With this bad news Keyes returned to de Robeck in the Queen Elizabeth which was lying just outside the straits. The captains of both the Irresistible and the Ocean had already been taken off their ships and were with the Admiral when Keyes arrived. A sharp discussion ensued. Keyes said exactly what he thought about the loss of the Ocean and her failure to take the Irresistible in tow, and he asked for permission to go back and torpedo the Irresistible. The Ocean, he thought, might be salvaged. De Robeck agreed, and after a quick meal Keyes set off again in one of the Queen Elizabeth’s cutters. It was now dark and he was unable to find the Wear but fell in with the Jed instead, and in this destroyer he steamed back into the straits.
The scene in the Dardanelles now was extremely eerie. All was silent on either shore, and except for the Turkish searchlights that kept sweeping back and forth across the water there was no sign of life anywhere. For four hours the Jed cruised about hunting for the two lost battleships. She crept close in to the Asiatic shore, and with the aid of the enemy searchlights probed into every bay where the Irresistible and the Ocean might have gone aground. But there was nothing to be seen or heard: nothing but this extraordinary silence, the utter lassitude of the battlefield after the day’s fighting is done. To Keyes it was an exhilarating experience.
‘I had,’ he wrote later, ‘a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 p.m. I knew he was beaten at 4 p.m. — and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting must, and could, be overcome.’
In the early hours of the morning Keyes, in this uplifted state of mind, steamed back to the Queen Elizabeth.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE attack on the Dardanelles could hardly have happened at a worse time for the Turks. In the five months that had elapsed since they had gone to war nothing had gone well with them. In the south Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, had fallen to the British, and the expedition into Egypt had ended in a miserable fiasco; a few exhausted and bewildered troops managed to reach the Suez Canal but they were easily driven off and not many of them got back to the oases of Palestine alive.
In the east things were even worse. It was Enver’s notion that Turkey should launch an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus with the Third Army stationed at Erzerum, and he decided to lead the expedition himself. Before leaving for the front he discussed his plan with Liman von Sanders, and the antagonism between the two men seems to have gathered impetus from this moment. Liman pointed out that Enver was proposing to take his troops across the mountains at Sarikamish in mid-winter, when the passes were blocked with snow, and that he had made no arrangements for his lines of supply. All this had no effect whatever upon Enver; he would proceed according to his plan, he said, and after the Russians had been defeated he would advance upon India through Afghanistan. Liman von Sanders has written a sober account of his experiences in Turkey, and he rarely permits himself an emotional expression. This last piece of information, however, undermined his calm. ‘Enver,’ he said, ‘gave utterance to fantastic ideas.’
The details of the battle of Sarikamish, on January 4, 1915, have never been fully known, for there was no one to record them and the news of what had happened was suppressed in Turkey at the time. The official figures, however, reveal that of the ninety thousand Turks who set out on the expedition only twelve thousand returned. The others were killed, captured, died of hunger or were frozen to death. Enver, a sad travesty of the Napoleon he so longed to emulate, abandoned what was left of the army in the field and came back through the winter snow across the Anatolian plain to resume his post at the Ministry of War in Constantinople. Outwardly he remained as calm as ever, and nothing was said about the disaster at Sarikamish or the subsequent outbreak of typhus in the broken army.
There followed in Constantinople a ludicrous attempt to proclaim a Jehad — a Holy War — against all Christians in the Near East (Germans and Austrians excepted), and German missions were sent as far off as Afghanistan to intrigue against the British. But nothing now could disguise the fact that Turkey’s war effort had come to a standstill. The Treasury was empty, the Army’s requisitions of private property were becoming more and more severe, and among civilians there was apathy everywhere. According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister, the Germans were in some considerable anxiety that at the next blow the Turks might start negotiating in secret for a separate peace.
It was in these low circumstances that the news of the bombardment of the Dardanelles arrived.
In a time of crisis the morale of the civilians in a city which has not yet been touched by war is seldom as high as it is among the soldiers in the frontline; but in March Constantinople excelled itself. In the absence of any reliable information from the Dardanelles rumours began to spread, and they gathered an astonishing virulence as they went along. Forty thousand British soldiers were about to land on the Golden Horn. The women would be raped. The whole city was about to go up in flames.
‘It seems so strange now,’ Henry Morgenthau wrote later on, ‘this conviction in the minds of everybody then — that the success of the Allied Fleets against the Dardanelles was inevitable, and that the capture of Constantinople was a matter of only a few days.’
For two centuries the British Fleet had gone on from one victory to another, it was the one wholly unshakeable power in the world; what hope was there that a handful of old guns on the Dardanelles could hold it back?
In early March the exodus from Constantinople began. The state archives and the gold in the banks were sent to Eski-Shehr, and some attempt was made to bury the more valuable art treasures underground. The first of two special trains, one for the Sultan and his suite, the other for the foreign diplomats, stood ready at Haidar Pasha on the Asiatic shore, and the more well-to-do Turks began to send their wives and families into the interior, by every means they could find.
They were hardly to blame for these precautions, for Talaat himself was utterly despondent. As early as January he had called a conference of Liman von Sanders, Admiral Usedom, the German who was in command of the coastal defences, and Bronsart, the German chief-of-staff of the Army. All had agreed that when the Allied Fleet attacked it would get through. Now in March, Talaat had requisitioned a powerful Mercedes car from the Belgian Legation, and it was packed and equipped with extra petrol tanks, ready for his departure. Since the distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles it was judged that the first British warships would appear off the Golden Horn within twelve hours of their arrival in the Sea of Marmara.
Among the diplomats too there was much apprehension. The German Embassy, a huge yellow pile of stone, stood on a particularly exposed point at the head of the Bosphorus, and Wangenheim, all his earlier courage gone, was convinced that it would be shelled. He had already deposited some of his baggage with Morgenthau for safe keeping on neutral American ground. ‘Let them dare to destroy that Embassy,’ he exclaimed to Morgenthau one day. ‘I’ll get even with them. If they fire a single shot at it we’ll blow up the French and the British Embassies. Go tell the British Admiral that, won’t you? Tell him also that we have the dynamite ready to do it.’