Had the war continued into 1919 the British Fleet would have made another attempt to force the Dardanelles. In 1918 Admiral Wemyss had been installed as First Sea Lord, and Keyes was in command of the Dover Patrol. They had obtained the cabinet’s consent to the new assault, and were actually engaged in assembling the ships when they were forestalled by the Armistice. It was signed with the Turks in the harbour of Mudros on October 30, 1918, twelve days before the cessation of hostilities in France. A fortnight later an Allied flotilla steamed up the Dardanelles, a long grey line of silent ships watched silently by the Turkish gunners on the cliffs, and an occupation force was put ashore.
Talaat and Enver did not wait for the end. Shortly before the Armistice they were ousted by a provisional government, and while all the waterfront at Constantinople was hung with Greek flags in expectation of the arrival of the Allied Fleet they fled to Germany. Talaat made his home under another name in Berlin, and from there in 1921 he sent a message to Aubrey Herbert in England suggesting that they should meet. The rendezvous took place at Hamm in Germany, and Talaat proposed an Anglo-Turkish alliance. He agreed that he had made mistakes — that the Young Turks should never have joined the Germans — but that, he said, was past and done with; the important thing was that Britain was losing everything she had gained in Turkey by failing to come to an agreement with Mustafa Kemal.
The two men talked at great length, and it did not seem to Herbert that Talaat, even in these circumstances when his voice could only be a voice in a void, was absurd or even particularly pathetic. He was thinner and he was obviously poor, but the shrewdness remained, the hardness and the subtlety. Herbert said he could do no more than report to the Foreign Office, and Talaat went off in the Berlin train.
Talaat was wrong in one important aspect of his argument, for the past was not nearly done with yet. A few days later he felt a tap on his shoulder as he was walking in the street in Berlin, and turning round he saw the strained white face of a young Armenian student. This boy, Solomon Telririam by name, was in that instant the apotheosis of the ruined Armenian race. As a child he had seen his father stripped and murdered by the Turks, his mother and sisters put on the road for the Mesopotamian desert only to be raped and butchered by their guards. Someone had picked him up unconscious from the ground, and somehow he had made his way through Russia to Berlin. There, he said later, he had a vision: his mother was standing over him saying, ‘You know Talaat is here. But you seem quite heartless and are not my son.’ And now in the street, having looked for a second into the gypsy face, the boy took a revolver from his pocket and blew out Talaat’s brains.
Both Liman, who was now living in retirement in Germany, and Talaat’s widow gave evidence at the trial — Liman to defend the reputation of himself and the German soldiers who were in Turkey at the time of the Armenian massacres, and the widow to plead for her husband’s name. Yet no one had the ghost of a chance of exonerating Talaat on this issue. One of the telegrams sent to a provincial Turkish commander was read in court. The officer had asked for the name of the place to which he was to send the Armenians whom he had rounded up. Talaat replied, ‘The place where they are being sent to is nowhere.’
Enver too had set out for Germany at the collapse in 1918, and soon after he was gone he was condemned to death in Constantinople. He made his way across the Black Sea to Odessa, and thence overland through the chaos of the Balkans to Berlin. He soon grew tired of the wretched life of a refugee in a defeated capital, and in 1919 he returned to Russia to try his fortune with the Soviets. For a while he was with General Denikin in the struggle for the independence of the Caucasus, but when Denikin negotiated with the Allies he went to Azerbaijan. During 1920 and 1921 he was employed at Moscow as the director of the Asiatic department of the Soviet government, and he attended a conference at Baku as the leader of the communist movement in the Middle East. From this point on the story grows obscure; he was constantly reported dead only to appear again. In the end, however, it appears that he turned against the Russians, and he is said to have met his death leading a cavalry charge against them in the mountains of Russian Turkestan in 1922. He was then in his early forties.
Liman remained in command of the Turkish Army on the southern front in Syria until he was defeated by Allenby in 1918, when he handed over the command to Kemal and returned to Constantinople. There he surrendered to the Allies, and was interned in Malta until the summer of 1919. In the ten years that were left to him (he was already sixty at Gallipoli), he enjoyed a dignified and respected retirement, and the private rages which, one feels, lie just below the surface in such a controlled character were his own affair. He died a few years before Hitler came to power and left a name as a military strategist which was hardly less admired in Britain than it was in Germany.
Of Kemal’s own fabulous rise to power there are of course very full accounts, but perhaps his first triumphs at the Dardanelles were as important to him as any others. When towards the end of the campaign he arrived in Constantinople ill and exhausted not even Enver’s opposition could prevent the Turkish newspapers from greeting him as ‘The Saviour of Gallipoli’.
In August 1916 a Royal Commission was set up in London to investigate the Gallipoli campaign. General Monro, who was then on his way to India to become Commander-in-Chief, was the first witness, and in the ensuing year nearly 200 others were called to give evidence: Churchill and Hamilton, de Robeck and Keyes, Stopford and Fisher, all the generals and admirals, and finally the War correspondents, Nevinson, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Kitchener, who by then was dead,[39] was the only major figure who did not put his case. At the end of 1917 the Commission’s report came out, and it stated its general conclusions very clearly: ‘… from the outset the risks of failure attending the enterprise outweighed its chances of success.’ General Monro was congratulated upon the evacuation: it was, the Commission said, ‘a wise and courageous decision.’
Dealing with the Suvla landing, the Commissioners expressed the view that General Stopford might have kept in closer touch with his troops, but Hamilton, they thought, had only increased his difficulties by intervening on August 8. ‘We regard the intervention,’ the report stated, ‘as well-intentioned but injudicious.’ In short, the general conclusion was that the campaign was a mistake, and that even with better luck and better management, it could hardly have succeeded.
In 1917 the Dardanelles Commissioners were not ideally placed for taking an historical view of the campaign, for there was then still another year of trench warfare to be fought in France, and the Russian revolution had not yet taken its full effect; and so it may not have been altogether apparent then that there were worse things in the world than the loss of half a dozen old battleships in the Dardanelles, or the weakening of the French front by a few extra divisions which might have made all the difference at Gallipoli.
It was apparent only that the Allies had been incomparably the losers. During the 259 days that elapsed between the first landings in April 1915 and the final withdrawal in January 1916 they sent half a million men to Gallipoli, and slightly more than half of these became casualties. There is some doubt about the exact number of the Turkish losses, but they are officially computed at 251,000, which is just one thousand less than those suffered by the Allies; and this perhaps is the best indication of how closely the struggle was fought.[40]
39
On June 5, 1916, he sailed in the
