The bell rang five minutes ago, and my students are mounting a counteroffensive against the approved AP curriculum. We've hit a dull spot known as the Grover Cleveland administration, and they are out to spike all this talk about the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. I don't want to succumb to their treachery. I want to be a good teacher, the kind who gets them to excel on the exam, or at least one who gets them through the Nixon administration.
But the rebellion is on. Students mill about, except Asher, who boldly claims my black swivel chair. He spins around and around in it.
"Coady," says Caleb. "How about 'dem ships?"
Ships? What ships?
"German ships. You promised you'd tell us about German ships."
"Yeah, German ships," says Asher. "You said these German ships got chased in the Mediterranean, and it was crazy, and all this gold was involved."
Not in the standards, I tell them. No German boats in American history.
"World War I," offers Caleb. "That's American history."
Not in 1914 it ain't, I say.
From the far back, a familiar nemesis pounces, "1914! He knows what we're talking about. And he promised us German ships, right?"
It’s Marcus. He is the class Googleman, the tech-enhanced know-it-all who haunts their history teacher’s every waking moment. There he sits, deathly blue light on his face, Yankees hat on his head—racing me for answers, fact-checking my assertions, finding useless tangents to pursue. Worse, he's a Yankees fan, and sadly, there’s no known cure. Right now, he's furiously typing to find the name of the ships. He's got the nationality (German), the year (1914), and the mention of gold. Triangulated, he'll get the names for sure.
Google will cough it up.
Now I'm racing against time and technology.
"Grover Cleveland," I say, rapping my knuckles on the podium while Asher sits in the swivel chair spinning beside me—a portrait of a teacher who has hopelessly lost control. "President number 22 and 24. AKA Big Steve. Or Uncle Jumbo. Notebooks out. Guess what? We're tackling Greenbacks and Mugwumps. Loads of action in that, folks."
I hear a hand smacking a desk top from the back.
"The Goeben!" Marcus jumps out of his seat, nearly losing his stupid Yankees hat. "The Goeben! The Goeben," says Marcus. "The Goeben and…" he looks back down at his screen to make sure. "The Goeben and the Breslau."
Asher, spinning in my swivel chair, stops cold.
"That's right, Coady," he says, shaking his head patronizingly. "The Goeben." He waits a beat. "The Goeben and the Breslau."
He need not say it, but he says it anyway. "Checkmate."
Ok, class, you win.
We’re floating down to planet Earth from way up high. It is night, and the dark mass of the Mediterranean is beneath us. The Great War has not fully broken out, but many of the major players are on the scene, fighting. Flashes of light burst beneath us, courtesy of two German ships, the Goeben and the Breslau. They are cherry-picking French transports carrying soldiers from Algeria.
Softly, we land on the deck of the Goeben.
Moin moin! Now we are German sailors.
It's dark, so you can barely see it, but look aft: big British ships are shadowing us. We tense up. Surely this means that the British will soon fire on us. After all, the British are pals with the French, and we’re sinking French ships. But minutes pass, and nothing happens. Strange.
Asher's hand shoots up from the back.
"That's crazy, Coady," he says. "The Brits don't defend their French pals when they're getting picked off by Nazis?"
Not Nazis. It’s 1914. No Nazis in sight.
"Still, Coady, it's nuts," says Asher. "The British can help out their pals and knock out these bastard ships. What's the hold up?"
The hold up? The hold up is that England is not yet in the war. A single errant shot will bring them into the conflict, and they're not ready for that. This is how it works, Asher. It's a dance, intricate timing, pieces of paper, protocol, and the less enforceable pinkie promise. No treaties have been violated. Belgium sits unmolested. The Brits need a piece of paper to point at before they blow up German ships. Anyway, it’s good for us. We're German sailors now.
Marie shakes her head. "I don't want to be on this ship."
"Would you rather be on the French troop transports?" asks Caleb.
Good point. All we want to do is survive. Our ship is strong: 23,000 tons with a top speed of 27 knots. That's fast! But there’s a hissing sound coming from below deck. A leaky boiler slows us down. We're burning coal fast.
We need to head for the Strait of Messina and coal up, but the strait is a potential trap, and we know it. The British ships can block either end. If they enter the war while we're coaling—which is now a distinct possibility—we'll be stuck inside, sitting ducks. Alas, we have no choice.
No coal, no heat; no heat, no speed.
Into the Strait of Messina we go.
Coaling is nasty, dirty work, made all the more complicated because Italy is not in the war yet. As a neutral power, Italy won't let combatant ships dock. Merchants bring coal out on barges and rob us blind. Dead cows are placed at the bottom to fake the weight. Coal is shoveled over the side, later recovered by divers. We should probably dispute the bill. At the same time, the Italians are not even supposed to be selling the coal they’re partially stealing from us.
Why quibble over 15% spillage? Consider it a tip.
Besides, we’re in a rush.
I tell them that coaling is soul-deadening work.
Natalie, in the front row, breaks into my story.
"Like learning about the Pendleton Act?" she quips.
Oh, yes, Natalie, exactly. Sitting here in this air-conditioned room being humored by your off-topic history teacher is exactly like shoveling coals into buckets, hefting them up on derricks, scooping them into the chutes, and pushing them farther into the ship toward the engine room for 12 straight hours. Sailors on the Goeben and the Breslau work so hard they end up on the deck barely able to breathe, dangerously close to falling into comas.
Did I tell you the boilers of the Goeben are leaking?
Yes, they say, like a million times. Who cares?
The kids don't get it. A broken boiler sounds like a nuisance, like when bread gets stuck in a toaster or a phone charger doesn't work. They're not even sure what boilers do except leak in video games to provide ambience.
Besides, you have a leaky boiler?
Jump online and order a new one, you lazy bastard.
Meanwhile, as we're being cheated by Italian coal merchants, two events happen. One, Germany invades Belgium on their way to France. Because how the hell else are you going to do it? Two, Britain honors its treaty with Belgium, that precious and necessary scrap of paper, and enters the war just as we have locked ourselves into the trap that is the Strait of Messina.
Ordinarily, we might be able to run the British line, but remember, our boilers are leaking. It's the hiss of death. As we head for the eastern exit of Messina, our engines churn, doing their damnedest to build up speed for what awaits us. Coal stokers work demonically to feed the furnace, knowing that pausing even for a moment will slow us and make us an easy target.
Three coal stokers work so hard that they die of exhaustion.
Students gasp. What?!
They’re stunned. In war movies, secondary characters take a bullet to the chest and call out for mom. Extras take one to the head. But dying by shovel?
God, it seems so pointless.
Natalie stares blankly at her desk.
Yes, Natalie, imagine it's your turn to feed the furnace and out come the bodies, laid out like sacks on the deck. Imagine one of them was a sailor named Paul. Back in Düsseldorf, his Gretchen will get a letter; she will have to make sense of the rest of her life. Their infant, Klaus, will never meet his father, Paul. Later, Klaus will invent the circumstances of his father's death, never knowing he shoveled himself to death. What a total and absolute waste.
Paul was a hero, Natalie. He died to keep our Goeben out of danger. Next time you hear about leaky boilers, maybe you won't be so glib.
Now the class is all rooting for the men of the Goeben and Breslau. Forget about the poor French Algerian soldiers we sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean. We on the Goeben are now the underdogs, shoveling ourselves to death, our ship stuck in the Strait of Messina.
Lord, save us.
We're all in this together now, back on the Goeben heading for the eastern end of the Strait, where we get an impossible piece of luck: Nothing is waiting there to harass us. The British don’t block this exit, figuring we'd run west for Gibraltar and the Atlantic. Huge error. We go east instead.
A cheer goes up from the deck. Gott mit uns!
But wait—why are we going east?
The British own the Suez. We'll get trapped in the Mediterranean.
I pull down the map, the one that got all of this chokepoint chatter going in the first place. I put my finger on the Strait of Messina.
Come on, folks. You got this. Where are we heading?
We steam east. British ships close the space between us.
Coal stokers, stoke. Flirt with death. We do our best to keep speed, but no one in London is clear on where we are heading or why.
Finally, we spy our destination: the Dardanelles.
We cut our engines and drift sideways at the sealed door of the Ottoman Empire. Finally, silence. Just the dark water and the hills of Gallipoli and whatever comes next. In the distance, a Turkish destroyer emerges like a puff of dead air from the mouth of the strait.
If an exchange of fire breaks out, we will not get the better of it.
Behind us, the British are closing in, maybe a day or two away.
On the deck of the Goeben, we wait and watch.
Is God with us now? We send our prayers to heaven: Please, let us live.
But it's not God we should be praying to.
Class is over, but the history heads have stayed put. They claim to have a free block, but some of them probably don’t and figure I’ll write passes so they can be late to math. They’ll be sure to drag things out. Fifteen minutes at least.
“How about the gold?” says Caleb.
The gold?
“Yeah, you said there was gold.”
Right, I did say that, didn’t I?
“Forget the gold. What happens to the ships?” says Asher.
“Coady,” says Marie, “I don’t get the Young Turks. Is there a leader, or is it just a bunch of randos?”
My head begins to spin. I’ve been dreading this. I’ve even tried a number of times imagining teaching this part to them—what, exactly, happens after the Goeben cruises to a halt at the mouth of the Dardanelles. Because it’s chaos and makes limited sense. Everything having to do with the Young Turks is a fog. And it’s not just me. They made the German Ambassador so crazy that he stroked out and died after strenuous negotiations. Or they poisoned him. Or not “they,” but one of the Young Turks—Cemal, maybe, who hated the Germans. Not Talat, who is slow-moving. Definitely not Enver, who is pro-German.
You see what I mean. It’s confusing.
The kids sense it: The Young Turks are the perfect vehicle to squander time. There’s no single, definitive leader. Instead, a group of forty starry-eyed hipster-intelligentsia jointly shares power. It’s more like a nightclub than a government. Executive decisions are hoisted onto a select group of twelve, who kick up suggestions to the Three Pashas, though actually there’s a fourth Pasha. It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme. Sound confusing? Yes, it is.
“What’s that have to do with gold, Coady?” says Caleb.
Hold on, we’re not near the gold. Not yet.
“The ships,” says Asher. “What happens to the ships?”
“The ships,” Natalie chimes in. Is she messing with me?
Yeah, right, the ships, the Goeben and the Breslau. They’re at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and the British are closing in on them. They want the safety of the Black Sea. And this is where we have to go back to the Young Turks.
“The forty, the twelve, the three?” asks Caleb.
“Don’t forget about the fourth,” says Asher.
Now I’m sure they’re messing with me. But I don’t care at this point, I just want to get it out of my system and move on.
Forget about the forty and the fourth. Let’s just deal with the three. There’s Cemal, there’s Talat, and there’s—I point to Asher:
“Enver Pasha,” he says.
Correct, Enver Pasha. For our story, he’s the most important. He’s also the most erratic. Talat is sensible, but transactional, and slow to move. Cemal is Pro-French—he hates the Germans. Enver is the only one who’s in for the Germans, but it’s going to be an uphill battle. He doesn’t just have to fight Talat and Cemal; he has to fight his own erratic nature.
“The ships, Coady,” says Asher.
Right, the ships. They’re sitting at the Dardanelles like a gift for the Turks, but it’s actually quite complicated. If they let them in, the British will never forgive them. But if they let them sink, the Germans will never forgive them. They’re forced to make a decision they are in no position to make. They’re the Sick Man of Europe, for chrissakes! What are they supposed to do? Go with the Germans and fling themselves into the cold expanse of Mother Russia? Fat chance.
I’m getting tired. I kick it back to the kids.
So, what can they do?
They can’t let them in. They can’t let them sink.
What do they do?
“Steal them,” says Natalie, probably just randomly.
Holy crap, Natalie, that’s exactly what they do!
Delighted, Natalie fist pumps. I’ve never seen her delighted before.
But it’s a slow-motion steal. First, Enver tells the German ambassador that the only solution is to transfer the ships to Ottoman possession. No one can object to the Ottomans letting Ottoman ships into the Dardanelles and the Black Sea beyond. The Germans hate this, of course. They want their ships safe, but they also want them back. The poor German ambassador, who is now on the verge of a cerebral hemorrhage, drags Enver’s putrid offer to Berlin, gets his ass kicked there, limps it back to Enver in Constantinople, and gets his ass kicked again. That stroke is starting to sound like welcome news. He’s almost there.
But then Enver Pasha does a very Enver-type thing: He announces that the Goeben and the Breslau are now the Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli. He sends a box of red fezzes and a bucket of paint to the ships, and before you know it, the now-Ottoman ships are rising up the fallopian tube for the amniotic sack of the Black Sea. Rapturous crowds cheer them on from both sides of the strait. A week ago, the British stole two of their ships; now, two have magically appeared to replace them. Allah must really be happy with the Turks.
“Wait,” says Caleb. “Germany just accepts that?”
What other choice do they have?
In diplomacy, we call it a fait accompli. In reality, it’s called larceny.
But it’s better than letting the ships sink.
“Not by much,” mutters Natalie.
“So, they’re with Germany now?” asks Marie.
See, no. Not yet. The ships are in the Black Sea, but there’s no fertilization yet. Most of the Young Turks want neutrality. It’s worked well so far. And don’t forget, Cemal hates the Germans, and Talat is slow to move.
But you know what Enver hates even more than he loves Germany? Neutrality. The Germans are kicking ass on the Eastern Front. It’s now or never. Enver goes to work, heading to the German Ambas—
Natalie interrupts, “When is this guy gonna have a stroke already?”
—heading to the German Ambassador and basically says, “Look, the British have seen right through this charade with renaming the ships. It’s so obvious. I think we need to go ahead and buy them from you.”
It’s the first piece of good news the ambassador has heard since he arrived in Constantinople. Only there’s a problem: The Ottomans are broke. They need a loan to buy the ships they’ve basically stolen, but worry not, the Turks will pay the loan right back—with the loan itself! This is before the advent of cryptocurrency. The gold will actually have to be physically sent from Berlin.
Then you will send it right back, ja?
Yes, we send it right back.
You promise, ja?
Totally, we promise.
The Germans send two million Turkish pounds in gold and wait. And wait. And then they wait some more. Folks, that gold ain’t never going home.
Instead, Enver runs around the Sublime Porte, throwing it around, trying to bind the other Young Turks to the cause of Germany.
“And the German Ambassador?” asks Natalie.
Still alive at this point, surprisingly.
Truth be told, Enver’s gold-throwing-spree doesn’t do much. The Young Turks are a pack of feral cats. The rest of Europe can’t wrap its head around it. They assume there must be a single leader at the Sublime Porte when there simply is not. It might have been Talat, but he’s slow-moving. Enver runs circles around him. It could have been Cemal, but his French buddies reject him. He’s weak. Enver is in love with the Germans, and guess what? They love him back. Altogether, it’s a bat-crap-crazy form of diplomacy. It’s also wildly effective.
Everyone is losing their mind.
“Caleb,” says Asher. “We’re changing the name of the band.”
Caleb ignores him. “How does Enver get them to go with the Germans?”
How else? He goes around them, just like the Ottomans moved their ships around that Byzantine chain. He tosses a few more fait accompli cards on the pile, dealt from the bottom of the deck. He doesn’t have the power to run things properly, but he’s high up enough that confused people further down the line follow his orders. He commands the new Ottoman Fleet in the Black Sea to harass and provoke Russian ships into a fight. What the Ottoman fleet then does is even more surprising: They shell the Russian coastline.
It kind of shoots any kind of plausible deniability, doesn’t it? After all, you can pretend to be attacked by another ship; it's hard to keep up the lie that a landmass approached your ship and attacked you first.
“Okay. So now they’re with the Germans,” says Marie.
Yes, now they’re with the Germans. And the British are sick of Ottoman intrigues and declare war on them. All the sides stack up. All it took was some paint, a box of red fezzes, and two million pounds of gold.
“And this is when the German ambassador dies,” says Natalie.
Nope. Still a few more months of suffering to go.
But it is when the Turks close off the Straits. There’s a massive creaking; the hinges are screaming. Then comes that haunted, hollow sound and WHAM!
The Turkish door is closed.
“Enver Pasha,” says Asher with admiration. He enumerates, using his fingers, “Stole ships, stole gold, closed door. Total genius.” He turns to Caleb and says it again: “Bro, we’re changing the name of our band.”
Caleb isn’t having it. “What band? We haven’t practiced in months.”
I look up at the clock: Holy crap! We’re forty minutes into the block.
Asher and Caleb both jump up—evidence that they do not, in fact, have a free block. Now they want passes.
No way, I say. You told me you had a free block.
They’re a frenzy of action, backpacks flying, water bottles dropping. Marie and Natalie—who do have a free block—point and laugh, nearly falling out of their seats as Asher and Caleb plead with me.
No dice. I can’t write a pass. The block is almost over.
“Say we were retaking a test,” says Caleb.
And what kind of modeling would that be? Off-topic teacher lets students blow off math class and then lies about it—in writing?!
The push back: We get caught skipping, we get detention.
Good, I tell them. I’m running detention this week. And get out of my room—I don’t want you seen in there. Don’t tell them you’ve been with me.
“Nice modeling, Coady,” Marie laughs.
Asher and Caleb stand by the door like they’re about to parachute onto the beaches of Normandy. They look both ways, clocking the probabilities that they’ll make it to the library without being scooped up by the dean.
They know it, I know it, Natalie and Marie know it: Probabilities are low.
It’s more than a century later, and the Young Turks are still causing havoc.
