Authors: Alan Moorehead
It is doubtful if anyone was much impressed by this, but by the end of the first week in May it was clear at least that the invading army was not making much headway. An apathetic quiet settled
on the streets, and the city began to accustom itself to the suspense, the misery and the occasional shocks of a long campaign. Presently the old familiar signs of war began to appear: the
conscripts marching through the streets in their shabby field grey uniforms and pyramidal hats, the Army communiqués that announced yesterday’s victory all over again, the ferocious
newspaper articles, the flags and the parades, the spy hunt and the renewed outburst of official xenophobia.
Once again the foreign minorities, the Armenians and the Greeks, went underground with their thoughts and, where they could, their belongings. Bedri, the Chief of Police,
pursued them as persistently as he could, issuing worthless receipts for the goods he seized from their shops and houses, and extracting money by the simple process of keeping people in gaol until
they bought themselves out. One day his men swooped on the Bon Marché and carried off all the boxes of toy soldiers in the shop on the ground that they had been manufactured in France.
After the first rush on the banks and the stores there was the usual shortage of coal and petrol. ‘The bazaar is dead,’ one of the foreign diplomats wrote in his diary.
‘Nothing is bought or sold.’ The Germans, meanwhile, managed to exercise a censorship on news since they controlled the newsprint that was imported into the country and issued it only
to those newspapers which took a line that was strongly favourable to Germany.
For the rest, however, the rhythm of the city was not much changed, and travellers arriving there on the Orient Express were astonished at how normal it all was. The lights went on at night, the
Pera Palace Hotel was open, the restaurants appeared to have plenty of food, and for the rich at least the war continued to rumble somewhere in the distance, unseen and only faintly heard like a
far-off summer thunderstorm which yet might blow itself away. Even the bombardments of the Bosphorus by the Russian Black Sea Fleet caused very little alarm, for they were hit-and-run affairs and
soon ceased altogether. At the international club where the foreign diplomats gathered Talaat was often to be seen serenely playing poker far into the night, and Enver continued to be very
confident. He liked to show his visitors his latest trophy from the Dardanelles: an unexploded shell from the
Queen Elizabeth
mounted on a Byzantine column in his palace garden.
Wangenheim was a masterful figure in Constantinople during these weeks. He would come into the Club in the evening, huge, garrulous and assured, and when the other diplomats gathered round him
he would retail the latest news from Potsdam: another 100,000 Russian prisoners taken, a break in the French line on the
Marne, another British cruiser sunk in the North Sea.
It was known that he had a wireless station attached to his Embassy, and was in direct touch with Berlin, if not with the Kaiser himself.
The other members of the Club were in no position to deny or check any of Wangenheim’s stories; they had no wireless stations of their own and the Turkish newspapers told, them nothing
that they could believe. Without Wangenheim’s daily bulletins they were forced to fall back on the small change of local gossip. The surprising thing about this gossip is not that it should
have been so cynical, so entertaining and so futile in itself, but that it was so very nearly accurate. Thus someone would report that his doorman—or his cook or his butler—had positive
information that the Italian Ambassadress had booked sleepers on the Orient Express; and this surely was a firm sign that Italy was about to declare war at last. Or again it would be some devious
story of how Enver had quarrelled again with Liman von Sanders and was about to replace him at the front. There was much talk of peace: the Germans, it was said, had made a secret approach to
Russia offering her Constantinople if she would abandon the Allies. Bulgaria, with her army of 600,000 men and her traditional hatred of Turkey was, naturally, very much on their minds, and there
was a flurry in the foreign colony when it was learned that the Bulgarian students at the Robert College outside Constantinople had been recalled home by their Government. This, they argued, could
hardly have happened unless Bulgaria, too, was about to come into the war. But on whose side? And when? Or was it just another move in the game of bargaining with her neutrality?
On such matters Wangenheim was always ready to comment, to correct and to inform. He was like the boy who has the crib with all the answers in it, and he spoke with a large air of frankness that
seemed to put an end to all doubts and speculations.
As the spring advanced he developed the habit of sitting at the bottom of his garden at Therapia, on the Bosphorus, within nodding distance of all who passed by. He liked to stop his
acquaintances when they were out walking in the morning and read them tit-bits from his latest telegrams. Soon Morgenthau noticed that
when things were going well for the
Germans the Ambassador was always there in his accustomed seat by the garden wall, but when the news was bad he was nowhere to be found. He told Wangenheim one day that he reminded him of one of
those patent weather gauges equipped with a little figure that emerged in the sunshine and disappeared in the rain. Wangenheim laughed very heartily.
And, in fact, up to the middle of May, there were no reasons for the Germans to be apprehensive about Turkey. Instead of weakening and dividing the Government as in England, the Gallipoli
landing had knitted the Young Turks together and made them stronger than ever. Unlike the Allies, the Turks were not obliged to advance in the peninsula; so long as the line held it was unlikely
that Bulgaria or Rumania or even Greece would come in against them. The very strain of the war itself was useful; it gave them the right to requisition whatever property they liked, to call up more
and more men for active service, to get a tighter control on everybody’s lives. There were now over half a million Turks in the Army, and this force was becoming steadily stronger as the
threat from Russia died away; already in May divisions were being withdrawn from the Caucasus to strengthen the front at Gallipoli. The Germans, too, were increasing their garrison in
Constantinople and in the peninsula. They had various means of smuggling men and munitions through Bulgaria and Rumania; it was even said that on one occasion a bogus circus was sent from Germany
by rail, and the clowns on arrival turned out to be sergeants and their baggage filled with shells. Taube aircraft were flown across from Austria, refuelling at secret landing-places on the way.
Soon there was another munitions factory working at Constantinople under German supervision, and guns from the old Turkish warships were dismantled and sent down to the front. Wangenheim in his
role of local Kaiser in the German garrison took good care not to expose the
Goeben
to the British fleet in the Dardanelles; occasionally she went off hunting the Russian fleet in the
Black Sea, but for the most part she rode at anchor in the Bosphorus.
Enver, the chief sponsor of the Germans, had great credit for all
this. As Minister for War he somehow contrived to make it appear that he personally was responsible for
the successful resistance in the peninsula just as he had been responsible for the defeat of the Fleet on March 18. There was not very much that Wangenheim, Talaat or anybody else could do to
correct this impression. The young man ballooned up before them. However incredible it might be, the truth was that this boy, who had been born of a fifteen-year-old peasant girl on the Black Sea
only thirty-five years before, was now virtually dictator of Turkey. He assumed all the trappings of dictatorship with apparent ease—the sudden tantrums and rages, the personal bodyguard, the
uniform (the sword, the epaulettes and the black sheepskin fez), and the ring of subservient generals. Even the Germans in Turkey were becoming a little afraid of him, especially when he went over
their heads and corresponded directly with the Kaiser.
There was a macabre incident about this time which shows very clearly how far Enver had travelled and how high he still hoped to go. Early in May he sent for Morgenthau and with a great show of
anger told him that the British were bombarding helpless villages and towns in the Gallipoli peninsula. Mosques and hospitals had been burned down, he said, and a number of women and children had
been killed. He proposed now to take reprisals; the 3,000 British and French citizens who were still living in Turkey were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps in the peninsula. Enver
desired the Ambassador to inform the British and French governments through the State Department in Washington that henceforth they would be killing their own people at Gallipoli as well as
Turks.
It was useless for Morgenthau to protest that towns like Gallipoli, Chanak and Maidos were military headquarters and that the Allies had a perfect right to bombard them; the best he could do was
to get the women and children excluded from the order. A few days later, when the arrests began, an hysterical horde of French and British civilians descended on the American Embassy. Most of these
people were Levantines who had been born in Turkey of British or French parentage and who had never seen
either England or France. They gathered in hundreds round the
Ambassador whenever he appeared, gesticulating and crying, clutching at his arms, imploring him to save them. After several days of this Morgenthau telephoned to Enver and demanded another
interview. Enver replied smoothly that he was engaged in a council of Ministers but would be delighted to see the Ambassador on the afternoon of the following day. The hostages were due to be sent
off to the peninsula in the morning, and it was only when Morgenthau threatened to force his way into the council room that Enver agreed to receive him at the Sublime Porte at once.
For one reason or another—perhaps because the Bulgarian Ambassador had just been in to protest against the arrests—Enver was excessively polite when Morgenthau arrived. He agreed
after a while that perhaps he had made a mistake in this matter but it was too late to do anything about it: he never revoked orders. If he did he would lose his influence with the Army. He added,
‘If you can show me some way in which this order can be carried out, and your protégés still saved, I shall be glad to listen.’
‘All right,’ Morgenthau said, ‘I think I can. I should think you could still carry out your orders without sending
all
the French and English residents down. If you
would send only a few you would still win your point. You could still maintain discipline in the Army and these few would be as strong a deterrent to the Allied Fleet as sending all.’
It seemed to Morgenthau that Enver seized on this suggestion almost eagerly. ‘How many will you let me send?’ he asked.
‘I would suggest that you take twenty English and twenty French—forty in all.’
‘Let me have fifty.’
‘All right, we won’t haggle over ten,’ Morgenthau answered, and the bargain having been made Enver conceded that only the youngest men should go. Bedri, the Chief of Police,
was now sent for, and these arrangements did not suit him at all. ‘No, no, this will never do,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the youngest; I must have the notables.’
The point was still unsettled when Bedri and Morgenthau drove back to the American Embassy where the selection was to be made. It was with some difficulty that they made
their way through the frantic crowd to Morgenthau’s office.
‘Can’t I have a few notables?’ Bedri repeated.
There was an Anglican clergyman named Dr. Wigram, who, Morgenthau knew, was determined to be one of the hostages. ‘I will give you just one,’ he said.
Bedri had his eye on a Dr. Frew and several well-known men in the French colony, and he insisted, ‘Can’t I have three?’
‘Dr. Wigram is the only notable you can have.’
In the end Bedri with a fairly good grace settled for the clergyman and forty-nine young men, but he gave himself the pleasure of telling them that the British were in the habit of regularly
bombing the town of Gallipoli to which they were to be sent. On the following morning, amid frenzied scenes, and accompanied by Mr. Hoffman Philip, the American counsellor, and a quantity of
American food, the party set off.
Morgenthau at once began to agitate for their return, and his task was not made easier by the arrival of a message from Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stating that Enver and his
fellow Ministers would be held personally responsible for any injury to the hostages.
‘I presented this message to Enver on May 9th,’ Morgenthau writes. ‘I had seen Enver in many moods, but the unbridled rage which Sir Edward’s admonition now caused was
something entirely new. As I read the telegram his face became livid, and he absolutely lost control of himself. The European polish which Enver had sedulously acquired dropped like a mask; I now
saw him for what he really was—a savage, bloodthirsty Turk. “They will not come back,” he shouted, “I shall let them stay there until they rot. I would like to see those
English touch me.” And he added, “Don’t ever threaten me.” In the end, however, he calmed down and agreed that the hostages could come back to Constantinople.’
For a day or two this incident was the talk of Constantinople,
but it was soon swallowed up in the general tide of half-truths and gossip, in the long, weary ennui of
waiting for something definite to happen. Constantinople had a strange drifting existence at this time; it was in the war but not of it. It heard nothing and saw nothing and yet was ready to fear
everything. The third week of May went by and still very few people had any real inkling of what was happening at the Dardanelles beyond the barren fact that the Allies were neither advancing nor
being driven away. Nothing was published in the newspapers about the disastrous attack on the Anzac bridgehead on May 19, and the Ministry of War was careful to see that the increasing numbers of
wounded returning from the front were taken through the city in the middle of the night when the streets were deserted. One quiet, uneasy day followed another, and it was not until May 25 that in
the most unexpected and alarming way Constantinople was made to realize at last that the war was very near and very threatening. A British submarine surfaced in the Golden Horn.