British Secret Service During the Great War

by Nicholas Everitt

In Libya, however, Turkish machinations were not discontinued, although they were carried on with greater secrecy. The Turks still despatched officers, revolutionary proclamations, and Ottoman decorations to the insurgents, and the Germans sent rifles in double-bottomed beer-barrels via Venice. Through an accident in transit on the railway one of these barrels was broken and the subterfuge and treachery became revealed. The rifles were new, and most of them bore the mark "St. Etienne," being meant not only to arm the revolt against Italy but also to create the belief that France was treacherously aiding and abetting the Tripolitan insurgents. And to crown all, during the efforts of fraternisation, in German fashion, Enver Bey's brother clandestinely joined the Senoussi, bringing 200,000 Turkish pounds and the Caliph's order "to purge the land of those Italian traitors."

The never-to-be-forgotten "Scrap of Paper," the violation of neutral Belgium, the shooting and burning of civilians there, the slaying of the wounded, the torturing of the weak and helpless, at first chilled the warm blood of humane sentiment, then sent it boiling to the impressionable brain of the Latin race. Every new horror, every fresh crime in the scientific barbarians' destructive progress intensified the wrath and charged the emotional susceptibility of the Italian nation with explosive elements. The shrieks of the countless victims of demoniac fury awakened an echo in the hearts of plain men and women, who instinctively felt that what was happening to-day to the Belgians and the French might befall themselves to-morrow. The heinous treason against the human race which materialised in the destruction of the Lusitania completed the gradual awakening of the Italian nation to a sense of those impalpable and imponderable elements of the European problem which find expression in no Green Book or Ambassadorial dispatch. It kindled a blaze of wrath and pity and heroic enthusiasm which consumed the cobwebs of official tradition and made short work of diplomatic fiction.

Rome at the moment was absorbed by rumours and discussions about Germany's supreme efforts to coax Italy into an attitude of quiescence. But these machinations were suddenly forgotten in the fiery wrath and withering contempt which the foul misdeeds and culmination of crimes of the scientific assassins evoked, and in pity for the victims and their relatives.

The effect upon public sentiment and opinion in Italy, where emotions are tensely strong, and sympathy with suffering is more flexible and diffusive than it is even among the other Latin races, was instantaneous. One statesman who is, or recently was, a partisan of neutrality, remarked to Dr. Dillon that "German Kultur, as revealed during the present war, is dissociated from every sense of duty, obligation, chivalry, honour, and is become a potent poison, which the remainder of humanity must endeavour by all efficacious methods to banish from the International system. This," he went on, "is no longer war; it is organised slaughter, perpetrated by a race suffering from dog-madness. I tremble at the thought that our own civilised and chivalrous people may at any moment be confronted with this lava flood of savagery and destructiveness. Now, if ever, the opportune moment has come for all civilised nations to join in protest, stiffened with a unanimous threat, against the continuance of such crimes against the human race. Europe ought surely to have the line drawn at the poisoning of wells, the persecution of prisoners, and the massacre of women and children."

The real cause of the transformation of Italian opinion was no mere mechanical action; it was the inner promptings of the nation's soul.

The tide of patriotic passion was imperceptibly rising, and the cry of completion of Italian unity was voiced in unison which culminated on the day of the festivities arranged in commemoration of the immortal Garibaldi. Signor D'Annunzio, the Poet Laureate of Italian Unity, was the popular hero who set the torch to the mine of the peoples which, when it exploded, instantly erupted parliamentary power, Ministers' dictation, and the influences of the throne itself. It shattered the foul system of political intrigue built up by the false Giolitti and developed the overwhelming sentiment of an articulate nation burst into bellicose action against the scientific barbarians; by which spontaneous ebullition Italy took her place among the civilised and civilising nations of Europe.

Most people who have followed events closely are convinced that Turkey could, with judicious diplomacy, have been kept neutral throughout the war. It was whispered in Secret Service circles that a very few millions of money, lent or judiciously expended, would easily have acquired her active support on the side of the Entente.

One need not probe further back in history than to the autumn of 1914 to ascertain the blundering fiasco that was made in that sphere of our alleged activities.

Sir Edwin Pears, who has spent a lifetime in the Turkish capital and who can hardly be designated a censorious critic, because for many years he was the correspondent of a Liberal newspaper in London, published, in October, 1915, a book entitled "Forty Years in Constantinople." In that book he describes how the Turks drifted into hostility with the Entente because the British Embassy was completely out of touch with them. Sir Louis Mallet, H.B.M. Ambassador, appointed in June, 1913, had never had any experience of the country; he did not know a word of Turkish, whilst he had under him three secretaries also ignorant of the language and of the people. Sir Edwin Pears thus describes them: