The Sleepwalkers (44 page)

If political causes do not weaken or dissolve the Ottoman Empire, it, within two or three years, will have a powerful fleet that would render more difficult for us and perhaps even impossible an enterprise against Tripoli . . .
²³

The most striking feature of this last argument is the total absence of any foundation for it. The Ottoman government was, to be sure, striving to upgrade its obsolete fleet; an order had been placed for one modern battleship from England and another was in preparation for a purchase from Brazil. But these modest efforts were dwarfed by Italian naval construction plans, not to mention the current strength of the Italian fleet, and there was no reason to suppose that they would ever unsettle Italy's comfortable naval superiority over the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean.
²⁴
San Giuliano's argument was thus founded less in the facts of the naval balance of power than in a kind of temporal claustrophobia that we find at work in the reasoning of many European statesmen of this era – a sense that time was running out, that in an environment where assets were waning and threats were growing, any delay was sure to bring severe penalties.

So it was that, after a sequence of minor naval skirmishes, the signal to stand by rang out on 3 October 1911 across a squadron of Italian warships moored before Tripoli harbour. An Italian commander on board one of the ships recalled ‘a rush of gunners to guns, of carriers to ammunition rooms, of signalmen to the speaking-tubes'. Ammunition lifts raised to the batteries the white shells, tipped with red, which were laid out in neat lines behind each gun. At exactly 3.13 in the afternoon the
Benedetto Brin
fired the first shell at the Red Fort that stood on the spit of land enclosing Tripoli harbour. It was the signal for a gigantic volley that ‘boomed across the sea in clouds of white smoke'.
²⁵
The city of Tripoli fell after perfunctory resistance and was occupied by 1,700 Italian marines only forty-eight hours after the commencement of hostilities. The occupations of Tobruk, Derna, Benghazi and Homs followed over the next few weeks. In the following months, Italian troops, 20,000 at first, later increasing to 100,000, descended on the thinly defended
vilayet
of Tripolitania.

The ‘rapid liquidation' San Giuliano had hoped for did not come about. The Italians found it difficult to break into the interior of the country and for the first six months of the war remained confined to their coastal bridgeheads. An Italian decree of 5 November formally announcing the ‘annexation' of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was a gesture intended to pre-empt premature mediation by the other powers, not a faithful reflection of the military situation. In a succession of naval actions off the Lebanese coast in January and February 1912, the Italians destroyed the Ottoman naval presence at Beirut and eliminated the only remaining threat to Italian naval dominance in the southern Mediterranean. But the land war dragged on amid hair-raising reports of Italian atrocities against the Arab population. Despite their technological inferiority, the Ottoman defenders and their auxiliaries inflicted bruising defeats on the invaders. A series of concentric Turco-Arab attacks on the Italian perimeter around Tripoli during the first month of the war broke through the lines at various points, destroying some units and exacting high casualties, while armed ‘rebels' inside the perimeter harassed the defending forces from behind.
²⁶
Throughout the conflict, small skirmishes, ambushes and guerrilla warfare impeded movement between the main coastal strongholds or into the interior. It would take the Italians twenty years to ‘pacify' the Libyan hinterland.

San Giuliano had seen that the invasion and seizure of Libya might have a disinhibiting effect on the Christian states of the Balkan peninsula. If this outcome was probable after the initial invasion, it became inevitable when Italy attempted to break the stalemate on land by taking the sea war into Ottoman home waters. On 18 April 1912, Italian gunboats bombarded the two outer forts guarding the entrance to the Turkish Straits. The gun crews fired 346 shells from moorings seven miles off shore, killing one soldier and one horse, and damaging a barrack. It was a symbolic demonstration, rather than a real blow at the enemy's military strength. The Turks responded, predictably enough, by closing the Straits to neutral commerce.

Ten days later, there was a further naval attack on the Dodecanese Islands at the southern end of the Aegean Sea; between 28 April and 21 May 1912, the Italians seized control of thirteen islands, whose Greek natives greeted them as heroes and liberators. After a lull, the Italians stepped up the pressure in July, sending eight submarines into the Straits. Once again, there was talk of a Turkish closure, though on this occasion Constantinople agreed under Russian pressure merely to narrow the width of the channel by laying mines. In October 1912, the Italian government threatened to launch a major naval campaign in the Aegean if the Ottoman government did not agree to conclude a peace. Under pressure from the great powers – and especially Russia and Austria, who were concerned, respectively, by the disruption to shipping and the growing danger of Balkan complications – the Turks finally caved in and signed a secret peace treaty on 15 October stipulating the autonomy of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. An Imperial
Ferman
(decree) of the same date announced the withdrawal of Ottoman direct rule from the lost provinces. Three days later, this arrangement was publicly confirmed in the Treaty of Lausanne.
²⁷

The Italo-Turkish War, today largely forgotten, disturbed the European and international system in significant ways. The Libyan struggle against the Italian occupation was one of the crucial early catalysts in the emergence of modern Arab nationalism.
²⁸
It was the powers of the Entente that had encouraged Italy to this bold act of unprovoked predation, while Italy's partners in the Triple Alliance reluctantly acquiesced.
²⁹
There was something revelatory in this constellation. The interventions of the powers exposed the weakness, indeed the incoherence, of the Triple Alliance. The repeated warnings from Austria and Berlin that Italy's action would unsettle the entire Balkan peninsula in dangerous and unpredictable ways were ignored. Italy, it seemed, was an ally in name only.

There was as yet no overt hint of Italy's later defection to the Entente. Italian foreign policy still played a complex and ambiguous game in which contradictory commitments were precariously balanced. The traditional rivalry with France over northern Africa still seethed below the surface. Sensational naval incidents, such as the impounding by Italian naval craft of French steamers suspected of carrying Turkish arms and military personnel ensured that the war stirred mutual bitterness and paranoia between Italy and its long-resented Latin
sorellastra
(stepsister).
³⁰
Nonetheless, the war confirmed an insight of great importance to Paris and London, namely that Italy was, for the moment, a more valuable asset to the Entente inside the Triple Alliance than outside it. In a letter of January 1912 to premier Raymond Poincaré, Paul Cambon noted that Italy was ‘more burdensome than useful as an ally':

Against Austria she harbours a latent hostility that nothing can disarm and, as regards France, we have reasons to think that in the event of a conflict, she would remain neutral or more likely would await events before taking part. It is thus unnecessary for us to attach her more closely to us . . .
³¹

Underlying the disarray of the Triple Alliance was a development of even more fundamental importance. In mounting her assault on Libya, Italy had the more or less reluctant support of most of Europe. This in itself was a noteworthy state of affairs, for it revealed how comprehensively the pro-Ottoman European coalition had dissolved. In the 1850s, a concert of powers had emerged to contain Russian predations against the Ottoman Empire – the result was the Crimean War. This grouping had reconstituted itself in different form after the Russo-Turkish War at the Conference of Berlin in 1878 and had regrouped during the Bulgarian crises of the mid-1880s. It was now nowhere to be seen. In the opening phase of the Italian war, the Ottoman Empire had sought an English alliance, but London, reluctant to alienate Italy, did not respond. The two Balkan Wars that followed then broke the concert beyond repair.
³²

A transition of profound significance was taking place: Britain was gradually withdrawing from its century-long commitment to bottle the Russians into the Black Sea by sustaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. To be sure, British suspicion of Russia was still too intense to permit a complete relaxation of vigilance on the Straits. Grey refused in 1908 to accede to Izvolsky's request for a loosening of the restrictions on Russian access to the Turkish Straits, notwithstanding the Anglo-Russian Convention signed in the previous year. Right up until 1914, the Ottoman fleet on the Bosphorus was still commanded by a Briton, Admiral Sir Arthur Henry Limpus. But the gradual loosening of the British commitment to the Ottoman system created by degrees a geopolitical vacuum, into which Germany equally gradually slipped.
³³
In 1887, Bismarck had assured the Russian ambassador in Berlin that Germany had no objection to seeing the Russians ‘masters of the Straits, possessors of the entrance to the Bosphorus and of Constantinople itself'.
³⁴
But after the departure of Bismarck in 1890 and the slackening of the traditional tie to Russia, Germany's leaders sought closer links with Constantinople. Kaiser Wilhelm II made lavishly publicized journeys to the Ottoman Empire in October 1889 and again in October 1898, and from the 1890s German finance was deeply involved in Ottoman railway construction, first in the form of the Anatolian Railway, later in the famous Baghdad Railway, begun in 1903, which was supposed on completion to connect Berlin via Constantinople to Ottoman Iraq.

A structural continuity underlay this Anglo-German changing of the guard. The problem of the Straits – which is another way of describing the problem of containing Russian power in the eastern Mediterranean – would remain one of the constants of the modern European system (if we leave aside the brief interlude of 1915–17, when France and Britain sought to bind St Petersburg to the wartime coalition by promising Constantinople and the Turkish Straits to Russia). It was still in evidence after 1945, when Turkey was shielded against potential Soviet aggression by her alliance with the United States. This critical strategic commitment has meant that Turkey, though it remains excluded from the EU, has been a member of NATO since 1952. The gradual replacement of Britain by Germany as the guardian of the Straits at
this
particular juncture was of momentous importance, because it happened to coincide with the sundering of Europe into two alliance blocs. The question of the Turkish Straits, which had once helped to unify the European concert, was now ever more deeply implicated in the antagonisms of a bipolar system.

By the time the Ottomans sued for peace with Italy in the autumn of 1912, the preparations for a major Balkan conflict were already well underway. On 28 September 1911, the day Italy delivered its ultimatum to Constantinople, the Serbian foreign minister warned that if the Italo-Turkish War were to be protracted, it would inevitably bring Balkan repercussions.
³⁵
Almost as soon as the Italian declaration of war became known in October 1911, arrangements were put in train for a meeting between representatives of the Serbian and Bulgarian governments to discuss a joint military venture.
³⁶
A first Serbian draft of a treaty of alliance with Bulgaria spelling out the provisions for an offensive war against Turkey was complete by November 1911. The defensive Serbo-Bulgarian alliance signed in March 1912 was followed by an openly offensive one in May, just as Italy was seizing the Dodecanese. The Serbo-Bulgarian accords were focused mainly on military objectives against Ottoman south-eastern Europe, but they also foresaw the possibility of combined action against Austria-Hungary.
³⁷
Around the Serbo-Bulgarian core, a secret Balkan League now coalesced whose purpose was to expel the Turks from the peninsula. The peace negotiations between Italy and the Ottoman Empire were still dragging on when the League states began mobilizing for a general Balkan War. Hostilities opened on 8 October 1912 with a Montenegrin attack on Ottoman positions. On 18 October 1912, just as the peace of Lausanne was being signed, King Petar I issued a royal declaration announcing that he had ‘by the grace of God ordered [his] brave army to join in the Holy War to free our brethren and to ensure a better future'.
³⁸

The war that broke out in the Balkans in October 1912 had been foreseen by nearly everyone. What astonished contemporary observers was the swiftness and scope of the victories secured by the Balkan League states. Battles flared up across the peninsula as Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and Montenegrin armies advanced on the Ottoman strongholds. Geography dictated that the fulcrum of the Bulgarian war would be in Eastern Thrace, whose broad undulating plains narrow into the isthmus at the end of which Constantinople stands. Into this area the Bulgarians poured nearly 300,000 men – approximately 15 per cent of the country's total male population (in all, just over 30 per cent of Bulgarian males were mobilized during the First Balkan War).
³⁹
At Kirk-Kilisse (Lozengrad), a battle raged for three days along a thirty-six-mile front stretching eastward from the Ottoman fortress of Edirne (Adrianople). Led by the exceptionally energetic Dimitriev, who was known as ‘Napoleon' on account both of his small stature and his preference for leading from the heat of battle, the Bulgarian infantry attacked with great determination and ferocity. When the Ottomans fell back in disarray, the Bulgarians followed through mud and heavy rain until they reached country for which they lacked good maps or reconnaissance – their commanders had never expected them to get this far. The Bulgarian onslaught broke at last on the Chataldja line of fortifications, only twenty miles from Constantinople. Here, on 17 November 1912, with the capital city at their backs, the Ottomans held the line, deploying accurate artillery fire to inflict appalling casualties on the advancing lines of infantry, and repelling wave after wave of assaults. This was as close as the Bulgarians would ever get to Constantinople.