Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [242]
Like many young officers in the years before 1914, Atatürk dabbled in secret societies which swore to give the empire a modern constitution. He shared the hopes of the revolution of 1908, and the disappointments when it failed to make the empire stronger.14 In 1908 Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria declared its independence. In 1911 Italy, the weakest of the European powers, declared war and seized Libya. After the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, Albania, Macedonia and part of Thrace, including Salonika, were gone. By 1914 the European part of the empire, which had once stretched into Hungary, was reduced to a small enclave in Thrace tucked under Bulgaria. In six years, 425,000 square miles had been lost.
When the Great War started, Atatürk was enjoying life as a diplomat in Bulgaria. He went to his first opera in Sofia; fifteen years later, he put an opera house into the plans for his new capital of Ankara. He took up ballroom dancing; later, in his new republic, civil servants were made to dance at official balls because “that was how they do it in the West.” At the beginning of 1915, he was offered command of a new division which was being thrown into the defense of the Gallipoli peninsula. Many Allied reputations were destroyed at Gallipoli; his was made. As the author of the official British history later wrote, “Seldom in history can the exertions of a single divisional commander have exercised, on three separate occasions, so profound an influence on the course of a battle, but perhaps on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.” 15
The Constantinople Atatürk found at the end of the war was very different from the city he remembered. There was no coal and very little food. A Turk who was a boy at the time remembered his mother struggling to feed the family: “It seemed to us that we had lived forever on lentils and cabbage soup and the dry, black apology for bread.” The government was bankrupt. On street corners distinguished officers sold lemons because their pensions were worthless. And more refugees were pouring in: Russians fleeing the civil war, Armenians searching desperately for safety, and Turks abandoning the Middle East and Europe. By the end of 1919 perhaps as many as 100,000 were sleeping on the streets of the city. The only Turks who prospered were black marketeers and criminals. Crazy rumors swept through the city: one day crowds rushed to Santa Sophia because it was whispered that Christian bells were being hung again.16
Local Greeks, intoxicated by the hope of restored Hellenic rule, hung out the blue-and-white flag of Greece; a giant picture of Venizelos went up in one of the main squares. The Greek patriarch sent aggressive demands to Paris, denouncing the Turks and demanding that Constantinople be made Greek again. His office told Greek Christians to stop cooperating with the Turkish authorities. The Greeks were, said an English diplomat, “apt to be uppish.” 17 Some hotheads jostled Turks in the streets and made them take off their fezzes.
Allied officers and bureaucrats arrived in increasing numbers to supervise the armistice. “Life,” recalled a young Englishman, “was gay and wicked and delightful. The cafes were full of drinking and dancing.” In the nightclubs, White Russians sang melancholy songs and pretty young refugees sold themselves for the price of a meal. You could race motor-boats across the Sea of Marmara, ride to hounds on the Asian side of the Bosphorus and pick up wonderful antiques for pennies. The Allies unofficially divided up Constantinople into spheres of influence and took over much of its administration; they ran the local police and set up their own courts. When the Turkish press