Germany was not slow in taking up the part of Turkey’s friend as bit by bit it fell from England’s hand. If, in Lord Salisbury’s phrase, England found in the ’nineties that at the time of the Crimean War she had put her money on the wrong horse, Germany continued to back the weak-kneed and discarded outsider. Germany’s voice was never heard in the widespread outcry against “the Red Sultan.” German diplomacy regarded all Balkan races and Armenians with indifferent scorn. It called them “sheepstealers” (Hammeldiebe), and if Abdul Hamid chose to stamp upon troublesome subjects, that was his own affair. With that keen eye to his country’s material interest which, before the war, made him the most enterprising and successful of commercial travellers, Kaiser Wilhelm II., repeating the earlier visit of 1889, visited the Sultan in state at the height of his unpopularity (1898), commemorated the favour by the gift of a deplorable fountain to the city, and proceeded upon a speculative pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which holy city German or Turkish antiquarians patched with the lath and plaster restorations befitting so curious an occasion.
The prolonged negotiations over the concession of the Bagdad railway ensued, the interests of Turkey and Germany alike being repeatedly thwarted by England’s opposition, up to the very eve of the present war, when Sir Edward Grey withdrew our objection, providing only for our interests on the section between Bagdad and the Persian Gulf.[2] During the Young Turk revolution of 1908–1909, English Liberal opinion was enthusiastic in support of the movement and in the expectation of reform. But our diplomacy, always irritated at new situations and suspicious of extended liberties, eyed the change with a chilling scepticism which threw all the advantage into the hands of Baron Marschall von Biberstein, the German Ambassador in Constantinople. His natural politeness and open-hearted industry contrasted favourably with the habitual aloofness or leisured indifference of British Embassies; and so it came about that Enver Pasha, the military leader of Young Turkey, was welcomed indeed by the opponents of Abdul Hamid’s tyranny at a public dinner in London, but went to reside in Berlin as military attaché.
GERMANY’S EASTERN AIMS
Germany’s object in this astute benevolence was not concealed. With her rapidly increasing population, laborious, enterprising, and better trained than other races for the pursuit of commerce and technical industries, she naturally sought outlets to vast spaces of the world, such as Great Britain, France, and Russia had already absorbed. The immense growth of her wealth, combined with formidable naval and military power, encouraged the belief that such expansion was as practicable as necessary. But the best places in the sun were now occupied. She had secured pretty fair portions in Africa, but France, England, and Belgium had better. Brazil was tempting, but the United States proclaimed the Monroe doctrine as a bar to the New World. Portugal might sell Angola under paternal compulsion, but its provinces were rotten with slavery, and its climate poisonous. Looking round the world, Germany found in the Turkish Empire alone a sufficiently salubrious and comparatively vacant sphere for her development; and it is difficult to say what more suitable sphere we could have chosen to allot for her satisfaction, without encroaching upon our own preserves. Even the patch remaining to Turkey in Europe is a fine market-place; with industry and capital most of Asia Minor would again flourish as “the bright cities of Asia” have flourished before; there is no reason but the Ottoman curse why the sites of Nineveh and Babylon should remain uninhabited, or the Garden of Eden lie desolate as a wilderness of alternate dust and quagmire.
But to reach this land of hope and commerce the route by sea was long, and exposed to naval attack throughout its length till the Dardanelles were reached. The overland route must, therefore, be kept open, and three points of difficulty intervened, even if the alliance with Austria-Hungary permanently held good. The overland route passed through Serbia (by the so-called “corridor”), and behind Serbia stood the jealous and watchful power of the Tsars; it passed through Bulgaria, which would have to be persuaded by solid arguments on which side her material interests lay; and it passed through Constantinople, ultimately destined to become the bridgehead of the Bagdad railway—the point from which trains might cross a Bosphorus suspension bridge without unloading. There the German enterprise came clashing up against Russia’s naval ambition and Russia’s rooted sentiment. There the Kaiser, imitating the well-known epigram of Charles v., might have said: “My cousin the Tsar and I desire the same object—namely, Constantinople.” There lay the explanation of Professor Mitrofanoff’s terrible sentence in the Preussische Jahrbücher of June 1914: “Russians now see plainly that the road to Constantinople lies through Berlin.” The Serajevo murders on the 28th of the same month were but the occasion of the Great War. The corridor through Serbia, and the bridgehead of the Bosphorus, ranked among the ultimate causes.
The appearance (Dec. 1913) of a German General, Liman von Sanders, in Constantinople shortly after the second Balkan War, if it did not make the Great War inevitable, drove the Turkish alliance in case of war inevitably to the German side. He succeeded to more than the position of General Colman von der Goltz, appointed to reorganise the Turkish army in 1882. Accompanied by a German staff, the Kaiser’s delegate began at once to act as a kind of Inspector-General of the Turkish forces, and when war broke out they fell naturally under his control or command. The Turkish Government appeared to hesitate nearly three months before definitely adopting a side. The uneasy Sultan, decrepit with forty years of palatial imprisonment under a brother who, upon those terms only, had borne his existence near the throne, still retained the Turk’s traditional respect for England and France. So did his Grand Vizier, Said Halim. So did a large number of his subjects, among whom tradition dies slowly. With tact and a reasonable expenditure of financial persuasion, the ancient sympathy might have been revived when all had given it over; and such a revival would have saved us millions of money and thousands of young and noble lives, beyond all calculation of value.
ENGLAND’S ATTITUDE TO TURKEY
But, most disastrously for our cause, the tact and financial persuasion were all on the other side. The Allies, it is true, gave the Porte “definite assurances that, if Turkey remained neutral, her independence and integrity would be respected during the war and in the terms of peace.”[3] But similar and stronger assurances had been given both at the Treaty of Berlin and at the outbreak of the first Balkan War in 1912. Unfortunately for our peace, Turkey had discovered that at the Powers’ perjuries Time laughs, nor had Time long to wait for laughter. Following upon successive jiltings, protestations of future affection are cautiously regarded unless backed by solid evidences of good faith; but the Allies, having previously refused loans which Berlin hastened to advance, had further revealed the frivolity of their intentions the very day before war with Germany was declared, by seizing the two Dreadnought battleships, Sultan Osman and Reshadie, then building for the Turkish service in British dockyards. Upon these two battleships the Turks had set high, perhaps exaggerated, hopes, and Turkish peasants had contributed to their purchase; for they regarded them as insurance against further Greek aggression among the islands of the Asiatic coast. Coming on the top of the Egyptian occupation, the philanthropic interference with sovereign atrocity, the Russian alliance, and the refusal of loans, their seizure overthrew the shaken credit of England’s honesty, and one might almost say that for a couple of Dreadnoughts we lost Constantinople and the Straits.[4]
GERMANY TAKES HER ADVANTAGE
With lightning rapidity, Germany seized the advantage of our blunder. At the declaration of war, the Goeben, one of her finest battle-cruisers, a ship of 22,625 tons, capable of 28 knots, and armed with ten 11-inch guns, twelve 5·9-inch, and twelve lesser guns, was stationed off Algeria, accompanied by the fast light cruiser Breslau (4478 tons, twelve 4·1 inch guns), which had formed part of the international force at Durazzo during the farcical rule of Prince von Wied in Albania. After bombarding two Algerian towns, they coaled at Messina, and, escaping thence with melodramatic success, eluded the Allied Mediterranean command, and reached Constantinople through the Dardanelles, though suffering slight damage from the light cruiser Gloucester (August 8 or 9). When Sir Louis Mallet and the other Allied Ambassadors demanded their dismantlement, the Kaiser, with constrained but calculated charity, nominally sold or presented them to Turkey as a gift, crews, guns, and all. Here, then, were two fine ships, not merely building, but solidly afloat and ready to hand. The gift was worth an overwhelming victory to the foreseeing donor.[5]