A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (41 page)

For years—for generations, actually—none of the great powers had wanted a formal connection with Constantinople. Turkey was “the sick man of Europe,” slowly disintegrating, relentlessly dying. Its demise had been averted only by jealous disagreements among the powers over who should reap the benefits when it finally collapsed. Russia was prevented from taking possession of Constantinople only by Britain’s and France’s insistence that such a conquest would not be tolerated—that they would fight rather than let it happen. But becoming Turkey’s actual
ally
was a different matter. To do that would be to incur obligations to an empire that had little to offer in return. And no ally of Turkey’s would be free, precisely because it was an ally, to snatch up fragments of the empire as opportunities arose. So Turkey remained alone as Greece and Serbia and Bulgaria and Romania all broke away, as Britain grabbed Egypt and Cyprus, France took Algeria, Greece took Crete, and Austria-Hungary absorbed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Turkey and its rulers lived in a state of apparently irreversible fear and humiliation.

The two powers with which Turkey had the closest relationships were Britain, its chief protector against Russian expansion, and Germany, which had increasingly substantial economic interests in the Middle East, including a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. Prussia had been given responsibility for training the Turkish army as early as 1822. In 1913, when German General Otto Liman von Sanders arrived in Constantinople as head of his country’s military mission, he found himself also named inspector of the Turkish army—chief of staff, in effect. As a balancing measure, the Young Turks invited Britain to take charge of upgrading their navy. They placed an order for two new dreadnoughts to be built in England at the cost of £11 million—a colossal sum for an empire that had been financially ruined by the Balkan wars. This purchase was so popular with the people of Turkey that much of the necessary money was raised through public fund-raising drives.

The outbreak of the war meant the end of Turkey’s long isolation—if Turkey chose to end it. What was not at all clear was which side it would embrace, or whether it should embrace either. It came down, in the end, to a matter of ships, and of British blundering, and of German bullying. When the summer crisis of 1914 rose to its climax, a crew of Turkish seamen was in Britain, ready to take possession of the first of the new dreadnoughts. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill announced that his country was confiscating both ships. He did so on July 28, the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and his act was understandable as a way of assuring that two of the world’s newest and most potent warships would not fall into enemy hands. The matter could have been handled more delicately, however. It appears not to have occurred to the British government to negotiate with Turkey—to offer to release the ships in return for an alliance that at least some of the Young Turks would have welcomed. Churchill’s announcement provoked outrage in Constantinople. At the beginning of August, with the start of the war only hours away, the Turkish government proposed a formal alliance with Germany.

Berlin, as it happened, already had a draft of such an alliance ready for use and eagerly wired it to Constantinople. It would require Turkey to enter any war in which Germany became involved. The Young Turks, unprepared for such a drastic commitment, made excuses for not signing. Meanwhile they were secretly approaching Russia about a possible alliance in that direction. The Russians, confident at this early stage of the Entente’s ability to overwhelm the Central Powers, brushed this overture aside. To them it seemed little more than a pathetic request that they refrain from seizing Constantinople.

While the Turks dawdled, two swift and powerful German warships, the
Göben
and the
Breslau,
were playing a game of hide-and-seek across the Mediterranean with the British and French fleets. On August 10, pursued by their enemies after shelling the coast of Algeria, the two vessels arrived at the entrance to the Dardanelles and requested permission to enter. Enver Pasha, Turkey’s thirty-four-year-old minister of war and a dominant figure among the Young Turks, found himself under intense pressure from all sides. His German advisers insisted that he admit the ships. British and French diplomats demanded a refusal. He tried to delay, but when the Germans insisted on an immediate decision, he yielded. The
Göben
and the
Breslau
were allowed to steam north to Constantinople. Later, when their pursuers arrived at the straits, they were turned away. The Dardanelles were thus sealed, with three hundred and fifty thousand tons of Russian exports suddenly unable to reach the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

Even that did not settle the matter. Even when the Germans presented the
Göben
and
Breslau
as a gift to the Turkish government (it was an empty gesture: the ships were given Turkish names but retained their German crews and continued to take their orders from Berlin), the Turks declined to commit. Everything remained unresolved until the end of September, when, for the precise purpose of precipitating a crisis, the two German ships steamed up the Bosporus strait into the Black Sea. Flying the Turkish flag, they shelled the Russian cities of Feodosiya, Odessa, and Sebastopol. The Young Turks, as alarmed as the Russians by news of this attack, hastened to assure St. Petersburg that they remained neutral, that the attack had been a
German
act. The Russians replied that the Turks could prove their good faith by expelling the Germans. This they were powerless to do. On November 30, after an Entente ultimatum went unanswered, Russia declared war on Turkey. Britain and France did the same a few days later.

Though Turkey’s alliance with the Central Powers was a serious setback for the Entente, some of Britain’s leaders thought it opened new options. Being invulnerable to invasion, the British—unlike the French and Russians—had never been required to commit themselves to any theater of operations. By early 1915, thanks to the arrival of units of the regular army from distant parts of the empire and of colonial forces from India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Sir John French had more than three hundred thousand troops under his command. Hundreds of thousands more, the “Kitchener’s armies” made up of men who had flocked to recruiting centers at the start of the war, were in training back in England. The question was what to
do
with all this power. The answer was obvious to many senior members of the army and the cabinet, but they were far from united on exactly what they thought was so obvious.

French himself, despite the horrors of Ypres, was as convinced as Joffre that the German defenses could be cracked open, and he was as eager as Joffre to prove it. Consistent exaggeration of German casualties had helped to persuade him that the enemy must be approaching exhaustion. Entente propagandists depicted almost every fight in the West as a slaughter of Germans mounting robotlike suicide attacks, when in fact German losses were often markedly lower than those of the Entente. Back in London, the army’s director of military operations produced an analysis supposedly demonstrating that Germany was going to run out of men “a few months hence.” (This hopeful myth was slow to die. Before June 1915 another operations director would predict that if Britain would “keep hammering away…we shall wear Germany out and the war will be over in six months.”) Though French like Joffre wanted to stay on the offensive, he remained unwilling to do so under Joffre and even reluctant to do so
with
Joffre. He continued to demand the freedom to operate independently. There was one final point, however, on which Joffre and French were in complete agreement: every available British soldier, they insisted, should be sent to the Western Front at the earliest possible moment.

Early in January, French went to London and met with the British War Council, a new planning body whose seven members included Asquith, Kitchener, Churchill, Grey, and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. He proposed a new offensive that would follow the coast and be aimed at recapturing the Belgian Channel ports. Churchill supported this idea, seeing in it a way to bring neutral Holland into the war on the Entente side and, by drawing more German troops to the west, to prepare the way for a landing of troops on Germany’s Baltic coast. At first the council turned French’s proposal down. Most members regarded it as too risky to justify the possible gains and also as contrary to the wishes of Joffre, who wanted the British to attack not along the coast but, again, near Ypres. Days later the idea was brought back to life, not as an approved plan but as a possibility to be kept under consideration. Asquith was unfriendly to the idea. Kitchener was absolutely opposed. What he wanted—it was not a thing to be talked about openly—was to keep Britain’s new armies at home until the French and Germans had exhausted each other. Then London could send masses of fresh troops across the Channel and decisively tip the scales. “The German armies in France may be looked upon as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault,” Kitchener told French. The British lines, he added, “may be held by an investing force while operations proceed elsewhere.”

Elsewhere.
For Kitchener and Churchill and others, that became a kind of dream. Shaken by the destruction of the BEF’s first divisions and hoping to avoid a repeat, they began looking for less painful ways to prosecute the war. Grand Duke Nicholas was encouraging their search by sending telegrams to Kitchener, asking him to make a show of force in the Middle East and thereby oblige the Turks to suspend their offensives in Persia and the Caucasus. A campaign in Syria was one idea; by drawing the Turks from the north, it could free Russian troops for the Eastern Front. A Baltic landing was another option; the navy was building a fleet of six hundred motor barges and other craft for an invasion (by
Russian
troops, though St. Petersburg had not been informed) of Germany’s Pomeranian coast. Still another possibility, one less fraught with risk than the Baltic scheme, was the landing of an Entente force at the port of Salonika, in northwestern Greece. Greece was not even in the war (it was one of the several neutral states being courted by both sides), but the council hoped that the injection of Entente troops into the southern Balkans might win over not only Greece but Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy. An army moving northward out of Salonika could secure Serbia. Then, reinforced, it might be able to invade Austria-Hungary. Kitchener liked this idea. So did Lloyd George, who as chancellor of the exchequer was not necessarily a central figure in Britain’s military planning but was making himself one by sheer force of will.

Finally there were the Dardanelles, which had already been briefly attacked by a British ship at the end of 1914 and had demonstrated no ability to resist. Renewed action there in greater force could create problems for all the Central Powers. Churchill sent a telegram asking the commander of the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean if a naval force could fight its way through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. When the admiral replied that this might be accomplished “by extended operations with a large number of ships,” Churchill was satisfied. He instructed the admiral to submit a detailed plan for such an operation.

The Dardanelles were becoming
elsewhere.

Just a week into the new year, two offensives that Joffre had put in motion in France’s Champagne and Artois regions were essentially at an end. The French advanced only five hundred yards in three weeks and by January 8, with the Germans launching counterattacks, had added tens of thousands of casualties to their dizzily rising total. The Champagne operation alone, by the time it was shut down, had cost ninety thousand French casualties. Even then Joffre did not give up. He would try again in February and yet again in March, continuing to think that he was on the verge of a breakthrough. The British War Council felt confirmed in its skepticism about the Western Front and about Sir John French’s promises of success.

The Germans, while successful in holding their line against this endless hammering, were still divided on strategy. No mechanism existed by which Germany’s competing strategists could discuss their differences in any systematic way. The kaiser, the “All-High Warlord,” rarely attempted to bring them together, and as a result the rivalries within the high command could only fester. Clear policy formulation was replaced by backstabbing and bickering. Those who wanted to concentrate on the Western Front tried in childish ways to undercut and discredit their rivals. (Falkenhayn, for example, deleted the names of Hindenburg and Ludendorff from reports of success in the east.) The “easterners” not only responded in kind but plotted to have Falkenhayn dismissed. The kaiser, meanwhile, neither led nor allowed anyone else to do so. A crisis was inevitable. But instead of experiencing
a
leadership crisis, the high command went through a series of such crises that lasted a year and a half.

Falkenhayn’s position remained ambiguous in the extreme. He wanted to win the war in the west, but also to make the Russians willing to negotiate. When he refused Conrad’s request for help in a winter offensive, then refused again when Hindenburg demanded that his unassigned new corps be sent to the east, Hindenburg and Ludendorff announced that they were detaching three and a half divisions from their own Ninth Army and sending them to Conrad. In any army this would have bordered on insubordination. By the traditions and standards of the Prussian army, it was little short of shocking. Falkenhayn protested to the kaiser. Hindenburg responded with an appeal of his own for the kaiser’s support. The battle for control over German strategy was joined.

Falkenhayn’s next move was clever but certain to enrage his rivals. He used his double-barreled authority as head of the general staff and war minister to declare that the troops being sent from Hindenburg’s army to Conrad would become the core of a new Army of the South. This army would be commanded by General Alexander von Linsingen, a protégé of Falkenhayn’s, who would report not to Hindenburg but to Falkenhayn himself. Ludendorff was named Linsingen’s chief of staff. With this move, Falkenhayn dissolved the team that had given Germany its only victories and diminished the authority of its leading members.