Germany’s representatives pressed this enormous advantage by inducing the Turkish Government to appoint General Liman Commander-in-Chief, and to abrogate the Capitulations. They advanced fresh loans, and fomented the Pan-Islamic movement in Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia, and perhaps in Northern India. They even disseminated the peculiar rumour that the Kaiser, in addition to his material activities, had adopted the Moslem faith. The dangerous tendency was so obvious that, after three weeks’ war, Mr. Winston Churchill concluded that Turkey might join the Central Powers and declare war at any moment. On September 1 he wrote privately to General Douglas, Chief of the Imperial General Staff:
“I arranged with Lord Kitchener yesterday that two officers from the Admiralty should meet two officers from the D.M.O.’s (Director of Military Operations) Department of the War Office to-day to examine and work out a plan for the seizure, by means of a Greek army of adequate strength, of the Gallipoli Peninsula, with a view to admitting a British Fleet to the Sea of Marmora.”
Two days later, General Callwell, the D.M.O., wrote a memorandum upon the subject, in which he said:
“It ought to be clearly understood that an attack upon the Gallipoli Peninsula from the sea side (outside the Straits) is likely to prove an extremely difficult operation of war.”
He added that it would not be justifiable to undertake this operation with an army of less than 60,000 men.[6]
Here, then, we have the first mention of the Dardanelles Expedition. It will be noticed that the idea was Mr. Churchill’s, that he depended upon a Greek army to carry it out, and that General Callwell, the official adviser upon such subjects, considered it extremely difficult, and not to be attempted with a landing force of less than 60,000 men.
In mentioning a Greek army, Mr. Churchill justly relied upon M. Venizelos, at that time by far the ablest personality in the Near East, entirely friendly to ourselves, and Premier of Greece, which he had saved from chaos and greatly extended in territory by his policy of the preceding five or six years. But Mr. Churchill forgot to take account of two important factors. After the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, King Constantine’s imaginative but unwarlike people had acclaimed him both as the Napoleon of the Near East and as the “Bulgar-slayer,” a title borrowed from Byzantine history. Priding himself upon these insignia of a military fame little justified by his military achievements from 1897 onward, the King of Greece posed as the plain, straightforward soldier, and, perhaps to his credit, from the first refused approval of a Dardanelles campaign, though he professed himself willing to lead his whole army along the coast through Thrace to the City. The profession was made the more easily through his consciousness that the offer would not be accepted.[7] For the other factor forgotten by Mr. Churchill was the certain refusal of the Tsar to allow a single Greek soldier to advance a yard towards the long-cherished prize of Constantinople and the Straits.
TURKEY DECLARES WAR
Turkish hesitation continued up to the end of October, when the war party under Enver Pasha, Minister of War, gained a dubious predominance by sending out the Turkish fleet, which rapidly returned, asserting that the ships had been fired upon by Russians (Oct. 28)—an assertion believed by few. On the 29th, Turkish torpedo boats (at first reported as the Goeben and Breslau) bombarded Odessa and Theodosia, and a swarm of Bedouins invaded the Sinai Peninsula. Turkey declared war on the 31st. Sir Louis Mallet left Constantinople on November 1, and on the 5th England formally declared war upon Turkey.