A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (54 page)

What Falkenhayn had first proposed was not an alternative offensive but an end to the attacks coupled with an attempt to open negotiations with the Russians. The kaiser was taken aback by this idea and would not discuss it. But he was inclined to agree when Falkenhayn said “The Russians can retreat into the vastness of their country; we cannot go chasing them forever and ever.” Another compromise emerged, a plan for a three-pronged offensive that, if not as grandiose as what Ludendorff wanted, nonetheless had a lofty objective: to force the Russians out of Poland.

Russian Poland, wedged between East Prussia and the Hapsburg domains to the south, was thus exposed on three sides. The new campaign began on July 12 with one German army group driving southward to east of Warsaw, another attacking west of the city, and Mackensen moving north toward Lublin and Brest-Litovsk. When the Russian commander in Poland sensibly suggested withdrawal, Grand Duke Nicholas refused, much as he had at first refused to permit his Third Army to pull out of Galicia. His reasons were more political than military. Some in St. Petersburg—called Petrograd now, to erase the taint of Germanism—feared that if Russia abandoned Poland while the British and French achieved a great victory at Gallipoli, Russia’s claim to Constantinople might be compromised. They feared too that if Russian reverses continued while Italy was inflicting defeat on Austria-Hungary (that too was still widely expected), Italy would move into the Balkans. The Russians had strong fortresses in Poland, recently updated at tremendous expense and generously supplied with guns and ammunition that were badly needed elsewhere; the grand duke, in believing that they could hold out, ignored the lessons of Liège and Namur.

At first the German advance on Poland was slow. The emphasis was not on infantry attacks but on colossal artillery bombardments—hundreds of thousands of shells day after day—that had a ruinous effect on Russian numbers and morale. Gradually the pace accelerated. Town after town was abandoned to the Germans, and soon Warsaw, which had been in Russian hands for exactly one hundred years, was in grave danger. Townsfolk and peasants fled in all directions, leaving behind almost all their possessions and finding safety nowhere. “They are in despair, and protest bitterly,” a Russian soldier wrote. “At eight in the evening we are on the march again. We come out onto the road. It is dark. But what’s that noise? Oh my God, what’s happening on the road ahead? It is blocked by carts, full of kids and household stuff. The cows are bellowing, the dogs are barking and yelping. The poor people are going God knows where, anywhere to get away from the fighting. But the old nags don’t have the strength to pull the loads; the air is filled with the sound of horses being whipped and the Polish ‘tso,’ and still the carts won’t move. We don’t have the heart just to drive through them. It’s such a heartbreaking scene, we drag one cart after another out of the mud, get them onto the main road and then onto the bridge over the river Narew. I pity them all, particularly the little children, sitting in the carts or in their mothers’ arms. They don’t understand what is happening around them. My thoughts turn to my own family, I feel depressed and before I know it tears run down my cheeks.”

By any measure, the German achievement in the east had been tremendous. Russian resistance was crumbling everywhere. But Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann were contemptuous. The Germans were merely forcing the Russians to move. They were not annihilating them.

The French and British were troubled. Something big had to be done to turn the tide—to ease the danger of Russia making a separate peace. For Joffre and French, only one thing could suffice: a fall offensive big enough and successful enough to neutralize everything that had happened in the east. For others, it meant that Gallipoli had to be carried to a victorious conclusion. For still others, Kitchener among them,
both
aims now seemed imperative.

Background

GENOCIDE

THE HOPE WITH WHICH MANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE’S
Young Turks had begun the war—a hope of regaining lost territories, of taking revenge on old enemies (on Russia above all), and of restoring their empire’s faded glory—soon turned to fear. A December 1914 invasion of the Caucasus, led personally by War Minister Enver Pasha, had aimed at driving the Russians out of a region whose population was overwhelmingly Muslim, but it ended in failure and the death of more than a hundred thousand Turkish troops. Then came the Entente assaults on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli—and a panicky realization that Constantinople itself was threatened. By the time the war was six months old, everything that remained of what Suleiman the Magnificent and his forebears had built was in danger of falling into ruin.

These disasters, coming hard on the heels of the Turkish expulsion from the Balkans in 1912 and a century of other humiliating concessions to the Europeans, inflamed the worst tendencies of the Turkish leadership. For more than a generation before the war, nationalist Turks and Islamic extremists had been saying that the Ottoman Empire, in order to be saved, must first be purified—must above all be purged of non-Muslim elements. By the spring of 1915 this idea was policy. The government of Turkey embarked upon the first true genocide of the twentieth century, the modern era’s first effort to eliminate a whole people. The target was Armenia, which the loss of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia had left as the last large Christian population still inside the Turkish empire.

History had long been unkind to Armenia, which in ancient times was the most powerful independent kingdom on the eastern border of the Roman Empire and in the fourth century became the first nation to make Christianity its official religion. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the northward advance of the Turks and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire reduced the Armenians, like the Christian kingdoms of the Balkans, to a persecuted subject people. In the centuries that followed they became entangled in the conflict between the Turks and the Russians, who were by then advancing southward. By the late nineteenth century Armenia was divided, upward of a million and a half of its people still subject to the Turks but another million living in areas annexed by Russia.

This division—the Armenian homeland occupying a contested borderland between two bitterly hostile empires—eventually brought disaster. Russia justified its expansion by claiming to be the champion, and where possible the liberator, of the Turks’ Christian subjects. The Turks, brutish in their management of non-Islamic populations, responded by electing to deal with the Armenians as hostile aliens. They raised taxes to ruinous levels and encouraged the Kurds to enrich themselves, by force, at the expense of their Armenian neighbors. Inevitably such actions gave rise to Armenian radical groups demanding autonomy and to further Turkish suppression.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century Constantinople’s treatment of Turkish Armenia was so atrocious that it became an international cause célèbre and an early focus of the American Red Cross. Constantinople saw the attention it was receiving as interference in its internal affairs. When Armenians living in Constantinople raised a disturbance, the Turks responded with a savagery that was remarkable even by Ottoman standards. Tens of thousands of Armenians were slaughtered, many others were driven from their homes, and whole towns were leveled.

Among the Young Turks who took power in 1908 were men who wanted the Ottoman Empire to become a multicultural enterprise in which the rights of religious and ethnic minorities were respected. Such men were eventually pushed aside, however, and the government came to be dominated by fanatical nationalists who found in the Armenians a convenient object for their hatred. When a counterrevolution against the Young Turks failed in 1909, the Armenians again became scapegoats. At least fifteen thousand were butchered at the city of Adana amid grotesque scenes of rape, mutilation, and destruction of property.

When the Balkan wars sent a flood of displaced Muslims into Turkey, many were sent to Armenia (where Christians had no legal rights and were under the heel of Kurdish tribal chieftains) with license to take what they wanted and kill anyone who tried to interfere. Against this background it is remarkable that a hundred thousand Armenian men joined the Ottoman army when Constantinople entered the Great War. Rather naturally, however, loyalties were divided, and the situation became hopelessly confused. Armenians on the Russian side of the border were joining the tsar’s army, and they encouraged their cousins on the other side to join in the fight against a regime that had done nothing to earn their loyalty. In December 1914 an Armenian division organized by the Russians crossed the border and killed one hundred and twenty thousand non-Armenians (most of them Turks and Kurds).

The Young Turks found here all the justification they needed for actions that in peacetime probably would have been unimaginable. They began in comparatively innocuous fashion, disarming their Armenian soldiers and assigning them to labor battalions. Then they proceeded to work, and starve, those battalions to death. Next, having eliminated the part of the population most capable of defending itself, they sent an army onto the plateau that had long been home to most of Turkey’s Armenians. In town after town and city after city, all males over the age of twelve were gathered up and shot or hacked to death en masse. Women were raped and mutilated, and those who were not killed were sold into slavery. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were marched off to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Many died of exposure, starvation, or exhaustion along the way, and others were murdered by their Kurdish escorts. The pogrom spread across all of Turkey. In Constantinople thousands of convicted criminals were organized into death squads whose only assignment was to kill every Armenian they could find, giving first priority to those intellectuals, professionals, and religious and political leaders who might have the potential to serve as leaders. The families of Turkish officials took the choicest booty; the death squads and rabble took the rest.

It is estimated that more than half a million Armenians were killed in 1915, and that was far from the end of it. The massacre would continue through 1916, with further death marches in Syria. Still later, when the Russian armies withdrew from the Caucasus, the Armenians whose shield they had been fell prey to the Turks in their turn. The final convulsion would not come until 1922, when a new Turkish government took possession of Smyrna, set the city afire, and systematically slaughtered its tens of thousands of Armenian and Greek inhabitants.

No one would ever be punished. In the years after the war the United States found it more advantageous to come to terms with the Muslims of the Middle East with their oil riches than to redress the wrongs done to an Armenian nation described by the American high commissioner in Istanbul as “a race like the Jews; they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character.”

Successive Turkish governments continued into the twenty-first century not only to deny that an Armenian genocide ever occurred but to prosecute any Turk who dared to write of it.

Chapter 18

Gallipoli Again, and Poland, and…

“Perhaps a scapegoat is needed to save Russia.
I mean to be the victim.”

—T
SAR
N
ICHOLAS II

A
s the first faint hint of dawn began to glow in the eastern sky beyond Gallipoli on August 9, the men of the British Thirty-second Brigade were crouched in readiness just below the crest of Tekke Tepe Ridge, a high point dominating the center of the peninsula. These were untested but well-trained troops, some of the hundreds of thousands who had volunteered in the first days of the war, and they had landed at Gallipoli scarcely more than fifty hours before. They were also very tired troops, having spent the night clawing their way through the dark up the steep and rugged hillside. But the great prize, the heights that men from Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand had for more than three months been trying and failing to reach, was now just yards away. And it was undefended: just the previous afternoon air reconnaissance had found no sign of Turkish forces anywhere in the neighborhood. Best of all, at the backs of the battalion, down on the beach at Suvla Bay less than three miles to the rear, were another twenty thousand newly arrived and well-equipped Tommies. They would be more than enough, once the ridge was in hand, to free the Anzacs from the nearby beachhead where they had been bottled up since July, cut off the Turkish units defending the lower peninsula, and crush them against the British and French at Cape Helles.

With the darkness fading to a predawn gray and the details of the landscape becoming visible, the order came to move. Silently, rifles in hand, the men started for the top. As they climbed, there suddenly appeared on the skyline above them, as if out of nowhere, the backlighted outlines of human beings. In another instant the silhouettes turned into a mass of shouting, shooting, bayonet-waving Turks, and the mass became a downrushing wave. Defense was impossible; those British who didn’t flee were overrun and killed. The survivors were chased all the way down to the coastal flats. What they could not know was that their pursuers too had just arrived at Tekke Tepe. They had reached the crest at the end of a thirty-six-hour forced march and had been immediately sent into their attack by Mustafa Kemal, who himself had just spent three sleepless days and nights in desperate combat at Anzac Cove. Thus it had all come down to a question of minutes.