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and composed good looks that never seem to age or reveal the
mind beneath; and indeed, if Talaat is represented by Wallace Beery of the silent films, then Enver most certainly, for all his pertness, is Rudolph Valentino.
    He was born at Adano on the Black Sea coast, the son of a Turkish father who was a bridge-keeper and an Albanian mother who followed one of the lowest occupations of the country—that of
laying out the dead. It is possible that the boy’s exceptional good looks descended to him from a Circassian grandmother, but his other qualities seem to have been peculiarly his own, and
were in a state of remarkable balance with each other. He was extremely vain, but it was a special kind of vanity which was overlaid by an air of shyness and modesty, and his reckless bravery in
action wasoffset by an appearance so cool, so calm and unhurried, that one might have thought him half asleep. In office he exhibited this same quiet distinction of manner,
so that no disaster ever appeared to flurry him, and no decision, however important, caused him more than a few moments’ hesitation. Even his ambition was disguised by a certain ease with
which he moved among people who belonged to a much more cultivated society than his own. With this fluency and this charm it was no wonder that he was made so much of by the hostesses of the time;
here was the young
beau sabreur
in real life, an unassuming young hero. All this was a most effective cover for the innate cruelty, the shallowness and the squalor of the megalomania that
lay beneath.
    From the age of twenty-five or so, when he had graduated from the military staff college in Constantinople, Enver’s career had been tumultuous. His speciality was the overturning of
governments by physical violence, the sudden armed raid on cabinet offices. In later wars he would have made an admirable commando leader. In 1908 he was one of the small band of revolutionaries
who marched on Constantinople and forced Abdul Hamid to restore the constitution, and a year later when Abdul had defaulted in his promises, Enver was back again in the capital, storming the
barricades in a torn uniform, with a four days’ growth of beard and a bullet wound on his cheek; and this time Enver and his friends disposed of Abdul forever.
    Then in the following years, when half the countries of Eastern Europe were demohshing the carcase of the Ottoman Empire, there was no front, however remote, at which Enver did not appear,
dramatically and suddenly, to lead the counter-attack. From his post of military attaché in Berlin he rushed to the Libyan desert to fight the Italians outside Benghazi. Then in 1912 he was
back on the Continent again holding the Bulgars off Constantinople. Nothing dismayed him, no defeat exhausted his endless energy. At the end of the first Balkan war in 1913, when everything was
lost and Constantinople itself in danger of falling, Enver was the one man who would not accept an armistice. He led a band of two hundred followers into the capital, burst inupon the peace-making cabinet at their deliberations, shot dead the Minister for War, and then, having established a new government which was more to his liking, he returned to the
front again. Finally he emerged gloriously at the end of the second Balkan war leading the tattered Turkish battalions back into Adrianople.
    As an administrator his methods were very similar. In the summer of 1913, when he was at the Ministry of War, he dismissed 1200 officers from the Turkish army in a single day, among them no
fewer than 150 generals and colonels. In Enver’s view they were politically unsound.
    There were other leaders among the Young Turks who were probably just as able as Enver: Mahmad Shevket, who led the 1900 march on Constantinople, Djavid, the Jewish financier from Salonika,
Djemal, the Minister for Marine, and several others; but none could compete with Enver’s peculiar brand of political audacity. He out-manœuvred them