Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/95

 and Islamic opinion, would "liberate" 40,000,000 "Turks" then "groaning under the heel of the Russian oppressor" and would emerge from the war a Great Power extending from the Balkans to Bokhara. The Arabs to the south would be hammered into that respect for the Caliphate which they had once manifested, but the Turks' real future lay away to the east. So the Enver Ministry concluded its secret agreement with Germany, the British Government seized the two Ottoman battleships which were building in British yards, and Germany was soon to run the Goeben and Breslau into the Straits to take their places.

To Kemal and Rauf, the latter of whom had brought his crew home from one of the two seized battleships in England, Enver's Pan-Turanianism was a program which the Empire could not afford. Both of them were Westerners, but their Westernism was hard and practical and close to the ground. Within the limits imposed upon them by the Caliphate, which made the Empire the leader of Islam, they held that the Turk's first duty was to his own country. Russia having entered the war in Europe, a defense of the eastern frontier would be necessary but the Empire's internal condition made it essential that events in Europe should not be permitted to carry it further than a state of armed neutrality. In the country's bankrupt condition, the Enver Ministry had secured the promise of German loans on condition that it participated in the war against Germany's enemies, and Rauf went to the British Embassy immediately on his return to Constantinople, to say that payment by the British Government for the two battleships it had