World War One: A Short History Read Free Page A

the first instance, to declare their interests. In alliance, in 1912, they attacked, winning in a few weeks, clearing the Ottoman army from the Balkans. Then, in a second Balkan war (1913) they fell apart among themselves, and fought again.The Turks staged a recovery, but the victors were Serbia, which cooperated closely with Russia, and Greece, which cooperated closely with Great Britain.
    When China had been disintegrating, ten years before, the Powers had also been rivals, but the rivalry was naval. If the Ottoman empire was disintegrating – and almost no one now expected it to last – then the rivalry would be nearer home and would involve land connections and armies. For Russia, the straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara or the Dardanelles between the Marmara and the Aegean were vital: the windpipe of the Russian economy. Ninety per cent of grain exports went through, and much else came in, to keep going the industries of southern Russia. During the Italian war, in 1911–12, the Turks had closed the Dardanelles; there had been an immediate economic stoppage in southern Russia. To get security at the Straits was a vital matter for Russia, and early in 1914 the Entente Powers forced the Turks to grant a status close to autonomy to the partly Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia. This (and the parallel Anglo-French interest in the Arab provinces) might easily have spelled the end of the Ottoman empire, as the Christian Armenians might become Russian instruments. Before the treaty could be ratified, the Turks opened a line to Berlin.
    Germany was the Power that threatened them least – quite the contrary, the Kaiser paraded himself as protector of Islam and gave the Sultan a vast, Germanic railway station on the Asian shore of Istanbul as a sign of approval and support. At the end of 1913 a German general, Liman von Sanders (son of a converted Jew, and therefore considered in wooden Berlin thinking to be suitable for the Orient), became in effect commander of an Ottoman army corps, placed at the Straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The Russians reacted against this, but they could not stop the sending of a German military mission to Turkey – several dozen specialist officers –and in any case the chief figure in the new regime at Istanbul was very clearly the Germans’ man: Enver Pasha, who spoke German almost perfectly and had the kind of military energy that the Germans admired. He and other ‘Young Turks’ generally came from the Balkans and had learned at first hand how ‘nation-building’ was carried on there – a new language, militarism, expulsion of minorities. Germany was the magnet for them, whereas France or England were the models for their political opponents. For the moment, given the despair that followed upon the Balkan Wars, it was Enver and his friends who were in the ascendant, and they invited Liman von Sanders. A Russian nightmare was a Germany in charge of the Straits, and the arrival of that German military mission at Sirkeci station in December 1913 marked the beginning of the countdown to war, eight months later.
    Russia might dread German control of the Straits. But there was also a German dream of empire – or, more correctly, a Central European dream, because Austria-Hungary had also long sought commercial and political influence in the Near East, and Austro-Hungarian trade was not far behind Germany’s. One of the great international wrangles of the era had concerned a German-sponsored railway, linking Berlin and Baghdad – the Kaiser’s gift of a station was part of this – and by 1914 a new German embassy had been built in Istanbul (known as ‘the bird cage’ from the ostentatious eagles on the roof), glowering down over the Bosphorus at the Dolmabahce Palace, where skulked the resentful puppet Sultan, whom Enver and the Young Turks treated as furniture. Hitherto, Russo-German rivalry had been somewhat indirect, to do with tepid German support for