Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences, we see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for humane progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline. The ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ programme which its authors put forward (a civilian minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted, and the populace of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express the motive of the movement or eventually guide its course. The essence of that movement was militant nationalism. The empire was to be regenerated, not by humanizing it but by Ottomanizing it. The Osmanli, the man of the sword, was the type to which all others, who wished to be of the nation, were to conform. Such as did not so wish must be eliminated by the rest.
The revolutionary Committee in Salonika, called ‘of Union and Progress’, held up its cards at first, but by 1910 events had forced its hand on the table. The definite annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the declaration of independence and assumption of the title Tsar by the ruler of Bulgaria, since they were the price to be paid by the revolutionaries for a success largely made in Germany, were opposed officially only pro forma; but when uninformed opinion in the empire was exasperated thereby against Christendom, the Committee, to appease reactionaries, had to give premature proof of pan-Osmanli and pro-Moslem intentions by taking drastic action against rayas. The Greeks of the empire, never without suspicions, had failed to testify the same enthusiasm for Ottoman fraternity which others, e.g. the Armenians, had shown; now they resumed their separatist attitude, and made it clear that they still aspired, not to Ottoman, but to Hellenic nationality. Nor were even the Moslems of the empire unanimous for fraternity among themselves. The Arab-speaking societies complained of under-representation in the councils and offices of the state, and made no secret of their intention not to be assimilated by the Turk-speaking Osmanlis. To all suggestions, however, of local home-rule and conciliation of particularist societies in the empire, the Committee was deaf. Without union, it believed in no progress, and by union it understood the assimilation of all societies in the empire to the Osmanli.
Logic was on the side of the Committee in its choice of both end and means. In pan-Ottomanism, if it could be effected, lay certainly the single chance of restoring Osmanli independence and power to anything like the position they had once held. In rule by a militarist oligarchy for some generations to come, lay the one hope of realizing the pan-Ottoman idea and educating the resultant nation to self-government. That end, however, it was impossible to realize under the circumstances in which past history had involved the Ottoman Empire. There was too much bad blood between different elements of its society which Osmanli rulers had been labouring for centuries rather to keep apart than to unite; and certain important elements, both Moslem and Christian, had already developed too mature ideas of separate nationality. With all its defects, however, the new order did undoubtedly rest on a wider basis than the old, and its organization was better conceived and executed. It retained some of the sympathy of Europe which its beginnings had excited, and the western powers, regarding its representative institutions as earnests of good government, however ill they might work at the first, were disposed to give it every chance.
Unfortunately the Young Turks were in a hurry to bring on their millennium, and careless of certain neighbouring powers, not formidable individually but to be reckoned with if united, to whom the prospect of regenerated Osmanlis assimilating their nationals could not be welcome. Had the Young Turks been content to put their policy of Ottomanization in the background for awhile, had they made no more than a show of accepting local distinctions of creed and politics, keeping in the meantime a tight rein on the Old Turks, they might long have avoided the union of those neighbours, and been in a better position to resist, should that union eventually be arrayed against themselves.
But a considerable and energetic element among them belonged to the nervous Levantine type of Osmanli, which is as little minded to compromise as any Old Turk, though from a different motive. It elected to deal drastically and at once with Macedonia, the peculiar object not only of European solicitude but also of the interest of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. If ever a province required delicate handling it was this. It did not get it. The interested neighbours, each beset by fugitives of its oppressed nationals, protested only to be ignored or browbeaten. They drew towards one another; old feuds and jealousies were put on one side; and at last, in the summer of 1912, a Holy League of Balkan States, inspired by Venezelos, the new Kretan Prime Minister of Greece, and by Ferdinand of Bulgaria, was formed with a view to common action against the oppressor of Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia. Montenegro, always spoiling for a fight, was deputed to fire the train, and at the approach of autumn the first Balkan war blazed up.
8
Balkan War
The course of the struggle is described elsewhere in this volume. Its event illustrates the danger of an alliance succeeding beyond the expectations in which it was formed. The constituent powers had looked for a stiff struggle with the Ottoman armies, but for final success sufficient to enable them, at the best, to divide Macedonia among themselves, at the worst, to secure its autonomy under international guarantee. Neither they nor any one else expected such an Ottoman collapse as was in store. Their moment of attack was better chosen than they knew. The Osmanli War Office was caught fairly in the middle of the stream. Fighting during the revolution, subsequently against Albanians and other recalcitrant provincials, and latterly against the Italians, who had snatched at Tripoli the year before, had reduced the Nizam, the first line of troops, far below strength. The Redif, the second line, had received hardly more training, thanks to the disorganization of Abdul Hamid’s last years and of the first years of the new order, than the Mustafuz, the third and last line. Armament, auxiliary services, and the like had been disorganized preparatory to a scheme for thorough reorganization, which had been carried, as yet, but a very little way. A foreign (German) element, introduced into the command, had had time to impair the old spirit of Ottoman soldiers, but not to create a new one. The armies sent against the Bulgarians in Thrace were so many mobs of various arms; those which met the Serbs, a little better; those which opposed the Greeks, a little worse.
It followed that the Bulgarians, who had proposed to do no more in Thrace than block Adrianople and immobilize the Constantinople forces, were carried by their own momentum right down to Chataldja, and there and at Adrianople had to prosecute siege operations when they ought to have been marching to Kavala and Salonika. The Serbs, after hard fighting, broke through not only into Macedonia but into Albania, and reached the Adriatic, but warned off this by the powers, consoled themselves with the occupation of much more Macedonian territory than the concerted plans of the allies had foreseen. The Greeks, instead of hard contests for the Haliacmon Valley and Epirus—their proper Irredenta—pushed such weak forces before them that they got through to Salonika just in time to forestall a Bulgarian column. Ottoman collapse was complete everywhere, except on the Chataldja front. It remained to divide the spoil. Serbia might not have Adriatic Albania, and therefore wanted as much Macedonia as she had actually overrun. Greece wanted the rest of Macedonia and had virtually got it. Remained Bulgaria who, with more of Thrace than she wanted, found herself almost entirely crowded out of Macedonia, the common objective of all.
Faced with division ex post facto, the allies found their a priori agreement would not resolve the situation. Bulgaria, the predominant partner and the most aggrieved, would neither recognize the others’ rights of possession nor honestly submit her claims to the only possible arbiter, the Tsar of Russia. Finding herself one against two, she tried a coup de main on both fronts, failed, and brought on a second Balkan war, in which a new determining factor, Rumania, intervened at a critical moment to decide the issue against her. The Ottoman armies recovered nearly all they had lost in eastern and central Thrace, including Adrianople, almost without firing a shot, and were not ill pleased to be quit of a desperate situation at the price of Macedonia, Albania, and western Thrace.
Defeated and impoverished, the Ottoman power came out of the war clinging to a mere remnant of its European empire—one single mutilated province which did not pay its way. With the lost territories had gone about one-eighth of the whole population and one-tenth of the total imperial revenue. But when these heavy losses had been cut, there was nothing more of a serious nature to put to debit, but a little even to credit. Ottoman prestige had suffered but slightly in the eyes of the people. The obstinate and successful defence of the Chataldja lines and the subsequent recovery of eastern Thrace with Adrianople, the first European seat of the Osmanlis, had almost effaced the sense of Osmanli disgrace, and stood to the general credit of the Committee and the individual credit of its military leader, Enver Bey. The loss of some thousands of soldiers and much material was compensated by an invaluable lesson in the faultiness of the military system, and especially the Redif organization. The way was now clearer than before for re-making the army on the best European model, the German. The campaign had not been long, nor, as wars go, costly to wage. In the peace Turkey gained a new lease of life from the powers, and, profligate that she was, the promise of more millions of foreign money.