Enver now informed me that the Allied ships were bombarding in reckless fashion, and ignoring the well-established international rule that such bombardments should be directed only against fortified places. British and French shells, he said, were falling everywhere, destroying unprotected Moslem villages and killing hundreds of innocent non-combatants. Enver asked me to inform the Allied Governments that such activities must immediately cease. He had decided to collect all the British and French citizens who were then living in Constantinople, take them down to the Gallipoli Peninsula, and scatter them in Moslem villages and towns. The Allied fleets would then be throwing their projectiles not only against peaceful and unprotected Moslems, but against their own countrymen. It was Enver’s idea that this threat, communicated by the American Ambassador to the British and French Governments, would soon put an end to “atrocities” of this kind. I was given a few days’ respite to get the information to London and Paris.
At that time about 3,000 British and French citizens were living in Constantinople. The great majority belonged to the class known as Levantines; nearly all had been born in Turkey, and in many cases their families had been domiciled in that country for two or more generations. The retention of their European citizenship is almost their only contact with the nation from which they have sprung. Not uncommonly we meet in the larger cities of Turkey men and women who are English by race and nationality, but who speak no English, French being the usual language of the Levantine. The great majority have never set foot in England, or any other European country; they have only one home, and that is Turkey. The fact that the Levantine usually retains citizenship in the nation of his origin was now apparently making him a fitting object for Turkish vengeance.
Besides these Levantines, a large number of English and French were then living in Constantinople as teachers in the schools, as missionaries, and as important business men and merchants. The Ottoman Government now proposed to assemble all these residents, both those who were immediately and those who were remotely connected with Great Britain and France, and to place them in exposed positions on the Gallipoli Peninsula as targets for the Allied fleet.
Naturally my first question when I received the startling information was whether the warships were really bombarding defenceless towns. If they were murdering non-combatant men, women, and children in this reckless fashion, such an act of reprisal as Enver now proposed would probably have had some justification. It seemed to me incredible, however, that the English and French could commit such barbarities. I had already received many complaints of this kind from Turkish officials which, on investigation, had turned out to be untrue. Only a little while before, Dr. Meyer, the first assistant to Suleyman Nouman, the Chief of the Medical Staff, had notified me that the British fleet had bombarded a Turkish hospital and killed 1,000 invalids. When I looked into the matter, I found that the building had been but slightly damaged, and only one man killed.
I now naturally suspected that this latest tale of Allied barbarity rested on a similarly flimsy foundation. I soon discovered, indeed, that this was the case. The Allied fleet was not bombarding Moslem villages at all. A number of British warships had been stationed in the Gulf of Saros, an indentation of the Ægean Sea, on the western side of the Peninsula, and from this vantage point they were throwing shells into the city of Gallipoli. All the “bombarding” of towns in which they were now engaging was limited to this one city. In doing this the British Navy was not violating the rules of civilised warfare, for Gallipoli had long since been evacuated of its civilian population, and the Turks had established military headquarters in several of the houses, which had properly become the object of the Allied attack. I certainly knew of no rule of warfare which prohibited an attack upon a military headquarters! As to the stories of murdered civilians—men, women, and children—these proved to be gross exaggerations; as almost the entire civilian population had long since left, any casualties resulting from the bombardment must have been confined to the armed forces of the Empire.
I now discussed the situation for some time with Mr. Ernest Weyl, who was generally recognised as the leading French citizen in Constantinople, and with Mr. Hoffman Philip, the Conseiller of the Embassy, and then decided that I would go immediately to the Sublime Porte and protest to Enver.
The Council of Ministers was sitting at the time, but Enver came out. His mood was more demonstrative than usual. As he described the attack, of the British fleet he became extremely angry; it was not the imperturbable Enver with whom I had become so familiar.
“These cowardly English!” he exclaimed. “They tried for a long time to get through the Dardanelles, and we were too much for them! And see what kind of a revenge they are taking. Their ships sneak up into the outer bay, where our guns cannot reach them, and shoot over the hills at our little villages, killing harmless old men, women, and children, and bombarding our hospitals. Do you think we are going to let them do that? And what can we do? Our guns don’t reach over the hills, so that we cannot meet them in battle. If we could, we would drive them off, just as we did at the straits a month ago. We have no fleet to send to England to bombard their unfortified towns as they are bombarding ours, so we have decided to move all the English and French we can find to Gallipoli. Let them kill their own people as well as ours.”
I told him that, granted that the circumstances were as he had stated them, he had grounds for indignation. But I called his attention to the fact that he was wrong; that he was accusing the Allies of crimes which they were not committing.
“This is about the most barbarous thing that you have ever contemplated,” I said. “The British have a perfect right to attack a military headquarters like Gallipoli.”