“Berlin to Bagdad” Becomes But a Memory
Germany may have been determined to dominate the Ottoman Empire by military force. But from the Turkish point of view domination by Germany was hardly more objectionable than the dismemberment which was certain to be the result of an Allied victory.
Indeed, confident that they would eventually win the war, the Entente Powers had proceeded far in their plans for the division of the Ottoman Empire. During the spring of 1915, as has been indicated,[23] Russia had been promised Constantinople, and Italy had been assigned a share of the spoils equal to that of Great Britain, France, or Russia. To give full effect to these understandings, further negotiations were conducted during the autumn of 1915 and the spring of 1916, looking toward a more specific delimitation of interests.
Accordingly, on April 26, 1916—the first anniversary of the Treaty of London with Italy—France and Russia signed the secret Sazonov-Paléologue Treaty concerning their respective territorial rights in Asiatic Turkey. Russia was awarded full sovereignty over the vilayets of Trebizond, Erzerum, Bitlis, and Van—a vast area of 60,000 square miles (about one and one-fifth times the size of the State of New York), containing valuable mineral and petroleum resources. This handsome prize put Russia well on the road to Constantinople and in a fair way to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. And at the moment the treaty was signed the armies of the Grand Duke Nicholas were actually overrunning the territory which Russia had staked out for herself! For her part, France was to receive adequate compensations in the region to the south and southwest of the Russian acquisitions, the actual delimitation of boundaries and other details to be the result of direct negotiation with Great Britain.[24]
Thus came into existence the famous Sykes-Picot Treaty of May 9, 1916, defining British and French political and economic interests in the hoped-for dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The Syrian coast from Tyre to Alexandretta, the province of Cilicia, and southern Armenia (from Sivas on the north and west to Diarbekr on the south and east) were allocated to France in full sovereignty. In addition, a French “zone of influence” was established over a vast area including the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Deir, and Mosul. Administration of this stretch of coast and its hinterland would give French imperialists what they most wanted in the Near East—actual possession of a country in which France had many religious and cultural interests, control of the silk production of Syria and the potential cotton production of Cilicia, ownership of the Arghana copper mines, and acquisition of that portion of the Bagdad Railway lying between Mosul and the Cilician Gates of the Taurus.[25] Aside from its satisfaction of French imperial ambitions, however, “the French area defied every known law of geographic, ethnographic, and linguistic unity which one might cite who would attempt to justify it.”[26]
Great Britain, by way of “compensation,” was to receive complete control over lower Mesopotamia from Tekrit to the Persian Gulf and from the Arabian boundary to the Persian frontier. In addition, she was recognized as having special political and economic interests—particularly the right “to furnish such advisers as the Arabs might desire”—in a vast territory lying south of the French “zone of influence” and extending from the Sinai Peninsula to the Persian border. Palestine was to be internationalized, but was subsequently established as a homeland for the Jews. In this manner Britain, also, had adequately protected her imperial interests—she had secured possession of the Bagdad Railway in southern Mesopotamia; she had gained complete control of the head of the Persian Gulf, thus fortifying her strategic position in the Indian Ocean; she was assured the Mesopotamian cotton supply for the mills of Manchester and the Mesopotamian oil supply for the dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet; she had erected in Palestine a buffer state which would block any future Ottoman attacks on the Suez Canal. All in all, Sir Mark Sykes had driven a satisfactory bargain.[27]
Italian ambitions now had to be propitiated. For a whole year before the United States entered the war—while the Allied governments were professing unselfish war aims—secret negotiations were being conducted by representatives of France, Great Britain and Italy to determine what advantages and territories, equivalent to those gained by the other Allies, might be awarded Italy. In April, 1917, by the so-called St. Jean de Maurienne Agreement, Italy was granted complete possession of almost the entire southern half of Anatolia—including the important cities of Adalia, Konia, and Smyrna—together with an extensive “zone of influence” nort-heast of Smyrna. With such a hold on the coast of Asia Minor, Italian imperialists might realize their dream of dominating the trade of the Ægean and of reëstablishing the ancient power of Venice in the commerce of the Near East.[28]
These inter-Allied agreements for the disposal of Asiatic Turkey were instructive instances of the “old diplomacy” in coöperation with the “new imperialism.” The treaties were secret covenants, secretly arrived at; they bartered territories and peoples in the most approved manner of Metternich and Richelieu. But they were less concerned with narrowly political claims than with the exclusive economic privileges which sovereignty carried with it; they determined boundaries with recognition of their strategic importance, but with greater regard for the location of oilfields, mineral deposits, railways and ports of commercial importance. They left no doubt as to what were the real stakes of the war in the Near East.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the secret treaties with the pronouncements of Allied statesmen regarding the origins and purposes of the Great War. Certainly they were no part of the American program for peace, which promised to “the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire a secure sovereignty”; which demanded “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined”; and which announced in no uncertain terms that “the day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by” as is also “the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world.”[29]
Allied diplomacy was to have its way in the Near East, however, for the goddess of victory finally smiled upon the Allied armies and frowned upon both Turks and Germans. As 1916 had been a year of Turco-German triumphs at the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia, 1917 brought conspicuous Allied victories along the Tigris and in Syria, and 1918 saw the complete collapse of the Ottoman Empire. On February 24, 1917, General Sir Stanley Maude, in command of reënforced and rejuvenated British forces in Mesopotamia, captured Kut-el-Amara, retrieving the disaster which had befallen Townshend’s army a year before. Deprived of the services of Field Marshal von der Goltz, who died during the Caucasus campaign, the Turks retired in disorder, and on March 11 British troops entered Bagdad—the ancient city which had bulked so large in the German scheme of things in the Near East. Although the capture of Bagdad was not in itself of great strategic importance, its effect on morale in the belligerent countries was considerable. British imperialists were in possession of the ancient capital of the Arabian Caliphs, as well as the chief entrepôt of caravan trade in the Middle East; therefore their prestige with both Arabs and Turks was certain to rise. At home, pictures of British troops in the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights appealed to the imagination of the war-weary, as well as the optimistic, patriot. In the Central Powers, on the other hand, the loss of Bagdad created scepticism as to whether the German dream of “Hamburg to the Persian Gulf” was not now beyond realization. This scepticism became more confirmed when, on April 24, General Maude captured Samarra, northern railhead of the uncompleted Bagdad line in Mesopotamia.[30]
Scepticism would have turned to alarm, however, had Germans been fully aware of the significance of the British advance in the Land of the Two Rivers. For behind the armies of General Maude came civil officials by the hundreds to consolidate the victory and to lay the foundations of permanent occupation. An Irrigation Department was established to deal with the menace of floods, to drain marshes, and to economize in the use of water. An Agricultural Department undertook the cultivation of irrigated lands and conducted elaborate experiments in the growing of cotton—the commodity which means so much in the British imperial system. A railway was constructed from Basra to Bagdad which, when opened to commerce in 1919, became an integral part of the Constantinople-Basra system. There was every indication that the British were in Mesopotamia to stay.[31]
Germans and Turks were sufficiently aroused, however, to take strenuous measures to counteract General Maude’s successes. In April, 1917, Field Marshal von Mackensen, hero of the Balkan and Rumanian campaigns and strong man of the Near East, was sent to Constantinople to confer with Enver Pasha regarding the military situation. It was decided, apparently, that Bagdad must be retaken at all costs, for throughout the summer quantities of rolling stock for the Bagdad Railway were shipped to Turkey, enormous supplies of munitions were accumulated at Haidar Pasha, and a division of picked German troops (including machine-gun and artillery units) made its appearance in Anatolia. Command of all the Turkish armies in Mesopotamia was conferred upon General von Falkenhayn, former German Chief of Staff. Germany was not yet prepared to surrender her sphere of interest in Turkey.
The great expedition against Bagdad, however, had to be abandoned. In the first place, Turkish officers were loath to serve under von Falkenhayn. Turkish nationalism was beginning to assert itself, and German supervision of Ottoman military affairs was resented—Mustapha Kemal Pasha, for example, refused to accept orders from German generals and resigned his commission. Von Falkenhayn himself was disliked because of his dictatorial methods and was held in light esteem because of his responsibility for the disastrous Verdun offensive. Furthermore, many Turks deemed it inadvisable to dissipate energy in a Mesopotamian campaign, the avowed purpose of which was a recovery of German prestige, when all available man power was required for the defence of Syria. Djemal Pasha was so insistent on this point that he received from the Kaiser an “invitation” to visit the Western Front! In the second place, Providence or, perhaps, an Allied spy intervened to thwart the German plans, for a great fire and a series of explosions (September 23–26, 1917) destroyed the entire port and terminal of Haidar Pasha, together with all the munitions and supplies which had been accumulated there by months of patient effort. And finally, the spectacular campaign of Field Marshal Allenby in Palestine, which opened with the capture of Beersheba, on October 31, convinced even von Falkenhayn that an expedition in Mesopotamia, while Aleppo was in danger, would be the height of folly. German energies were thereupon diverted to the defence of the Holy Land.[32]
During the autumn of 1917, Great Britain and France, to assure their possession of the territories assigned them by the Sykes-Picot Treaty, began a Syrian campaign which was not to terminate until Turkey had been put out of the war. Under Field Marshal Sir E. H. H. Allenby, British troops, reënforced by French units and assisted by the rebellious Arabs of the Hedjaz, captured Gaza (November 7), Jaffa (November 16), and Jerusalem (December 9). The triumphal entry of General Allenby into Jerusalem was hailed throughout Christendom as marking the success of a modern crusade to rid Palestine of Ottoman domination forever. Jericho was occupied, February 21, 1918, but Turkish resistance, under Marshal Liman von Sanders, stiffened for a time, and it was not until the autumn that large-scale operations were resumed. On October 1, Damascus was occupied by a combined Arab and British army; a week later Beirut was taken; and on October 25, Aleppo, the most important junction point on the Bagdad Railway, capitulated. Five days afterward, Turkey gave up the hopeless fight by signing the Mudros armistice, terminating hostilities.[33]
Thus ended a Great Adventure for both Turkey and Germany. Germany lost all hope of retaining any economic or political influence in the Ottoman Empire; the dream of Berlin-to-Bagdad became a nightmare. Turkey faced dismemberment. “The Bagdad Railway had proved to be the backbone of Turkish utility and power in the War. Were it not for its existence, the Ottoman resistance in Mesopotamia and in Syria could have been discounted as a practical consideration in the War, and the sending of Turkish reënforcements to the Caucasus would have been even more materially delayed than was in fact the case.”[34] For Turkey, then, the war had come at a most inappropriate time. Had hostilities begun ten years later, after the completion of the Bagdad system, military operations in the Near East might have had an entirely different result. As it was, the Bagdad Railway—and the international complications arising from it—proved to be the ruination of the Ottoman Empire.