The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (44 page)

Gallipoli was the greatest defensive victory in Ottoman history. The tenacity of ‘Mehmedchik’—the Turkish counterpart of ‘Tommy Atkins’won the empire of the Sultans
a six-year reprieve. But the cost was frightful; although Turkish casualty figures in the campaign were never finally established, they must certainly have been twice as high as for the invading
armies. Enver, as War Minister, claimed credit for the victory; more precisely, the strategic dispositions were ordered by Liman von Sanders while, at the tip of the peninsula, Essad Pasha and his
staff successfully contained the inland thrust of the Anzacs. If a folk hero emerged from the campaign he was Mustafa Kemal, the colonel who inspired or cajoled the wavering fugitives of his XIXth
Division into a
valiant defence along the rocky ridges of Sari Bair and Anafarta. The official Ottoman War Ministry propaganda magazine wished to carry Kemal’s
portrait on its cover, but Enver personally intervened: there could be no public trumpeting of a contemporary whose military achievements were beginning to surpass his own. Kemal was given command
of the Sixteenth Army, and sent to fight the Russians in Anatolia. Fourteen years later a British staff officer, writing the official history of Gallipoli, assessed Kemal’s role in the
defence of the peninsula objectively: ‘Seldom in history can the exertions of a single divisional commander have exercised so profound an influence, not only on the course of a battle but
perhaps on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.’
²¹

The fighting at the Dardanelles was forced on the Ottomans by their enemies. So, too, through much of 1915 and 1916, was the grim campaign along the old Russian frontier in Transcaucasia, where
in mid-February 1916 the historic fortress of Erzerum fell suddenly to a surprise enemy assault, almost certainly thanks to information received by the Tsar’s field commanders from Ottoman
Arab officers incensed by the assertive ‘Turkism’ spreading through the Sultan’s army. In contrast to these defensive campaigns at the Dardanelles and in eastern Anatolia were the
attempts by both Germany and the Ottoman Empire to spread the jihad by fomenting rebellion. ‘Our consuls . . . must inflame the whole Mohammeddan world to wild revolt,’ Kaiser William
declared. ‘At least England shall lose India.’
²²
So, it seems, Enver too believed. Before Gallipoli, he had invited Kemal to take command
of three regiments and lead them across Persia to raise the Muslims of Baluchistan, Sind and the Punjab against the British Raj—an offer Kemal shrewdly rejected. Indian Muslims took little
notice of the Caliph’s proclamation, nor did Indian troops fighting alongside the British and Anzacs at Gallipoli respond to Turkish calls for mutiny.

Enver also gave his support to plans for saboteurs to cross the frontier from Mesopotamia into southern Persia and blow up the newly constructed Anglo-Persian Oil Company refinery at Abadan.
Swift military action by the British frustrated this particular design, although the German agent, Wilhelm Wassmuss, later sparked off an anti-British rebellion over a wide area of southern
Persia.
²³
As a last resort Enver
sent Young Turk officers into Libya to encourage the puritanical Muslim Sanussi sect to
attack British outposts and, if Italy should again go to war with Turkey, to resume desert raids on the coastal towns of Cyrenaica. Here Enver had more success. Under Sayed Ahmed the Senussi fought
loyally for their Caliph in the western desert until the empire’s final fall. On the other hand, one prominent Ottoman agent, Jafar Pasha al-Askiri, who was captured by the British in a
western desert cavalry skirmish, later supported the Arab rebellion in his native Mesopotamia and helped create the Iraqi army.
²⁴

At Germany’s request the Ottoman High Command sought to implement a master design for ‘the destruction of British rule in Egypt’, developing a plan originally prepared in
Berlin three months before Turkey became a belligerent. General Ahmed Cemal, abandoning ministerial office in order to return to active service, was appointed to command the Fourth Ottoman Army at
Damascus in November 1914. Two months later he concentrated at Beersheba some 20,000 men, with artillery support, who were to mount an attack on the Suez Canal, ‘the jugular vein of the
British Empire’. With the Turks were some German specialist troops, and Cemal had a Bavarian colonel, Baron Franz von Kress von Kressenstein, as his Chief-of-Staff. Pontoon bridges,
constructed in Germany and smuggled through neutral Bulgaria, were intended to allow the invaders to cross to the west bank of the canal. Both Cemal and Kress believed that a surprise raid in
strength on the British positions would incite Egyptian nationalists to turn against the occupying ‘colonialists’ and welcome back Khedive Abbas Hilmi II. The raiders might hope to
‘be joined by 70,000 Arab nomads’, predicted Ernst Jaeckh, the German High Command’s favourite Orientalist.
²⁵

Cemal’s raid did not (as is often said) take the British by surprise: French reconnaissance aircraft had seen the columns advancing across the Sinai desert. From 3 to 10 February 1915
there was fighting to the north of Ismailia; a single Ottoman platoon successfully bridged the canal before Cemal pulled his men back, disappointed at the failure of the Egyptians to welcome
Ottoman liberation. While Cemal withdrew to Beersheba, Colonel Kress remained in the Sinai desert with a few battalions of infantry and a squadron of cavalry, as a standing threat to Egypt.
German engineers supervised construction of a strategic railway linking Jaffa with Beersheba. Occasionally Kress’s raiders would drop mines into the canal, until in
the late summer of 1916 Anzac horsemen finally cleared the desert. Not until the end of the year did the British resolve to open up a new—and ultimately decisive—battle front in
Palestine.
²⁶

As early as August 1914, some contact had been established between British Intelligence in Cairo and dissident Arabs serving with the Ottoman army in Mesopotamia. The principal emissary was
Major Abdul Aziz al-Masri, who had founded in Baghdad a secret society known as
al-Ahd
(The Covenant), in which Iraqi officers pledged themselves to support any cause promoting Arab
independence from Turkish rule.
²⁷
The outbreak of war intensified British efforts to foment revolts in these outer Ottoman provinces. Here, however,
there was a clash of interests between the Foreign Office and the India Office in London, and between Cairo and Simla, the headquarters of the British army in India; the Viceregal authorities
opposed any encouragement of rebellion in the Ottoman Empire. They feared that the contagion of unrest would spread to the Indian subcontinent, where there were similar secret societies to those in
the Arab lands.

There is no doubt that this cumbersome shared British responsibility for the Middle East helped the Ottoman High Command. While Cairo maintained political contact with the tribes of the Hejaz
and southern Syria, it was the India Office which concluded the treaty of December 1915, recognizing the ambitious thirty-five-year-old Abdulaziz Ibn Saud as ruler of Nejd.
²⁸
The Viceregal administration in Bombay regarded the Gulf, Mesopotamia and the recently developed oilfields as falling within its sphere of interest—and also much
of southern Arabia and Aden, where the British coaling-station was administered from 1839 until 1937 by military Political Residents appointed by the Government of India. And it was GHQ Simla which
began the Mesopotamian Campaign with the dispatch of ‘Force D’ to the head of the Persian Gulf. The expedition landed at Fao on the second day of the war, brushed aside the local
Ottoman garrisons and took Basra without much difficulty a fortnight later, thus safeguarding the oil installations in the Shatt-al-Arab. But instead of using Arab levies to harass the Ottomans,
the British treated
southern Mesopotamia as conquered territory: it was on this occasion that the twenty-six-year-old Iraqi Arab nationalist, Nuri as-Said, was hurriedly
deported to India.

Force D’s hostility towards Arab nationalism, together with the arrival in Baghdad of Field-Marshal von der Goltz and a German mission, strengthened Ottoman resistance. Eventually General
Townshend occupied the strategically important town of Kut-al-Amarah, 250 miles north of Basra, at the end of September 1915, and GHQ Simla at once urged him to advance on Baghdad itself. Townshend
dutifully tried to accomplish all that was expected of him, but without Arab support any drive further into Mesopotamia was a rash undertaking, and on 22 November Goltz’s improvised army,
strengthened with a crack Anatolian division, defeated the invaders at Ctesiphon, less than twenty miles south of Baghdad. By 3 December Townshend’s 17,000 men were besieged in Kut, together
with 6,000 Arabs trapped in the fighting. Four attempts to relieve the town were defeated. Kitchener’s confident ruse of offering Khalil Pasha, the Ottoman commander, at least a million
pounds if he permitted the Kut garrison to go free was rejected—and, for propaganda purposes, was treated with great contempt by Enver (who was Khalil’s nephew). On 29 April 1916 the
Kut garrison passed into a harsh captivity. As after the evacuation of Gallipoli three and a half months before, the Ottomans prided themselves on having routed an infidel invader. Momentarily the
claim boosted morale at home.
²⁹

Like other governments in 1914, the Ottoman authorities had assumed that the war they were entering would soon be over. The economy could not stand the strain of long campaigns on several battle
fronts. Although most towns and villages in the provinces were accustomed to feeding themselves, Constantinople had depended on grain imports from Russia and, to a lesser extent, from France and
Italy. There was, in consequence, a severe shortage of food in the capital, even during the first winter of war; its effects were aggravated by an influx of refugees and the spread of typhus. Other
regions, normally self-sufficient, suffered from the conscription of agricultural workers for service in the army and, in eastern Anatolia, from the devastation caused by an invasion. Famine in
Syria and the Lebanon was caused in part by a prolonged
drought, but also through an inequitable system of food distribution, made worse by the mobilization of railway
rolling-stock and track for military purposes. From October 1915, when Bulgaria entered the war as an ally of Germany, Austria–Hungary and the Ottomans, there was a direct rail-link once
again with Central Europe, giving the Turks a market for cotton, wool, leather, oil from the Mosul vilayet and other minerals. Without Germany’s material backing the Sultan would have been
forced to seek an early peace. As it was, official figures indicate that the cost of living in the capital quadrupled in the first twenty-five months of the war. Germany effectively subsidized its
ally to the equivalent of a quarter of a billion pounds sterling in order to keep Ottoman armies in the field for four years.
³⁰

Politically there was no change in the character of Ottoman rule, although it was inevitable that censorship and police control should be strengthened. The Young Turks determined policy until
the final weeks of war.
³¹
Said Halim remained Grand Vizier until February 1917 when Talaat, long the effective chief minister, formally succeeded him.
At the same time Mehmed V continued to fulfil the duties of a constitutional Sultan. He welcomed Kaiser William II on his third state visit, presiding over a banquet in the Dolmabahche on 16
October 1917; and in the third week of May 1918 he was host during the only Habsburg State Visit to the Ottoman capital, entertaining Emperor-King Charles and his consort, Zita, with a splendour
which taxed the resources of an empire threatened by runaway inflation. Seven weeks later—on 3 July—Mehmed V died and was succeeded by Abdulmecid’s youngest son, the
fifty-seven-year-old Mehmed VI Vahideddin, last of the thirty-six Ottoman Sultans. Five months earlier, almost forgotten amid the stress of war, their half-brother Abdulhamid had also died, not
from an assassin’s knife or poison as he had so long feared, but from heart failure in his bed at Beylerbey.

Although in some respects it seems astonishing, the Young Turks sought to maintain the momentum of their revolution throughout the first three years of war. In April 1913 decrees permitting
judgements of the religious courts to be referred to the
Mahkrme-i Temyiz
(lay Court of Appeal) had asserted the primacy of the secular judiciary over the
ulema
; and this gradual toning down of the Muslim hierarchy’s authority reached a climax towards the end of Said Halim’s vizierate. From April 1916 the
ş
eyhülislâm
was no longer automatically a member of the cabinet, and in the next few months he was deprived of all his executive functions in what were now regarded as lay
affairs, such as the administration of religious foundations and education. By the time of Mehmed VI Vahideddin’s accession the
ş
eyhülislâm
was accepted as a solely
religious dignitary, someone to be consulted and respected as an interpreter of Islamic teaching. There was also a series of measures which cautiously advanced the general emancipation of women:
thus, in 1917 revision of the code of family law established that marriage was a secular contract, and recognized that a wife was entitled to divorce a husband who was a proven adulterer.
Nevertheless, many social taboos remained rigidly enforced, especially in the countryside: and in the towns and cities all theatres, restaurants and lecture halls were still required to have a
curtained-off area set aside for women.

Conservative disapproval of secularization lessened with the removal of the restraints on Muslim fanaticism which the Young Turks had imposed so long as they courted favour abroad. There was no
longer any prospect of foreign inspectors-general operating in the provinces where Christian minorities complained of persecution. Renewed Dashnak activity in the city of Van, with the Russians now
openly backing some form of Armenian autonomy on both sides of the old frontier, led to Ottoman fears that the Sultan’s Armenian subjects would regard the Tsarist invaders as liberators and
therefore assist their advance into Anatolia. Accordingly, in May 1915 the Ottoman authorities organized a mass deportation of Armenians from the eastern provinces to guarded settlements in
northern Mesopotamia. As many as half a million Armenians may have died at this time from starvation, or from the sufferings of long marches through mainly Kurdish territory, or from massacres
committed by the Kurds themselves, with the connivance of local officials. Soon afterwards Armenian communities living in the countryside of northern Syria and Cilicia were similarly uprooted, and
concentrated in central Syria. No one knows how many Armenians perished during the war. Official Turkish estimates put the total figure at about
300,000; maximum Armenian
claims suggest a figure of some two million, killed during what is regarded as a systematic campaign of genocide.
³²
Sadly, at least 1.3 million
Armenian deaths seem probable. This estimate, if correct, means that in the war and its aftermath as many Armenians were slain as were soldiers serving the French Republic.