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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10881 ***
+
+CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS
+
+
+BY E.F. BENSON
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Preface_
+
+
+In compiling the following pages I have had access to certain sources of
+official information, the nature of which I am not at liberty to specify
+further. I have used these freely in such chapters of this book as deal
+with recent and contemporary events in Turkey or in Germany in
+connection with Turkey: the chapter, for instance, entitled 'Deutschland
+über Allah,' is based very largely on such documents. I have tried to be
+discriminating in their use, and have not, as far as I am aware, stated
+anything derived from them as a fact, for which I had not found
+corroborative evidence. With regard to the Armenian massacres I have
+drawn largely on the testimony collected by Lord Bryce, on that brought
+forward by Mr. Arnold J. Toynbee in his pamphlet _The Murder of a
+Nation_, and _The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks,_ and on the pamphlet
+by Dr. Martin Niepage, called _The Horrors of Aleppo_. In the first
+chapter I have based the short historical survey on the contribution of
+Mr. D.G. Hogarth to _The Balkans_ (Clarendon Press, 1915). The chapter
+called 'Thy Kingdom is Divided' is in no respect at all an official
+utterance, and merely represents the individual opinions and surmises of
+the author. It has, however, the official basis that the Allies have
+pledged themselves to remove the power of the Turk from Constantinople,
+and to remove out of the power of the Turk the alien peoples who have
+too long already been subject to his murderous rule. I have, in fact,
+but attempted to conjecture in what kind of manner that promise will be
+fulfilled.
+
+Fresh items of news respecting internal conditions in Turkey are
+continually coming in, and if one waited for them all, one would have to
+wait to the end of the war before beginning to write at all on this
+subject. But since such usefulness as this book may possibly have is
+involved with the necessity of its appearance before the end of the war,
+I set a term to the gathering of material, and, with the exception of
+two or three notes inserted later, ceased to collect it after June 1917.
+But up to then anything that should have been inserted in surveys and
+arguments, and is not, constitutes a culpable omission on my part.
+
+E.F. BENSON
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Contents_
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLAH
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+'THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED'
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter I_
+
+
+THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS
+
+The maker of phrases plies a dangerous trade. Very often his phrase is
+applicable for the moment and for the situation in view of which he
+coined it, but his coin has only a temporary validity: it is good for a
+month or for a year, or for whatever period during which the crisis
+lasts, and after that it lapses again into a mere token, a thing without
+value and without meaning. But the phrase cannot, as in the case of a
+monetary coinage, at once be recalled, for it has gone broadcast over
+the land, or, at any rate, it is not recalled, and it goes on being
+passed from hand to hand, its image and superscription defaced by wear,
+long after it has ceased to represent anything. In itself it is
+obsolete, but people still trade with it, and think it represents what
+it represented when it came hot from the Mint. And, unfortunately, it
+sometimes happens that it is worse than valueless; it becomes a forgery
+(which it may not have been when it came into circulation), and deceives
+those who traffic with it, flattering them with an unfounded possession.
+
+Such a phrase, which still holds currency, was once coined by Lord
+Aberdeen in the period of the Crimean War. 'Turkey is a sick man,' he
+said, and added something which gave great offence then about the
+advisability of putting Turkey out of his misery. I do not pretend to
+quote correctly, but that was the gist of it. Nor do I challenge the
+truth of Lord Aberdeen's phrase at the period when he made it. It
+possibly contained a temporary truth, a valid point of view, which, if
+it had been acted on, might have saved a great deal of trouble
+afterwards, but it missed then, and more than misses now, the essential
+and salient truth about Turkey. The phrase, unfortunately, still
+continued to obtain credit, and nowadays it is a forgery; it rings
+false.
+
+For at whatever period we regard Turkey, and try to define that
+monstrous phenomenon, we can make a far truer phrase than Lord
+Aberdeen's. For Turkey is not a sick man: Turkey is a sickness. He is
+not sick, nor ever has been, for he is the cancer itself, the devouring
+tumour that for centuries has fed on living tissue, absorbing it and
+killing it. It has never had life in itself, except in so far that the
+power of preying on and destroying life constitutes life, and such a
+power, after all, we are accustomed to call not life, but death. Turkey,
+like death, continues to exist and to dominate, through its function of
+killing. Life cannot kill, it is disease and death that kill, and from
+the moment that Turkey passed from being a nomadic tribe moving
+westwards from the confines of Persia, it has existed only and thrived
+on a process of absorption and of murder. When first the Turks came out
+of their Eastern fastnesses they absorbed; when they grew more or less
+settled, and by degrees the power of mere absorption, as by some failure
+of digestion, left them, they killed. They became a huge tumour, that
+nourished itself by killing the living tissues that came in contact
+with it. Now, by the amazing irony of fate, who weaves stranger dramas
+than could ever be set on censored stages, for they both take hundreds
+of years to unravel themselves, and are of the most unedifying
+character, Turkey, the rodent cancer, has been infected by another with
+greater organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is
+threatened by a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its
+crab-pincers into the cancer that came out of Asia. Those claws are
+already deeply set, and the problem for civilised nations is first to
+disentangle the nippers that are cancer in a cancer, and next to deprive
+of all power over alien peoples the domination that has already been
+allowed to exist too long.
+
+The object of this book is the statement of the case on which all
+defenders of liberty base their prosecution against Turkey itself, and
+against the Power that to-day has Turkey in its grip.
+
+Historical surveys are apt to be tedious, but in order to understand at
+all adequately the case against Turkey as a ruler and controller of
+subject peoples, it is necessary to go, though briefly, into her
+blood-stained genealogy. There is no need to enter into ethnological
+discussions as to earlier history, or define the difference between the
+Osmanli Turks and those who were spread over Asia Minor before the
+advent of the Osmanlis from the East. But it was the Osmanlis who were
+the cancerous and devouring nation, and it is they who to-day rule over
+a vast territory (subject to Germany) of peoples alien to them by
+religion and blood and all the instincts common to civilised folk. Until
+Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a
+champion of murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and
+literature and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare
+with the anachronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, in August 1914,
+there was hoisted the German flag, superimposed with skulls and
+cross-bones, and all the insignia of piracy and highway robbery on land
+and on sea, and Germany showed herself an anachronism worthy to impale
+her arms on the shield of the most execrable domination that has ever
+oppressed the world since the time when the Huns under Attila raged like
+a forest fire across the cultivated fields of European civilisation.
+To-day, in the name of Kultur, a similar invasion has broken on shores
+that seemed secure, and it is no wonder that it has found its most
+valuable victim and ally in the Power that adopted the same methods of
+absorption and extermination centuries before the Hohenzollerns ever
+started on their career of highway robbery. But like seeks like, and
+perhaps it was not wholly the fault of our astonishing diplomacy in
+Constantinople that Turkey, wooed like some desirable maiden, cast in
+her lot with the Power that by instinct and tradition most resembled
+her. Spiritual blood, no less than physical blood, is thicker than
+water, and Gott and Allah, hand-in-hand, pledged each other in the cups
+they had filled with the blood that poured from the wine-presses of
+Belgium and of Armenia.
+
+For centuries before the Osmanli Turks made their appearance in Asia
+Minor, there had come from out of the misty East numerous bodies of
+Turks, pushing westwards, and spreading over the Euphrates valley and
+over Persia, in nomadic or military colonisations, and it is not until
+the thirteenth century that we find the Osmanli Turks, who give their
+name to that congregation of races known as the Ottoman Empire,
+established in the north-west corner of Asia Minor. Like all previous
+Turkish immigrations, they came not in any overwhelming horde, with
+sword in one hand and Koran in the other, but as a small compact body
+with a genius for military organisation, and the gift, which they retain
+to this day, of stalwart fighting. The policy to which they owed their
+growth was absorption, and the people whom they first began to absorb
+were Greeks and other Christians, and it was to a Christian girl,
+Nilufer, that Osman married his son Orkhan. They took Christian youths
+from the families of Greek dwellers, forced them to apostatise, gave
+them military training, and married them to Turkish girls. It was out of
+this blend of Greek and Turkish blood, as Mr. D.G. Hogarth points out,
+that they derived their national being and their national strength. This
+system of recruiting they steadily pursued not only among the Christian
+peoples with whom they came in contact, but among the settlements of
+Turks who had preceded them in this process of pushing westwards, and
+formed out of them the professional soldiery known as Janissaries. They
+did not fight for themselves alone, but as mercenaries lent their arms
+to other peoples, Moslem and Christian alike, who would hire their
+services. This was a policy that paid well, for, after having delivered
+some settlement from the depredations of an inconvenient neighbour, and
+with their pay in their pocket, they sometimes turned on those who had
+hired their arms, took their toll of youths, and finally incorporated
+them in their growing empire. Like an insatiable sponge, they mopped up
+the sprinklings of disconnected peoples over the fruitful floor of Asia
+Minor, and swelled and prospered. But as yet the extermination of these
+was not part of their programme: they absorbed the strength and manhood
+of their annexations into their own soldiery, and came back for more.
+They did not levy those taxes paid in the persons of soldiers for their
+armies from their co-religionists, since Islam may not fight against
+Islam, but by means of peaceful penetration (a policy long since
+abandoned) they united scattered settlements of Turks to themselves by
+marriages and the bond of a common tongue and religion.
+
+Their expansion into Europe began in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, when, as mercenaries, they fought against the Serbs, and fifty
+years later they had a firm hold over Bulgaria as well. Greece was their
+next prey; they penetrated Bosnia and Macedonia, and in 1453 attacked
+and took Constantinople under Mohammed the Conqueror. Still true to the
+policy of incorporation they continued to mop up the remainder of the
+Balkan Peninsula, and at the same time consolidated themselves further
+in Asia Minor. By the beginning of the seventeenth century their
+expansion reached its utmost geographical limits, but already the Empire
+held within it the seeds of its own decay, and by a curious irony the
+force that should still keep it together was derived not from its own
+strength, but from the jealousies of the European Powers among
+themselves, who would willingly have dismembered it, but feared the
+quarrels that would surely result from the apportionment of its
+territories. The Ottoman Empire from then onwards has owed its existence
+to its enemies.
+
+Its weakness lay in itself, for it was very loosely knit together, and
+no bond, whether of blood or religion or tongue, bound to it the
+assembly of Christian and Jewish and non-Moslem races of which it was so
+largely composed. The Empire never grew (as, for instance, the British
+Empire grew) by the emigration and settlement of the Osmanli stock in
+the territories it absorbed: it never gave, it only took. From the
+beginning right up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it has
+been a military despotism, imposing itself on unwilling and alien tribes
+whom it drained of their blood, and then left in neglect until some
+further levy was needed. None of its conquered peoples was ever given a
+share in the government; they were left unorganised and, so to speak,
+undigested elements under the Power which had forced them into
+subjection, and one by one the whole of the European peoples included in
+that uncemented tyranny have passed from under Turkish control. Turkey
+in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to the Sea of
+Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt has been lost, Tripoli also, and the
+only force that, for the last hundred years has kept alive in Europe the
+existence of that monstrous anachronism has been the strange political
+phenomenon, now happily extinct, called the Balance of Power. No one of
+the Great Powers, from fear of the complications that would ensue, could
+risk the expulsion of the Turkish Government from Constantinople, and
+there all through the nineteenth century it has been maintained lest the
+Key of the Black Sea, which unlocked the bolts that barred Russia's
+development into the Mediterranean, should lead to such a war as we are
+now passing through. That policy, for the present, has utterly defeated
+its own ends, for the key is in the pockets of Prussia. But all through
+that century, though the Powers maintained Turkey there, they helped to
+liberate, or saw liberate themselves, the various Christian kingdoms in
+Europe over which at the beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey
+exercised a military despotism. They weakened her in so far as they
+could, but they one and all refused to let her die, and above all
+refused to give her that stab in the heart which would have been implied
+in her expulsion from Constantinople.
+
+For centuries from the first appearance of the Osmanlis in north-west
+Asia Minor down to the reign of Abdul Hamid, the Empire maintained
+itself, with alternate bouts of vigour and relapses, on the general
+principle of drawing its strength from its subject peoples. Internally,
+from whatever standpoint we view it, whether educational, economic, or
+industrial, it has had the worst record of any domination known to
+history. Rich in mineral wealth, possessed of lands that were once the
+granary of the world, watered by amazing rivers, and with its strategic
+position on the Mediterranean that holds the master-key of the Black Sea
+in its hands, it has remained the most barbaric and least progressive of
+all states. Its roads and means of communication remained up till the
+last quarter of the nineteenth century much as they had been in the days
+of Osman; except along an insignificant strip of sea-coast railways were
+non-existent; it was bankrupt in finance and in morals, and did not
+contain a single seed that might ripen into progress or civilisation.
+Mesopotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, capable of
+supporting not itself alone, but half the civilised world: nowadays,
+under the stewardship of the Turk, it has been suffered to become a
+desert for the greater part of the year and an impracticable swamp for
+the remainder. Where great cities flourished, where once was reared the
+pride of Babylon and of Nineveh, there huddle the squalid huts of
+fever-stricken peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved living
+from the soil that once supported in luxury and pomp the grandeur of
+metropolitan cities. The ancient barrages, the canals, the systems of
+irrigation were all allowed to silt up and become useless; and at the
+end of the nineteenth century you would not find in all Mesopotamia an
+agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and
+the flails of more than two thousand years ago. But so long as there was
+a palace-guard about the gates to secure the safety of the Sultan and
+his corrupt military oligarchy, so long as there were houris to divert
+their leisure, tribute of youths to swell their armies, and taxes wrung
+from starving subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not one of
+those who held the reins of government who cared the flick of an eyelash
+for the needs of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for the
+cultivation of its soil that would yield a hundredfold to the skilled
+husbandman, or for the exploitation and development of its internal
+wealth. While there was left in the emaciated carcase of the Turkish
+Empire enough live tissue for the cancerous Government to grow fat on,
+it gave not one thought to the welfare of all those races on whom it had
+fastened itself. Province after province of its European dominions
+might be lost to it, but the Balance of Power still kept the Sultan on
+his throne, and left the peoples of Asia Minor and Syria at his mercy.
+They were largely of alien religion and of alien tongue, and their
+individual weakness was his strength. Neglect, and the decay consequent
+on neglect, was the lot of all who languished under that abominable
+despotism.
+
+With the accession in 1876 of Abdul Hamid, of cursed memory, there
+dawned on the doomed subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire a day of
+bloodier import than any yet. The year before and during that year had
+occurred the Bulgarian atrocities and massacres, and the word 'massacre'
+lingered and made music in Abdul Hamid's brain. He said it over to
+himself and dwelt upon it, and meditated on the nature and possibilities
+of massacre. The troubles which massacre had calmed had arisen before
+his accession out of the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, which
+corresponded to the Greek Patriarchate, and was given power over
+districts and peoples whom the Greeks justly considered to belong to
+them by blood and religion. Greek armed bands came into collision with
+Bulgarian bands, and in order to calm these disturbances by thoroughly
+effectual means, irregular Turkish troops were sent into Bulgaria,
+charged with the command to 'stop the row,' but with no other
+instructions. Indiscriminate killing, with all the passions and horrors
+that bloodshed evokes in the half-civilised, followed, and there was no
+more trouble just then in the disturbed districts, for there was none to
+make trouble. In 1876 Abdul Aziz was deposed by a group of king-makers
+under Midhat Pasha, Murad V. reigned shadow-like for three months, and
+during the same year Abdul Hamid was finally selected to fill the
+throne, and stand forth as the Shadow of God. It was a disturbed and
+tottering inheritance to which he succeeded, riddled with the dry-rot of
+corruption, but the inheritor proved himself equal to the occasion.
+
+For a little while he was all abroad, and at the bidding of Midhat, who
+had placed him on the throne, he summoned a kind of representative
+Turkish Parliament, by way of imbuing the Great Powers with the idea
+that he was an enlightened Shadow of God bent on reform. This parody of
+a Parliament lasted but a short time: it was no more than a faint,
+dissolving magic-lantern picture. In the spring of 1877 Rumania, under
+Russian encouragement, broke away from Turkish rule. Turkey declared war
+on Russia, and in 1878 found herself utterly defeated. At Adrianople was
+drawn up the Treaty of San Stefano, creating an independent Bulgarian
+state, and, in the opinion of Great Britain and Germany, giving Russia
+far greater influence in the Balkan Peninsula than was agreeable to that
+disastrous supporter of Turkey, the Balance of Power. In consequence the
+Treaty of San Stefano was superseded by the Treaty of Berlin.
+
+In those arrangements Abdul Hamid had no voice, but he was well content
+to sit quiet, think about what was to be done with what was left him,
+and thank his waning crescent that once again the Balance of Power had
+secured Constantinople for him, leaving him free to deal with his
+Asiatic dominions, and such part of Europe as was left him, as he
+thought fit. He could safely trust that he would never be ejected from
+his throne by a foreign Power, and all he need do was to make himself
+safe against internal disturbances and revolutions which might upset
+him. And it was then that he begot in the womb of his cold and cunning
+brain a policy that was all his own, except in so far as the Bulgarian
+atrocities, consequent on feuds between Bulgars and Greeks, may be
+considered the father of that hideous birth. But it was he who suckled
+and nourished it, it was from his brain that it emerged, full-grown and
+in panoply of armour, as from the brain of Olympian Zeus came Pallas
+Athene. This new policy was in flat contradiction of all the previous
+policy, as he had received it from his predecessors, of strengthening
+Turkey by tributes of man-power from his subject tribes, but it would,
+he thought, have the same result of keeping the Turk supreme among the
+alien elements of the Empire. Times had changed; it behoved him to
+change the methods which hitherto had held together his hapless
+inheritance.
+
+Now Abdul Hamid was not in any sense a wise man, and the ability which
+has been attributed to him, in view of the manner in which he
+successfully defied the civilisations of Europe, is based on premisses
+altogether false. He never really defied Europe at all; he always
+yielded, secure in his belief that Europe in the shape of the Balance of
+Power, was unanimous in keeping him where he was. He never even risked
+being turned out of Constantinople, for he knew--none better--that all
+Europe insisted on retaining him there. As regards wisdom, there was
+never a greater fool, but as regards cunning there was never a greater
+fox. He had a brain that was absolutely impervious to large ideas: the
+notion of consolidating and strengthening his Empire by ameliorating its
+internal conditions, by bringing it within speaking distance of the
+influence of civilisation and progress, by taking advantage of and
+developing its immense natural resources, by employing the brains and
+the industry of his subject races, seems never to have entered his head.
+He could easily have done all this: there was not a Power in Europe that
+would not have lent him a helping hand in development and reform, in the
+establishment of a solvent state, in aiding the condition of the peoples
+over whom he ruled. In whatever he did, provided that it furthered the
+welfare of his subjects, whether Turk, Armenian, or Arab, the whole
+Concert of Europe would have provided him with cash, with missionaries,
+with engineers, and all the resources of the arts and sciences of peace
+and of progress. But being a felon, with crime and cunning to take the
+place of wisdom, he preferred to develop his Empire on his own original
+lines. In Europe he was but suffered to exist. There remained Asia.
+
+The policy of previous Osmanli rulers has already been roughly defined.
+They strengthened themselves and the military Turkish despotism round
+them by absorbing the manhood of the tribes over which they had obtained
+dominion. Abdul Hamid reversed that policy; he strengthened the Turkish
+supremacy, not by drawing into it the manhood of his subject peoples,
+but by destroying that manhood. In proportion, so his foxlike brain
+reasoned, as his alien subjects were weak, so were the Turks strong. A
+consistent weakening of alien nations would strengthen the hold of those
+who governed the Ottoman Empire. It was as if a man suffered from gout
+in his foot: he could get rid of the gout by wholesome living, the
+result of which would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. But the
+plan which he adopted was to cause his foot to mortify by process of
+inhuman savagery. When it was dead it would trouble him no longer.
+
+He was well aware that the Turkish people only comprised some forty per
+cent, of the population of the Turkish Empire: numerically they were
+weaker than the alien peoples who composed the rest of it. Something had
+to be done to bring the governing Power up to such a proportionate
+strength as should secure its supremacy, and the most convenient plan
+was to weaken the alien elements. The scheme, though yet inchoate, had
+been tried with success in the case of the Bulgarians and Greeks, and to
+test it further he stirred up Albanians against the inhabitants of Old
+Servia with gratifying results. They weakened each other, and he further
+weakened them both by the employment of Turkish troops in Macedonia to
+quell the disturbances which he had himself fomented. There were
+massacres and atrocities, and no more trouble just then from Macedonia.
+Having thus tested his plan and found no flaw in it, he settled to adopt
+it. But European combinations did not really much interest him, for he
+was aware that the Great Powers, to whose sacred Balance he owed the
+permanence of his throne, would not tolerate interference with European
+peoples, and he turned his attention to Asia Minor. There were
+excrescences there which he could not absorb, but which might be
+destroyed. He could use the knife on living tissues which the impaired
+digestion of the Ottoman Empire could not assimilate. So he hit on this
+fresh scheme, which his hellish cunning devised with a matchless sense
+of the adaptation of the means to the end, and he created (though he did
+not live to perfect) a new policy that reversed the traditions of five
+hundred years. That is no light task to undertake, and when we consider
+that since his deposition, now nine years ago, that policy has reaped
+results undreamed of perhaps by him, we can see how far-sighted his
+cunning was. To-day it is being followed out by the very combination
+that deposed him; his aims have been fully justified, and for that
+precise reason we are right to classify him among the abhorred of
+mankind. He had an opportunity such as is given to the few, and he made
+the utmost of it, even as his greater successor on the throne of Turkey
+for the present, namely Wilhelm II. of Prussia, has done, in the service
+of the devil. 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant,' must surely
+have been his well-deserved welcome, when he left the hell he had made
+on earth for another.
+
+Of all his subjects the Armenians were the most progressive, the most
+industrious, the most capable. They therefore contributed, according to
+that perverted foxlike mind, one of the greatest menaces to the
+stability of his throne, which henceforth should owe its strength to the
+weakness of those it governed. They, as all the world knows, are a
+peaceful Christian people, and it was against them that Abdul Hamid
+directed the policy which he had tested in Europe. The instruments he
+employed to put it in force were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race
+marching with and mixed up among the Armenians. By this means he had the
+excuse ready that these massacres were local disturbances among remote
+and insubordinate tribes, one of whom, however, the Kurds, he armed with
+modern rifles and caused to be instructed in some elementary military
+training. Their task was to murder Armenians, their pay was the
+privilege to rape their girls and their women, and to rob the houses of
+the men they had killed. The Armenians resisted with at first some small
+success, upon which Abdul Hamid reinforced the Kurds with regular
+troops, and caused it to be proclaimed that this was a war of Moslems
+against the infidel, a Holy War. Moslem fanaticism, ever smouldering
+and ready to burst into flames, blazed high, and a fury of massacres
+broke forth against all Armenians, east and west, north and south. The
+streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before Abdul Hamid
+was obliged by foreign civilised Powers to stop those holocausts, he had
+so decimated the race that not for at least a generation would they
+conceivably be a menace again even to that zealous guardian of the
+supremacy in its own dominions of the Ottoman power. Very unwillingly,
+when obliged to do so, he whistled off his bands of Kurds, and dismissed
+them: unwillingly, too, he gave orders that the Armenian hunts which had
+so pleasantly diverted the sportsmen of Constantinople, must be
+abandoned: then was decreed a 'close time' for Armenians, the shooting
+season was over. There is no exaggeration in this: eye-witnesses have
+recorded how at the close of the business day in Constantinople,
+shooting parties used literally to go out, and beat the coverts of
+tenement houses for Armenians, of whom there were at that time in
+Constantinople some 150,000. But when Abdul Hamid had finished his
+sport, I do not think more than 80,000 at the most survived. These were
+saved by the protests of Europe, and perhaps by the knowledge that if
+all the Armenians were killed, there could never be any more shooting.
+The Kurds also had lost a considerable number of men, and that was far
+from displeasing to the yellow-faced butcher of Yildiz. A little
+blood-letting among those turbulent Kurds was not at all a bad thing.
+
+Here, then, we see defined and at work the new Ottoman policy with
+regard to its peoples. Hitherto, it had been sufficient to take from
+them its fill of man-power, and leave the tribe in question to its own
+devices. There was no objection whatever to its developing the resources
+of its territory, to its increasing in prosperity and in population.
+Indeed the central Power was quite pleased that it should do so, for
+when next the gathering of taxes and youths came round the collectors
+would find a creditable harvest awaiting them. Such a tribe received no
+encouragement or help from the Government; that would have been too
+much to expect, but as long as it kept quiet and obedient it might,
+without interference, prosper as well as it could. But now, in the last
+quarter of the nineteenth century, all that was changed; instead of a
+policy of neglect there was substituted a policy of murder. The state no
+longer considered itself secure when in various parts of its dominions
+its subjects showed themselves progressive and industrious. They had to
+be kept down, and clearly the most efficient way of keeping people down
+was killing them. Let it not be supposed for a moment that either the
+first massacre, or any that followed, was the result of local
+disturbances and fanaticism. It was nothing of the sort: each was
+arranged and planned at Constantinople, as the official means, invented
+by the arch-butcher, Abdul Hamid, of maintaining in power the most
+devilish despotism that has ever disgraced the world. Something had to
+be done to prevent the alien tribes in Asia slipping out of the noose of
+Ottoman strangulation, even as the European tribes had done, and
+forming themselves into separate and independent states. A ruler with
+progressive ideas, one who had any perception of the internal prosperity
+which alone can render an empire stable, would have made the attempt to
+weld his loose and wavering domination together by encouraging and
+working for the prosperity of its component peoples, so that he might,
+though late in the day, give birth to a Turkey that was strong, because
+its citizens were prosperous and content. Not so did Abdul Hamid; the
+Turkey that he sought to establish was merely to be strong because he
+had battered into a blood-stained pulp the most progressive and the most
+industrious of the alien peoples over whom he ruled.
+
+It is significant that, while yet the blood of the murdered Christians
+was scarcely washed from the streets of Constantinople, the Emperor
+Wilhelm II. visited his brother-sovereign at Yildiz, after making his
+tour throughout the Holy Land. The two can hardly, in their intimate
+conversations, have completely avoided the subject of the massacres; but
+after all, that was not such an unmanageably awkward topic, for Wilhelm
+II. could tactfully have reminded Abdul Hamid that his own throne also
+was based on the murderous progress of the Teutonic Knights. Then there
+was the war between Turkey and Greece only lately concluded to discuss,
+and there again--for the Emperor's sister was Crown Princess of
+Greece--conversation must have been a shade difficult. Altogether, in
+spite of the Emperor's lifelong desire to visit the Holy Places in
+Palestine, it was an odd moment for a Christian monarch to visit the
+butcher of Constantinople. But the truth is that Wilhelm II. had a very
+strong reason for going to see his brother, for the fruit of German
+policy in Turkey was already ripening and swelling on the tree, and the
+minor disadvantages of visiting this murderous tyrant while still his
+hands were red with blood was more than compensated for by the
+advantages of having a heart-to-heart talk with him on other subjects.
+Germany had already begun her peaceful penetration, and the real motive
+of the Emperor's visit was, after swords and orders had been exchanged,
+to make the definite request that bodies of colonising Germans should be
+allowed to settle on the Sultan's dominions in Asia Minor, and a hint no
+doubt was conveyed that there would be plenty of room for them now that
+there were so many Armenian farms unfortunately without a master. But,
+like Uriah Heep, the Emperor had attempted to pluck the fruit before it
+was ripe, or, to use a more exact simile, before he was tall enough to
+reach it. In vain he represented to Abdul Hamid the immense advantages
+which would result to Turkey by the establishment of those Gott-like
+German settlers in Asia Minor. Out of his colossal egalo-megalomania, of
+which we know more now, he thought that any request which the
+All-Highest should deign to make must instantly be granted. But he met
+with a perfectly flat refusal, and the baffled All-Highest left
+Constantinople in an exceedingly bad temper, which quite undid all the
+good that the balm in Gilead and the sacred associations of Jerusalem
+had done him. It is pleasant to think of the Pan-Islamic merriment with
+which Abdul Hamid must have viewed the indignant exit of his Christian
+brother, who had come such a long way to see him, and was so tactful
+about the Armenian atrocities. He might perhaps--for those Christians
+were very odd pigs--have expressed horror or remonstrance. Not at all:
+he was much too anxious to get his request granted, to make himself
+disagreeable. But did his Christian brother really think that all those
+massacres over which Abdul Hamid had spent so much time and money, had
+been arranged in order to settle those nasty progressive Germans in the
+lands that had been so carefully depopulated? Why, the whole point of
+them had been that the Armenians were too progressive and prosperous,
+thus constituting a menace to the central Government, and certainly
+Abdul Hamid was not meaning to put in their place settlers even more
+progressive and with a stronger backing behind them. So off went the
+All-Highest back home again, very much vexed with Abdul Hamid, and
+possibly (if that was not sacrilegious) with himself for having been in
+too great a hurry. There was more spade-work to be done yet before
+Turkey was ripe for open and avowed colonisation by the Fatherland.
+
+The episode, strictly historical, is of a certain importance, for it
+shows the date at which Wilhelm II. thought that the time had come for
+Germans to colonise Turkey. The peaceful penetration (which now amounts
+to perforation) was even then pretty far advanced. But Abdul Hamid seems
+to have seen the significance of the request, and for some little while
+after that German influence had a certain set-back in Turkey. The date
+of this marks an era, and Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' set to work
+again, in no way discouraged, to set her cancer-nippers in the cancer
+that already had begun to eat the live tissues round it.
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter II_
+
+
+THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS
+
+In the year 1908 a military group in Constantinople, styling itself the
+'Young Turk' party, seized and deposed Abdul Hamid, and shut him up at
+Salonika, there to spend the remainder of his infamous days. They put
+forth a Liberal programme of reformation, one that earned them at the
+moment the sympathy of civilised Europe (including Germany), and the
+Balance of Power very mistakenly and prematurely heaved a sigh of
+relief. For upwards of a century it had maintained in Constantinople the
+corrupt and bloody autocracy of the Sultans, fearing the European
+quarrels that would attend the dismemberment of that charnel-house of
+decay known as the Ottoman Empire, and now (just for the moment) it
+seemed as if a sudden rally had come to the Sick Man, and he showed
+signs of returning animation and wholesome vitality. The policy of the
+Powers, after a century of failure, looked as if it was justifying
+itself, and they were full of congratulations towards Turkey and each
+other. But never, in the whole century of their pusillanimous cacklings,
+had they made a greater mistake.
+
+Whether the Young Turks ever meant well or not, whether there was or was
+not a grain of sincerity in this profession of their policy, is a
+disputed question. There are those who say that originally they were
+prompted by patriotic and high-minded aims, when they proclaimed their
+object of 'Organisation,' and of reform. But all are agreed that it
+matters very little what their original aims were, so speedily did their
+Liberal intentions narrow down to an Ottomanisation such as Adbul Hamid
+had aimed at, but had been unable to accomplish before his evil sceptre
+ceased to sway the destinies of his kingdom. In any case this programme
+earned its authors the sympathy of Europe, and probably this, and no
+more than this, prompted it. They wished to establish themselves,
+unquestioned and undisturbed, and did so; and I do not think we shall
+be far wrong if we take the original Young Turk programme about as
+seriously as we took the parody of a Parliament with which Abdul Hamid
+opened (as with a blessing) his atrocious reign. The very next year
+(1909) they permitted (if they did not arrange) the Armenian massacres
+at Adana, and the Balance of Power began faintly to wonder whether the
+Young Turks in their deposition of Abdul Hamid had not slain an asp and
+hatched a cockatrice. Given that their aims originally were sincere, we
+can but marvel at the swiftness of the corruption which in little more
+than a year had begun to lead them not into paths of reform and Liberal
+policy, but along the road towards which the butcher they had deposed
+had pointed the way. It must have made Abdul Hamid gnaw his nails and
+shake impotent hands to see those who had torn him from his throne so
+soon pursuing the very policy which he invented, and to which he
+nominally owed his dethronement. Strange, too, was it that his overthrow
+should come from the very quarter to which he looked for security, for
+it was on the army that each Sultan in turn had most relied for the
+stability of his throne. But Abdul Hamid, in order, perhaps, to deal
+more effectually with the subject races he wished to exterminate, had
+introduced a system of foreign training for the officers of his army, a
+course of Potsdam efficiency, and it was just they, on whom Sultans from
+time immemorial had relied, who knocked the prop of the army away from
+him. Though publicly, for the edification of Europe his deposers
+professed a Liberal policy, it was not on account of Armenian massacres
+that they turned him off his throne, but because of the muddle and
+corruption and debility of his rule. Herein we may easily trace the hand
+of Germany, no longer publicly beckoning as when Wilhelm II., just after
+the first Armenian massacres, made his request of the Sultan for the
+establishment in Turkey of German colonists, but working underground,
+sapping and mining like a mole. For Germany, her mind already fixed on
+securing Turkey as an instrument of her Eastern policy, wanted a strong
+Turkey, and without doubt desired to bring an end to the disorganisation
+and decay of the Empire, and create and at the same time interpenetrate
+an efficient state that should be useful to her. We may take it for
+granted that she, like the rest of Europe, welcomed any sign of
+regeneration in the Ottoman Empire, but there was an ulterior purpose
+behind that. Turkey, already grasped by the Prussian hand, must be in
+that hand a weapon fit for use, a blade on which she could rely. She
+strengthened the Turkish army by the introduction of Prussian
+discipline, and worked on good material. Already she has realised her
+ambition in this respect, and now controls the material which she then
+worked on.
+
+The troubled years of the Balkan wars which followed this false dawn,
+coupled with the loss of all the territory which remained to the Ottoman
+Empire in Europe, with the exception of Thrace, caused an immediate
+reaction from the open-minded policy of the Young Turks, if we decide to
+credit them at the outset with a sincere purpose. Organisation by a
+slightly different spelling became Ottomanisation, and the aims of the
+Young Turks were identified with those of the Nationalist party which
+followed out and developed into a finished and super-fiendish policy the
+dreams of Abdul Hamid. He, as we have seen, had invented the idea of
+securing Ottoman supremacy in the Empire, not as before by absorption of
+the strength of its subject peoples, but by their extermination, and
+this formed part of the new programme which was to be more efficiently
+administered. Already, in 1909, the experimental massacre at Adana took
+place, and the Young Turk party, with its possibly Liberal aims, had
+become a party that had as its main object a system of tyranny and
+murder such as the world had never seen. Simultaneously Turkey itself,
+Nationalist party and all, became enslaved to German influence. Link by
+link the chains were forged and the manacles welded on, and before the
+European War broke out in 1914, the incarceration of Turkey in Germany
+was complete, and Wilhelm II. had a fine revenge for the snub inflicted
+on him by Abdul Hamid when he proposed the scheme of German
+colonisation in the lands depopulated by the Armenian massacres of 1895.
+
+From the first the aim of the Nationalists, who thus formed so deadly a
+blend with the Young Turk party, was Ottomanisation, or the
+establishment within the Empire of an Ottoman domination which should be
+pure and undefiled, and in which none of the subject peoples, be they
+Armenians or Kurds, Arabs or Greeks or Jews, Christian or Moslem, should
+have any part. The inception of the scheme was no doubt inspired by the
+example given by Prussia's treatment of the Poles, and Hungary's of
+Roumans and Slovaks. But in thoroughness of method Prussia's pupil was
+to prove Prussia's master, for it aimed not merely at expropriation, but
+extermination, and sought to become strong, not merely by weakening
+alien elements, but by abolishing them. It did not set this out quite
+explicitly in its manifestoes and the resolutions of its congresses, but
+two extracts, the first from the proceedings of the 'Committee of Union
+and Progress,' held in Constantinople in 1911, have a sinister
+suggestiveness about them for which the acts and measures of the
+Committee had already supplied the comment.
+
+'The formation of new parties in the Chamber or in the country must be
+suppressed, and the emergence of new Liberal ideas prevented. Turkey
+must become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem influence must be
+preponderant. Every other religious propaganda must be suppressed....
+Sooner or later the complete Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects must
+be effected; it is clear, however, that this can never be attained by
+persuasion, but that we must resort to armed force.... Other
+nationalities must be denied the right of organisation, for
+decentralisation and autonomy are treason to the Turkish Empire.'
+
+Could there be a completer reversion to the policy of Abdul Hamid, than
+this formal resolution, passed within three years of the time when the
+Young Turks deposed him? The conviction begins to dawn on one--as it
+began to dawn on the Balancers of Power--that he owed his downfall not
+to his illiberal and butcherous policy, but because he was not thorough
+enough.
+
+The second extract, from a pamphlet by Jelal Noury Bey, may be added,
+which defines the policy, not with regard to the Christian or Jewish
+subjects of the Turks, but with regard to the Arabs, Moslem by creed,
+and the guardians of the Holy Cities.
+
+'It is a peculiarly imperious necessity of our existence for us to
+Turkise the Arab lands, for the particularistic idea of nationality is
+awaking among the younger generation of Arabs, and already threatens us
+with a great catastrophe. Against this we must be fore-armed.'
+
+The design of Ottomanisation soon began to take practical form.
+Ottomanisation was to be the highest expression of patriotism, and any
+means which secured it, massacres such as, in 1909, had taken place at
+Adana, or the treatment accorded to the Greeks and Bulgarians who
+remained in Thrace after the Balkan wars, were in accordance with the
+new 'Liberal' gospel. Thrace was the only territory left to the Turks in
+Europe, and as it was largely populated by Greeks and Bulgarians, it
+could not be considered as sufficiently Ottomanised. A massacre under
+the very eyes of Europe was perhaps dangerous, so it sufficed to put the
+entire non-Turkish population over the frontier and lay hands on their
+property. In fact this was the first of the 'deportation' schemes which,
+in 1915, proved so successful with the Armenians, and the effect of it
+was that neither Greeks nor Bulgarians were left in Thrace. Then
+followed the expulsion of Greeks from the Mediterranean sea-board, but
+this was never completely carried out because the European war
+intervened, and the attention of the Nationalists was claimed by their
+over-lord. Later, as we shall see, a further deportation of Greeks was
+begun, but again that was stopped, for Germany saw that it would never
+do to have her Turkish allies murdering settlers of the same blood as
+those she hoped would become her allies. Of course, when it was only a
+question of Armenians she did not interfere.
+
+The design, then, of the new 'Liberal' regime, of which those three
+measures, the massacres at Adana, the expulsion of Greeks and Bulgarians
+from Thrace, and of Greeks from the sea-board of the Mediterranean, were
+early instances, was to restore the absolute supremacy of the Turks in
+the Ottoman Empire. It was obvious that the problem was one of
+considerable difficulty, since the Turks at the time composed only some
+forty per cent, of the whole population. They numbered about 8,000,000,
+while in the Empire were included about 7,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000
+Greeks, 2,000,000 Armenians, and 3,000,000 more of smaller
+nationalities, such as Kurds, Druses, and Jews. But the Turks were
+backed by Germany, and nowadays, since the abolition of the
+Capitulations, which leaves all alien races unprotected by foreign
+Powers, such as survive, after the extermination of the Armenians, are
+completely at the mercy of the Government in Constantinople. All these
+peoples speak a different language from the Turks, and have a different
+religion, for the Nationalist party, with a view to the Ottomanisation
+of the Arabs, have definitely stated that Arab Moslems are not of the
+true faith, and that their own Allah (in whose name they subsequently
+exterminated the Armenians) is the God of Love--German equivalent
+Got--whereas the Arab Allah is the God of vengeance. The sinister motive
+in this discovery needs no comment, for it is obvious that it releases
+the Ottoman Government from the prohibition in the Koran, whereby Moslem
+may not fight against Moslem. Therefore the Arabs were declared not to
+be true Moslems. Later on, that motive was translated into practical
+measures.
+
+Among the first tasks with regard to the Arabs that faced the
+Nationalist party from what we may call the pacific side of their
+mission was to substitute the Turkish language for Arabic. Kemal Bey, a
+Nationalist of Salonika, with the help of Ziya Bey, collected round him
+a group of young writers, and these proceeded to translate the Koran out
+of Arabic into Turkish, and to publish the prayers for the Caliphate in
+their own language, and orders went out that these revised versions
+should be used in all mosques. Turkish was to be the official language
+for use in all public proclamations, and, with Prussian thoroughness, it
+was even substituted on such railway tickets as had hitherto been
+printed in Arabic. The new Turkish tongue (Yeni Lisan) had also to be
+purged of all foreign words, but here some difficulty was experienced,
+for Persian and Arabic formed an enormous percentage in the language as
+hitherto employed, and the promoters of this Ottoman purity of tongue
+found themselves left with a very jejune instrument for the rhapsodies
+of their patriotic aims. Poets in especial (for the Nationalists, like
+all well-equipped founders of romantic movements, had their bards) found
+themselves in sore straits owing to the limited vocabulary; and we read
+of one, Mehmed Emin Bey, who was forced to publish his odes in small
+provincial papers, since no well-established journal would admit so
+scrannel an expression of views however exalted.[1] But the translation
+of the Koran was the greatest linguistic feat, and Tekin Alp, the most
+prominent exponent of Nationalism, refers to it as one of the noblest
+tasks undertaken by the new movement. It mattered not at all that by
+religious ordinance the translation of the Koran into any other tongue
+was a sin. 'The Nationalists,' he tells us, 'have cut themselves off
+from the superstitious prejudice.' A further attempt was made to
+substitute Turkish letters for Arabic letters in the alphabet, but this
+seems to have presented insuperable difficulties, and I gather that it
+has been abandoned.
+
+[Footnote 1: This thwarted poet retired from the Committee of Union and
+Progress not long after, and his place was taken by Enver.]
+
+The Ottomanisation of religion and language, then, was among the pacific
+methods of spreading Pan-Turkism through the Empire. A monstrous idol
+was set up, a Hindenburg idol, in front of which all peoples and
+languages, not Christians alone, but Moslems, were bound to prostrate
+themselves. Indeed it was against Arabs mainly that these provisions
+were directed, for the Arabs constituted the most menacing obstacle to
+the spread of Ottomanisation, since they numbered in the Empire only a
+million less than the Turks themselves. It was ordained by statute that
+no Arab could have a seat on the Committee of Union and Progress, and
+the Cabinet similarly was purged of any Greek or Armenian element. Never
+any more must there be new parties in the Chamber, never any more must
+Liberal ideas (to champion which the New Turk party had come into being)
+be allowed to prick up their pernicious heads. For the Nationalist
+party, with whom the New Turks were now identical, had taken as their
+creed all that the deposed Abdul Hamid stood for, and only differed from
+him in that as their schemes developed they looked forward to logical
+conclusions far beyond what he had ever dreamed of. But Abdul Hamid may,
+I think, be taken to be the true founder of the new Nationalism: at any
+rate it was he who had first seen the possibilities of massacre as a
+means of maintaining Ottoman supremacy. In the hands of Nationalists
+that was to prove a more effective weapon than the printing of railway
+tickets in Turkish. But already before the European War the Nationalists
+had vastly extended his ideas, and had seen the danger of allowing even
+Arabs to have a standing of any kind in the new state. Henceforth all
+subject people were to be _rayas_, cattle, as in the old days of the
+Sultans who absorbed the strength of the aliens, but did not exterminate
+them. But now the cattle were not only to be used for milk, but were to
+be slaughtered when advisable. Till then they must be dumb, or speak the
+language of their masters only, for this alone can save them from the
+shambles. Ahmed Sherif Bey, a prominent Nationalist, lays this down. 'It
+is the business of the Porte to make the Arabs forget their own
+language, and to impose upon them instead that of the nation that rules
+them. If the Porte loses sight of this duty, it will be digging its
+grave with its own hands, for if the Arabs do not forget their language,
+their history, and their customs, they will seek to restore their
+ancient empire on the ruins of Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia.'
+
+Here, then, is the definite statement of the Nationalists' hostility to
+all things Arab, and we shall see how they translated it into practice.
+Even Moslems were but cattle for them, as also were Armenians and Greeks
+and Kurds. Armenians were doomed to be the first complete sacrifice on
+the bloody altar of the Nationalists, and, as a Turkish gendarme engaged
+in that sacrifice said to a Danish Red Cross nurse, 'First we kill the
+Armenians, then the Greeks, and then the Kurds.' And if he had been a
+Progressive Minister he would certainly have added, 'And then the
+Arabs.'
+
+It was not only within the present limits of the Ottoman Empire that the
+Committee of Union and Progress proposed to accomplish their unitive
+purpose, for after having seen a glorious and exclusive Turkey arise
+over the depopulated territories of their alien peoples, a vaster
+vision, for an account of which we are indebted to Tekin Alp, opened
+before their prophetic eyes. Out of the 10,000,000 inhabitants of Persia
+they claim that one-third are of true Turkish blood, and in the new
+Turkey which, so they almost pathetically hope, will be established at
+the conclusion of the European War by the help of Wilhelm II., those
+Persian Turks must be incorporated into the true fold of Allah, God of
+Love. The province of Adarbaijan, for instance, the richest and most
+enlightened district of Persia, they claim, is entirely Turkish, and
+here the needful rectification will be made in the new atlases that bear
+the imprimatur of Potsdam. Similarly, all the country south of the
+Caucasus must rank as Turkish territory, since the Turks form from fifty
+to eighty per cent, of the population; all Kazan, for the same reason,
+is truly Turkish, with the alluvial plains of the Volga, while the
+Crimea, so Tekin Alp discovers, is also a lost sheep longing for the
+Turkish fold. All this is Turkey (or Turania) Irredenta, and, may we not
+add:--
+
+'Jerusalem and Madagascar
+And North and South Amerikee.'
+
+And then what a glorious future awaits the Power that Europe once
+thought of as a sick man. 'With the crushing of Russian despotism,'
+exclaims Tekin Alp, 'by the brave German, Austrian, and Turkish armies,
+thirty to forty million Turks will receive their independence. With the
+ten million Ottoman Turks this will form a nation of fifty millions,
+advancing towards a great civilisation which may perhaps be compared to
+that of Germany, in that it will have the strength and energy to rise
+even higher. In some ways it will be even superior to the degenerate
+French and English civilisations.'
+
+The arithmetic and the enthusiasm of the foregoing paragraph are, of
+course, those of Tekin Alp, from whose book, _The Turkish and
+Pan-Turkish Ideal_, the quotation is made. The work was published in
+1915, and, appearing as it did after the beginning of the European War,
+it is but natural to find in it an expression not only of the
+Nationalist aims for Turkey, but of the Prussian aims for Turkey, or, to
+speak more correctly, of the dream which Prussia has induced in a
+hypnotised Turkey. It sets forth in fact the bait which Prussia has
+dangled in front of Turkey, the hunger for which has inspired the
+projected future which is here sketched out; and significantly enough
+this book has been spread broadcast over Turkey by the agency of German
+propagandists. The Ottomanisation of the Empire, the vision of its
+further extension, free from all consideration of subject peoples, was
+exactly the lure which was most likely to keep the Turks staunch to
+their Prussian masters. It will be noticed that there is no suggestion
+of the Turks recovering their lost provinces and kingdoms in Europe,
+Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Servia, and the rest, for it would never do
+to let Fox Ferdinand awake from _his_ hypnotic sleep of a sort of
+Czardom over the Balkans, or cease to dangle dreams, that included even
+Constantinople before the shifty eye of King Constantine So, before
+Turkey was spread the prospect of appropriating Russian and Persian
+spoils: Prussia had already given the lost Turkish kingdoms in Europe
+elsewhere, but would there not be a dismembered Russian Empire to
+dispose of? The Crimea, the province of Kazan, the province of
+Trans-Caucasia: all these might be held before Turkey's nose, as a dog
+has a piece of meat held up before it to make it beg. Then there was the
+province of Adarbaijan: certainly Turkey might be permitted to promise
+herself that, without incurring the jealousy of Austria or Bulgaria.
+Greedily Turkey took the bait. She gulped it down whole, and never
+considered that there was a string attached to it, or that, should ever
+the time come when Germany, the conqueror of the world, would be in a
+position to reward her Allies with the realisation of the dreams she had
+induced, the string would be pulled, and up, with retchings and
+vomitings, would come these succulent morsels of Russia and Persia.
+Indeed these bright pictures flashed on to the sheet as the visions of
+Nationalists are but the slides in a German magic-lantern, designed to
+keep Turkey amused, and it was with the same object that Ernst Marré, in
+his _Die Türken und Wir nach dem Kriege_, was bidden to make other
+pictures ready in case Turkey grew fractious or sleepy. 'From the ruins
+of antiquity,' he says, when speaking of the Ottoman Empire, 'new life
+will spring, if we can manage to raise the treasures which time and sand
+have covered.' Then he remembers that he must be less Pan-Germanic for
+the moment, and dangles the bait again. 'In doing this,' he adds, 'we
+are benefiting Turkey. The Turkish state is no united whole, and it has
+always been very difficult to govern. Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians,
+Kurds, cannot be welded together. This is a war of liberation for
+Turkey.... Only by energetic interference, and by "expelling" the
+obstinate Armenian element could the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian
+domination.... The non-Turkish population of the Ottoman Empire must be
+Ottomanised.'
+
+There is no need for further quotations, which might be multiplied
+indefinitely. The Prussian programme is for the moment identical with
+the Turkish Nationalist programme: Turkey, in order to be kept 'in with'
+Germany, must be encouraged to dream of depopulated Armenia (that dream
+has come tragically true) and of annexations in Russia and Persia. All
+this fitted in with the Turkish programme: Germany had scarcely to
+inspire, only to encourage. That encouragement she gave, for,
+simultaneously she was penetrating Turkey as water penetrates a sponge,
+and reducing it to the position of a vassal state. To keep Turkey happy
+she allowed the Armenian massacres to run their deadly course, and only
+interfered with other massacres when they did not suit her purpose. But
+supposing (to suppose the impossible) that a peace to the European War
+was dictated by Germany, how much of the future Pan-Turkish programme
+would be realised? Would there be a Turkey at all? I think not: there
+would be a Germany in Europe, and a Germany in Asia, where Turkey once
+was. Indeed, in all but name, they are in existence now; so complete, as
+we shall see, has been Germany's penetration of the Ottoman Empire. Just
+for the present she calls herself Turkey in those regions; that is her
+incognito. But Turkey as an independent Power has already ceased to
+exist, and Tekin Alp and the Nationalists still dream on with rainbow
+visions of Ottomanisation, the vistas of which stretch far into Persia
+and the plains of the Volga. And all the while she has been put out like
+a candle, and all that is left of her is the smouldering wick ready to
+be pinched between the horny fingers of her stepmother. There she
+stands, her stepmother, with her grinning teeth already disclosing the
+Wolf....
+
+Whatever the end of the European War may be, in no circumstances can the
+dreams of the Nationalists be realised. Even if Germany and her arms
+were so victorious that Russia lay at her feet a mere inert carcase
+ready for the chopper, she would no more dream of giving Russian
+provinces to an independent Turkey than she would hand over to her
+Berlin itself. And if, as we know, Germany can never be victorious, will
+the Allies once more strive to keep the Sick Man alive, or leave in his
+ruthless power the peoples whom he is longing to exterminate? Even Tekin
+Alp can hardly expect that.
+
+Here then, in brief, is the policy of New Turkey. Its subject
+peoples--Armenians, Arabs, Greeks, Kurds, and Jews--are to be totally
+unrepresented in its councils, though together they number sixty per
+cent, of the population of the Empire. But they are not only to be
+unrepresented in Government--they are, if the programme is to be carried
+conclusively out, to have no existence. In accordance with the plans of
+the murderous ruffians who to-day administer the Nationalist policy,
+those of the Armenians who have not fled beyond the frontiers have
+already been exterminated, and the same fate threatens Arabs, Greeks,
+and Jews. Hence, when the Allied Governments wrote their joint note to
+President Wilson, they stated that among their aims in the war was 'the
+liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of
+the Turks.' From that avowed determination they will never recede.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NOTE.--It is to be hoped that Tekin Alp's pamphlet, _Turks and the
+Pan-Turkish Ideal_, may soon be accessible to English readers. The
+author is a Macedonian Jew who writes under the pseudonym of Tekin Alp,
+and his mind is such that he appears to find romance in the idea of a
+united Turkey purged by indiscriminate massacre from all alien elements.
+But he sets forth with admirable lucidity the aims of the Nationalist
+party and the steps already achieved by them in their progress towards
+their ideal. Already the sequestered ladies of the harem have come out
+of their retirement and join in the crusade, and not only do men give
+lectures to women, but 'women mount the platform and address the men.'
+There are corporations to advance economic organisations, boy-scout
+centres all over the Empire, and 'intellectual parties' among the guilds
+of merchants--England and Russia appear as the most virulent foes of
+Pan-Turkism, 'the colossus of darkest barbarism joined with the colossus
+of a degenerate civilisation.'
+
+In the second part of his pamphlet Tekin Alp passes on with an
+enthusiasm which is as sincere as it is pathetic to the vision of a
+tremendous Turkey, extending from Thrace on the west to the Desert of
+Gobi on the east. It embraces, as his map shows, Egypt as far south as
+Victoria Nyanza, Arabia, Persia, the greater part of India, the littoral
+of the Black Sea, the plains of the Volga, the circuit of the Caspian
+Sea and the Aral Sea, and in the north-east nearly touches Tomsk. All
+this naturally is dependent on complete German victory in the war, and,
+pathetically enough, Tekin Alp appears to think that his ideal Turkey
+will meet with the approval of Germany. Indeed it is no wonder that his
+pamphlet is circulated broadcast by German propagandists, for it is
+precisely what Germany wants Turkey to believe.
+
+The romance of the movement appeals also very strongly to Ziya Gök Alp,
+the official bard of the butchers of Constantinople. He has written a
+sort of Ode to Attila, quoted by Tekin Alp, which is a fine frenzy in
+favour of barbarism. This preposterous poem begins:
+
+'I do not read the famous deeds of my ancestors in the dead, faded,
+dusty leaves of the history books, but in my own veins, in my own heart.
+My Attila, my Huns, those heroic figures which stand for the proud fame
+of my race, appear in those dry pages to our malicious and slanderous
+age as covered with shame and disgrace, while in reality they are no
+less than Alexander and Caesar,' etc. etc.
+
+I have been at present unable to ascertain whether it is true that the
+German Emperor has set it to music, under the impression that it refers
+to him and the German armies. It is very popular in Prussia, which need
+arouse no surprise.
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter III_
+
+
+THE END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION
+
+We have traced in brief the backward progress of Ottoman domination, and
+have seen how, from the rough and ready methods of a military barbarism,
+the Turks evolved a more emphatic and a more highly organised negation
+of all those principles which we may sum up under the general term of
+civilisation. The comparatively humane neglect of the unfortunate alien
+peoples herded within the frontiers of earlier Sultans was improved upon
+by Abdul Hamid, who struck out the swifter and superior methods of
+maintaining the dominating strength of the Turkish element in the
+kingdom not by the absorption of subject peoples, but by their
+extermination. This in turn, this new and effective idea, served as a
+first sketch of an artist with regard to his finished picture, and
+starting with that the Nationalist party enlarged and elaborated it
+into that masterpiece of massacre which they exhibited to the world in
+the years 1915 and 1916 of the Christian Era, when from end to end of
+the Empire there flashed the signal for the extermination of the
+Armenian race. Abdul Hamid was but tentative and experimental as
+compared to their systematised thoroughness, but then the Nationalist
+party had learned thoroughness under the tutelage of its Prussian
+masters. And in addition to instruction they had had the advantage of
+seeing how Prussian firmness, with the soothing balm of Kultur to
+follow, had dealt with the now-subject remnant of Belgians. That was the
+way to treat subject people: 'the first care of a state is to protect
+itself,' as Enver and Talaat could read in the text-books now translated
+into Turkish, in copies, maybe, presented to them by their Master in
+Berlin, and Turkey could best show the proof of her enlightenment and
+regeneration, by following in the footsteps of Prussian Kultur. Perhaps
+a few thousand innocent men might suffer the inconvenience of having
+their nails torn out, of being bastinadoed to death, of being shot,
+burned or hanged, perhaps a few thousand girls and women might die by
+the wayside in being deported to 'agricultural colonies,' might fall
+victims to the lusts of Turkish soldiers, or have babes torn from their
+wombs, but these paltry individual pains signified nothing compared to
+the national duty of 'suffering the state to run no risks.' As one of
+this party of Union and Progress said, 'The innocent of to-day may be
+the guilty of to-morrow,' and it was therefore wise to provide that for
+innocent and guilty alike there should be no to-morrow at all. Years
+before the statesmanship of Abdul Hamid had prophetically foreseen the
+dawning of this day, when he remarked 'The way to get rid of the
+Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians,' and temporarily for
+twenty years he did get rid of the Armenian question. But when, in 1915,
+Talaat Bey completed his arrangements for a further contribution to the
+solution of the same problem, he said, 'After this, there will be no
+Armenian question for fifty years.' As far as we can judge, he rather
+under-estimated the thoroughness of his arrangements.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Lately (September 1917), when the massacres were all over,
+Talaat, speaking at a Congress of the Committee of Union and Progress,
+upheld as right and proper the treatment of the Armenian race.]
+
+The race thus marked out for extermination was one of the oldest
+settlements in Asiatic Turkey. Originally it was confined to Armenia
+proper, a highland district comprising part of what is now the Russian
+province of Trans-Caucasia, part of Persia, notably the province of
+Adarbaijan, and, within the Turkish frontier, the province of Armenia,
+itself. According to legend, which may well be correct, the Armenians
+were the oldest national Christian Church in the world, with a liturgy
+that dates from the first century of the Christian Era, while their
+translation of the Bible dates from the early years of the fifth century
+A.D. Here in these uplands they formed a compact and homogeneous
+population, spread over towns and country alike, and were occupied in
+the main with agrarian and pastoral pursuits. But they had in addition
+much of the versatility and business capacity of the Jews, as well as a
+strong liberal-mindedness towards progress and education, and thus,
+while they still continued up to the present day their pastoral life in
+the countryside, others gravitated towards towns, and by degrees they
+spread over a large part of the Turkish Empire, until most of the towns
+in Turkey had a progressive and peaceful quota of Armenian citizens,
+tolerated by their Moslem neighbours, and, though possessed of no great
+share of political influence, powerful, in that the trade and commerce
+of inland Turkey was largely in their hands. Wherever they went they
+established their schools; many were lawyers, doctors, and professors of
+education. Certain repressive measures were brought to bear on them;
+they were not, for instance, allowed to carry arms, except when, in
+accordance with Turkish conscriptive laws, they served in the Ottoman
+army. But many of them, by paying their exemption money, got off
+military service, and they confined themselves to the arts of peace,
+whether pastorally in their native highlands, or in the shops and
+offices of the towns to which they migrated. They were not, till the
+time of Abdul Hamid, held to be in any sense a national danger, for,
+except in Armenia proper, they were too scattered and too peace-loving
+an element of the population to be capable of united action, and never
+do they seem to have provoked any outburst of Moslem fanaticism. They
+had local quarrels and fights with the more warlike Kurds who encroached
+on Armenia, and in the towns where they settled they often incurred the
+vague jealousy and dislike which are the penalties of a race superior
+morally and intellectually to those among whom they live. But that
+superiority constituted in course of time the 'Armenian question,' to
+which Abdul Hamid alluded. In all, some sixty years ago their entire
+race numbered about 4,000,000 persons, of whom about 1,250,000 inhabited
+Russian Trans-Caucasia, about 150,000 were in the province of
+Adarbaijan, and there were smaller bodies of them in Austria and India.
+The remainder, some 2,500,000, were spread over Armenia, over the
+villages and towns of Turkey, notably the eastern edge of the Cilician
+uplands, while in Constantinople itself there were certainly not less
+than 150,000, and probably as many as 200,000. To-day, the male portion
+of the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire has practically ceased to
+exist: a quarter of a million men and women escaped over the Russian
+frontier, five thousand escaped to Egypt, and there are a few thousand
+women and girls (it is impossible to ascertain the exact number) in
+Turkish harems. Turkism, as administered by Abdul Hamid first, then, far
+more efficiently, by Enver Pasha, and Talaat Bey, has solved the
+Armenian question.
+
+The history of its solution falls under two heads, of which the first
+concerns the manner in which it was solved in Armenia itself, where the
+population was almost exclusively Armenian, both in towns and in the
+country. Here the eastern and north-eastern frontiers of Turkey, across
+which lie the province of Russian Trans-Caucasia and Persia, pass
+through the middle of districts peopled by men of Armenian blood, and
+when, in the autumn of 1914, the Turks made their entry into the
+European War, their eastern armies, operating against Russia, found
+themselves confronted by troops among whom were many Armenians, while in
+their advance into the Persian province of Adarbaijan, there were in the
+ranks of their opponents, Armenians and Syriac Christians. They advanced
+in fact, in the first weeks of the war, into a country largely peopled
+with men of the same blood as those on their own side of the frontier.
+Though the edict had not yet come from Constantinople for the massacre
+of the Armenians (Talaat Bey did not complete his arrangements till the
+following April), the slaughter of them began then, first in the advance
+of the Turkish armies, and following on that movement, which lasted but
+a few weeks, in their subsequent retreat before the Russians. All
+villages through which the Turkish armies passed were plundered and
+burned, all the inhabitants on whom the Turks could lay their hands were
+killed. Sometimes women and children were given to the Kurds, who formed
+bands of irregular troops in conjunction with the Turkish army, and
+these were outraged before they were slaughtered. A price was put on
+every Christian head, and in the Turkish retreat the corpses were thrust
+into the wells in order to pollute them. The excuse for this, as given
+by German apologists (not apologists, perhaps, so much as supporters and
+adherents of the policy), was that since behind the Turkish lines the
+country was populated by a race of the same blood as that through which
+they advanced, and then retreated, extermination was necessary in order
+to prevent or to punish treachery and collusion. But I have been nowhere
+able to find that there were instances of such, nor that the Turks put
+forward that excuse themselves. Indeed it would have been an unnecessary
+explanation, for but a few months after the opening of the war, Talaat
+Bey's plans were complete, and the extermination of Armenians hundreds
+of miles from any sphere of military operations rendered it needless to
+say anything about it, or to invent instances of treachery if there were
+actually none to hand.
+
+Simultaneously the massacre of Armenians behind the Turkish lines
+began. The whole male population of the district round Bitlis was
+murdered, so too were all males in Bitlis itself. Then all women and
+children were driven in, as a herdsman might drive sheep, from the
+reeking villages round, and, for purposes of convenience, concentrated
+in Bitlis. When they were all collected, they were driven in a flock to
+the edge of the Tigris, shot, and the corpses were thrown into the
+river. That was the solution of the Armenian question in Bitlis.
+
+North-west of Bitlis, and some sixty miles distant, lies the town of
+Mush. It used to contain about 25,000 Armenian inhabitants, and in the
+district round there were some three hundred villages chiefly consisting
+of Armenians. Arrangements were on foot for a general massacre there
+when the arrival of Russian troops at Liz, some fifteen hours' march
+away, caused the execution of it to be put off for a while, and up till
+July a few folk only had been shot, and a few beaten to death, as a
+warning to those treacherously inclined. Then the Russians, in the face
+of superior forces, had to retire again, and the massacres were put on a
+systematic footing. The account which follows is based on four
+independent authorities: (1) The statement of a German eye-witness in
+Mush in charge of an Armenian orphanage; (2) the statement of a woman
+deported from a village near, and subsequently killed by Kurds; (3)
+information from refugees escaped to Trans-Caucasia; (4) the journal
+_Horizon_ of Tiflis. These supplement each other, often verify each
+other, and in no instance are contradictory.
+
+Rumours of an impending massacre reached Mush before the end of 1914, at
+a time when the massacres across the frontier had begun. The Mutessarif
+of Mush, an intimate friend of Enver Pasha, had openly declared that 'at
+an opportune moment' the slaughter of the whole Armenian race was
+contemplated, and later Ekran Bey corroborated this in the presence of
+the American and German Consuls. Enver indeed seems to have been the
+chief organiser with regard to the massacres in Armenia itself, while
+Talaat Bey saw to the fate of those dispersed in towns throughout the
+rest of Turkey. During the whole of that winter, a very severe one,
+signs of the approaching extermination multiplied. In the villages round
+fresh taxes were introduced, and when Armenians were unable to pay they
+were beaten to death, while, if they resisted, the village in question
+was burned. But by July 1915 (after the unavoidable delay caused by the
+proximity of Russian troops) all was ready, and the massacre began in
+earnest.
+
+Four battalions of Turkish troops arrived from Constantinople, and an
+order was given that all Armenians must leave the town within three
+days, after 'registering themselves' at the Government office. The women
+and children were to remain, but their money and their property would be
+confiscated. Within two hours after that, owing, I suppose, to fresh
+orders from Constantinople, the guns opened fire on the crowds in the
+streets flocking to the registry offices, and after that systematic
+house-to-house murder began. Prominent Armenians were tortured to
+death, houses containing women and children were set on fire, a body of
+men collected together was thrown into the river, girls were outraged
+and slaughtered. For two days the massacre continued, and by the end of
+the second day the Armenian question was solved as regards Mush.
+
+In the surrounding villages the same Prussian thoroughness was observed,
+and out of all the inhabitants of the plain 5000 only seemed to have
+survived, who fled to Sasun (there to be subsequently massacred in
+1916), while a few from outlying villages escaped to the Russian troops.
+In certain villages the girls and young women were given to the Kurd
+soldiery, who raped them publicly in the presence of their families, not
+sparing girls of eight and ten years of age, who then, bleeding and
+violated, were shot in company with the old women, for whom the Kurds
+(inspired by Allah, the God of Love) had no use. Elsewhere, as the story
+of a deported woman from Kheiban tells us, the women guarded by Kurdish
+troops were driven out of their villages, leaving behind the corpses of
+the men and of old women who could not walk, and for days were marched
+along the roads, nearly naked, under the fierce heat of the July sun.
+Once every other day they were given bread, but all did not get it, and
+many fell exhausted by the wayside, and were either whipped to their
+feet again or allowed to lie down and die. As they passed through
+villages Kurds would come out and rape a girl or two, and when they
+halted at night their guards would come among them.... Some few escaped;
+the rest, in dwindling company, went on through days of blinding sun and
+nights of shame till at last there were only a few remaining. It was not
+worth while going farther, for the work of Enver Pasha was nearly done,
+and the rest were pushed into the river. One alone survived, who could
+swim, and she, with her two-year-old baby on her back, got across the
+stream and made her way to a village where were a party of Armenians who
+had escaped massacre. She arrived there at midnight, and at first they
+thought she was a ghost. To them she told her story of the outraged and
+ever-dwindling caravan of helpless women and girls driven onwards all
+day beneath the smiting arrows of the sun, and encamped by the wayside,
+where they halted with their barbarous guards and their lusts for a
+terror by night. Of them none but this one was left, who had carried her
+baby with her every step of that infernal pilgrimage. Two days
+afterwards he died from want of nourishment, and before the week was out
+the mother fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, and was
+killed.
+
+So the problem of the village of Kheiban was solved, and if in the
+history of the crimes that have blackened the earth with wanton cruelty
+and made God to hide His face, there is any so atrocious a tale, I do
+not know it. But if among the annals of heroism and of mother-love we
+want to find a nobler record than that of this woman of Kheiban, equally
+am I at a loss as to where we should look for it. Among the true and
+golden legends of the world shall that which she did be inscribed for a
+memorial of her.
+
+Northward from Mush, and Bitlis lies the province of Erzerum, with the
+town of the same name, that contained in the autumn of 1914 some 20,000
+Armenians. Here the first hint of coming trouble was the order that all
+Armenian soldiers serving in Turkish ranks should be disarmed. This was
+followed in June by another order that all the inhabitants of the
+hundred villages in the district should leave their homes at two hours'
+notice. They numbered between 10,000 and 15,000 persons. Of these a few
+took refuge with friendly Kurds, but of the remainder a few only lived
+to reach Erzinjan, where they were again deported, and the rest were
+murdered as they marched. In Erzerum itself orders were received by
+Tahsin Bey, the Vali of the town, that all Armenians were to be killed
+without distinction of age or sex. He refused to carry this order out,
+but his unwillingness was overruled.[1] Simultaneously, the German
+Consul telegraphed protests to his Ambassador at Constantinople, and
+was told that Germany could not interfere in the internal affairs of
+Turkey.
+
+[Footnote 1: At Angora a similar refusal on the part of the Governor
+resulted in his dismissal, and the same thing happened at Konia and at
+Kutaia.]
+
+Here the method employed was deportation: the victims were murdered, not
+in the town itself, but were given orders to leave their homes, and
+under guard march (for no conveyances were given them) to other
+districts. The first company was to go to Diarbekr. All these, with the
+exception of one man and forty women, were murdered on the first day's
+march. The remainder reached Kharput, which was another station or
+collecting place for the deported. A German eye-witness tells us what
+fate waited them. 'They have had their eyebrows plucked out, their
+breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their
+feet, or else hammer nails into them as they do in shoeing horses. This
+is all done at night-time, in order that people may not hear their
+screams and know of their agony. Soldiers are stationed round the
+prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles. It is needless to relate
+that many died of these tortures. When they die, the soldiers cry, "Now
+let your Christ help you."' A second caravan of five hundred families
+left Erzerum: at Baiburt they were joined by another contingent deported
+from that town, and the account that follows is based on the information
+supplied by the Rev. Robert Stapleton, an American minister at Erzerum,
+and by an Armenian woman who was among the deported, and whose life was
+spared on her embracing Islamism.
+
+The convoy numbered, when it left Baiburt, some 15,000 persons, and it
+reached Erzinjan in safety. There the massacres had already taken place,
+and the women and children had been deported, for they found no
+Armenians there. But the convoy had not yet arrived at its goal, and it
+started out again moving south by east till it came to Kamakh. There
+bands of Kurds descended on them, and in the space of seven days every
+male above fifteen years of age, including an aged priest of ninety, was
+killed. Thereafter a pilgrimage of women, as from Kheiban, moved
+southwards across plain and mountain, and every day its numbers were
+diminished, for the youthful and the good-looking were carried off by
+brigands. At night they were halted outside villages, and the gendarmes
+and villagers took what they chose. Many died from hunger and
+heat-stroke: others were left by the wayside. When they came to the
+banks of the river Kara-Su there was a debauch of horror. Women and
+girls and little children were raped and mutilated, and the children who
+still survived were thrown into the river. Those who could swim were
+shot. Thereafter the movements of this caravan are hard to trace.
+Probably there was then but little left of it. But others followed on
+the same route 'through fields and hillsides dotted with swollen and
+blackened corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench.'
+Some of them reached Mosul, some reached Aleppo, another collecting
+station, where, by the mouth of other witnesses, we shall hear of them
+again.
+
+Corroborative and additional evidence is given by the Danish Red Cross
+nurses who, with a noble disregard of their own safety, accompanied one
+of these caravans from Erzerum to Erzinjan. They speak of the massacres
+at Kamakh, of the killing by the river, and of a _battue_ through the
+cornfields, where the wheat was high, into which some Armenians had
+escaped. At one time these Danish Sisters were in the charge of a
+gendarme who had superintended a massacre of 3000 women and children
+driven from their homes into the country, rounded up and killed. He told
+the Sisters that this was the best method of getting rid of them, for
+they should be made to suffer first, and besides it would be
+inconvenient for Moslems to live in a village with so many corpses
+about. At another place they came to a shambles, where Armenian
+soldiers, deprived of their arms, and sent to make roads, had been
+slaughtered: at another there were three gangs of labourers, one Moslem,
+one Greek, and one Armenian. These latter were guarded. Presently, as
+they proceeded along their road, they looked round and saw that the
+Armenian gang was being formed up by itself, a little off the
+highroad....
+
+And so the ghastly record went on all over Armenia. At one place only,
+the town of Van, was any resistance organised. There, after the massacre
+had begun, some 1500 Armenians got hold of arms (probably many of these
+men were soldiers who had not yet had their arms taken from them), and
+for the space of twenty-seven days defended themselves against five
+thousand Turkish troops, till the Russian advance relieved them. During
+that advance Armenian refugees, into whose districts the massacres had
+not yet penetrated, fled for refuge to the invading army, and in all
+some 250,000 Armenians under its protection crossed in safety the
+Russian frontier into Trans-Caucasia. How many died on the way from
+hunger and exhaustion is not known. Cholera, dysentery, and spotted
+fever broke out among them, and the path of their passage was lined with
+dead and dying. Companies of Kurds made descents upon them, taking toll
+of their maidenhood, but, with the Russian line to protect them at their
+rear, they struggled on out of the cemetery and brothel of their native
+country, and out of the accursed confines of that hell on earth, the
+Ottoman Empire, leaving behind them the murdered myriads of their
+husbands and their sons, their violated wives and daughters. Through
+incredible hardships they passed, but, unlike the other pilgrimages we
+have briefly traced, they moved not towards death, but towards safety
+and life, and their dark steps were lightened with Hope.
+
+Before the last of those who survived the hunger and the pestilence of
+that pilgrimage had reached Russian soil, it is probable that in all
+Armenia there was not a man of their race left alive, nor a woman either
+unless she had accepted Islamism and the life of the harem. A peaceful
+and progressive nation had been wiped out with every accompaniment of
+horror and cruelty and bestial lust, and in Armenia itself there would
+never more be an Armenian question. Abdul Hamid had hinted at the
+solution of it, and had made, as we have seen, experiments in that
+direction; but it was reserved for Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey,
+enlightened men of the Young Turk party, with the advantages of a
+Prussian example, to complete the work. Already Enver had said that he
+would never rest until the last Armenian in the Ottoman Empire had been
+killed, and before the end of 1915, as far as Armenia itself went, he
+was able to see a reasonable prospect of repose before him. But there
+was much work still left to do in other provinces.
+
+We have seen that for the extirpation of Armenians in Armenia proper,
+the excuse put forward, if not by the Turks themselves, by their German
+apologists, was the necessity of guarding against treachery in the
+vicinity of the Turkish army, and against spying and collusion between
+the Armenians behind the Russian lines and those behind Turkish lines.
+The same pretext was put forward for the massacres and deportations from
+Thrace, from Constantinople, and from the shores of the Sea of Marmora.
+Here, if anywhere, there may be thought to be some justification for
+measures which might have been undertaken for the sake of public safety.
+At any rate, there were definite charges brought against Armenians in
+these districts, and the Armenian boatmen of Silivri, for instance, were
+imprisoned, but not, as far as I know, massacred, on the charge of
+revictualling English submarines, which at that time, as the reader will
+remember, had penetrated into the Sea of Marmora, and indeed had reached
+Constantinople itself. It is not, of course, consonant with Turkish or
+Prussian justice to substantiate charges before inflicting penalties, it
+is sufficient in the new World-justice to accuse. But here round
+Constantinople, there was some pretence at procedure before resorting to
+murder and deportation. A register was drawn up of all Armenians
+resident in the capital, dividing into separate classes those who were
+born in Constantinople, and those who were immigrants from Armenia, with
+a view to deporting those who were not native to the city. Here, I
+think, we may see traces of the Prussian instinct for tabulation, for
+classification, for category-mongering. Enver and his colleagues lost
+patience with these dilatory tactics. The Armenians of the province of
+Brussa were deported wholesale, and long before the registration lists
+of Constantinople were finished, all Armenians were moved out of the
+town. Ten thousand males were massacred in the mountains of Ismid, and
+the Armenian women and children taken into collecting stations for
+deportation to 'agricultural colonies' (so the phrase ran in the
+Pecksniff language of Prussia) situated in the Anatolian desert, in the
+desert of Arabia, and in malarious marshes on the Euphrates. With this
+clearing out of Armenians from Thrace, from Constantinople, and from
+Armenia itself, we have finished with our first class of the Armenian
+atrocities. For it reasons were at least invented by German apologists.
+Military necessities, which here, as in Belgium, knew no law, dictated
+it; the frightfulness involved was incidental to War. But such
+considerations were not even alleged for the second class of the
+murder-scheme. Before passing on, it will be well to review, quite
+shortly, the reasons which dictated it, and penetrate into the infernal
+councils of Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey.
+
+The text of the scheme is to be found in the defined policy of the
+Young Turk party as set forth in their Congress of 1911. 'Turkey must
+become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem ideas and Moslem
+influence must be preponderant.... Sooner or later the complete
+Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects must be effected: it is clear,
+however, that this can never be attained by persuasion, but that we must
+resort to armed force.'
+
+There is the text that was expanded into the discourse of murder; it is
+the definition of a policy. Within a few years there followed the
+European War, and that probably was the immediate cause of its being put
+into effect. No more admirable opportunity for Ottomanisation could
+present itself, for the entry of Turkey into the war was most unpopular
+with the bulk of the Turkish population, and it was advisable to bribe
+them into acceptance of it. The bribe was the houses, the property, the
+money and the trade that throughout the length and breadth of Turkey was
+in Armenian hands. For the Armenians were by far the wealthiest of the
+alien populations, and some 90 per cent. of Turkish trade passed through
+their shops and offices. Here, then, was the psychological moment:
+Turkey for the Turk was the aim of the Committee of Union and Progress,
+and with a discontented population, unwilling to fight, the moment had
+come for restoring to the Turk this mass of property which at present
+belonged to an alien race. War might have its drawbacks and its clouds,
+but war would be seen to have its advantages and its silver linings, if
+out of it there came this legacy of Armenian wealth. And by the same
+stroke Turkey could get rid of those thousands of meddlesome
+missionaries, American and French, who spread religion and learning and
+other undesirable things among the cursed race. Once remove the cursed
+race, and there would be an end of their instructors also, for there
+would be none to instruct. 'Thanks to their schools,' so we read in the
+_Hilal_, an organ of the Young Turks, 'foreigners were able to exercise
+great moral influence over the young men of the country.... By closing
+them (i.e. by exterminating their pupils) the Government has put an end
+to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous.'
+
+Such, then, was the spirit that animated Enver and Talaat, and during
+the winter of 1914-15 they perfected their plans. The Armenian race was
+to cease, and the Valis and other officials were, each in his district,
+to see to the thoroughness of its cessation. Sometimes, as happened at
+Erzerum, the Vali in question, not having the broad out-look of Enver,
+or quaintly and curiously having a womanish objection to the national
+duty of flogging men to death and giving over young girls to a barbarous
+soldiery, remonstrated with the authorities, or even refused to obey
+orders. Such a one was instantly removed from his office, and a
+stauncher patriot substituted. All was put on an orderly footing: here
+Kurds were to be employed on the old Abdul Hamid formula, who by way of
+wage would enjoy the privilege of raping as many women and girls out of
+their hapless convoy as seemed desirable, while in agricultural
+districts they were allowed also to take over the sheep and cattle of
+their murdered victims. Here, in towns where there was more chance of
+resistance than in scattered homesteads, it would be wise to employ
+regular troops, backed, if necessary, by artillery, to whom would be
+entrusted the murder of the whole male population, after suitable
+tortures, supposing the executioners had a taste for the sport, and to
+them was given the right of general plunder. Then, as soon as the number
+and capacity of the vacant houses were telegraphed to Constantinople,
+occupiers from the discontented townsfolk and natives of Thrace were
+assigned to them. Sometimes there would be a big school building to give
+away as well, but that was not always so, for it might be more
+convenient to assemble Armenians there for purposes of registration or
+so forth, and then, if it happened to catch fire, why Enver would
+understand that such accidents would occur. Among other careful and
+well-thought-out instructions came the order that, when possible, the
+murders should not take place in the town, but outside it, for clean
+Allah-fearing Moslems would not like to live in habitations defiled by
+Christian corpses. But, above all, there must be thoroughness; not a man
+must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman who must not drag her
+outraged body, so long as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to,
+or rather towards those 'agricultural colonies,' as Talaat Bey, in a
+flash of whimsical Prussian humour, called them. One was advantageously
+situated in the middle of the Anatolian desert at the village of
+Sultanieh. There, for miles round, stretched the rocks and sands of a
+waterless wilderness, but no doubt the women and children of this very
+industrious race would manage to make it wave with cornfields. Another
+agricultural colony, by way of contrast, should be established a couple
+of days' journey south of Aleppo, where the river loses itself in
+pestilential and malarious swamps. Arabs could not live there, but who
+knew whether those hardy Armenians (the women and children, of them at
+least who had proved themselves robust enough to reach the place) would
+not flourish there out of harm's way? After the swamps one came to the
+Arabian desert, and there, a hundred miles south-east, was a place
+called Deir-el-Zor; wandering Arab tribes sometimes passed through it,
+but, arrived there, the Armenians should wander no more. In those arid
+sands and waterless furnaces of barren rock there was room for all and
+to spare. Sultanieh, the swamps, and Deir-el-Zor: these were the chief
+of Talaat Bey's agricultural colonies.
+
+There must be collecting stations for these tragic colonists, centres to
+which they must be herded in from surrounding districts: one at
+Osmanieh, let us say, one at Aleppo, one at Ras-el-Ain, one at Damascus.
+And since it would be a pity to let so many flowers of girlhood waste
+their sweetness on the desert air of Deir-el-Zor, slave markets must be
+established at these collecting stations. There would be plenty of
+girls, and prices would be low, but the reverend ministers of Allah the
+God of Love, the Ulemas, the Padis and the Muftis, should be accorded a
+preferential tariff. Indeed they should pay nothing at all; they should
+just choose a girl and take her away, and, with the help of Allah the
+God of Love, convert her to the blessed creed. No one was too young for
+these lessons.... A little abstemiousness would not hurt these pampered
+Christians, so when they set out on their marches they need not be
+provided with rations or water. Perhaps some might die, but Talaat had
+no use for weaklings at his agricultural colonies. Nor must there be any
+poking and prying on the part of those interfering American
+missionaries; and so Talaat Bey put all the agricultural colonies out of
+bounds for foreigners....
+
+There was no hurry over these deportations, for the plea of military
+exigencies, which had caused the deportations in Armenia itself to be
+terminated by massacre with a rapidity almost inartistic, did not apply
+to Armenians so far from the seat of war. Their picnics could be
+conducted quietly and pleasantly in the leisurely Oriental manner. Even
+the men need not be murdered absolutely out of hand. Strong young
+fellows might be stripped and tied down and then beaten to death by
+bastinadoing the feet till they burst, or by five hundred blows on the
+chest and stomach. Their cries would mingle with the screams of their
+sisters in the embrace of Turkish soldiers. And, talking of embraces, if
+a woman was desirable, she need not walk all the way to Deir-el-Zor, but
+by embracing Islamism be transferred to a harem. But these were details
+that might be left to individual taste: there were no precise
+instructions save that no Armenian men must be discoverable in the
+Ottoman Empire at all, and no women save those who had become Turkish
+women, or who were at work on the waterless and the malarial
+agricultural colonies.
+
+Talaat Bey reviewed his finished scheme. He thought it would do, and
+Enver Pasha agreed with him, and Jemal Bey (who soon after styled
+himself Jemal the Great), the Military Governor of Syria, and so
+responsible for the last stages of their pilgrimage, thought it would do
+very well indeed. And instructions were sent out to every town in the
+Empire where there were Armenians, in accordance with the programme of
+Talaat Bey.
+
+How Enver carried out his part of the programme in Armenia itself we
+have seen, and by the end of the year (1915) his work was done, and
+Armenia was Armenia no longer. But operations, as I have said, were
+conducted in a more leisurely manner elsewhere, and the agony of that
+butchery protracted. But Jemal got to work at once in the thickly
+populated district round Zeitun. He had had no success in the campaign
+of the winter in the direction of the Suez Canal, and his troops were
+hungry for some sort of victory. The Zeitunlis were hardy independent
+mountaineers, who were possessed of arms, and Jemal thought it more
+prudent not to dally with deportations, but conduct a regular campaign
+against them. For two or three months they resisted, entrenching
+themselves in the hills, but they could not hold out against artillery
+and the modern apparatus of war, and the whole tribe was wiped out. That
+done, Jemal became Jemal the Great by reason of his national services,
+and paid a visit to Germany. On his return we shall hear of him again.
+
+Meanwhile, from all the reports that have arrived from missionaries and
+others, we may take one or two, almost at random. At certain places, as
+in the governments of Ismid, Angora and Diarbekr, the Armenian
+population was completely wiped out. Sometimes tortures were added, as
+at a certain Anatolian town where there was a big Armenian school, in
+which a number of professors and instructors, some of whom had studied
+in America, in Scotland, and in Germany, had for years been working.
+
+What happened to them was this:--
+
+(1) Professor A served the College thirty-five years, and taught
+Turkish and history. He was arrested without charge, the hair of his
+head and beard were pulled out in order to secure damaging confessions.
+He was starved and hung up by the arms for a day and a night and
+repeatedly beaten. He was then murdered.
+
+(2) Professor B, who had served the College thirty-three years, and
+taught mathematics, suffered the same fate.
+
+(3) Professor C, head of the preparatory department, had served the
+College for twenty years. He was made to witness the spectacle of a man
+being beaten almost to death, and became mentally deranged. He was
+murdered with his family.
+
+(4) Professor D, who taught mental and moral sciences, was treated in
+the same way as Professor A. He also had three finger nails pulled out
+by the roots, and was subsequently murdered.
+
+Similarly, at Diarbekr, the Armenians were collected in batches of 600,
+taken out of the town, and killed to the last man. Among them was the
+Armenian Archbishop; his eyes and nails were dragged out before he was
+butchered.
+
+Or let us take a look at some of the collecting camps. At one, described
+by an eye-witness, we find that the convoy had arrived after several
+months of travel. More than half were already dead, they had been
+pillaged by bandits and Kurds seven times. They were forbidden to drink
+water when they passed by a stream, three-quarters of the young women
+and girls had been kidnapped, the rest were compelled to sleep with the
+gendarmes who conducted them. At Osmanieh it was decided to deport the
+women and children by train. They lay about the station starving and
+fever-stricken. When the train arrived many were jostled on to the line,
+and the driver yelled with joy, crying out, 'Did you see how I smashed
+them up?'
+
+At another camp typhus broke out; those who died of it were left
+unburied, as vouched for by a Turkish officer, in order to increase the
+infection....
+
+Urfa was another collecting camp for the Armenians in that district, and
+the following account is based on the information of an eye-witness.
+Here, before the concentration began, the Armenians living in the town
+offered resistance to the Turks, and held out until Fahri Bey, second in
+command to Jemal the Great, arrived with artillery, bombarded the town,
+and massacred every Armenian there. Quiet being thus restored, the bands
+of deported began to arrive. They came by rail or on foot, and, with
+the Prussian love of tabulation, were divided into three groups.
+
+The first group consisted of old men, old women, and young children.
+They, guarded by gendarmes, were sent marching through the desert to
+Deir-el-Zor. Few, if any, ever arrived there, all dying by the way.
+
+The second group, consisting of able-bodied men, was led off in batches
+and slaughtered. Among them were Zohrab and Vartkes, Armenian deputies
+who had been brought there from Constantinople.
+
+The third group consisted of young marriageable girls. Some, perhaps,
+found their way into harems.
+
+From Aleppo (one of the final concentration camps before such as were
+left of the convoys set forth for their goal, the swamps or the desert
+round Deir-el-Zor) we have the detailed evidence of Dr. Martin Niepage,
+High Grade teacher in the German Technical School. This gentleman, with
+a courage and a humanity to which the highest tribute must be paid,
+addressed a report of protest to the German Ambassador at
+Constantinople, and wrote an open letter to the Reichstag on the subject
+of what he had seen with his own eyes in that town. In his preliminary
+matter he speaks as follows:--
+
+'In dilapidated caravanserais I found quantities of dead, many corpses
+being half-decomposed, and others still living among them who were soon
+to breathe their last. In other yards I found quantities of sick and
+dying people, whom nobody was looking after.... We teachers and our
+pupils had to pass them every day. Every time we went out we saw through
+the open windows their pitiful forms, emaciated and wrapped in rags. In
+the morning our school children, on their way through the narrow
+streets, had to push past the two-wheeled ox-carts on which every day,
+from eight to ten rigid corpses without coffin or shroud, were carried
+away, their arms and legs trailing out of the vehicle.'
+
+From the report itself:--
+
+'Out of convoys which, when they left their homes on the Armenian
+plateau, numbered from two to three thousand men, women, and children,
+only two or three hundred survivors arrived here in the south. The men
+were slaughtered on the way, the women and girls, with the exception of
+the old, the ugly and those who are still children, have been abused by
+Turkish soldiers and officers.... Even when they are fording rivers they
+do not allow those dying of thirst to drink. All the nourishment they
+receive is a daily ration of a little meal sprinkled on their hands....
+Opposite the German Technical School at Aleppo, a mass of about four
+hundred emaciated forms, the remnant of such convoys, is lying in one of
+the caravanserais. There are about a hundred children (boys and girls)
+among them, from five to seven years old. Most of them are suffering
+from typhoid and dysentery. When one enters the yard, one has the
+impression of entering a madhouse. If one brings food, one notices that
+they have forgotten how to eat.... If one gives them bread, they put it
+aside indifferently. They just lie there quietly waiting for death.'
+
+Dr. Niepage wrote this report in the hope of saving such as then (1915)
+survived. No notice whatever was taken of it, and his postscript,
+written in May 1916, records the fact that 'the exiles encamped at
+Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 men, women and
+children, were slaughtered to the last one.'[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: It is right to add that at Aleppo an officer called Bekir
+Sami guarded 50,000 Armenians whom he had collected from neighbouring
+districts, who were threatened with massacre, and I find that a German
+missionary states that there were 45,000 Armenians alive in Aleppo. This
+forms confirmatory evidence, but at the same time there is nothing to
+show that they were not subsequently deported to Deir-el-Zor. In this
+case it is highly improbable that any survive.]
+
+In Dr. Niepage's view, as I have stated elsewhere, the Germans are
+directly responsible for the continuance of the massacres. Such, too, is
+the opinion, he tells us, of the educated Moslems, and his courage in
+stating this has lost him his post at Aleppo. It is to be sincerely
+hoped that he has escaped the fate of a certain Dr. Lepsius, who, for
+drawing attention to the fact that Germany allowed the Armenian
+massacres, has been arrested for high treason.
+
+Before the end of 1915 the German authorities, who had refused to
+interfere in the massacres, and both in the official press and through
+official utterances had expressed their support of this Ottomanisation
+of the Empire, began to think that you might have too much of a good
+thing, and that the massacres had really gone far enough. Their reason
+was clear and explicit: there would be a very serious shortage of labour
+in the beet-growing industry and in the harvest-fields, for which they
+had sent grain and artificial manures from Germany. There had been some
+talk, they said, of saving 500,000 Armenians out of the race, but, in
+the way things were going on, it seemed that the remnant would not
+nearly approach that figure. Would not the great Ottomanisers temper
+their patriotism with a little clemency? Talaat Bey disagreed: he wanted
+to make a complete job of it, but Jemal the Great, fresh from his visit
+to Germany, supported the idea, and, in spite of Talaat's opposition,
+made a spectacular exhibition of clemency, in which, beyond doubt, we
+can trace an 'Imitatio Imperatoris,' in the following manner.
+
+There was at the time a large convoy of men and women in Constantinople
+which was to be led out for murder and deportation, and Jemal gave
+orders that it should be spared and sent back to its highland home. He
+gave orders also that the entire convoy should be informed who was their
+saviour, and should be led in procession past his house and show their
+gratitude. All day the sorry pageant lasted, the ragged, half-starved
+crowd streamed by the house of Jemal the Great, with murmurs of
+thanksgiving and uplifted hands, and all manner of obeisances, while
+Jemal the Great stood in his porch with stern, impassive face, and hand
+on his sword-hilt in the best Potsdam manner, and acknowledged these
+thanksgivings....[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In support of Jemal's claim to clemency it must be added
+that, according to a report coming from Alexandria, he hanged twelve of
+the worst assassins sent to Syria as ringleaders of the massacres. I
+cannot find corroboration of this.]
+
+Here, then, is the absurd, the Williamesque side of this ludicrous
+popinjay, Jemal the Great, and it contains not only the obvious seeds of
+laughter, but the more helpful seeds of hope. He has a strong hand on
+the very efficient army of Syria, and his visits to Berlin seem perhaps
+to have turned his head not quite in the direction that the
+Master-egalo-megalomaniac of Berlin intended. I gather that Jemal the
+Great was not so much impressed by the magnificence of William II. as to
+fall dazzled and prone at the Imperial feet, and lick with enraptured
+tongue the imperial boot polish, but rather to be inspired to do the
+same himself, to become the God-anointed of the newly acquired German
+province, which is Turkey, and make a Potsdam of his own. This is only a
+guess, but the conduct of Jemal the Great in the matter of these
+Armenian refugees, and in other affairs, has been distinctly imperial.
+In June of this year, for instance, he telegraphed to H.E. the Vali of
+Syria, and an extract from his text is truly Potsdamish. 'One and a half
+million of sandbags,' he wrote, 'are required for the fortress of
+Gaza.... The bags should be made, if necessary, of all the silk-hangings
+in houses of Syria and Palestine.' With his army behind him, he has
+twice already defied the orders of Talaat, and I am inclined to think
+that he is the coming Strong Man of the effete Empire with whom it would
+be well worth while to make friends, even at a highish price. The Allied
+Powers should keep an undazzled eye on him, for it is quite possible
+that, having defied Talaat successfully, he may go on to defy the real
+rulers of Turkey, who live in Berlin. His Syrian army, from such sources
+as are available, appears to be more efficient than any other body of
+troops the Turks can put into the field, and he has them in control.
+Probably in the winter of 1917-1918 our troops will come into collision
+with them. But in the interval, also quite probably, Jemal the Great may
+resent German superintendence.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: See note at end of this chapter.]
+
+But in addition to his ludicrous side, there is in him a refined
+hypocrisy and a subtle cruelty worthy of Abdul Hamid. One instance will
+suffice.
+
+There had been some talk that at certain of these concentration camps
+there was no water supply, and he gave orders, did Jemal the Great and
+the Merciful, that water should be sent. A train consisting of trucks
+of water accordingly was despatched to one of those camps, situated in
+the desert, with no supply nearer than six miles, and an eye-witness
+describes its arrival. The mob of Armenians, mad with thirst, surrounded
+it, and, since everything must be done in an orderly and seemly manner,
+were beaten back by the Turkish guards, and made to stand at a due
+distance for the distribution. And when those ranks, with their parched
+throats and sun-cracked lips, were all ready, the Turkish guards opened
+the taps of the reservoirs, and allowed the whole of their contents to
+run away into the sand. Whether Jemal the Great planned that, or whether
+it was but a humorous freak on the part of the officials, I cannot say.
+But as a refinement of cruelty I have, outside the page of Poe's tales,
+only once come across anything to equal it, and that in a letter from
+the _Times'_ correspondent at Berne on April 11, 1917. He describes the
+treatment of English prisoners in Germany: 'An equally common
+entertainment with those women (German Red Cross nurses) was to offer a
+wounded man a glass, perhaps, of water, then, standing just outside his
+reach, to pour it slowly on the ground.' Could those sisters of mercy
+have read the account of Jemal's clemency, or is it merely an instance
+of the parallelism of similar minds?
+
+So the empty train returned, and Jemal the Great caused it to be known
+in Berlin that he was active in securing a proper water supply for the
+famous agricultural settlements in the desert, and loud were the
+encomiums in the press of the Central Powers over the colonisation of
+Syria by the Armenians, the progress and enlightenment of the Turks, and
+the skilful and humane organisation of Jemal the Great.
+
+There is no difficulty in estimating to-day the number of Armenian men
+who survive in the Turkish Empire. All appeals to the Prussian
+overlords, such as were made by Dr. Niepage, and the belated
+remonstrance of the Prussians themselves when they foresaw a dearth of
+labour for the husbandry of beet and cereals, fell on deaf ears, and I
+cannot see any reason for supposing that Armenian men exist any more in
+the Empire. It is more difficult to judge of the numbers of women who,
+by accepting the Moslem creed and the harems, are still alive. Certainly
+in some districts there were considerable 'conversions,' and Dr. Niepage
+rates them as many thousands. But the willingness to accept those
+conditions was not always a guarantee for their being granted, and I
+have read reports where would-be converts were told that 'religion' was
+a more serious matter than that, and, instead of being accepted, they
+were massacred. But even if Dr. Niepage is right, we can scarcely
+consider these women as constituting an Armenian element any more in the
+country. The work of butchery, the torture, the long-drawn agonies of
+those inhuman pilgrimages have come to an end because there are no more
+Armenian victims available. Apart from those who escaped over the
+Russian frontier, and the handful who sought refuge in Egypt, the race
+exists no longer, and the seal has been set on the bloodiest deed that
+ever stained the annals of the barbarous Osmanlis. It is not in revenge
+on the murderers, but in order to rescue the other subject peoples,
+Arabs, Greeks, Jews, who are still enclosed within the frontiers of the
+Empire, that the Allied Governments, in their answer to President
+Wilson, stated that among their aims as belligerents, was the
+'liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of
+the Turks.' There is defined their irreducible demand: never again,
+after peace returns, will the Turk be allowed to control the destinies
+of races not his own. Too long already--and to their disgrace be it
+spoken--have the civilised and Christian nations of Europe tolerated at
+their very doors a tyranny that has steadily grown more murderous and
+more monstrous, because they feared the upset of the Balance of Power.
+Now at least such Powers as value national honour, and regard a national
+promise as something more than a gabble of ink on a scrap of paper, have
+resolved that they will suffer the tyranny of the Turk over his alien
+subject peoples to continue no longer. It is the least they can do (and
+unhappily the most) to redeem the century-long neglect of their duty.
+Even now, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, the direst peril
+threatens those other peoples who at present groan under Turkish rule,
+and we can but pray that the end of the war will come before Arabs or
+Greeks or Jews suffer the same fate as has exterminated the Armenians.
+Too often have we been too late; we must only hope that another item
+will not have to be added to that miserable list, and that, when the day
+of reckoning comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous policy will stay
+our hands from the complete execution of that to which we stand pledged.
+The Balance of Power has gone the way of other rickety makeshifts, but
+there must be no makeshift in our dealings with the Turk, no compromise
+and no delay. What shall be done with those who planned and executed the
+greatest massacres known to history matters little; let them be hanged
+as high as Haman, and have done with them. But what does matter is that
+at no future time must it be in the power of a Government that has never
+been other than barbaric and butcherous, to do again as it has done
+before.
+
+NOTE ON JEMAL THE GREAT
+
+Jemal the Great has very obligingly done what I suggested we might
+expect him to do, and has kicked against the German control of the
+Syrian army. General von Falkenhayn was sent to take supreme command,
+and on June 28th of this year Jemal the Great refused to receive orders
+from him. In consequence General von Falkenhayn refused responsibility
+for any offensive movement there if Jemal remained in command.
+
+This promised well for trouble between Turks and Germans, but we must
+not, I am afraid, build very high hopes on it, for Germany has dealt
+with the situation in a masterly manner. Jemal was already Minister of
+Marine as well as commander of the Syrian army, so the Emperor asked him
+to pay another visit to Berlin, and he has been visiting Krupp's works
+and German naval yards, and we shall find probably that in the future
+his activities will be marine rather than military, and that von
+Falkenhayn will have a free hand in Syria.
+
+But this will prove rather disappointing for Jemal, since it seems
+beyond mere coincidence that towards the end of August Herr von
+Kuhlmann, the new German Foreign Minister, induced the Turkish
+Government (while Jemal was at Berlin) to put their navy and their
+merchant fleet under the orders of the German Admiralty, and already
+many Turkish naval officers have been replaced by Germans. Thus Jemal
+will find himself deprived of his military command, because the navy so
+urgently needed his guiding hand, while his guiding hand over the navy
+will be itself guided by the German Admiralty.... In fact, it looks
+rather like checkmate for Jemal the Great, and an end to the trouble he
+might have given the German control.
+
+On the eve of his leaving Germany, as yet unconscious probably of the
+subordination of the entire Turkish fleet to the German Admiralty, he
+gave an interview to a representative of the _Cologne Gazette_, which
+deserves more than that ephemeral appearance. It shows Jemal the Great
+in a sort of hypnotic trance induced at Potsdam. 'The German fleet,' he
+says, 'is simply spotless in its power, and a model for all states which
+need a modern navy--a model which cannot be surpassed.' ... He went for
+a cruise in a submarine which proceeded 'so smoothly, elegantly, calmly
+and securely that I had the impression of cruising in a great
+steamship.' ... He was taken to Belgium, and describes the 'idyllic life
+there': in the towns 'the people go for walks all day long,' and in the
+country the peasants blithely gather in the harvest with the help of
+happy prisoners.' (He does not tell us where the harvest goes to, any
+more than the Germans tell us where the Turkish harvests go to.) He was
+taken to General Headquarters, which he describes as 'majestic.' Finally
+he was taken into the presence of the All-Highest, and seems to have
+emerged in the condition in which Moses came down from Sinai.... But one
+must not altogether despair of Jemal the Great. It is still possible
+that, on his return to Constantinople, when he found that his position,
+as Minister of Marine was but a clerkship in the German Admiralty, the
+hypnotic trance began to pass off, and his ambitions to re-assert
+themselves. He may yet give trouble to the Germans if properly handled.
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter IV_
+
+
+THE QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE
+
+It is impossible to leave this heart-rending tale of the sufferings of
+the Armenian people under the Turks without some account of that devoted
+band of American missionaries who, with a heroism unsurpassed, and
+perhaps unequalled, so eagerly sacrificed themselves to the ravages of
+pestilence and starvation in order to alleviate the horrors that
+descended on the people to whom they had been sent. Often they were
+forcibly driven from the care of their flocks, often in the
+extermination of their flocks there was none left whom they could
+shepherd, but wherever a remnant still lingered there remained these
+dauntless and self-sacrificing men and women, regardless of everything
+except the cause to which they had devoted themselves. They recked
+nothing of the dangers to which they exposed themselves so long as
+there was a child or a woman or a man whom they could feed or nurse.
+Terrible as were the sufferings through which the Armenians passed, they
+must have been infinitely more unbearable had it not been for these
+American missionaries; small as was the remnant that escaped into the
+safety of Persia or Russian Trans-Caucasia, their numbers must have been
+halved had it not been for the heroism of these men and women. While the
+German Consuls contented themselves with a few faint protests to their
+Ambassador at Constantinople, followed by an acquiescence of silence,
+the missionaries constituted themselves into a Red Cross Society of
+intrepid workers, and, as one well-qualified authority tells us,
+'suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaustion as any
+proportionate body of workers on the European battlefields.' Fully
+indeed did they live up to the mandate of the American board that sent
+them out: 'Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and
+duties of the Gospel.'
+
+At the opening of the European War the American Missions had been at
+work for nearly a hundred years, and were disseminated over Anatolia and
+Armenia. They had opened 163 Protestant churches and 450 schools, they
+established hospitals, and in every possible way spread civilisation in
+a country where the spirit of the governing class was barbarism. It was
+not their object to proselytise. 'Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if
+he will,' so ran the instructions from which I have already quoted, 'the
+Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental,' and
+in the same wise and open-minded spirit they encouraged native
+Protestant Churches which were independent of them and largely
+self-supporting. Naturally in a country governed by monsters like Abdul
+Hamid and Enver Pasha in later days, they earned the enmity which is the
+tribute of barbarians to those who stand for civilisation, and when,
+owing to the extermination or flight of their Armenian flocks, they were
+left without a charge, and their schools were closed, we find a paean of
+self-congratulation going up from the Turkish press inspired by the
+butchers of Armenia. But till the massacres and the flight were
+complete, they gave themselves to the 'duties of the Gospel,' and their
+deeds shine like a star into the blackness of that night of murder.
+
+I will take as an example of the superb heroism of those men and women
+the diary of an American lady attached to the mission at Urmia, a
+document that, anonymously, is one of the noblest, least self-conscious
+records I have ever read. The period of it extends over five months.
+
+Early in January 1915 the Russian troops were withdrawn from Urmia,
+which lies on the frontier between Turkey and Persia, and simultaneously
+the Moslem population began to plunder the Christian villages, the
+inhabitants of which fled for refuge to the missions in the city.
+Talaat's official murder-scheme was not completed yet, but the Kurds,
+together with the Turks, had planned a local massacre at Geogtapa, which
+was stopped by the American doctor of this mission, Dr. Packard, who, at
+great personal risk, obtained an interview with the Kurdish chief, and
+succeeded in inducing him to spare the lives of the Christians, if they
+gave up arms and ammunition and property. The American flag was hoisted
+over the Mission buildings, and before a week was out there were over
+ten thousand refugees housed in the yards and rooms, where they remained
+for five months, the places of the dead being taken by fresh influxes.
+The dining-room, the sitting-room, the church, the school, were all
+given over to these destitute people, and from the beginning fear of
+massacre, as well as prevalence of disease, haunted the camp. It was
+impossible to move dead bodies outside; they had to be buried in the
+thronged yards, and every day children were born. But here is the spirit
+that animated their protectors. 'We have just had a Praise meeting,'
+records the diarist at the close of the first fortnight, 'with fifty or
+sixty we could gather from the halls and rooms near, and we feel more
+cheerful. We thought if Paul and Silas, with their stripes, could sing
+praises in prison, so could we.'
+
+The weeks, of which each day was a procession of hours too full of work
+to leave time for anxiety, began to enrol themselves into months, and
+the hope of rescue by a Russian advance made their hearts sick, so long
+was it deferred. Refugees from neighbouring villages kept arriving, and
+there was the constant problem before these devoted friends of their
+flock, as to how to feed them. All such were welcome, and eager was the
+welcome they received, though every foot of space in the buildings and
+in the yards was occupied. But somehow they managed to make room for all
+who came, and for those villagers who, under threat of torture and
+massacre, had apostatised, there was but yearning and sorrow, but never
+a word of blame or bitterness. Sometimes there was a visit of Turkish
+troops to search for concealed Russians, and, as our diarist remarks,
+'We can't complain of the monotony of life, for we never know what is
+going to happen next. On Tuesday morning we had a wedding in my room
+here. The boy and girl were simple villagers.... The wedding was fixed
+for the Syrian New Year, but the Kurds came and carried off wedding
+clothes and everything else in the house. They all fled here, and were
+married in the old dirty garments they were wearing when they ran for
+their lives.... Their only present was a little tea and sugar that I
+tied up in a handkerchief and gave to the bride.'
+
+The eternal feminine and the eternal human speak there; and there, for
+this gallantest of women, were two keys that locked up the endless
+troubles and anxieties that ceased not day or night. But sometimes the
+flesh was weak, and in the privacy of her diary she says, 'How long, O
+Lord?' But for that there was the master-key that unlocks all wards, and
+a little further on we read, 'One of the verses that helps to keep my
+faith steady is, "He that spared not His own Son." For weeks we have had
+no word from the outside world, but we "rest in Jehovah and wait
+patiently for Him."'
+
+The conditions inside the crowded yards grew steadily worse. Dysentery
+was rife, and the deaths from it in that narrow space averaged thirty a
+day. The state of the sufferers grew so terrible that it was difficult
+to get any one to look after them at all, and many were lying in the
+open yards, and the weather, which hitherto had been warm, got cold, and
+snow fell. It was with the greatest difficulty that food could be
+obtained for those in health, and that of a kind utterly unsuitable to
+the sick, while in the minds of their nurses was the bitter knowledge
+that with proper diet hundreds of lives could have been saved, and
+hundreds of cases of illness avoided.
+
+For the dead there was but a small percentage of coffins available, and
+'the great mass are just dropped into the great trench of rotting
+humanity (in the yard). As I stand at my window I see one after another
+of the little bodies carried by ... and the condition of the living is
+more pitiful than that of the dead--hungry, ragged, dirty, sick, cold,
+wet, swarming with vermin. Not for all the wealth of all the rulers of
+Europe would I bear for one hour their responsibility for the suffering
+and misery of this one little corner of the world alone. A helpless
+unarmed Christian community turned over to the sword and the passion of
+Islam!'
+
+On the top of this came an epidemic of typhoid, twenty-seven cases on
+the first day. Outside in the town the Turkish Consul began hanging
+Christians, and the missioners were allowed to take the bodies and bury
+them. There were threats that the mission would be entered, and all
+young men (possible combatants) killed, but this fear was not realised.
+The typhoid increased, and the doctor of the mission and others of the
+staff fell ill with it; but the patience and service of the remainder
+never faltered, while the same spirit of uncomplaining suffering
+animated the refugees. 'Mr. McDowell,' so the diarist relates, 'saw a
+tired and weary woman with a baby in her arms, sitting in one of the
+seats, and said to her, "Where do you stay?" She said "Just here." "How
+long have you been here?" "Since the beginning." (two months) she
+replied. "How do you sleep at night?" "I lay the baby on the desk in
+front of me, and I have this post at the back to lean against. This is a
+very good place. Thank you very much."'
+
+In April there comes a break in the diary after the day on which the
+following entry is made:--
+
+'I felt on Sunday as if I ought to get my own burial clothes ready, so
+as to make as little trouble as possible when my time comes, for in
+these days we all go about our work knowing that any one of us may be
+the next to go down. And yet I think our friends would be surprised to
+see how cheerful we have kept, and how many occasions we find for
+laughing: for ludicrous things do happen. Then, too, after dwelling so
+intimately with Death for three months, he doesn't seem to have so
+unfriendly an aspect, and the "Other Side" seems near, and our Pilot
+close beside us.... I find the Rock on which I can anchor in peace are
+the words of Christ Himself: "Where I am, there ye may be also." ...
+That is enough, to be where He is....'
+
+Then comes a break of two months, during which the writer was down with
+typhoid. She resumes again in June, finding that death has made many
+changes, and gets back to work again at once. By that time the Russians
+had entered Urmia, a thanksgiving service was held, the refugees
+dispersed, and the American Mission went quietly on with its normal
+work.
+
+Now I have taken this one instance of the work of Americans at Urmia to
+show in some detail the character of the work that they were doing, and
+the Christian and humanising influence of it. But all over Armenia and
+Anatolia were similar settlements, and, as already mentioned, at the
+time of the massacres there were established there over a hundred of
+their churches and over four hundred schools, and from these extracts
+which concern only one not very large centre, it may be gathered what
+leaven of civilising influence the sum of their energies must have
+implied. That lamp shone steady and clear, a 'kindly light' in the
+darkness of Turkish misrule, and in the havoc of the massacres a beacon
+of hope, not always reached by those hapless refugees. Indeed it seems
+to have been only on the frontier that the missions were able to save
+those foredoomed hordes of fleeing Christians; in Armenia and in
+Anatolia generally the massacres and 'deportations' were complete, and
+by the end of 1915 all American missions were closed, for there were
+none to tend and care for. Even if the massacres had not occurred, the
+entry of America into the war would have resulted in a similar cessation
+of their work, and most probably in a massacre of the American
+missioners themselves. Their withdrawal, of course, was hailed with a
+peacock scream of pride by that enlightened body under Talaat and Enver,
+called the New Turkish party of Progress, for their presence was a bar
+to the Turkish notions of civilisation, in that their influence made for
+humanity, and health and education. Now 'the humiliating and dangerous
+situation' (to quote from the columns of _Hilal_) was put an end to, and
+Turkish progress could make headway again.
+
+Similarly in Syria the outbreak of war put an end to 'the humiliating
+and dangerous situation' of the presence of French schools and missions.
+There, for many years, French missioners had done the same work as
+Americans in Armenia, work in every sense liberal and civilising, but
+undenominational in religious matters and unproselytising. That came to
+an end earlier than the organisations in Armenia, and in Syria now, as
+over the rest of the Turkish people, Arabs and Jews and Greeks have
+nothing except German influence and Kultur to stand between them and the
+spirit of Turkish progress of which the Armenian massacres were the
+latest epiphany. Germany, as we have seen, stood by and let the Armenian
+massacres go on, professing herself unable to interfere in the internal
+affairs of Turkey, though at the time there was not a single branch of
+Turkish industries, railways, telegraphs, armies, navies over which she
+had not complete control, exercising it precisely as she thought fit.
+
+It is useless, then, to base any confidence in the safety of Jews,
+Greeks, and Arabs from suffering the same fate as the Armenians, on a
+veto from Germany. If it suits Germany to let those unfortunate peoples
+be murdered or deported to agricultural colonies, Germany will assuredly
+not stir a finger on their behalf nor prevent a repetition of the
+horrors I have dealt with in the previous chapter. Sooner than risk her
+hold over Turkey by enforcing unacceptable demands, she will, unless
+other considerations of self-interest determine her, let further
+massacres occur, if Talaat Bey insists on them. That spokesman of her
+policy, Ernst Marré, makes this perfectly explicit in his book, _Die
+Türken und Wir nach dem Kriege_, upholding from the German standpoint
+the right of Turkey and the wisdom of Turkey in dealing with her subject
+peoples as she had dealt with the Armenians. 'The Turkish State,' he
+tells us, 'is no united whole: Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds,
+cannot be welded together.' (This, by a somewhat grim and ominous
+coincidence, is in exact accordance with a remark made to a Danish Red
+Cross Sister by a Turkish gendarme then engaged in massacring Armenians:
+'First we get rid of the Armenians,' he said, 'then the Greeks, then the
+Kurds.') Or again, in defence of the Armenian massacres, 'Only by
+energetic interference and by expelling of the obstinate Armenian
+element, could the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian dominion.' Or
+again, 'The non-Turkish population of the Ottoman Empire must be
+Ottomanised.' Here, then, is the German point of view: the Ottoman
+Government will be right to 'dispose of' its subject peoples as it
+thinks fit. So far from interfering, Germany endorses, and German
+influence to-day is all that stands between 'the murderous tyranny' and
+its subject peoples. French, English, and finally American pressure can
+no longer, since the entry of these nations into the war, be exercised
+within the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, and the only protection of
+defenceless aliens is the German Government. It did not stir a finger to
+save the Armenians, until it saw that depopulation threatened the
+prosperity of its industries, and it is idle to expect that it will do
+more if the consolidation of Turkish supremacy demands a further
+campaign of murder. Greeks, Arabs, and Jews are all completely at the
+mercy of Talaat's murder-schedules. The only chance that can save them
+is that further extermination may not suit Germany's political aims,
+and that she may find it worth her while to be peremptory, and forbid
+instead of endorsing.
+
+There are unhappily many signs that the butchers of Constantinople are
+planning further massacres. In February of this year preliminary
+measures were begun against the Greeks settled in Anatolia. Many were
+forcibly proselytised, their property was confiscated, and they were
+forbidden to carry on their businesses. Deportations also occurred, and
+all Greeks were removed from many villages in Anatolia, into the
+interior, presumably to 'agricultural colonies' such as those provided
+for Armenians. They suffered terribly from hunger and exposure, and it
+is estimated that ten per cent. of them died on their marches. Since
+then, however, there has been no more heard of any extension of those
+measures, and there seems to have been as yet no massacre of Greeks. It
+is reasonable to infer that Germany has in this case intervened. She
+still hoped to win Greece over to the Central European Powers, and
+clearly any massacre of Greeks by her own Allies was not desirable.
+King Constantine, among his endless vacillations and pusillanimous
+treacheries, probably made a firm protest on the subject. But in the
+kaleidoscope of war, should Greece come to the side of the Allies, it
+seems most probable that there will occur a wholesale massacre of
+Greeks. From what we know of the principles on which German Kultur is
+based, the most optimistic can scarcely hope that the very faintest
+remonstrance will emanate from Berlin.
+
+The case of the Arabs in Syria is even more precarious. From the moment
+that the policy of the Young Turks was evolved, namely, to consolidate
+Osmanli supremacy by the weakening of its subject peoples, the Ottoman
+Government has been waiting for its opportunity to get rid of the 'Arab
+menace.' As we have seen, they began by substituting Turkish for Arabic
+as a written language in all official usages from the printing of the
+Koran and the prayers for the Sultan down to the legends on railway
+tickets. The Arab spirit, according to one of the spokesmen of the New
+Turk party, had to be suppressed, the Arab lands had to become Turkish
+colonies. 'It is a peculiarly imperious necessity of our existence,' we
+read in Jelal Noury Bey's propaganda, 'to Turkise the Arab lands, for
+the particularistic idea of nationality is awaking among the younger
+generations of Arabs, and already threatens us with a great
+catastrophe.' Against the Arabs the Young Turks formed and fostered a
+special animosity; they were powerful and warlike, and Enver, Talaat,
+and others saw that the idea of an Osmanli supremacy could never be
+realised unless very drastic measures were taken against them. The
+tenets of Islamism, it is true, forbade Moslems to fight Moslems, but
+Islamism, as a binding force, was already obsolete in the counsels of
+the new regime, having given place to Kultur. Of all their subject
+peoples, the Young Turks hated the Arabs the most, and, had not the
+European War intervened, there is no doubt that the Armenian massacres,
+already being planned, would have been followed by Arab massacres. But
+the armed and warlike Arabian tribes were not so easy to deal with as
+the defenceless Armenians, and Turkish troops could not be spared in
+sufficient numbers to render an Arab massacre the safe, pleasant, and
+lucrative pursuit that massacres should be. But Jemal the Great, black
+with his triumph over the Armenians at Zeitun, was Military Governor of
+Syria, and, the Armenian question being solved, he began to get to work
+on the Arab question. Owing to the expulsion of the French Missions from
+Syria in 1914, we have no such full or detailed information as we have
+from Americans in Armenia, and the following account is mainly derived
+from the Arabic journal _Mokattam,_ published in Cairo, the information
+in which is based on the account given by a Syrian refugee. It agrees
+with pieces of evidence that have come to hand from other sources.
+
+Ever since the beginning of the war Syria has been an area of direst
+poverty, starvation, and sickness, which have been the natural
+co-operators in Jemal's policy there. All supplies have been
+commandeered for the troops (including by special clause from Potsdam,
+the German troops); even fish caught by the fishermen of Lebanon have
+to be handed over to the military authorities, and the shortage of
+supplies in Smyrna, for instance, is such that at the end of 1916 there
+were two hundred deaths daily from sheer starvation, while Germany was
+importing from Turkey hundreds of tons of corn and of meat. Thus this
+was no natural shortage, for though supplies were low all over the
+Turkish Empire, there was not dearth of that kind. It was an artificial
+shortage made possible by German demands, and made intentional by
+Jemal's policy. Beirut was in no better case than Smyrna; Lebanon
+perhaps was in sorer straits than either. Money was equally scarce, and
+it fitted Jemal's policy that this should be so, for when Americans in
+Beirut had raised funds in America for the relief of the destitute, the
+Turkish Government forbade their distribution. Arabs and Greeks were
+dying by the hundred all over the provinces, and the beneficent decrees
+of nature must not be interfered with. In the streets of towns the poor
+have been fighting over scraps of sugarcane and orange peel; in the
+country, to quote from _Molcattam_, 'no sooner do wild plants and beans
+start to grow than the fields are filled with women and children who
+pick them and use them as food.' Except for military purposes (including
+the victualling of German troops) transportation has ceased to exist,
+and this, too, was part of the policy of Jemal the Great.
+
+On the heels of famine, like a hound behind a huntsman, came typhus. In
+the province of Aleppo before the summer of 1916, over 8000 persons had
+died of it. Doctors and medicines were unobtainable, for all were
+requisitioned for the needs of the army, and in Damascus and Tripoli, in
+Hama and Homs, the epidemic spread like a forest fire. No help was sent
+from Constantinople, none was permitted to be brought by the charitable
+from abroad, for famine and pestilence among the Arabs were working for
+the policy of Jemal the Great. There were no troops to spare who should
+hasten on the work, but the work was progressing by swift and 'natural'
+means. Hunger and pestilence--behold the finger of Allah the God of
+Love! How superior He showed Himself to the discarded Allah of the
+Arabs. 'Ring down the curtain,' said Jemal the Great, 'and let no news
+of the ways of Allah get abroad!' So a strict surveillance was
+established on the coast, all boats were chained to the shore, and if
+any attempted to swim out to ships of the Allied nations which passed,
+the coast guards had orders to shoot him down. Too much news about
+Armenian massacres filtered through; there should not now be such
+leakage. And when starvation and pestilence had firmly established
+themselves, Jemal the Great went down to see what his personal exertions
+could effect. All was working in accordance with his plan; the poorer
+classes of Arabs were dying like flies, but mortality was not so
+successful among the wealthier, who could, to some extent, purchase
+food. So Jemal the Great set to work among them. He began by hanging the
+heads of Syrian-Arabs in Damascus, Beirut, and other cities. No
+semblance of trial, no prosecution or arraignment, were necessary: he
+established courts-martial under military control, made lists of the
+accused, and ordered the courts-martial to condemn them to death.
+Sometimes he made mistakes, appointing as the members of his
+court-martial men who were not such sturdy patriots as he, and refused
+to sentence for no crime the accused whom he nominated. He remedied such
+mistakes by appointing new boards of more seasoned stuff. Moslem and
+Christian alike were brought before them, and a general accusation of
+pro-French tendencies seems to have been sufficient to secure a sentence
+of death or lifelong imprisonment. He aimed not at the poor and the
+obscure, for whom hunger and pestilence were providing, but at the rich
+and the influential. The higher clergy in Christian circles, Bishops and
+Monsignors, were a favourite target, and among Moslems influential
+Sheikhs. Sometimes there was a parody of a trial; sometimes the parody
+was dispensed with, and when the black curtain was last raised over
+Syria, Jemal the Great had disposed of over eight hundred of the heads
+of the most influential of Syrian Arabs. He had got rid, in fact, of
+the whole House of Lords, and something more. Those who are acquainted
+with 'feudal values' among the Arabs will understand what that means. He
+decapitated, not individuals only, but groups. For devilish ingenuity in
+this combination of starvation and pestilence for the poor, and death or
+lifelong imprisonment for the chiefs, Jemal the Great must take rank
+with Abdul Hamid and the contrivers of the Armenian massacres. He
+cannot, it is true, owing to lack of troops, obtain the swift results of
+Enver in Armenia, but between typhus, starvation, and courts-martial,
+his solution of the Arab question in Syria is making steady progress.
+And those measures, hideously efficient in themselves, are, beyond any
+doubt whatever, only the precursors of more sweeping exterminations of
+the Arab race, which will be effected after the war, if the Allied
+Powers do not step in to save it. The Faithful of the Holy City, Mecca,
+have revolted and thrown off the Turkish yoke, and while the war lasts,
+and Turkish troops are otherwise occupied under Teutonic supervision,
+they will be able to maintain their independence, for there is no
+considerable body of Turks which can seriously threaten them. But the
+Syrian Arabs, so long as the war lasts, are being, and will be, the
+victims of a quiet scheme of extermination, which, if long continued,
+will be as complete as that devised and carried out by the butchers of
+Constantinople for the peoples of Armenia. It is not in the interest of
+the Germans to save them, and no check is being put on Jemal the Great
+to hinder him from assisting starvation and typhus to ravage the
+country, and supplementing their deadly work by court-martial without
+trial.
+
+Equally significant of the rage for the destruction of Arabs was the
+treatment of the Bagdad Arab army corps. In spite of the need for troops
+one half of it was sent from Bagdad to Erzerum in the depth of winter,
+without any provision of warm clothing. There, in those cold uplands,
+the men died at the rate of fifty to sixty a day. Their commanding
+officer was a Turk, and a creature of Enver's, called Abdul Kader.
+Though these troops had fought admirably, he openly called them Arab
+traitors, and his orders seem to have been merely to get rid of them.
+There were no courts-martial; they were just taken into a climate which
+killed them.
+
+While for the last thirty years the Armenians and Syrians have emigrated
+in large numbers from the Ottoman Empire, there has been a large
+immigration of Jews into it. This movement was originally due to the
+persecution they suffered in Russia. Germany and Austria were closed to
+them, and, flying from the hideous pogroms that threatened them with
+extermination, they begun to settle in Palestine. Wealthy compatriots
+such as Baron Edmond de Rothschild assisted them, and, with the amazing
+versatility of their race, they, trades-people and town-folk, adapted
+themselves to new conditions, turned their wits towards husbandry and
+agriculture, and during the last thirty years have flourished and
+multiplied in a manner quite unrealised by the western world. In 1881
+there were not more than 25,000 of them in the home of their race, but
+by the beginning of the European War, when their immigration ceased for
+the present, they numbered 120,000 souls. Till then the Ottoman
+Government adopted the ancient Turkish policy of neglect towards them,
+for they were not powerful enough numerically to earn the honour of a
+massacre, and, in addition, they were useful settlers. Backed by
+powerful Western influence, French, English, and German alike, they
+improved out of knowledge the values of the lands where they established
+themselves, and by intelligent management, by conserving and increasing
+the water supply with irrigation and well-digging, they have brought
+many thousand acres into cultivation. Originally refugees, fleeing from
+outrageous persecutions, their immigration by degrees took on a
+different spirit. Not only were they coming out of captivity, but they
+were entering into the ancient Land of Promise again. Zionism, the
+spirit of the returning exiles, animated them, and, according to their
+prophets, they realised that 'The Lord shall comfort Zion, He shall
+comfort all her waste places.' They had sowed in tears; now, on their
+return, they were reaping in joy, and, though their land was still
+under the infidel yoke, they were allowed to dwell in peace, busy,
+industrious, with the halo of home-coming in their hearts. They paid, of
+course, their Turkish taxes, but these were not levied in any oppressive
+manner, and their colonies were thrifty, self-governing, and prosperous.
+Already before the war, one-tenth of the cultivated land in Palestine
+was in their hands, they had their own schools, their own methods of
+organisation, and, more significant than all, Hebrew became a living
+language again. Germany, intent on her penetration of Turkey, made an
+attempt to Germanise them also (for Germany, as we shall see, has a very
+special interest in these Jewish colonies), shook her head over Zionism,
+for which she tried to substitute Prussianism, and wanted to make the
+German language compulsory in Jewish schools at Haifa and Jaffa, but her
+effort completely failed. Nothing could show the inherent vitality of
+this Jewish colonisation more strikingly.
+
+These Jewish settlers then were left in peace; from minuteness they
+escaped the notice of the Young Turk party in its schemes for the
+complete Ottomanisation of the Empire, and, until the present year 1917,
+no mention of 'the Jewish question' was propounded. But it will he
+remembered that in 1915, certain Jewish refugees, taking warning from
+the Armenian massacres, fled to Egypt, and there founded a Zionist
+mule-corps, which served under the English in the Gallipoli campaign. It
+seems very probable that it was this that directed the attention of
+Jemal the Great to the Jewish colonies in Palestine: possibly it was
+merely that he was a more thorough Ottomaniser than his colleagues in
+Constantinople. In any case he ordered the 'deportation' of all Jews
+from Jaffa, Gaza, and other agricultural districts. All Jews were
+commanded to leave Jaffa within forty-eight hours, no means of transport
+was given them, and they were forbidden to take with them either
+provisions or any of their belongings. Eight thousand Jews were evicted
+from Jaffa alone, and their houses were pillaged, and they robbed,
+maltreated, and many were murdered. Thus, and in no other way had the
+massacres of the Armenians begun, and, that there should be no mistake
+about it, Jemal threatened them explicitly with the fate of the
+Armenians. Next day Ludd was evacuated also; the evacuation of Haifa and
+Jerusalem was threatened, and artillery was sent to Jerusalem. There can
+be no doubt in fact that Jemal planned and began to carry out a massacre
+of all Jews.
+
+At that point the Germans intervened, and for the present (but only for
+the present, for so long in fact as Germany has complete control over
+all Turkish internal affairs, in which she protested she could not
+meddle) the Jewish colonies in Palestine seem to be safe.[1] The German
+chief of the General Staff telegraphed to Berlin that the 'military
+considerations' on which Jemal based his deportations did not exist, and
+Herr Cohn in the Reichstag drew the Imperial Chancellor's attention to
+this. How seriously the menace was regarded in Germany, and how far the
+deportations had gone may be gathered from his words, 'Is the Imperial
+Chancellor prepared to influence the Turkish Government in such a manner
+as to prevent with certainty--so far as this is still possible--a
+repetition in Palestine of the Armenian atrocities?' This was
+sufficient: Germany, who could not dream of interfering in Turkish
+internal affairs when only the massacre of hundreds of thousands of
+Armenians was concerned, sent her order, and, for the present, Jemal the
+Great has been unable to proceed with the solution of the Jewish
+question in Turkey, which he had just discovered. We need not yet in
+fact give Jemal his Jew. But some sort of explanation to soothe the
+exasperation of the Turks in not being allowed to murder when and how
+and where they pleased, was thought advisable, and the explanation (an
+extraordinarily significant one) was given in an inspired paragraph of
+the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ not long after. 'The valuable structure of
+Zionist cultural work, in which the German Empire must have well founded
+interest in view of future and very promising trade relations, will, it
+is very much to be hoped, be preserved from destruction so far as purely
+military requirements do not make it necessary. Pan-Turkish ideals have
+no sort of meaning in Palestine where practically no Turks dwell.'
+
+[Footnote 1: This view seems to be borne out by subsequent events, for
+the Jews evacuated from Jaffa have been permitted to return owing to the
+intervention of the Spanish Government. It is not hard to guess who
+prompted that.]
+
+We may take it, then, that with regard to the projected Jewish
+massacres, quite clearly foreshadowed by the schemes of deportation from
+Jaffa and Gaza, Germany has made strong representations to the Ottoman
+Government. She did not do so (indeed she officially refused to do so)
+when the Armenian massacres began, for she could not interfere in
+Turkey's internal affairs. But now she has discovered that Pan-Turkish
+ideals have no sort of meaning in Palestine, and thus, with amazing
+astuteness, has provided herself with a reason for interfering, while
+still not giving up the policy of non-interference in Turkish affairs,
+for Turkey, she has discovered, _has_ no affairs in Palestine. At the
+same time she guards herself from diplomatic defeat by the hope that
+Zionist cultural work will be saved from destruction so _far as purely
+military requirements do not make it necessary_. In other words,
+supposing Jemal the Great got completely out of hand, and proceeded to
+indiscriminate massacre of the Jews, Germany would doubtless accept his
+plea that military requirements had made it necessary.... And we were
+once so ignorant as to assure ourselves that Germany had no notions of
+diplomacy!
+
+The full significance of her intervention on behalf of the Jews, when
+neither the extermination of the Armenians, the persecution of the
+Arabs, nor the deportation of the Greeks moved Germany to any decided
+action or energetic protest, must be left, in so far as it concerns the
+future, to another chapter. But as regards the present and the past it
+will be useful to consider here what has prompted her to make a protest
+(which we may regard, so long as her foot is on the neck of the Turks,
+as having been successful) against these projected massacres. Certainly
+it was not humanity; it was not the faintest desire to save innocent
+people in general from being murdered wholesale, for in the similar
+case of the Armenians, her bowels of compassion were not moved. Or,
+possibly, if we incline to lenience, we may say that she was sorry for
+the Armenians, but could not then risk a disagreement with their
+murderers who were her allies, whereas now, feeling herself more
+completely dominant over the Turks than she then did, she could risk
+being peremptory, especially since there was that saving clause about
+military requirements. For during the Armenian massacres, the
+Dardanelles expedition was still on the shores of Gallipoli, and the
+menace to Constantinople acute. It was possible that if she opposed a
+firm front to the Armenian massacres, the Turks, already on the verge of
+despair with regard to saving the capital from capture, might have made
+terms with the Allies. But now no such imminence of danger threatened
+them, and, with Germany's domination over them vastly more secure than
+it had been in 1915, she could afford to treat them less as allies and
+more as a conquered people. This alone might have accounted for her
+unprecedented impulse of humanity in the minds of those who still
+attribute such instincts to her, but she had far stronger reasons than
+that for wanting to save the Jews of Palestine.
+
+Her policy with regard to them is set forth in a pamphlet by Dr. Davis
+Treitsch, called _Die Jüden der Türkei_, published in 1915, which is a
+most illuminating little document. These Jewish colonies, as we have
+seen, came from Russia, and as Germany realised, long before the war,
+they might easily form a German nucleus in the Near East, for they
+largely consisted of German-speaking Jews, akin in language and blood to
+a most important element in her own population. 'In a certain sense,'
+says Dr. Treitsch, 'the Jews are a Near Eastern element in Germany and a
+German element in Turkey.' He goes on with unerring acumen to lament the
+exodus of German-speaking Jews to the United States and to England.
+'Annually some 100,000 of these are lost to Germany, the empire of the
+English language and the economic system that goes with it is being
+enlarged, while a German asset is being proportionately depreciated....
+It will no longer do simply to close the German frontiers to them, and
+in view of the difficulties which would result from a wholesale
+migration of Jews into Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad to
+find a way out in the emigration of those Jews to Turkey--a solution
+extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all three parties
+concerned.'
+
+Here, then, is the matter in a nutshell: Germany, wide-awake as ever,
+saw long ago the advantage to her of a growing Jewish population from
+the Pale in Turkey. She was perhaps a little overloaded with them
+herself, but in this immigration from Russia to Palestine she saw the
+formation of a colony that was well worth German protection, and the
+result of the war, provided the Palestinian immigrants were left in
+peace, would be to augment very largely the number of those settling
+there. 'Galicia,' says Dr. Treitsch, 'and the western provinces of
+Russia, which between them contain more than half the Jews in the world,
+have suffered more from the war than any other region. Jewish homes
+have been broken up by hundreds of thousands, and there is no doubt
+whatever that, as a result of the war, there will be an emigration of
+East European Jews on an unprecedented scale.' This emigration, then, to
+Palestine was, in Germany's view, a counter-weight to the 100,000
+annually lost to her through emigration to America and England. With her
+foot on Turkey's neck she had control over these German-speaking Jews,
+and saw in them the elements of a German colony. Her calculations, it is
+true, were somewhat upset by the development of the Zionist movement, by
+which those settlers declared themselves to have a nationality of their
+own, and a language of their own, and Dr. Treitsch concedes that. 'But,'
+he adds, 'in addition to Hebrew, to which they are more and more
+inclined, the Jews must have a world-language, and this can only be
+German.'
+
+This, then, in brief, and only up to the present, is the story of how
+the Jewish massacres were stayed. The Jews were potential Germans, and
+Germany, who sat by with folded hands when Arabs and Armenians were led
+to torture and death, put up a warning finger, and, for the present,
+saved them. In her whole conduct of the war, nothing has been more
+characteristic than her 'verboten' to one projected massacre and her
+acquiescence in others. But, as for her having saved the Jews out of
+motives of humanity, 'Credant Judaei!'
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter V_
+
+
+DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLAH
+
+It was commonly said at the beginning of this war that, whatever
+Germany's military resources might be, she was hopelessly and childishly
+lacking in diplomatic ability and in knowledge of psychology, from which
+all success in diplomacy is distilled. As instances of this grave
+defect, people adduced the fact that, apparently, she had not
+anticipated the entry of Great Britain into the war at all, while her
+treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards was universally pronounced
+to be not a crime merely, but a blunder of the stupidest sort. It is
+perfectly true that Germany did not understand, and, as seems likely in
+the light of innumerable other atrocities, never will understand, the
+psychology of civilised peoples; she has never shown any signs up till
+now, at any rate, of 'having got the hang of it' at all. But critics of
+her diplomacy failed to see the root-fact that she did not understand it
+merely because it did not interest her. It was not worth her while to
+master the psychology of other civilised nations, since she was out not
+to understand them, but to conquer them. She had all the information she
+wanted about their armies and navies and guns and ammunition neatly and
+correctly tabulated. Why, then, since this was all that concerned her,
+should she cram her head with irrelevant information about what they
+might feel on the subject of gas-attacks or the torpedoing of neutral
+ships without warning? As long as her fumes were deadly and her
+submarines subtle, nothing further concerned her.
+
+But Europe generally made a great mistake in supposing that Germany
+could not learn psychology, and the process of its distillation into
+diplomacy when it interested her. The psychology of the French and
+English was a useless study, for she was merely going to fight them, but
+for years she had been studying with an industry and a patience that
+put our diplomacy to shame (as was most swiftly and ignominiously proven
+when it came into conflict with hers) the psychology of the Turks. For
+years she had watched the dealings of the Great Powers with Turkey, but
+she had never really associated herself with that policy. She sat
+quietly by and saw how it worked. Briefly it was this. For a hundred
+years Turkey had been kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions of
+the Physician Powers, who dared not let him die for fear of the
+stupendous quarrels which would instantly arise over his corpse. So
+there they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive with injections of
+strychnine and oxygen, and, no less, by a policy of rousing and
+irritating the patient. All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they
+persevered: Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by
+her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him;
+France deprived him of his hot-water bottle when she snatched at the
+Constantinople quays, and they all shook and slapped him when he went to
+war with Greece in 1896, and instantly deprived him of the territory he
+had won in Thessaly. That was the principle of European diplomacy
+towards Turkey, and from it Germany always held aloof.
+
+But from about the beginning of the reign of the present German Emperor,
+German or rather Prussian diplomacy had been going quietly about its
+work. It was worth while to study the psychology of the Turks, because
+dimly then, but with ever-increasing distinctness, Germany foresaw that
+Turkey might be a counter of immense importance in the great conflict
+which was assuredly drawing nearer, though as yet its existence was but
+foreshadowed by the most distant reflections of summer lightning on a
+serene horizon. But if Turkey was to be of any profit to her, she wanted
+a strong Turkey who could fight with her (or rather for her), and she
+had no use for the Sick Man whom the other Powers were bent on keeping
+alive, but no more. Her own eventual domination of Turkey was always the
+end in view, but she wanted to dominate not a weak but a strong servant.
+And her diplomacy was not less than brilliant simply from the fact that
+on the one hand it soothed Turkey instead of irritating, and, on the
+other, that it went absolutely unnoticed for a long time. Nobody knew
+that it was going on. She sent officers to train the Turkish army, well
+knowing what magnificent material Anatolia afforded, and she had
+thoroughly grasped the salient fact that to make any way with Oriental
+peoples your purse must be open and your backshish unlimited. 'There is
+no God but backshish, and the Deutsche Bank is his prophet.'
+
+For years this went on very quietly, and all over the great field of the
+Ottoman Empire the first tiny blades of the crop that Germany was sowing
+began to appear. To-day that crop waves high, and covers the whole field
+with its ripe and fruitful ears. For to-day Turkey is neither more nor
+less than a German colony, and more than makes up to her for the
+colonies she has lost and hopes to regain. She knows that perfectly
+well, and so do any who have at all studied the history and the results
+of her diplomacy there. Even Turkey itself must, as in an uneasy dream,
+be faintly conscious of it. For who to-day is the Sultan of Turkey? No
+other than William II. of Germany. It is in Berlin that his Cabinet
+meets, and sometimes he asks Talaat Bey to attend in a strictly honorary
+capacity. And Talaat Bey goes back to Constantinople with a strictly
+honorary sword of honour. Or else he gives one to William II. from his
+_soi-disant_ master, the Sultan, or takes one back to his _soi-disant_
+master from his real master. For no one knows better than William II.
+the use that swords of honour play in deeds of dishonour.
+
+The object of this chapter is to trace and mount the hewn and solid
+staircase of steps by which Germany's present supremacy over Turkey was
+achieved.
+
+Apart from the quiet spade-work that had been going on for some years,
+Germany made no important move till the moment when, in 1909, the Young
+Turk party, after the forced abdication of Abdul Hamid, proclaimed the
+aims and ideals of the new regime. At once Germany saw her opportunity,
+for here, with her help, might arise the strong Turkey which she
+desired to see, instead of the weak Turkey which all the other European
+Powers had been keeping on a lowering diet for so long (desirous only
+that it should not quite expire), and from that moment she began to
+lend, or rather let, to Turkey in ever-increasing quantities, the
+resources of her scientific and her military knowledge. It was in her
+interests, if Turkey was to be of use to her, that she should educate,
+and irrigate, and develop the unexploited treasures of human material,
+of fertility and mineral wealth; and Germany's gold, her schools, her
+laboratories were at Turkey's disposal. But in every case she, as in
+duty bound to her people, saw that she got very good value for her
+outlay.
+
+Here, then, was the great psychological moment when Germany instantly
+moved. The Young Turks proclaimed that they were going to weld the
+Ottoman Empire into one homogeneous and harmonious whole, and by a piece
+of brilliant paradoxical reasoning Germany determined that it was she
+who was going to do it for them. In flat contradiction of the spirit of
+their manifestoes, which proclaimed the Pan-Turkish ideal, she conceived
+and began to carry out under their very noses the great new chapter of
+the Pan-Germanic ideal. And the Young Turks did not know the difference!
+They mistook that lusty Teutonic changeling for their own new-born
+Turkish babe, and they nursed and nourished it. Amazingly it throve, and
+soon it cut its teeth, and one day, when they thought it was asleep, it
+arose from its cradle a baby no more, but a great Prussian guardsman who
+shouted, 'Deutschland über Allah!'
+
+Only once was there a check in the growth of the Prussian infant, and
+that was no more than a childish ailment. For when the Balkan wars broke
+out the Turkish army was in the transitional stage. Its German tutors
+had not yet had time to inspire the army with German discipline and
+tradition; they had only weeded out, so to speak, the old Turkish
+spirit, the blind obedience to the Ministers of the Shadow of God. The
+Shadow of God, in fact, in the person of the Sultan, had been dragged
+out into the light, and his Shadow had grown appreciably less. In
+consequence there was not at this juncture any cohesion in the army, and
+it suffered reverse after reverse. But a strong though a curtailed
+Turkey was more in accordance with Prussian ideas than a weak and
+sprawling one, and Germany bore the Turkish defeats very valiantly. And
+that was the only set-back that this Pan-Prussian youngster experienced,
+and it was no more than an attack of German measles which he very
+quickly got over. For two or three years German influence wavered, then
+recovered, 'with blessings on the falling out, that all the more
+endears.'
+
+It is interesting to see how Germany adapted the Pan-Turkish ideal to
+her own ends, and, by a triumphant vindication of Germany's methods, the
+best account of this Pan-Turkish ideal is to be found in a publication
+of 1915 by Tekin Alp, which was written as German propaganda and by
+Germany disseminated broadcast over the Turkish Empire. An account of
+this movement has already been given in Chapter II., as far as the
+Turkish side of it is concerned, and it remains only to enumerate the
+German contribution to the fledging of this new Turkish Phoenix. The
+Turkish language and the Turkish Allah, God of Love, in whose name the
+Armenians were tortured and massacred, were the two wings on which it
+was to soar. Auxiliary soaring societies were organised, among them a
+Turkish Ojagha with similar aims, and no fewer than sixteen branches of
+it were founded throughout the Empire. There were also a Turkish Guiji
+or gymnastic club, and an Izji or boy scouts' club. A union of merchants
+worked for the same object in districts where hitherto trade had been in
+the hands of Greeks and Armenians, and signs appeared on their shops
+that only Turkish labour was employed. Religious funds also were used
+for similar economic restoration.
+
+Germany saw, Germany tabulated, Germany licked her lips and took out her
+long spoon, for her hour was come. She did not interfere: she only
+helped to further the Pan-Turkish ideal. With her usual foresight she
+perceived that the Izji, for instance, was a thing to encourage, for
+the boys who were being trained now would in a few years be precisely
+the young men of whom she could not have too many. By all means the boy
+scout movement was to be encouraged. She encouraged it so generously and
+methodically that in 1916, according to an absolutely reliable source of
+information, we find that the whole boy scout movement, with its
+innumerable branches, was under the control of a German officer, Colonel
+von Hoff. In its classes (derneks) boys are trained in military
+practices, in 'a recreational manner,' so that they enjoy--positively
+enjoy (a Prussian touch)--the exercises that will fit them to be of use
+to the Sultan William II. They learn trigger-drill, they learn
+skirmishing, they are taught to make reports on the movements of their
+companies, they are shown neat ways of judging distances. They are
+divided into two classes, the junior class ranging from the ages of
+twelve to seventeen, the senior class consisting of boys over seventeen,
+but not yet of military age. But since Colonel von Hoff organised this,
+the military age has been extended, and boys of seventeen have got to
+serve their country on German fronts. Prussian thoroughness, therefore,
+saw that their training must begin earlier; the old junior class has
+become the senior class, and a new junior class has been set on foot
+which begins its recreational exercises in the service of William II.,
+Got and Allah, at the age of eight. It is all great fun, but those
+pigeon-livered little boys who are not diverted by it have to go on with
+their fun all the same, for, needless to say, the Izji is compulsory on
+all boys. Of course they wear a uniform which is made in Germany and is
+of a 'semi-military' character.
+
+The provision of soldiers and sailors, then, trained from the early age
+of eight, was the first object of Germany's peaceful and benign
+penetration. As from the Pisgah height of the Pan-Turkish ideal she saw
+the promised land, but she had no idea of seeing it only, like Moses,
+and expiring without entering it, and her faith that she would enter it
+and possess it and organise it has been wonderfully justified. She has
+not only penetrated, but has dominated; a year ago towns like Aleppo
+were crammed with German officers, while at Islahie there were separate
+wooden barracks for the exclusive use of German troops. There is a
+military mission at Mamoura, where all the buildings are permanent
+erections solidly built of stone, for no merely temporary occupation is
+intended, and thousands of freight-cars with Belgian marks upon them
+throng the railways, and on some is the significant German title of
+'Military Headquarters of the Imperial Staff.' There are troops in the
+Turkish army, to which is given the title of 'Pasha formation,' in
+compliment to Turkey, but the Pasha formations are under command of
+Baron Kress von Kressenstein, and are salted with German officers,
+N.C.O.'s, and privates, who, although in the Turkish army, retain their
+German uniforms.
+
+This German leaven forms an instructional class for the remainder of the
+troops in these formations, who are Turkish. The Germans are urged to
+respect Moslem customs and to show particular consideration for their
+religious observances. Every German contingent arriving at
+Constantinople to join the Pasha formations finds quarters prepared on a
+ship, and when the troops leave for their 'destination' they take
+supplies from depots at the railway station which will last them two or
+three months. They are enjoined to write war diaries, and are provided
+with handbooks on the military and geographical conditions in
+Mesopotamia, with maps, and with notes on the training and management of
+camels. This looks as if they were intended for use against the English
+troops in Mesopotamia, but I cannot find that they have been identified
+there. The greatest secrecy is observed with regard to those Pasha
+formations, and their constitution and movements are kept extremely well
+veiled.
+
+Wireless stations have been set up in Asia Minor and Palestine, and
+these are under the command of Major Schlee. A Turkish air-service was
+instituted, at the head of which was Major Serno, a Prussian officer,
+and Turkish aviators are now in training at Ostend, where they will very
+usefully defend their native country. At Constantinople there is a
+naval school for Turkish engineers and mechanics in the arsenal, to help
+on the Pan-Turkish ideal, and with a view to that all the instructors
+are German: a floating dock is in construction at Ismid, and the order
+has been placed with German firms. It will be capable of accommodating
+ships of Dreadnought build, which is a new departure for the strictly
+Pan-Turkish ideal. The cost is £740,000, to be repaid three years after
+the end of the war. Similarly, by the spring of this year, Germany had
+arranged to start submarine training in Constantinople for the Turks,
+and a submarine school was open and at work in March. A few months later
+it was established at the island of Prinkipo, where it is now hard at
+work under German instructors. Other naval cadets were sent to Germany
+for their training, and Turkish officers were present at the battle of
+Jutland in June 1916, and of course were decorated by the Emperor in
+person for their coolness and courage.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In October 1917 a bill was passed for the entire
+remodelling of the Turkish fleet after the war, on the lines of the
+German fleet, 'which proved its perfect training in the battle of Skager
+Rak.']
+
+A complete revision of the Turkish system of exemptions from military
+service was necessary as soon as Germany began to want men badly. The
+age for military service was first raised, and we find a Turkish order
+of October 1916, calling on all men of forty-three, forty-four, and
+forty-five years of age to pay their exemption tax if they did not wish
+to be called to the colours. That secured their money, and, with truly
+Prussian irony, hardly had this been done when a fresh army order was
+issued calling out all men, whether they had paid their exemption tax or
+not. Germany thus secured both their money and their lives.
+
+Still more men were needed, and in November a fresh levy of boys was
+raised regardless of whether they had reached the military age or not.
+This absorbed the senior class of the boy scouts, who hitherto had
+learned their drill in a 'recreationary manner.' Neither Jews nor
+Christians are exempt from service, and frequent press gangs go round
+Constantinople rounding up those who are in hiding.
+
+Again the Prussian Moloch was hungry for more, and in December 1916 the
+Turkish _Gazette_ announced that all males in Asia Minor between the
+ages of fourteen and sixty-five were to be enrolled for military
+service, and in January of this year, 1917, fresh recruiting was
+foreshadowed by the order that men of forty-six to fifty-two, who had
+paid their exemption money, should be medically examined to see if they
+were fit for active service. This fresh recruiting was also put in force
+in the case of boys, and during the summer of 1917 all boys above the
+age of twelve, provided they were sound and well-built, were taken for
+the army. Wider and wider the net was spread, and in the same month a
+fresh Turco-German convention was signed, whereby was enforced a
+reciprocal surrender in both countries of persons liable to military
+service, and of deserters, and simultaneously all Turks living in
+Switzerland, and who had paid exemption money, were recalled to their
+Germanised fatherland. By now the first crops of the year were ripening
+in Smyrna, and in default of civilian labour (for every one was now a
+soldier) they were reaped by Turkish soldiers and the produce sent
+direct to Germany.
+
+Already in August 1916, certificates of Ottoman nationality had been
+granted to Serbians resident in the Empire who were willing to become
+Ottoman subjects, and their 'willingness' was intensified by hints that
+incidents akin to the Armenian massacres might possibly occur among
+other alien peoples. They had to sign a declaration that they would not
+revert to their former nationality, and thus, no doubt, many Serbs
+passed into the Turkish army. Further enrolments were desirable, and, in
+March 1917, all Greeks living in Anatolia were forcibly proselytised,
+their property was confiscated, and they were made liable to military
+service. Unfortunately all were not available, for of those who were
+removed from the villages where they lived to military centres, ten per
+cent. died on the forced marches from hunger and exposure. That was
+annoying for the German recruiting agents, but it suited well enough the
+Pan-Turkish ideal of exterminating foreign nationalities. When trouble
+or discontent occurred among the troops, it was firmly dealt with, as,
+for instance, when, in November 1916, there were considerable desertions
+from the 49th Division. On that occasion the order was given to fire on
+them, and many were killed and wounded. The officer who gave the order
+was commended by the Prussian authorities for his firmness. Should such
+an incident occur again, it will no doubt be dealt with no less
+firmness, for, in April 1917, Mackensen was put in supreme command of
+all troops in Asia Minor. But in spite of this desertions have largely
+increased lately, and during the summer deserters out of all the Turkish
+armies were believed to number about 200,000. Many of those have formed
+themselves into brigand bands, who make the roads dangerous for
+travellers. The exchange of honours goes on, for not long ago, in
+Berlin, Prince Zia-ed-Din, the Turkish Sultan's heir, presented a sword
+of honour to the Sultan William II. Probably he gave him good news of
+the progress of the German harbour works begun in the winter at
+Stamboul, and himself learned that the railway bridge which the Turks
+proposed to build over the Bosporus was not to be proceeded with, for
+the German high command had superseded that scheme by their own idea of
+making a tunnel under the Bosporus instead, which would be safer from
+aircraft.
+
+Such up-to-date, though in brief outline, is the history of the
+establishment of the Prussian octopus grip on military and naval matters
+in Turkey. We have largely ourselves to blame for it. Upon that pathetic
+and lamb-like record of our diplomacy during the months between the
+outbreak of the European War, and the entry of Turkey into it in October
+1914, it would be morbid to dwell at any length, though a short summary
+is necessary. As we all know now, Turkey had concluded a treaty with
+Germany early in August, and when our Ambassador in Constantinople, Sir
+Louis Malet, who was on leave in England at that date, returned to his
+post on August 16th, all that Turkey wanted was to gain time in which to
+effect her mobilisation. This she did, with complete success, and our
+Ambassador telegraphed to England stating his perfect confidence in the
+sincerity with which the Grand Vizier professed his friendship for
+England. All through those weeks of August and September this confidence
+appeared to continue unabated. The Moderate party in Turkey--that is to
+say, the hoodwinking party--were reported to be daily gaining strength,
+and it was most important that the Allies should give them every
+assistance, and above all not precipitate matters. All was going well:
+all we had to do was to wait. So we waited, still blindly confident in
+the sincerity of Turkey's friendship for England, while the mobilisation
+of the Turkish forces proceeded merrily. By the end of September this
+was nearly complete, and quite suddenly the Ambassador informed the
+Foreign Office that Turkey appeared to be temporising. That was
+perfectly true, but the period of temporisation was nearly over, and by
+mid-October Turkey had something like 800,000 men under arms, and for
+nine weeks Enver Pasha had had his signed treaty with Germany in his
+pocket. Possibly this diplomatic procrastination was useful to us, for
+it enabled us to bring troops from India in security, and send others to
+Egypt. But without doubt it was useful to the Turks, for it enabled them
+to mobilise their armies, and to strengthen enormously the defences of
+the Dardanelles. Then came the day when Germany and Turkey were ready,
+the attack was made on Odessa, and out of Constantinople we went. We
+climbed into the railway carriages that took the last rays of English
+influence out of the Ottoman Empire, and steep were the stairs in the
+house of a stranger! Turks are not much given to laughter, but Enver
+Pasha must at least have smiled on that day.
+
+Already, of course, German influence was strong in the army, which now
+was thoroughly trained in German methods, but that army might still be
+called a Turkish army. Nowadays, by no stretch of language can it be
+called Turkish except in so far that all Turkish efficient manhood is
+helplessly enlisted in it, for there is no branch or department of it
+over which the Prussian octopus has not thrown its paralysing tentacles
+and affixed its immovable suckers. Army and navy alike, the wireless
+stations, the submarines, the aircraft, are all directly controlled from
+Berlin, and, as we have seen, the generalissimo of the forces is
+Mackensen, who is absolutely the Hindenburg of the East. But thorough as
+is the control of Berlin over Constantinople in military and naval
+matters, it is not one whit more thorough than her control in all other
+matters of national life. Never before has Germany been very successful
+in her colonisation; but if complete domination--the sucking of a
+country till it is a mere rind of itself, and yet at the same time full
+to bursting of Prussian ichor--may be taken as Germany's equivalent of
+colonisation, then indeed we must be forced to recognise her success.
+And it was all done in the name and for the sake of the Pan-Turkish
+ideal. Even now Prussian Pecksniffs like Herr Ernst Marré, whose
+pamphlet, _Die Türken und Wir nach dem Kriege_, was published in 1916,
+continue to insist that Germany is nobly devoting herself to the
+well-being of Turkey. 'In doing this,' he exclaims in that illuminating
+document, 'we are benefiting Turkey.... This is a war of liberation for
+Turkey,' though omitting to say from whom Turkey is being liberated.
+Perhaps the Armenians. Occasionally, it is true, he forgets that, and
+naively remarks, 'Turkey is a very difficult country to govern. But
+after the war Turkey will be very important as a transit country.' But
+then he remembers again and says, 'We wish to give besides taking, and
+we should often like to give more than we can hope to give.' Let us look
+into this, and see the manner in which Germany expresses her yearning to
+impoverish herself for the sake of Turkey.
+
+All this reorganisation of the Turkish army was of course a very
+expensive affair, and required skilful financing, and it was necessary
+to get the whole of Turkey's exchequer arrangements into German hands. A
+series of financial regulations was promulgated. The Finance Minister,
+during 1916, was still Turkish, but the official immediately under him
+was a German. He was authorised to deposit with the Controllers of the
+Ottoman National Debt German Imperial Bills of £T30,000,000, and to
+issue German paper money to the like amount. This arrangement insures
+the circulation of the German notes, which are redeemable by Turkey in
+_gold_ two years after the declaration of peace. Gold is declared to be
+the standard currency, and no creditor is obliged to accept in payment
+of a debt more than 300 piastres in silver or fifty in nickel. And since
+there is no gold in currency (for it has been all called in, and
+penalties of death have been authorised for hoarders) it follows that
+this and other issues of German paper will filter right through the
+Empire. At the same time a German expert, Dr. Kautz, was appointed to
+start banks throughout Turkey in order to free the peasants from the
+Turkish village usurer, and in consequence enslave them to the German
+banks. Similarly a German was put at the head of the Ottoman
+Agricultural Bank. These new branches worked very well, but it is
+pleasant to think that one such was started by the Deutsche Bank at
+Bagdad in October 1916, which now has its shutters up. Before this, as
+we learn from the _Oesterreichischer Volkswirt_ (June 1916), Germany had
+issued other gold notes, in payment for gold from Turkey, which is
+retainable in Berlin till six months after the end of the war. (It is
+reasonable to wonder whether it will not be retained rather longer than
+that.) These gold notes were accepted willingly at first by the public,
+but the increase in their number (by the second issue) has caused them
+to be viewed with justifiable suspicion, and the depreciation in them
+continues. But the Turkish public has no redress except by hoarding
+gold, which is a penal offence. That these arrangements have not
+particularly helped Turkish credit may be gathered from the fact that
+the Turkish gold £1, nominally 100 piastres, was very soon worth 280
+piastres in the German paper standard, and it now fetches a great deal
+more.
+
+Again, the Deutsche Orientbank has made many extensions, and is already
+financing cotton and wool trade for after the war. The establishment of
+this provoked much applause in German financial circles, who find it to
+be an instance of the 'far-reaching and powerful Germano-Austrian unity,
+which replaces the disunion of Turkish finance.' This is profoundly
+true, especially if we omit the word 'Austrian' inserted for diplomatic
+reasons. Again we find Germany advancing £3,000,000 of German paper to
+the Turkish Government in January 1917, for the payment of supplies they
+have received from Krupp's works and (vaguely) for interest to the
+German Financial Minister. This, too, we may conjecture, is to be
+redeemed after the war in gold.
+
+In March of this year we find in the report of the Ottoman Bank a German
+loan of £1,000,000 for the purchase of agricultural implements by
+Turkey, and this is guaranteed by house-taxes. In all up to that month,
+as was announced in the Chamber of Deputies at Constantinople, Germany
+had advanced to Turkey the sum of £142,000,000, entirely, it would seem,
+in German paper, to be repaid at various dates in gold. The grip, in
+fact, is a strangle-hold, all for Turkey's good, as no doubt will prove
+the 'New Conventions' announced by Zimmermann in May 1917, to take the
+place of the abolished Capitulations, 'which left Turkey at the mercy of
+predatory Powers who looked for the disruption of the Ottoman Empire.'
+Herr Zimmermann does not look for that: he looks for its absorption. And
+sees it.
+
+The industrial development of Turkey by this benevolent and
+disinterested Power has been equally thorough and far-reaching, though
+Germany here has had a certain amount of competition by Hungary to
+contend against, for Hungary considered that Germany was trespassing on
+her sphere of interest. But she has been able to make no appreciable
+headway against her more acute partner, and her application for a
+monopoly of sugar-production was not favourably received, for Germany
+already had taken the beet industry well in hand. In Asia Minor the
+acreage of cultivation early in 1917 had fallen more than 50 per cent.
+from that under crops before the war, but owing to the importation of
+machinery from the Central Powers, backed up by a compulsory
+Agricultural Service Law, which has just been passed, it is hoped that
+the acreage will be increased this year by something like 30 per cent.
+The yield per acre also will be greatly increased this year, for Germany
+has, though needing artificial manures badly herself, sent large
+quantities into Turkey, where they will be more profitably employed. She
+has no fear about securing the produce. This augmented yield will, it is
+true, not be adequate to supply the needs of Turkey, who for the last
+two years has suffered from very acute food shortage, which in certain
+districts has amounted to famine and wholesale starvation of the poorer
+classes. But it is unlikely that their needs will be considered at all,
+for Germany's needs (she, the fairy godmother of the Pan-Turk ideal)
+must obviously have the first call on such provisions as are obtainable.
+Thus, in the new preserved meat factory at Aidin, the whole of the
+produce is sent to Germany. Thus, too, though in February 1917 there was
+a daily shortage in Smyrna of 700 sacks of flour, and the Arab and
+Greek population was starving, no flour at all was allowed to be
+imported into Smyrna. But simultaneously Germany was making huge
+purchases of fish, meat, and flour in Constantinople (paid for in German
+paper), including 100,000 sheep. Yet such was the villainous selfishness
+of the famine-stricken folk at Adrianople that, when the trains
+containing these supplies were passing through, a mob held them up and
+sold the contents to the inhabitants. That, however, was an isolated
+instance, and in any case a law was passed in October 1916, appointing a
+military commission to control all supplies. It enacts that troops shall
+be supplied first, and specially ordains that the requirements of German
+troops come under this head. (Private firms have been expressly
+prohibited from purchasing these augmented wheat supplies, but special
+permission was given in 1915 to German and Austro-Hungarian societies to
+buy.) A few months later we find that there are a hundred deaths daily
+in Constantinople from starvation, and two hundred in Smyrna, where
+there is a complete shortage of oil. But oil is still being sent to
+Germany, and during 1916 five hundred reservoirs of oil were sent there,
+each containing up to 15,000 kilogrammes. Similarly during this summer
+the price of fruit has gone up in Smyrna, for the Germans have reopened
+certain factories for preserving it and turning it into jam, which is
+being sent to Germany. The sugar is supplied from the new beet-fields of
+Konia. But Kultur must be supplied first, else Kultur would grow lean,
+and the Turkish God of Love will look after the Smyrniotes. It is no
+wonder that the blockade of Germany does not produce the desired result
+a little quicker, for food is already pouring in from Turkey, and when
+the artificial manures have produced their early harvest the stream will
+become a torrent.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The harvest has now come in, and is most abundant.]
+
+But during all these busy and tremendous months of war Germany has not
+only been denuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the sake of the
+Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same altruistic spirit she has been vastly
+increasing the productiveness of her new and most important colony. The
+great irrigation works at Konia, begun several years ago, are in
+operation, and the revenues of the irrigated villages have been doubled.
+In fact, as the report lately issued says, 'a new and fertile province
+has been formed by the aid of German energy and knowledge.' At Adana are
+similar irrigation works, financed by the Deutsche Bank. Ernst Marré
+gives us a most hopeful survey of them, for Adana was already linked up
+with the Bagdad Railway in October 1916, which was to be the great
+artery connecting Germany with the East. There is some considerable
+shortage of labour there (owing in part to the Armenian massacres, to
+which we shall revert presently), but the financial arrangements are in
+excellent shape. The whole of the irrigation works are in German hands,
+and have been paid for by German paper; and to get the reservoirs, etc.,
+back into her own control, it has been agreed that Turkey, already
+completely bankrupt, will have to pay not only what has been spent, but
+a handsome sum in compensation; while, as regards shortage of labour,
+prisoners have been released in large numbers to work without pay. This
+irrigation scheme at Adana will increase the cotton yield by four times
+the present crop, so we learn from the weekly Arab magazine, _El Alem el
+Ismali_, which tells us also of the electric-power stations erected
+there.
+
+The same paper (October 1916) announces to the Anatolian merchants that
+transport is now easy, owing to the arrival of engines and trucks from
+Germany, while _Die Zeit_ (February 1917) prophesies a prosperous future
+for this Germano-Turkish cotton combine. Hitherto Turkey has largely
+imported cotton from England; now Turkey--thanks to German capital on
+terms above stated--will, in the process of internal development so
+unselfishly devised for her by Germany, grow cotton for herself, and be
+kind enough to give a preferential tariff to Germany.
+
+A similarly bright future may be predicted for the sugar-beet industry
+at Konia, where are the irrigation works already referred to. Artesian
+wells have been sunk, and there is the suggestion to introduce
+Bulgarian labour in default of Turkish. As we have seen, Hungary
+attempted to obtain a monopoly with regard to sugar, but Germany has
+been victorious on this point (as on every other where she competes with
+Hungary), and has obtained the concession for a period of thirty years.
+She reaped the first-fruits this last spring (1917), when, on a single
+occasion, 350 trucks laden with sugar were despatched to Berlin. A
+similar irrigation scheme is bringing into cultivation the Makischelin
+Valley, near Aleppo, and Herr Wied has been appointed as expert for
+irrigation plant in Syria. There has been considerable shortage of coal,
+but now more is arriving from the Black Sea, and the new coal-fields at
+Rodosto will soon be giving an output.
+
+Indeed, it would be easier to enumerate the industries and economical
+developments of Turkey over which Germany has not at the present moment
+got the control than those over which she has. In particular she has
+shown a parental interest in Turkish educational questions. She
+established last year, under German management, a school for the study
+of German in Constantinople; she has put under the protection of the
+German Government the Jewish institution at Haifa for technical
+education in Palestine; from Sivas a mission of schoolmasters has been
+sent to Germany for the study of German methods. Ernst Marré surmises
+that German will doubtless become compulsory even in the Turkish
+intermediate (secondary) schools. In April 1917, the first stone of the
+'House of Friendship' was laid at Constantinople, the object of which
+institution is to create among Turkish students an interest in
+everything German, while earlier in the year arrangements were made for
+10,000 Turkish youths to go to Germany to be taught trades. These I
+imagine were unfit for military service. With regard to such a scheme
+Halil Haled Bey praises the arrangement for the education of Turks in
+Germany. When they used to go to France, he tells us, 'they lost their
+religion' (certainly Prussian Got is nearer akin to Turkish Allah) 'and
+returned home unpatriotic and useless. In Germany they will have access
+to suitable religious literature' (Gott!) 'and must adopt all they see
+good in German methods without losing their original characteristics.'
+Comment on this script is needless. The hand is the hand of Halil Haled
+Bey, but the voice is the voice of Potsdam. Occasionally, but rarely,
+Austrian competition is seen. Professor Schmoller, in an Austrian
+quarterly review, shows jealousy of German influence, and we find, in
+October 1916, an Ottoman-Austrian college started at Vienna for 250
+pupils of the Ottoman Empire. But Germany has 10,000 in Berlin. At Adana
+(where are the German irrigation works) the German-Turkish Society has
+opened a German school of 300, while, reciprocally, courses in Turkish
+have been organised at Berlin for the sake of future German colonists.
+In Constantinople the _Tanin_ announces a course of lectures to be held
+by the Turco-German Friendship Society. Professor von Marx discoursed
+last April on foreign influence and the development of nations, with
+special reference to Turkey and the parallel case of Germany. A few
+months later we find Hilmet Nazim Bey, official head of the Turkish
+press, proceeding to Berlin to learn German press methods. A number of
+editors of Turkish papers will follow him, and soon, no doubt, the
+Turkish press will rival Cologne and Frankfort.
+
+So much for German education, but her penetrative power extends into
+every branch of industry and economics. In November 1916, a Munich
+expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic
+society was started in Constantinople on German lines with German
+instructors. Inoculation against small-pox, typhoid, and cholera was
+made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of
+Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have Germans as their
+acting Ministers. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for
+silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the
+railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase.
+Germany owns the Anatolian railway concession (originally British),
+with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession,
+with preferential rights over minerals; they have bought the
+Mersina-Adana Railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad Railway;
+they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba Railway, built with French capital.
+They have secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour concession, thereby
+controlling and handling all merchandise arriving at railhead from the
+interior of Asia Minor.[1] Already on the Bagdad Railway the big tunnels
+of Taurus and Amanus are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven
+motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be complete. Meanwhile
+railway construction is pushed on in all directions under German
+control, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (August 1916) allocated a
+large sum of German paper money for the construction of ordinary roads,
+military roads, local government roads, all of which are new to Turkey,
+but which will be useful for the complete German occupation which is
+being swiftly consolidated. To stop the mouths of the people, all
+political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior,
+for Prussia does not care for criticism. To supply German ammunition
+needs, lead and zinc have been taken from the roofs of mosques and
+door-handles from mosque-gates, and the iron railings along the Champs
+de Mars at Pera have been carted away for the manufacture of bombs. Not
+long after eight truck-loads of copper were sent to Germany: these, I
+imagine, represent the first produce of copper roofs and utensils. A
+Turco-German convention signed in Berlin in January of this year,
+permits subjects of one country to settle in the other while retaining
+their nationality and enjoying trading and other privileges. In Lebanon
+Dr. König has opened an agricultural school for Syrians of all
+religions. In the Homs district the threatening plague of locusts in
+February 1917 was combatted by Germans; and a German expert, Dr. Bucher,
+had been already sent to superintend the whole question. For this
+concerns supplies to Germany, as does also the ordinance passed in the
+same month that two-thirds of all fish caught in the Lebanon district
+should be given to the military authorities (these are German), and that
+every fish weighing over six ounces in the Beirut district should be
+Korban also. The copper mines at Arghana Maden, near Diarbekr, are busy
+exporting their produce into Germany; the coal-mines at Rodosto will
+very soon be making a large output.[2]
+
+[Footnote 1: The balance-sheets for 1916 of certain of those railways in
+which the Deutsche Bank has an interest have come to hand. They show a
+very disagreeable degree of prosperity. The Anatolia Railway Company has
+large profits with a gross revenue of 25,737,995 marks. The profit on
+the Haidar-Pasha-Angora Line has risen from 42,566 francs per kilometre
+to 45,552. The Mersina-Tarsus-Adana Railway has paid 6 per cent. on its
+preference shares, and 3 per cent. on its ordinary shares. The Haidar
+Pasha Harbour Company has paid 8 per cent.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Later in this year we find three trains daily leaving
+Constantinople for Germany, laden with coal and military supplies.]
+
+There is no end to this penetration: German water-seekers, with divining
+and boring apparatus, accompanied the Turkish expedition into Sinai;
+Russian prisoners were sent by Germany for agricultural work in Asia
+Minor, to take the place of slaughtered Armenians; a German-Turkish
+treaty, signed January 11, 1917, gives the whole reorganisations of the
+economic system to a special German mission. A Stuttgart journal chants
+a characteristic _Lobgesang_ over this feat. 'That is how,' it proudly
+exclaims, 'we work for the liberation of peoples and nationalities.'
+
+In the same noble spirit, we must suppose, German legal reforms were
+introduced in December 1916, to replace the Turkish Shuriat, and in the
+same month all the Turks in telegraph offices in Constantinople were
+replaced by Germans. Ernst Marré gives valuable advice to young Germans
+settling in Turkey. He particularly recommends them, knowing how
+religion is one of the strongest bonds in this murderous race, to 'trade
+in articles of devotion, in rosaries, in bags to hold the Koran,' and
+points out what good business might be built up in gramophones. Earlier
+in this year we find a 'German Oriental Trading Company' founded for the
+import of fibrous materials for needs of military authorities, and a
+great carpet business established at Urfa with German machinery that
+will supplant the looms of Smyrna. A saltpetre factory is established
+at Konia by Herr Toepfer, whose enterprise is rewarded with an Iron
+Cross and a Turkish decoration. The afforestation near Constantinople,
+ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture, is put into German hands, and in
+the vilayet of Aidin (April 1916) ninety concessions were granted to
+German capitalists to undertake the exploitation of metallic ores.
+Occasionally the German octopus finds it has gone too far for the
+moment, and releases some struggling limb of its victim, as, for
+instance, when we see that, in September 1916, the German Director's
+stamp for the 'Imperial German Great Radio Station' at Damascus has been
+discarded temporarily, as that station 'should be treated for the
+present as a Turkish concern.'
+
+A 'Trading and Weaving Company' was established at Angora in 1916, an
+'Import and Export Company' at Smyrna, a 'Trading and Industrial
+Society' at Beirut, a 'Tobacco Trading Company' at Latakieh, an
+'Agricultural Company' at Tripoli, a 'Corn Exporting Company' in
+Lebanon, a 'Rebuilding Commission' (perhaps for sacked Armenian houses)
+at Konia. More curious yet will be a Tourist's Guide Book--a Baedeker,
+in fact--for travellers in Anatolia, and the erection of a monument in
+honour of Turkish _women_ who have replaced men called up for military
+duty. Truly these last two items--a guide-book for Anatolia, and a
+monument to women--are strange enterprises for Turks. A new Prussian day
+is dawning, it seems, for Turkish women as well, for the _Tanin_ (April
+1917) tells us that diplomas are to be conferred on ladies who have
+completed their studies in the Technical School at Constantinople.
+
+It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but
+given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with
+tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none
+round which it has not cast its feelers--no Semitic moneylender ever
+obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military,
+educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold.
+Turkey's life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it
+has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, who, among
+all the Great Powers of Europe, invested their time and their money in
+the achievement of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Silently and skilfully they
+worked, bamboozling their chief tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha
+bamboozled us. As long as he was of service to them they retained him;
+for his peace of mind at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in
+Constantinople because so many threatening letters were sent him. But
+now Enver Pasha seems to have had his day; he became a little
+autocratic, and thought that he was the head of the Pan-Turkish ideal.
+So he was, but the Pan-Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and he had
+not noticed the transformation. Talaat Bey has taken his place; it was
+he who, in May 1917, was received by the Emperor William, by King
+Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, and he who was the mouthpiece of
+the German efforts to make a separate peace with Russia. Under Czardom,
+he proclaimed, the existence of Turkey was threatened, but now the
+revolution has made friendship possible, for Russia no longer desires
+territorial annexation. And, oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia's
+friend! Enver Pasha has of late been somewhat out of favour in Berlin,
+and I cannot but think it curious that when, on April 2, 1917, he
+visited the submarine base at Wilhelmshaven, he was very nearly killed
+in a motor accident. But it may have been an accident. Since then I
+cannot find that he has taken any more active part in Pan-Turkish ideals
+than to open a soup-kitchen in some provincial town, and lecture the
+Central Committee of the Young Turks on the subject of internal affairs
+in Great Britain. I do not like lectures, but I should have liked to
+hear that one.
+
+
+I have left to the end of this chapter the question of Germany's
+knowledge of, and complicity in the Armenian massacres. From the tribune
+of the Reichstag, on January 15, 1916, there was made a definite denial
+of the existence of such massacres at all; on another subsequent
+occasion it was stated that Germany could not interfere in Turkish
+internal affairs.
+
+In view of the fact that there is no internal affair appertaining to
+Turkey in which Germany has not interfered, the second of these
+statements may be called insincere. But the denial of the massacres is a
+deliberate lie. Germany--official Germany--knew all about them, and she
+permitted them to go on. A few proofs of this are here shortly stated.
+
+(1) In September 1915, four months before the denial of the massacres
+was made in the Reichstag, Dr. Martin Niepage, higher grade teacher in
+the German Technical School at Aleppo, prepared and sent, as we have
+seen, in his name, and that of several of his colleagues, a report of
+the massacres to the German Embassy at Constantinople. In that report he
+gives a terrible account of what he has seen with his own eyes, and also
+states that the country Turks' explanation with regard to the origin of
+these measures is that it was 'the teaching of the Germans.' The German
+Embassy at Constantinople therefore knew of the massacres, and knew
+also that the Turks attributed them to orders from Germany. Dr. Niepage
+also consulted, before sending his report, with the German Consul at
+Aleppo, Herr Hoffman, who told him that the German Embassy had been
+already advised in detail about the massacres from the consulates at
+Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Mosul, but that he welcomed a further protest
+on the subject.
+
+(2) These reports, or others like them, had not gone astray, for in
+August 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Wangenheim,
+made a formal protest to the Turkish Government about the massacres.
+
+There is, then, no doubt that the German Government, when it officially
+denied the massacres, was perfectly cognisant of them. It was also
+perfectly capable of stopping them, for they were not local violences,
+but wholesale murders organised at Constantinople. In support of this
+view I find an independent witness stating that 'there is no Turk of
+standing who will not readily declare that it would have been perfectly
+possible for Germany to have vetoed the massacres had she chosen.'
+Germany had indeed already given assurances that such massacres should
+not occur. She had assured the Armenian Katholikos at Adana that so long
+as Germany has any influence in Turkey he need not fear a repetition of
+the horrors that had taken place under Abdul Hamid. Had she, then, no
+influence in Constantinople, or how was it that she had obtained
+complete control over all Turkish branches of government? The same
+assurance was given by the German Ambassador in April 1915, to the
+Armenian Patriarch and the President of the Armenian National Council.
+
+So, in support of the Pan-Turkish ideal, and in the name of the Turkish
+Allah, the God of Love, Germany stood by and let the infamous tale of
+lust and rapine and murder be told to its end. The Turks had planned to
+exterminate the whole Armenian race except some half-million, who would
+be deported penniless to work on agricultural developments under German
+rule, but this quality of Turkish mercy was too strained for Major
+Pohl, who proclaimed that it was a mistake to spare so many. But he was
+a soldier, and did not duly weigh the claims of agriculture.
+
+The choice was open to Germany; Germany chose, and let the Armenian
+massacres go on. But she was in a difficulty. What if the Turkish
+Government retorted (perhaps it did so retort), 'You are not consistent.
+Why do you mind about the slaughter of a few Armenians? What about
+Belgium and your atrocities there?'
+
+And all the ingenuity of the Wilhelmstrasse would not be able to find an
+answer to that.
+
+I do not say that Germany wanted the massacres, for she did not. She
+wanted more agricultural labour, and I think that, if only for that
+reason, she deprecated them. But she allowed them to go on when it was
+in her power to stop them, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash
+clean her hand from that stinking horror.
+
+Here, then, are some of the problems which those who, at the end of the
+war, will have to deal with the problem of Turkey must tackle. It is
+just as well to recognise that at the present moment Turkey is virtually
+and actually a German colony, and the most valuable colony that Germany
+has ever had. It will not be enough to limit, or rather abolish, the
+supremacy of Turkey over aliens and martyrised peoples; it will be
+necessary first to abolish the supremacy of Germany over Turkey. To do
+this the victory of our Allied Nations must be complete, and Germany's
+octopus envelopment of Turkish industries severed. Otherwise we shall
+immediately be confronted with a Germany that already reaches as far as
+Mesopotamia. That is done now; and that, before there can come any
+permanent peace for Europe, must be undone. Nothing less than the
+complete release of that sucker and tentacle embrace will suffice.
+
+
+NOTE
+
+As throwing a sidelight on the German complicity in the Armenian
+massacres, the following is of interest. It is known that when
+Metternich succeeded Wangenheim as German Ambassador in Constantinople,
+he brought with him a speech, written in Berlin, which, by the Kaiser's
+orders, he was to read when presenting his credentials to the Sultan.
+This contained a sentence which implied that Germany had been unable to
+stop the Armenian massacres. Talaat refused to allow the speech to be
+read, obviously because it threw the responsibility of the massacres on
+to the Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was that they took
+place with the connivance and even at the instigation of the Germans.
+Eventually a compromise was arrived at, and the speech _in toto_ was
+read privately, the part referring to the Armenian massacre not being
+published.... It is a pity that Germany is always found out....
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VI_
+
+
+'THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED'
+
+Let us commit the crime of _lèse-majesté_, and assume (though the
+Emperor Wilhelm II. has repeatedly announced the contrary) that Germany
+is not at the conclusion of the European War to find herself in
+possession of the world. She has prepared her plans in anticipation of
+the auspicious event; in fact she has had a most interesting map of
+Europe produced which, except by its general shape, is scarcely
+recognisable. The printing of it, it is true, was a little premature,
+for it shows what Europe was to have been like in 1916, and the
+apportionments are not borne out by facts. But assuming that there is
+some radical error about it all from her point of view, and assuming
+that there will not be either a conclusive peace favourable to Prussian
+interests, or even an inconclusive peace, but one in which the Allies
+will be able to dictate and enforce their own terms, the magnitude of
+the problems that will await their decision may well appal the most
+ingenious of their statesmen. And of all those problems none, it is safe
+to prophesy, will be found more difficult of solution than that which
+will deal with the future of the corrupt and barbarous Government which
+has for centuries made hell of the Ottoman Empire. We know more or less
+what will happen to Alsace and Lorraine, to Belgium, to the Trentino,
+because in those cases the claims of one or other of our Allies to
+demand a particular settlement are quite certain to be agreed to by
+those not so immediately and vitally concerned. But in the Balkans these
+problems will be more complicated because of conflicting interests, and
+most complicated of all will they be in Turkey. One thing, however, is
+certain, that there can be no going back to the conditions that existed
+there before the war.
+
+Ever since the Osmanlis came out of remoter Asia into the Nearer East
+and into Europe, the government of their Empire has gone from bad to
+worse. In the early days, as we have seen, their policy was to absorb
+the strength of their subject peoples by incorporating the youth of them
+into the Turkish army, by giving them Turkish wives, and by converting
+them to Mohammedanism. Such was the foundation of the Empire and such
+its growth. But having absorbed their strength, the Sultan's Government
+neglected them until they milked them again. They were allowed to
+prosper if they could: all that was demanded of them was a toll of their
+strength. They were cattle, and for the right to graze on Turkish lands
+they paid back a pail of their milk of manhood. But an empire founded on
+such principles contains within it active and prolific seeds of decay,
+and, as we have seen, more stringent measures had to be resorted to in
+order to preserve the supremacy of the ruling people. Instead of
+absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing
+them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. And the
+policy set on foot by him was developed but a few years ago into a
+scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity has far surpassed the killings of
+Attila, of whom the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs of the
+deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, with the exception of such part of
+it as has escaped into Russian territory, has been exterminated, and
+similar measures have been planned and indeed begun, against the Greeks,
+the Arabs, and the Jews.
+
+In consequence of this, in consequence also of the European War, the
+policy of the Balance of Power as regards Turkey has been at length
+abandoned. The Allies have definitely declared in their joint note to
+President Wilson their aims in the war, and for those they have pledged
+themselves to fight until final and complete victory wreathes their
+arms. Among these aims are:--
+
+(1) The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous
+tyranny of the Turks.
+
+(2) The expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved
+itself so radically alien to Western civilisation.
+
+For a century that most inharmonious of orchestras called the Concert
+of Europe has, owing to the exigencies of the Balance of Power, kept
+Turkey together, and in particular has maintained the centre of its
+government at Constantinople simply because the Balance of Power would
+be upset if anybody else held the key of the straits that separate
+Russia from the Mediterranean. England, above all others, was
+instrumental in preserving that precarious Balance, and England now must
+confess the utter failure of her policy there throughout a century. It
+is humiliating to acknowledge the complete collapse of that which for so
+many decades has been the keystone of our ruling with regard to our
+Eastern Empire, but the arch has collapsed; Germany pulled the keystone
+out, and all our efforts to exclude Russia from free access to the
+Mediterranean have only resulted in letting Germany in. To-day she holds
+Constantinople, and the bitter pill must be swallowed. The situation, as
+it stands at this moment, is infinitely worse than it could have been
+for a century back, if at any moment during those hundred years we had
+done what we always ought to have done, and declared that the
+anachronism of Turkey being in Europe was more intolerable than anything
+that could happen in consequence of her expulsion. But we have
+acknowledged that now. We have also acknowledged the even greater
+anachronism of Turkey being allowed to dispose of the destinies of any
+of those peoples who inhabit the territories of the Ottoman Empire, for
+the Allies, in their joint Note, have declared that the remedy of these
+two monstrous abuses forms an essential part of their aim in the war,
+which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any
+cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and
+Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years.
+And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields
+that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the
+Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of
+Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople
+and the subject peoples of the Turks will have passed from the yoke of
+that murderous tyranny for ever.
+
+We will take these two avowed aims of the Allies in order, and first try
+to draw (though with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will be the
+confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we pluck the fruits of the great
+crusade against the barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is quite
+useless to attempt to keep the map as it was, and peg out claims within
+the Empire where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks and Armenians
+shall live in peace, for it is exactly that plan which has formed a
+century's failure. At the International Congress of Berlin, for
+instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the
+Armenian vilayets. She carried out her promise by slaughtering every
+Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them.
+The _soi-disant_ protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in
+securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to
+bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable
+yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations,
+which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples
+in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of
+covenants with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to
+repeat such outrages: the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be
+hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, _ipso
+facto_, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of
+whom such a province is placed.
+
+The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at
+first appear. We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such
+a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view. Even
+the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity of similar
+adjustments made by the Concert of Europe during the last hundred years.
+The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and
+finally abolishing that: they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern
+Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity,
+they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more
+peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began,
+and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre
+in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more
+massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will
+be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples
+dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or
+other of the allied nations. In most cases we shall find that there is a
+protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of
+interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and
+independent provinces.
+
+The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most
+atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is
+fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it. If the
+reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that
+the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old
+Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian
+Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by
+Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest
+of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling,
+such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and
+probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as
+survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their
+professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the
+Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a
+million. In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and
+partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were
+largely instrumental in butchering them. Their lands have been
+appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.
+
+Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The robber-tenants must be
+evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated. Without
+exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts
+near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the pursuing
+Turks and Kurds. Naturally, this remnant of a people will not nearly
+suffice to fill their entire province, but in order to satisfy the
+claims of justice at all adequately, the whole district of Armenia, as
+Armenia was known before its people were exterminated, must be amputated
+by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Empire and placed, in an autonomous
+condition in a new protected province, which will include all the
+vilayets of Armenia.
+
+There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done,
+and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn
+promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their
+aims in the war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious
+people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries
+of fiendish oppression. With facilities given them for their
+re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will,
+beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds. As a
+nation they are, as we have seen, partly agricultural in their pursuits;
+but a considerable proportion of them (and these the more intelligent)
+are men of business, merchants, doctors, educationalists, and gravitate
+to towns. Constantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them again,
+where lately they numbered nearly as many as the entire remnant of their
+nation numbers now; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of Palestine,
+and of Mesopotamia in the New Turkey which we are attempting to sketch.
+They will probably not care to settle in the towns and districts that
+will remain in the hands of their late oppressors and murderers.
+
+In the work of their repatriation none will be more eager to help than
+the American missionaries, who, at the time of the last massacre, as so
+often before, showed themselves so nobly disregardant of all personal
+danger and risk in doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and who
+have explicitly declared their intention of resuming their work. With
+regard to the eviction of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be
+remembered that the Kurd is a trespasser on the plains and towns of
+Armenia, and properly belongs to the mountains from which he was
+encouraged to descend by the Turks for purposes of massacre. Out of
+those towns and plains he must go, either into the mountains of Armenia
+from whence he came, or over the frontier of Armenia into the New Turkey
+presently to be defined. He must, in fact, be deported, though not in
+the manner of the deportations at which he himself so often assisted.
+
+The Armenians who will thus be reinstated within the boundaries of their
+own territory, will be practically penniless and without any of the
+means or paraphernalia of life, and the necessary outlay on supplies for
+them, and the cost of their rehabilitation would naturally fall on the
+protecting Power. They will, however, be free from the taxes they have
+hitherto paid to the Turks, and it should not be difficult for them by
+means of taxes far less oppressive, to pay an adequate interest on the
+moneys expended on them. These would thus take the form of a very small
+loan, the whole of which could easily be repaid by the Armenians in the
+course of a generation or so. Once back on their own soil, and free from
+Turkish tyranny and the possibility of it, they are bound to prosper,
+even as they have prospered hitherto in spite of oppressions and
+massacres up till the year 1915, when, as we have seen, the liberal and
+progressive Nationalists organised and executed the extermination from
+which so few escaped.
+
+It is hardly necessary to point out who the protecting Power would be in
+the case of the repatriated Armenians, for none but Russia is either
+desirable or possible. With one side along the Russian frontier of
+Trans-Caucasia, the New Armenia necessarily falls into the sphere of
+Russian influence.
+
+It has been suggested that not only Armenia proper, but part of Cilicia
+should also become a district of the repatriated Armenians, with an
+outlet to the sea. But while it is true that complete compensation would
+demand this, since Zeitun and other districts in Cilicia were almost
+pure Armenian settlements, I cannot think that such a restoration is
+desirable. For, in the first place, the extermination of the Zeitunlis
+(as carried out by Jemal the Great) was practically complete. All the
+men were slaughtered, and it does not seem likely that any of the women
+and girls who were deported reached the 'agricultural colony' of
+Deir-el-Zor in the Arabian desert. It is therefore difficult to see of
+whom the repatriation would consist. In the second place, the New
+Armenia will be for several generations to come of an area more than
+ample for all the Armenians who have survived the flight into Russia,
+and it obviously will give them the best chance of corporate prosperity,
+if the whole of them are repatriated in a compact body rather than that
+a portion of them should be formed into a mere patch severed from their
+countrymen by so large a distance. Another sphere of influence also will
+be operating near the borders of Cilicia, and to place the Armenians
+under two protecting Powers would have serious disadvantages. In
+addition they never were a sea-going people, and I cannot see what
+object would be served by giving them a coast-board. In any case, if a
+coast-board was found necessary, the most convenient would be the
+coast-board of the Black Sea, lying adjacent to their main territory.
+
+If it seems clear that for New Armenia the proper protecting Power is
+Russia, it is no less clear that for the freed inhabitants of New Syria,
+Arabs and Greeks alike, the proper protecting Power is France.
+Historically France's connection with Syria dates from the time of the
+Crusades in 1099; it has never been severed, and of late years the ties
+between the two countries have been both strengthened and multiplied.
+The Treaties of Paris, of London, of San Stefano, and of Berlin have all
+recognised the affiliation; so, too, from an ecclesiastical standpoint,
+have the encyclicals of Leo XIII. in 1888 and 1898. Similarly, it was
+France who intervened in the Syrian massacres of 1845, who landed troops
+for the protection of the Maronites in 1860, and established a
+protectorate of the Lebanon there a few years later, which lasted up
+till the outbreak of the European War. France was the largest holder, as
+she was also the constructor, of Syrian railways, and the harbour of
+Beirut, without doubt destined to be one of the most flourishing ports
+of the Eastern Mediterranean, was also a French enterprise. And perhaps
+more important than all these, as a link between Syria and France, has
+been the educational penetration which France has effected there. What
+the American missionaries did for Armenia, France has done for Syria,
+and according to a recent estimate, of the 65,000 children who attended
+European schools throughout Syria, not less than 40,000 attended French
+schools. When we consider that that proportion has been maintained for
+many years in Syria, it can be estimated how strong the intellectual
+bond between the Syrian and the French now is. The French language,
+similarly, is talked everywhere: it is as current as is modern Greek in
+ports of the Levant.
+
+In virtue of such claims few, if any, would dispute the title of France
+to be the protecting Power in the case of Syria. Here there will not
+be, as was the case with the Armenians, any work of repatriation to be
+done. Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the
+Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot,
+and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that
+barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical
+sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which
+will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.
+
+It will be with regard to the geographical limits of a French
+protectorate that most difficulty is likely to be experienced; there
+will also be points claiming careful solution, as will be seen later,
+with regard to railway control. Northwards and eastwards the natural
+delimitations seem clear enough: northwards French Syria would terminate
+with, and include, the province of Aleppo, eastwards the Syrian desert
+marks its practical limits, the technical limit being supplied by the
+course of the Euphrates. But southwards there is no such natural line of
+demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches
+the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the
+Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence. Inset into this long strip
+of territory lies Palestine.
+
+Now to make one single French protectorate over this very considerable
+territory seems at first sight a large order, but the objections to any
+other course are many and insuperable. Should the line of French
+influence be drawn farther north than the Hedjaz, under what protection
+is the intervening territory to be left? At present it is Turkish, but
+inhabited by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the fulness of their
+declaration not to leave alien peoples under the 'murderous tyranny' of
+the Turks, Turkish it cannot remain. But both by geographical situation
+and by racial interest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, and there
+seems no answer to the question as to what sphere of influence it comes
+under if not under the French. Just as properly, if we take this view of
+the question, the Sinaitic Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to
+Egypt, the French protectorate being defined westwards at Akabah. That
+the Eastern side of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the same
+control as the Western has always been an anomaly, admitted even by the
+sternest opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the absence of any
+canal corresponding to that of Suez, and debouching into the Red Sea
+_via_ the Gulf of Akabah, the most advanced champion of French influence
+in the Near East would see no objection to this rectified frontier.
+There is no question of competition involved. The proposed change is but
+a rational rectification of the present status.
+
+This scheme of delimitation leaves Palestine inset into the French
+protectorate of Syria, and it is difficult to see to whom the
+protectorate of Palestine should be properly assigned except to France.
+Italy has no expansive ambitions in that sector of the Mediterranean;
+England's national sphere of influence in this partition of the
+districts now occupied by alien peoples in the Ottoman Empire lies
+obviously elsewhere; and since the Jews, who settled in ever-increasing
+numbers in Palestine before the war, and will assuredly continue to
+settle there again, come and will come as refugees from the Russian
+Pale, it would be clearly inadvisable to assign to Russia the
+protectorate of her own refugees. The only other alternative would be to
+create an independent Palestine for the Jews, and the reasons against
+that are overwhelming. It would be merely playing into the hands of
+Germany to make such an arrangement. For the last thirty years Germany
+has watched with personal and special interest this immigration of Jews
+into Palestine, seeing in it not so much a Jewish but a German
+expansion. Indeed, when, in the spring of this year, as we have noticed,
+a massacre and deportation of Jews was planned and begun by Jemal,
+Germany so far reversed her usual attitude towards massacres in general,
+and her expressed determination never to interfere in Turkey's internal
+affairs, as to lodge a peremptory protest, and of course got the
+persecution instantly stopped. Her reason was that Pan-Turkish 'ideals'
+(the equivalent for the massacre of alien people) had no sort of
+meaning in Palestine. But the Pan-Germanic ideals had a great deal of
+meaning in Palestine, as Dr. Davis Treitsch _(Die Jüden der Türkei)_
+very clearly states. For 'as a result of the war,' he tells us, 'there
+will be an emigration of East-European Jews on an unprecedented scale
+ ... the disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany
+(and) Germans will be only too glad to find a way out in the emigration
+of those Jews to Turkey, a solution extraordinarily favourable to the
+interests of all _three [sic]_ parties concerned. There are grounds for
+talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry.'
+
+Now this is explicit enough; Germany clearly contemplated a protectorate
+over Palestine, and if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are left
+independent, there is nothing more certain than that, after the war, her
+penetration of Palestine will instantly begin. These colonists are, and
+will be, in want of funds for the development and increase of their
+cultivated territories, and when we consider the names of the prominent
+financiers in the Central Empires, Mendelssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid,
+Bleichroeder, Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in much doubt as
+to the quarter from which that financial assistance will be forthcoming,
+on extremely favourable terms. It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine
+is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end
+of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as
+complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the
+Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a
+strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with
+an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the
+blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For
+great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during
+the twenty or twenty-five years before the war, and strong as is the
+spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet number more than about
+120,000, nor have they under crops more than ten per cent. of the
+cultivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but settlers, and their
+work is before them. If left without a protectorate they will not be
+without a protectorate long, but not such an one as the Allies desire. A
+protectorate there must be, and no reason is really of weight against
+that protectorate being French. Let that, then, extend from the
+Mediterranean to the Euphrates, and from Alexandretta to where the
+Hedjaz already prospers in its self-proclaimed independence. It will be
+completely severed from Turkey by tracts under protection of one or
+other of the Allied Powers, any expedition through which would be an act
+of war.
+
+The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French
+protectorate: it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of
+the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia. Just as no other
+Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can
+fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper
+sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards
+from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each
+other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very
+well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India,
+and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost,
+by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of
+world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should
+never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no
+means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated
+here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen,
+England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in
+a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.
+
+To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still
+might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a
+huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers. Even Germany,
+in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged
+screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of
+Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much
+as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of
+realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her
+pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right--she usually is right in
+these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical--for she seems
+dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was
+the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she
+guessed it: I only guess that she guessed it.
+
+This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work
+and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we
+may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris
+and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Northern Mesopotamia, as
+Dr. Rohrbach points out in his _Bagdadbahn_, needs only the guarantee of
+security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the
+hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under
+a protectorate that insures them against massacre and confiscation of
+property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread
+and something of the ancient prosperity return. The land is immensely
+fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has
+left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life.
+The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will
+naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny
+that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.
+
+But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally different proposition. The land
+lies low between the rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility,
+yields under present conditions but a precarious livelihood to its
+sparse population. For nine months of the year it is a desert, for three
+months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. Once, as we all know, it
+was the very heart of civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out the
+life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarcely existent, any more than
+it is existent in Southern or Upper Egypt; but in the days of Babylon
+the Great there were true rulers and men of wisdom over these
+desiccated regions, who saw that every drop of water in the river, that
+now pours senselessly through swamp and desert into the sea, was a grain
+of corn or a stalk of cotton. They dug canals, they made reservoirs, and
+harnessed like some noble horse of the gods the torrents that now gallop
+unbridled through dreary deserts. The black land, the Sawad, was then
+the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested
+and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat
+and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the
+blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the
+revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the
+statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its
+amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen the might
+of Babylon, and for centuries later, while the canals still regulated
+the water supply, it remained the granary of the world. More than a
+thousand years after Herodotus there were over 12,500,000 acres in
+cultivation, and the husbandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities
+numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab invasion, which was bad
+enough, but colossally worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 'a
+fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell
+therein.'
+
+But the potentiality for production of that great alluvial plain is not
+diminished; the Turks could not dispose of that by massacre, as a means
+of weakening the strength of their subject peoples. It is still there,
+ready to respond to the spell of the waters of Tigris and Euphrates,
+which once, when handled and controlled, caused it to be the Garden of
+the Lord.
+
+Not long before the present European War Sir William Willcocks, under
+whose guidance the great modern irrigation works at Assouan were
+constructed, was appointed adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public
+Works, and his report on the Irrigation of Mesopotamia was issued in
+1911. He tells us that the whole of this delta of the Sawad is capable
+of easy levelling and reclamation. It would naturally be a gigantic
+scheme, and he takes as a basis to start on the question of the
+refertilisation of 4,000,000 acres. Into the details of it we need not
+go, but his conclusions, calculated on a thoroughly conservative basis,
+give the following results. He proposes to restore, of course with
+modern technical improvements, the old system of canals, and, allowing
+for interest on loans, estimates the total expense at £26,000,000 (or
+the cost of the war for about three days). On this the annual value of
+the crops would pay 31 per cent. The figures need no enlargement in
+detail and no comment.
+
+But now comes the difficulty: the construction of the irrigation works
+is easy, the profits are safe so long as the Tigris and 'the ancient
+river,' the river Euphrates, run their course. But all the irrigation
+works in the world will not raise a penny for the investor or a grain
+for the miller unless there are men to sow and gather the crops. A
+million are necessary: where are they to come from? And the answer is
+'Egypt and India.'
+
+This is precisely why the protectorate of Mesopotamia and its future
+must be in English hands, why no other country can undertake it with
+hope of success. Even the ingenious Dr. Rohrbach, whose _Bagdadbahn_ I
+have quoted before, is forced to acknowledge that there is no solution
+to the man-power problem except by the 'introduction of Mohammedans from
+other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail.' It is
+true that he starts upon the assumption that Mesopotamia will remain
+Turkish (under a German protectorate, as we read between his lines),
+with which we must be permitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite
+correct. Even under German protection he realises that citizens of
+well-governed states will not flock by the million to put themselves
+under Turkish control, and he dismisses as inadequate the numbers of
+Syrians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews who can be transported to Mesopotamia
+from inside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Their numbers are even
+more inadequate since the Armenian massacres permitted by Dr. Rohrbach's
+Fatherland, and even he cannot picture a million of his own countrymen
+forsaking the beer-gardens for summers in the Sawad. He does not
+positively state our answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the
+man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned before, I think he guesses
+it. His prophetic gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let him
+state the glorious future, when India and Egypt shall become German, but
+that, I feel sure, is his vision: 'he sees it, but not now; he beholds
+it, but not nigh.'
+
+But we can give the answer which he does not quite like to state, since
+for the English it is clearly more easily realisable. The native labour
+we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a
+million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty.
+But no Power except England can furnish it. And that, I submit, is the
+solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power
+of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already
+bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the world. And I cannot do
+better, in trying to convey the spirit in which this work of
+reclamation should be undertaken, than by quoting some very noble words
+from Sir William Willcocks's report, in which he speaks of the
+desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked
+stewardship.
+
+'The last voyage I made before coming to this country was up the Nile
+from Khartoum to the Equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and
+forbidding region I was filled with pride to think I belonged to a race
+whose sons, even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling
+in the face of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees
+and new agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the
+conditions of life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I
+have felt, if in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day
+represent what was the richest and most famous tract in the world, I had
+thought that I was the scion of a race in whose hands God has placed,
+for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my
+countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the
+exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste
+themselves in the sea for nine months of the year, and desolating
+everything in their way for the remaining three? No effort that Turkey
+can make can be too great to roll away the reproach of those parched and
+weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven.'
+
+But the harvests of Mesopotamia, when gathered in, must needs be
+transported, and for that railways are necessary. Water transport would,
+of course, carry them easily down to the Persian Gulf, but the supply
+will be mainly, if not wholly, wanted westwards, and it must be conveyed
+to the shores of the Mediterranean. Already, in preparation for
+world-conquest, Germany has proceeded far with her construction of the
+Bagdad Railway, which was intended, after her absorption of Turkey, to
+link up Berlin with her next Oriental objective, namely, India; the
+Taurus has been tunnelled, the Euphrates bridged, and but for a hiatus
+of a few miles the line is practically complete from Constantinople into
+Northern Mesopotamia. But its route was chosen for German strategic
+reasons, for the linking up of Berlin with Constantinople and Bagdad.
+This, it may be permitted to say, does not form part of the schemes of
+the Allies: it is to snap rather than weld such links that they have
+taken the field. What we want in the matter of railway transport for the
+harvests of Mesopotamia, and generally for our Eastern communications,
+is not a line that passes through Turkish and German soil, and
+terminates at Berlin, but one which, after the directest possible
+land-route, reaches the Mediterranean and terminates in suitable ports.
+
+The reader therefore is requested to _unthink_ the present Bagdad
+Railway altogether, to 'scrap' it in his mind, as it will be probably
+scrapped on the map, since it is utterly useless for our purposes. For
+taking Aleppo as (roughly) the half-way house in the existent line, we
+find that the western half of it lies in Asia Minor, in territory which,
+as we shall see, will remain Turkish, while the eastern half of it makes
+a long detour instead of striking directly for Bagdad. After our
+experience with Turkey there is nothing less conceivable than that we
+should allow a single mile of our new Mesopotamia Railway to run
+through the territory of the Turks, for who knows that she might not
+(say when harvests are ripe and ready for delivery), on any arbitrary
+pretext, close or destroy the line, even as before now she has closed
+the Dardanelles? Besides, for our purposes, a line that goes to
+Constantinople (in whosoever hands Constantinople may be after the war)
+is out of the way and altogether unsuitable. Eastwards, again, from
+Aleppo the present Bagdad line is circuitous and indirect, admirably
+adapted to the German purposes for which it was constructed, but utterly
+unadapted to ours.
+
+Let us then 'scrap' the existent Bagdad route altogether, and consider
+not what the Germans want, but what we want, which, as has been already
+stated, is a direct land communication with suitable Mediterranean
+ports. Of those there are three obvious ones, Alexandretta, Tripoli, and
+Beirut, of which Beirut is a long way the first in importance and
+potentiality of increased importance. Two possible routes therefore
+would seem to suggest themselves, one running from Alexandretta to
+Aleppo, and thence following pretty closely the course of the Euphrates
+till it reaches Hit, and from there striking directly to Bagdad. Aleppo
+is already connected with Tripoli and El Mina (the actual port of
+Tripoli), and also with Beirut by branch lines making a junction at
+Homs, and thus all those ports will be brought together on one system.
+But if the reader will glance at the map, he will see that by far the
+most direct communication with Bagdad would be to run the railway direct
+from there to Homs, thus making Homs rather than Aleppo the central
+junction of the system. From Homs lines would run northward to Aleppo,
+due west to Tripoli, and south-west to Beirut. Either of those routes,
+in any case, would be infinitely preferable to the long loop which the
+present Bagdad Railway traverses, as planned on German lines and for
+German requirements. The new railway will thus lie exclusively in
+territory under French and English protectorate, and will probably be
+their joint enterprise and property.
+
+Prospectively then, as regards the fulfilment of the solemn pledge of
+the Allies to liberate subject peoples from the murderous tyranny of the
+Turks, we have discussed the future of Armenia, of Syria, of Palestine,
+and of Mesopotamia. All those are well defined districts, and the
+demarcation of their respective protectorates should not present great
+difficulties. But there remains, before we pass on to the problem of
+Constantinople, a further district less easily defined, largely
+inhabited by European peoples whose liberty in the future we are pledged
+to secure. This is the Mediterranean coastline to the south and west of
+Asia Minor, the towns of which have been so extensively peopled and made
+prosperous by Greeks and Italians. Similarly among those of our European
+Allies who are desirous and capable of Eastern expansion, there remains
+one, Italy, whose rights to partake in this Turkish partition we have
+not yet considered. In the shifting kaleidoscope of national
+war-politics, it seems at the moment of writing by no means impossible
+that Greece, having at length got rid of a treacherous and unstable
+Reuben of a monarch, may redeem her pledge to Serbia, in which case, no
+doubt, she too would state the terms of her desired and legitimate
+expansion. But these would more reasonably be concerned with the
+redistribution of the Balkan Peninsula, which does not come within the
+scope of this book, and we may prophesy without fear of invoking the
+Nemesis that so closely dogs the heels of seers, that Italy will
+legitimately claim (or perhaps has already claimed) the protectorate of
+this valuable littoral. Certain it is that, when peace returns, the
+large population of Greeks and Italians once resident (and soon again to
+be) on these coasts, must be given the liberty and security which they
+will never enjoy so long as they remain in Turkish hands, and the hands
+that have earned the right to be protecting Power are assuredly Italian.
+Along the south coast a line including the Taurus range would seem to
+suggest a natural frontier inland from Adana on the east to the
+south-west corner of Asia Minor, and from there a similar strip would
+pass up the coast as far as, and inclusive of, Smyrna. That at least
+Italy has every right to expect, and there seems no great fear that
+among the International Councils there will arise a dissentient voice.
+The inland boundary on the west coast is the difficult section of this
+delimitation, and into the details of that it would be both rash and
+inexpedient to enter.
+
+
+II
+
+We pass, then, to the second avowed object of the Allies, namely, the
+expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman rule, which has proved itself so
+radically alien to Western civilisation. This must be taken to include
+not only the expulsion of the Turkish control from Thrace and
+Constantinople, but from the eastern side as well of the Bosporus, the
+Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles. At no future time must Turkey be in
+a position to command even partially a single yard of that momentous
+channel through which alone our Allies, Russia and Rumania, have access
+to the Mediterranean. Though this was not formally stated in the Allies'
+reply to President Wilson, it is clearly part and parcel of the object
+in view, for while the Ottoman Empire retains the smallest control on
+either side of either of the Straits, she is so far able to interfere in
+European concerns, in which she must never more have a hand. The east
+shore, then, of the Straits and the Sea of Marmora, as well as the west,
+must be under the control of a Power, or a group of Powers, not alien to
+Western civilisation. Germany and her allies therefore, no less than
+Turkey, must be excluded from the guardianship of the Straits.
+
+As we have had previous occasion to note, this ejection of the Turkish
+power from Constantinople is the absolute reversal of European and, in
+especial, of English policy for the last hundred years. No crime that
+the Ottoman Government could commit, no act of barbarism, would ever
+persuade us to do away with the anachronism of Turkey's existence in
+Europe; but at last the seismic convulsion of the war has knocked this
+policy into a heap of disjected ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again
+on the old lines. For among our other avowed objects in prosecuting the
+war to its victorious end, we have pledged ourselves to uphold the
+right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment
+of full security and free economic development. But while Turkey can
+close the Straits at her own arbitrary will, or at the bidding of a
+superior and malevolent Power, and block the passage of ships from
+Russian and Rumanian ports into the Mediterranean, the economic
+development of both these countries is seriously menaced. Three times
+within the last six years has she exercised that right, and while she
+holds the shores of the Straits she can at any moment blockade all
+southern Russian ports. That such power should be in the hands of any
+nation is highly undesirable; that it should be in the hands of a
+corrupt despotism like Turkey, especially now that Germany, as things
+stand, can dictate to Turkey when and what she pleases, is a thing
+unthinkable by the most improvident of statesmen. Already we have paid
+dearly enough for the pusillanimity of a hundred years: it is impossible
+that we should ever allow a similar bill to be again presented.
+Whatever be the guardianship of the Straits, whoever the holder of
+Constantinople, it will not be Turkey.
+
+At the beginning of the war, and indeed till after the revolution in
+Russia, it was announced and stated as an axiom that on the conclusion
+of peace, Russia should be the door-keeper of what after all is her own
+lodge-gate. Subsequently, in the unhappy splits and disintegration of
+her Government, it was announced that she favoured peace without
+annexation--in other words, that she neither claimed nor desired the
+guardianship of Constantinople. But I think we should be utterly wrong
+if we regarded that as an expression of the will of the Russian people:
+it is far more probable that it was the expression of the will of
+Germany, directly inspired by German influence with a view to concluding
+a separate peace with Russia. As we have seen, it had its due effect in
+Turkey, and Talaat Bey gave vent to pious ejaculations of thanksgiving,
+that now all cause of quarrel with Russia was removed, and Turkey and
+she could be friends. It is possible that when out of the confused
+cries there again rises from Russia the clear call of the people's
+voice, we shall find her wishing to set in order her own house before
+she projects herself on new missions, but, as far as the manifesto of
+'peace without territorial annexation' goes, we shall be wise to regard
+it for the present with the profoundest suspicion. It sounds far more
+like the tones of the Central European wolf than those of Little Red
+Riding Hood's proper grandmother.
+
+But be Russia's decision what it may, the Turk will hold sway no longer
+in Thrace or Constantinople, or on the shores of the Straits of the Sea
+of Marmora. There is, of course, no question of deporting the whole of
+the Turkish population that lives in those regions, nor would it be
+desirable, even if it were possible, to realise Gladstone's robust
+vision of seeing every Turk, 'bag and baggage,' clear out from the
+provinces they have desolated and profaned. But if not under Russia,
+then under the joint control of certain of the Allied Powers there will
+be a complete reconstruction of the administration of those districts.
+The headquarters of the protectorate will doubtless be at
+Constantinople, which will be reorganised somewhat on the lines of the
+Treaty Port of Shanghai, and will be open to the ships of all nations.
+The security of the town must be assured by a military garrison either
+of mixed troops of the controlling nations, or possibly by a rotation of
+troops drawn from the armies of each in turn. More important even than
+this will be the adequate control of the Straits by sea. A naval base
+must be formed, which by the gospel of the freedom of the seas (but not
+according to St. Goeben and the submarine disciples) will constitute a
+patrolling police force of the waters. Whether the system of
+fortifications and defences that lately rendered the Dardanelles
+impregnable shall be retained or not is a question demanding the most
+careful consideration. Some will hold that they should be maintained in
+order to insure that none but the guarantors of the freedom of the
+Straits shall ever take possession of them: others that they shall be
+utterly dismantled and destroyed, so that the closing of the Straits
+shall be an impossibility. The matter really turns on the question as to
+the extent to which the Allies will have the prudence to cut Germany's
+claws when the war is over. It is eminently to be hoped that they will
+be cut so short that never again will they be able to show those
+chiselled talons beyond her velvet--that sense, in fact, will allow
+sentiment no word to say. Unfortunately, there are a great many people
+the basis of whose character consists of a washy confidence in the good
+intentions of everybody. Most mistakenly they call it Christianity.
+
+Here, then, has been outlined the effect of the Allies' declared aims.
+Such territories as Turkey holds in Europe, such control as she
+possesses over the free passage of the Straits must pass from her, and
+the alien peoples, who for centuries have fainted and bled underneath
+her infamous yoke, must be led out of the land of bondage. As we have
+seen throughout preceding chapters, it was the fixed policy of the
+Ottoman Government to rid itself of their presence, and already it has
+gone far in its murderous mission. Indeed the avowed aims of the
+Allies, when accomplished, will do that work for her, for the Allies are
+determined to remove those peoples from Turkey. The difference of
+execution, however, consists in this, that they will not remove Arabs
+and Greeks and Italians and Jews, as Turkey has already done with the
+Armenians by the simple process of massacres, but by a process no less
+simple, namely, of taking out of the territories of the Ottoman Empire
+the districts where such peoples dwell. The Allies will accomplish, in
+fact, for the Turks that policy of Ottomanisation which was the aim of
+Abdul Hamid, and has been the aim of his more murderous successors.
+Turkey shall henceforth be for the Turks: she shall no more be in
+'danger' from the defenceless nations, who at present exist within her
+borders. The Sultan of Turkey, in some year of grace now not far
+distant, will find that his Ottomanisation has been done for him, and,
+though his realm is curtailed, he will have his rest broken no more by
+the thought of Arab risings, nor will he have to devise measures that
+will solve the Arab question. Except for a strip along the west and
+south coast, all Asia Minor and Anatolia will be his from the Black Sea
+to the Mediterranean, but Syria, Armenia, the coast of Asia Minor,
+Palestine, and Mesopotamia shall have passed from him. It is no
+dismemberment of an Empire that the Allies contemplate, for they cannot
+dismember limbs that never belonged to the real trunk. It was a despotic
+military control that the Osmanlis had established, they always regarded
+their subject peoples as aliens, whom they did not scruple to destroy if
+they exhibited symptoms of progress and civilisation. Henceforth the
+Turkish Government shall govern Turks, and Turks alone. That for many
+years has been its aim, and, by the disastrous dispensation of fate, it
+has been largely able to realise its purpose. Now, though by different
+methods, the Allies will see thorough accomplishment of it. There will
+be no question, of course, of turning out or of deporting Turks who live
+in Syria, in Armenia, in Constantinople, for the ways of the Allies are
+not those of Talaat and Enver and Jemal the Great. Where to-day Turks
+dwell, there shall they continue to dwell, but they must dwell there in
+peace in equal liberties and rights with the once-subject peoples whom
+the Allies shall have delivered. If they do not like that they can
+migrate, not by forced marches and under the guardianship of murderous
+Kurds, but in protection and security, to the lands where they can still
+enjoy the beneficent sway of their own governors, and be Ottomanised to
+the top of their bent. But Syrians and Armenians and Greeks and Jews
+will be Ottomanised no longer.
+
+The Turk was always a fighter, disciplined and courageous, and he has
+never lost that virtue of valour. But he has been a fighter because he
+has always lived under a military despotism which demanded his services,
+and it is much to be doubted whether his qualities in this regard will
+for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the
+Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been
+chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who,
+when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and
+massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands
+and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. And for their lords and
+governors, who, until Prussia assumed command of the Turkish armies,
+there will no longer be either the possibility of further conquests as
+in the old Osmanli days, or, in less progressive times, the necessity
+for securing Ottoman supremacy over the huge ill-knit lands which it
+governed. But now, instead of having alien and defenceless tribes within
+their borders, tribes forbidden to bear arms and chafing at the Turkish
+yoke, they will see free peoples under the protectorates of Powers that
+are capable of self-defence and, if necessary, of inflicting punishment.
+Russia, France, England, Italy, all allied nations, will be established
+in close proximity to the Turkish frontiers, and the New Turkey will be
+as powerless for aggression as she will be for defence, should she
+provoke attack. But within their borders there may the Osmanlis dwell
+secure and undisturbed, so long as they conform to the habits of
+civilised people with regard to their neighbours, and it is a question
+whether, now that the military despotism which has always misguided the
+fortunes of this people, has no possible fields for conquest, and no
+need of securing security, the nation will not settle down into the
+quiet existence of small neutral countries. Perhaps the last chapter of
+its savage and blood-stained history is already almost finished, and in
+years to come some little light of progress and of civilisation may be
+kindled in the abode where the household gods for centuries have been
+cruelty and hate.
+
+
+
+
+_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VII_
+
+
+THE GRIP OP THE OCTOPUS
+
+It will not be sufficient for the fulfilment of the Allies' aims as
+regards Turkey to free from her barbarous control the subject peoples
+dwelling within her borders, for Turkey herself has to be delivered from
+a domination not less barbaric than her own, which, if allowed to
+continue, would soon again be a menace to the peace of the world. We
+have seen in a previous chapter how deeply set in her are Germany's
+nippers, how closely the octopus-embrace envelops her, and we now have
+to consider how those tentacles must be unloosed from their grip, and
+what will be the condition of the victim, already bled white, when that
+has been done. In the beginning, as we have seen, Germany obtained her
+hold by professing a touchingly beautiful and philanthropic desire to
+help Turkey to realise her national ideals, and her Pecksniffs, Tekin
+Alp and Herr Ernst Marré, were bidden to write parallel histories, the
+one describing the aims of the Nationalist party, the other the
+benevolent interest which Germany took in them. Occasionally Herr Ernst
+Marré could not but remember that he was a German, and permitted us to
+see the claws of the cat, without quite letting it out of the bag, but
+then he pulled the strings tight again, and only loud comfortable
+purrings could be heard, the Prussian musings over the 'liberation' of
+Turkey which she was helping to accomplish. But nowadays, so it seems to
+me, the strings have been loosened, and the claws and teeth are clearly
+visible. It is not so long since Dr. Schnee, Governor of German East
+Africa, sent a very illuminating document to Berlin from which I extract
+the following:--
+
+'Do you consider it possible to make a regulation prohibiting Islam
+altogether? The encouragement of pig-breeding among natives is
+recommended by experts as an effective means of stopping the spread of
+Islam....'
+
+That seems clear enough, and I can imagine Talaat Bey, with his sword
+of honour in his hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in _Alice in
+Wonderland_:--
+
+'After such kindness that would be
+  A dismal thing to do.'
+
+But I am afraid that Germany is contemplating (as indeed she has always
+done) a quantity of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Walrus and
+the Carpenter, beginning to let them appear. She has taken the Turkish
+oysters out for a nice long walk, and when the war is over she proposes
+to sit down and eat them. And did she not also interfere in the affair
+of Jewish massacres and declare that 'Pan-Turkish ideals have no sort of
+meaning in Palestine'? That must have been almost an unfriendly act from
+Turkey's point of view, for it cannot be stated too clearly that part of
+the price which Germany paid for Turkey's entry on her side into the
+war, was the liberty, as far as Germany was concerned, of managing her
+internal affairs, massacres and the rest, as best suited the damnable
+doctrines of Ottomanisation. The other Powers could not interfere, for
+they failed to force the Dardanelles, and Germany promised not to. That
+promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited
+her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the
+Armenian massacres. And in that matter her refusal to interfere is,
+among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness.
+
+Signs are not wanting that Turkey is beginning to realise the position
+in which she has placed herself, namely, that of a bankrupt dependant at
+the mercy of a nation to whom that quality is a mere derision. Lately a
+quantity of small incidents have occurred, such as disputes over the
+ownership of properties financed by Germany and the really melodramatic
+depreciation in the German coinage, which unmistakably show the swift
+ebb of Turkey's misplaced confidence. More significant perhaps than any
+is a transaction that took place in May 1917, when Talaat Bey and Enver
+Pasha took the whole of their private fortunes out of the Deutsche Bank
+in Constantinople, and invested them in two Swiss banks, namely, the
+Banque Nationale de Suisse, and the Banque Fédérale: they drew out also
+the whole funds of the Committee of Union and Progress, and similarly
+transferred them. This operation was not effected without loss, for in
+return for the Turkish £1 they received only thirteen francs. But it is
+significant that they preferred to lose over fifty per cent. of their
+capital, and have the moiety secure in Switzerland to leaving it in
+Constantinople.[1] It is certain therefore that at both ends of the
+scale a distrust of German management has begun. A starving population
+has wrecked trains loaded with food-stuffs going to Germany, and at the
+other end the men with the swords of honour and dishonour deem it wise
+to put their money out of reach of the great Prussian cat. That the
+Germans themselves are not quite at their ease concerning the security
+of their hold may also be conjectured, for they are, as far as possible,
+removing Turkish troops from Constantinople, and replacing them with
+their own regiments. An instance of this occurred in June 1917, when,
+owing to the discontent in the capital, it was found necessary to guard
+bridges, residences of Ministers, and Government offices. But instead of
+recalling Turkish troops from Galicia to do this, they kept them there
+in the manner of hostages, mixed up in German regiments, and sent picked
+bodies of German troops to Constantinople. Fresh corps of secret police
+have also been formed to suppress popular manifestations. They are
+allowed to 'remove' suspects by any means they choose, quite in the old
+style of bag and Bosporus, but the organisation of them is German. And
+well may the German Government distrust those signs of popular
+discontent in a starving population: already the people have awoke to
+the fact that the German paper money does not represent its face-value,
+and, despite assurances to the contrary, it is at a discount scarcely
+credible. Three German £1 notes are held even in Constantinople to be
+the equivalent of a gold £1, while in the provinces upwards of five are
+asked for, and given, in exchange for one gold pound. It is in vain that
+German manifestoes are put forth declaring that all Government offices
+will take the notes as an equivalent for gold, for what the people want
+is not a traffic with Government offices, but the cash to buy food. Even
+more serious is the fact that Austrian and Hungarian directors of banks
+will no longer accept these scraps of paper. In vain, too, is it that
+the hungry folk see the walls of the 'House of Friendship' rise higher
+and higher in Constantinople, for every day they see with starving eyes
+the trains loaded with sugar from Konia, and the harvests raised in
+Anatolia with German artificial manures guarded by German troops and
+rolling westwards to Berlin. According to present estimates the harvest
+this year is so vastly more abundant than that of previous years, that
+no comparison, as the Minister of Agriculture tells his gratified
+Government, is possible. But the poorer classes get no more than the
+leavings of it when the armies, which include the German army, have had
+their wants supplied. The governing classes, whom it is necessary to
+feed, are not yet suffering, for the Germans grant them enough, issuing
+rations to such families as are proved adherents of the German-Turkish
+combination, and until the pinch of want attacks them we should be
+foolishly optimistic if we thought that a starving peasantry would cause
+the collapse or the defection of Germany's newest and most valuable
+colony. There is enough discontent to make Germany uneasy, but that is
+all.[2] Long ago she proved the efficiency of her control, and the
+successful pulling of her puppet-strings, and no instance of that is
+more complete than the brief story of Yakub Jemil and the extinction of
+him and his party, which, though it happened a full year ago, has only
+lately been completely transmitted. Yakub Jemil was an influential
+commander of a frontier guard near the Black Sea coast. In July 1916 he
+went to Constantinople, accompanied by his staff (which included the
+informant from whom this account is derived), and, being cordially
+received by Enver and Talaat, discussed the situation with them. He
+pointed out the demoralising effect of the Armenian massacres, and the
+danger of Jemal the Great's attitude towards the Arabs in Syria,
+realising, and seeking to make them realise, the stupendous folly of
+making enemies of the subject peoples, and urging the re-establishment
+of cordial relations between the Turks and them. That, considering that
+Enver and Talaat were responsible (under the Germans) for the Armenian
+massacres, was a brave outspeaking. He went on to say that Turkey was at
+war not on behalf of herself, but on behalf of Germany, and that it
+would be wise of the Government to consider the possibility of a
+separate peace with the Powers of the Entente. He was heard with
+interest, and took his leave. He remained in Constantinople, and his
+views obtained him many adherents, not only among Turkish officers whose
+sympathies were already alienated from Germany, but among members of the
+Committee of Union and Progress. But before long his adherents began to
+disappear, and he asked for another interview with Talaat. He was
+received, as the informant states, 'with open arms,' for Talaat seized
+and held him, called for the guard, and he was searched, and on him were
+found certain documents which proved him to hold the views he had
+already expressed. That now, was enough. He was 'interrogated' for two
+days (interrogation is otherwise called torture), and was then hanged.
+Subsequently 111 officers and men in the army also disappeared. Some
+were marched into the Khiat Khana Valley, opposite Pera, and were
+stabbed: others were sent under escort to the provinces and murdered. No
+courts-martial of any kind were held.
+
+[Footnote 1: Similarly, in October of this year, a new Turkish law was
+passed, prohibiting the acquisition of Turkish land by foreign settlers.
+This is aimed point-blank at Germany, and has naturally annoyed Berlin
+very much.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The army rations have lately been reduced, each Turkish
+soldier receiving daily an oke of bread and a dried mackerel.]
+
+And should anybody doubt the efficiency of German control in Turkey, and
+be disposed to be optimistic about the imminence of Turkey's detachment,
+he might do well to ponder that story.
+
+Meantime the efficacy of our naval blockade is largely discounted by
+Germany's new source of supply. Possibly in the ensuing winter of
+1917-18 conditions may get unbearable, but if the Turkish Government
+only two years ago massacred more than a million of its subjects, it
+would be absurd to expect that the starving of a million more would
+produce much effect on the Ministers of the Turkish God of Love.[1] The
+people are, of course, told, with suitable statistics, how famine is
+decimating England and France, and how the total starvation of those
+unfortunate countries is imminent. Indeed, of all the signs of want of
+confidence in their German overlords, by far the most promising are the
+facts that Talaat and Enver have sent their money out of the country,
+and that Jemal the Great has a swelled head. On these facts there is a
+certain justifiable optimism to be based. It will do no good to consider
+them academically in London; but are there not practical channels to
+reach the instincts of the Turkish triumvirate that might be navigated?
+
+[Footnote 1: The following list of prices in Constantinople is of
+interest:--
+
+                  July 1914.    July 1917.
+Rice, per lb.        2-1/4 d.      3s. 4d.
+Milk, per quart       5d.          2s.
+Flour, per lb.        3d.          2s. 6d.
+Petroleum, per lb.    1d.          4s. 6d.
+Pair of boots         £1           £8.    ]
+
+We need not trouble ourselves with considering what the Allies will
+have to do with the Turkish army when once the end of the war comes, for
+the collapse of the military party in Turkey, which owes its whole
+vitality to Germany, will be perfect and complete. But the economical
+future of Turkey is not so plain: at the present moment its bankruptcy
+is total. Early in the war Germany drained it of such bullion as it had,
+and has since then advanced it about £150,000,000, which, as far as I
+can trace, is entirely in German paper, and must be redeemed in gold at
+some period (chiefly two years) after the end of the war. That is
+wonderful finance, and one marvels that Turkey could have been so far
+blinded as to accept it. But I expect that the swallowing of the first
+loan was sweetened by a spoonful of jam of this kind. Germany pointed
+out that, though England was quite certainly going to lose the war, she
+had issued an immense paper coinage which had all the purchasing power
+of gold. Germany, on the other hand, with her dear Ally to help her, was
+just as certainly going to win the war. How, then, could there be the
+slightest risk of the German paper money depreciating a single piastre
+in value? That sounded very good sense to Turkey, who was equally
+convinced that she would be on the victorious side (else she would not
+have joined it), and down went the loan with a pleasant sensation of
+sweetness. A second loan was easily induced by the failure of the
+Dardanelles expedition, and about then the 'ignorant' Turkish peasant
+began to wonder whether the paper was quite as valuable as gold, and to
+prefer gold or even the ordinary silver piastre to its German
+equivalent. To counteract that, as we have seen, a law was passed making
+it criminal to hoard gold, and, to complete the ruin, the silver piastre
+was called in, and a nickel token was substituted.... We can but bow our
+heads in reverence of the thoroughness of German swindling.
+
+Now Turkey is completely bankrupt, and we must ask ourselves why Germany
+ever bargained for the repayment in gold, after the war, of the millions
+she had lent the Turks in paper, if she knew that Turkey could never
+repay her. True, the loans had only cost her the paper the notes were
+printed on, so that in no case could she prove a loser, but how could
+she be a gainer? The answer to that question shouts at us from every
+acre of Turkish soil. The immense undeveloped riches of Turkey supply
+the answer. Some indeed are already being developed, and the labour and
+most of the materials have been paid for by the German paper notes.
+There are the irrigation works at Adana, there is the beet-sugar
+industry at Konia, the irrigation works in the Makischelin Valley, the
+mineral concessions of the Bagdad Railway, the Haidar Pasha Harbour
+concessions, the afforestation scheme near Constantinople, the cotton
+industry in Anatolia--there is no end to them. Turkey may not be able to
+pay in cash, but over all these concessions already working, and over a
+hundred more, of which the concessions have been granted, Germany has a
+complete hold, and her victim will pay in minerals and cotton and sugar
+and corn. She will pay over and over and over again, as none who have
+the smallest knowledge of Kultur-finance can possibly doubt. She is
+bled white already, and for the rest of time bloodless and white will
+she remain. Only one event can possibly avert her fate, and that is the
+victory of the Allies.
+
+We have been so bold as to assume that this is not an impossible
+contingency, and on that assumption there is a brighter future for
+Turkey than the Prussian domination could ever bring her. Bankrupt she
+is, but, as Germany saw, she is rich in possibilities even with regard
+to the restricted territory to which she will surely find herself
+limited, and it is a pleasant chance for her that Germany has already
+been so busy in developing the resources of Anatolia. For Germany may
+safely bet her last piece of paper money that she will not lay a finger
+on them.
+
+The Turkey of the future is to be for the Turks; not for the persecuted
+Armenians, nor for the Arabs, nor for the Greeks, and assuredly it is
+not to be for the Prussians. While the war lasts, Germany may draw
+supplies from the fields her artificial manures have enriched, and from
+the acres that her paper money has planted, but after that no more. Her
+Ottomanising work will be over. Such development (and it is far from
+negligible) as she has done in Syria will be continued under French
+protection for the Arabs, such as she has done in Mesopotamia under
+English protection, and such as she has done in Anatolia will be
+continued by the Turks to drag them out of the utter insolvency that she
+has brought them to. Never before has a country so justly and so richly
+deserved the repudiation of a debt incurred by the confidence trick. Not
+a civilised Government in the world would dream of enforcing payment,
+any more than a magistrate would enforce a payment to some
+thimble-rigger returning from a race-meeting.
+
+
+The roar of battle still renders inaudible all voices save its own, but
+already the dusk begins to gather over the halls where sit the War-lord
+and those who, for the realisation of their monstrous dreams, loosed
+hell upon the world, and in the growing dusk there begin to steal upon
+the wall the letters of pale flame that to them portend the doom, and to
+us give promise of dawn. Faintly they can see the legend _Mene, Mene,
+Tekel, Upharsin...._
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Crescent and Iron Cross, by E. F. Benson
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10881 ***