The threat of holy war

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd.

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a story about German attempts, headed by the unlovely Kaiser Wilhelm and the glamorous and suitably ruthless Hilda von Einem, to stir up a world-wide Muslim holy war against the Allies during the first world war and ultimately build a vast German empire stretching to India itself? Now Sean McMeekin shows that fiction, after all, was not so far from the truth, and he makes the most of what is a very good story.

He starts in the late 19th century with the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. It drew in some of Germany’s greatest engineers and sucked up huge sums of German money, and in return was meant to spread German influence and sell German goods throughout the decaying Ottoman empire. Kaiser Wilhelm, who never passed up an opportunity to show off on the world stage, rushed to Istanbul in 1898 to assure the introverted and paranoid Ottoman Sultan (who, as Caliph, also claimed to be the supreme spiritual leader to Muslims) that he was the friend of all Muslims for all time. (When Wilhelm tried to present the latest German rifle to the Sultan, the poor creature shrank away in terror of assassination; it was a harbinger of the uneasy and mutually suspicious relationship between their two peoples.)

If the novel has Hilda and the sinister, gorilla-like Colonel Von Stumm, history features a collection of equally formidable German soldiers and improbable ‘eastern’ enthusiasts such as the Kaiser himself and Max von Oppenheim, spoiled rich boy, linguist, explorer, diplomat and anti-Semite (although his ancestors were Jewish bankers). The outbreak of world war in 1914 gave them the opportunity to put their dreams into action.