“There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress,” he told me, “who care for anything that is old. We all like new things!”
That was all the satisfaction I obtained in this matter at that time.
Enver’s insistence that the Dardanelles could resist caused his associates to lose confidence in his judgment. About a year afterward, Bedri Bey, the Prefect of Police, gave me additional details. While Enver was still in the Caucasus, Bedri said, Talaat had called a conference, a kind of council of war, on the Dardanelles. This had been attended by Liman von Sanders, the German General who had reorganised the Turkish Army; Usedom, the German Admiral who was the Inspector-General of the Ottoman coast defences, and Bronsart, the German Chief of Staff of the Turkish Army, and several others. Every man present gave it as his opinion that the British and French fleets could force the strait; the only subject of dispute, said Bedri, was whether it would take the ships eight or twenty hours to reach Constantinople after they had destroyed the defences. Enver’s position was well understood, but this council decided to ignore him and to make the preparations without his knowledge—to eliminate the Minister of War, at least temporarily, from their deliberations.
In early March, Bedri and Djambolat, who was Director of Public Safety, came to see me. At that time the exodus from the capital had begun; Turkish women and children were being moved into the interior; all the banks had been compelled to send their gold into Asia Minor; the archives of the Sublime Porte had already been carried to Eski-Shehr, and practically all the Ambassadors and their suites, as well as most of the Government officials, had made their preparations to leave. Many of Constantinople’s finest works of art had been buried in cellars or covered for protection, the Director of the Museum being one of the six Turks to whom Talaat had referred as liking “old things.”
Bedri came to arrange the details of my departure. As Ambassador I was personally accredited to the Sultan, and it would obviously be my duty, said Bedri, to go wherever the Sultan went; the train was all ready, he added. He wished to know how many people I intended to take, so that sufficient space could be reserved. To this proposal I entered a flat refusal. I informed Bedri that I thought that my responsibilities made it necessary for me to remain in Constantinople. Only a neutral Ambassador, I said, could forestall massacres and the destruction of the city, and certainly I owed it to the civilised world to prevent, if I could, such calamities as these. If my position as Ambassador made it inevitable that I should follow the Sultan, I would resign and become honorary Consul-General.
Both Bedri and Djambolat were much younger and less experienced men than I, and I therefore told them that they needed a man of maturer years to advise them in an international crisis of this kind. I was not only interested in protecting foreigners and American institutions, but I was also interested, on general humanitarian grounds, in safeguarding the Turkish population from the excesses that were generally expected. The several nationalities, many of them containing elements which were given to pillage and massacre, were causing great anxiety. I therefore proposed to Bedri and Djambolat that the three of us form a kind of committee to take control in the approaching crisis. They consented, and we sat down and decided on a course of action. We took a map of Constantinople and marked the districts which, under the existing rules of warfare, we agreed that the Allied fleet would have the right to bombard. Thus, we decided that the War Office, Marine Office, telegraph offices, railroad stations, and all public buildings could quite legitimately be made the targets for their guns. Then we marked out certain zones which we should insist on regarding as immune. The main residential section, and the part where all the Embassies are located, is Pera, the district on the north shore of the Golden Horn. This we marked as not subject to attack. We also delimited certain residential areas of Stamboul and Galata, the Turkish sections. I telegraphed to Washington, asking the State Department to obtain a ratification of these plans and an agreement to respect these zones of safety from the British and French Governments. I received a reply endorsing my action.
All preparations had thus been made. At the station stood trains which were to take the Sultan and the Government and the Ambassadors to Asia Minor. They had steam up, ready to move at a minute’s notice. We were all awaiting the triumphant arrival of the Allied fleet.
CHAPTER XVII
ENVER AS THE MAN WHO DEMONSTRATED “THE VULNERABILITY OF THE BRITISH FLEET”—OLD-FASHIONED DEFENCES OF THE DARDANELLES
When the situation had reached this exciting stage Enver asked me to visit the Dardanelles. He still insisted that the fortifications were impregnable, and he could not understand, he said, the panic which was then raging in Constantinople. He had visited the Dardanelles himself, had inspected every gun and every emplacement, and was entirely confident that his soldiers could hold off the Allied fleet indefinitely. He had taken Talaat down, and by doing so he had considerably eased that statesman’s fears. It was Enver’s conviction that, if I could visit the fortifications, I would be persuaded that the fleets could never get through, and that I would thus be able to give such assurances to the people that the prevailing excitement would subside. I disregarded certain natural doubts as to whether an Ambassador should expose himself to the dangers of such a situation—the ships were bombarding nearly every day—and promptly accepted Enver’s invitation.
On the morning of the 15th we left Constantinople on the Yuruk. Enver himself accompanied us as far as Panderma, an Asiatic town on the Sea of Marmora. The party included several other notables: Ibrahim Bey, the Minister of Justice, Husni Pasha, the General who had commanded the army which had deposed Abdul Hamid in the Young Turk revolution, and Senator Cheriff Djafer Pasha, an Arab and a direct descendant of the Prophet. A particularly congenial companion was Fuad Pasha, an old Field-Marshal, who had led an adventurous career. Despite his age, he had an immense capacity for enjoyment, was a huge feeder and a capacious drinker, and had as many stories to tell of exile, battle, and hair-breadth escapes as Othello. All of these men were much older than Enver, and all of them were descended of far more distinguished lineage, yet they treated this stripling with the utmost deference.