Turkish literature--Turkish proverbs--The literature of other
Tartars--Legend of Turkish descent--The origin of the Turks--The
Turks and Giougen--The Turks with the Eastern Empire--Arab
subjection of the Turks--The Turks and Western civilization--The
Turkish Navy--The Sultan's Army--The lines of Chatalja--The
refugees--View from the Mosque of Mihrama--The Mosque of Mohammed
the Conqueror--The care of the sick and wounded.
The history of the Turks has formed the subject of much scientific
research, hampered considerably by a want of material, by a lack of
information on the subject, handed down from earlier days. The Turks
themselves have no liking for literature, have no bent in that
direction, and all they have ever produced in that line are a series of
stories relating the doings and sayings of Nasreddin Hodja, whose rôle
is much like that of Till Eulenspiegel in Germany. These stories of
Nasreddin Effendi are humorous in their way, but are to a great extent
too indecent for the fastidious Western mind. The humour, too, is of the
obvious order, from which the West is gradually, painfully emerging. I
will give only one sample of Nasreddin's wit. This worthy was awakened
one night by a noise in his garden. He went to the open window, looked
out, and saw something large and white moving about below. Nasreddin
took down his bow, his quiver full of arrows, and sent one in the
direction of the white object, then returned to bed and to sleep. The
next morning he went out into his garden to ascertain the cause of the
nocturnal disturbance, and discovered his shirt, hung out to dry,
transfixed by the arrow. "How fortunate it is that I was not inside
that shirt last night," quoth Nasreddin.
Proverbs give some idea of the working of a people's soul, but in this
respect too the Turk is not very prolific, certainly not original.
Herewith a few samples:
Ei abdal! Ei dervish! Aktché ilé biter beriche.
Freely translated: Oh, monk! Oh, dervish! money will take you anywhere!
The sentiment has nothing to recommend it, and is certainly better
expressed by La Fontaine:
Quelles affaires ne fait point
Ce malheureux métal, l'argent maître du monde.
Or again:
Abdel Sekkédé, hadji Mekkédé.
(The monk to the convent, the pilgrim to Mecca.)
Also to be found in other languages:
Chasseur dans les bois, voyageur sur la route,
Les hommes, commes les mots n'out de prix qu'à leur place.
(_Pariset._)
Or the simpler German:
Schuster bleib' bei deiner Leiste.
There are no epics in the Turkish language, yet their wanderings should
have called forth some such ebullition had they ever had some slight
tendency to rise out of their primordial inarticulateness. They have
little songs which the Anatolian peasants sing when the day's work is
done, which sound through the latticed windows of the women's secluded
chambers. But these songs are generally of love or homely matter, and do
not tend to inspire the listener with ambition to emulate the deeds of
his fathers for the honour and glory of his race and country. Other
races emerging from barbarism to this day sing of their national heroes.
What traveller along the lower reaches of the Danube has not listened to
those bands of wandering Tsigani?
Then again, the Highlands of Scotland ring still with the recital of
some great clan leader's doughty deeds. True, they are mostly tales of
strife and bloodshed, but they hold the germs of history and record it
in the manner most likely to lead others to higher aims. Of all this
the Turk knows nothing. No epic tells of those days when his wild
forebears left the congeries of nomad tribes which haunted the
hunting-grounds north of the Hwang-Ho, of Tibet, and the rolling plains
beyond the Hindu-Kush. Mongol and Manchu, Tartar and Magyar, forming
groups of nomad tribes, akin and possibly speaking the same primitive
language, which, when history became articulate, only differed in
vocabulary, hardly at all in structure, as it does so widely from Aryan
and Chinese. Of these races Manchu and Tartar have risen to greatness;
Manchu till recently reigned over China from Peking, while one Osmanli,
descendant of a wandering Tartar tribe, sits in the seat of former Roman
Emperors of the East. The Finns, belonging to the same race, have in the
course of centuries developed a literature of a high order, and are
among the most enlightened of the children of the Tsar of all the
Russias; Hungary's history lives in glowing epics and passionate song;
and both these scions of the same stock are valuable factors in the
æsthetic life of Europe. But the Manchus have fled from Peking after
centuries of dark incompetence, and the Sultan, whose palace stands on
the European banks of the Bosphorus, has during his short reign seen the
provinces won by the sword of Othman torn from him by younger nations,
whose soul has been nourished by stirring recital of their former
greatness, whose heroes live in song and epic, which by these puts heart
into the warrior and leads him on to victory.
Now those young nations are without the gates of Constantinople; they
have reduced the Turkish Empire in Europe to a narrow strip of land
between the Bosphorus and a line of defences, stretching from the Sea of
Marmora to the Black Sea, the lines of Chatalja.
The Turks themselves claim descent from Japheth, the son of Noah, as do
the Armenians, by the way, and there is no reason to dispute with them
about their traditional ancestor, who, by all accounts, was a most
respectable person, and will serve as well as any other for genealogical
mystification. Undoubtedly the Turks and their origin began to attract
attention comparatively early in the history of Europe, and an English
historian (Knolles) of the seventeenth century writes of them as
follows: "The glorious empire of the Turks, the present terrour of the
world, hath amongst other things nothing in it more wonderful or strange
than the poor beginning of itself, so small and obscure as that it is
not well knowne unto themselves, or agreed upon even among the best
writers of their histories; from whence this barbarous nation that now
so triumpheth over the best part of the world, first crept out and took
their beginning. Some (after the manner of most nations) derive them
from the Trojans, led thereunto by the affinity of the word Turci and
Teucri; supposing (but with what probability I know not) the word Turci,
or Turks, to have been made of the corruption of the word Teucri, the
common name of the Trojans."
Others have ingeniously endeavoured to identify the Turks with the lost
"Ten Tribes"; these mysterious people have frequently been called upon
to act as ancestors to modern nations. I remember well an English
matron, mother of a promising family, who tried to foist this ancestry
upon the people of Great Britain. However, she was advised to look at
her domestic treasures, and the sight of her snub-nosed offspring
seriously shook her strange belief.
Perhaps, though it seems no adequate reason, the constant infusion of
fresh blood, the mixing by marriage with the women of conquered or
conquerors, has prevented a national expression of sentiment based on
historic facts, and the Turks, even before they emerged from distant
Asia, had absorbed several other races not akin to them, or had been
absorbed by some temporarily more powerful nation. There is sufficient
reason to suppose that the Iranians, the original inhabitants of
Bokhara, were the foundation and predominant note in the tribes which
after a while became defined as Turks. The Chinese seem to have been the
first to become acquainted with the Turks, and that so long ago as 1300
B.C. Chinese records of 300 B.C. mention a warlike race called Hiung-nu.
Vigorous, active, restless, always on horseback, these savages hovered
round the frontiers of the Celestial Empire. They were, it seems,
divided into tribes, which when not acting in concert on some greater
raid, probably behaved much as Scottish clans did not so long ago, and
quarrelled and fought amongst each other. So it appears that a clan
called the Asena sought the protection of a stronger one, which Gibbon
called the Giougen, or Jwen-jwen. The Asena settled for a while in the
district where now stands Shan-tan, in which district a hill called
Dürkö (helmet), from its shape, is said to have originated the name
"Turk."
In course of time, about a century, the Asena began to feel their
strength and tried it on their hosts, the result a massacre of Giougen
and their disappearance from the pages of history. Again no epic tells
us the stirring story of those days, and what is known is due to the
researches of men like Chavannes and E. H. Parker. But the Turks from
this time came into the field of history and into the purview of the
West; they had gained in strength and importance with astounding
rapidity, and were making their presence felt on the nations to westward
of their former haunts. They still clung to their habits of nomadic
hunters, but, it seems, engaged in trade as well, carrying goods for
others in their caravans, connecting East and West with links of
doubtful trustiness.
It was through this trading that they first came into contact with the
Western world. Persia stood in the way of this young Turkey's commercial
development, and would insist on Turkish silks finding their outlet to
the Persian Gulf rather than by the roads of the old Roman Empire of the
East. Thus it came that Turkish envoys sought out Emperor Justin at
Constantinople. The Emperor was somewhat chary of dealing with these
strangers, but little more than half a century later Turkish warriors
were assisting Heraclius against the Persians. As the Turks increased in
number they felt the need of further expansion, so a section of them
made its way north towards Lake Baikal and menaced China, but were
subdued in 630. China then set about creating ill-feeling between the
two sections of the Turkish people, the northern and the western tribes,
and brought about a division which seems to have been final. In the
meantime another force had arisen in Asia Minor which was destined to
overrun that district, surge into Syria, conquer Egypt and the African
countries washed by the Mediterranean Sea, and send its tide up against
the barriers of the Pyrenees.
The Arabs had come from out of the desert and, fired by the teachings of
the Prophet Mohammed, had carried their green banner victorious over the
ruins of former Empires. The Caliphate, the Arab Empire, grew as rapidly
under the immediate successors of the Prophet as the Turkish State, if
it could be so called, had done a century before. Persia went under
before the furious onslaught of the Arabs in 639, and the conquerors
overflowing into Transoxania had subjected the peoples living there by
714. The Arabs spread westward as well, and only forty-six years after
the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, in the seventh century the
Sea of Marmora was alive with the lateen sails of the swarthy
marauders. They dashed out their souls against the strong defences of
Constantinople, the Walls of Theodosius, in successive attempts to
capture the City of fabulous wealth, but were forced to retire defeated.
However, the Turks, who nearly ten centuries later broke down those
stout defences, became subject to the Caliphate.
This applies to the Western Turks only; they vanished as a political
entity and gradually became converted to a creed well suited to bring
out the qualities of a high-spirited, martial race of nomads. It
sanctified their lust of blood and conquest, and gave fuller force to
this people's fighting spirit by imposing the strict discipline of
Islam, "obedience," but made no mention of that broad tolerance breathed
by the Founder of Christianity to which the West owes so much of its
civilization. It is doubtful though whether those early Turkish tribes,
if they had come under the influence of Christianity instead of Islam,
would have advanced any further on the path of culture than they have
arrived to-day. Though they have been in contact with the West since the
seventh century, though they conquered the Empire of the East and made
its Christian peoples their subjects, and from the City of Constantine
overflowed Eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna, yet the Turk has
learnt nothing. This people, still nomad, has taken nothing from the
West but a misunderstood, misapplied idea of representative Government
which failed at its inception and has hastened the downfall of the
Ottoman Empire in Europe. It has absorbed nothing but a dim idea of a
military organization which when applied to a civilized, cultured nation
makes for military perfection, when attempted on nomads leads to such
debacles as the plains of Thessaly, the mountainous districts of
Macedonia, and the stricken fields of Thrace have recently witnessed.
British naval officers have for years been acting as instructors to the
Turkish Navy, which from a collection of obsolete iron tanks has to
outward appearance assumed the semblance of a war fleet; left to
themselves, what has that fleet done to help Turkey in her present
straits? The Greek Navy is afloat and preventing transhipment of Turkish
troops from Asia Minor--but the Sultan's fleet did not move out to help!
Only some mines were laid and allowed to float about the southern
entrance to the Dardanelles, endangering foreign commerce from which
Turkish officials indirectly draw their means of livelihood. The
"Hamidieh," her officers warned time and again to take precautions
against torpedo attack, was laid up in dock with a gaping rent in her
bows caused by a Bulgarian torpedo, and only the "Khairreddin
Barbarossa," named after Turkey's greatest sailor, lying at the southern
end of the lines of Chatalja, has taken any part in a war in which naval
power, properly applied, could have turned the fortunes of the day.[5]
[5] Since this was written the Turkish fleet has emerged from hiding
once or twice, and shown some signs of activity. Both Turks and Greeks
have laid claim to victories at sea.
The sea-coast of Bulgaria lay exposed; a strong naval force to escort
transport would have made practicable a landing of Turkish troops behind
the enemy's lines and threatened his communications, thus checking his
advance on Adrianople. But the Turkish Navy was content to throw a few
shells into a harmless convent, or monastery, at Varna. Possibly there
were no transports, probably there was no definite scheme, but certainly
there was no navy commensurate with the power assumed by the Osmanli in
the comity of European nations.
Money was spent on the Sultan's navy, and it failed. Money, much money,
was given for the Sultan's army. The highly trained officers, carefully
selected from Europe's most efficient military organization, were
acquired as instructors, and worked hard at what must have seemed the
labours of Sisyphus. The Sultan's army took the field, and all the work
of years seemed as if thrown away. Instead of military organization
there was chaos. Nominal army corps with staff and commanders figured on
paper. In reality commanders of army corps, divisions, brigades waited
for the troop trains at wayside stations, and as each tactical unit
detrained and fell in on the platforms, these commanders without
commands gathered together such units as they thus found and
extemporized commands. Transport failed completely, and at Rodosto men
landing from Asia Minor cried for bread, hundreds strayed starving in
search of food for five and six days on end, and then were driven back
by cavalry into the firing line--to fight!
Of all the costly engines of war ordered and paid for, field telegraphs,
field telephones, not one was in evidence. Thousands of Anatolian
peasants, greybeards and youths, swelled the ranks, untrained many of
them, some only used to muzzle-loading rifles. Some two hundred thousand
of these men, Turkish soldiers, clung on to the lines of Chatalja;
others, in thousands, stragglers from the battlefield, collected from
day to day in the purlieus of Stamboul and returned unwilling to the
front. Among these were even officers--an official announcement ordered
the imams, the priests, to render to the military police authorities
lists of all officers living in the streets of their respective
districts--officers here in the capital of an Empire, the existence of
which in Europe is threatened as gravely as was ever any Empire of the
world, and out in the West, but fifty miles away, is the front, the line
of Chatalja's defences, result of Valentine Baker Pasha's military
skill. Impregnable, they say, are those lines, and that they would be,
and will remain, if all available sons of Othman put their backs into
the work. Yet there were officers and men of the Sultan's army
frittering away their time and wasting opportunities of at last doing
something for the country they profess to love, here in the capital with
the enemy hammering at the outer defences. And would it be believed,
those lines of Chatalja, just before the debacle of Lüle Burgas, were
left in charge of two men, whose function was to see that no thief
removed doors, shutters, or any other portable trifles from the many
Government buildings on the lines!
It is no wonder that the example set by many officers of the Sultan's
army had discouraged the troops, who, seeing everything going against
them, starving, diseased, turned their weary eyes homeward to the East,
to Asia, the Turk's real home, and dragged their tired, wounded limbs
over the incredibly bad roads till the soaring minarets and their rivals
the cypresses, the domes of mosques built to commemorate the conquests
of former warrior Osmanli, gladdened their sight. Beyond those imposing
temples lay the sea, and across it, only a little way, Anatolia--Home.
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF MOHAMMED
Built to commemorate the Conqueror of Constantinople. He lies buried
under the shadow of this Mosque.]
Of the thousands of broken-spirited, ignorant peasant-soldiers who left
their country's colours, a term the inner meaning of which was
incomprehensible to the majority of them, many fell by the way.
Thousands clambered into railway trucks, on to the roofs, of any train
starting for the base, and of these many died and their comrades threw
them out by the way; corpses strewed the railway embankments. Many
reached St. Stefano, where preliminary peace was signed after another
Northern foe, Russia, had defeated the Osmanli in the field. Of these
one-third, it is said, died of cholera, exposure, starvation, their
festering bodies covering the pavements. Considerable numbers reached
Stamboul and took refuge in the mosques, perhaps hoping that Allah might
help them out of their affliction. St. Sophia was crowded with sick and
despondent humanity, the flotsam and jetsam of a war of East and
West: one side all unprepared, purposeless, corrupt; the other in
well-ordered array, conscious of power and of purpose, and using
intelligently all the dread weapons of modern warfare.
With the fugitive soldiery came columns of refugees, peasants of Thrace
and Macedonia, Pomaks--Bulgarian converts to Islam; they came across the
rolling plains with all their portable belongings, their trail marked by
an occasional grave, by a dead horse or bullock by the roadside. These,
too, sought shelter in the courtyards of the mosques; they streamed in
at the City gates, chiefly Edirné Kapoo, as the Turks renamed the
ancient Gate of Adrianople. I have seen them here herded without the
gate awaiting admission, crowded in the courtyard of the Mosque of
Mihrama, which occupies the site of a church once dedicated to St.
George in the days of old Byzant.
St. George, the patron saint of warriors, was entrusted with the defence
of Constantine's City here where the Walls of Theodosius reach this
highest point. A glorious view spreads at your feet from their height;
past groves of solemn cypress trees, which cast their long shadows over
the graves of faithful followers of the Prophet, thousands of whom in
distant ages assailed the strong defences of the City, your eye travels
along the hoary walls, over a ruined palace to where Galata arises
beyond the Golden Horn. Forests of masts, smoke rising from the funnels
of ocean-going steamers or busy ferry-boats speak of commercial activity
contrasting with the Oriental repose of Stamboul at your feet. Little
wooden houses, some of warm purply greys, others are painted with some
bright colour; fig trees and cypresses on the rising ground towards the
east, where many mosques, the only lasting monument a Turk builds, stand
out above the clustering houses, their blue-grey domes crowned with
gleaming crescent, light against the deep blue of the Anatolian
mountains, attendant minarets a dazzling white against the southern sky.
And then to southward another mosque or so with minaret and sentinel
cypress, and over them the sparkling waters of the Sea of Marmora, where
the Prince's Islands seem floating in the fairy haze of a southern
summer day. This was when I saw it a few short years ago; to-day the sky
is grey and cloudy, the smoke hangs heavy over the leaden waters of the
Golden Horn, mosques and minarets loom dark against the faint, watery
outlines of the distant hills, the fig trees have shed their leaves and
throw out writhing arms against winter's inclemency, and sullen
cypresses bend ungraciously before the north wind. Grey despondency is
the keynote of the picture, for from the south-west and the west, and
from the north-east, the foes have gathered in strength and hold
Constantinople in bonds, and beyond those dark heights to westward an
enemy, strong and purposeful, is demanding admission to Turkey's last
foothold in Europe.
The untidy street from Edirné Kapoo to the heart of Stamboul is
punctuated here and there by mosques--there is the Mosque of Mihrama,
already mentioned, where once stood a Christian church; there is the
Mosque of Mohammed II the Conqueror, built on the site of a church
dedicated to the Holy Apostles, for long the resting-place of those
far-off Byzantine Emperors, the last of whom perished when the City fell
before the sword of Othman. Around it stand the academies where are
trained those destined to expound the teaching of the Prophet. Under a
wintry sky, amidst the squalor of a people incapable of elementary
hygiene, the glory of the Conqueror's deeds is dimmed, and the
vanquished, despondent sons of his fierce warriors huddle in groups
about this monument to an epoch-making victory. The road leads for a
while along an aqueduct attributed to Valens, the Emperor who was
killed in battle at Adrianople by the Goths. Bulgarians are this day
holding the city of Emperor Hadrian in an iron vice. Along here are
other ruins, more recent, the result of a fire probably; no rebuilding
has been attempted, everywhere is dirt, squalor, and decay.
The street opens out on to a large square, one side of which is occupied
by the Seraskierat, the War Office. From here came the order to the
Sultan's officers that they should pack up their full-dress uniforms for
the triumphal entry of the Othman army into Sofia. To-day weary
stragglers from the battlefields of Thrace lean against the walls of the
Seraskierat, heavy-eyed, hungry, diseased, despondent. Surely there were
some whose business is between these walls cognisant of the real state
of affairs! It is said that of some eighteen German instructors sixteen
declared the Turkish Army to be quite unfit to take the field; yet those
holding office at the Seraskierat heeded not and sent hundreds of
thousands in smaller tactical units, under-officered, to take what place
they could in the fighting line; no scheme was ready, or if there was no
one adhered to it, no adequate provision for commands and staff, for
communications, for commissariat preceded the flood of miscellaneous
soldiery which flowed out to meet the enemy's advance and then ebbed
back, carrying with it all the human wreckage thrown up on to the
ill-kept pavements of the mosques of conquerors.
And while this mass of suffering Eastern humanity was but fitfully and
quite inadequately cared for by the Turkish authorities, Western
humanity was putting forth its finest efforts to alleviate this awful
distress by all the means of Western civilization, against which the
Turk is making his last stand. In the old Seraglio, at Galata and Pera
hospitals have been opened to receive the sick and wounded soldiers of
the Sultan, and they now readily make their way to where the Red
Crescent flies by the side of the ensigns of Great European Powers. I
know fair English women, all unused to the sights and sounds, the
aftermath and echo of glorious war, who are giving all their strength to
works of mercy, Germans and Austrians, French and Italians, all moved by
the spirit which informs Christianity. Do they expect gratitude in
return, I wonder! I hope not, for they are likely to be disappointed.
One gentle lady I know of, who has worked hard amongst all this misery,
asked some of her patients whether in case of a massacre of Christians
they would at least protect those who had nursed them back to life.
After some deliberation the answer came: "No, not that. But we would
kill you first, so that you may escape torture, and worse, from others."
Again, at a meeting where many ladies were busy preparing hospital
necessaries, the talk turned to the question of a massacre of
Christians. A Turkish lady, a lady of high degree, turned on her
fellow-workers and declared that should her people be driven to the last
extremity they would certainly wreak vengeance on the Christian
population, and she herself would be the first to incite them, to goad
them on to murder and rapine, until the streets should run with the
blood of Christians, and Christian habitations became a howling
wilderness, to show a horror-stricken world in what manner a race of
warriors goes out of history.
Personally I do not think any such catastrophe will happen; the Turkish
soldiers I saw daily straggling into hospital are too broken in spirit,
too sick in mind and body, to carry out such atrocities as those with
which they have from time to time sullied the pages of their history.
Nevertheless, those two accounts I have given above, of the truth of
which I am convinced, prove to me that when the Turk finally leaves
Europe he will take with him nothing which the West has tried to teach
him, least of all any conception of the divine quality of mercy.