ENVER AS THE MAN WHO DEMONSTRATED “THE VULNERABILITY OF THE BRITISH FLEET”—OLD-FASHIONED DEFENCES OF THE DARDANELLES

When the situation had reached this exciting stage Enver asked me to visit the Dardanelles. He still insisted that the fortifications were impregnable, and he could not understand, he said, the panic which was then raging in Constantinople. He had visited the Dardanelles himself, had inspected every gun and every emplacement, and was entirely confident that his soldiers could hold off the Allied fleet indefinitely. He had taken Talaat down, and by doing so he had considerably eased that statesman’s fears. It was Enver’s conviction that, if I could visit the fortifications, I would be persuaded that the fleets could never get through, and that I would thus be able to give such assurances to the people that the prevailing excitement would subside. I disregarded certain natural doubts as to whether an Ambassador should expose himself to the dangers of such a situation—the ships were bombarding nearly every day—and promptly accepted Enver’s invitation.

On the morning of the 15th we left Constantinople on the Yuruk. Enver himself accompanied us as far as Panderma, an Asiatic town on the Sea of Marmora. The party included several other notables: Ibrahim Bey, the Minister of Justice, Husni Pasha, the General who had commanded the army which had deposed Abdul Hamid in the Young Turk revolution, and Senator Cheriff Djafer Pasha, an Arab and a direct descendant of the Prophet. A particularly congenial companion was Fuad Pasha, an old Field-Marshal, who had led an adventurous career. Despite his age, he had an immense capacity for enjoyment, was a huge feeder and a capacious drinker, and had as many stories to tell of exile, battle, and hair-breadth escapes as Othello. All of these men were much older than Enver, and all of them were descended of far more distinguished lineage, yet they treated this stripling with the utmost deference.

Enver seemed particularly glad of this opportunity to discuss the situation. Immediately after breakfast he took me aside, and together we went up to the deck. The day was a beautiful{134} sunny one, and the sky in the Marmora was that deep blue which we find only in this part of the world. What most impressed me was the intense quiet, the almost desolate inactivity of these silent waters. Our ship was almost the only one in sight, and this inland sea, which in ordinary times was one of the world’s greatest commercial highways, was now practically a primeval waste. The whole scene was merely a reflection of the great triumph which German diplomacy had accomplished in the Near East.

For nearly six months not a Russian merchant ship had passed through the straits. All the commerce of Rumania and Bulgaria, which had normally found its way to Europe across this inland sea, had long since disappeared. The ultimate significance of all this desolation was that Russia was blockaded and completely isolated from her allies. How much that one fact has meant in the history of the world for the last three years! And now England and France were seeking to overcome this disadvantage; to link up their own military resources with those of their great eastern ally, and to restore to the Dardanelles and the Marmora the thousands of ships that meant Russia’s existence as a military and economic, and even, as subsequent events have shown, as a political, Power. We were approaching the scene of one of the great crises of the war.

Would England and her allies succeed in this enterprise? Would their ships at the Dardanelles smash the fortifications, break through, and again make Russia a permanent force in the war? That was the main subject which Enver and I discussed, as for nearly three hours we walked up and down the deck. Enver again referred to the “silly panic” that had seized nearly all classes in the capital.

“Even though Bulgaria and Greece both turn against us,” he said, “we shall defend Constantinople to the end. We have plenty of guns, plenty of ammunition, and we have these on terra-firma, whereas the English and French batteries are floating ones. And the natural advantages of the straits are so great that the warships can make little progress against them. I do not care what other people may think. I have studied this problem more thoroughly than any of them, and I feel that I am right. As long as I am at the head of the War Department we shall not give up. Indeed, I do not know just what these English and French battleships are driving at. Suppose that they rush the Dardanelles, get here into the Marmora, and reach Constantinople, what good will that do them? They can bombard and destroy the city, I admit, but they{135} cannot capture it, as they have no troops to land. Unless they do bring a large army, they will really be caught in a trap. They can perhaps stay here for two or three weeks, until their food and supplies are all exhausted, and then they will have to go back—rush the straits again, and again run the risk of annihilation. In the meantime we would have repaired the forts, brought in troops, and made ourselves ready for them. It seems to me to be a very foolish enterprise.”

I have already told how Enver had taken Napoleon as his model, and in this Dardanelles expedition he now apparently saw a Napoleonic opportunity. As we were pacing the deck he stopped a moment, looked at me earnestly, and said:

“I shall go down in history as the man who demonstrated the vulnerability of England and her fleet. I shall show that her Navy is not invincible. I was in England a few years before the war, and discussed England’s position with many of her leading men, such as Asquith, Churchill, Haldane. I told them that their course was wrong. Winston Churchill declared that England could defend herself with her Navy alone, and that she needed no large Army. I told Churchill that no great empire could last that did not have both an army and a navy. I found that Churchill’s opinion was the one that prevailed everywhere in England. There was only one man I met who agreed with me—that was Lord Roberts. Well, Churchill has now sent his fleet down here—perhaps to show me that his Navy can do all that he said it could do. Now we’ll see.”

Enver seemed to regard his naval expedition as a personal challenge from Mr. Churchill to himself—almost like a continuation of their argument in London.

“You, too, should have a large army,” said Enver, referring to the United States.

“I do not believe,” he went on, “that England is trying to force the Dardanelles because Russia has asked her to. When I was in England I discussed with Churchill the possibility of a general war. He asked me what Turkey would do in such a case, and said that, if we took Germany’s side, the British fleet would force the Dardanelles and capture Constantinople. Churchill is not trying to help Russia—he is carrying out the threat made to me at that time.”

Enver spoke with the utmost determination and conviction; he said that nearly all the damage inflicted on the outside forts had been repaired, and that the Turks had methods of defence the existence of which the enemy little suspected. He showed great bitterness against the English; he accused them of attempting{136} to bribe Turkish officials, and even said that they had instigated attempts upon his own life. On the other hand, he displayed no particular friendliness toward the Germans. Wangenheim’s overbearing manners had caused him much irritation, and the Turks, he said, got on none too well with the German officers.

“The Turks and Germans,” he added, “care nothing for each other. We are with them because it is our interest to be with them; they are with us because that is their interest. Germany will back Turkey just so long as that helps Germany; Turkey will back Germany just so long as that helps Turkey.”

Enver seemed much impressed at the close of our interview with the intimate personal relations which we had established with each other. He apparently believed that he, the great Enver, the Napoleon of the Turkish Revolution, had unbended in discussing his nation’s affairs with a mere Ambassador; colossal vanity, as I have before remarked, was one of his strong points.

“You know,” he said, “that there is no one in Germany with whom the Emperor talks as intimately as I have talked with you to-day.”

We reached Panderma about two o’clock. Here Enver and his auto were put ashore, and our party started again, our boat arriving at Gallipoli late in the afternoon. We anchored in the harbour and spent the night on board. All the evening we could hear the guns bombarding the fortifications, but these reminders of war and death did not affect the spirits of my Turkish hosts. The occasion was for them a great lark; they had spent several months in hard, exacting work, and now they behaved like boys suddenly let out for a vacation. They made jokes, told stories, sang the queerest kinds of songs, and played childish pranks upon each other. The venerable Fuad, despite his nearly ninety years, developed great qualities as an entertainer, and the fact that his associates made him the butt of most of their horse-play apparently only added to his enjoyment of the occasion. The amusement reached its height when one of his friends surreptitiously poured him a glass of eau-de-cologne. The old gentleman looked at the new drink a moment and then diluted it with water. I was told that the proper way of testing raki, the popular Turkish tipple, is by mixing it with water; if it turns white under this treatment it is the real thing, and may be safely drunk. Apparently water has the same effect upon eau-de-cologne, for the contents of Fuad’s glass, after this test, turned white. The old gentleman, therefore, poured the whole thing down his throat without a grimace—much to the hilarious entertainment of his tormentors.{137}

In the morning we started again. We had now fairly arrived in the Dardanelles, and from Gallipoli we had a sail of nearly twenty-five miles to Tchanak Kalé. For the most part this section of the strait is uninteresting, and, from a military point of view, it is unimportant. The stream is about two miles wide, both sides are low-lying and marshy, and only a few scrambling villages show any signs of life. I was told that there were a few ancient fortifications, their rusty guns pointing toward the Marmora, the emplacements having been erected there in the early part of the nineteenth century for the purpose of preventing hostile ships entering from the north. These fortifications, however, were so inconspicuous that I could not see them. My hosts informed me that they had no fighting power, and that, indeed, there was nothing in the northern part of the straits, from Point Nagara to the Marmora, that could offer resistance to any modern fleet.

The chief interest which I found in this part of the Dardanelles was purely historic and legendary. The ancient town of Lampsacus appeared in the modern Lapsaki, just across from Gallipoli, and Nagara Point is the site of the ancient Abydos, from which village Leander used to swim nightly across the Hellespont to Hero—a feat which was repeated about one hundred years ago by Lord Byron. Here, also, Xerxes crossed from Asia to Greece on a bridge of boats, embarking on that famous expedition which was to make him master of the world. The tribe of Xerxes, I thought, as I passed the scene of his exploit, is not yet entirely extinct! The Germans and Turks had found a less romantic use for this, the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, for here they had stretched a cable and anti-submarine barrage of mines and nets—a device which, as I shall describe, did not keep the English and French underwater boats out of the Marmora and the Bosphorus. It was not until we rounded this historic point of Nagara that t............