3

Kitchener of Arabia

Stephen Badsey

Kitchener of Khartoum

His calendar in the War Office in Whitehall showed that it was Friday 18 December 1914. Sifting through the papers on his desk, Horatio, Lord Kitchener, His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, noted with a grunt that today a formal British protectorate over Egypt had come into force. So, Egypt was no longer part of the Ottoman Empire, that great rotting relic of past Turkish glories still ruled from Constantinople. It was an empire that included not just Turkey itself but the whole great swathe of Arabia, stretching eastwards from the Suez Canal through Palestine and Syria, then southwards taking in the whole of Mesopotamia and the desert vastness of the Arabian peninsula, all the way to the Indian Ocean. For Kitchener, Arabia would be the next great battlefield.¹

The Ottoman Empire had entered the Great War because of a secret treaty signed with Germany on 2 August 1914. ‘So much for secrecy in the Levant!’ thought Kitchener. What his network of spies and contacts throughout Arabia could not find out could easily be bought for money or favours in Constantinople, or in Baghdad.² The Ottomans had entered the war when, after a series of provocative incidents, on 28 October their navy had bombarded the Black Sea ports of Odessa, Sebastopol, and Feodosia, belonging to their old enemy Russia. The declaration of war by Russia, France, and Great Britain that had followed on 4 November had been just a formality. The Ottoman response of declaring a jihad, or holy war, against the Allies had produced singularly little reaction among their own peoples, or among the Muslim troops and peoples of the British and French empires. Instead, the British had landed the 6th (Poona) Division from India unopposed at Basra, as the start of a painfully slow advance up the river Tigris into Mesopotamia.³ Kitchener estimated that Major General Sir John Maxwell’s 10th and 11th Indian divisions, now fully formed in Egypt, should be enough to hold against a Turkish attack on the Suez Canal. The much greater problem was that the Ottoman entry into the war had severed the main line of supply and communications through the Black Sea between the Russian Empire and its French and British allies. The British government should have appointed him ambassador to Constantinople back in 1910 when they had the chance, Kitchener thought. He would have put an end to all this nonsense with the Germans! Now, if the Black Sea route to Russia could be reopened, he could put that right. He might even just save little Serbia, hard-pressed though it was.

The formality of the British protectorate over Egypt was of little matter to Kitchener. In reality, the British had controlled Egypt since 1882, including officering the Egyptian Army. Kitchener himself spoke Arabic, and he had passed as an Egyptian when in disguise. In 1898 he had commanded the combined British and Egyptian army that had smashed the Sudanese at Omdurman and recaptured Khartoum. His active military service went back to 1870 and the Franco-Prussian War, when he had volunteered as an ambulance corpsman with the French. He had gone on to serve in most of the Levant, including Cyprus, which he had mapped early in his career. After Omdurman, he had faced down a French attempt at Fashoda to interfere in British rule over Sudan, risking a war with France to do so. Sent to South Africa in 1899 alongside Field Marshal Lord Roberts – little ‘Bobs’ who had died of old age and pneumonia only last month visiting his beloved Indian troops in France – he had rescued the disastrous British campaign against the Boers, ending the South African War of 1899–1902 by annexing the two Boer republics to the Crown.

Kitchener was now sixty-four years old. Having achieved his last great ambition of commanding the Indian Army, in 1914 he was ending a lifetime of imperial service with the post of consul general (effectively governor) for Egypt. In Cairo, he had shared a palatial house with the commander of the Egyptian Army, Major General the Honourable Julian Byng, an aristocratic, tough, and experienced cavalryman known to all as ‘Bungo’. He was Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and Broome; ‘K of K’ – and to the British ‘K’ never meant anyone else, just as a century before ‘the Duke’ had only ever meant Wellington. The double ‘K’ monogram adorned the stately home that he had bought at Broome Park near Canterbury. Music hall songs were sung about him, and china plates and mugs were sold with his face on them. No British public figure was more popular, or more of an imperial legend.

Kitchener reached for the latest report from Maxwell’s headquarters in Egypt, assessing the Ottoman threat to the Suez Canal. ‘The only place from which a fleet can operate against Egypt is Alexandretta. It is a splendid natural naval base.’⁴ The report’s author was one Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence. Always on the lookout for promising officers, Kitchener made a note of the name. Alexandretta, that was the key. The small and almost unnoticed Turkish port in the eastern Mediterranean was barely a hundred miles from Cyprus (which the British had also just annexed from the Ottoman Empire, having governed it in practice since 1878). Kitchener knew better than most just how ramshackle Ottoman rule over Arabia had become. ‘A great deal depends on the attitude of the Arab tribesmen,’ he had told Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, on 5 December, but Baghdad, five hundred miles from Basra along the Tigris, was ‘an open city of 150,000 inhabitants – the garrison consists of a weak division of probably bad troops’.⁵ Kitchener also knew all about the men now ruling the Ottoman Empire, the ‘Young Turks’ of the 1908 palace revolution who hoped to modernise their country. They cared far more about Turkey than about Arabia, and increasingly they had come to accept that the vast expanses of desert and palm trees might not be worth keeping in the future, even if they could.

Kitchener hated politics and politicians even more than he hated the cold of the London winter. Meetings of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s new War Council were meant to decide strategy, but they were achieving nothing because no one could agree on a plan. Despite the high political office which he now held, Kitchener had insisted on keeping his job as consul general for Egypt, and because he was a serving field marshal he was still eligible for a military command. In July 1914 he had been in London only to receive his earldom from King George V, and had been about to take ship for Egypt again. But with war breaking out in Europe, Asquith had appealed to him to take the War Office position, which had been vacant since April after a political fiasco over Ireland which had nearly brought down the government, causing the fall of Colonel J. E. B. ‘Galloper Jack’ Seeley as Secretary of State for War, and nearly that of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty.⁶ Asquith should have given the War Office back to Lord Haldane, the brilliant political lawyer who had created the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), the Territorial Force of part-time peacetime volunteers, and much more besides. However, in the atmosphere of August 1914, Haldane’s known admiration for – of all things – German philosophy had ruled him out.⁷ The Chief of the Imperial General Staff (the army’s professional head), Field Marshal Sir John French, had done the decent thing in also resigning. But at least on the war’s outbreak French had been given a proper job as commander of the BEF, which had been sent to the continent. Kitchener grunted again, with approval: Johnny French was a difficult man to work with, but he knew how to do his duty.

To Kitchener, Asquith’s appeal to take the War Office had been direct and simple: in their hour of trial his country and its people once more needed a hero, and he would never let them down. The problem was that, despite the all-powerful Royal Navy, the British Empire had gone to war against Germany without having an army to speak of. By continental European standards the BEF was tiny. It had been badly knocked about before playing its magnificent part in stemming the tide of the German invasion of France, and it was crying out for reinforcements. The first troops of the Territorial Force, who would ordinarily have needed months of training, were already in action alongside the BEF regulars.

Kitchener had agreed with his new Cabinet colleagues that the war would be long and hard, lasting perhaps three years. He had called for a volunteer New Army, and both Britain and its empire had answered his call. By the end of August one hundred thousand men had volunteered, and it would be half a million by the start of the New Year. The recruiting posters were everywhere, including Kitchener’s pointing finger telling the men that he ‘Wants You!’ The first of the New Army divisions – the ‘K-1’ divisions, they were calling them – would be ready to be sent overseas by spring 1915. Volunteers from Canada were arriving in Britain, and more from Australia and New Zealand were training in Egypt, under the odd name of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps or ANZAC. It was a worldwide phenomenon unprecedented in military history. Half a million men were volunteering to go to war, because K of K had summoned them to do their duty.

In October, the hard-pressed BEF had also been reinforced by four Indian Army divisions: an Indian Corps consisting of 3rd (Lahore) Division and 7th (Meerut) Division, and an Indian Cavalry Corps consisting of 1st and 2nd Indian cavalry divisions. That had been mostly because of the work before the war of General Sir Douglas Haig, now one of French’s subordinate commanders with the BEF, from back when Haig had been Chief of Staff in India a few years earlier. But putting Indian troops into a European war had been a stop-gap, and the sooner they were out of France the better. Already, over seven thousand Indian soldiers had been killed or wounded, in what one of them described ominously as ‘this cold hell across the black water to which our British Sahibs have sent us’.⁸ In Kitchener’s view, the complex balancing act that was the British Empire did not include breaking faith with its Indian soldiers by getting them killed by the Germans. Nor did it include those Indian soldiers, many of whom revered their British officers, getting too close a look at the darker realities of British society.

Although Kitchener did not admit to mistakes, he also knew that appointing General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien as Johnny French’s other subordinate commander had been an error: the two men just did not trust each other. The problem was that Sir John French was in the wrong job. His replacement as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Charles Douglas, had died from overwork in October while trying to make the New Armies a reality. Kitchener had chosen a pliable nonentity, Lieutenant General James Wolff Murray, for his successor. At least Kitchener had an old and trusted subordinate, General Sir Ian ‘Johnnie’ Hamilton, helping with recruiting at the War Office. Hamilton was also the British Army’s expert on amphibious landings, having pioneered the techniques and training before the war.

Kitchener re-read the draft of a letter he was writing to Johnny French at BEF headquarters: ‘the German lines in France may be looked on as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault and also cannot be completely invested, with the result that the lines may be held by an investing force whilst operations proceed elsewhere.’⁹ Kitchener had seen too often what happened when under-trained and badly equipped troops were thrust into action. It would be at least two years before his New Army divisions were ready to beat the Germans on the Western Front. So before then, what was the best use of them, and of any other troops that he could find?

There was the last of the good divisions that Kitchener had formed by bringing home the regular battalions from all over the empire, the 29th Division. Winston Churchill had contributed a Royal Naval Division made up of sailors and marines, and the irrepressible Churchill would be bound to get involved in the fighting somehow. In October he had led the Royal Naval Division on a brief and unsuccessful excursion to preserve Antwerp from the Germans, and had even tried to resign from the Cabinet if only Asquith would give him command of the troops there! With a Cavalry Corps of three divisions already serving with the BEF – with old Bungo in command of the new 3rd Cavalry Division, Kitchener noted – an Indian Cavalry Corps of two divisions was not going to be of much use. The Western Front would be dominated by artillery and combat engineering for the foreseeable future. So, where would cavalry be most useful?

Kitchener thought about his days as commander-in-chief in India, when Haig as his inspector general of cavalry had introduced the new tactics and methods that he and Johnny French had pioneered in Britain. Unlike any other cavalry in the world – except for the Japanese and the Americans, and they didn’t matter – the cavalry of the British Empire were equipped with the same rifles as the infantry, and were trained to charge rapidly to capture a position and then hold it dismounted. Even more importantly, years of hard experience campaigning in the desert and the veldt meant that British Empire troopers knew how to keep the horses alive and fit for battle in the most unpromising terrain.

Generals, soldiers, sailors, plans – it was all starting to fit together. Britain did not even have one proper army, but now by a conjuring trick Kitchener would create two. What if he took command of the Indian Corps and Indian Cavalry Corps taken from the Western Front, plus the Indian and ANZAC infantry in Egypt, the Royal Naval Division, and the crack 29th Division? Against the weak Ottoman Turkish divisions spread thinly throughout Arabia that was the beginnings of a powerful force. For the time being, Kitchener’s job in Whitehall was done. The best service he could give his country now was to resign, go back to Egypt and beat the Turks, opening up the Black Sea route to Russia. Then he could return in a year or so, in triumph as so often before, to take command in the field of his New Army divisions, which by then would be well enough trained to take on the Germans, and so win the war. But it all hinged on the amphibious landings, on the cavalry, and on Alexandretta.

Alexandretta

On the very day that Kitchener was deliberating, 18 December 1914, at Alexandretta itself events were taking place that would convince Prime Minister Asquith and the War Council of the wisdom of his plan. Frightened officials in Alexandria were informed that a British warship had been sighted out to sea just to the north of the port, and had landed an armed party of sailors. The British had torn up the rail track, isolating Alexandretta from Constantinople, and derailed an arriving train. The officials, with their small military garrison and no warships, had hardly expected the Great European War to reach as far as them. The artillery pieces from Alexandretta’s obsolete fortress had been dismounted at the war’s start and sent elsewhere. The strongest Ottoman forces, the fourteen divisions of the 1st and 2nd armies, were on the European side of the Bosphorus in Thrace. They were waiting for an expected attack by Bulgaria, which had been the main enemy in the First Balkan War of 1912–13. Bulgaria had then been attacked by its own allies, Serbia and Greece, in the Second Balkan War of 1913, enabling the Ottomans to seize back Adrianople, but the threat was still there. The best quality Ottoman formation, the 5th Army, of six divisions, was guarding the southern approaches to Constantinople including the Gallipoli peninsula, in case the British or French attempted to break through the Dardanelles by sea. Constantinople’s attention was fixed on the Russian Caucasus, where the 3rd Army of eleven divisions and two cavalry divisions was launching its great offensive at Sarikamis against the Russians. This was an ambitious encirclement planned along impeccable German General Staff lines, and modelled on the recent German triumph at Tannenberg in August.

By far the weakest and least well-equipped Ottoman formation was the 4th Army under Djemel Pasha (with the German Colonel Werner von Frankenberg as his Chief of Staff). This had only XII Corps of two divisions in Mesopotamia, and VIII Corps of five divisions in Palestine and Syria, mostly facing the Sinai desert. That left only 27th Division at Damascus and 23rd Division at Aleppo. The damning postwar assessment by Paul von Hindenburg (in 1914 commander of German forces in Eastern Europe) was that ‘The protection of the Gulf of Alexandretta was entrusted to a Turkish Army which contained scarcely a single unit fit to fight.’¹⁰

Kitchener’s eyes were drawn to Alexandretta because, along with its importance as a harbour, Alexandretta was also the hinge of Ottoman strategic communications by land between Turkey and Arabia, including Mesopotamia and the Levant. Alexandretta was the southern terminus of a minor branch of the incomplete main rail line from Constantinople. In 1914 the main line ran with some breaks through to Muslimie Junction, only a few miles north of Aleppo. At this critical junction the line divided, with one branch going south through Damascus and Amman, with a further branch through Jerusalem, and the other going east to the railhead at Ras-el-Ayn, the gateway to Mesopotamia, where far to the south the line joining Samarra and Baghdad had only just opened that year.

North of Alexandretta there were two critical gaps in the main rail line, totalling about twenty-five miles, through the Taurus and Amanus mountains, where the route was impassable to wheeled transport. Rather than negotiate the Amanus gap with pack animals, it was actually faster for travellers and supplies to be routed down the Alexandretta branch line. They would then strike out eastwards across the lower slopes of the Amanus range to the open plain, covering the sixty or so miles inland to Muslimie Junction across country. With all the gaps and problems of the line, and the bureaucracy of a diverse and dissolute empire, military reinforcements and supplies from Constantinople could take two months to reach Baghdad or Jerusalem. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war, confided to his German allies that ‘My only hope is that the enemy has not discovered our weakness at this critical spot.’¹¹

Enver’s hope was in vain. British war plans going back to 1906 included an attack from Egypt supported by amphibious landings at Haifa or Alexandretta, accompanied by possible support from the Arab tribes. But the British understood that the greatest Ottoman fear, other than a renewed attack from the west by Bulgaria or the other Balkan states, was that the British could use their formidable command of the sea to attack Constantinople through the Dardanelles narrows. British plans before the war had considered a landing on the Gallipoli peninsula to force a passage through the Dardanelles narrows and on to Constantinople, but only as part of a much larger campaign involving several fronts.¹² Even at worst for the British, a landing at Gallipoli would provoke a strong Ottoman response, tying down more of their best troops.

The first British warship to appear off the coast at Alexandretta – the appearance on 18 December that so panicked the town’s officials – was the light cruiser HMS Doris, one of a small naval flotilla with seaplanes based in Egypt and sent out from Alexandria to gather intelligence on the Ottoman dispositions. Next day, the Doris landed another shore party which drove in a Turkish patrol, blew up a railway bridge, wrecked a railway station, and cut the telegraph wires. The ship’s captain also sent an ultimatum, backed by the threat of a naval bombardment from the Doris’s 6-in guns against which Alexandretta had no defence, that its officials should surrender all warlike stores and engines.

The Ottoman officials’ surprising response was to offer to destroy the two locomotives lying within the port’s radius, if the British would oblige them with the explosives and demolition experts to do so. On disembarkation of the British shore party with its gun-cotton, the torpedo-lieutenant in charge found himself faced with prevarication. ‘While they were delighted to comply, their honour and that of the Ottoman Empire meant that they could not be seen to collaborate with the enemy,’ the lieutenant told his shipmate E. V. Kinross. So, the officials argued, the lieutenant must not place the charges himself, and since no one else was trained or competent to do so, the thing could not be done. ‘I began to feel’, the lieutenant complained, ‘that they might not be entirely sincere.’¹³ After several hours’ negotiation, the solution was found: for that one day the lieutenant must be formally transferred to the Ottoman Navy. This accomplished, Turkish cavalry rounded up the locomotives and brought them into Alexandretta, where the British party duly destroyed them, after which the Doris sailed away.¹⁴

In London, this almost incredible story was repeated as proof that the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of collapse. As the New Year began, the War Council discussed many plans for the future, and Alexandretta kept appearing as an option, particularly favoured by Churchill. On 2 January there came an appeal from the Russian government for the British to make a military demonstration of some kind against the Turks. This was the last element for Kitchener to make his plan a reality. He spoke first to the king, as was his right as a field marshal, then went to BEF headquarters and talked the matter through with French and his subordinates. Only then did he speak to Asquith, followed by Churchill.

On Wednesday 13 January, Kitchener presented his plan to the War Council. Any public concerns over his giving up the War Office would be met by returning French to his old post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff; Colonel Seeley, who had been acting as a staff officer at BEF headquarters, could also return to be Secretary of State for War. Haldane would be the real power, with Seeley as the figurehead, something to which Seeley loyally agreed as long as he could take the outward credit. Douglas Haig would take over command of the BEF, which Kitchener knew he badly wanted, and in return Kitchener wanted Smith-Dorrien and Byng together with Hamilton for Egypt. Kitchener also wanted the Indian Corps and Indian Cavalry Corps, along with the 29th Division, the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division which had already been marked for Egypt, and the Royal Naval Division. They could all reach Alexandria or Cyprus in under two months’ time if the government requisitioned as troopships four big ocean liners waiting idle in British ports for want of passengers because of the risks of an Atlantic crossing in wartime: the RMS Olympic and the sister ships RMS Mauritania, RMS Aquitania, and RMS Lusitania. Supported by a substantial Royal Navy presence, led by the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, the pre-dreadnoughts HMS Agamemnon and HMS Lord Nelson, and the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible, with these troops Kitchener would make his first landing at Gallipoli, followed by a second landing at Alexandretta. This would leave the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow weakened against the potential threat of the German High Seas Fleet. But Churchill was not only confident that the Royal Navy could cope, but volunteered himself to go out to Egypt as the senior government representative and Kitchener’s political adviser.

There was one remaining major obstacle for Kitchener to overcome: the French. In 1912, as part of the Entente Cordiale agreements, Britain had accepted that Alexandretta and the whole of Syria were a French sphere of influence. The French were utterly opposed to any British military action that might jeopardise this agreement. On 22 January a high-ranking diplomat, François Georges-Picot, a former consul in Beirut and ardent champion of Syrian independence under French tutelage, came to London to insist that Alexandretta would be French, not British. With him was Alexandre Millerand, the French minister for war, with a further demand that all British troops should be sent to France and nowhere else. The attitude of the French commander-in-chief General Joseph Joffre was that of course British soldiers were useless when compared to his own magnificent troops, but nevertheless France demanded from the British government as many of them as possible, and quickly. As with the Royal Navy facing the High Seas Fleet, there was a real chance that weakening the BEF on the Western Front could present the Germans with the opportunity for a successful attack. But Kitchener, with both Asquith and Churchill behind him, was not to be stopped. Millerand and Joffre huffed and puffed, but at last accepted the situation. Georges-Picot’s deep suspicions were partly allayed by the undertaking that, when captured, Alexandretta would be placed under French control. To protect their own interests, and to keep an eye on the British so that there should be no misunderstanding between allies, the French agreed to provide for the venture a corps of two infantry divisions, the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient or CEO, together with a substantial fleet of transports and warships, including some pre-dreadnoughts.

From Gallipoli to Aleppo

The timing of the War Council’s agreement on Kitchener’s plan on 13 January could not have been better. Within days, news had reached London that the ambitious Ottoman 3rd Army envelopment of the Russians at Sarakamis had fallen apart in the winter snows and been heavily defeated. On 4 February an attack by the Ottoman VIII Corps on the Suez Canal line was also crushingly defeated by 10th and 11th Indian divisions and fell back through the Sinai to Gaza. This episode convinced Kitchener that the Suez Canal was safe, and that he could use his troops gathering in Egypt for the planned landings, starting with Gallipoli. On 18 February the combined British and French fleet began a bombardment of the Turkish forts on the Gallipoli peninsula, in the expectation that this would reinforce the Ottoman perception that the Allies planned to force their way through the Dardanelles.

While Kitchener with Churchill’s help gathered his forces at Alexandria, Sir John French in Whitehall made sure that all ran smoothly, with Haldane’s help behind the scenes. Asquith’s government confidently rejected in March a Russian demand that Constantinople should be handed over to them when it was captured. Asquith also had confidence in Haig as the new BEF commander. Lacking the Indian Corps, Haig cancelled a proposed attack by the BEF at Neuve Chapelle in support of a French attack on Vimy Ridge. Well known for his stubbornness, Haig was adamant that no British attack would take place against the Germans until his arriving Territorial Force and New Army divisions were quite ready, probably in the early autumn.

Joffre was furious once more, although slightly mollified when on 22 April the expected German counterattack came at Ypres, including the first large-scale use of poison gas on the Western Front. A much stronger and better-prepared BEF helped the French inflict a severe defeat on the Germans, driving them back as far as the otherwise unimportant village of Passchendaele. On the same day, Russian forces captured the key town of Przemysl from the Austro-Hungarians on the Eastern Front, and began a major offensive in the Caucasus. In Mesopotamia, in the ‘miracle of Shaiba’, the 6th (Poona) Division, now under the newly arrived Lieutenant General Sir John Nixon, shattered a counterattack by the Turkish 35th Division aimed at driving them back into the sea. Everything seemed to be swinging the Allies’ way.

Meanwhile, on the docks and in the harbour of Alexandria, all was chaos as Kitchener and his staffs worked to prepare their landing forces. With the naval bombardment of the Gallipoli forts already in progress, Hamilton was alarmed to find crates and boxes stencilled ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’. Kitchener let the blunder stand; knowing that he could not keep the presence of his forces secret, he chose the other option by intentionally letting the Turks and the whole world know where he would attack and why. Across the southern Mediterranean and the Levant, and as far away as India and South Africa, the call went out that K of K needed ships and craft of all descriptions to come to Alexandria, to sail under the protection of the Royal Navy, and to be paid in gold. ‘Kitchener from the Mediterranean and Egypt,’ Haig commented with rueful admiration, ‘Wherever he is, by his masterful action he will give that sphere of operations undue prominence in the strategical picture.’¹⁵

On Sunday 25 April, with both Kitchener and Hamilton watching from warships, Smith-Dorrien led the landing boats of the Constantinople Expeditionary Force ashore at Gallipoli into a lethal hail of well-prepared Turkish fire. The 29th Division landed at the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula on designated beaches that were barely more than cliff-faces, the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers famously winning ‘six VCs before breakfast’ in the face of murderous fire. ‘The trenches on the right raked us and those above us raked our right,’ recalled one officer of the battalion, ‘while trenches and machine guns fired straight down the valley. The noise was ghastly and the sights horrible.’¹⁶

Meanwhile, the Royal Naval Division made a brief diversionary landing to the north before re-embarking and joining in the real landings. Between this and the 29th Division beaches, the ANZAC divisions landed at what later became equally legendary as ‘Anzac Cove’. The French 1st Division of the CEO landed on the mainland to the east of the Dardanelles narrows. In a matter of hours, in the gullies and crags of the peninsula, the entire landing force had been pinned down only a few miles inland by a brave and resolute Turkish defence. It was grim war, but the continuing threat to Constantinople was enough for Kitchener for now, holding the Ottoman 5th Army in its place; the British had never intended this to be anything more than part of a larger strategy. There had been hopes that Gallipoli by itself would be enough to prompt intervention by other countries, but as Hamilton – who had exhorted the Australians to ‘Dig, dig, dig until you are safe!’ – noted with disgust in his diary, ‘The landing has been made but the Balkans fold their arms, the Italians show no interest, the Russians do not move an inch to get across the Black Sea.’¹⁷

Leaving Smith-Dorrien to manage the fight at Gallipoli, Kitchener and Hamilton returned to Egypt to ready the first wave of the Alexandretta Expeditionary Force (AEF). This now consisted of the two divisions of the Indian Corps, the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division, and the 2nd Division of the CEO, plus the 2nd Mounted Division from the Territorial Force, renamed the Yeomanry Division on its arrival in Cyprus. For the Allies, the strategic timing was now critical, including the few weeks remaining before the onset of the blistering heat of the full Arabian summer.

To emphasise the fragility of the brief Allied advantage, at the start of May a great German offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow drove the Russians back on the Eastern Front. But against the Ottoman Empire the story was different. The Russians scored a further success in the Caucasus, while Nixon resumed his advance up the Tigris, forcing the two weak Turkish divisions back. On 19 May a substantial Ottoman counterattack at Gallipoli, meant to sweep Smith-Dorrien’s troops off the peninsula, was heavily defeated. Italy, more impressed than Hamilton realised, had signed a secret treaty to enter the war on the Allied side at the end of the month.

On Friday 14 May the War Council met and gave formal approval to the second phase of Kitchener’s strategy, including the dispatch by the ocean liner fleet of six further infantry divisions, three of the Territorial Force and three of the New Army.¹⁸ In fact sending these divisions was a bluff: they were still very raw, badly under-equipped, and would be unfit for combat for some months. But what leaked to the Turks was the dispatch of a powerful British strategic reserve assembling at Alexandria, threatening to reinforce either Maxwell or Smith-Dorrien. The result was to pin both 5th Army at Gallipoli and VIII Corps facing the Sinai in place. By now, rumours of Kitchener’s intentions were flying around London. The chief military correspondent of The Times noted privately, ‘I hear of mad schemes for him joining Nixon via Damascus and plunging into the centre of Asia Minor.’¹⁹

The Times’s information was almost correct. On Sunday 23 May, the very day that Italy entered the war on the Allied side, troops of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division rowed ashore to start an unopposed landing just north of Alexandretta. A delighted Churchill pointed out to all he could that it was also the anniversary of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Ramilies. The local authorities promptly surrendered to the British, who equally promptly handed the town except for its port facilities over to the French under Georges-Picot.

Three days later Maxwell’s 10th and 11th Indian divisions arrived to threaten Gaza unexpectedly from across the Sinai, and started to shell the Turkish positions. In Mesopotamia the Turkish XII Corps was already retreating before the 6th (Poona) Division, which reached Amara on 3 June. With their 3rd Army barely holding the Russians in the Caucasus, their 5th Army defending Gallipoli, and their 1st and 2nd armies facing an increasingly hostile and confident Bulgaria and Greece, there was no military response that the Ottomans could make. The 27th Division at Damascus was rushed north by rail to help the 23rd Division defend Aleppo. But it was more than two weeks after the first British landings that both divisions started a tentative advance towards Alexandretta. They found a well-prepared defence by the Indian Corps and 2nd Division of the CEO, dug in along the lower ridges of the Amanus mountain range that protected Alexandretta to the east, their fire augmented by artillery and offshore naval gunfire, including the 15-in guns of HMS Queen Elizabeth. The Battle of Alexandretta, fought on Friday 18 June (the anniversary of Waterloo, as Churchill politely explained to Georges-Picot in his terrible French) was a one-sided massacre.

The Ottoman defeat acted as a signal to the Arab leaders, with whom Kitchener had kept in close contact. Across the peninsula a major revolt began, with Bedouin horsemen raiding out of the desert, hitting supply routes and the rail lines from Aqaba to Amman, and from Samarra to Baghdad. Meanwhile, at Alexandretta harbour and across the nearby beaches, the frantic unloading of the second wave of the AEF continued, using anything that could float and carry horses and men.

None too soon, by 28 June, what was now named the Desert Mounted Corps under Major General Julian Byng was ready to begin its advance: the 1st and 2nd Indian cavalry divisions, the ANZAC Mounted Division, the Yeomanry Division, and the composite 1st Spahi Regiment as a token French contribution. Byng had forty thousand horsemen with just over sixty miles to cover, against the few reserves that the Ottoman VIII Corps could assemble, between them and Aleppo. ‘A remarkable sight,’ enthused one British regimental commander, ‘ninety-four squadrons, all hurrying forward relentlessly on a decisive mission – a mission of which all cavalry soldiers have dreamed.’²⁰

It was a wild ride, in which the cavalry’s horses far outdistanced their artillery and supply vehicles. The Australians were particularly impressed by the Indian lancers’ method of ‘harpooning’ enemy infantry with a single thrust as they rode past. Although some Ottoman battalions or batteries put up a brief resistance, most broke and ran. On 1 July, the first Indian troopers clattered through the streets of Aleppo, and within two days Byng’s soldiers were holding the town and its environs in a solid dismounted perimeter, with the Australians and New Zealanders sitting on Muslimie Junction. A week later, to the astonishment of the tiny local garrison, the Yeomanry Division, who had followed the rail line eastwards, arrived at Ras-el-Ayn. When next morning, Friday 9 July, Kitchener entered Aleppo in triumph, Arabia was lost to the Ottoman Empire forever.

Hamilton’s already great admiration for Kitchener overflowed at this astonishing feat of arms. ‘He is the idol of England, and take him all in all, the biggest figure in the world,’ he wrote.²¹ Hindenburg added his own praise for Kitchener’s identification of ‘this critical weakness at the Gulf of Alexandretta’, adding that, ‘If ever there was a prospect of a brilliant strategic feat, it was here,’ in a campaign that ‘made an enormous impression on the whole world, and unquestionably [had] a far-reaching effect on our Turkish Ally’.²²

Kitchener’s victory certainly helped the Allied cause with Bulgaria, Greece, and other neutral Balkan countries that were wavering in their choice of sides, and did much to hearten hard-pressed Serbia. But in truth, with the fall of Aleppo, Kitchener’s campaign had shot its bolt. The same mountains and ramshackle rail system that prevented the Turks reinforcing Arabia also posed massive difficulties for any proposed Allied offensive northwards, while neither the British nor the French had any interest in dismembering Turkey itself. The Anglo-French landing at Gallipoli could achieve nothing without other countries joining in, and was a strategic dead end.

The critical issue now was whether the Turkish government, facing the strong possibility of an imminent attack by Bulgaria and Greece as well as Russia, would decide to cut its losses while it still could. Any peace with the Allies would mean the Ottoman Empire accepting the loss of Arabia, and the opening of the Black Sea route to Russia, allowing the British and French to concentrate their forces within Europe, against Germany and Austria- Hungary. The world now well knows the decisions taken in Constantinople in June 1915, and their consequences down to the present day.

The Reality

This account follows the informal rules and conventions of accurate counterfactual history as developed since just after the First World War, and which I have helped codify.²³ The modern name for Alexandretta is Iskenderun, lying in Turkey close to the Syrian border.

Quotations from real people are all genuine, including the views of Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’), Haig, and Hamilton, although in some cases the dates and the context have been changed. The assessments of the vulnerability of Alexandretta from Enver Pasha and Hindenburg appear in Hindenburg’s postwar memoirs. François Georges-Picot was the leading French opponent of British involvement in Alexandretta and Syria, although he did not accompany Millerand to London on 22 January; he was later one of the authors of the Sykes-Picot Agreement on the future of Arabia. Of others mentioned in passing or in the end-notes, Francis Aylmer (‘Frank’) Maxwell, nicknamed ‘The Brat’, was a prominent ADC to Kitchener earlier in his career, but by the First World War he had moved on and held various field commands, being killed in action as a brigadier general in 1917. Colonel J. E. B. ‘Galloper Jack’ Seeley, Secretary of State for War 1912–14, was a highly controversial figure, but it is likely that he would have agreed to serve again as a figurehead for Haldane. In reality, after serving at BEF headquarters he commanded the Canadian cavalry brigade on the Western Front 1915–18. Sidney Reilly (not his real name) was a legendary British spy of the period, but had no direct connection to Kitchener or to the Ottoman Empire. Captain E. V. Kinross and HMS Torrin are famously fictional.

A British landing at Alexandretta was debated and rejected in London over the winter of 1914–15 because of strong French political opposition, the risks to the Western Front and the Grand Fleet as described, and the shortage of available trained troops. The idea remained a British strategic option up to the end of the war. Real events up to early 1915 took place as described, including the comic-opera raid on Alexandretta by HMS Doris. But Kitchener gave up his position as consul general in Egypt in January 1915, and the various command changes described, which would have greatly improved the British management of the war, are fiction.

The War Council of 13 January 1915 approved a purely naval bombardment of the Dardanelles forts, so starting the real and disastrous Dardanelles campaign. The naval bombardment began on 18 February and the Gallipoli landings, commanded by Ian Hamilton, began on 25 April. The Lusitania was sunk on 7 May while making a commercial passenger crossing of the Atlantic, but the other liners mentioned were all used as troopships to help transport the raw British reinforcement divisions to Gallipoli between June and August. The British made a number of premature and unsuccessful attacks on the Western Front in 1915, starting with Neuve Chapelle on 10 March. Kitchener died when the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire, on which he was travelling to Russia, sank in the North Atlantic on 5 June 1916.

What was briefly known as the Constantinople Expeditionary Force was rapidly renamed the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, or MEF, otherwise its forces for the historical landing at Gallipoli are given correctly. The forces potentially available to create the Alexandretta Expeditionary Force are also historically accurate. The Indian Corps remained on the Western Front until late 1915, and the Indian Cavalry Corps remained there until early 1918, when its troops were sent to Egypt to join the real Desert Mounted Corps. The composite French 1st Spahi Regiment was also attached to the Desert Mounted Corps in 1918, for political reasons.

What actual decision the government in Constantinople would have taken in June 1915, faced with this fictional scenario, is beyond my ability or willingness to guess.