CHAPTER XV
DJEMAL, A TROUBLESOME MARK ANTONY—AN EARLY GERMAN ATTEMPT TO GET A GERMAN PEACE
In early November, 1914, the railroad station at Haidar Pasha was the scene of a great demonstration. Djemal, the Minister of Marine, one of the three men who were then most powerful in the Turkish Empire, was leaving to take command of the Fourth Turkish Army, which had its headquarters in Syria. All the members of the Cabinet and other influential people in Constantinople assembled to give this departing satrap an enthusiastic farewell. They hailed him as the “Saviour of Egypt,” and Djemal himself, just before his train started, made this public declaration:
“I shall not return to Constantinople until I have conquered Egypt!”
The whole performance seemed to me to be somewhat bombastic. Inevitably I called to mind the third member of another bloody triumvirate who, nearly two thousand years before, had left his native land to become the supreme dictator of the East. And Djemal had many characteristics in common with Mark Antony. Like his Roman predecessor, his private life was profligate; like Antony, he was an insatiate gambler, spending much of his leisure over the card-table at the Cercle d’Orient. Another trait which he had in common with the great Roman orator was his enormous vanity. The Turkish world seemed to be disintegrating in Djemal’s time, just as the Roman Republic was dissolving in the days of Antony. Djemal believed that he might himself become the heir of one or more of its provinces and possibly establish a dynasty. He expected that the military expedition on which he was now starting would not only make him the conqueror of Turkey’s fairest province, but make him one of the powerful figures of the world. Afterward, in Syria, he ruled as independently as a medieval robber baron, whom in other details he resembled; he became a kind of sub-sultan, holding his own court, having his own selamlik, issuing his orders, dispensing freely his own kind of justice, and often disregarding the authorities at Constantinople.
The applause with which Djemal’s associates were speeding
