Although Kitchener was in charge of the War Office, he did not by any means give up his concern for the Middle East; and everybody in the Middle East—including Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar in Khartoum; and Sir Henry McMahon, who had replaced Kitchener in Cairo—still looked to him for advice and direction. Others in the cabinet might be alarmed by the Germans’ swift advance through Belgium, or by the ponderous slowness of Russia’s mobilization, or even by the diminutive size of Britain’s regular army, but some part of Kitchener’s mind was still set on the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal. Despite a secret alliance with Germany, the Turkish government had not declared war, and was in fact vigorously negotiating with both sides in the conflict. Kitchener, who had spent much of his adult life in the Middle East, except during the years 1902–1909 when he was commander in chief in India, still hoped to keep Turkey out of the war, or bring it in on the Allies’ side. He was therefore all the more determined not to admit that the Sinai map survey had been a military expedition, as opposed to an archaeological one. With his formidable memory and his capacity for detail, Kitchener continued to urge the book forward, thus effectively blocking Lawrence (and Leonard Woolley) from joining the army for the moment, and keeping them at their desks in Oxford.

Trying to placate the Turks was all the more important because even before Kitchener had joined the government, Winston Churchill had single-handedly made a decision that brought relations between Britain and Turkey almost to the breaking point. The Turkish navy was so enfeebled after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897 that the then first lord of the admiralty, the second earl of Selborne, on visiting Turkey’s fleet in 1903, announced when he returned home, “There was no Navy!” The army was scarcely in better condition, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Turkey took the extraordinary step of entrusting the modernization of its army to a German military delegation, and of its navy to a British one. To some extent, this can be seen as an attempt to have the best of both worlds—an army trained and equipped by the Germans, and a navy trained and equipped by the British—but it was also symptomatic of Turkey’s attempt to survive by means of a balancing act between the great powers. In order to play the role of a great power in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Turkey would need modern warships, and it thus set out on an ambitious and expensive program to order more than forty ships from European shipyards, of which the two most important were the Reshadiye and the Sultan Osman I.

Laid down in 1911, these were battleships of the British Dreadnought class, among the most powerful and modern warships in the world; the Reshadiye* was built by Vickers, and the Sultan Osman I by Armstrong. The Turks had spread their bet by commissioning each ship from one of the two great rival British arms firms, in the expectation that competition between the two firms would speed up delivery. These two great ships were a matter of intense and widespread national pride—the Turkish government, strapped for cash, had raised the Ј4 million (about $320 million in today’s money) needed to build the ships by asking for public donations. From all over the Ottoman Empire people, even schoolchildren, had contributed toward their purchase, and larger donations were rewarded with a patriotic medal. Both ships were launched late in 1913, and in a charming ceremony the daughter of the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St. James’s “christened” the Reshadiye by breaking a bottle of rose water against the bow, champagne being thought inappropriate for a vessel of a Muslim power. But as the months went by the Turkish government became increasingly alarmed by the long delays in fitting the ships’ armament, and in endless gunnery and speed trials. By August 1914, however, the ships were at last ready for delivery, and Turkish crews were on hand to take them over and hoist the Turkish flag; but before they could do so, on August 1, 1914, armed British troops and naval personnel seized both battleships and raised the White Ensign on each stern. As every day brought Britain closer to war, Churchill, determined not to let two modern battleships go into the hands of a government allied with Germany, had boldly made the decision to “requisition” the two great ships, which were immediately incorporated into the Royal Navy as HMS Erin and HMS Agincourt.

The reaction in the Ottoman Empire to this high-handed act was widespread anger—the ships had been paid for by public subscription, and Turkey was still a neutral country. “In Constantinople the seizure seemed an act of piracy,” in the words of Martin Gilbert. Historians still debate the wisdom of Churchill’s impulsive decision, but of course there was no easy answer. If Turkey was going to join the Central Powers anyway, then seizing its battleships was the right thing for the British to do; if there had been any chance at all of Turkey’s joining the Allies or staying neutral, then it was clearly the wrong thing to do. As first lord of the admiralty, Churchill thought it was better to be safe than sorry regarding two powerful warships.

The act would almost immediately have grave and unforeseen consequences. In the first days of the war two fast, powerful German warships were in the Mediterranean, hotly pursued by a superior but slower British fleet. The German battle cruiser SMS Goeben and the smaller SMS Breslau, both under the command of Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, having failed to prevent the convoy of French troops from North Africa to France, steamed east and managed to outrun and evade the British fleet sent to sink them. “As the shadows of the night fell over the Mediterranean the Goeben increased her speed to twenty-four knots,” wrote Churchill in Volume 1 of The World Crisis, “… shook off her unwelcome companions and vanished gradually in the gathering gloom.” Having thrown off his pursuers, Souchon paused to take on coal from German freighters at Messina; then, instead of entering the Adriatic to seek shelter in an Austro-Hungarian port, as the British expected him to do, he set course instead for Gallipoli, where on arrival he urgently requested permission from the Turkish government to pass through the strait. After several hours of intense diplomatic negotiations the two Germanwarships were permitted to enter the Dardanelles, and were led through the minefields by a Turkish destroyer. They were now safely in neutral waters, and on August 16 they anchored off Constantinople, where, to almost universal astonishment, both ships were immediately commissioned into the Turkish navy, their German crews raising the Turkish flag and changing into Turkish uniforms, with a fez to replace the uniform cap. Thus, in less than two weeks, the Turks had lost two battleships and replaced them with two German cruisers—one of the cruisers, the Goeben, almost the equivalent of a battleship in strength and speed. Practically speaking, this had no immediate effect on the war—although the German ships and their crews could easily dominate the antiquated Russian warships in the Black Sea—but it was a brilliant propaganda coup for the Germans, whose popularity in the Ottoman Empire soared as a result. To most people it seemed to ensure that Turkey would join the war immediately on the side of the Central Powers.

Disenchantment soon set in. Despite the Turkish flag and the fezzes, it began to dawn uncomfortably on some of the less pro-German members of the Turkish government that all of Constantinople was now threatened by the 12.5-inch guns of the Goeben. Still, Turkey showed no sign of entering the war as the great battles of the late summer of 1914 shook the nerves of all those who had believed that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. In the west, the vaunted attack of the German right wing through Belgium—intended to drive to the Channel, destroy the British Expeditionary Force, then cut south to separate the French armies of the north from Paris—came to an abrupt end within sight of the Eiffel Tower at the Battle of the Marne. From September 5 to September 12, this battle produced hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides and a bloody stalemate that would endure for four years. In the east, the equally vaunted “Russian steamroller,” the avant-garde of an army of 6 million men, entered East Prussia and met with a bloody and decisive defeat at Tannenberg, between August 23 and September 2, exposing the incompetence of the Russian high command, as well as the fecklessness and indifference of the czar and his advisers. Illusions were shatteredfrom one end of Europe to the other, among them any remaining shred of belief in Berlin that Turkey was a trustworthy or reliable ally.