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Yet elsewhere on their massive panorama the Ottomans performed well. Churchill believed that the deadlock on the western front and the Russian retreat could be reversed by knocking out the Ottomans, so he instigated a landing in the Dardanelles to seize Constantinople. But an able colonel, Mustafa Kemal – later Atatürk, the creator of Türkiye – routed the ill-coordinated military and naval forces (though with huge Ottoman losses), a debacle that made Kemal and brought down Churchill. As British forces protected the new oilfields in Persia, an Allied army advanced from Basra towards Baghdad, but at Kut the Ottomans surrounded it and forced its surrender. ^*

Arab nationalists in Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem, finally seeing a chance to escape Ottoman rule, plotted against the Three Pashas, who launched a genocidal campaign against ethnic traitors. In January 1915, blaming the Armenians for their earlier defeats, Enver, Talaat and Jemal ordered the killing of all Armenians, whom they suspected of pro-Russian sympathies. First they murdered notables in Istanbul, then they unleashed their paramilitary Special Organization, which killed around a million Armenians.^* ‘The Armenian question,’ Talaat boasted, ‘no longer exists.’ The Assyrians – a Christian sect – were also slaughtered by the Special Organization. The Kurds in the Hamidiye regiments joined the killing; other Kurds were deported and killed. In Damascus and Beirut, the pashas hanged Arab nationalists, while in Arabia two dynasties made their moves: Hussein of Mecca, thirty-seventh in descent from Muhammad, had waited a long time to get power in Hejaz, the western coast. Obstinate, vain and autocratic, the sixty-one-year-old Hussein believed that he and his Hashemite family should succeed the Ottoman sultans not just in Arabia. He sent his energetic eldest son, Abdullah, to offer the British an Arab revolt against the Turks. But his intrigues alarmed the rival Saudi family in Najd, eastern Arabia, where Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the tall, energetic sheikh who hated the Hashemites, pushed the British to recognize his fiefdom as independent.

In 1915, the British, facing slaughter in Flanders, defeat at Kut and in the Dardanelles, encouraged both Hashemites and Saudis to join the Allies. Abdulaziz resisted, but Hussein, negotiating through his sons Abdullah and Faisal, now demanded a vast hereditary kingdom encompassing not just Arabia but also today’s Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The British excluded Jerusalem and slices of Palestine but agreed in principle.^* Simultaneously, the British started to negotiate a Jewish homeland in Palestine with a Zionist leader, a Russian-born chemist, Chaim Weizmann, who, aided by two Rothschild wives, Dolly and Rózsika,^* discovered that Lloyd George and the aristocratic ex-prime minister, now first lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour were already sympathetic to a Jewish return to Judaea.

Both negotiations were designed to maximize support at a desperate time, and both were subordinate to traditional imperial power plays in which the British, French and Russians agreed, in a Sykes–Picot–Sazanov pact, to divide the Ottoman empire, with the British getting Palestine and Iraq, the French Damascus and Beirut, and the Romanovs swathes of Ottoman territory plus the jewel, Constantinople.

THE KAISER’S SCROTUM: HINDENBURG AS DICTATOR

In June 1916, as the fighting was at its most desperate on the western front, Tsar Nicholas’s forces shattered the Austrians, who were rescued by the Germans just in time. Decisively, Nicholas’s Guards – the Romanov praetorians – were obliterated. In every country, sluggish politicians were replaced by warlords, ready to wage total war. The kaiser had lost control almost immediately, preposterously instructing, ‘Issue the order to fix bayonets and drive the bastards back,’ in a war dominated by mud and dynamite. But he did understand the new savagery, demanding that French civilians should ‘be ruthlessly strung up’, Russian prisoners left to starve. Willy remained sequestered at headquarters. Suffering a swelling on his scrotum, twelve and a half inches in circumference, until his doctors managed to operate, he was simultaneously suffering furuncles (boils) on his face, possibly signs of porphyria. His condition was exacerbated by disillusionment with Falkenhayn, who questioned whether his rival, the sixty-four-year-old Hindenburg, commander in the east, ‘has the desire and the courage to take the post’ of chief of the general staff in his place.