Free Enemy on the Euphrates by Ian Rutledge Page B

perspective, the right to issue mineral concessions. Although each ayalet would have an imperial governor general, his powers would be strongly circumscribed by the fact that each ayalet would elect its own parliament, which in turn would appoint a cabinet of ‘Heads of Departments’. Moreover, provision would be made ‘to enable the Heads of Departments to employ foreign advisors without reference to the Imperial Government’. This last requirement, coupled with the fact that the five ayalets specified in the scheme were virtually coextensive with those envisaged in both the ‘partition’ and ‘zones of interest’ options, meant that, depending on circumstances, the devolved ayalets could easily be transformed into either of those two alternatives. This advantage of flexibility was explicitly stated in the concluding section of the report.
    We are thus favourably placed, in the event of the complete breakdown of the scheme, for securing our political and commercial interests and indeed there seems to be no valid reason why the division of Turkey into these Ayalets need necessarily preclude an understanding among the Allies as to the areas in which each of them claims to have special interests. 15
    Indeed, as if to already anticipate this eventuality, the map attached to the report showing the geographical extension of each of the five ayalets was already marked with a red line drawn around the ayalets of Iraq and Palestine (including most of the present state of Jordan), delineating what was described as the ‘British Sphere of Enterprise’.
    In reality, given that the five ayalets could employ foreign advisors ‘without reference to the Imperial Government’, the ‘British Sphere of Enterprise’ might well be expected to be even larger. Britain might gain influence in
all
of the ayalets without interference from the Turks, Germans, Russians or French. In short, ‘devolution’ was a solution very close to the old idea of ‘friendly native states’ so dear to the hearts of both Sykes and Kitchener.
    However, by the time the De Bunsen Committee presented its report to the prime minister listing the various alternative methods for sharingout the eastern possessions of the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, the Sick Man himself was unexpectedly beginning to show signs of recovering from his earlier indisposition. On one point Sykes had always been relentlessly emphatic in both his written and spoken commentaries on the Ottoman Empire. Commenting on the behaviour of Turkish troops who had been sent to fight in the Yemen before the war, he observed:
    The Turk as a soldier shows a heroism that no other race can boast: willingness to face any danger is nothing compared with that stubborn sense of duty which makes a man ready to endure eight years of misery in a climate of hell, unpaid, unclothed, ill-fed. Continually at war, with no hope of reward, no bounties, no banquets or encouragement. We who pride ourselves on our army having borne the South African campaign with endurance and fortitude must reverence and respect the Turks who bear ten thousand times more, and consider it as nothing but their ordinary duty. 16
    However, for some reason, Sykes’s appreciation of the Turkish fighting man had not filtered down to Kitchener, Churchill and the British High Command currently embarking on a major escalation of their campaign in the Dardanelles: an amphibious attack on the Gallipoli peninsula. The conventional wisdom to which they subscribed was summed up by one British staff officer: ‘It will be grim work to begin with, but we have good fighters ready to tackle it, and an enemy who has never shown himself as good a fighter as the white man.’ 17 Not only did this expression of racial arrogance display a remarkable ignorance of Ottoman history but it also completely ignored the fact that Britain was no longer fighting an army of spear-wielding ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ but a resourceful enemy equipped with all the accoutrements