but for power, not for peace but for war. In developing Turkey, Germany
is simply developing the "Central Europe" scheme of a military combine
self-contained economically and challenging the world in arms[29].
Germany is concerned with Turkey, not for her splendid past and future,
but for her miserable present; for Turkey--as she is, and only as she
is--is a vital chequer on the chess-board where Germany has been playing
her game of world power, or "des staatlich-machtlichen Interessens," as
Dr. Wiedenfeld would say. Therefore Germany does not eye the lands and
peoples under Ottoman dominion with a view to their common advantage and
her own. She selects a "piece" among them which she can keep under her
thumb and so control the square. Abd-ul-Hamid was her first pawn, and
when the Young Turk Party swept him off the board she adopted them and
their colour[30]; for by hook or by crook, through this agency or that,
Turkey had to be commanded or Germany's play was spoilt.
Germany's control over Turkey depends upon the maintenance of a corrupt
minority in power--too weak and corrupt to remain in it without
Germany's guarantee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put it
at Germany's disposal. A free hand at home in return for servitude in
diplomacy and war--the deal is called "Hegemony," and is as old as
Ancient Greece. By her hegemony over the Ottoman Government Germany
threatens the British and Russian Empires from all the Ottoman
frontiers; and with the free hand that is their price the Young Turks
inflict on all lands and peoples within those frontiers whatever evils
conduce to the maintenance of their pretensions.
As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this political understanding
underlies all Germany's economic efforts in Western Asia, and we can see
how it has warped them from their proper ends. The track of the Bagdad
Railway, for example, has not been selected in the economic interests of
the lands and peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach himself
admits that
"The Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway cannot be described as
properly paying its way. It is otherwise with the" (French) "line from
Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar, which links the Anatolian Railway with the
older railway system in the West.... The parts of Asia Minor which were
thickly populated and prosperous in antiquity lie mostly westward of
this first section of the Bagdad Railway, round the river-valleys and"
(French and English) "railways leading down to the Aegean."
"There are other once-flourishing parts of the peninsula," he continues,
"which the Bagdad Railway does not touch at all"--the Vilayet of Sivas
and the other Armenian provinces. The original German plan was to carry
the Railway through Armenia from Angora to Kharput, but Russia not
unnaturally vetoed the construction, so near her Caucasian frontiers, of
a line which, by the nature of the Turco-German understanding, must
primarily serve strategic ends[31], and the track was therefore
deflected to the south-east. This took it through the most barren parts
of Central Anatolia, and in the next section involved the slow and
costly work of tunnelling the Taurus and Amanus mountains.
"If merely economic and not political advantages were taken into
account," Dr. Rohrbach concedes, "the question might perhaps be raised
whether it would not be better to leave the Anatolian section alone
altogether and begin the Bagdad Railway from Seleucia" (on the Syrian
coast). "The future export trade in grain, wool, and cotton will in any
case do all it can to lengthen the cheap sea-passage and shorten
correspondingly the section on which it must pay railway freights. The
fact that the route connecting Bagdad with the Mediterranean coast in
the neighbourhood of Antioch is the oldest, greatest, and still most
promising trade-route of Western Asia is independent of all railway
projects."
It is worth remembering that a railway, following this route from the
Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, has more than once been projected by
the British Government. As early as the thirties of last century Colonel
Chesney was sent out to examine the ground, and in 1867 the proposal was
considered by a Committee of the House of Commons. For the economic
development of Western Asia it is clearly a better plan, but then Dr.
Rohrbach bases the "necessity for the East Anatolian section of the
Bagdad Railway" on wholly different grounds.
"The necessity," he declares, "consists in Turkey's military interests,
which obviously would be very poorly served" (by German railway
enterprise) "if troops could not be transported by train without a break
from Bagdad and Mosul to the extremity of Anatolia, and _vice versâ_."
The Bagdad Railway is thus acknowledged to be an instrument of strategy
for the Germans and for the Turks of domination--for "_vice versâ_"
means that Turkish troops can be transported at a moment's notice
through the tunnels from Anatolia to enforce the Ottoman pretension over
the Arab lands. Militarily, these tunnels are the most valuable section
of the line; economically, they are the most costly and unremunerative.
And the second (and longer) tunnel could still have been dispensed with,
if, south of Taurus, the track had been led along the Syrian coast.
"Economic interests and considerations of expense," Wiedenfeld
concedes[32], "argued strongly for the latter course, but--fortunately,
as we must admit to-day--the military point of view prevailed." Thus the
Turco-German understanding prevented the Bagdad Railway first from
beginning at a port on the Mediterranean coast, and then from touching
the coast at all[33]. "The spine of Turkey," as German writers are fond
of calling it, distorts the natural articulation of Western Asia.
Nemesis has overtaken the Germans in the Armenian deportations--a
"political end" of Turkish Nationalism which swept away the "economic
means" towards Germany's subtler policy. A month or two before the
outbreak of war Dr. Rohrbach stated, in a public lecture, that
"Germany has an important interest in effecting and maintaining contact
with the Armenian nation. We have set before ourselves the necessary and
legitimate aim of spreading and enrooting German influence in Turkey,
not only by military missions and the construction of railways, but also
by the establishment of intellectual relations, by the work of German
_Kultur_--in a word, by moral conquests; and we are determined, by
pacific means, to reach an amicable understanding with the Turks and the
other nations in the Turkish Empire. Our ulterior object in this is to
strengthen the Turkish Empire internally with the aid of German science,
education, and training, and for this work the Armenians are
indispensable."
A few months later Germany, as part price of Turkey's intervention in
the War, had to leave the Young Turks a "free hand" to exterminate the
nation which was the indispensable instrument of her Turkish policy. On
the 9th August, 1915, the German Ambassador at Constantinople handed in
a formal protest against the deportations, in which his Government
"declined all responsibility for the consequences which might result."
On the 11th January, 1916, in the German Reichstag, the Chief of the
Political Department of the Foreign Office replied to a question from
Dr. Liebknecht that "an exchange of views about the reaction of these
measures upon the population was taking place," and that "further
information could not be given." And while Germany was maintaining this
"correct attitude" before the world, she was assisting in Turkey at the
destruction of her own work.
Even the atrocities of 1909 had damaged the economic prospects of the
Adapa district from which Dr. Rohrbach[34] hoped so much, for
"The first thing the Turkish peasants did was to destroy all the
steam-ploughs and nearly all the threshing machines (there were over a
hundred of them) which the Armenian villagers had imported for the
cultivation of the Civilian plain[35]."
By the atrocities of 1915 the economic life of Western Asia was
completely ruined, and the fruits of German enterprise were swept away
in the flood.
"I have before me," writes our German memorialised, "a list of the
customers of a single Constantinople firm of importers which places its
orders principally in Germany and Austria. The accounts which this firm
has outstanding amount to date to £13,922 (Turkish), owing from 378
customers in 42 towns of the interior. In consequence of the Armenian
deportations these debts are no longer recoverable. The 378 customers,
with all their employees, goods, and assets, have vanished from the face
of the earth. Any of the owners that are still alive are now beggars on
the borders of the Arabian desert."
At Urfa, after the atrocities of 1896, philanthropists of all nations
had founded orphanages and started native industries. Attached to the
German orphanage there was a carpet factory, with dyeing vats and a
spinnery, which Dr. Rohrbach[36], after personal investigation,
describes as "an institution to be welcomed as unreservedly from the
national as from the humanitarian point of view."
"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides work and bread for 400
persons, but has transplanted one of the most profitable and promising
industries of the East into the sphere traversed by the German Railway,
where German interests are predominant."
He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of Western Asia, "from
which English and other foreign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous
profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in German hands. From
Armenia's evil, apparently, springs Germany's good--but in 1911 Dr.
Rohrbach did not foresee the catastrophe of 1915.
"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes,
"Turkey has to thank capitalists and exporters who are almost all
Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cotton cultivation
introduced by Germany into Cilicia, this carpet industry, in the eastern
provinces, has been deprived of the hands essential to it by the
Armenian deportations."
Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian community there was
massacred in 1915--the third time in twenty years, and this time to
extinction--and it points the irony of the situation that the Turkish
guns were served by German artillerymen[37].
"I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, the German teacher from
Aleppo, "about the opinion of the German officers in Turkey. I often
noticed among them an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change
the subject, when any German of warm feelings and independent judgment
talked in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the Armenians."
This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future of Germany in Western
Asia than all the material havoc which the Armenian deportations have
caused. For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the Armenians
will be on Germany's head:
"'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple Turk's explanation, ...
and more sensitive Mohammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe
that their own Government has ordered these horrors. They lay all
excesses at the Germans' door, for the Germans, during the War, are
regarded as Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mollahs declare in
the mosques that the German officers, and not the Sublime Porte, have
ordered the maltreatment and extermination of the Armenians.... Others
say: 'Perhaps the German Government has its hands tied by certain
agreements defining its powers, or perhaps it is not an opportune moment
for intervention.'
"Our presence had no ameliorating effect, and what we could do ourselves
was negligible.... The abusive epithet 'Giaur' is heard once more by
German ears....
"We think it our duty to draw attention to the fact that our educational
work in Turkey forfeits its moral basis and the natives' esteem, if the
German Government is not in a position to prevent the brutalities
inflicted here upon the wives and children of murdered Armenians.
"The writer considers it out of the question that the German Government,
if it seriously desired to stem the tide of destruction in this eleventh
hour, would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to
reason....
"If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians as an internal
affair of Turkey, which is only important to us because it ensures us
the Turks' friendship, then we must change the orientation of our German
_Kulturpolitik_. We must stop sending German teachers to Turkey, and we
teachers must give up telling our pupils in Turkey about German poets
and philosophers, German culture and German ideals, to say nothing of
German Christianity.
"Three years ago I was sent by the Foreign Office as higher-grade
teacher to the German Technical School at Aleppo. The Prussian
Provincial School Board at Magdeburg specially enjoined upon me, when I
went out, to show myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me in the
grant of furlough to take up this post. I should not be fulfilling my
duty as a German official and an accredited representative of German
culture, if I consented to keep silence in face of the atrocities of
which I was a witness, or to look on passively while the pupils
entrusted to my charge were driven out into the desert to die of
starvation.
"The things of which everybody here has been a witness for months past
remain as a stain on Germany's shield in the minds of Oriental nations."
What will be left to Germany in Western Asia after the war? She may keep
her trade, though Wiedenfeld confesses that "the exchange of commodities
between Germany and Turkey has never attained any really considerable
dimensions," and that "the German export trade commands no really staple
article whatever of the kind exported by England, Austria, and
Russia"--unless we count as such munitions and other materials of
war[38]. Except for the last item, this German trade will probably
remain and grow; but the German hegemony, based on railway enterprise
and reinsured by "moral conquests," will scarcely survive the Ottoman
dominion.
Happily there are other representatives of culture, other indigenous
nationalities, other possibilities of economic development, which will
remain in Western Asia when the Turk and German have gone, and which
may be equal to repairing the ruin they will leave behind.
For nearly a century now the American Evangelical Missions have been
doing work there which is the greatest conceivable contrast to the
German _Kulturpolitik_ of the last thirty years. A missionary, sent out
to relieve the first pioneers, was given the following instructions by
the American Board:
"The object of our missions to the Oriental Churches is, first, to
revive the knowledge and spirit of the Gospel among them, and, secondly,
by this means to operate upon the Mohammedans.
"The Oriental Churches need assistance from their brethren abroad. Our
object is not to subvert them: you are not sent among those Churches to
proselytise. Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if he will, the Greek a
Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental.
"Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and duties of the
Gospel[39]."
In this spirit the American missionaries have worked. They have had no
warships behind them, no diplomatic support, no political ambitions, no
economic concessions. As Evangelicals their first step was to translate
the Bible into all the living languages and current scripts of the
Nearer East. For the Bulgars and Armenians this was the beginning of
their modern literature, but the jealousy of the Orthodox and Gregorian
clergy was naturally aroused. Native Protestant Churches formed
themselves--not by the missionaries' initiative but on their own. They
were trained by the missionaries to self-government, and as they spread
from centre to centre they grouped themselves in unions, with annual
meetings to settle their common affairs. The missionaries also
encouraged them to be self-supporting, and in 1908 the contributions of
the Native Churches to the general expenses of the missions were twice
as large as those of the American Board[40]. The Ottoman Government
recognised its Protestant subjects as a religious corporation _(Millet)_
in 1853, and in spite of this the jealousy of the national Churches was
overcome. For the work of the Americans was not confined to the new
Protestant community. The translation of the Bible led them also into
educational work; they laid the foundations of secondary education in
Western Asia, and their schools and colleges--still the only
institutions of their kind--are attended by Gregorians as well as
Protestants, Moslems as well as Christians, Moslem girls as well as
boys. As they opened up remoter districts they added medicine to their
activities, and their hospitals, like their schools, have been the first
in the field. And all this has been built up so unassumingly that its
magnitude is hardly realised by the Americans themselves. In the three
Turkey Missions, which cover Anatolia and Armenia--the whole of Turkey
except the Arab lands--there were, on the eve of the War, 209 American
missionaries with 1,299 native helpers, 163 Protestant churches with
15,348 members, 450 schools with 25,922 pupils; Constantinople College
and 6 other colleges or high schools for girls; Robert College on the
Bosphorus and 9 other colleges for men or boys; and 11 hospitals.
The War, when it came, seemed to sweep away everything. The Protestant
Armenians, in spite of a nominal exemption, were deported and massacred
like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the boys and girls were carried
away from the American colleges, the nurses and patients from the
hospitals; the empty buildings were "requisitioned" by the Ottoman
authorities; the missionaries themselves, in their devoted efforts to
save a remnant from destruction, suffered as many casualties from typhus
and physical exhaustion as any proportionate body of workers on the
European battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists congratulated themselves
that the American work in Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a
lecture by a member of the German _Reichstag_, who had declared himself
"opposed to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire," a
Constantinople newspaper[41] wrote:
"The suppression of the schools founded and directed by ecclesiastical
missions or by individuals belonging to enemy nations is as important a
measure as the abolition of the Capitulations. Thanks to their schools,
foreigners were able to exercise great moral influence over the young
men of the country, and they were virtually in charge of its spiritual
and intellectual guidance. By closing them the Government has put an end
to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous."
But the missionaries' spirit was something they could not destroy.
"When they deported the Armenians," wrote a missionary, "and left us
without work and without friends, we decided to come home and get our
vacation and be ready to go wherever we could after the War[42]."
After the War the Turks in Anatolia may still be infatuated enough to
banish their best friends, but in Armenia, when the Turk has gone, the
Americans will find more than their former field; for, in one form or
another, Armenia is certain to rise again. The Turks have not succeeded
in exterminating the Armenian nation. Half of it lives in Russia, and
its colonies are scattered over the world from California to Singapore.
Even within the Ottoman frontiers the extermination is not complete, and
the Arabian deserts will yield up their living as well as the memory of
their dead. The relations of Armenia with the Russian democracy should
not be more difficult to settle than those of Finland and Poland; her
frontiers cannot be forecast, but they must include the Six Vilayets--so
often promised reforms by the Concert of Europe and so often abandoned
to the revenges of the Ottoman Government--as well as the Civilian
highlands and some outlet to the sea. One thing is certain, that,
whatever land is restored to them, the Armenians will turn its resources
to good account, for, while their town-dwellers are the merchants and
artisans of Western Asia, 80 per cent., of them are tillers of the soil.
What the Americans have done for Armenia has been done for Syria by the
French[43]. There are half a million Maronite Catholics in Syria, and
since the seventeenth century France has been the protectress of
Catholicism in the Near East. In 1864, when there was trouble in Syria
and the Maronites were being molested by the Ottoman Government, France
landed an army corps and secured autonomy for the Lebanon under a
Christian governor. But French influence is not limited to the Lebanon
province. All over Syria there are French clerical, secular, and Judaic
schools. Beirût and Damascus, Christian and Moslem--for there is more
religious tolerance in Syria than in most Near Eastern countries--are
equally under the spell of French civilisation; and France is the chief
economic power in the land, for French enterprise has built the Syrian
railways. The sufferings of Syria during the War have been described;
the Young Turks have confiscated the railways and deprived the Lebanon
of its autonomy; even Rohrbach deprecates the fact that "only a few of
the higher officials in Syria are chosen from among the natives of the
country, while almost all, from the Kaimakam upwards, are sent out from
Constantinople," and he attributes to this policy "the feeling against
the Turks, which is most acute in Damascus." This is Rohrbach's
periphrasis for Arab Nationalism, which will be master in its own house
when the Turk has been removed. The future status and boundaries of
Syria can no more be forecast than those of Armenia at the present stage
of the War; yet here, too, certain tendencies are clear. In some form or
other Arab Syria will retain her connection with France, and her growing
population will no longer be driven by misgovernment to emigration.
Syrians and Armenians have been emigrating for the last quarter of a
century, and during the same period the Jews, whose birthright in
Western Asia is as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their
native land--not because Ottoman dominion bore less hardly upon them
than upon other gifted races, but because nothing could well be worse
than the conditions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants came
almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern
Jewry. The movement really began after the assassination of Alexander
II. in 1881, which threw back reform in Russia for thirty-six years. The
Jews were the scapegoats of the reaction. New laws deprived them of
their last civil rights, _pogroms_ of life itself; they came to
Palestine as refugees, and between 1881 and 1914 their numbers there
increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls.
The most remarkable result of this movement has been the foundation of
flourishing agricultural colonies. Their struggle for existence has been
hard; the pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, unused to
outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern conditions; Baron Edmund de
Rothschild financed them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were
taken over by the "Palestine Colonisation Association," which discovered
the secrets of success in self-government and scientific methods.