The Guns of August (29 page)

“To the north” was, of course, exactly where Souchon was going, but as the Turks had mined the entrance to the Straits
he could not enter without their permission. He could go no further until he had coaled and communicated with Constantinople. His collier, the
Bogadir,
was waiting in Greek disguise at Cape Malea as ordered. Fearing to be discovered, he ordered it to make for Denusa, an island farther inside the Aegean. Unaware that the British chase had been discontinued, he lay low all during the day of August 8 and crept in to the deserted coast of Denusa only on the morning of the 9th. Here, all day, the
Goeben
and
Breslau
coaled while steam was kept up in their boilers so that they might depart on half an hour’s notice. A lookout post was erected on a hilltop to keep watch for the British who were then five hundred miles away keeping watch for the Austrians.

Admiral Souchon did not dare use his wireless to communicate with Constantinople because a signal strong enough to cover the distance would have at the same time betrayed his location to the enemy. He ordered the
General,
which had followed him from Messina along a more southerly course, to go to Smyrna and from there transmit a message to the German naval attaché in Constantinople: “Indispensable military necessity requires attack upon enemy in Black Sea. Go to any lengths to arrange for me to pass through Straits at once with permission of Turkish Government if possible, without formal approval if necessary.”

All day of the 9th Souchon waited for an answer. At one moment his wireless operators picked up a garbled text, but its meaning could not be deciphered. Night came without a reply. By this time Milne’s squadron, having discovered the Austrian error, was advancing toward the Aegean again. Souchon decided, if no answer came, to force the Dardanelles if necessary. At 3:00
A.M.
of August 10 he heard the wireless signals of the British squadron as it entered the Aegean. He could wait no longer. Just then a different series of syncopated buzzes came over the earphones. It was the
General,
at last, transmitting the Delphic message: “Enter. Demand surrender of forts. Capture pilot.”

Uncertain whether this meant him to make a show of force to save Turkish face or whether he would have to force his
way through, Souchon left Denusa at dawn. While all day he steamed north at 18 knots, all day Admiral Milne cruised across the exit of the Aegean to prevent him from coming out. At four that afternoon Souchon sighted Tenedos and the plains of Troy; at five he reached the entrance to the historic and impregnable passageway under the guns of the great fortress of Chanak. With his crew at battle stations and every nerve on board stretched in suspense, he slowly approached. The signal flag, “Send a pilot,” fluttered up his mast.

That morning there arrived at Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the
Gloucester
’s action against the
Goeben
and
Breslau.
Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau. They brought an exciting tale of the boom of guns, puffs of white smoke, and the twisting and maneuvering of faraway ships. The Italian captain had told them that two of the ships were the
Goeben
and
Breslau
which had just made their notorious exit from Messina. Mr. Morgenthau, having occasion to meet Ambassador Wangenheim a few hours later, mentioned his daughter’s story, in which Wangenheim displayed “an agitated interest.” Immediately after lunch, accompanied by his Austrian colleague, he appeared at the American Embassy where the two ambassadors “planted themselves solemnly in chairs” in front of the American lady and “subjected her to a most minute, though very polite, cross-examination .… They would not permit her to leave out a single detail; they wished to know how many shots had been fired, what direction the German ships had taken, what everybody on board had said and so on .… They left the house in almost jubilant mood.”

They had learned that the
Goeben
and
Breslau
had escaped the British fleet. It remained to obtain Turkish consent to let them through the Dardanelles. Enver Pasha, who as War Minister controlled the mine fields, was more than willing but he had to play a complicated game vis-à-vis his more nervous colleagues. A member of the German Military Mission was with him that afternoon when another member, Lieutenant Colonel von Kress, was urgently announced. Kress said that
the commander at the Chanak reported the
Goeben
and
Breslau
requesting permission to enter the Straits and wanted immediate instructions. Enver replied he could not decide without consulting the Grand Vizier. Kress insisted that the fort required an answer at once. Enver sat perfectly silent for several minutes, and then said abruptly, “They are to be allowed to enter.”

Kress and the other officer, who had unconsciously been holding their breaths, found themselves breathing again.

“If the English warships follow them in are they to be fired on?” Kress next asked. Again Enver refused to answer, pleading that the Cabinet must be consulted; but Kress insisted that the fort could not be left without definite instructions.

“Are the English to be fired on or not?” A long pause followed. Finally Enver answered, “Yes.”

At the entrance to the Straits, 150 miles away, a Turkish destroyer put out from shore and approached the
Goeben,
watched in tense anxiety by every eye on deck. A signal flag fluttered briefly and was recognized as “Follow me.” At nine o’clock that evening, August 10, the
Goeben
and
Breslau
entered the Dardanelles, bringing, as long afterward Churchill somberly acknowledged, “more slaughter, more misery and more ruin than has ever before been borne within the compass of a ship.”

Instantly telegraphed round the world, the news reached Malta that night. Admiral Milne, still probing among the Aegean islands, learned it at noon next day. So little did his superiors understand the mission of the
Goeben
that they instructed him to establish a blockade of the Dardanelles “in case the German ships came out.”

Prime Minister Asquith’s comment on the news was that it was “interesting.” But, he wrote in his diary, “as we shall insist” on the
Goeben
’s crew being replaced by Turks who will not be able to navigate her, “it does not much matter.” To “insist” appeared to Asquith to be all that was necessary.

Allied ambassadors at once insisted, furiously and repeatedly. The Turks, still hoping to hold on to neutrality as a bargaining
counter, decided to ask the Germans to disarm the
Goeben
and
Breslau
“temporarily and superficially only,” but Wangenheim, invited to hear this proposal, absolutely refused. After further agitated discussion, one minister suddenly suggested: “Could not the Germans have sold us these ships? Could not their arrival be regarded as delivery under contract?”

Everyone was delighted with this superb idea which not only solved a dilemma but dealt the British poetic justice for their seizure of the two Turkish battleships. With Germany’s agreement, announcement of the sale was made to the diplomatic corps, and shortly thereafter the
Goeben
and
Breslau,
renamed the
Jawus
and
Midilli,
flying the Turkish flag and with their crews wearing Turkish fezzes, were reviewed by the Sultan amid the wild enthusiasm of his people. The sudden appearance of the two German warships, as if sent by a genie to take the place of the two of which they had been robbed, put the populace in transports of delight and invested the Germans with a halo of popularity.

Still the Turks postponed the declaration of war for which Germany was pressing. Instead, they themselves began demanding from the Allies an increasing price for their neutrality. Russia was so alarmed by the
Goeben
’s arrival at the doors of the Black Sea that she was willing to pay. Like the sinner who renounces lifelong bad habits when in extremity, she was even ready to renounce Constantinople. On August 13 Foreign Minister Sazonov proposed to France to offer Turkey a solemn guarantee of her territorial integrity and a promise of “great financial advantages at the expense of Germany” in return for her neutrality. He was actually willing to include a promise that Russia would abide by the guarantee “even if we are victorious.”

The French agreed and “moved heaven and earth,” in the words of President Poincaré, to keep Turkey quiet and neutral and to persuade Britain to join in a joint guarantee of Turkish territory. But the British could not bring themselves to bargain or pay for the neutrality of their onetime protégé. Churchill, at his “most bellicose” and “violently anti-Turk,”
proposed to the Cabinet to send a torpedo flotilla through the Dardanelles to sink the
Goeben
and
Breslau.
It was the one gesture which might have carried weight with vacillating Turks and the only gesture which could have prevented what ultimately happened. One of the keenest and boldest minds in France had already suggested it on the day the Straits were violated. “We should go right in after them,” said General Gallieni; “otherwise Turkey will come in against us.” In the British Cabinet Churchill’s idea was vetoed by Lord Kitchener, who said England could not afford to alienate the Moslems by taking the offensive against Turkey. Turkey should be left “to strike the first blow.”

For nearly three months, while the Allies alternately blustered and bargained and while German military influence at Constantinople daily increased, the groups within the Turkish government disputed and wavered. By the end of October, Germany determined that their endless procrastination must be brought to an end. Turkey’s active belligerency, in order to blockade Russia from the south, had become imperative.

On October 28 the former
Goeben
and
Breslau,
under Admiral Souchon’s command and accompanied by several Turkish torpedo boats, entered the Black Sea and shelled Odessa, Sevastopol, and Feodosia, causing some civilian loss of life and sinking a Russian gunboat.

Aghast at the
fait accompli
laid at their door by the German Admiral, a majority of the Turkish government wished to disavow it but was effectively prevented. The operating factor was the presence of the
Goeben
at the Golden Horn, commanded by her own officers, manned by her own crew, disdainful of restraint. As Talaat Bey pointed out, the government, the palace, the capital, they themselves, their homes, their sovereign and Caliph, were under her guns. Dismissal of the German military and naval missions which the Allies were demanding as proof of Turkey’s neutrality, they were unable to perform. The act of war having been committed in the Turks’ name, Russia declared war on Turkey on November 4, followed by Britain and France on November 5.

Thereafter the red edges of war spread over another half of the world. Turkey’s neighbors, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, and Greece, were eventually drawn in. Thereafter, with her exit to the Mediterranean closed, Russia was left dependent on Archangel, icebound half the year, and on Vladivostok, 8,000 miles from the battlefront. With the Black Sea closed, her exports dropped by 98 per cent and her imports by 95 per cent. The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the
Goeben.

Other sequels were as bitter if less momentous. Meeting the censure of his comrades, Admiral Troubridge demanded a Court of Inquiry which ordered his trial by court-martial in November, 1914, on the charge that “he did forbear to chase H.I.G.M.’s ship
Goeben,
being an enemy then flying.” On the basic issue, whether he was justified in regarding the
Goeben
as a “superior force,” the Navy, for its own sake, acquitted him. Though he performed further service in the war, he was never again, owing to feeling in the fleet, given a command at sea. Admiral Milne, recalled on August 18 in order to leave the Mediterranean under French command, came home to be retired. On August 30 the Admiralty announced that his conduct and dispositions in regard to the
Goeben
and
Breslau
had been made the subject of “careful examination” with the result that “their Lordships approved the measures taken by him in all respects.” Their Lordships, who had been blind to the importance of Constantinople, did not seek a scapegoat.

W
HILE CONCENTRATION OF THE ARMIES
was proceeding, advance groups of the German and French forces moved to the attack as if through a revolving door. The Germans entered from the east and the French from the west. Each opponent’s first move was to take place on his own extreme right on the rim of the revolving door’s perimeter, three hundred miles apart. The Germans would proceed, regardless of what the French did, to the assault of Liège and the reduction of its ring of twelve forts in order to open the roads across Belgium to the armies of their right wing. The French, equally regardless of what the enemy did, would charge into Upper Alsace in a move, more sentimental than strategic, designed to open the war upon a wave of national enthusiasm and encourage an uprising of the local population against Germany. Strategically its purpose was to anchor the French right on the Rhine.