Istanbul, March 1910
The winter receded with a white hush, and the city exhaled into spring: steam from workshops, the soft whistle of trains, the distant hum of wireless towers. Yıldız Palace still kept its old shadows, but the shadows grew different now — mapped, disciplined, networked. Abdulhamid moved among his ministers with a new purpose. Where once he had labored to build schools and factories, now he concentrated on the single hard fact: the world was converging toward a war, and time was a cruel kiln. Four years. That was what his memory told him; four years until the storm would break. There would be no more experiments with sending scientists to foreign universities, no charming trade missions to sway the elites of Europe. The work required another craft: preparation.
He sat for a long time with the census reports and the logistics tables spread before him. The numbers had begun to sing a different song. The second generation of Turks — the boys and girls who had grown exclusively in Latin Turkish classrooms and imperial academies — were entering the age of men. They were tall, literate, trained, and in many places already useful. The state could now count on them not only as taxpaying citizens but as soldiers, engineers, clerks, nurses, and factory hands. Population policy was no longer a promise on paper; it was manpower.
Selim entered, bringing the crisp smell of intelligence and winter roads. He deposited a sealed packet on the table and spoke without ornament. "Majesty, the reports from Crescent Eyes are clear. Europe is aligning; the Entente discussions proceed quietly. They prepare contingencies for Ottoman reaction. Britain watches our oil; Russia eyes Central Asia; France skulks at our borders in Syria. They seek pretexts. We have a few years at most. We must transform the empire from a structure of peacetime industry into a state capable of sustained, modern war."
Abdulhamid tapped the map, touching the rail arteries, the refineries, the wireless nodes. "Then we will make the empire a machine of war that understands its own heartbeat. No scientist will leave us now; no precious engineer will take root in Paris while our yards in Izmit and Galata build the hulls. We keep our knowledge here, we expand our workshops, we teach here in our Turkish halls. The world will have to come to Istanbul to study what it takes to win."
The first order was doctrine. Years of modernization had given the Ottomans steel and oil, but doctrine — the coherent plan for how to feed, move, and command armies in a mechanized age — was a different thing. Abdulhamid convened the generals and the logistics ministers. They designed new tables for daily rations, for fuel consumption per brigade, for train capacity per hour. The railways were recalibrated not as merchant arteries but as military veins. Sidings were laid to conceal troop trains; depots were expanded and camouflaged with timber and earth. Telegraph and wireless stations were assigned military frequencies, encryption routines, and mobile relay wagons to follow advancing columns.
Abdulhamid insisted on three operational priorities: mobility, sustainment, and centralized command. Mobility meant that a division should be able to move across Anatolia in days rather than weeks; sustainment meant depots stocked for months of operations; centralized command meant wireless-linked headquarters with trained signal officers able to issue and adjust orders in near real time. To that end, schools for signal corps and logistics clerks were multiplied. Boys from the Academy who had learned radio theory were folded into signal battalions. Factories that had made textile looms were redeployed to produce rail rolling stock, ammunition boxes, and standardized parts. The Ministry of Industry reported in shocked pride: within six months, they had converted a quarter of the Anatolian ironworks to military production.
He ordered the navy to definitive change: not merely more ships, but integration. Shipyards at Izmit would build hulls; Turkish engineers, trained at the Imperial Arsenal, would supervise. The most crucial naval requirement was fuel: the Ottoman fleet must be independent of foreign bunkering. The Mesopotamian refineries were expanded and new storage caverns dug along secure points of the Aegean and Marmara. The admiral reported preliminary plans for rail-to-ship fuel transfers that would allow squadrons to refuel away from vulnerable foreign commercial docks. Wireless relays were to be installed along the Dardanelles and Bosphorus approaches, creating an early-warning screen to coordinate coastal batteries and torpedo boats.
Army reforms went deeper than men and metal. Conscription was restructured. The new law privileged rapid mobilization — registrars and local deputies were ordered to hold detailed mustering lists with phone and telegraph relay points. The bureaucracy of war, the thing that had failed empires when the first shell fell, was now a project in the Ministry of Interior. Reservists were assigned to rail sectors, oil depots, and telegraph lines based on local skills: wheelwrights to rolling stock depots, blacksmiths to ammunition repair shops. The Sultan did not want raw troops sent to slaughter — he wanted mechanics, munitions workers, telegraph technicians, doctors — a population weaponized for resilience.
Medical capacity received equal attention. In his first life he had seen what disease did to armies. The Academy's medical wing now became the backbone of a national wartime health service. Hundreds of mobile surgical trains were built; they could hook to any rail line and become operating theaters in motion. Vaccine production for typhoid and smallpox was scaled up; water purification units designed in Salonika were mass-produced and stockpiled. Field sanitation teams were trained and drilled. Abdulhamid understood that casualties were not only killed by bullets; poor logistics and disease could annihilate a force long before the enemy's guns did.
Intelligence, always the Sultan's secret passion, evolved from shadows into structure. Crescent Eyes, which had spent years snuffing out local intrigues, now matured into a continental network of trade covers, press contacts, and sympathizers. But the new order avoided the dangerous temptation to station Ottomans abroad in public scientific posts. Instead Crescent Eyes cultivated non-official intermediaries: merchants who traveled legitimately, clerics who visited pilgrimage routes, and diasporic communities that sent letters back home. Their mission shifted to two tasks: sabotage of enemy logistical preparations and denial — burying or misdirecting diplomatic papers, interrupting hostile telegraph lines, corrupting procurement channels so that, when war came, enemy plans would be clogged with false leads.
Another ministry, the Ministry of Stockpile and Reserve, was formed with quiet fanfare. It coordinated caches of crucial materials: steel billets, standardized rounds, radio vacuum tubes, medical supplies, boots, and canned rations. Depots were intentionally decentralized — small, well-hidden stores that could feed local columns for weeks. Engineering corps dug shallow underground caverns and leveled fields to hide stockpiles; oak forests were harvested in discrete lots to avoid alerting foreign forestry monitors. The economy moved to dual belts: consumer production where feasible, and a silent, rolling pivot to military production upon the first mobilization order.
Abdulhamid also rewired the social contract. He issued decrees that framed conscription, factory work, and large families as acts of faith and honor. Patriotic awards were reimagined and publicized; mothers of large families received medals presented at mosque courtyards, priests were asked to deliver sermons equating national service with piety. It was not simply coercion — the Sultan wanted enthusiasm. Propaganda organs were created under the Ministry of Culture: newspapers in French, German, and Ottoman Turkish that emphasized an image of a modern, unified empire — healthy, industrious, and morally resolute. But crucially these publications were almost entirely produced domestically and disseminated across the empire and to neutral foreign readers in controlled channels. He forbade the export of key scientific personnel or critical technical documents abroad to avoid intellectual leakage; knowledge was a national reservoir to be defended.
On the diplomatic front, Abdulhamid practiced a rare kind of ambiguity. He opened discreet back-channels with Germany — not to surrender sovereignty but to obtain naval machinery, technical advice, and contracts for steel exports that would be converted to armor plates. He received envoys with courtesy and returned polite refusals to any request that looked like dependence. He accepted commercial offers that built Ottoman yards and workshops, but he would not allow foreign technical schools to train Ottoman officers en masse in foreign capitals. His message was clear: we can trade for tools, but we will not farm our officers' minds to strangers.
Domestic politics required deft balancing. The Young Turks—once potential rivals—were integrated into the mobilization framework. Many younger reformists now ran logistics offices, manufacturing councils, and recruitment oversight. Abdulhamid's genius here was to convert their energy into state purpose: the government offered responsibility and status, and in return the Young Turks lent administrative capacity and national passion. He avoided purges; blood drawn from internal factions would bleed the war effort later. Instead, he folded their ambitions into the war machine.
Education was explicitly militarized in tone, though not entirely seized by arms. Technical schools added practical courses in munitions, metallurgy, and mechanics; birthright apprenticeships linked students to factories and depots as early as sixteen. The Academy continued to produce high-level engineers but under tighter seals: every graduate pledged an oath of service and non-disclosure for a fixed term. The empire's intelligence succeeded where previous states failed: it sowed loyalty by offering prestige within a national project.
Yet all this concentration raised its own risk. Centralization could be brittle, and Abdulhamid sensed the danger. He ordered redundancy: secondary command centers in Anatolia that mirrored Warsaw-style bunkered posts; duplicate train schedules; alternate fuel reservoirs for fleets; emergency codes rotated weekly. He demanded that the rail timetables have hidden contingency slots and that local governors drill for mobilization quietly but regularly. "Let the enemy study our maps," he said, "but let him never find the clockwork inside."
The last major pillar was economic resilience. Abdulhamid ordered special measures to ensure currency stability, to limit speculation that might ruin wartime procurement, and to create a state buffer of credit by nationalizing certain railway lines and key refineries. He extended favorable contracts to loyal industrialists who would promise production quotas under mobilization. Corrupt Pashas lost privileges; their fortunes were redirected into war trusts. The state increasingly acted like a wartime economy in peacetime, an approach designed to avoid the panic of sudden conversion when war arrived.
Late in spring, the Sultan visited a railroad junction outside Ankara. He watched an exercise: divisions embarked and disembarked, rations loaded, field hospitals attached as if by choreography. It worked. The men moved like cogs in a well-oiled machine. He saw in their faces the new Ottoman generation — steady-eyed, obedient, taught to think in Turkish terms of duty. He felt the promise of four years' work crystallize. The empire would not be perfect on day one of war, but it would be a formidable instrument.
At night, when the lamps were trimmed and the palace fell quiet, he read the foreign press with the same attention as he read logistics tables. The newspapers in London and Paris still debated his character, but now their pages included maps and contingency plans. They were planning; that much was clear. He entrusted Selim with the task of deepening Crescent Eyes' infiltration in those capitals — not by sending Ottomans abroad publicly, but by recruiting local assets: journalists, clerks, shipping agents — men who could access the administrative cogs of the Entente and pass back information. No dangerous scientists would leave Istanbul; instead, emissaries of commerce, of religion, and of the shadow service would gather the intelligence needed to blunt the storm.
By midsummer, a new confidence hummed through the ministries. Factories whispered in a different voice, one of purpose. The Academy produced new fuse designs and metalwork that would standardize ammunition across grades. The radio schools could now manage multiple channels and coordinate blackout protocols. The fleet's fuel reserves were doubled. The people listened when minarets spoke of duty. The bureaucrats turned an abstract census into living readiness.
Abdulhamid's final act that season was less administrative than psychological. He ordered a nation-wide exercise, a public demonstration of mobilization. Trains rumbled on tighter schedules; depot lights dimmed and workers fell into silent, efficient rhythm; radio stations relayed commands across provinces. For one week, the empire practiced war as if for real, and the people watched. The demonstration was a signal to friend and foe: the Ottoman state could become a martial reality quickly.
When the exercise ended, Selim reported quiet satisfaction: "Majesty, we have seen the state at work. We have seen the bones and the flesh moving together. Europe watches and will judge whether we are a threat to be destroyed or a force to be negotiated with. We have built the threat. We must now teach our children how to wield it."
Abdulhamid looked at the map that night, tracing a finger along the rail lines to the Gulf and then east to Persia. The future still unfolded like a storm cloud, but for the first time in many years, he felt not dread alone but a scholar's readiness — not for glory, but for survival. He recalled, as he always did, that his knowledge of the coming war was a sacred burden. He would not squander it. The empire would be a fortress of industry, faith, and logistics by the year the clouds broke.
Outside, Istanbul glowed with lamps fed by Mesopotamian oil. Inside, men planned and worked. The clock ticked toward four years. The Sultan closed the folder on his desk and felt the weight of every decision. No scientist would be sent abroad, no secrets sold. The preparation would be homegrown, disciplined, and hard. The storm was coming, and he would not be caught without a roof.