But it was the personalities of the protagonists that counted, above all the personalities of the Young Turks. Even in a place with so lurid a reputation as Constantinople it would be hard to imagine a stranger group of men. There is a dramatic quality about the Young Turks, a wild and dated theatricality, which is familiar and yet quite unreal. One tends to see them in the terms of a gangster movie, half documentary and half extravagant make-believe, and it would be very easy to dismiss them to that convenient limbo that envelops most political adventurers had they not, just for this instant, had such power over so many millions of men.
Sir Harold Nicolson, who was then a junior secretary in the British Embassy, remembers them all coming to dinner at his house one day. ‘There was Enver,’ he wrote, ‘in his neat little uniform, his hands resting patiently upon his sword-hilt, his little hairdresser face perked patiently above his Prussian collar. There was Djemal, his white teeth flashing tigerish against his black beard: there was Talaat with his large gypsy eyes and his russet gypsy cheeks: there was little Djavid who spoke French fluently, and who hopped about, being polite.’
The odd thing, of course, was that they should have been there at all, that power should ever have reached them in a world which still knew nothing of Nazis and Fascists in uniform, of communist officials at a banquet.
Talaat was an extraordinary man: yet there is a certain earthiness about him that makes him rather easier to understand than any of the others. He is the party boss, gross, hard and good-tempered, who has his tendrils everywhere, and in place of faith possesses an instinctive understanding of the weaknesses of human nature. He began life as a post office telegraphist, and he never really made much of an outward show of being anything more. Even now when he was Minister of the Interior, a post for which he might have been designed by nature, and virtually controller of the Committee machine, he still had his telegraphist’s keyboard on his desk, and, with his enormous wrists on the table, he liked to tap out messages to his colleagues on it. Long after the others, with their uniforms and their bodyguards, had moved into splendid villas along the Bosphorus, Talaat continued to live in a rickety three-storied wooden house in one of the poorer districts of Constantinople. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador, called upon him there unexpectedly one afternoon, and found him in thick grey pyjamas with a fez on his head. He was surrounded by cheap furniture, bright prints on the walls, worn rugs on the floor; and his Turkish wife kept peeping nervously at the two men through a latticed window while they talked.
Most of those foreigners who knew Talaat during this summer regarded him highly and even with some liking. Morgenthau always found it possible to make him laugh, and then the animal craftiness would subside, the dark gypsy face would relax, and he would talk with great frankness and intelligence. He had, Aubrey Herbert says, ‘strength, hardness and an almost brutal bonhomie, and a light in his eyes rarely seen in men, but sometimes in animals at dusk’. Yet Talaat with all his sagacity and his powers of unemotional concentration seems to have felt the need of men of action like Enver.
Enver was the prodigy of the group, the terrible child who shocked and bewildered them all. He was distinguished by the kind of dark and composed good looks that never seem to age or reveal the mind beneath; and indeed, if Talaat is represented by Wallace Beery of the silent films, then Enver most certainly, for all his pertness, is Rudolph Valentino.
He was born at Adano on the Black Sea coast, the son of a Turkish father who was a bridge-keeper and an Albanian mother who followed one of the lowest occupations of the country — that of laying out the dead. It is possible that the boy’s exceptional good looks descended to him from a Circassian grandmother, but his other qualities seem to have been peculiarly his own, and were in a state of remarkable balance with each other. He was extremely vain, but it was a special kind of vanity which was overlaid by an air of shyness and modesty, and his reckless bravery in action was offset by an appearance so cool, so calm and unhurried, that one might have thought him half asleep. In office he exhibited this same quiet distinction of manner, so that no disaster ever appeared to flurry him, and no decision, however important, caused him more than a few moments’ hesitation. Even his ambition was disguised by a certain ease with which he moved among people who belonged to a much more cultivated society than his own. With this fluency and this charm it was no wonder that he was made so much of by the hostesses of the time; here was the young beau sabreur in real life, an unassuming young hero. All this was a most effective cover for the innate cruelty, the shallowness and the squalor of the megalomania that lay beneath.
From the age of twenty-five or so, when he had graduated from the military staff college in Constantinople, Enver’s career had been tumultuous. His speciality was the overturning of governments by physical violence, the sudden armed raid on cabinet offices. In later wars he would have made an admirable commando leader. In 1908 he was one of the small band of revolutionaries who marched on Constantinople and forced Abdul Hamid to restore the constitution, and a year later when Abdul had defaulted in his promises, Enver was back again in the capital, storming the barricades in a torn uniform, with a four days’ growth of beard and a bullet wound on his cheek; and this time Enver and his friends disposed of Abdul forever.
Then in the following years, when half the countries of Eastern Europe were demohshing the carcase of the Ottoman Empire, there was no front, however remote, at which Enver did not appear, dramatically and suddenly, to lead the counter-attack. From his post of military attaché in Berlin he rushed to the Libyan desert to fight the Italians outside Benghazi. Then in 1912 he was back on the Continent again holding the Bulgars off Constantinople. Nothing dismayed him, no defeat exhausted his endless energy. At the end of the first Balkan war in 1913, when everything was lost and Constantinople itself in danger of falling, Enver was the one man who would not accept an armistice. He led a band of two hundred followers into the capital, burst in upon the peace-making cabinet at their deliberations, shot dead the Minister for War, and then, having established a new government which was more to his liking, he returned to the front again. Finally he emerged gloriously at the end of the second Balkan war leading the tattered Turkish battalions back into Adrianople.
As an administrator his methods were very similar. In the summer of 1913, when he was at the Ministry of War, he dismissed 1200 officers from the Turkish army in a single day, among them no fewer than 150 generals and colonels. In Enver’s view they were politically unsound.
There were other leaders among the Young Turks who were probably just as able as Enver: Mahmad Shevket, who led the 1900 march on Constantinople, Djavid, the Jewish financier from Salonika, Djemal, the Minister for Marine, and several others; but none could compete with Enver’s peculiar brand of political audacity. He out-manœuvred them by doing the outrageous, the impossible thing. By the summer of 1914, when he was thirty-four and looking as youthful and composed as ever, he had reached a position of great power in Constantinople. He had married a princess and was settled in a palace with a personal bodyguard and a retinue of attendants. He was Minister for War and Commander-in-Chief of the army. In cabinet and in the Committee of Union and Progress not even Talaat cared to oppose him, and it was becoming increasingly evident that he had even larger designs for his own future. Foreign ambassadors coming to call on the young minister in his office would find him sitting there in his uniform, very spruce and smiling. On the wall behind his desk there were portraits of Frederick the Great and Napoleon.