After the first rush on the banks and the stores there was the usual shortage of coal and petrol. ‘The bazaar is dead,’ one of the foreign diplomats wrote in his diary. ‘Nothing is bought or sold.’ The Germans, meanwhile, managed to exercise a censorship on news since they controlled the newsprint that was imported into the country and issued it only to those newspapers which took a line that was strongly favourable to Germany.
For the rest, however, the rhythm of the city was not much changed, and travellers arriving there on the Orient Express were astonished at how normal it all was. The lights went on at night, the Pera Palace Hotel was open, the restaurants appeared to have plenty of food, and for the rich at least the war continued to rumble somewhere in the distance, unseen and only faintly heard like a far-off summer thunderstorm which yet might blow itself away. Even the bombardments of the Bosphorus by the Russian Black Sea Fleet caused very little alarm, for they were hit-and-run affairs and soon ceased altogether. At the international club where the foreign diplomats gathered Talaat was often to be seen serenely playing poker far into the night, and Enver continued to be very confident. He liked to show his visitors his latest trophy from the Dardanelles: an unexploded shell from the Queen Elizabeth mounted on a Byzantine column in his palace garden.
Wangenheim was a masterful figure in Constantinople during these weeks. He would come into the Club in the evening, huge, garrulous and assured, and when the other diplomats gathered round him he would retail the latest news from Potsdam: another 100,000 Russian prisoners taken, a break in the French line on the Marne, another British cruiser sunk in the North Sea. It was known that he had a wireless station attached to his Embassy, and was in direct touch with Berlin, if not with the Kaiser himself.
The other members of the Club were in no position to deny or check any of Wangenheim’s stories; they had no wireless stations of their own and the Turkish newspapers told, them nothing that they could believe. Without Wangenheim’s daily bulletins they were forced to fall back on the small change of local gossip. The surprising thing about this gossip is not that it should have been so cynical, so entertaining and so futile in itself, but that it was so very nearly accurate. Thus someone would report that his doorman — or his cook or his butler — had positive information that the Italian Ambassadress had booked sleepers on the Orient Express; and this surely was a firm sign that Italy was about to declare war at last. Or again it would be some devious story of how Enver had quarrelled again with Liman von Sanders and was about to replace him at the front. There was much talk of peace: the Germans, it was said, had made a secret approach to Russia offering her Constantinople if she would abandon the Allies. Bulgaria, with her army of 600,000 men and her traditional hatred of Turkey was, naturally, very much on their minds, and there was a flurry in the foreign colony when it was learned that the Bulgarian students at the Robert College outside Constantinople had been recalled home by their Government. This, they argued, could hardly have happened unless Bulgaria, too, was about to come into the war. But on whose side? And when? Or was it just another move in the game of bargaining with her neutrality?
On such matters Wangenheim was always ready to comment, to correct and to inform. He was like the boy who has the crib with all the answers in it, and he spoke with a large air of frankness that seemed to put an end to all doubts and speculations.
As the spring advanced he developed the habit of sitting at the bottom of his garden at Therapia, on the Bosphorus, within nodding distance of all who passed by. He liked to stop his acquaintances when they were out walking in the morning and read them tit-bits from his latest telegrams. Soon Morgenthau noticed that when things were going well for the Germans the Ambassador was always there in his accustomed seat by the garden wall, but when the news was bad he was nowhere to be found. He told Wangenheim one day that he reminded him of one of those patent weather gauges equipped with a little figure that emerged in the sunshine and disappeared in the rain. Wangenheim laughed very heartily.
And, in fact, up to the middle of May, there were no reasons for the Germans to be apprehensive about Turkey. Instead of weakening and dividing the Government as in England, the Gallipoli landing had knitted the Young Turks together and made them stronger than ever. Unlike the Allies, the Turks were not obliged to advance in the peninsula; so long as the line held it was unlikely that Bulgaria or Rumania or even Greece would come in against them. The very strain of the war itself was useful; it gave them the right to requisition whatever property they liked, to call up more and more men for active service, to get a tighter control on everybody’s lives. There were now over half a million Turks in the Army, and this force was becoming steadily stronger as the threat from Russia died away; already in May divisions were being withdrawn from the Caucasus to strengthen the front at Gallipoli. The Germans, too, were increasing their garrison in Constantinople and in the peninsula. They had various means of smuggling men and munitions through Bulgaria and Rumania; it was even said that on one occasion a bogus circus was sent from Germany by rail, and the clowns on arrival turned out to be sergeants and their baggage filled with shells. Taube aircraft were flown across from Austria, refuelling at secret landing-places on the way. Soon there was another munitions factory working at Constantinople under German supervision, and guns from the old Turkish warships were dismantled and sent down to the front. Wangenheim in his role of local Kaiser in the German garrison took good care not to expose the Goeben to the British fleet in the Dardanelles; occasionally she went off hunting the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, but for the most part she rode at anchor in the Bosphorus.
Enver, the chief sponsor of the Germans, had great credit for all this. As Minister for War he somehow contrived to make it appear that he personally was responsible for the successful resistance in the peninsula just as he had been responsible for the defeat of the Fleet on March 18. There was not very much that Wangenheim, Talaat or anybody else could do to correct this impression. The young man ballooned up before them. However incredible it might be, the truth was that this boy, who had been born of a fifteen-year-old peasant girl on the Black Sea only thirty-five years before, was now virtually dictator of Turkey. He assumed all the trappings of dictatorship with apparent ease — the sudden tantrums and rages, the personal bodyguard, the uniform (the sword, the epaulettes and the black sheepskin fez), and the ring of subservient generals. Even the Germans in Turkey were becoming a little afraid of him, especially when he went over their heads and corresponded directly with the Kaiser.
There was a macabre incident about this time which shows very clearly how far Enver had travelled and how high he still hoped to go. Early in May he sent for Morgenthau and with a great show of anger told him that the British were bombarding helpless villages and towns in the Gallipoli peninsula. Mosques and hospitals had been burned down, he said, and a number of women and children had been killed. He proposed now to take reprisals; the 3,000 British and French citizens who were still living in Turkey were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps in the peninsula. Enver desired the Ambassador to inform the British and French governments through the State Department in Washington that henceforth they would be killing their own people at Gallipoli as well as Turks.
It was useless for Morgenthau to protest that towns like Gallipoli, Chanak and Maidos were military headquarters and that the Allies had a perfect right to bombard them; the best he could do was to get the women and children excluded from the order. A few days later, when the arrests began, an hysterical horde of French and British civilians descended on the American Embassy. Most of these people were Levantines who had been born in Turkey of British or French parentage and who had never seen either England or France. They gathered in hundreds round the Ambassador whenever he appeared, gesticulating and crying, clutching at his arms, imploring him to save them. After several days of this Morgenthau telephoned to Enver and demanded another interview. Enver replied smoothly that he was engaged in a council of Ministers but would be delighted to see the Ambassador on the afternoon of the following day. The hostages were due to be sent off to the peninsula in the morning, and it was only when Morgenthau threatened to force his way into the council room that Enver agreed to receive him at the Sublime Porte at once.