Two war years in Constantinople

by Harry Stürmer

There was a marked and ill-concealed contrast in the coldness shown to Imperial German officers and the lavish affection showered on the Austrians and Hungarians who used for a time often to pass through Constantinople on their way to the Dardanelles or Anatolia with their heavy artillery. They were a great deal more sociable than their German comrades, and one could not fail to note the significance of such freely voiced comments as "N'est-ce pas, ils sont charmants les Autrichiens?" ("The Austrians are delightful, aren't they?") The sight of us Germans, especially the very considerable German garrison stationed for a time in the Capital, awakened in the Turks, however much they might recognise the military necessity for their presence, remarkable ideas about the future "German Egyptising of Turkey," and everyone blamed Enver Pasha as the man responsible for Germany's penetrating thus far.

A Turk in a high official position—whose name I shall naturally not divulge—even went so far as to say to me in an intimate personal discussion we were having one day between friend and friend: "We Turks are and will always remain, in spite of the war, pro-English and pro-French so far as social and intellectual life is concerned; and it would need twenty years of hard propaganda work on Germany's part, quite different from her present methods, to change this point of view, if it ever could be changed." He went on to recall the time of the pro-English era, and the enthusiastic demonstrations that had taken place at the Sirkedji station when the horses were taken out of the English Ambassador's carriage. "I was there myself," he said, "and believe me, apart from the war, heaps of us are at bottom still of the same mind." And, growing heated, he added: "What is your Embassy, tell me? Is it really an Embassy? No representation, no intimate intercourse with us, or at best only with your political agents, no personal charm, nothing but brusque demands and a most humiliating economic neglect of the Turkish population. The English and the French and even the Russians would treat us quite differently."

This man is no exception in his ideas. He is a thorough Young Turk, who holds with the "Committee" through thick and thin and has to thank them for a very pleasant billet, but he is, besides, a youngish man with a modern European education. He is thoroughly imbued, as are all of his kind, with modern French ideas, and even the war cannot alter that. It only needs the final collapse of the Central Powers, and then the break-down of the whole political system under the direction of these jingoistic emancipationists who think they can get on without Europe, and the Turks will all, every one of them, be as thoroughly pro-English and pro-French as they ever were and will hate Germany and everything German with fanatical hatred.

Towards Hungary, their blood relation, they will probably retain some friendliness in memory of their alliance in the Great War and the cause of Turanism; they will be quite indifferent to Bulgaria; they will lose their fear of Russia and come to an agreement with her; but after the war there will be no bridging the gulf between Turkey and Germany, and if Germany, on the conclusion of peace, is allotted any part of smaller Turkey by the rest of the European Powers, she will have to reckon for many a long year with the very chilly relations that will exist between Germans and Turks. Even those who went heart and soul into the war as a war of defence against Turkey's powerful northern neighbour foresee that when peace is declared Turkey will, so far as her enormous indebtedness to Germany permits, rather throw herself on the mercy of England and France and America and beg from them the capital necessary for reconstruction and for freeing them from the hated German influence—an aversion which is already evident in hundreds of different ways. Even Germany is beginning to recognise the existence of this tendency, which, hand in hand with the jingoistic attempt to turkify commercial life, bodes ill for German activity in Turkey after the war.

These are the opinions of the educated classes. The people, however, the poor, ignorant Turkish people, were ready long ago to accept any solution that would liberate them from their terrible sufferings. The Turkish people have not the mental calibre of our German people which will perhaps make them fight on, just for the sake of leaving no stone unturned, even after it is quite evident that they are tending towards final collapse. The stake for which they are fighting is not so valuable to this agricultural people, who with an inferior and extortionate set of rulers have never been able really to enjoy life, as it is to the population of a modern industrial country like Germany, where every political gain or loss has a direct result on their own pockets; defeat will certainly have much less effect on the Oriental. One can therefore speak with confidence of a general longing for the end of the war at any price. The Turks have had quite enough of suffering, and there are limits to what even these willing and mutely resigned victims can bear.

Nevertheless it is quite certain that the courageous Turkish soldier, in obedience to iron discipline and in unconditional submission to his Padishah, will continue to defend his lost cause to the very last drop of his blood, with an unquestioning resignation that absolutely precludes the idea of any defection within the army. Only a purely political military revolution, originating with the better-informed officers, who now really no longer believe in ultimate victory, is within the bounds of possibility.

But the most confiding endurance on the part of the Turkish soldier, even when the military cause has long been lost, will not hinder this same soldier, when he is once more back in his own home as a peasant, from realising that European influence and European civilisation are a very competent protection against the miserably retrogressive Turkish rule, and that he has drawn more material profit from that single example of European activity, the Baghdad Railway, than from all Turkish official reforms put together, and so would willingly see Europe exercising a powerful control in his country. He would accept the military collapse of his country which he had so long and so bravely defended, and the dramatic political changes, with a quietly submissive "Inshallah." And although, deprived as he is of every kind of information and without even the beginnings of knowledge, he perhaps still believes in ultimate victory for the Padishah, he will probably heave a sigh of relief when the unexpected collapse comes, and he will not take long to understand what it means for him: freedom and happiness and an undreamt-of material well-being under strong European influence.

The late successor to the throne, Prince Yussuf Izzedin Effendi, was the highest of those in high authority who openly represented the pessimistic anti-war tendency. It was for this that he was murdered or perhaps made to commit suicide by Enver Pasha. The whole truth about this tragic occurrence can only be sifted to the bottom when the dictators of the "Committee" are no longer in their place and light finally breaks on Turkey. Whether it was murder or suicide, the death of the successor to the throne is one of the most dramatic scandals of Turkish history, and Enver Pasha has his blood, as well as the blood of so many others, on his head. As far as is possible during the war, Europe has already collected all the information available on the subject. I myself was in Constantinople when the tragic occurrence took place, and I can speak so far from personal experience.

In connection with this sensational event, the world has already heard how Yussuf Izzedin was kept for years under the despotic Abdul-Hamid shut off from the world as a semi-prisoner in his beautiful Konak of Sindjirlikuyu, just outside the gates of Constantinople, where he became a sufferer from acute neurasthenia. In recent years, however, his health had improved and, although latently hostile to the men of the "Committee" and their politics, he had come more into the foreground, especially after the recapture of Adrianople, which he visited with full pomp and ceremony as Crown Prince of the Turkish Empire. While the Gallipoli campaign was going on, he even made a journey to the Front to greet his soldiers. Early one morning he was found lying dead in a pool of his own blood with a severed artery. He had received his death wound in exactly the same place and exactly the same way as his father, Sultan Abdul-Aziz, who fell a victim to Abdul-Hamid's hatred. The political significance of Yussuf Izzedin's death is perfectly clear. What we want to do now is to demonstrate Enver Pasha's moral culpability in the matter and to show how he was more or less directly the murderer of this quiet, cultured, highly respected, and thoroughly patriotic man, who was some day to ascend the throne of Turkey.

So much at least seems to be clear, that Prince Izzedin, who was naturally interested in retaining his accession to the throne undisturbed and who in spite of his neurasthenia was man enough to stand up for his own rights, foresaw ruin for his kingdom by Turkey's entry into the war on the side of Germany. He was more far-seeing than the careless adventurers and narrow-minded fanatics of the "Committee" and recognised that the letting-go of the treasured Pan-Islamic traditions of old Sultan Hamid was a grave mistake which would lead to the alienation of the Arabs, and which endangered both the Ottoman Caliphate and Ottoman rule in the southern parts of the Empire. He could not console himself for the evacuation of the territory round Adrianople, right up to the gates of the sacred city, which meant much to him as the symbol of national enlightenment. He had a real personal dislike for upstarts of the stamp of Enver and Talaat. Apart from these differences of opinion and personal sympathies and antipathies, deep-rooted though these undoubtedly were, Yussuf Izzedin was and always would have been a thorough "Osmanli" with fiery nationalistic feelings, who wished for nothing but the good of his Empire and his country. And yet he was got rid of.