Fall 1907 - The October Constitution
Enver Pasha, right-hand of the Sultan and darling of the People, war hero and revolutionary, cringed at the wave upon wave of adulation rising from the jubilant crowd. He was at heart a modest man, a man who preferred to do as he was told, to take pride in his work and not in the admiration of others. That simple professionalism had gotten harder and harder which each rung of the Turkish military he climbed. Generals and colonels turned from the strategic situation and to the political one. It was the petty back-biting that had led him into the Frenchman's quiet reading club.
He was one of the only military men there, in Monsieur de Montluzin-Sauzay's salon as he called it. Mostly they were journalists, academics, men of letters and ideas. There were a few nascent industrialists. A few Jews. None of the old Anatolian warrior-aristocracy. Just a few like-minded soldiers tired of the endemic corruption and incompetence of their fellows.
The man talked of revolution even as he served as the Padishah Sultan's 'groveling slave.' Oh, he spoke of it in the abstract...as a theory of revolution, replete with examples from his own homeland, insights on what had worked, what had failed, how to do it again.
The men who gathered there found themselves drawn to each other outside of M. de M.'s salon. Like they shared a secret desire or a secret knowledge. It could be better...it could all be better.
By and by a plan was hatched. In the later stages, the Frenchman was brought in, but he waived them off, pointing out that any true reform had to come from the Turkish people and could not be imposed by a foreign interloper. He himself knew that if the plan was initiated, he would fall, possibly to death, and yet the man did nothing to stop it, in fact, he cleared the way.
Enver did not know how the sailor's pay had been delayed, just when they were stationed in the capital city. The French spider had strings running to every bureau of his reformed civil service, yet they always snapped if you tried to follow them to the center. He himself had not given the order for the old man to be captured or killed. It had fallen to some functionary overzealous in his desire to demonstrate loyalty to the new regime.
But that was all past now. The head they had brought the Palace was another's. None dared speak of it in those uncertain days, and it was burned and the skull smashed.
Now the second phase had begun. The Sultan and his camarilla had played right into their hand, declaring fealty to a foreign power, and capitulating without a single battle fought. He was an old man, the Padishah, and not suited for rule. He had not been raised to it, and wanted nothing of its burdens. The Army and the Navy were furious.
It was easy for Enver Pasha to issue the secret order, passed from hand to hand, occasionally via one-time-pads for riskier hand-offs. None wanted the already once humiliated Ottoman Empire to prostrate itself completely.
And it had been a success thanks to the assistance of Austria and the diplomatic groundwork laid by M. de M. in his last months. Now Enver's star was higher than it had ever been, higher than any other man in all of Turkey, now was the time, the time of Destiny.
He mounted Destiny, and rode her with workman-like competence. He was at heart a modest man. He did not want glory, he wanted only a constitution for his people, a basic and timeless law that would enshrine the values and principles of fairness and diligence he cherished like his very breath.
He got his constitution. The absolute power of the House of Osman was broken. The Turkish people were free.