The ending of the British Dardanelles expedition, however, failed to impress either Greece or Bulgaria. It did impress Constantinople and when Ali Fethy Bey, Ottoman Minister at Sofia, not only supplied Bulgaria with the necessary promise of Macedonia but made over to it at once that bend in the Maritza River in which Karagatch, a suburb of Adrianople, lies, Bulgaria came in and the Enver Government found itself on the crest of a great wave of popularity. The Berlin-to-Bagdad highway was now complete and on the afternoon of January 17, 1916, the first express rolled into Constantinople direct from Berlin, while Sirkedji Station rang with cheers.
British defeat at the Dardanelles was a severe blow to the legend of British invincibility, and the promise of friendship to Islam which the Kaiser had made at Damascus in 1898 now offered a possible means of escape from the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Enver Government had shown the way out and Persia which had felt the weight of the 1907 Treaty most heavily, was not long in following. The German Legation in Teheran helped it along with much talk of Kaiser Hajji Wilhelm Mohammed II and that sort of thing, but when the Persian Parliament fled from Teheran in 1915 to declare war against the Allies at Kum, the Russian and British Ministers hastened to the Palace and threatened to complete their partition of the country the moment the Shah left the capital. Thereafter the Shah remained a prisoner in Teheran, while Russians, British, Persian Nationalists and Turks fought across his chaotic country.
As for Afghanistan, the war found the Court at Kabul divided into two parties, one led by the Amir’s stepmother Bibi Halima which backed him in sticking loyally to the British, and the other led by his younger brother Nasrullah Khan which demanded that he seize the chance of powerful alliance in breaking out of the Anglo-Russian vise. Nasrullah’s party grew rapidly, despite the fact that the Amir fought it with every resource at his command. He confronted it personally when in November, 1914, he strode onto Kabul bridge in royal state and, holding the Koran in his hand, declaimed to his enemies: “These feringhis (British) are our friends. They are my friends. I the Light of Faith, I, the Torch of the Nation, have decreed, and now repeat my decree, that no subject of mine shall lift a finger against the feringhis.”
As for Islam in India, its position became one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. Its Emperor in London was at war with its Caliph in Constantinople. As the result of the 1907 Treaty, its temporal and its religious allegiances were thrown into direct opposition. Its leaders attempted to harmonize this contradiction in its loyalties by drawing a distinction between its Caliph and the Ottoman Sultan, by conceiving of the war as existing between its Emperor in London and the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, and by demanding an undertaking from the Government of India that the war involved purely temporal objectives and was not concerned in any degree whatsoever with the Caliphate. The Government of India accordingly gave an undertaking that the question of the Caliphate was one for Moslem opinion alone to decide, and on this explicit understanding Moslem troops were enlisted in India for service against “our brother Turk.”
This use of Indian Moslems against the Ottoman Sultan, one of the most delicate of operations, formed one of the outstanding British successes of the war, but Englishmen at home have never succeeded in discovering that British India exists. Forgetful of the fact that the British Empire was “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” that it contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, British statesmen in England publicly referred to Salonica as “the portal of Christianity” and to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force which later advanced into Palestine, as “Crusaders.” At a moment when the Government of India was making every effort to give its vast country a sense of security, such references in England made Islam in India instantly alert for its Caliphate.
IX
THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915
ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH—WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED—AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS—RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS—GREAT BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY—ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES—THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS.
When the Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave birth.