The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (46 page)

During that last winter of war Cemal was the only member of the basically secularist Talaat government to affect what might today be described as a ‘born-again’ Muslim enthusiasm.
But other colleagues were willing to accept extensive devolution so long as some form of Ottoman authority was preserved in the Arab lands: thus the Foreign Minister, a kinsman of Enver, let the
Americans know in February 1918 that the Porte did not reject the Twelfth of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which recommended autonomous development for the Ottoman non-Turkish
nationalities; and the influential publicist Ziya Gökalp
argued in favour of a federalized empire which would link virtually independent Turkish and Arab
states.
⁴⁶
Inevitably the Hashemites were tempted by this apparent change of mood on the Golden Horn, and there were further (almost-) secret exchanges
between Emir Feisal and Cemal, and indeed even more confidential contacts between Feisal and Mustafa Kemal, when in the summer the latter returned to the Palestine Front.
⁴⁷
Lawrence may have encouraged Feisal, in the double hope of spreading dissension among the Young Turk factions and of finding out more about Ottoman intentions. But, if
so, it was a risky game to play. In June 1918 the British Foreign Office discovered that Feisal had gone so far as to set down on paper the basic concessions to be met by the Porte before Arab and
Turkish armies might again fight ‘side by side’. As Lawrence discreetly writes in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, ‘Events in the end made abortive these complicated
negotiations.’
⁴⁸

Enver was no longer greatly interested in the fate of the Arab lands within the Empire. Turkestan beckoned him eastwards. The collapse of Russia enabled the Ottoman armies to reoccupy Erzerum,
eastern Anatolia and the historic ‘Armenian’ vilayets lost in three years of war. Provided Enver was allowed a free hand to concentrate Turkish troops in Transcaucasia and thereby
secure Central Asia, he was prepared to leave Europe and Asia Minor to the German mission which he had for so long encouraged. Within a few months such mistrust had developed between Enver and the
German units around the Black Sea that his staff produced maps marking German outposts in the Caucasus as ‘held by the enemy’.
⁴⁹
But in
January 1918 he was by no means displeased that the German ascendancy on the Straits was as strong as ever: Admiral Souchon still commanded the feet; the Chief of the Ottoman General Staff was a
gifted Prussian strategist, General Hans von Seeckt; and German officers were in command of the Ottoman Fifth Army (Liman von Sanders) and, in the Levant, of the Eighth Army (Kress von
Kressenstein) and ‘Army Group F’ (Falkenhayn). No Ottoman commander could work amicably with Falkenhayn, and there was widespread satisfaction when Seeckt persuaded Berlin to recall him
and replace him in Damascus with Liman. Enver regarded these German specialists as shock-absorbers who would contain the expected Allied onslaught in Palestine while he gave his
attention to the Caucasus. Thanks to Enver’s initiative, the crescent flag flew that autumn over lands which no Sultan had possessed for more than three centuries. Yet while
Enver was employing good Turkish regiments to indulge his Caucasian fantasies, his colleagues in government were wondering how long they could count on the crescent flag continuing to fly over
Stamboul itself.

By now the British had perfected their strategic plans for a three-pronged blow which would knock the Ottomans out of the war before the coming of winter.
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The principal offensive would begin in Palestine, with Allenby following the traditional route of Bonaparte and Ibrahim Pasha into Syria and, if necessary, across Cilicia and
Anatolia, too. Once at Aleppo Allenby’s army would be joined by cavalry advancing up the Euphrates from Ramadi. Feisal’s Arabs would give support east of the Jordan valley, with
Damascus as their main objective. Meanwhile, on the Salonika Front in the Balkans, the British divisions serving in General Franchet d’Esperey’s multinational army would help defeat
Germany’s ally, Bulgaria, and turn eastwards to follow another familiar route to Constantinople, through the mountains of Thrace. In this Balkan sector the Ottomans had their weakest troops;
even in the spring of 1917, at the height of the campaign, no more than eighteen Ottoman battalions fought alongside the Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Bulgars against the Entente allies in
Macedonia; and when the Bulgars concluded their separate armistice with the Allies on 30 September 1918 it was unlikely that this skeleton contingent in Europe would offer serious resistance.

It seemed indeed by the late summer of 1918 as though Young Turk rule were crumbling. There had been a relaxation of political censorship in the press in June, and although Talaat remained Grand
Vizier he appointed a liberal Minister of the Interior in July. A few weeks later political exiles were encouraged back to the capital, where new political parties and societies began to spring
up.
⁵¹
Among them, significantly, was a ‘Turkish Wilsonian League’ of liberal intellectuals. As the USA was never at war with the Sultan,
this could not be regarded as in any sense a treasonable society. Parlour politicians in Constantinople hoped that, by resuscitating Ottoman parliamentarianism, they might gain a sympathetic
hearing from the great prophet of democracy in Washington.

Only in Palestine—and at distant Medina—did the Ottoman commanders still show any real determination to withstand the Allied onslaught. Mustafa Kemal had
returned to Palestine in the second week of August to command the Seventh Army, one of the three corps in Liman von Sanders’s Army Group. He did not think the war could continue much longer,
but he wished to save the genuinely Turkish heartland from invasion, enemy occupation or partition. It was therefore primarily as Turkish nationalists, rather than as good Ottomans, that the
Seventh Army resisted Allenby’s onslaught when, on 18 September, the Allied advance began along the coast north of Jaffa. Constant use of aircraft and imaginative deployment of cavalry
enabled the British to defeat the two Ottoman armies west of Jordan within three days, while Feisal’s Arabs cut the railway links north of Deraa.

Damascus fell on 1 October.
⁵²
The historic city was officially liberated by the Arabs, who were anxious to gain support for their claims to
administer the Syrian capital; but in reality the first troops to reach the centre of Damascus—at six in the morning—were Australians of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade. The French, eager
to secure control of the Syrian ports, reached Beirut next day, although here the ‘first in’ were units of the 7th Indian Division. The loss of Damascus and Beirut had dramatic
consequences in Constantinople; the bad news finally toppled the government. Talaat resigned on 8 October, but there was such confusion in the capital that it took the Sultan six days to find a
successor whom he could trust. At last, on 14 October, General Ahmed Izzet was able to form a ‘Peace Ministry’. By then, in Thrace, the vanguard of General Milne’s British
Salonika Army was approaching Dedeagatch, while in Mesopotamia British and Indian troops were fighting their way resolutely up the Tigris, heading for the Mosul oil wells (which were not finally
secured until 3 November).
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Peace talks began on 26 October aboard the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet, HMS
Agamemnon
, moored off Mudros. They lasted for five days; there was confusion over the delineation of
provincial boundaries; and Admiral Calthorpe, the chief Allied representative, had the difficult task of reconciling his own practical needs with the demands of an Anglo-Indian pressure group in
London and with
hardliners in Paris and Rome, too.
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The Ottoman delegation missed the hidden menace of clauses giving the
Allies a right to occupy strategic points ‘in case of disorder’. When, on 30 October, an armistice was signed, it was not as harsh as the Turks had feared; there was to be no mandatory
occupation of Constantinople. Ottoman garrisons in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia were to surrender to the Allies, who would establish military administrations pending the conclusion of a
peace treaty; Armenian internees would be released; Allied troops would occupy the forts of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus; the Straits would be cleared of mines, enabling warships to enter the
Black Sea; Allied commissioners would control the railways; the army would demobilize, except for units needed to safeguard internal order.

The Mudros Armistice was a businesslike document imposing no formal restraints on the Sultan’s sovereignty, yet Mehmed VI was soon to see for himself the reality of defeat. By 13 November
a line of Allied warships stretched for sixteen miles from the Golden Horn westwards into the Sea of Marmara. ‘I can’t look out of the window. I hate to see them,’ the Sultan is
reported to have told a deputation of Turkish parliamentarians who visited him in the Dolmabahche.
⁵⁵
He was painfully aware that he possessed only a
shadow authority. That, however, was more than Kaiser William, Emperor-King Charles, or King Ferdinand of Bulgaria now enjoyed. Of the four defeated rulers, by mid-November only the Sultan retained
his throne.

C
HAPTER
16

S
OVEREIGNTY AND
S
ULTANATE

C
ONSTANTINOPLE IN THE WINTER OF
1918–19
WAS A WRETCHEDLY
demoralized city. It was overcrowded with refugees, many weakened
by typhus and other diseases. Everywhere food was short, and coal for heating almost unobtainable. No trams were running, and few ferries crossed between Europe and Asia. The Ottomans had lost nine
wars in the past century and a half, but never before had the people of the capital felt so bitterly the impact of defeat. Allied ‘protection’ was hardly distinguishable from enemy
occupation. In practice little could be done without the permission of the senior Allied High Commissioner, Admiral Calthorpe, who was assisted by French and Italian colleagues. Although the
Commissioners personally worked well together, the divergent policies of their respective governments prevented close collaboration or forward planning for the Empire as a whole. In the more
distant provinces of north-eastern Turkey, the mountainous terrain often left the ‘strategic points’ occupied by the Allies in remote and ineffectual isolation. Uncertainty over the
future of Russia intensified the virtual anarchy in these vilayets.
¹

On the Golden Horn there was at least the semblance of orderly administration. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson established his headquarters in Pera, while British, French and Italian
detachments guarded strategic positions. Yet Turkish units still bore arms. When the victorious French general, Franchet d’Esperey, arrived in the snow-choked city from Salonika in February,
Ottoman officers as well as Greeks and Italians joined him in inspecting the British guard of
honour; and when a panic report swept Stamboul asserting that Greeks were about
to restore Christian symbols in the mosque of Ayasofya, it was Ottoman guards who kept in check an ugly crowd of Muslim demonstrators. Such rumours were common that winter: the Allies were said to
be allowing Greeks and Armenians to massacre Muslims and destroy their homes in the disputed vilayets; Christian priests were alleged to be taking over Muslim schools and orphanages, even in the
capital; and non-Turks were reputedly receiving preferential treatment by the Allied military administration in every region. There were enough instances of discrimination to give credence to these
tales, exaggerated though the reports were in many cases. When forced to choose between the subject-peoples of the Ottoman Empire, Admiral Calthorpe over-simplified: as far as he was concerned,
Turks were ‘baddies’. ‘It has been our consistent policy to show no kind of favour whatsoever to any Turk,’ he assured the Foreign Secretary seven months after taking up his
duties.
²

This suspicion and mistrust hampered the growth of the fledgling Ottoman democracy. During November and early December 1918 it looked as if the parliamentary regime, introduced ten years before,
would survive the eclipse of the Young Turks. With the CUP triumvirate in exile, there was an immediate revival of the Ottoman Liberal Union, headed by the Sultan’s brother-in-law and close
friend, Damat Ferid Pasha. But in the absence of strong political leadership more policy decisions depended upon the Sultan’s personal inclinations than had seemed likely so long as the war
continued. Mehmed VI Vahideddin—as the Sultan was officially styled—was not a natural autocrat. He possessed to the full all the awkward obstinacy of a weak ruler, short of temper and
narrow in outlook. A trivial incident soon after his accession was a pointer to his character. Sultans traditionally had beards, any clean-shaven prince hurriedly seeing that his chin became
hirsute within weeks of his accession. Not, however, Mehmed VI; at fifty-seven he saw no reason to conform. Despite remonstrances from the
ulema
, he was prepared to strike one defiant note
of modernity; he would reign as ‘the beardless Sultan’. It was widely felt that, in some strange way, the innovation lessened the sovereign’s stature.
³