FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA
Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.
ALI FETHY BEY
Nationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the Second Grand National Assembly.
But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an Anglo-Russian entente, its end was only a matter of time. Already the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two communions in Constantinople.
The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with shouts of “Sheriat!” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies—two Turks, a Christian and a Jew—presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government. And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its headquarters at Salonica.
Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more tightly to their community institutions. The application of Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as unpalatable to the Rûm and Ermeni communities as to the dominant Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place their own Christian theocracies.
Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and the revolution degenerating for the time being into a mere coup d’etat. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War. Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as military attache where he joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to Bulgaria.
The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire, its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia, preparing at Athens for still another war.