The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920
By Eugene Rogan, Allen Lane, 512 pages, £25
The last thing the people of the Ottoman empire needed in autumn 1914 was another war. In the six years leading up to that calamitous year they had seen a sultan deposed and their immense and immensely inefficient army battered.
In several bruising wars, they had ceded Libya to Italy and all their European territories — including what is now Bulgaria, large chunks of Greece, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania — to independence. Now their Young Turk leaders were siding with Germany, because the Kaiser looked most likely to help them regain some of that lost territory, or at least avoid the dismantlement of the empire.
The consequences of that decision — the great war that shaped the Middle East, the conflict that made the war global — form the grand tale that Eugene Rogan tells in his latest book.
Readers of his previous work, “The Arabs” , will know how comfortably he handles multiple themes, ambitious narratives and a crowd of characters. Writing about the collapse of an empire that, in 1914, still included all of what is now Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demands those skills, and more. Finding something new to say about a conflict that one of its most famous participants described as “a sideshow of a sideshow” would seem to be a challenge, especially with other books recently published on the subject.
Some of these have looked at individual theatres, most obviously the Arab revolt, while others (such as Kristian Coates Ulrichsen’s “The First World War in the Middle East”) cover the entire war. So what does Rogan bring to the subject?
For one thing, he has extensive background knowledge, as one would expect from the director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University . To this he has added extensive research. Most histories of the Middle East in this period have been written from a western point of view, because British, French and German archives have been open longer and are, for the most part, more accessible.
Rogan has drawn on little-used Ottoman and Arab material. He has also brought a clarity of vision and of description to the war, whether sketching out the intentions of military commanders and the effects of their plans on the ground, or when choosing a chapter title.
“Annihilation of the Armenians”, for instance, will win him no friends among those Turks still in denial about the genocide, for it describes with depressing clarity the plan of Talaat Pasha, the Turkish leader, and his advisers Dr Mehmed Nazim and Dr Behaeddin Shakir: that there should be nothing less than “the annihilation of the vast majority of Ottoman Armenians” in order to ensure there would not be enough of them left to fight for an independent homeland.
Turkish authors, including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have recently faced jail on treason charges for alluding to the genocide. As Rogan tells it, participants in the Middle East had different reasons for entering the conflict: the British fought to secure the Suez canal and the Gulf oilfields; the Turks feared Russian encroachment and hoped to regain territory lost before the great war; the Germans sought to destabilise the British empire, the Russians coveted Istanbul and Anatolia...
Rogan examines these larger geopolitical motives while also giving a human face to the military engagements that they created, using a wide range of voices — from a low-ranking Ottoman medic, to an Australian poet, an Arab from Jerusalem and an emir from the Hejaz.
The story needs these voices to make poignant the consistent bungling by commanders, and equally consistent bravery of soldiers (and the hardship) on all sides — as, for instance, when the poorly equipped Turkish Third Army fought the Russians in the Caucasus, in the snow, with neither heavy coats nor boots; or when British planners underestimated the strength of Ottoman defences along the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, with enormous loss of life.
Some of this is already familiar: the account of the Arab revolt adds little to what has been told before. But even the familiar has resonance, such as General Maude’s insistence to the battered people of Baghdad that his soldiers were “liberators”. Or foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s declaration that the British government would favour the creation of a Jewish homeland so long as it did not infringe on “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Or the cynical German manipulation of an Ottoman call for jihad against Britain, in an attempt to rouse Indians against the crown.
That resonance adds relevance to this thorough and absorbing book, because it reminds us that the postwar Middle East settlements were as flawed as the conditions imposed on Germany, and that in turn explains why the land they fought over then is still being contested today.
Guardian News & Media Ltd
Anthony Sattin’s “Young Lawrence” is published by John Murray.
