_DISCONTENT IN THE ARMY_
In 1906 the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, considering that
the time had come to transfer their organisation to the soil of Turkey
itself, and there make the final preparations for their attack on the
Despotism, selected Macedonia as the scene of their initial operations.
There were good reasons for choosing this portion of Turkey as their
strategic base. In the first place, it was here that the forces were
chiefly at work which were threatening the speedy dissolution of the
Ottoman Empire, and the Young Turks realised that unless they quickly
came to the rescue it would be too late, and Macedonia would be lost.
The terrible condition of the country, overrun as it was by murderous
bands of political brigands supported by Turkey’s enemies, had already
drawn an interference in the internal affairs of Macedonia on the part
of the Great Powers that was deeply humiliating to every patriotic
Turk. The Powers had compelled the Sultan, by threat of force, to
consent to the supervision of the civil administration of Macedonia
by an international financial commission, and to the formation of
an international _gendarmerie_ trained and commanded by foreign
officers—of whom, by the way, the English officers have undoubtedly
been the most successful, as they are more in sympathy than the others
with the nature of the Turkish soldier. But the patriotic Turks, though
they often entertained personal affection for the European officers
who were thus thrust upon them, loathed this foreign interference, and
nourished a bitter resentment against the Hamidian _régime_, whose
inept rule had brought this indignity upon Turkey and made the world
regard the Ottomans as a fallen people no longer capable of managing
their own affairs.
There was one feature of this foreign intervention which was especially
disagreeable and alarming to the Young Turks. The reforms proposed by
England, a disinterested country, had been rejected by the Powers, and
a mandate had been given to Russia and Austria—regarded by the Turks
as their most treacherous enemies—to introduce their own programme of
reform (the Murzteg programme) into Macedonia. The Turks maintained,
as, too, did independent observers, that these two Powers of a
purpose made this programme a wholly ineffective one, and that their
representatives were so working as to foment disorder and strife among
the Christian populations in order to forward the schemes for the
dismemberment of European Turkey.
The signs of this foreign intervention everywhere around them served
as object lessons to the people in Macedonia, whether educated men
or peasants, civilians or soldiers, and they realised that, unless
the methods of Turkish government improved, the foreign hold on the
country would be ever tightened until its independence was destroyed.
Thus there spread throughout Macedonia a profound discontent with
the existing order of things, that prepared the ground for the great
conspiracy.
To win over the Army to their side was of course the first object of
the Young Turks, and therefore Macedonia was well chosen as the field
of the early operations, inasmuch as the troops there were in a more
disaffected condition than those in any other part of the Empire, and
were ripe for revolt. For years these troops—ill clad, ill fed, and
rarely paid—had been engaged in a desultory guerilla war against the
bands of the Christian insurgents—a form of police work that brought
no glory and was uncongenial to soldiers, while, by scattering them
over the country in small sections, it did away with the cohesion and
_esprit de corps_ essential to an army. Their discontent was also
aroused by seeing by the side of them their brothers of the smart
international _gendarmerie_, men with military pride and bearing, well
disciplined and (for the Powers saw to this) well clothed and fed,
and regularly paid. It hurt the self-respect of both officers and men
in the regular army to contrast the condition of these men with that
of their ragged selves, for which, as they well knew, the corrupt
administration of the Palace gang was to blame.
Of the intolerable military spy system and the other causes of
disaffection among the officers of the Ottoman forces I have already
spoken. The young officers of the Macedonia army, men of education
and open-minded, who had passed through the military academies and
had received instruction from foreign teachers, had exceptional
opportunities in Macedonia for observing how an infamous rule was
hurrying their country to its ruin, and therefore their sympathies
naturally inclined towards the Young Turkey movement. Moreover,
special grievances of their own aggravated their detestation of the
Hamidian _régime_; the spy system was more searching and oppressive
then elsewhere in this suspected portion of the Ottoman army, and it
had become the habit of the Palace—galling to those who suffered under
it—to send from the capital sleek Court favourites, with nothing of the
soldier in them, to assume commands over the heads of fine officers who
had taken a distinguished part in Turkey’s wars, and had been fighting
the insurgent bands for years in the Macedonian mountains, but had
never obtained the promotion that was their due.
Moreover, it favoured the plan of the revolutionaries that this vantage
ground of Macedonia was at a safe distance from the capital—from
the Palace with its myriad eyes and its regiments of well-fed,
well-equipped, well-paid troops who could be counted upon to remain
loyal to the despotism.
So far as the Mussulman population and the army were concerned,
Macedonia was therefore ripe for rebellion, and the Christian
peasantry, weary of the slaughter and devastation which the bands
for years had been inflicting on the wretched country, were ready
to welcome any new order of things that promised to bring peace and
security.
To understand the operations of the secret society that organised
the insurrection in Macedonia, it is necessary to bear in mind the
condition of the country at that time. The Christian peasantry in
Macedonia had suffered terribly from the pitiless methods employed
by the Turks in suppressing any signs of insurrection, but during
the latter years of the Hamidian _régime_ they had to suffer even
worse things, in consequence of the cruel internecine war which they
waged among themselves. The various races that make up the population
of Macedonia had for long been carrying on their several national
propaganda. The three independent States on Macedonia’s borders,
Greece, Bulgaria, and Servia, were working with the Greeks, Bulgarians,
and Serbs under Turkish rule, with a view to territorial expansion
in this region, so soon as the dissolution of the Turkish Empire, to
which they looked forward with confidence, should come to pass. But in
Macedonia there are no extensive districts exclusively inhabited by
Greeks, Bulgarians, or Serbs. The different races are intermingled,
and it is not unusual to find Mussulman Turks and Christians of each
of three races living side by side in the same village. Consequently,
as each of the three States above mentioned aspired to the reversion
of all territory occupied by people of its own race, there was nearly
everywhere an overlapping of claims; and it became the policy of each
State to gain influence in a coveted district and there secure the
numerical superiority of people of its own race, so as to be able to
establish a strong title to possession when the Powers should undertake
the dismemberment of Turkey.
This racial rivalry was embittered by religious fanaticism. Formerly
the Greek Orthodox Church exercised an exclusive influence over the
Bulgarian as well as Greek population of Macedonia, and all recognised
the Patriarch as their spiritual head. The Bulgarians resented the
tyrannical ecclesiastical ascendency of the Greeks, and a schism arose
which was deliberately widened by the Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz, who conceded
to the Bulgarians the right to separate from the Greek Church and
appoint an Exarch of their own. The Patriarch excommunicated the first
Exarch and all who gave their allegiance to him, and since then there
has been bitter hatred between the Orthodox and the schismatics. Of the
Bulgarians in Macedonia, some have remained faithful to the Orthodox
Church, while the majority acknowledge the spiritual headship of the
Exarch. Now in Turkey populations are reckoned according to creed
and not race, and in the census returns a Bulgarian who was a member
of the Orthodox Greek Church would appear as a Greek. Therefore, for
political, as well as religious, reasons the Greeks and Bulgarians
strove hard to snatch from each other the control of the schools and
churches in any district where there was a Bulgarian population, and
employed violence and every form of persecution to secure converts.
In Greece, Bulgaria, and Servia, armed bands were equipped and sent
into Macedonia to forward the rival interests of these land-lustful
States. Bulgarian bands burnt Greek villages and Greek bands
those of the Bulgarians. The seizure of each other’s churches and
ecclesiastical property, and the murder of priests, became features
of the propaganda. In the zeal to bring about the preponderance of
this or that race the armed ruffians murdered women and children,
and all the barbarities which aroused the indignation of Europe when
Turkish irregulars were the guilty, were now committed against each
other by the Christian _protégés_ of our humanitarians. With fire and
sword the several propaganda were spread through the country. The
Greeks boycotted the Bulgarians in the towns, and by various methods
of persecution endeavoured to drive Bulgarians from coveted districts
on the sea-coast. The Greek bishops and clergy worked with fanatical
activity; not only did they forbid their co-religionists to give
employment to Bulgarians, but they were largely responsible for the
atrocities committed by the Greek bands, and went so far as to draw up
proscription lists of Bulgarian schismatics who had to be assassinated;
but the Bulgarians often had their revenge, as when, about a year ago,
they dragged a Greek clergyman out of his church and burnt him alive.
Out of the many stories which one could tell, here is one which will
serve as an example of the methods of the bands. On November 26, 1907,
a Greek band of over sixty men surrounded the village of Zelenitchi,
while a party broke into the house of the Bulgarian, Stoyan Gateff,
where a marriage was being celebrated, killed thirteen men, women, and
children, and wounded others.
To add to all this orgie of bloodshed, robbery, and violence, came the
formation of bands of Mussulman Turks, endowed with the bravery of
their race, who, while protecting the Turkish peasantry against the
Christians, pillaged and burnt the villages of the latter, and did
their share of the killing; while the bodies of half-famished, unpaid
Turkish troops who were sent to search for concealed arms over the
countryside naturally lived on the wretched Christian peasants, and
helped themselves to all they needed.
Between the Greeks and Bulgarians there was never a truce save in
winter, when the snow lay deep upon the Balkans, but sometimes the
Serb would join the Greek bands in their attacks on the Bulgarians.
Thus organised brigandage terrorised the countryside, and the bands,
when they ran short of money or supplies, did not hesitate to rob even
the people of their own kin, whose cause they were espousing, levying
blackmail upon them, and burning their villages if demands were not
satisfied. It is not to be wondered at that a large proportion of the
Christian population found the succour of their ferocious brethren
somewhat irksome, and were ready to welcome the pacific programme of
the Young Turks. It will be remembered that when Bulgaria declared
her independence last year the Bulgarian peasants in Macedonia held
meetings at which they denounced the Principality and sent a memorial
to Prince Ferdinand to warn him that they would hold him responsible
for whatever evil might now befall them, as the result of his action.
Of all these Christian propagandists the Bulgarians aroused most
sympathy in Europe; for they are a brave and straightforward people.
They had good reason to hate the Greeks, who had always persecuted
them. When, in 1903, the Bulgarian exarchists in Macedonia, with their
hundreds of small armed bands, carried on a gallant but hopeless
guerilla war against the Turkish regular troops, the Greek Macedonians
remained neutral, but worked against their fellow-Christians after
a fashion characteristically Hellenic; they assisted the Turks
by betraying and denouncing to them the Bulgarian rebels; for in
their zeal to forward their ultimate political designs they were
not ill pleased to witness the extermination by the Turks of their
fellow-Christians who repudiated the Patriarch and refused to become
Hellenised. It was not until 1904 that Greek bands, led by officers
of the Greek regular army, crossed the frontier into Macedonia to
wage war not only against the propaganda of the Bulgarian exarchists,
but also that of the Wallach inhabitants, who desired to throw off
the tyrannical supremacy of the Greek Patriarch and have an Exarch of
their own, as the Bulgarians had, with their own schools and churches
in which their national language could be used. The Sultan, who was
ever playing one Christian sect off against another, and made no real
effort to stop the fratricidal strife that served his designs, now gave
his encouragement to the Wallach propaganda, for this did not threaten
the integrity of his Empire as did the propaganda of the Greeks and
Serbs, there being no question of annexation of any Wallach districts
of Macedonia to the distant kingdom of the Wallachs’ kin, Roumania.
The Bulgarians proved themselves the braver men in this racial
struggle; but the Greek bands were the strongest in numbers and were
also the best equipped, for they were always kept well supplied with
ammunition and food by the rich merchants in Athens. The Greek bands
chiefly distinguished themselves by attacking unprotected villages and
slaughtering unarmed peasants; half-a-dozen brave Turkish _gendarmes_
have on occasion sufficed to rout the largest of these bands. I
need not say that the unfortunate Turkish peasants, being regarded
as enemies by all parties, suffered severely at the hands of the
propagandists.
The condition of the country ever got worse. In 1907 there were one
hundred and thirty-three conflicts between Turkish troops and Greek
and Bulgarian bands, and a large but unrecorded number of fights
between rival bands: Greek and Wallach; Greek and Bulgarian; Bulgarian
and Serb; and Albanian and Serb. The bands used to come down to the
plains and carry off the crops outside Salonica itself. The Greek
Committee sent a manifesto to the villages round Salonica ordering the
villagers, under pain of death, to become converts to Orthodoxy and
to accept the Patriarch, and have themselves inscribed as Greeks upon
the census papers. Shortly before the Sultan’s proclamation of the
Constitution the artillery of the Salonica garrison had to shell the
reed-covered swamps in the vicinity of the city to drive out the bands
that had found shelter there.
It was in the city of Salonica that the Ottoman Committee of Union and
Progress decided to establish the headquarters of the secret society
that was to prepare the outbreak of rebellion in Macedonia, a city
which, as being the cradle of their liberties, has already come to
be regarded as a sort of holy place by patriotic Turks. It is a city
worthy to be the scene of the initiation of one of the world’s great
movements. The splendid seaport, on the acquisition of which Austria
had set her heart, impresses every visitor with a sense of a peculiar
nobility with which it is invested by its aspect, situation, and
history. Stately and beautiful is the approach to it from the sea as
one sails up the fifty-mile broad Gulf of Salonica; on the right the
undulating land of Cassandra, with grassy, tree-studded shores, and
windmills on the skyline testifying to the productiveness of the fields
beyond; on the left the mountain ranges of Thessaly; with peaks whose
names are known to every school-boy—Pelion to the south, then Ossa,
and, near the head of the Gulf, a noble mountain mass towering over the
lesser heights, with snowy summits ten thousand feet above the sea,
Mount Olympus itself, the abode of the old gods.
From the busy quay of Salonica one looks across the blue water at the
snows of Olympus and a wonderful far panorama of hills and dales of
classic Greece; and Salonica itself is a fair city to look upon from
the sea, with its gleaming white houses and minarets, and dark groves
of cypress sloping up to the ancient castle and fortifications. I need
not recall here the great part which Thessalonica played in the old
days when Persians, Athenians, Macedonians, Romans, Normans of Sicily,
and Saracens in succession conquered and held the famous port, the
principal city between Rome and the East; its vicissitudes and many
bloody sieges. Old Thessalonica, with its Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
ruins, relics of “sad, half-forgotten things and battles long ago,”
the thronged city where St. Paul preached and worked with his hands
among the Macedonian artisans, as the modern Salonica has once again
come to the forefront in the shaping of the world’s history, and its
citizens walk proudly because here dawned the liberty of the Ottomans,
with its inspiring hopes. There is something about the atmosphere of
Salonica which makes it seem a fitting place to be the birthplace of
a great movement. One feels freer on its broad quay and in its clean,
well-paved streets than in the narrow, ever muddy lanes which imprison
one in Constantinople. The climate for the greater part of the year
is most exhilarating, and the inhabitants of this white city, “ever
delicately walking through most pellucid air,” seem more vivacious
and brisk, and are said to be more enlightened, more industrious, and
shrewder than those of the capital.
Even under the tyranny and corruption of the old _régime_ things were
fairly well ordered in Salonica, and the municipal authorities did
some good work, as the appearance of the streets shows, though they
did appropriate, in the shape of irregular salaries, one-half of the
rates. Salonica, too, enjoyed a measure of liberty, even in those dark
days, and men could do here many things which would have ensured their
prompt punishment in Constantinople. For example, though meetings of
any description were banned by the Palace, and a man could not invite
two or three friends to dine with him in his house without permission,
and though to be found guilty of being a Freemason was to incur the
death penalty, Freemasonry (French, Grand Orient, Spanish, and Italian)
flourished in Salonica; there were five Masonic Lodges in the town
throughout the long years of despotism, though of course the Lodges had
no fixed habitations, and the Masons used to meet in whatever house or
perhaps lonely spot in the open country was at any time deemed to be
the safest place.
In Salonica, with its teeming population of Turks, Greeks, Jews,
Albanians, Bulgarians, and Levantines of many mixed races, speaking
divers tongues, it is easy for men to assume disguises and difficult
for spies to trace conspiracies. In no city does one come across a
greater variety of race and picturesque costume than in these busy
bazaars and streets—the Jews (who here number fifty thousand) who look
as if they had stepped straight out of the Venice of Shakespeare’s
time, the men in gabardines, the women in robes such as were worn by
the ancestors of these people when they were driven out of Spain by
Ferdinand and Isabella, still speaking among themselves a strange
Spanish dialect—swaggering Albanians in their picturesque becoming
national costume of which Byron sang—burly Bulgarian peasants—priests
of all denominations, including Russian monks of neighbouring Mount
Athos, emissaries from that holy promontory on which for one thousand
years no woman or even animal of the female sex has been allowed to set
foot, where monks in their thousands dwell in ascetic retirement in
monasteries perched like the lamaseries of Tibet among the mountains,
while in the wildest and most inaccessible spots anchorites have their
hermitages and live in complete solitude after the manner of their
predecessor, St. Anthony.
The fact that it was possible in this crowded city to escape
observation and to organise secret societies made Salonica the natural
centre of the Young Turk movement in Macedonia. Secret political
organisation already existed there, and the Internal Organisations of
the Bulgarian revolutionary party had had its head-quarters there since
about 1895.