sucha turn in the spring of 1915 that Germany and Austria would have had to continue the
struggle without Turkey.’

Meanwhile at the Narrows in the Dardanelles, the last obstacle
between the Fleet and the Sea of Marmara, the Turkish and German gunners were reaching the end of their
resources. Up to March 18 they had been able to hold their own, and in the excitement of the struggle they had come to regard with almost a casual air the slim dark silhouettes of the battleships
which appeared each day so clearly before them at the southern approaches to the straits. Soon they knew all the names: ‘There’s the
Agamemnon
; there’s the
Elizabeth
,’ and they longed only for the ships to come within range so that they could begin to shoot. But each day drained away a little more of their energy and their ability to
fight. The massed attack of March 18 had been a devastating thing. By midnight, just as Keyes had guessed, they had reached a point of crisis.

Their courage had not gone—it had been a tremendous thing to see the enemy battleships go down, and in all the day’s fighting they had suffered only 118 casualties—but half
their ammunition had been fired away, and there was no possibility of getting any more. In particular the heavy guns had been left with less than thirty armour-piercing shells, which alone had
power to destroy the battleships. When these were gone it was simply a question of how long the lighter guns and howitzers could keep the minesweepers off the minefields; some thought one day,
others two. The mines themselves offered no particular difficulty once the guns were dominated; there were 324 of them arranged in ten lines, but they were spaced ninety yards apart, many of them
were old, and after six months in the water had broken from their moorings and drifted away.
⁴
Apart from another thirty-six mines which had not yet been put
into the water there was no other reserve, and it was now quite possible for the British to sweep a channel through to the Sea of Marmara in a matter of hours. Beyond the Narrows there were no
other defences of any kind to impede the
battleships, except a few old guns which were aimed the wrong way.