A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (17 page)

Germany now sent what would become known as its double ultimatum to France and Russia. This was a message warning that German mobilization “must follow in case Russia does not suspend every war measure against Austria-Hungary and ourselves within twelve hours.” France was asked for a declaration of neutrality. The deadline for responses was Saturday afternoon.

The double ultimatum was in part Berlin’s desperate final effort to escape mobilization and in part an effort to precipitate a breakdown in diplomatic relations to help justify the westward invasion that must follow mobilization. As directed to Russia, it was a straightforward request for cooperation. As directed to France, it was a kind of wild theatrical gesture aimed at making clear to the world that if war with Russia came, Germany and France would be at war also. It was intended to explain, in the court of public opinion, a German attack on France. What it actually looked like was overbearing German bluster. The likelihood that Berlin never expected Paris to accept it is supported by the outrageous additional demand that the German ambassador to France was instructed to make in case of acceptance: France’s temporary surrender of its great fortresses at Verdun and Toul, in return for a promise that they would be returned at the end of Germany’s fight with Russia. Bethmann would intimate as much in his memoirs. “If France had actually declared her neutrality,” he wrote, “we should have had to sit by while the French army, under the protection of a specious neutrality, made all its preparations to attack us while we were busy in the East.”

There came a final flurry of Nicky-Willy telegrams. The kaiser told the tsar that he was continuing to try to mediate in Vienna, and that “the peace of Europe may still be maintained by you, if Russia will agree to stop the military measures which must threaten Germany and Austria-Hungary.”

Once again, messages between the two emperors crossed in midair. Nicholas told Wilhelm that it was “technically impossible” to stop Russia’s mobilization but that Russia did not want war and still did not see war as unavoidable. “So long as the negotiations with Austria on Serbia’s account are taking place, my troops shall not take any provocative action. I give you my solemn word for this. I put all my trust in God’s mercy and hope in your successful mediation in Vienna for the welfare of our countries and for the peace of Europe.”

As soon as the kaiser’s message reached the tsar, Nicholas sent back an answer. He said he understood that Russian mobilization might require Germany to mobilize as well. He said he accepted this, but it need not mean war. He asked Wilhelm for “the same guarantee from you as I gave you, that these measures do not mean war and that we shall continue negotiating for the benefit of our countries and universal peace dear to all our hearts. Our long proved friendship must succeed, with God’s help, in avoiding bloodshed. Anxiously, full of confidence await your answer.”

It was obviously heartfelt and must have seemed the richest of opportunities. But nothing would come of it. Because of all that had already happened, nothing could.

Background

THE OTTOMAN TURKS

IT IS ONE OF HISTORY’S LITTLE JOKES, SURELY, THAT TURKEY
and the Ottoman Empire that it ruled had no part to play in the July crisis that brought on the Great War. For the crisis could never have unfolded as it did if not for the profound impact that the empire of the Turks had had on the development of eastern Europe. And no one would be affected by the war itself more profoundly than the Turks and the many peoples who, century after century, had been their unhappy subjects.

Without the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburgs would not have been in Bosnia at all, and there could have been no Kingdom of Serbia. There would have been no power vacuum in the Balkans. Russia and Austria-Hungary could never have been pulled into that vacuum or into such dangerous conflict with each other.

To go back further, without the
rise
of the Ottomans the whole bitter saga of the Balkans would have been unimaginably different. The Turks had ruled the peninsula for five hundred years, reaching at their height westward into Italy, northward into Austria, Hungary, and Russia, and all the way around the Black Sea. For a time they seemed destined to conquer the whole eastern half of Europe, if not the entire continent. When the Great War began, their empire, while maintaining only a toehold in Europe proper, still extended across the Middle East to the Arabian Peninsula.

The empire reached its pinnacle, and its decline began, with the life of a single man, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. (That was what Christian Europe called him—to his own people he was Suleiman the Lawmaker.) He ruled from 1520 to 1566 and led the Ottomans to their zenith both culturally and geographically. He was ten generations removed from the Turkish-Mongol chieftain named Osman who had founded the dynasty three hundred years before and given it his name. In every one of those ten generations, in an unbroken sequence of achievement that no other family has ever approached, the Ottoman Turks were led by yet another dynamic, heroic, conquering figure. Generation after generation, starting where Osman had first emerged from obscurity in what is now eastern Turkey and from there moving outward in all directions, the dynasty took control of more and more of the world around it. The sultans forced their way into Europe for the first time in 1354, and ninety-nine years later they captured Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire. From then on Constantinople was their home. Its mighty basilica of Hagia Sophia, perhaps the greatest architectural achievement of the Roman era, became an Islamic mosque.

The Ottomans continued their expansion for another century after taking Constantinople, conquering among other places all of eastern Europe south of the Danube. Suleiman’s father, Selim I, doubled the size of the empire by winning a single battle that made him the master of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria. The domain that he passed on to Suleiman included among its major cities Alexandria, Algiers, Athens, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Smyrna. The Ottomans had become not only the political and military masters of the Islamic world but also—what put their supremacy beyond challenge—the custodians of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places associated with the Prophet Muhammad.

As its power increased, the dynasty evolved into something that was not a family in any ordinary sense of the term but a chain of fathers and sons who never married. Instead of taking wives, the sultans kept scores and even hundreds of women who were property rather than spouses. These women lived as prisoners in a harem. They were allowed contact with no men except the rulers who owned them and an army of custodians, many of them black Africans, whose sexual organs had been surgically removed.

Suleiman, a contemporary of Henry VIII of England, took this strange heritage to a peak of vitality. Like his forebears, he was a warrior, personally leading his army in thirteen campaigns. He pushed deeper into Europe, capturing Belgrade and Budapest and completing the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna, the keystone of central Europe, and would have captured it too if torrents of rain had not made it impossible for him to bring his heavy guns north. He was a poet, a student of the works of Aristotle, and a builder who made Constantinople grander and more beautiful than it had ever been. The opulence of life in his Topkapi Palace beggars the imagination.

Suleiman had some three hundred concubines, as well as a promising young son and heir named Mustafa, when he was given a red-haired Russian girl named Ghowrem, who came to be known as Roxelana. She came into his harem as part of his share of the booty from a slave-gathering raid into what is now Poland, and she must have been a remarkable creature. (Not surprisingly, in light of the power she acquired in Constantinople, she eventually won a second new name: “the witch.”) Almost from the day of her arrival, Suleiman never slept with another woman. Eventually and amazingly, he did something that no sultan had done in centuries: he married. Their love story would have been one of the great ones if it hadn’t ended up taking the dynasty and the empire in such a sordid direction.

Mustafa gave every indication of developing into yet another mighty branch on the family tree. At an early age he showed himself a bold military leader adored by his troops, a capable provincial governor, and a popular hero. But he stood in the way of the son whom Roxelana had borne to (presumably) Suleiman, and so he was doomed. Working her wiles, Roxelana persuaded Suleiman that Mustafa was plotting against him. (He was doing nothing of the kind.) With his father looking on, Mustafa was overpowered and strangled by five professional executioners whose tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw. And so when Suleiman died some years later, master of an empire of almost incredible size and power, he was succeeded by Roxelana’s son, Selim II. Nothing was ever the same again.

Selim the Sot was short and fat and a drunk. He never saw a battlefield and died after eight years on the throne by falling down and fracturing his skull in his marble bath. His son, Murad III, was also a drunk and an opium addict as well; during a reign of twenty years he sired 103 children and apparently did little else. His heir, Mahomet III, began his reign by ordering all of his many brothers, the youngest of them mere children, put to death, thereby introducing that custom into Ottoman royal culture. Having done so he followed his father in devoting the rest of his life to copulation. And so it went. Every sultan from Roxelana’s son forward was a monster of degeneracy or a repulsive weakling or both. The abruptness and permanence of the change, the sharpness of the contrast between the murdered Mustafa and his half-brother Selim II, has given rise to speculation that perhaps Roxelana’s son was not Suleiman’s son at all.

In the post-Suleiman empire, a new breed of craven sultans came to live in terror of being overthrown by rivals from within the dynasty. Appalling new traditions emerged, to be observed whenever one of them died. All the women of the deceased sultan would be moved to a distant place and kept in even deeper solitude for the rest of their miserable lives. Any who happened to be pregnant would be murdered (generally by being bundled in sacks and drowned), and the younger brothers and half-brothers of the new monarch (often a large number of men, boys, and infants) were murdered as well (generally by strangulation).

The rulers erected a windowless building called the Cage in which their heirs were confined from early childhood until they died or were put to death or, having been taught nothing about anything, were released to take their turns on the throne. The result was as inevitable as it was monstrous: an empire ruled year after year and finally century after century by utterly ignorant, utterly incompetent, sometimes half-imbecilic, half-mad men, some of whom spent decades in the Cage before their release and all of whom, after their release, were free to do absolutely anything they wanted, no matter how vicious, for as long as they remained alive. They commonly indulged their freedom to kill or maim anyone they wished to kill or maim for any reason—for playing the wrong music or for smoking, for example—or for no reason at all.

Throughout the three and a half centuries from the death of Suleiman until the Great War, only one sultan displayed some of the fire and strength of the men who had built the empire. This was Murad IV, who reigned from 1623 to 1640. He became sultan when he was only ten years old—too young to have been incapacitated by the Cage—and he grew into a man of immense courage and physical power. He was the first sultan since Suleiman to be a soldier, leading his army into Persia, where he savagely put down an uprising. He was also even more insanely cruel than most sultans. In just one year of his reign, 1637, some twenty-five thousand of the empire’s subjects were executed, many of them by Murad’s own hand. He claimed the right to kill ten innocent people per day, and occasionally he would sit on the wall of his palace shooting randomly at passersby. At night he would make incognito visits to the taverns of Constantinople, where anyone found smoking would be executed on the spot. “Wherever the sultan went,” says Noel Barber in his book The Sultans, “he was followed by his chief executioner, Kara Ali, whose belt bulged with nails and gimlets, clubs for breaking hands and feet, and cannisters containing different kinds of powder for blinding.”

Almost uniquely among the Ottomans, Murad produced no children, and on his deathbed he ordered the death of his brother and heir, Ibrahim, who had been living in the Cage from the age of two. This order was not obeyed, Ibrahim being the last living member of the dynasty, but from that point there were few further signs of vitality in the Ottoman line. Ibrahim devoted himself to building up a harem of 280 beautiful young women. Then, acting on a dubious report that one of these women (no one could say which one) had become romantically involved with a eunuch, he had all of them drowned. And so it continued.

Not surprisingly, the empire rotted from within under this kind of leadership and became an increasingly inviting target. Young General Napoleon Bonaparte first showed Europe just how impotent the Ottomans had become when, in 1798, he invaded and almost effortlessly conquered Egypt. Also suggestive of what lay ahead was the fact that Napoleon was driven out of Egypt not by the Turks or their Egyptian subjects but by the British navy. From then on, and increasingly, the survival of the sultans and their decaying empire depended less on themselves than on the jealousies and rivalries of the European powers. The Ottomans hung on through the nineteenth century less through any acts of their own than because Britain and France blocked Russia from finishing them off.

Even so, the hundred years leading up to 1914 brought uninterrupted losing wars: with the empire’s own Turkish satraps as they tried for autonomy in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere; with Arab chieftains seeking independence; with Persia; with the Christian peoples of the Balkans; and—four times between 1806 and 1878—with a Russia hungering for Constantinople.