THE TURKS PREPARE TO FLEE FROM CONSTANTINOPLE AND ESTABLISH A NEW
CAPITAL IN ASIA MINOR--THE ALLIED FLEET BOMBARDING THE DARDANELLES
Probably one thing that stimulated this German desire for peace was the
situation at the Dardanelles. In early January, when Wangenheim
persuaded me to write my letter to Washington, Constantinople was in a
state of the utmost excitement. It was reported that the Allies had
assembled a fleet of forty warships at the mouth of the Dardanelles and
that they intended to attempt the forcing of the strait. What made the
situation particularly tense was the belief, which then generally
prevailed in Constantinople, that such an attempt would succeed.
Wangenheim shared this belief, and so, in a modified form, did von der
Goltz, who probably knew as much about the Dardanelles defences as any
other man, as he had for years been Turkey’s military instructor. I find
in my diary von der Goltz’s precise opinion on this point as reported to
me by Wangenheim, and I quote it exactly as written at that time:
“Although he thought it was almost impossible to force the Dardanelles,
still, if England thought it an important move of the general war, they
could, by sacrificing ten ships, force the entrance, and do it very
fast, and be up in the Marmora within ten hours from the time they
forced it.”
The very day that Wangenheim gave me this expert opinion of von der
Goltz, he asked me to store several cases of his valuables in the
American Embassy. Evidently he was making preparations for his own
departure.
Reading the Cromer Report on the Dardanelles bombardment, I find that
Admiral Sir John Fisher, then First Sea Lord, placed the price of
success at twelve ships. Evidently von der Goltz and Fisher did not
differ materially in their estimates.
The situation of Turkey, when these first rumours of an Allied
bombardment reached us, was fairly desperate. On all hands there were
evidences of the fear and panic that had seized not only the populace,
but the official classes. Calamities from all sides were apparently
closing in on the country. Up to January 1, 1915, Turkey had done
nothing to justify her participation in the war; on the contrary, she
had met defeat practically everywhere. Djemal, as already recorded, had
left Constantinople as the prospective “Conqueror of Egypt,” but his
expedition had proved to be a bloody and humiliating failure. Enver’s
attempt to redeem the Caucasus from Russian rule had resulted in an even
more frightful military disaster. He had ignored the advice of the
Germans, which was to let the Russians advance to Sivas and make his
stand there, and, instead, he had boldly attempted to gain Russian
territory in the Caucasus. This army had been defeated at every point,
but the military reverses did not end its sufferings. The Turks had a
most inadequate medical or sanitary service; typhus and dysentery broke
out in all the camps, the deaths from these diseases reaching 100,000
men. Dreadful stories were constantly coming in telling of the
sufferings of these soldiers. That England was preparing an invasion of
Mesopotamia was well known, and no one at that time had any reason to
believe that it would not succeed. Every day the Turks expected the news
that the Bulgarians had declared war and were marching on
Constantinople, and they knew that such an attack would necessarily
bring in Rumania and Greece. It was no diplomatic secret that Italy was
waiting only for the arrival of warm weather to join the Allies. At this
moment the Russian fleet was bombarding Trebizond, on the Black Sea, and
was daily expected at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Meanwhile the
domestic situation was deplorable; all over Turkey thousands of the
populace were daily dying of starvation; practically all able-bodied men
had been taken into the army, so that only a few were left to till the
fields; the criminal requisitions had almost destroyed all business; the
Treasury was in a more exhausted state than normally, for the closing of
the Dardanelles and the blockading of the Mediterranean ports had
stopped all imports and customs dues; and the increasing wrath of the
people seemed likely any day to break out against Talaat and his
associates. And now, surrounded by increasing troubles on every hand,
the Turks learned that this mighty armada of England and her allies was
approaching, determined to destroy the defences and capture the city. At
that time there was no force which the Turks feared so greatly as they
feared the British fleet. Its tradition of several centuries of
uninterrupted victories had completely seized their imagination. It
seemed to them superhuman--the one overwhelming power which it was
hopeless to contest.
Wangenheim and also nearly all of the German military and naval forces
not only regarded the forcing of the Dardanelles as possible, but they
believed it to be inevitable. The possibility of British success was one
of the most familiar topics of discussion, and the weight of opinion,
both lay and professional, inclined in favour of the Allied fleets.
Talaat told me that an attempt to force the strait would succeed--it
only depended on England’s willingness to sacrifice a few ships. The
real reason why Turkey had sent a force against Egypt, Talaat added, was
to divert England from making an attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The
state of mind that existed is shown by the fact that on January 1st the
Turkish Government had made preparations for two trains, one of which
was to take the Sultan and his suite to Asia Minor, while the other was
intended for Wangenheim, Pallavicini, and the rest of the diplomatic
corps. On January 2nd I had an illuminating talk with Pallavicini. He
showed me a certificate given him by Bedri, the Prefect of Police,
passing him and his secretaries and servants on one of these emergency
trains. He also had seat tickets for himself and all of his suite. He
said that each train would have only three cars, so that it could make
great speed; he had been told to have everything ready to start at an
hour’s notice. Wangenheim made little attempt to conceal his
apprehensions. He told me that he had made all preparations to send his
wife to Berlin, and he invited Mrs. Morgenthau to accompany her, so that
she, too, could be removed from the danger zone. Wangenheim showed the
fear, which was then the prevailing one, that a successful bombardment
would lead to fires and massacres in Constantinople, as well as in the
rest of Turkey. In anticipation of such disturbances he made a
characteristic suggestion. Should the fleet pass the Dardanelles, he
said, the life of no Englishman in Turkey would be safe--they would all
be massacred. As it was so difficult to tell an Englishman from an
American, he proposed that I should give the Americans a distinctive
button to wear, which would protect them from Turkish violence. As I was
convinced that Wangenheim’s real purpose was to arrange some sure means
of identifying the English, and of so subjecting them to Turkish
ill-treatment, I refused to act on this amiable suggestion.
Another incident illustrates the nervous tension which prevailed in
those January days. As I noticed that some shutters at the British
Embassy were open, Mrs. Morgenthau and I went up to investigate. In the
early days we had sealed this building, which had been left in my
charge, and this was the first time we had broken the seals to enter.
About two hours after we returned from this tour of inspection,
Wangenheim came into my office in one of his now familiar agitated
moods. It had been reported, he said, that Mrs. Morgenthau and I had
been up to the Embassy getting it ready for the British Admiral, who
expected soon to take possession!
All this seems a little absurd now, for, in fact, the Allied fleets made
no attack at that time. At the very moment when the whole of
Constantinople was feverishly awaiting the British dreadnoughts, the
British Cabinet in London was merely considering the advisability of
such an enterprise. The record shows that Petrograd, on January 2nd,
telegraphed the British Government, asking that some kind of a
demonstration be made against the Turks, who were pressing the Russians
in the Caucasus. Though an encouraging reply was immediately sent to
this request, it was not until January 28th that the British Cabinet
definitely issued orders for an attack on the Dardanelles. It is no
longer a secret that there was no unanimous confidence in the success of
such an undertaking. Admiral Carden recorded his belief that the strait
“could not be rushed, but that extended operations with a large number
of ships might succeed.” The penalty of failure, he added, would be the
great loss that England would suffer in prestige and influence in the
East; how true this prophecy proved I shall have occasion to show. Up to
this time one of the fundamental and generally accepted axioms of naval
operations had been that warships should not attempt to attack fixed
land fortifications. But the Germans had demonstrated the power of
mobile guns against fortresses in their destruction of the emplacements
at Liège and Namur, and there was a belief in some quarters in England
that these events had modified this naval principle. Mr. Churchill, at
that time at the head of the Admiralty, placed great confidence in the
destructive power of a new superdreadnought which had just been
finished--the _Queen Elizabeth_--and which was then on its way to join
the Mediterranean fleet.
We in Constantinople knew nothing about these deliberations then, but
the result became apparent in the latter part of February. On the
afternoon of the 19th, Pallavicini, the Austrian Ambassador, came to me
with important news. The Marquis was a man of great personal dignity,
yet it was apparent that he was this day exceedingly nervous, and,
indeed, he made no attempt to conceal his apprehension. The Allied
fleets, he said, had reopened their attack on the Dardanelles, and this
time their bombardment had been extremely ferocious. At that time things
were going badly for the Austrians; the Russian armies were advancing
victoriously; Serbia had hurled the Austrians over the frontier, and the
European Press was filled with prognostications of the break-up of the
Austrian Empire. Pallavicini’s attitude this afternoon was a perfect
reflection of the dangers that were then encompassing his country. He
was a sensitive and proud man--proud of his Emperor and proud of what he
regarded as the great Austro-Hungarian Empire--and he now appeared to be
overburdened by the fear that this extensive Hapsburg fabric, which had
withstood the assaults of so many centuries, was rapidly being
overwhelmed with ruin. Like most human beings, Pallavicini yearned for
sympathy; he could obtain none from Wangenheim, who seldom took him into
his confidence and consistently treated him as the representative of a
nation that was compelled to submit to the overlordship of Germany.
Perhaps that was the reason why the Austrian Ambassador used to pour out
his heart to me. And now this Allied bombardment of the Dardanelles came
as the culmination of all his troubles. At this time the Central Powers
believed that they had Russia bottled up; that, because they had sealed
the Dardanelles, she could neither get her wheat to market nor import
the munitions needed for carrying on the war. Germany and Austria thus
had a strangle-hold on their gigantic foe, and, if this condition could
be maintained indefinitely, the collapse of Russia would be inevitable.
At present, it is true, the Czar’s forces were making a victorious
campaign, and this in itself was sufficiently alarming to Austria; but
their present supplies of war materials would ultimately be exhausted,
and then their great superiority in men would help them little, and they
would inevitably go to pieces; But should Russia get Constantinople,
with the control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, she could obtain
all the munitions needed for warfare on the largest scale, and the
defeat of the Central Powers might immediately follow, and such a
defeat, Pallavicini well understood, would be far more serious for
Austria than for Germany. Wangenheim had told me that it was Germany’s
plan, in case the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated, to incorporate
her 12,000,000 Germans in the Hohenzollern domain, and Pallavicini, of
course, was familiar with this danger. The Allied attack on the
Dardanelles thus meant to Pallavicini the extinction of his country, for
if we are properly to understand his state of mind we must remember that
he firmly believed, as did almost all the other important men in
Constantinople, that such an attack would succeed.
Wangenheim’s existence was made miserable by this same haunting
conviction. As I have already shown, the bottling-up of Russia was
almost exclusively the German Ambassador’s performance. He had brought
the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ into Constantinople, and by this
manœuvre had precipitated Turkey into the war. The forcing of the
strait would mean more than the transformation of Russia into a
permanent and powerful participant in the war; it meant--and this was by
no means an unimportant consideration with Wangenheim--the undoing of
his great personal achievement. Yet Wangenheim showed his apprehensions
quite differently from Pallavicini. In true German fashion, he resorted
to threats and bravado. He gave no external signs of depression, but his
whole body tingled with rage. He was not deploring his fate; he was
looking for ways of striking back. He would sit in my office, smoking
with his usual energy, and tell me all the terrible things which he
proposed to do to his enemy. The thing that particularly preyed upon
Wangenheim’s mind was the exposed position of the German Embassy. It
stood on a high hill, one of the most conspicuous buildings in the town,
a perfect target for an enterprising English admiral. Almost the first
object the British fleet would sight, as it entered the Bosphorus, would
be this yellow monument of the Hohenzollerns, and the temptation to
shell it might prove irresistible.
“Let them dare destroy that Embassy!” Wangenheim said. “I’ll get even
with them! If they fire a single shot at it we’ll blow up the French and
the English Embassies! Go tell the Admiral that, won’t you? Tell him
also that we have the dynamite ready to do it!”
Wangenheim also showed great anxiety over the proposed removal of the
Government to Eski-Shehr. In early January, when everyone was expecting
the arrival of the Allied fleet, preparations had been made for moving
the Government to Asia Minor; and now again, at the first rumbling of
the British and French guns, the special trains were prepared once more.
Wangenheim and Pallavicini both told me of their unwillingness to
accompany the Sultan and the Government to Asia Minor. Should the Allies
capture Constantinople, the Ambassadors of the Central Powers would find
themselves cut off from their home countries and completely in the hands
of the Turks. “The Turks could then hold us as hostages,” said
Wangenheim. They urged Talaat to establish the emergency Government at
Adrianople, from which town they could motor in and out of
Constantinople, and then, in case the city were captured, they could
make their escape home. The Turks, on the other hand, refused to adopt
this suggestion because they feared an attack from Bulgaria. Wangenheim
and Pallavicini now found themselves between two fires. If they stayed
in Constantinople they would naturally become prisoners of the English
and French; on the other hand, if they went to Eski-Shehr, it was not
unlikely that they would become prisoners of the Turks. Many evidences
of the flimsy basis on which rested the German and Turkish alliance had
come to my attention, but this was about the most illuminating.
Wangenheim knew, as did everybody else, that, in case the French and
English captured Constantinople, the Turks would vent their rage not
mainly against the Entente, but against the Germans who had enticed them
into the war.
It all seems so strange now, this conviction that was uppermost in the
minds of everybody then--that the success of the Allied fleets against
the Dardanelles was inevitable and that the capture of Constantinople
was a matter of only a few days. I recall an animated discussion that
took place at the American Embassy on the afternoon of February 24th.
The occasion was Mrs. Morgenthau’s weekly reception--meetings which
furnished almost the only opportunity in those days for the
foregathering of the diplomats. Practically all were on hand this
afternoon. The first great bombardment of the Dardanelles had taken
place five days before; this had practically destroyed the
fortifications at the mouth of the strait. There was naturally only one
subject of discussion: Would the Allied fleets get through? What would
happen if they did? Everybody expressed an opinion, Wangenheim,
Pallavicini, Garroni, the Italian Ambassador, D’Anckarsvard, the Swedish
Minister, Koloucheff, the Bulgarian Minister, Kühlmann, and
Scharfenberg, First Secretary of the German Embassy, and it was the
unanimous opinion that the Allied attack would succeed. I particularly
remember Kühlmann’s attitude. He discussed the capture of Constantinople
almost as though it was something which had taken place already. The
Persian Ambassador showed great anxiety; his Embassy stood not far from
the Sublime Porte. He told me that he feared that the latter building
would be bombarded and that a few stray shots might easily set afire his
own residence, and he asked if he might move his archives to the
American Embassy. The wildest rumours were afloat; we were told that the
Standard Oil agent at the Dardanelles had counted seventeen transports
loaded with troops, that the warships had already fired 800 shots and
had levelled all the hills at the entrance, and that Talaat’s bodyguard
had been shot--the implication being that the bullet had missed its
intended victim. It was said that the whole Turkish populace was aflame
with the fear that the English and the French, when they reached the
city, would celebrate the event by a wholesale attack on Turkish women.
The latter reports were, of course, absurd; they were merely
characteristic rumours set afloat by the Germans and their Turkish
associates. The fact is that the great mass of the people in
Constantinople were probably praying that the Allied attack would
succeed, and so release them from the control of the political gang that
then ruled the country.
And in all this excitement there was one lonely and despondent
figure--this was Talaat. Whenever I saw him in those critical days, he
was the picture of desolation and defeat. The Turks, like most primitive
peoples, wear their emotions on the surface, and with them the
transition from exultation to despair is a short one. The thunder of the
British guns at the strait apparently spelled doom to Talaat. The
letter-carrier of Adrianople seemed to have reached the end of his
career. He again confided to me his expectation that the English would
capture the Turkish capital, and once more he said that he was sorry
that Turkey had entered the war. Talaat well knew what would happen as
soon as the Allied fleet entered the Sea of Marmora. According to the
report of the Cromer Commission, Lord Kitchener, in giving his assent to
a purely naval expedition, had relied upon a revolution in Turkey to
make the enterprise successful. Lord Kitchener has been much criticised
for his part in the Dardanelles attack; I owe it to his memory, however,
to say that on this point he was absolutely right. Had the Allied fleets
once passed the defences at the strait, the administration of the Young
Turks would have come to a bloody end. As soon as the guns began to
fire, placards appeared on the hoardings denouncing Talaat and his
associates as responsible for all the woes that had come to Turkey.
Bedri, the Prefect of Police, was busy collecting all the unemployed
young men and sending them out of the city; his purpose was to free
Constantinople of all who might start a revolution against the Young
Turks. It was a common report that Bedri feared this revolution much
more than he feared the British fleet. And this was the same Nemesis
that was every moment now pursuing Talaat.
A single episode illustrates the nervous excitement that prevailed. Dr.
Lederer, the correspondent of the _Berliner Tageblatt_, made a short
visit to the Dardanelles, and, on his return, reported to certain ladies
of the diplomatic circle that the German officers had told him that they
were wearing their shrouds, as they expected any minute to be buried
there. This statement went around the city like wildfire, and Dr.
Lederer was threatened with arrest for making it. He appealed to me for
help; I took him to Wangenheim, who refused to have anything to do with
him. Lederer, he said, was an Austrian subject, although he represented
a German newspaper. His anger at Lederer for this indiscretion was
extreme. But I finally succeeded in getting the unpopular journalist
into the Austrian Embassy, where he was harboured for the night. In a
few days, Lederer had to leave town.
In the midst of all this excitement there was one person who was
apparently not at all disturbed. Though ambassadors, generals, and
politicians might anticipate the worst calamities, Enver’s voice was
reassuring and quiet. The man’s coolness and really courageous spirit
never shone to better advantage. In late December and January, when the
city had its first fright over the bombardment, Enver was fighting the
Russians in the Caucasus. His experiences in this campaign, as already
described, had been far from glorious. Enver had left Constantinople in
November to join his army an expectant conqueror; he returned in the
latter part of January, the commander of a thoroughly beaten and
demoralised force. Such a disastrous experience would have utterly
ruined almost any other military leader, and that Enver felt his
reverses keenly was evident from the way in which he kept himself from
public view. I had my first glimpse of him, after his return, at a
concert given for the benefit of the Red Crescent. At this affair Enver
sat far back in a box, as though he intended to keep as much as possible
out of sight; it was quite apparent that he was uncertain as to the
cordiality of his reception by the public. All the important people in
Constantinople, the Crown Prince, the members of the Cabinet, and the
Ambassadors attended this function, and, in accordance with the usual
custom, the Crown Prince sent for these dignitaries, one after another,
for a few words of greeting and congratulation. After that the visiting
from box to box became general. The heir to the throne sent for Enver as
well as the rest, and this recognition evidently gave him a new courage,
for he began to mingle with the diplomats, who also treated him with the
utmost cordiality and courtesy. Enver apparently regarded this
favourable notice as having re-established his standing, and now once
more he assumed a leading part in the crisis. A few days afterward he
discussed the situation with me. He was much astonished, he said, at the
fear that so generally prevailed, and he was disgusted at the
preparations that had been made to send away the Sultan and the
Government and practically leave the city a prey to the English. He did
not believe that the Allied fleets could force the Dardanelles; he had
recently inspected all the fortifications and he had every confidence in
their ability to resist successfully. Even though the ships did get
through, he insisted that Constantinople should be defended to the last
man.
Yet Enver’s assurance did not satisfy his associates. They had made all
their arrangements for the British fleet. If, in spite of the most
heroic resistance the Turkish armies could make, it still seemed likely
that the Allies were about to capture the city, the ruling Powers had
their final plans all prepared. They proposed to do to this great
capital precisely what the Russians did to Moscow, when Napoleon
appeared before it.
“They will never capture an existing city,” they told me, “only a heap
of ashes.” As a matter of fact, this was no idle threat. I was told that
cans of petroleum had been already stored in all the police stations and
other places, ready to fire the town at a moment’s notice. As
Constantinople is largely built of wood, this would have been no very
difficult task. But they were determined to destroy more than these
temporary structures; the plans aimed at the beautiful architectural
monuments built by the Christians long before the Turkish occupation.
The Turks had particularly marked for dynamiting the Mosque of Santa
Sophia. This building, which had been a Christian church centuries
before it became a Mohammedan mosque, is one of the most magnificent
structures of the vanished Byzantine Empire. Naturally the suggestion of
such an act of vandalism aroused us all, and I made a plea to Talaat
that Santa Sophia should be spared. He treated the proposed destruction
lightly.
“There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress,” he told
me, “who care for anything that is old. We all like new things!”
That was all the satisfaction I obtained in this matter at that time.
Enver’s insistence that the Dardanelles could resist caused his
associates to lose confidence in his judgment. About a year afterward,
Bedri Bey, the Prefect of Police, gave me additional details. While
Enver was still in the Caucasus, Bedri said, Talaat had called a
conference, a kind of council of war, on the Dardanelles. This had been
attended by Liman von Sanders, the German General who had reorganised
the Turkish Army; Usedom, the German Admiral who was the
Inspector-General of the Ottoman coast defences, and Bronsart, the
German Chief of Staff of the Turkish Army, and several others. Every man
present gave it as his opinion that the British and French fleets could
force the strait; the only subject of dispute, said Bedri, was whether
it would take the ships eight or twenty hours to reach Constantinople
after they had destroyed the defences. Enver’s position was well
understood, but this council decided to ignore him and to make the
preparations without his knowledge--to eliminate the Minister of War, at
least temporarily, from their deliberations.
In early March, Bedri and Djambolat, who was Director of Public Safety,
came to see me. At that time the exodus from the capital had begun;
Turkish women and children were being moved into the interior; all the
banks had been compelled to send their gold into Asia Minor; the
archives of the Sublime Porte had already been carried to Eski-Shehr,
and practically all the Ambassadors and their suites, as well as most of
the Government officials, had made their preparations to leave. Many of
Constantinople’s finest works of art had been buried in cellars or
covered for protection, the Director of the Museum being one of the six
Turks to whom Talaat had referred as liking “old things.”
Bedri came to arrange the details of my departure. As Ambassador I was
personally accredited to the Sultan, and it would obviously be my duty,
said Bedri, to go wherever the Sultan went; the train was all ready, he
added. He wished to know how many people I intended to take, so that
sufficient space could be reserved. To this proposal I entered a flat
refusal. I informed Bedri that I thought that my responsibilities made
it necessary for me to remain in Constantinople. Only a neutral
Ambassador, I said, could forestall massacres and the destruction of the
city, and certainly I owed it to the civilised world to prevent, if I
could, such calamities as these. If my position as Ambassador made it
inevitable that I should follow the Sultan, I would resign and become
honorary Consul-General.
Both Bedri and Djambolat were much younger and less experienced men than
I, and I therefore told them that they needed a man of maturer years to
advise them in an international crisis of this kind. I was not only
interested in protecting foreigners and American institutions, but I was
also interested, on general humanitarian grounds, in safeguarding the
Turkish population from the excesses that were generally expected. The
several nationalities, many of them containing elements which were given
to pillage and massacre, were causing great anxiety. I therefore
proposed to Bedri and Djambolat that the three of us form a kind of
committee to take control in the approaching crisis. They consented, and
we sat down and decided on a course of action. We took a map of
Constantinople and marked the districts which, under the existing rules
of warfare, we agreed that the Allied fleet would have the right to
bombard. Thus, we decided that the War Office, Marine Office, telegraph
offices, railroad stations, and all public buildings could quite
legitimately be made the targets for their guns. Then we marked out
certain zones which we should insist on regarding as immune. The main
residential section, and the part where all the Embassies are located,
is Pera, the district on the north shore of the Golden Horn. This we
marked as not subject to attack. We also delimited certain residential
areas of Stamboul and Galata, the Turkish sections. I telegraphed to
Washington, asking the State Department to obtain a ratification of
these plans and an agreement to respect these zones of safety from the
British and French Governments. I received a reply endorsing my action.
All preparations had thus been made. At the station stood trains which
were to take the Sultan and the Government and the Ambassadors to Asia
Minor. They had steam up, ready to move at a minute’s notice. We were
all awaiting the triumphant arrival of the Allied fleet.