A Peace to End all Peace (14 page)

I

Mecca, where Mohammed was born, and Medina, to which he emigrated, are the holy cities that for Moslems everywhere give unique importance to the mountainous Hejaz, the long and narrow western section of the Arabian peninsula bordering the Red Sea. Hejaz means “separating”—a reference to the highlands that divide it from the plateau to the east. In the early twentieth century Arabia was an empty and desolate land, and the Hejaz, in the words of the 1910
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, was “physically the most desolate and uninviting province in Arabia.” Whole sections of it were unwatered and uninhabited wilderness. About 750 miles long and, at its widest, about 200 miles across, the Hejaz precariously supported a population estimated at 300,000, half-Bedouin and half-townsmen. Although it formed part of the Ottoman Empire, its distance from Constantinople, magnified by the primitive state of transportation and communications, had always lent it considerable autonomy.

Dates, of which a hundred varieties were said to grow, were the staple crop; but the real industry of the province was the annual pilgrimage. About 70,000 pilgrims made the journey to Mecca each year. Protecting the pilgrims from marauding Bedouin tribes was a principal function of the local representative of the Ottoman government; and the authorities made a practice of offering subsidies to the tribes in the hope of persuading them that there was better pay in safeguarding than in molesting the visitors.

Mecca was a two-day camel journey, or about forty-five miles, from the nearest coastal port. It lay in a hot and barren valley, and controlled the passages through the surrounding hills. Its population was estimated at 60,000. Entrance into its precincts was prohibited to non-Moslems, and exercised the powerful lure of the forbidden. Only a few European travelers had succeeded in penetrating the city in disguise and bringing back detailed descriptions of it.

These Europeans reported that even in the holy city certain dark practices lingered from a primitive past. According to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, “The unspeakable vices of Mecca are a scandal to all Islam, and a constant source of wonder to pious pilgrims. The slave trade has connexions with the pilgrimage which are not thoroughly clear; but under cover of the pilgrimage a great deal of importation and exportation of slaves goes on.”

Yet European travelers also reported that the people of the Hejaz, and indeed of all Arabia, were among nature’s aristocrats. According to the
Britannica
:

The job of the Emir of Mecca, if the
Britannica
was to be believed, was not an easy one.

For Moslems, Mecca had always been the center of the world. Now, the ambitions of Kitchener’s Cairo and of the C.U.P.’s Constantinople brought the arid Hejaz into the center of twentieth-century politics. The new attentions that Mecca received in the 1914 war brought it into the center in other ways, less welcome to its Emir; he found himself caught in the middle.

Hussein ibn Ali, who ruled the Hejaz on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan, was styled the Sherif of Mecca and its Emir. To be a sherif, or notable, was to be a descendant of Mohammed; and Hussein, like Mohammed himself, was a member of the House of Hashem.
^*
For some time it had been the practice of the Ottoman regime to appoint the Emir of Mecca from among rival sherifs. In 1908 Hussein, of the Dhawu-’Awn clan, was personally selected by the Sultan, over the opposition of the C.U.P., which backed the candidate of a rival clan.

Hussein, like his courtly friend the Grand Vizier and like the Sultan himself, was a man of old-fashioned breeding and learning whose style of expression was ornate. Of medium height, with a white beard, and about sixty years of age in 1914, he had spent much of his life in glorified captivity at the court in Constantinople. There, even the prying eyes of enemies were unable to detect him in any improper conduct; he spent his time in meditation.

Hussein continually expressed strong personal loyalty to the Sultan. The Sultan, however, was a figurehead. Real power at the Porte was wielded by the Young Turks, new men without family background, with whom he was out of sympathy. Though loyal to the Sultan, he found himself increasingly at odds with the Sultan’s government, and in particular with its policy of centralization.

Hussein’s ambition was to make his position as Emir secure for himself and, in perpetuity, for his family. He strove to increase his independence, while the centralizing C.U.P. government conspired to decrease it. The government pushed forward with construction of the Hejaz railroad, aimed, among other things, at curtailing the Emir’s autonomy. The railroad already ran from Damascus, capital of what is now Syria, to Medina in the Hejaz. What the government proposed was to extend the line to Mecca and to the port of Jeddah. This was a threat to the camel-owning Bedouin tribes of the Hejaz and to their lucrative control of the pilgrim routes to the Holy Places. Using the railroad and also the telegraph, the C.U.P. threatened to exercise direct rule over Medina, Mecca, and the rest of the Hejaz. If carried into effect, the Turkish government’s plan would make Hussein into a mere subordinate functionary. Hussein responded by inspiring civil disturbances.

For Hussein, who had begun his administration of affairs by using Turkish troops against the Arabian tribes, this represented a change in policy, but not a change in allegiance. He remained in the ambiguous position of supporting the Ottoman Empire while opposing its government.

In the years just before the beginning of the European war, the secret societies in Damascus and the various rival lords of Arabia were in frequent touch with one another; they explored the possibility of uniting against the Young Turks in support of greater rights for the Arabic-speaking half of the empire. At one time or another most of the principal Arabian chiefs were involved in such conversations. In 1911, the Arab deputies in the Ottoman Parliament asked Hussein to lead the Arabic-speaking peoples in throwing off the Turkish yoke; he refused. A year later the secret societies seem to have approached his rivals, but not Hussein. By 1913 Arab nationalists apparently regarded him as “a tool in the hands of the Turks for striking the Arabs.”
¹
Yet the Turkish government also strongly distrusted him, and explored the possibility of deposing him.

Two of Hussein’s sons were active politically. Abdullah, his favorite, was a deputy from Mecca in the Ottoman Parliament, while Feisal was a deputy from Jeddah. Abdullah counselled his father to resist the government; he believed that with the support of the secret societies and of Britain it could be done. Feisal advised against opposing the government. Abdullah, a short, heavy-set, astute man with a politician’s conciliating manner, was for boldness. Feisal, tall, quick, and nervous, was for caution.

Hussein, who had played off his enemies against one another for years, was inclined to temporize and delay. With each year in office as Emir he had increased his prestige and his mastery over the complex web of personal, family, and tribal relationships that made for authority in the Hejaz. He had reduced the political influence of the local C.U.P. lodges in Mecca and Medina. His primacy within his own emirate was established firmly.

In 1913 and 1914, however, he found himself surrounded by external enemies. There were his neighbors and traditional rivals, the Arabian lords to his south and east, whom he had threatened and who threatened him. There were the Arab nationalists, some of whom regarded him as an essentially Turkish official. There were the British, whose navy could easily dominate the long coastline of the Hejaz once they went to war against the Ottoman Empire—and he knew that they would become his enemies if he threw in his lot with the empire. Finally, there was the Ottoman government which threatened a showdown on the issue of the Emir’s autonomy.

Now, for the duration of the war, the C.U.P. postponed completion of the railroad and the adoption of its new governmental regulations, as well as its secret plan to appoint a new emir in Hussein’s place. But it ordered Hussein to supply manpower for the army. Hussein and Abdullah may well have suspected a C.U.P. plot: the men of the Hejaz would be sent as soldiers to distant battlefields, while regular Turkish troops would be sent to take their place in garrisoning the Hejaz, and would then seize control of it.

Hussein assured all his dangerous neighbors that he would act in accordance with their wishes—but put off doing so until some time in the future. He asked the advice of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, his rival and a powerful warlord to the east, as to whether or not he should associate Mecca with the Sultan’s call for a Holy War against Britain and her allies; and he discussed with Arabic nationalist leaders from Damascus the possibility of joint action against the Porte. In reply to requests and demands from the Porte, he asked for money to raise troops and supplies for the Ottoman Empire, but continued to postpone sending any contingents to the Turkish army.

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.

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 the 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.