The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (42 page)

Constantinople was by then crowded with less illustrious refugees, in pathetic flight from towns and villages which generations of their families had looked upon as their true home. The
Bulgarian army, although still besieging Edirne, was also attacking the main defences of the capital, the Chatalja Lines, barely twenty miles from the old walls of Byzantium. Mehmed Kamil,
appointed Grand Vizier on 29 October in the hopes that his anglophile reputation would win support from the British Government, appealed to the Great Powers to send their warships through the
Straits to protect the city from occupation. At the same time he ordered the police to arrest several CUP activists, whom he suspected of plotting a coup. But by the third week of November tension
had eased, both inside the capital and at the Front. The Chatalja Lines held firm, and morale was boosted by the exploits of the light cruiser
Hamidiye
whose commander, Hüseyin Rauf,
slipped out through the Dardanelles and threatened Greek naval mastery of the Aegean. When the first snow swept westwards from Anatolia into Rumelia, the Balkan allies agreed on a cease-fire. The
guns fell silent on 3 December. Within a week peace talks began in London under Sir Edward Grey’s chairmanship.

Rumours that Kamil Pasha was prepared to accept humiliating terms in order to placate his English friends allowed the CUP to recover the political initiative.
²⁵
The Grand Vizier was right to fear a coup. Talaat tried, in the first instance, to win support from General Nazim,
but he remained so mistrustful of the
CUP that he refused to be drawn into any conspiracy. On 23 January 1913 reports that Kamil was prepared to allow Edirne to become a Bulgarian city encouraged the Unionists to carry out the coup
they had been planning for several weeks. Colonel Enver led a band of officers into the principal council chamber of the Sublime Porte building and forced Kamil’s resignation at gun-point,
while one of his companions shot dead General Nazim, who must have known more about the CUP’s overt activities than was good for him. While the Young Turk general, Ahmed Cemal, took emergency
powers as Governor of the capital, Enver went to the palace and browbeat the Sultan into appointing Shevket as Grand Vizier. Soon afterwards an Egyptian steamer left for Alexandria with Kamil
aboard, a British diplomat having secured him a safe-conduct.
²⁶

‘The Sublime Porte Raid’, a dramatic episode which figures prominently in Young Turk legend, took place at a time when the peace talks in London seemed close to collapse, largely
through Bulgarian intransigence. Fighting was resumed on 3 February, but hopes that the new Shevket government would pull off a victory in the field were soon dashed. On 6 March the Greeks at last
captured Ioánnina, where Essad Pasha had maintained a valiant resistance throughout the winter in Ali Pasha’s old lair. At the same time it proved impossible to loosen the Bulgarian
hold on Edirne; shortage of food forced the city’s surrender on 26 March after fierce fighting with heavy casualties. On 14 April another cease-fire was imposed; the peace talks were resumed,
and by early June the Ottoman Government had to accept terms which recognized the loss of Crete, Macedonia, Thrace, Albania and most of the Aegean islands. Henceforth ‘Turkey-in-Europe’
would be limited to the hinterland of Constantinople, with the frontier running in an almost straight line from Enez (Enos) to Midye (Media), thus leaving Edirne more than thirty miles inside
Bulgaria.

Even before the final collapse of the army, Ambassador Lowther’s reports to the Foreign Office in London were anticipating yet another political coup during the summer months.
²⁷
There is no doubt that the British authorities in Egypt hoped to restore Kamil, trusting him as a ‘tried and convinced defender of the traditional
friendship between
Turkey and Great Britain’. But, though Kamil was smuggled back to Constantinople from his native Cyprus, he was hastily whisked away again, and it
was the CUP who benefited from the next move in the ruthless power game. On 11 June Mahmud Shevket was shot dead in Beyazit Square as his car left the War Ministry for the Sublime Porte buildings.
Cemal, as Military Governor, reacted swiftly. The murder was blamed on the political opposition, the Liberal Union Party, many of whose members were shipped off to Sinope under close arrest. Courts
martial sentenced several Liberal leaders to death—often, as in the case of Prince Sabaheddin,
in absentia
. Now at last the CUP Young Turks seized power. The Committee’s General
Secretary, Mehmed Said Halim Pasha—one of Muhammad Ali’s many grandsons—succeeded Shevket as Grand Vizier and was to hold office for more than three and a half years. But the real
rulers of the empire were the famous triumvirate: Talaat, as Minister of the Interior; Cemal, as military governor of the capital; and Enver, who for the moment was content to enhance his authority
by declining ministerial office, remaining a front-line soldier, and marrying the Sultan’s niece, Princess Emine Naciye. At the time of Shevket’s murder, the Princess was not quite
fifteen years old.

Bulgarian folly, and his own boldness, completed Enver’s ascendancy and consolidated the CUP’s hold on power.
²⁸
Resentment at
Graeco-Serbian gains, especially in parts of Macedonia which they considered their own, led the Bulgarians to launch a surprise attack on their former allies on the night of 29–30 June, 1913.
After six days of heavy fighting, King Ferdinand’s troops were in a desperate position, made worse by the decision of Roumania on 11 July to seize the Dobruja, thus opening up a northern
Front. Two days later the Ottoman army thrust westwards from the Enez-Midye line, encountering little resistance. As the army approached Edirne, Colonel Enver led his cavalry at the gallop ahead of
the marching columns, and thus became the warrior-liberator of the city. He went at once to Sinan’s masterpiece, the Selimiye mosque and, as a good Muslim who always carried a copy of the
Koran in his officer’s tunic, offered prayers to Allah for the city’s deliverance. Although far from popular with many brother-officers, Enver’s instinctive showmanship made him
appear a hero-protector to some 200,000 bewildered
refugees from the Balkan provinces who remained in or around the capital that summer.

Revised peace terms, settled in Bucharest, advanced the Enez-Midye frontier so as to return Edirne to Ottoman sovereignty. The CUP could thus claim some tangible fruits of victory in
the Second Balkan War, an essential need if its propagandists were to rekindle the Young Turk enthusiasm of the 1908 Revolution. On paper, the achievements of five years of constitutional rule
looked meagre. The Sultan’s powers remained clipped, there were more schools, more effective policing and better urban sewerage (especially in the capital); and in the more enlightened cities
the professional status of women was improved, giving them for the first time opportunities to become doctors, lawyers or civil servants. In this respect, and through tentative experiments in
economic nationalism, the Young Turks continued the work of the
Tanzimat
era, while providing the republican reformers of the next generation with guidelines on what might be developed
further—and what should be left well alone. These successes were offset by the repressive statutes enacted in the early months of Mehmed V’s reign, and thereafter by a rapid diminution
of parliament’s influence. There was something symbolic about the fire of January 1910 which, sparked off by an electrical fault, swiftly destroyed the parliamentary chambers newly created in
the Çira
ğ
an Palace and forced the deputies to develop their political skills in the cramped galleries of the Fine Arts Academy. Although the Sultan’s male subjects were allowed to
exercise their right to vote in the winter of 1913–14, military repression left the CUP as the only organized political party to contest the elections. By then Unionist candidates were
narrowly Turkish in ideology, rather than advocating a racially egalitarian Ottoman commonwealth like many earlier Young Turks. Inevitably, in the absence of an alternative party, the Opposition
(in so far as it existed at all by 1913) was also nationalistic in structure, with a large Arab group and smaller bodies representing the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities. Most deputies had
been vetted by the CUP before even seeking election.
²⁹

A pride in Turkish language and culture had shown itself before the turn of the century. It was intensified, however, by the disastrous loss of
territories in the five
years which followed the Young Turk Revolution. In 1878–9 Abdulhamid II had been forced to cede two-fifths of his lands. Between 1908 and 1913 another 425,000 square miles—or over a
third of the total remaining area of the Empire—passed out of Ottoman sovereignty; and, even after the recovery of Edirne, the Sultan’s foothold in Europe in 1914 still comprised no
more than 4,500 square miles of what had for so long been the great imperial recruiting ground of Rumelia. If the CUP triumvirate was to prevent the crumbling away still further of the empire, it
seemed essential to harness Turkish national pride to the service of the one institution which they understood, the Ottoman army. Shortly before his assassination Shevket had told the German
ambassador that his country must have a special role in reshaping the Ottoman State: the army would be reformed ‘under the almost dictatorial control of a German General,’ he
declared.
³⁰
Enver saw in the murdered Grand Vizier’s professed intention a testament of faith in two armies which he, like Shevket, held in high
respect. On 30 June 1913 Kaiser William II appointed General Liman von Sanders to lead a new military mission to Constantinople.
³¹

C
HAPTER
15

G
ERMANY
’
S
A
LLY

F
AMILIARITY WITH SUCH EPIC LEGENDS AS
G
ALLIPOLI AND
Lawrence’s Arab Revolt make it hard to appreciate that, even as late
as midsummer in 1914, the Ottoman Empire remained outside the network of rival alliances, free to choose between the Central Powers and the Entente or to guard its neutrality. Throughout the July
Crisis there was still no certainty which way Said Halim’s government would turn. Relations with Britain and France had improved considerably in the preceding twelve months; and both
countries were better trading partners for the empire as a whole than Germany or Austria–Hungary. Much progress had been made towards international collaboration in the management of the
Turkish Petroleum Company, which was registered in London in 1911–12 and committed to developing the oil resources of the vilayets of Mosul and Baghdad (Iraq). So unruffled were Anglo-Turkish
relations that, a fortnight after the Sarajevo murders, the British ambassador returned home on leave. As late as 21 July, Ottoman Bonds went on sale in London to finance British enterprises on the
Bosphorus.
¹

Yet no one questioned that Germany’s political influence there was considerable. Kaiser William II assumed that his empire still enjoyed a predominance which he, personally, was determined
to uphold. In December 1913 he had urged the forty officers of General Liman von Sanders’s new Military Mission to ‘work unobtrusively . . . steadfastly and harmoniously’ for
‘the Germanization of the Turkish army’;
²
and with realistic practicality he insisted that, while Goltz had managed with an annual 30,000
marks for baksheesh, Liman’s fund ‘to use as he
thought fit’ might creep up to a million marks a year in what was becoming a highly competitive and
inflationary market.

Few ministers or officials in Berlin shared the Kaiser’s confident enthusiasm for the mysterious East. Privately the German ambassador reckoned Turkey ‘worthless as an
ally’.
³
The Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which remained an obsessive interest of the Kaiser, could never serve as an axis of policy, for by
1913–14 the whole project was under strain. Completion of the line needed the injection of more capital, a grant of further privileges to its German investors, and the waiving of objections
to its most southern route by the British (who, having settled disputes with the Ottoman authorities in August 1913, were unable to complete parallel negotiations with Germany until the following
June). Nor could Berlin rely on constant support from the ‘pro-Germans’ in Constantinople. Although the Kaiser welcomed the appointment of Enver as War Minister in January 1914, within
ten weeks ‘Turkey’s last hope’ (as William had then called him) was quarrelling seriously with Liman. The hero-liberator of Edirne was infuriated by German attempts to secure key
commands for Prussian gunnery experts in the forts of the Bosphorus. If Russian sources may be believed, already in March 1914 ‘German tyranny’ was so deeply resented in the Ottoman
officer corps in the capital that some thought was being given to expedient ways of removing Liman by assassination.
⁴

The CUP leaders themselves would not have sanctioned so rash an act, though they never became the pro-German puppets depicted by Entente wartime propaganda. Talaat, from 1913 to 1918 the most
influential figure at the centre of Ottoman government, at first favoured closer relations with Russia, believing that he could strike a good bargain with the Tsar’s ministers alarmed by the
mounting German military presence on the Straits. In February 1914 Talaat accepted Russian treaty proposals giving some protection to the Christian communities in the eastern Armenian vilayets; and
in May he led an Ottoman delegation to the Crimea, where he was received in audience by Tsar Nicholas II at Livadia and tentatively put forward alliance proposals to the Russian Foreign Minister,
Sazonov.
⁵
Talaat’s colleague at the Ministry of Finance, Mehmed Cavit, favoured improved relations with France. Parisian nominees still
dominated the Ottoman Public Debt Commission, and were ready to authorize a further loan, when bankruptcy again faced the empire. They shared control of the Ottoman Bank with the
British, and gave shrewd advice to the Ministry of Finance; and French experts were also entrusted with organizing the gendarmerie in the capital and several other cities and ports. Nor was Cavit
the only CUP leader to look to Paris. In the second week of July 1914 Ahmed Cemal visited the Quai d’Orsay, where he let it be known that, given the right conditions, the Ottoman government
‘would orientate its policy towards the Triple Entente’.
⁶
Neither Russia nor France responded positively to these Young Turk
initiatives.