The Entente breaks off relations with Turkey

On the morning of 30 October 1914 the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Mikhail Girs, received instructions from Petrograd to demand his passports immediately. This was the response to the Ottoman fleet’s attack on Russian ports on the Black Sea. The Grand Vizier, Said Halim Pasha, pleading indisposition, asked for the meeting to be postponed, so Girs sent him a written note demanding his passports.

The British and French ambassadors, Louis Mallet and Maurice Bompard, had instructions to leave Constantinople together with their Russian colleague if any of them was forced to do so. Both immediately asked the Grand Vizier for a meeting. Said Halim received them that same afternoon. The conversation with Mallet was, as the British ambassador later wrote, painful. The Grand Vizier insisted that he had not known about the attack and that the situation could still be saved. Mallet replied that the time for assurances had passed. That day he telegraphed to London: “Russian Ambassador asked for his passports this afternoon, and my French colleague and I followed his example.” The conditions that London had put to Turkey that day were not met.

Girs left Constantinople on the evening of 31 October. Mallet, at the Grand Vizier’s request, postponed his departure by a day, but the last conversation changed nothing. On the evening of 1 November the British and French, together with the embassy staff, left by train for Dedeagach, today’s Alexandroupolis (PL), then a Bulgarian port on the Aegean Sea. There was confusion at the station, because the military authorities at the last moment stopped many British and French citizens from leaving. They were taken under the protection of the ambassador of the neutral United States, Henry Morgenthau.

The breaking off of diplomatic relations was not yet a declaration of war. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 2 November, and Britain and France on 5 November.