And now within the last two months we find once more the same influences
at work, and many of the same men who promulgated the Bulgarian
atrocities exploiting fresh massacres of Armenians. There is absolutely
no reason why we should implicitly believe the reports which have been so
assiduously circulated in the Press and on the platform, simply because,
owing to the unfortunate war with Turkey, we are unable to ascertain what
has really happened. The exploiters of these stories are under the same
disability, having only heard one side, and that an extremely biassed
one. The value of certain newspaper information is curiously illustrated
by Sir Edwin Pears who, writing about the Bulgarian “atrocities,”
says, “I collected a number of rumours (sic!) and made much use of the
information which Dr. Long furnished me ... [my account] appeared in
the _Daily News_, on the 23rd (June 1876).” Dr. Long, according to Sir
Edwin, was a former missionary and correspondent to “an obscure newspaper
in America,” and relied for his information entirely upon Bulgarian
letters and not on personal investigation. No Englishman worthy of the
name would condemn a prisoner on the evidence of the prosecution alone,
without first hearing the evidence for the defence. Yet that is exactly
what we are now asked to do. The Editor of the _Economist_ is right when
he says “Certainly we must not allow our standards of proof to decline
in judging reports of atrocities,” and this is especially necessary at a
time when truth seems rarer than fiction, and when sensational stories
are passed as authentic reports for the acceptance of a public prone to
believe anything (witness the stories, all since proved to be entirely
fictitious, of the fatal accident, the suicide, and finally the burial of
the German Crown Prince).
Captain Granville Fortescue, the well-known American war correspondent,
in his recently published book, “What of the Dardanelles,” gives an
example of how stories—not to call them by another name—are manufactured
and disseminated by means of the Press all over the world:
The rumours of a revolution in Turkey have been so many and
frequent, that I must state they have not the least foundation
in fact. Why should the British public be fed on these silly
canards? Time and again I have read long dispatches from
Athens and Mytilene, which purport to describe the troubled
conditions in Turkey. I remember an item that told of a riot
in Constantinople. Reference was made to the looting of
the Pera Palace Hotel by a “stop-the-war” mob. On the date
mentioned in the dispatch I was in this hotel. The whole story
was pure invention. Personal observation convinced me, that
Constantinople was the most normal of all the capitals of the
nations at war.
Sir William Osler, the eminent physician, in a speech recently delivered
at the Leeds Luncheon Club, said that:
In a great crisis like the present we are all a bit surcharged
emotionally. Judgment becomes difficult, and we become
weak-minded and believe anything any Ananias says. Who could
have dreamt that so early in the war there were so many liars
in the country as the men and women who saw the Russian troops?
An instability of this sort leaves us an easy prey for the
Yellow Press. Think of all the legless, armless, eyeless
Belgians that crowded their columns. All had been seen by these
perverters; few, if any, by the camera. What a triumph of
unstrung nerves was that matter of the war babies.
Russians, mutilated Belgians and “war-babies,” were said to be in our
midst, and yet it took us weeks to learn the truth. We shall indeed be
hysterical if we allow ourselves to be hoaxed about alleged events in the
recesses of Asia Minor.
It is well to recall that Sir Henry Layard in the report of the Bulgarian
atrocities, from which we have quoted, stated that: “there are persons,
and amongst them I grieve to say Englishmen, who boast that they invented
those stories with the object of writing down Turkey, to which they were
impelled by a well-known hand.”
No one believes that gentlemen in the position of Lord Bryce, Mr. Noel
Buxton, Mr. Aneurin Williams and Sir Edwin Pears would for a minute
willingly deceive the British public; but it is indeed more than possible
that some “well-known hand” has been deceiving them. May not this hand
have been that of the wealthy Armenian Committees which are spread
over Europe and America, and who have never hesitated as to the means
chosen for the attainment of their objects, because with them the end
justifies the means? Even the Earl of Crewe, when on October the 5th,
1915, he replied in the House of Lords to the Earl of Cromer’s question
as to “whether His Majesty’s Government had received any information
confirmatory of the statements made in the Press to the effect that
renewed massacres of Armenians had taken place on a large scale,” based
his information on a report he had received from His Majesty’s Consul
at Batum, and which he acknowledged was founded upon the statements
published in a newspaper at Tiflis. It is certainly most significant
that the British Consul at Batum,—a town actually on the frontier—should
have had to rely for his information on a newspaper published at Tiflis,
nearly 200 miles further back. This newspaper was probably “The Horizon,”
an Armenian propagandist organ, and therefore quite unreliable. Likewise,
unless he had been wilfully misinformed, it would be difficult to account
for Lord Bryce’s statement at the Mansion House, that there was not the
slightest basis for the report that the Armenians had themselves provoked
the massacre by rising in conspiracy. The facts and probabilities, so far
as we know them, are otherwise.
The Turks had just sustained in the Caucasus a severe defeat. They
needed every available man and every round of ammunition to check the
advancing Russians. It is therefore incredible that without receiving any
provocation they should have chosen that particularly inopportune moment
to employ a large force of soldiers and gendarmes with artillery to stir
up a hornet’s nest in their rear. Military considerations alone make the
suggestion absurd.
The Germans had failed in their projected attack on Calais and Dunkirk
after suffering enormous losses. The Franco-British forces were massing
for the counter-stroke. Russia was almost at the gates of Cracow,
Przemysl had fallen, and her armies were descending into the plains
of Hungary. The Servians had retaken Belgrade after inflicting a
disastrous defeat on the Austrians. The Allied fleets were hammering
at the Dardanelles. Greece, Roumania and possibly Bulgaria might at
any moment join the Entente Powers. The position of Turkey and the
Central Powers appeared worse than it has ever been before or since.
It is therefore most unlikely that the Turkish Government without
receiving any provocation, and even if, as suggested by Lord Bryce,
they entertained the idea of exterminating the Armenians, should have
chosen so inopportune a moment to damn themselves and forfeit all hope
of magnanimous treatment for their country if defeated, besides running
the risk of prejudicing the Christian Balkan States against them. Lord
Bryce’s accusation, from the point of view of political expediency,
carries its own refutation.
In peace the Turks are a good-natured, easy-going race, hospitable,
generous to the poor, and particularly fond of animals and children—a
sure sign of a kindly and humane disposition, long-suffering, but when
provoked, like all the near Eastern races both Moslem and Christian,
exhibiting a fury out of all proportion to the insult according to
our Western ideas. In war time the Turks are neither fanatical nor
intolerant. They are indeed less so than any of the Western nations with
all their supposed superiority.
When Greece was fighting Turkey, the Greeks of Constantinople, although
Ottoman subjects, actually dared to fly the Greek flag over their
houses, and after the death of their archbishop, which occurred at that
same time, paraded his dead body, seated upon the episcopal throne,
through the streets of Pera, escorted by their prelates and clergy,
without being subjected to any molestation. Annually, too, the Host
is borne in procession through the streets of the City of the Khalif.
Contrast this extraordinary tolerance with present conditions in London,
where German subjects are forbidden to pray in their own churches in the
German tongue and where, only a few years ago, the British Government on
the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress refused to allow the Host to be
borne through the streets of Westminster.
During the Balkan war, when even the mosques were crowded with sick and
starving refugees and only the most heroic efforts of the Turkish army,
decimated with cholera, were able to keep the victorious Bulgars outside
the gates of the city whose very foundations were shaking under the
vibration of the enemy’s guns, Greeks, Bulgars and foreign adventurers of
every description feasting and making merry in the cafés of Pera openly
rejoiced at the misfortune of the Turkish Empire. The principal of Robert
College, a Christian school on the shores of the Bosphorus, allowed full
play to his sectarian bias, boasting that many of the enemy’s successful
generals had been educated at the College, which was founded under the
protection and goodwill of the Sultan. Yet during those bitter days, in
spite of all this provocation, not a single alien enemy was interfered
with by those “fanatical Moslems,” whose hierarchial chief, the
Sheik-ul-Islam, set an example by continuing to employ the Greek gardener
who had been in his service for many years. The Turks were either too
tolerant or too contemptuous to even notice the unseemly and licentious
behaviour of the enemies within their gates. Such is the character of
a people who would rather go without their dinner than see a poor man
hungry, and who, even at a period when Jews were being burnt alive in
Christian Spain, Huguenots hunted out of France and priests guilty of
saying Mass executed in England, allowed perfect freedom to every race
and sect within her dominions.
In the present war we have the overwhelming and convincing testimony of
all ranks, from Lord Kitchener downwards, that the Turks have fought
gallantly and cleanly, and have treated our wounded and prisoners with
kindness and humanity. It is inconceivable, therefore, that these same
Turks without any provocation (and Lord Bryce himself has said that
there was no religious fanaticism), should have committed the devilries
of which they are accused, and in this connection we have the curiously
illuminating observation by a celebrated correspondent, on his return
from the seat of the last Balkan war, that “paradoxical as it might seem,
the Turks were the only Christians in the Balkans”!
This brief examination of the Turkish military and political situation,
and of Turkish character, ought sufficiently to refute the suggestion
that the Turks were the aggressors and acted without provocation.
On the other hand these same military and political factors, when applied
to the Armenian point of view and seen in conjunction with the character
of these people, afford good and sufficient reasons for believing that
the Armenians themselves commenced the troubles by rising in rebellion.
It would indeed have been more than extraordinary had the rebellious
section, armed and ready for any mischief, remained quiet under
circumstances which were so entirely in their favour.
The defeat of the Turkish army in the Caucasus and the absence of the
greater part of the local garrisons and gendarmery, as well as of the
able-bodied Moslems, at the front, were entirely favourable to the
long matured but hitherto abortive schemes of the revolutionists and
russophile Armenians for raising an armed rebellion. Bands of armed
Armenian volunteers called “Fedais,” estimated by Lord Bryce at over
8,000, with a probable increase “in the near future” to between 20,000
and 25,000, were already operating in the country as early as last
March, and Lord Bryce and the “Friends of Armenia” were appealing for
funds to clothe and equip the Armenian Volunteers on April 2nd, almost
one month before these alleged unprovoked “massacres.” Furthermore
Russia was undoubtedly arming the population and assisting in fomenting
a revolution; nor can Russia be blamed for this, seeing that she was
then at war with Turkey. Finally the character of the Armenians, so
graphically described by Sir Mark Sykes in his account of the people of
the Mush plain, and by other travellers whom we have quoted, leaves no
doubt that the majority of the Armenian population were quite ready and
willing to take advantage of the situation.
What really seems to have occurred in this: about the end of April
the Armenians of the Van district believing, after the defeat of Sary
Kamish in the Caucasus, that the complete victory of Russia was assured,
thought that their opportunity had at last arrived. Urged on by the
revolutionaries and Russian agents, and hoping to co-operate with the
“Fedais” who had already seized the town of Baskale, 50 miles to the East
on the main road from Van to the Persian frontier, they rose in revolt
and, as a correspondent of the _Times_, perhaps in an unguarded moment,
admits, “finally captured the town of Van and took a bloody vengeance
on their enemies.” It was the old story of the massacre of the Zeitun
garrison over again. Early in June the revolutionists betrayed the town
to the Russian troops.
What happened afterwards is more or less conjecture, but reading the
accounts, even those evidently inspired from Armenian sources, it would
appear that there were organized risings in other parts of Asia Minor
also. For Mr. Henry Wood, the special correspondent at Constantinople of
the United Press Agency of America, reported that the Armenians not only
were in open revolt but were actually in possession of Van and several
other important towns. At Zeitun he said that on the participation
of Turkey in the war, when the authorities tried to enforce military
service upon the young Armenians (as they were entitled to do by the
Constitution), the soldiers were attacked and 300 killed. The town was
subsequently retaken, and the population was dispersed and deported. It
appears obvious that the Turkish authorities, anxious for the safety of
their lines of communication, had no other alternative than to order
the removal of their rebellious subjects to some place distant from the
seat of hostilities, and their internment there. The enforcement of this
absolutely necessary precaution led to further risings on the part of
the Armenians. The remaining Moslems were almost defenceless, because
the regular garrisons were at the front as well as the greater part of
the police and able-bodied men. Already infuriated at the reports of
the atrocities committed at Van by the insurgents, in fear for their
own lives and those of their relatives, they were at last driven by the
cumulative effect of these events into panic and retaliation and, as
invariably happens in such cases, the innocent suffered with the guilty.
The Turkish Government has repeatedly been accused of trying to “end the
Armenian question by ending the Armenians,” but the evidence of many
persons who travelled through the country shortly after the previous
disturbances is, that with very rare exceptions only able-bodied men were
slain, and not the women, children, or aged. This in itself would confirm
the opinion that the measures were purely repressive and, however severe,
were taken in the interest of public safety.