Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
Bustány, Oskan, Mahmoud, and Djavid at once carried out their threats
and resigned from the Cabinet, thus leaving the government in the hands
of Moslem Turks. The Grand Vizier, although he had threatened to resign,
did not do so; he was exceedingly pompous and vain, and enjoyed the
dignities of his office so much that, when it came to the final
decision, he could not surrender them. Thus the net result of Turkey’s
entrance into the war, so far as internal politics was concerned, was to
put the nation entirely in the hands of the Committee of Union and
Progress, which now controlled the Government in practically all its
departments. Thus the idealistic organization which had come into
existence to give Turkey the blessings of democracy had ended by
becoming a tool of Prussian autocracy.
One final picture I have of these exciting days. On the evening of the
30th I called at the British Embassy. British residents were already
streaming in large numbers to my office for protection, and fears of ill
treatment, even the massacre of foreigners, filled everybody’s mind.
Amid all this tension I found one imperturbable figure. Sir Louis was
sitting in the chancery, before a huge fireplace, with large piles of
documents heaped about him in a semi-circle. Secretaries and clerks were
constantly entering, their arms full of papers, which they added to the
accumulations already surrounding the Ambassador. Sir Louis would take
up document after document, glance through it and almost invariably drop
it into the fire. These papers contained the embassy records for
probably a hundred years. In them were written the great achievements of
a long line of distinguished ambassadors. They contained the story of
all the diplomatic triumphs in Turkey of Stratford de Redcliffe, the
“Great Elchi,” as the Turks called him, who, for the greater part of
almost fifty years, from 1810 to 1858, practically ruled the Turkish
Empire in the interest of England. The records of other great British
ambassadors at the Sublime Porte now went, one by one, into Sir Louis
Mallet’s fire. The long story of British ascendency in Turkey had
reached its close. The twenty-years’ campaign of the Kaiser to destroy
England’s influence and to become England’s successor had finally
triumphed, and the blaze in Sir Louis’s chancery was really the funeral
pyre of England’s vanished power in Turkey. As I looked upon this
dignified and yet somewhat pensive diplomat, sitting there amid all the
splendours of the British Embassy, I naturally thought of how once the
sultans had bowed with fear and awe before the majesty of England, in
the days when Prussia and Germany were little more than names. Yet the
British Ambassador, as is usually the case with British diplomatic and
military figures, was quiet and self-possessed. We sat there before his
fire and discussed the details of his departure. He gave me a list of
the English residents who were to leave and those who were to stay, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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