Chapter 287: No Surrender, No Retreat!
Talaat Pasha, the leader of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, which was the largest and most powerful of the groups known under the umbrella term of the "Young Turks," sat in an office within the city of Constantinople.
His face was haggard and weathered and his hair greying. He looked far older than a man his age should. For instance, though a mere five years older than Bruno, making him 41 as of this year 1915, he appeared as if were a decade older than his actual age.
This was in stark contrast to Bruno, whose naturally youthful appearance made him appear as if he were not a day over thirty, that despite being closer to the age of 40, than he was that which he portrayed.
Why was Talaat so aggressively aged? Because the last few years had not quite gone as he had expected. Since putting a fierce end to Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s reign of terror with the Young Turks Revolution during the previous decade, the Ottoman Empire, or more specifically the Young Turk, had failed to achieve the majority of their aims.
Sure, the Sultan’s autocracy came to a swift and bitter end, but the constitutional monarch who replaced him was murdered in the streets of Constantinople by Ultra-Orthodox militants who had kicked off the Balkan Wars shortly after the Ottoman Army had gotten its ass handed to them by the Italians in Libya not a year prior.
Since then, it had been a string of military disasters, substantial political losses, and now a crippling economic situation as the trade which the Ottoman Empire had largely been reliant on to keep itself stable had collapsed with the onset of the Great War.
The Ottomans owed a substantial debt to the German Reich, who was also one of their largest trading partners. But after finding themselves at war with the Germans, any and all trade was ceased, while the Naval Supremacy of the Central Powers had blockaded most of the major trade outlets between the Turks and their other trading partners.
If that weren’t bad enough, Armenia fell within the first few months of the war, and Anatolia was currently a stalemate, forcing Ottoman forces to bleed by the tens of thousands with each passing month.
Then there was the fact that the Arab peoples were in open rebellion and taking their wrath out upon Ottoman infrastructure, which was critical to keeping the war effort going. And as if things could not possibly get worse, the Greeks and Russians landed an Army on the shores of Eastern Thrace a stone’s throw away from the Capital, while the Austro-Hungarian and Germans pushed further into their lands from the west.
No matter how much the man who was the man more or less orchestrating the affairs of the Ottoman Empire tried to think through a solution to these never-ending series of crisis which no doubt threatens to tear the very fabric of his realm apart, he could not do so.
Negotiating a favorable surrender was impossible. The Greeks had never forgiven the Turks for what happened in 1453, nor had the Balkans as a whole after centuries of invasion, occupation, enslavement, and outright oppression of the region by the hands of previous Sultans.
They would not be satisfied unless the Turks were expelled from Constantinople and all lands west of its glory. And perhaps they might even try to press ancient claims to Ionia and the surrounding regions that had in the distant past been Greek colonies of the ancient Hellenic world.