EMOTIONS AND IMPRESSIONS—“ON THE WAY.”—NOWHERE TO HOUSE THE POOR PEOPLE
IT was, indeed, a kindly Providence that led the cheik to accompany us
upon this stage of my tour. No one could have been more polite and
thoughtful, more ready to gratify my every wish at great personal
sacrifice, than the officer from Smyrna. But he had not been at Oxford;
he could not speak our language with the distinguished accent of that
University; above all, he had not the vast culture of this man of God.
His information would have been conveyed in German, a language I speak
with _no_ pleasure.
The cheik has large brown eyes, a dusky skin, and a face which, though
stamped with suffering, is kindness itself. He wore a long grey coat and
turban, and appeared to me at that moment years older than his actual
age. Maybe my inborn veneration for Oxford professors misled me; and no
doubt I was also influenced by the obvious respect of the many
hoary-headed disciples who came to the station to bid their “Master”
farewell, bending to kiss his hand and receive his blessing. Great
erudition, again, must always add to a man’s appearance of age, and his
allusions to varied experiences in many a Moslem land did certainly
suggest the passing of years.
Like myself, however, he was going to Angora for the first time,
venturing behind the long line of bayonets which still separates that
troubled land from the rest of the world.
In complete sympathy with my admiration for these men who had suffered
and been victorious, he was eager to learn a little of the tribulation
through which they had fought their way to liberty and freedom.
“It seems to me,” I began, “that were I the British High Commissioner, I
should have found some means of, at least, paying a visit to Angora.
What do our legislators yet know about this land under their charge, for
which they have been made responsible? They can have no idea of the
people’s aims, their faults and their virtues. You might as well take
charge of some province in heaven of which you only know that it
exists.”
“There is not a Turk to-day who would not welcome you as British High
Commissioner,” was the gallant reply. “We are, indeed, deeply grateful
for your trust. You have found the key to unlock Moslem hearts—to
_trust_ us.”
“Surely it is with nations as with individuals, the man who trusts and
is deceived will yet prevail over his deceiver, whatever temporary
profits that traitor may grasp. There can be no final conquest over
truth. That was my late father’s teaching, and if it has sometimes left
me an easy prey to liars and thieves, it has not killed my faith in
human nature or hurt my pride. Self-respect will always compel me to
treat every man as my friend.”
As we proceeded on our journey, one felt hourly more conscious of the
barrier that has been so unwisely set up between the Allies and Angora.
As railway and telegraphic communications had been cut off, news was not
only delayed, but distorted beyond recognition. One only marvels that
some grave disaster has not arisen from such confused reports, apparent
contradictions, stern threats, and frequent misunderstandings. It would
seem as if the Allied Commissioners had no desire to keep in touch with
this “little Republic of the Mountains.”
In all my wanderings I have never experienced such an overpowering sense
of isolation. For me there have been no “personal” communications from
Europe since October. That “English letters are not accepted in
Anatolia,” that all my friends’ news will be returned to them marked
“Service suspended” or “cannot be reached,” may explain the facts but
does not make them easier to bear. When homeless dogs howl and whine
outside my bedroom window, superstitions will intrude—dread of disaster
to distant friends.
There is, however, another and far more cheering side to our experiences
on the road. The “stranger within the gates” is still a sacred person to
these peasants, even although from an “enemy” land. There was absolutely
no sign of hostility all along the line, but everywhere the greatest
kindness. One and all gave me the gracious Eastern welcome, in
picturesque phrases, commending me to the care of Allah; these
“fanatics” from whom mere murder was the smallest evil I had been told
to expect!
Though we had started, through no fault of our own, without any
provision for food, I did not anticipate any serious inconvenience on
this account. In these hospitable countries I knew we had only to name
our need. The cheik, indeed, had been presented with two large baskets
of food by his disciples, and also carried a picturesque terra-cotta
water-pot, which he could refill whenever we stopped to alight.
“Eat, my children,” said he, “and when all is finished, the Lord will
provide.”
“What a feast from the Song of Solomon,” I exclaimed, as the contents of
his basket were disclosed—pomegranates, spices, nuts, helva (i.e., honey
and nut-cheese), raisins, and bread!
One is grateful for these slow trains that afford such ample opportunity
for seeing the country, with its fig-trees, olives, and palms, and the
bright sun bringing a climate that recalls the South of France. Yet
everywhere, long before we reached the actual devastations, one felt
that despair and sadness were hovering over the land. At first, we
sought in vain for the reason of our impressions. Then suddenly I knew:
There were no cattle.
Of course, Mrs. de. C—— had told me, they had all been brought into
Smyrna by the Greeks. Outside her house mules were being sold for
fourpence or sixpence apiece, and if no purchaser could be found even at
that figure, the wretched creatures were left mutilated on the wayside,
their eyes burnt out, their legs broken by hatchets!
Our first halt was at Manissa, once a flourishing town of about ninety
thousand inhabitants, standing some sixty-five kilometres above
sea-level. The Governor and all the “notables” were on the platform to
welcome the travellers, and had arranged that the “train should wait,”
for us to be shown round.
Some kind of most primitive carriage had been produced from somewhere,
and we were driven through more “ruins” to the “temporary” town hall for
the inevitable coffee and cigarettes. In the best English, the governor
told us of Greek atrocities and the victory of M. Kemal Pasha,
introducing us also to his whole staff.
I asked whether it would be possible for me to obtain precise figures of
the devastations, and he promised they should be prepared for my use at
once. When I reminded him of the “waiting” train, he merely waived such
difficulties aside as a “secondary consideration,” begging me “not to
mention it.”
Naturally, I found one ruined town very like another. There was, in a
sense, little to see beyond “parts of” the mosques, badly scorched or
half-burnt minarets, and, at Manissa, no more than one thousand houses
standing out of fourteen! Also, the statistics reveal a heartrending
loss of life!
The women and children, I learnt, had been driven into the mosques,
which were surrounded by machine-guns to ensure against any possibility
of escape, and _then_ set on fire. As the full realisation of such
hideous barbarity took hold of my imagination, it was as if all my
senses were paralysed. That cold perspiration which so often precedes a
faint, seized my limbs. I was powerless either to speak or move. How
would our twentieth century appear to the old cave-dwellers it has
pleased us to call savage? Mrs. de C—— was right, indeed, to say that
the Turks were “moderate.” Such scenes must compel revenge and let loose
the worst passions of men.
On our return the cheik tactfully endeavoured to distract our thoughts
by hospitable preparations for lunch. However little one felt disposed
to eat, he could have devised no kinder or more wise expression of
sympathy and understanding. Unfortunately, we had not yet escaped the
company of swarming flies, which afterwards vanished, however, with
startling completeness, when the train climbed into colder altitudes.
Our next halt was at Kassaba, where the “notables” again paid us a
visit, offering _both_ coffee and tea, one after the other. When the
cheik mentioned the loss of our food, _and_ my partiality for fruit, a
messenger was at once sent into the town for bread and the most luscious
melons, which reach to the highest possible perfection in Anatolia. I
have always been grateful for Turkish fruit!
The Governor told me “he had simply _nowhere_ to house the poor people.”
He “dare not think” of how they could pass the winter! I _saw_ them,
sitting in holes among the ruins, cooking whatever they had been able to
scrape together for a meal; the women huddled together in the “beds” of
fountains which were covered with straw and carpets, after the water had
been drained out. This arrangement permitted the slight protection of an
awning, only too badly needed for their threadbare clothes!
There seems no way of coping with the emergency, since they had no tools
for even the most primitive building. Except for those lucky enough to
secure one of the few booths in the town, the shopkeepers had to set out
their stock upon the cobblestones!
I dare not ask how many babies had died of cold. Anatolia has been bled
white through twelve years of war! Whatever the nation’s quarrel, it was
from hence were taken father, or brother, or son. Yet still, beside
these shivering women, you see long train-loads of more soldiers,
cattle-trucks full of human beings, called to some new “front.”
How is it these women can, even now, tenderly hush “the cry of the
children,” and give their men? Theirs is a “willing” sacrifice for an
ideal, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland.
* * * * *
I had been “protected” in advance, I found, by the authorities, who had
announced by telegram the arrival of “an American lady.” It was,
perhaps, perverse, even ungrateful, but I persisted in contradicting the
news at every stage. I would far sooner take all risks under my own flag
than falsely accept shelter beneath the “Stars and Stripes.” “I have no
dislike for America,” I assured those who assumed that explanation of my
obstinacy, “it simply does not happen to be my country, any more than
India is yours.... I have nothing but good to say of individual
Americans; the most charming people on the face of the earth.”
Nevertheless “I keenly resent the clamour of Mr. Morgenthau for ‘an
ideal republic of his own making on the banks of the Bosphorus, to be
backed by all that “Tammany” means in the U.S.A.’ I am for asking him,
then, to start by making an ‘ideal’ republic on the banks of the
Hudson.”
American oil-hunters are always boasting that _they_ never declared war
on Turkey. “You did not,” I have admitted, “but you urged, nay begged
and almost ordered, us to do it for you.... Your _Literary Digest_
printed at least one eloquent appeal to Great Britain for a ‘holy’ war
against the ‘unspeakable Turk’!” And if they resent my protest at being
called “an American,” I am convinced they would have done the same in my
place. They, too, have the virtue of national pride.
* * * * *
The train was held up once more for a little excursion to what had been
the prosperous town of Alaşehir, a well-wooded district with abundance
of fresh water. Here out of four thousand eight hundred houses only one
hundred remain, and the women and children have been simply wiped out!
Unfortunately, we had not time to visit the Hodja, who had found a quite
comfortable lodging in the trunk of an oak tree—a philosopher and a man
of letters. “I cannot live in a tub, like Diogenes, because I do not
possess a tub; but there is nothing wrong with this oak, which I suspect
will prove even warmer.”
* * * * *
Everywhere, at Manissa and Kassaba—even at Salihli, with its houses
reduced to four!—we were invited to stay and “put up for the night!”
Here were about two hundred inhabitants surviving from two thousand five
hundred, and from fifteen to twenty families sleeping in the mosque.
Yet, they would “certainly arrange something,” and it needed all my tact
to refuse any more extended hospitality than tea and coffee, served on
the roof of one of their four houses, from which we could look down upon
the skeleton town. Apparently, these stricken people found some sort of
comfort in the mere idea of my having _seen_ their suffering, though
often enough I could not even find _words_ for the sympathy no one could
fail to feel.
Once more lunch in the train. Pomegranate seeds should be eaten one by
one, a slow process, but as the cheik says “it passes the hours!”
He apologised for the number of times I had been reminded of what in
Turkey they call “the work of the British ex-Premier.”
“I had to expect that,” I replied, “when I came to Anatolia; and it
gives me the chance of reminding the Turks what part was played by M.
Venizelos!”
He tactfully turned the conversation to Oxford, paying a very high
tribute to Mr. Asquith’s brilliant son: “A noble character, highly
intelligent and broad-minded. A victim of war we could ill afford to
lose!”
Association inevitably led to the question I must have been asked a
hundred times during my journey, “Why does Lloyd George hate us so
bitterly? How can he admire the Greeks?”
“He knows little of either,” I replied, “nothing, at any rate, from
personal observation of them in their own lands. We have first-class
Near-East specialists, no doubt; but his chief informants have been
nonconformist preachers, even more biassed than he. Nonconformity is the
traditional foe of the Turks. Their boasted ‘freedom of thought and
conscience’ does not extend to the Servants of the Prophet, and as they
once echoed Gladstone, to-day they echo Lloyd George.”
“And in America?” asked the cheik.
“Their church is an advertising agency. They have transformed ‘dissent’
to a ‘trust.’ Go to the States with an idea, and, if it pleases them,
they will ‘put it across’ like any other commodity, as a ‘cute’ business
proposition. With a colony of two million Greeks, and, maybe, as many
Armenians (whose exaggerated and unchecked ‘lamentations’ have full
Free-Church support), America will never give Turkey even a fair
hearing. You have read their ‘Press’?”
“Alas,” he answered, “I fear the East is losing its faith in the West.”
“Do not say that,” I answered. “Men like you, who have known us at our
best, must declare that to-day’s madness is but a phase. Tell us these
things should never have been and shall not continue. Write as you _can_
write, and teach the people of Europe to be once more themselves.
“When East and West shake hands again, there will be peace, and peace we
_must have!_”
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