‘The Turks belong to the Turanian race which comprises the Manchus and Mongols of North China: the Finns and the Turks of Central Asia.’—WHITAKER’S ALMANAC
‘The epithet popularly associated with the Turk in the English mind is “unspeakable”: and the inevitable reaction against the popular prejudice takes the form of representing the Turk as “the perfect gentleman” who exhibits all the virtues which the ordinary Englishman lacks. Both these pictures are fantastic. . . .’
ARNOLD TOYNBEE and KENNETH P. KIRKWOOD in a study of Turkey written after the war.
ALTHOUGH they knew they had inflicted great damage on the Allied Fleet on March 18 it never occurred to the German and Turkish gunners on the Dardanelles that the Allied warships would not resume their attack on the following day. The men stood to their guns all through the morning of March 19, and when there was still no sign of the enemy they presumed that it was the gale that was preventing the ships from coming back. But the rough weather subsided and as day followed day without any sign of the Fleet their sense of dazed relief began to change into hope. By the end of the month this hope had developed into certainty.
There was one man in Constantinople who could claim that he had never been in the slightest doubt about this astonishing result. As early as February Enver had been saying to his friends in the capital that it was all nonsense; there was nothing to be afraid of, the enemy would never get through. In March he went down to the Dardanelles to watch the battle, and on his return he announced that the defences were absolutely solid; the gunners had plenty of ammunition, the minefields were intact. ‘I shall go down in history,’ Enver said, ‘as the man who demonstrated the vulnerability of the British Fleet. Unless they bring up a large army with them they will be caught in a trap. It seems to me a foolish enterprise.’7
Since Enver’s military judgments in the past had been spectacularly unsound, few people, either among the diplomats or his colleagues, had been much reassured by this. Yet nothing could shake him. He confided to Morgenthau one day that when he was in England before the war he had seen many of the leading men—Asquith, Churchill and Haldane—and had pointed out to them that their ideas were out of date. Churchill had argued that England could defend herself with her Navy alone, and Enver had replied that no great empire could last that did not have an Army as well. Now here was Churchill sending his Fleet to the Dardanelles so that he could prove to Enver that he was wrong. Well, they would see.
Turning to the Ambassador at the end of this interview, Enver said seriously: ‘You know, there is no one in Germany with whom the Emperor talks as intimately as I have talked with you today.’
It was not entirely ridiculous. Already Enver was ruling as a dictator in the Ministry of War. No one dared to take a decision in his absence, and the oldest and most distinguished of politicians and generals were obsequious before him. He thought nothing of keeping the Sultan waiting half an hour or more at a ceremony or a parade, and even Wangenheim was becoming alarmed at the little colossus he had raised, especially when, after March 18, Enver’s position became more powerful than ever.
In the many histories of the Gallipoli campaign it is argued that the abortive naval attack on the Dardanelles was a cardinal error, not only because it failed but because it warned the Turks of the approaching invasion and gave them time to fortify the peninsula. This, as we shall see in a moment, was true enough; yet it seems possible that the political and psychological effect of March 18 was even more important. It was the Turks’ first victory for many years. Since the beginning of the century the country had never known anything but defeat and retreat, and they had grown used but not reconciled to the demoralizing spectacle of the refugees streaming back after nearly every battle. To take only one case out of millions, Mustafa Kemal’s mother had been forced to decamp from Macedonia, and he found her penniless in Constantinople. Salonika, the city in which he had grown up and which he regarded as Turkish by right, was now Greek.
One particularly appalling winter in Constantinople Aubrey Herbert had been moved to write:
‘There falls perpetual snow upon a broken plain,
And through the twilight filled with flakes the white earth joins the sky.
Grim as a famished wounded wolf, his lean neck in a chain,
The Turk stands up to die.’
Kemal, no doubt, really did see himself in this light, and there must have been many others like him.
Herbert wrote again: ‘In 1913, when the Balkans gained one smashing victory after another over the unequipped and unorganized Turkish forces every Greek café in Pera shouted its song of triumph.’
Nor was it only the Greeks, the Armenians and the other foreign minorities who were witnessing the Turks’ humiliation; the great Christian powers had established sovereign prerogatives in Turkey. They controlled her foreign trade, they administered her armed services and the police, they granted loans to the bankrupt government according to their judgment of its behaviour, and their own nationals residing in Turkey were above the law: under the system of capitulations Western Europeans could only be tried for offences in their own courts. The obvious implication was that the Turk was not only incompetent to manage his own affairs, he was not yet civilized. He was Caliban, a dangerous but now docile monster; and the Christian powers were Prospero, controlling him for his own good.
For the first five months of the war there had been very little change in these conditions. However much their religion and their instincts taught them to regard foreigners and Christians as unclean slaves, lower than animals, the Young Turks still desired to be modern, to be Western, and they still affected to despise the methods of Abdul Hamid. Enver, it is true, had talked about abolishing capitulations and of making foreign residents pay special taxes, but he soon dropped these ideas when he heard Baron von Wangenheim was against him.
The security measures taken in Constantinople and the other cities, therefore, had not been excessive. Greeks and Armenians were deprived of their arms and were conscripted into the labour battalions of the Army. In some cases their property was requisitioned but this was a fairly general thing, and it probably fell as heavily upon the Moslem peasant as upon anyone else, since his stock and grain were seized to feed the Army. Bedri, the police chief in Constantinople, had gone out of his way to try and humiliate Sir Louis Mallet and the French Ambassador when they left the country on the outbreak of war by holding up their special trains and making other difficulties. But some 3,000 British and French nationals who had made their homes in Turkey had remained behind and they were not interned.
In Constantinople the street signs which for years had been written in French were obliterated; no shop could display a placard in a foreign language; merchants were required to dismiss their foreign employees and take on Turks instead. There was a mild spy hunt. Nobody in time of war could have seriously objected to these and the other measures that were imposed, since very much the same sort of thing, or worse, was happening in the other belligerent countries in western Europe.
But March 18 changed all this. Now at last the Turkish soldier was something in the world again. The British battle-fleet was the strongest armament in existence, its very name had been enough to strike terror among its enemies in every ocean, and no one had given the Turks the ghost of a chance against it. Yet by some miracle they had driven it away. Constantinople had been saved at the last moment. The Turk could hold up his head again.
Not unnaturally and perhaps not unfairly Enver and Talaat claimed the credit for all this, and indeed the victory of March 18 was for them absolutely vital. Up to this time they had never been really secure in office, they had steered a breathless course from day to day, and they had been very largely driven by events. But now they found themselves borne up on a wave of popularity and patriotic pride. The Army’s success was their success. At last they represented Turkey. It was even more than this: they stood for the Turk himself, for Islam with all its xenophobia and its hunger for revenge on the patronizing, dominating foreigner.
And so in their elation—their sudden emotional transition from fear to not-fear, from weakness and doubt to strength and certainty—they did a thing which was nothing new in the East, or anywhere else for that matter: they set about hunting down their racial and political opponents. They were now strong enough to express their hatred and they wanted victims.
At this stage there could be no question of attacking the British and French nationals: the American ambassador was looking after their interests, and in any case there was still the possibility that the Allies might win the war. The Greeks too could count on some sort of protection from the neutral government in Athens. But the Armenians were in a very different case. In nearly every way they fitted the role of the perfect scapegoat. The Armenians were Christians and yet there was no foreign Christian government which was responsible for them. For years they had hoped to set up an independent Armenian state in Turkey, and no matter how quiet they might be lying at the moment, it was obvious that they staked their future on the victory of the Allies. Herbert probably went too far when he said, ‘though the Armenians had a future before them in the development and the improvement of Turkey, they were seduced by Europe and flattered to suicide.’ Yet there were grounds for the Turkish belief that the Armenians were a fifth column inside the country, and that, no less than the Greeks, they had gloated over every Turkish reverse in the Balkan wars.
Then too the Armenians were supposed to be rich: they lent money, a thing forbidden to the Moslems, and many of them handled commerce in the city while the Turkish peasant remained on the land. They had a reputation for cleverness, for outwitting the lazier, less efficient Turks, and they had not always disguised the fact that they regarded themselves as a superior race, better educated than the Moslems, more Westernized. A long skein of trivial jealousy was woven around these gifted people in every village.
These things applied of course in equal measure to the Greeks and the Jews, but the Turks had another particular grudge against the Armenians. It was thought that they had been disloyal in the recent campaign in the Caucasus, that they had sent information across to the Russians, and that some of their young men had even crossed the border to join the Russian army. Soon a rumour spread that the Armenians were secreting arms with the idea of raising a revolution.
There had been massacres in Turkey before this, but nothing could compare with the ferocity, the organized brutal hatred with which the Turks now launched themselves in their revenge. In some places like Smyrna the massacres were comparatively mild; in others like Van, where the Armenians did put up a successful defence for a while, the slaughter was complete. The system used—and it was entirely a system planned by Talaat and the Committee—was to goad the Armenians to the point where they attempted to resist. At first their goods were requisitioned, then the women were molested, and finally the shooting began. It was customary, once an Armenian village had been quelled, to torture the men so that they would reveal where their arms and money were hidden, then to take them out into the country, tied together in batches of four, and shoot them dead. In some cases the women were given the opportunity of becoming Moslems, but more usually the attractive ones were simply taken off to the harems by the local Turkish garrison. The remainder, with the old men and the boys, were then assembled with what goods they could carry and put on the road to the Mesopotamian deserts in the south. Very few of them arrived; those who were not waylaid and stripped naked by marauding bands soon died of hunger and exposure.
To Morgenthau and other Western observers in Turkey who were confronted with the full horror of these events at the time it seemed that what they were witnessing was a reversion of the Turks to their nomadic and barbaric ancestry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Now at last, after two hundred years of interference in Constantinople, the Russians, the British and the French were out of the way, and the Germans, the only Christian people with any influence left in the country, soon made it clear that they had no intention of interfering. Indeed, it was believed that Wangenheim, or at any rate someone on his staff, had suggested the refinement of adding wholesale deportation to local massacre. The Germans at this moment had a good interest in the Turkification of Turkey, the doctrine of Pan-Turkism; it inflamed the Turks’ military spirit, it made them much more formidable allies in the struggle against Russia and the rest of Europe.
Protests by Morgenthau and even by the Bulgarians had no effect whatever upon the Young Turks. Talaat, who was so often reasonable on other matters, was ferocious on this subject. ‘I have accomplished more towards solving the Armenian problem in three months,’ he said, ‘than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years.’ The Armenians were disloyal, be declared, they had enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks, they had helped the Russians, they were plotting to set up a separate state.
Morgenthau pointed out that Talaat had even turned on his friends among the Armenians.
‘No Armenian,’ Talaat answered, ‘can be our friend after what we have done to them.’
Clearly there was some fundamental thing at work in the Turkish mind, something which was beyond all reason, some terrible instinct that made them feel that they had to persecute somebody in order to establish their own security. The very helplessness of the Armenians seemed to be an incitement. Having once raised their hand, the Turks appear to have felt, with a crazed and guilty logic, that they must go on and on until the very enormity of their cruelty was its own justification. If they could do this thing then they must be in the right. This was the only way to compensate for the unexpressed resentment of so many years.
‘The Turk,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote, ‘was unbusinesslike, placid, and lazy or easy-going. But when he turned in his rage he poured out death in a bucket, and guilty and innocent suffered in his blind anger.’
Before March there were about two million Armenians in Turkey, and it was the Young Turks’ intention to exterminate or deport them all. This task, however, was never completed; barely three-quarters of a million were dead or dying by the time the frantic rage of their tormentors had exhausted itself.
It would be absurd, of course, to argue that the Allies’ failure in the Dardanelles was the only cause of the Armenian massacre; the root instinct of the Turks to destroy this unprotected minority was always there. But March 18 offered them the opportunity, the massacre followed the victory, and the psychological effect on the Turks was immense. From this time onwards the soldiers felt that they were utterly committed; the traitors at home had been stamped out and now they were Moslems together in a common cause. There was no longer any question of surrender or defeat. It was the defiance of the wounded wolf. He had wreaked his vengeance on the weak and now he stood at bay against the world.
Thus before ever the land battle had begun there were decisive influences at work on the Gallipoli campaign, and perhaps in the long run they counted for more than armaments and strategy; March 18 had brought the Turks together, and the auto-da-fé of the Armenian massacres had added a certain desperation, the desperation which presumably the outlaw feels. And it was one more complication in this strange mental web that while the Turks were now quite determined to resist the coming invasion they did not really hate the British and the French—not at any rate in the intimate personal way in which they hated the Armenians and perhaps the Russians. It was opposition of a more dangerous kind. For the Turks the Allies were, quite simply, invaders from outer space, and they prepared to meet them as one prepares to face some tremendous natural upheaval like an earthquake or a hurricane at sea. In other words, they got ready to fight not with passion but simply to survive; they were Turks fighting for Turkey, Moslems against the infidel. The battle, as they saw it, was a straight clash of opposites, a trial of strength and skill which could only end in their own extermination or in victory. Such opponents are probably the most formidable of all—and especially so in this case because these things were not really understood in the Allied camp at the time.
The Turks were seriously underrated by the Allies. They had only been known in retreat and in battles outside their own country. They were expected to fight as they fought the Armenians, recklessly and viciously but not as disciplined soldiers who knew the science of modern war. It was even hoped in the War Office in London that once the Allied expeditionary forces were ashore at Gallipoli the enemy would turn tail and make for Constantinople. There might be moments of difficult guerrilla fighting, but it remained in effect for the British and the French a minor operation.
These were very serious delusions, for the Turks in fact were making the most sensible arrangements for the defence of their country. Directly the bombardment of March 18 was over Enver sent a message to Liman von Sanders saying he wanted to see him in his office. Arriving soon afterwards, he offered the Field Marshal the command of the forces at the Dardanelles.
It must have caused Enver some little heartburning to reach this decision, for his relations with Liman had been getting steadily worse from the moment when, three months before, the German general had derided his plans for the invasion of the Caucasus. To Enver, no doubt, this foreign technician was a solemn bore. In his capacity of Inspector-General of the Turkish Forces Liman had been a persistent nuisance; one day it was a complaint about the hospitals (they were in an appalling state, with spotted typhus spreading everywhere), and the next it was a demand for better food for the men, for rifles, for blankets, for uniforms. Enver at least had been able to settle the matter of the uniforms. Just a few soldiers in Constantinople were presentably equipped, and as soon as it was learned that Liman was about to make an inspection this squad was hurried to the spot with freshly polished boots and shining buttons. But Liman soon found out about this and complained again.
The real argument between the two men, however, had arisen over the disposal of the forces in the south. Enver, as commander-in-chief, had drawn a line through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, and had set up a command on either side, one in Asia, the other in Europe. This arrangement might have been sound enough at the time when Xerxes crossed from east to west in his advance on Europe, but to Liman’s mind it was precisely calculated to lead to the complete annihilation of the army as soon as an enemy attacked from the south. In short, the defences were placed exactly the wrong way round; the line should have been drawn east and west through the Sea of Marmara and all the forces to the south of it should have been prepared, under one command, to meet an invasion from the Mediterranean. When Liman advanced this view, Enver had replied calmly that he was wrong and the dispositions were going to stay as they were. By the end of February things had drifted towards an open breach, and Enver had even been intriguing for Liman’s recall to Germany.
But now in March when a renewal of the Allied attack on the Dardanelles was expected any minute, it was another matter. Something had to be done quickly about the fortification of Gallipoli.
Liman lost no time in taking up his new command. Having asked for and got the reinforcement of an extra division, he set off on March 25 for the peninsula—the very day on which Hamilton was sailing away from it to regroup his forces in Egypt. Liman’s departure indeed was so rapid that in many ways it resembled Hamilton’s hurried exit from London twelve days earlier; he waited neither for his staff nor his reinforcements, but took the first available boat and landed in Gallipoli town on the morning of March 26. There he set up his headquarters in the bare rooms of the French consular agent’s house and got to work.
The defence of the Gallipoli peninsula and the Dardanelles does not present any great mystery, at all events in its broader aspects. The peninsula juts out into the Ægean Sea for a distance of fifty-two miles, and it has a misshapen lozenge formation—very narrow at the neck, widening out to twelve miles in the centre, and then tapering off again to the tip at Cape Helles. The hills and the beaches are the important features, since an invading army presumably would first want to land, and then as quickly as possible get on to the heights whence it could dominate the Dardanelles. There were four beaches: at Bulair at the neck, at Suvla Bay half way down the peninsula, at Ari Burnu, still further south, and at the tip at Cape Helles. Behind all these landing places there was high ground—it almost formed a spine running down the centre of the peninsula—but the really important eminences were the Tekke Tepe ridge which made a semi-circle around Suvla Bay, the Sari Bair chain which rose to 1,000 feet just to the north of Ari Burnu, and Achi Baba, a rounded, gently-sloping hill 709 feet high, which was about six miles north of the Cape Helles beaches and dominated them entirely.
Similar beaches and hills existed on the eastern side of the peninsula along the Dardanelles, but it was hardly likely that an enemy would attempt a landing there, since he would come under fire from the Turkish guns in Asia, and so from Liman’s point of view they could be disregarded.
There remained the Asiatic side—the danger that the enemy might come ashore somewhere opposite the islands of Tenedos and Mytilene and make his way north across the plains of Troy towards the Narrows.
It was then, a question of guessing just where the invader was going to strike: at Bulair, where he could cut off the peninsula at the neck, at Suvla and Ari Burnu, half way down, where he could rapidly cross over to the Narrows, at Cape Helles, where his naval guns could dominate the land on three sides, or in Asia, where he had space to manœuvre: or at two or three or all these places?
Liman found that he had six divisions known as the Fifth Army under his command, and at the time of his arrival they were scattered along the coastline in a way which he considered bizarre if not downright dangerous. ‘The enemy on landing,’ he observed, ‘would have found resistance everywhere, but there were no reserves to check a strong and energetic advance. I ordered the divisions to hold their troops together and send only the most indispensable security detachments to the coast.’
It seemed to the new commander that the point of most danger was the Asiatic shore, and he accordingly posted two divisions there to the south and west of Troy—the 11th, and later, the 3rd, which he had trained himself and which was now on its way from Constantinople. Next in priority he placed Bulair, and here two more divisions, the 5th and the 7th, were disposed. A fifth division, the 9th, was sent to Cape Helles. To the sixth and last division, which was now under the command of Mustafa Kemal, there was assigned a special role: it was to remain grouped near Maidos on the Narrows, directly under the commander-in-chief’s orders, and would stand ready to go north to Bulair, south to Cape Helles, or across the straits to Asia, according to where the danger most threatened. Liman knew all about Kemal’s anti-German views, but he regarded him as an efficient and intelligent soldier; and there may even have been some grudging respect for the new commander-in-chief from Kemal’s side. At all events, this mobile assignment suited Kemal admirably.
Liman’s headquarters staff in Gallipoli town was Turkish, but he had, scattered through his divisions, a number of German officers in senior commands; and the German gunners and other technicians remained at the Narrows under a German admiral.
Having placed his forces where he wanted them—and these dispositions have been applauded by almost all experts who have studied them—Liman next got his men into training. They had grown stiff, he says, in their garrisons, and he now instituted a programme of drilling and digging. By day the men marched. By night they came down to the coast and worked on new roads and entrenchments. There was a shortage of every kind of material, and much improvisation was required. Spades and other implements were taken from the peasants, and the soldiers even dug the earth with their bayonets. When the supply of barbed wire gave out they ripped up the fences of the farms; and on the most likely landing places this wire was spread beneath the surface of the water. Land mines were constructed out of torpedo heads.
This work was pressed on with great haste, for there were many signs that the Allied attack would not be much longer delayed. Before the end of March Liman learned that four British officers had arrived in Piræus in Greece, and had there bought for cash forty-two large lighters and five tugs. The British apparently were not very successful in keeping watch on spies in Lemnos and the other Greek islands, for a stream of information about the Allies’ preparations kept reaching Constantinople by way of Egypt and Greece. General Hamilton’s arrival had been reported. It was known that a landing pier had been built in the harbour of Mudros, on Lemnos, and that stores and equipment were being unloaded there. Most of these reports came from the Balkans, but even as far off as Rome German agents were hearing rumours of the coming offensive, and these were duly relayed to the headquarters in Gallipoli. At one time it was said that 50,000 British soldiers had assembled on Imbros and Lemnos. Then the total was increased to 80,000 with 50,000 French in addition. Though confusing, all this intelligence pointed in the same direction: there was not much time left.
Each day, too, there was a good deal of enemy activity which Liman could see with his own eyes. Allied aircraft of a newer, faster pattern had begun to fly over the peninsula on reconnaissance. Like cruising sharks, grey, silent and sinister, the silhouettes of British warships kept ceaselessly moving back and forth far out to sea.
Then in the third week of April there occurred a sudden flurry of activity in the straits themselves.
Shortly after dawn on April 17 Turkish sentries at Kephez Point saw a submarine come to the surface. Apparently it was heading for the Narrows with the intention of passing through to the Sea of Marmara, but suddenly it was caught in a violent eddy and began to drift towards the shore. At once every Turkish gun in the neighbourhood was turned on to the helpless vessel, and as it touched the shore the crew came on deck and were swept into the sea by machine-gun fire. During the next two days and nights an erratic duel took place between the Turks and the British for the abandoned hulk. In turn British submarines, aircraft and warships came rushing into the straits in an attempt to destroy it before the Turks got possession, but their torpedoes went astray, the bombs fell wide, and the warships were driven off by the shore batteries. Finally on the third night a little British patrol boat came sailing straight into the glare of the searchlights and with a lucky shot got one of its torpedoes home.
According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister in Constantinople, the Turks behaved very well over this incident. When the submarine was first abandoned and the British sailors were struggling in the water the Turkish soldiers on the shore jumped in and rescued them. The dead were first buried on the beach and then taken to the English cemetery at Chanak, where a service was said over them. ‘The Turks are extraordinary in this,’ Einstein wrote. ‘One moment they will murder wantonly, and the next surprise everyone by their kindness. Thus when the first English submarine prisoners were led into the hospital at Chanak, shivering in their wet clothes, the Turkish wounded called them guests, and insisted on their being given everything new, and such few delicacies as they possessed.’
It was only later when the prisoners were sent to filthy prisons in Constantinople that ill-treatment began, but even then in most cases it was the ill-treatment of indifference, of the squalor and callousness of the East rather than an act of deliberate revenge.
Meanwhile another warning had sounded on the Dardanelles. On April 19 a company of Turkish soldiers had made their camp in a fold of the hills on the western side of the peninsula. It was the usual early morning scene: the soldiers asleep on the ground, the smoke of the first cooking fires rising upwards and the lines of horses and mules tethered nearby. Then without warning the terrible searing rush of shells filled the sky and everything was in an uproar of cascading earth and bursting shrapnel. Some thought it was an earthquake and lay still in terror, others ran to the lines of screaming animals and tried to mount and get away, others again who kept their wits went to their guns. But they could see nothing on the flat and deserted sea, nothing but a tiny yellow balloon on the far horizon. It was not until after the campaign that the Turks learned that this was the Manica, the first of the British kite-balloon ships, trying out a new artillery spotting device. While the vessel still lay below the horizon out of sight from the land two observers had gone up in a wicker basket attached to the balloon at the end of a long vertiginous swaying cable, and, with the first light of the morning, had seen through their binoculars the peaceful encampment in the hills. It was an easy matter then for the encampment’s position to be fixed on the map and the news to be telephoned down to the Manica’s bridge below; and it was the shells of the cruiser Bacchante lying unseen still further out at sea that fell, so miraculously, out of the empty sky on to the sleeping Turks.
And then, a day or two later, a heavy British air-raid, the first of the campaign, fell on Maidos at the Narrows. Seven 100-lb. bombs, an unheard-of kind of missile in the Mediterranean at this time, set the town on fire.
After this there was silence again. No more ships attempted to enter the straits and no gun was fired on either side. The weather continued to be unsettled and cold. Among the Turks, who had now been given almost five weeks in which to prepare their defences, nothing remained to be done but to wait—to post their watchers on the hill tops and the cliffs, to keep gazing out to sea by day and sweeping the straits with their searchlights at night. The dread of the coming invasion was everywhere about them; but where it would fall, and at what hour of the day or night, and what it would look like when it came—of all this they had no notion at all.