THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY 229
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIELD MARSHAL MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
HUSSEIN RAUF BEY GENERAL RAFET PASHA 16
FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA ALI FETHY BEY 48
LIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON, G. B. E., K. C. B.,
D. S. O. GENERAL ISMET PASHA 80
PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI MELETIOS IV 112
ASSEMBLY BUILDING AT ANGORA 144
REAR-ADMIRAL COLBY M. CHESTER REAR-ADMIRAL MARK L. BRISTOL,
U. S. N. 176
GENERAL MOUHEDDIN PASHA MEHMED EMIN BEY 208
THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY
I
MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA, THE MAN
HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE――THE EASTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT UNDER
WHICH HE WAS BORN――THE WESTERN TRADITION WHICH HE HAS SOUGHT TO
TRANSPLANT TO HIS COUNTRY――THE DIVERSION OF THE TURKS FROM A MILITARY
TO AN ECONOMIC LIFE, WHICH HE IS BEGINNING――“DO YOU THINK YOU WILL
SUCCEED?”
Having applied at the Foreign Office in Angora for an appointment with
Mustapha Kemal Pasha, a message finally reached me about 2 o’clock in
the afternoon that a half-hour had been arranged for me at the close
of the day’s session of the Grand National Assembly. The gray granite
building which houses the Assembly, stands at the foot of Angora, with
the red and white Crescent and Star flying above it by night as well
as by day. “The Pasha’s” car stood at the curb. He lives in a villa
presented to him by the town of Angora, at Tchan-Kaya, a suburb three
miles away, and the sight of his car, a long gray machine of German
make, is one of the few means of tracing him. He is the easiest of all
men to meet, but the most difficult of all men to find.
Within the building, one of Kemal’s _aides_ led me to a large room off
the corridor, within which to await the end of the session. It was the
room in which I had first met him, a large room with a flat-top desk
in the center of one side, with a row of chairs around the four walls,
and a sheet-iron stove with a pile of cut wood beside it, in the
middle of the carpet. I waited possibly a half-hour, listening to the
noise from the Assembly’s chamber and making guesses as to what the
trouble was. I had hoped to secure an hour or two with Kemal and had
been listing, during the month I spent at Angora, a number of subjects
on which I was anxious to secure his opinions. But he is not only
difficult to find but difficult to hold for long. I had applied to the
Foreign Office a week before and I believe they were not only willing
but anxious to secure the appointment I wanted. My application,
however, happened to coincide with a crisis in the Assembly and I had
to make the best of a half-hour.
The session had no sooner broken up and the clamor of the deputies
begun to overflow from the chamber into the corridor, than the _aide_
summoned me. We crossed the corridor into a small room with a flat-top
desk and, in the corner behind the desk, the limp folds of a tall
green banner inscribed with Turkish letters of gold. From his chair at
the desk, the military figure of Kemal himself in civilian clothes
rose to greet me――a man with a face of iron beneath a great iron-gray
_kalpak_. He spoke in French and the flash of much gold in his lower
teeth gave sparkle to the military incisiveness of his manner, a
manner which conveyed an instant reminder of cavalry.
His face is one of severely simple lines. The lower line of the
_kalpak_ comes down close to the straight eyebrows, and there is no
waste space between the eyebrows and the eyes themselves. “The Pasha”
is reputed to have occasional fits of temper which reveal themselves
in a noticeable squint in the pupils of his eyes, but during all the
time I talked with him that afternoon, those eyes of pale blue fixed
themselves on me and never left me.
There is a story of some famous German general who is reputed to have
smiled only twice in his life, once when his mother-in-law died and
once when he heard that the Swedish General Staff had referred to
certain military works outside Stockholm as a fortress. Applied to
Kemal, the story would hardly hold true for he has the gift of making
himself genuinely pleasant when he cares to exercise it. I can speak
of it only in connection with the handful of Westerners who have lived
in Angora during the last four years. Turkey has been not only Turkish
but desperately Turkish during these last years, yet no public
celebration of its victories has occurred in Angora without the
handful of Westerners in the town attending and without Kemal himself
making an opportunity to receive them upon its conclusion. On these
occasions, they have been received with a sensitive cordiality hardly
understandable by those Westerners at home to whom it has never
occurred that nations are born, not in debating societies, but in the
mud and blood of suffering.
Kemal is, however, a professional soldier, dismissed from the old
Ottoman Army by the Damad Ferid Ministry in Constantinople and now
occupying a politico-military position at the head of the new Turkish
Government. He has brought to Angora the blunt directness of the
soldier rather than the statesman, and his remarkable personal
prestige has colored his entire Government. Yet it is not sufficient
to define him as a soldier. The head of the new Turkish State happens
to be a soldier because the dominant tradition of the old Ottoman
Empire was the Turkish military tradition. In any country with a great
military tradition, the best brains of the country tend to flow into
the Army and the best brains of the Army tend to flow into the General
Staff. Kemal reached the General Staff of the old Ottoman Army at a
time when the best brains in the country were attempting to carry it
from those Eastern traditions of government in which it had had a long
and rich experience, to the newer Western traditions at which it is
still serving its apprenticeship.
If it is possible to press down the difference between these two
traditions of government into the limits of a single sentence, it
might be said that the Eastern tradition is that of action and the
Western tradition is that of argument. Under the Eastern tradition,
government is centralized in a single ruler whose power is as nearly
absolute as his own personal abilities enable him to make it. Under
the Western tradition, the functions of government are decentralized
and authority is carried down to a popular electorate, represented by
deputies in a parliament to which the Government of the day is
immediately responsible. Under the Eastern tradition, all things are
possible to an individual ruler as long as he disposes of sufficient
force to impose them. Under the Western tradition, all things are
possible to an electorate as long as it abstains from force in
imposing them. London is the home of the modern Western tradition but
to find the home of the Eastern tradition today it is necessary to go
farther east than Turkey, to a country like Afghanistan. One episode
which illustrates the contrast between the two traditions, is that of
an Afghan notable who happened to be in London at a time when the
Government fell, and who lost no time in sending an _aide_ into the
West End to purchase arms with which to defend himself. For further
illustration, I might draw on my own experience. I called on the
Afghan Ambassador at Angora in the course of my stay there and
discovered, I thought, an astonishing ignorance of our Western ways.
His was a charming tea, served by a charming gentleman who kept a
charming revolver on his desk throughout the period of our talk and
two charmingly brawny Secretaries of Embassy close at hand in case, I
suppose, of emergency. It happened, however, that no emergency
developed and our talk of an hour’s duration ended as happily as it
began.
But if we Westerners have slowly built up our own peculiar traditions
of government at home, we have not always carried them with us into
the East. In our contacts with Eastern peoples in their own lands, we
have tended to adopt the Eastern tradition. We have met force with
force and it is possibly difficult to blame the more provincial of
Eastern peoples if they conclude from their contacts with us along
their own frontiers, that our traditions of government are the same as
theirs. We cherish at home the reign of law, but our imperialisms in
the East have not always exemplified our love of law. Probably their
relatively lawless nature has been justified by necessity, for the
complicated machinery of Western trade demands conditions of security
if it is to work smoothly. Doubtless imperialism which is the simplest
method of affording it a degree of security, will continue as long as
it is able to command superior force, although naturally it is a daily
humiliation to the strongest of Eastern peoples. Necessity will tend
to justify its continuance until Easterners demonstrate that they can
adapt our tradition of law to their own needs and that they are
themselves able to afford legitimate Western trade (not of the
get-rich-quick sort) that security which it has a right to expect. It
is this task of adapting the Western tradition of law to Eastern
needs, of substituting in the East a new and Eastern _regime_ of law
for the lawlessness of imperialism, while disturbing as little as
possible the inter-flow of sound and legitimate trade――it is this task
which constitutes the Turkish problem today.
Kemal is a Westerner who was born under the Eastern absolutism of
Abdul Hamid. He has known the East, the West and that curious
offspring of both of them, imperialism. He is the son of a country
which has belonged in the past to any man who proved strong enough to
take it and which has rewarded its strong men with prestige or a cup
of poison or both. He has been a consistent Young Turk, although his
beliefs once flung him out of his country in disgrace and later tossed
him the dying remnant of his country to do what he could with it. In
his unaffected bearing, he embodies the old Ottoman officer type at
its best, and at its best that type was a very fine type indeed. He is
a great Turk and as a man among men he towers head and shoulders above
the type of man which our Western democracies have sometimes projected
into political life. A century from now, the historian of the future
will see him in a larger and more adequate perspective than we are
able to look upon him as he moves among us today.
He resumed his chair behind the desk, with the green and gold banner
hanging limply in the corner behind him, and took from his pocket a
string of amber beads with a brown tassel. His cheek bones are rather
high, his nose is straight and strong, his mouth is straight and
thin-lipped. I think a cartoonist would find him easy to do――a
towering iron-gray _kalpak_, and beneath it the straight strong lines
of the eyebrows, the mouth and the chin. He wore an English shooting
suit of tweed, a gray soft collar with a gray tie, and high-laced tan
boots with the short vamp which is native to the Near East.
Physically, he gives a lean, wiry impression.
He speaks either Turkish or French (he knows no English) in the
mildest of tones, hardly above a whisper and with a blunt frankness
which manages to remain free from any suggestion of truculence. I
formed the impression that he does not find talk congenial; he says
what needs to be said but he prefers to listen. Certainly he is quite
devoid of that love of talk which sometimes afflicts Western statesmen
and which is one of the less beautiful aspects of our Western
tradition of popular government. Like any other good soldier, there is
not the faintest trace of pose in him. He does not employ to
Westerners the, to us, exaggerated courtesies of the East; when he
does talk to us, he talks as we ourselves endeavor to talk to each
other, with simplicity and directness. At one time in our talk, I
asked him for photographs of himself since they were not then
obtainable elsewhere in Angora and weeks afterward I happened to
mention the matter to a Western friend in Constantinople. “What did he
tell you?” “That he would have them sent me the next day.” “And did
he?” “Yes.” My friend thought it over; he has lived in Constantinople
for some thirty years. “If you can really get any Turk to give you a
definite word on any subject under the sun without making you wait a
month for it,” he said finally, “its fairly certain there’s been a
revolution in the country.”
I had a feeling from the first that I was talking to an iron image,
that his brain was miles away busying itself with a thousand and one
affairs. He had a manner of dismissing question with question as
though he were very busy but desired not to be discourteous, and the
heaped-up pile of papers on his very neat and orderly desk made it
probable that this was precisely the case. I changed my tactics
finally and began firing questions at him abruptly, determined to get
his undivided attention. He reached up suddenly with a gesture which
might have savored slightly of impatience, and flung aside his
_kalpak_, revealing a tall sloping forehead, fringed at the top with
very thin brown hair, a forehead totally out of keeping with the
severely simple lines of his face. If his face is the iron face of the
cavalry officer, his forehead is the forehead of the statesman.
I kept on firing questions at him until I felt that his brain had
paused at its distance to listen. I continued to fire questions at him
until I felt that his brain had turned, had rushed down from its
distance and was sitting intently behind those fixed blue eyes,
staring out at its questioner:
“Suppose Turkey’s Western population leaves the country _en masse_
when it becomes certain that the Capitulations are ended?”
“The West can help us or hinder us greatly,” he said, “but it ought to
be remembered that we Turks have our own problem to work out in
Turkey.”
“Just what do you mean by your own problem?”
“You have seen the country, you know the condition in which Turkey is.
Our villages, our towns, our communications, all need to be built anew
from the ground up. We have had a good Army in times past. I don’t
believe there has been a better Army in Europe. But we hope soon to be
able to demobilize and then our real work will begin. We shall have a
potentially rich country on our hands and we shall have the right
which we have not had recently, to do what we can with it. We want to
make it a country worthy of its name, we want to give it not only the
best its own civilization offers it but the best we can take from
other civilizations. To that end, we shall welcome the help of others
but in the very nature of our task, any help we secure from others
must be subordinated to our own efforts. If we can not succeed, nobody
else can.”
“Do you think you will succeed?”
“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what
sort of beginning we have made.”
When my time was up, I left him and walked back in silence to my
rooms. I dispatched the aged Armenian maid after tea, took off my
shoes and donned my slippers. I felt somewhat as a man does when he
has seen a great cavalry charge and has returned to his billet and
taken his boots off. I became aware finally of the squeak of ox-carts
beneath my windows. A long string of them was passing on its 300-mile
trek up from the coast to the Army bases in the interior. The air was
filled with their slow screaming squeak, a squeak which with infinite
deliberation removed the skin from every note in the chromatic scale,
the squeak of wooden axles daubed with tar to tickle the musical
palates of a team of oxen. Each cart, a mere wooden platform mounted
on wooden wheels, bore a tall mound of hay for the oxen and beneath
the hay the rope-handled ends of two or four or six new wooden boxes
protruded, the number of boxes depending on the _calibre_ of the
shells within. Most of the drivers were Turkish peasant women,
jacketed and pantalooned, their feet shod in rope-bound woollens,
their faces and hands reddened by exposure. Dead men’s fathers and
sons and brothers in the Army, widows and dead men’s daughters behind
the Army――but still the rope-handled boxes squeaked up from the sea….
It is out of the dumb stubborn strength of this peasantry that the
Turkish military tradition has been fashioned in centuries past. But
can the Turks direct this strength from their native military
tradition into a new and Western economic tradition? This is the
question mark which hangs over the Turkish problem today and Kemal
knows it.
“Do you think you will succeed?” I had asked him.
“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what
sort of beginning we have made.”
II
THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE
KEMAL’S BIRTH AT SALONICA――HOW HE BECAME A YOUNG TURK――WHAT THE OLD
OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS LIKE――THE DIVISION OF ITS POPULATION INTO RELIGIOUS
COMMUNITIES――THE WESTERN CHALLENGE OF ITS _Rûm_ (GREEK) COMMUNITY――ITS
DUTY TO ISLAM.
Forty-two years ago, when Abdul Hamid II ruled in Constantinople and
the Ottoman Crescent and Star still floated over Salonica, an
underling in the Salonica customs office died, leaving his widow with
a small daughter and an infant son on her hands. The daughter in time
grew up and married, as is the way of Turkish daughters. The son was
intended by his mother for the mosque school and the career of a
_hoja_, as is the way of Turkish mothers, but he became fascinated by
the uniforms of the Ottoman Army officers whom he saw about the
streets, as is the way of Turkish sons. In time he succeeded in
passing the examinations for the military preparatory school at
Salonica, where his mathematics teacher became so fond of him that he
left off calling him by his given name of Mustapha and dubbed him
Kemal, a Turkish name meaning rightness.
The military preparatory school at Salonica, the officers’ school at
Monastir and the War Academy at Constantinople finally graduated him,
a headstrong youth of 22, into the Army in 1902 with the rank of
lieutenant. He had hardly reached the War Academy from Monastir before
his adolescent mind became tainted by the political ferment with which
the school was secretly permeated. A copy of the forbidden play
_Watan_ (The Fatherland) fell into his hands. Abdul Hamid had caused
every known copy of it to be confiscated and burned; he had forced its
author, despite his very high place in modern Turkish literature, to
flee into exile; he had driven out of the capital every Ottoman
subject whom his spies suspected of having read it. But _Watan_ gave
the young Kemal his first taste of Western ideas and made him secretly
a Young Turk and a bitter opponent of Abdul Hamid, which at the time
was a rather ridiculous thing to be.
Abdul Hamid was an able Easterner who maintained his grip on his
country by such a system of espionage that the life and liberty of no
Ottoman subject was safe who was remotely suspected of having heard of
the French Revolution, a system of espionage which could not keep
Western ideas out of the capital but which could, and did, keep them
underground. The military tradition of the country continued to
attract its best brains into the Army but the network of espionage
which radiated from Yildiz Kiosk had the effect of giving the Army a
sort of dual existence. On the surface, it continued to be a military
organism, the trustee of an Eastern military tradition, but beneath
the surface it became a ferment of forbidden Western ideas and the
example of Nihilism in Russia which did much to spread the secret
society craze, found no more fertile element to work upon than the
yeasty mentality of the War Academy and the Military College of
Medicine in Constantinople. So a secret political society which called
itself the Society of Liberty was formed among the students at the War
Academy and a similar society, the Society of Progress, was launched
across the Bosphorus at the Military College of Medicine. But both
were mere seeds sprouting underground in the rich and rotting soil of
the capital. The country itself, outside the capital, was still a
primitive Eastern land ruled by any man who proved himself strong
enough to take it.
There were some 600,000 square miles in the old Ottoman Empire when
Abdul Hamid came to the Throne. It was a compact area, lying at the
junction of three continents. On the west, it ran deeply into the
Balkans in Europe; on the east, it extended into Trans-Caucasia and
down the frontier of Old Persia in Asia; on the south, it followed the
Arabian coast of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and crossed to the
African coast to include a waning sovereignty over Egypt. In the
Balkans and Asia Minor, it consisted of a mountainous _massif_ tilting
up to the high plateau of Trans-Caucasia, its slopes dotted with
isolated villages quite out of effective touch with any Government
which might exist in Constantinople. Only the larger villages had a
_gendarmerie_ post, fewer still had a telegraph key to connect them
with the provincial capital and throughout most of the country such
Western contrivances as railroads were wholly unknown. With the
country’s administration rigidly centralized in Constantinople, only
the high prestige of the _Padishah_ linked these scattered villages in
their loosely organized provinces.
South of Asia Minor, the mountains dipped into a great desert arched
by the Tigris-Euphrates basin on the east and by the green Syrian
corridor on the west. Here, except in the Syrian corridor, the
inaccessibility of the country from Constantinople and the nomadic
nature of its sparse population gave the provincial administrations a
degree of semi-independence which increased to complete independence
down in the Arabian peninsula. The case of the Syrian corridor was
exceptional, however. Compared with the distant Tigris-Euphrates
basin, it was easily accessible from Constantinople; it was the home
of a settled population with a very high culture of its own; and it
was on the only line of land communication with the most venerable
holy places of Islam, the _Haram-esh-Sherif_ at Jerusalem, the
Prophet’s Tomb at Medina and the sacred _Kaaba_ at Mecca. The first of
these lay at the southern end of the corridor and the other two amid
the arid mountains which parallel the Arabian coast of the Red Sea.
Over these 600,000 square miles of country, the Sultan at
Constantinople maintained the loosest sort of government, permitting
his subjects to conduct their own affairs largely in their own ways
and confining his administration to the task of keeping the trade
routes open and the taxes collected, for under the Eastern tradition
this was the whole duty of government. There were about 25,000,000 of
his subjects, the overwhelming majority of them Moslems. The great
Moslem reformation had swept the entire area centuries ago, but in
accordance with the tolerance prescribed by the Prophet, Christians
and Jews, while set aside in their own community organizations as
dissenters, had been allowed to worship in their own ways. This was
quite in accord with the loose Eastern idea of government which
permitted every man to go his own way as long he paid his taxes
regularly and refrained from disturbing the peace of the country. Even
foreigners were likewise set apart under the Capitulations and were
permitted to govern themselves under their own laws and customs.
On the surface, the Sultan’s administration of his country from
Constantinople was very much like the King’s administration of his
realm from London. Both the Ottoman Sultan and the British King were
the heads of the dominant faiths in their respective countries. The
Sultans had become Caliphs of Islam in 1517, although not all Moslems
recognize them as such, just as the British Kings had become Defenders
of the Faith in 1521, although not all Christians recognize them as
such. The Sultan administered the spiritual affairs of his country
through the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_ and its temporal affairs through the
_Grand Vizier_, just as the King in London administers the spiritual
affairs of his realm through the Archbishop of Canterbury and its
temporal affairs through the Prime Minister. The surface of both
countries is feudal and mediaeval, and springs from the same source,
but their resemblance in the reign of Abdul Hamid II stopped at the
surface. Beneath the surface, England during the latter half of the
nineteenth century, was in a state of transition from feudalism to the
modern Western idea of democracy. A growing industrial plant was
giving rise to trade unions and trade unions, exerting a growing
influence on ideas of government, were drawing authority down to a
popular electorate. Government was tightening its hold on the lowliest
peasant and a civil service was being formed as a permanent body to
which the increasing duties of government were entrusted. The country
was becoming a powerful industrial unit, able to mobilize the vast new
energies which machinery was opening up to it. It was embarking on
manufacture and trade on such a scale as had never been dreamed of
before. It was becoming the ganglion of a financial nervous system
whose sensitive fibres covered the world. The old religious aspect of
government was dwindling and in its place we saw a drilled and
disciplined industrialism taking form beneath the feudal trappings
which still constitute the surface of British government.
[Illustration: HUSSEIN RAUF BEY
Head of the Ottoman Delegation which signed the Mudros Armistice,
October, 1918; Nationalist Party Leader in the Ottoman Chamber,
January and February, 1920; arrested and deported to Malta, March 16,
1920; Minister of Public Works and Prime Minister of the First Grand
National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921.]
[Illustration: GENERAL RAFET PASHA
Minister of War and Interior of the First Grand National Assembly
until November, 1921; Minister of War until January, 1922; Governor of
Eastern Thrace since November, 1922.]
But when Abdul Hamid II ascended the Ottoman Throne at Constantinople,
religion was still the dominant factor in his primitive and loosely
organized country. From its surface to its core, the Ottoman Empire
was still Eastern. The Moslem community was still the governing
community, a community with a profound self-respect and a knowledge of
its own duties as well as of the deference which was due to it. The
dissenting communities were exempt by Moslem law from the duty of
preserving the peace and hence were able frequently to attain a degree
of prosperity which many Moslems never knew. Since the bulk of the
Sultan’s revenue was obtained from taxation provided for in Moslem
law, foreigners, most of whom were Christians, were naturally exempt
from the payment of any but secular taxes such as land tax and customs
duties. We Westerners think of it today as a hopelessly mediaeval
method of governing a country, but we sometimes forget that it
permitted every man in the country a generous liberty which we in the
West have lost. It exemplified the Eastern tradition at its best and
if we in the West have won for ourselves the blessings of modern
industrialism, we have paid for them with a considerable share of the
liberties we once enjoyed. What larger liberties our new industrial
democracies may yet confer upon us in exchange for the liberties they
have taken from us, remain to be seen. We are still evolving our
Western tradition of government, but at present it has taken from us
feudalism and the open fields and given us in exchange democracy and
the machine-shop.
Even before Abdul Hamid II came to the Throne, the Western tradition
had begun to make itself felt in the old Empire, for it was obvious
that Western industrialism would succeed eventually in generating such
power that no non-industrial country could stand against it. The
disturbing lure of the Western tradition was heightened by the
religious element, for both Islam and Christendom, while divided
within themselves, tend to draw together when menaced from without.
The Islamic world found its political leadership in Constantinople,
its scholastic leadership in Cairo and its juridical leadership in
Mecca, and it was natural that it should resent any menace to the old
Ottoman Empire within whose frontiers these three centers of
leadership lay. At the same time, the memory of the great Moslem
reformation had not yet passed from Christendom and it was natural
that it should resent the fact of Moslem rule over Palestine and the
inferior position necessarily accorded to Christian communities in a
Moslem country. There were a number of these Christian communities in
the Ottoman Empire, but we shall confine ourselves here to the mention
of the two of them which most vitally concern us――the _Rûm_ community
which included all members of the powerful Orthodox Church who
recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, and the
_Ermeni_ community or the Gregorian Church, a small but historic sect
whose membership was limited to Armenians. Both these communities were
exempt from the operation of Moslem law and subject instead to their
own Christian laws. Both were officially established and represented
in the Sultan’s Government, the Oecumenical Patriarch himself
representing the _Rûm_ community and the _Ermeni_ community, since the
seat of its _Catholicos_ is in Trans-Caucasia, being represented by a
Patriarch appointed for the purpose in Constantinople. These
communities included most of the Christians who had survived the great
Moslem reformation and on the whole they lived quite peaceably under
Moslem rule. While their Moslem neighbors formed the governing class,
they formed the trading class and in any feudal country trading is the
occupation of the lower class. Still, their ablest men were frequently
utilized by the Sultan in the government of the country and when they
were so utilized, they were called upon quite without reference to
their position as religious dissenters, just as Nonconformists,
Catholics and Jews are utilized in the British Government without
reference to their attitude toward the Church of England.
It was through the Greeks, as the _Rûm_ community is called in the
West, that the Western tradition of government was first introduced
into the Ottoman Empire. They introduced it in its crudest form, a
form in which the basis of the State was shifted from religion to
race. The Greeks of Old Greece revolted successfully in the 1820’s and
were immediately recognized by the West as an independent State. But a
curious feature of their State was that it contained none of the
provisions for reasonably secure dissent which had marked the Empire.
Although the modern Greeks were without experience in the government
of dissenters, the West gave them immediate and full control over
their entire population without community organizations for dissenters
or Capitulations for foreigners. We Christians appear to be
characterized by this inability to tolerate dissent. Once we were
burning dissenters at the stake and today, although we have won
religious liberty for ourselves in the West, we have not even yet
succeeded in looking upon all religions and all races with the broad
tolerance which distinguishes Islam.
The revolt of the Old Greeks disturbed the peaceful relations which
had existed between the Sultan and his _Rûm_ community, but not as
violently as might have been expected. In time it disturbed Moslem
minds, for if this Western emphasis upon race were to gain any headway
in the Empire, there was literally no end to the amount of disruption
it could effect. As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems,
5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal
life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if
its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000
Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000
Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the
prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves
but for every race in the country.
To the Greeks of Old Greece, the new Westernism offered the prospect
of a reversal of the subordinate position they had occupied ever since
the Moslem reformation had all but swept Christianity out of existence
in the very land of its origin, and this prospect was heightened by
the increasing territorial losses which the Ottoman Empire had
suffered for two centuries. The same prospect made itself quickly felt
throughout the West, a fact which may afford evidence that the unity
of Christendom is greater than it appears to be on the surface, for
surely there can be no greater contrast within the limits of a single
faith than the contrast between the rich and decadent ritual of
Orthodoxy on one hand and the Spartan simplicity of British
Non-conformism and American Protestantism on the other.
But the challenge which the Greeks had found it comparatively easy to
fling down, was far from easy for the governing Moslems of the Empire
to pick up. In the first place, they had built the Empire to the
specifications of their own Moslem law and in the second place, quite
irrespective of any wishes they might have had in the matter, they
bore a heavy responsibility to the rest of Islam for their faithful
stewardship of that law. It had come to a time when the Empire was one
of the very few Moslem States which were able to interpret Moslem law
independently of external pressure, and Islam looked as it had never
looked before to its political leadership in Constantinople and its
juridical leadership in Mecca. The Sultan was the trustee of that
venerable Eastern civilization which was Islam’s own. The Caliphate
which Selim the Grim had lightly taken at Cairo in 1517, when Islam
was powerful, was now in the days of Islam’s political decline,
becoming an actual and heavy responsibility. The position was not a
hopeless one, for Indian Moslems who comprise some of the best brains
in Islam, had shown in their accommodation to the fact of British
India, that Moslem law is not inflexible. But for Moslems both within
and without the Empire, the challenge which the Old Greeks had flung
down, produced a position about as serious as can be imagined.
The Ottoman Empire was becoming the cockpit of an enormous arena whose
slopes extended from the back hills of Java to the country towns of
the United States. With the eyes of this worldwide audience upon them,
a handful of Young Turks in Constantinople were beginning secretly to
grope about after a way out of the apparent _impasse_ in which they
found themselves, after some formula which should adapt the Empire,
not to the hothouse Westernism of the Old Greeks, but to the maturer
and healthier Westernism of England. Luckily, the fact of India’s
70,000,000 Moslems had thrown the Caliph of Islam in Constantinople
and the Emperor of India in London into intimate contact.
III
THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM
KEMAL’S ARREST AND HIS EXILE TO DAMASCUS――HIS EVENTUAL RETURN TO
SALONICA――WHAT THE YOUNG TURKS WANTED――THE RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM
WHICH CONFRONTED THEM――THE ROLE OF AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND
EDUCATORS――CHRISTENDOM VS. ISLAM.
The young Kemal had no sooner been graduated from the General Staff
classes at the War Academy in Constantinople, than he engaged a small
apartment in Stamboul to serve as the headquarters of the secret
Society of Liberty. But an acquaintance whom he trusted and whom he
permitted to sleep in the apartment at night on the plea that he was
penniless, proved to be one of Abdul Hamid’s spies and Kemal was
arrested. Having been questioned at Yildiz Kiosk, he was held for
three months in a police cell and then exiled late in 1902 to a
cavalry regiment in Damascus. Fresh from the War Academy, fired with
the spirit of revolution and schooled in its _technique_, he lost no
time at Damascus in getting into touch with other exiles from the War
Academy and the Military College of Medicine in the capital. His
colonel, Lutfi Bey, introduced him to the keeper of a small stationery
shop in the Damascus bazaars who had been exiled from the College of
Medicine, and the two of them secretly organized a branch of the
Society of Liberty among the officers of the garrison. Under the
supposed necessity of his military duties, Kemal was soon dispatched
to Jaffa and Jerusalem where similar branches were organised, the
Jaffa branch attaining considerable strength. He soon became
convinced, however, that work in Syria was a mistake, that if the
challenge of Westernism which Old Greece had flung down was ever to be
picked up, it would have to be picked up where it had been flung down.
The political life of the Empire centered in Constantinople, but the
espionage system which radiated from Yildiz had the capital so
completely in its grip that revolutionary work there was subject to
the greatest dangers. Outside of the capital, the life of the Empire
was divided into two categories, that of the coast towns and that of
the interior. The life of the former was in a sort of touch with the
outside world, but the provincial capitals of the interior were quite
self-sufficient. Smyrna, the greatest of all the coast towns, was in
touch with all the outside world, but it was confronted in the
interior by Konia whose historic dervish _tekkes_ were a well of Islam
undefiled. It was the _tchelebi_ of the Mevlevi dervishes at Konia who
girded each new Caliph with the Prophet’s sword forty days after his
accession to the Throne, and when proud Konia spoke, its voice was
weighted with all the venerable conservatism of Islam.
But in Europe the coast town of Salonica was faced by no such
conservatism in its hinterland. The raw turbulent races of the Balkans
were already in a ferment of Westernism and in their grim way were
preparing to disentangle themselves in the wake of the retreating
Empire. Salonica, Uskub and Monastir were already seething with
forbidden political ideas and if the Empire were ever to halt its
retreat, it was here it would have to make its peace with Westernism.
It was here that Old Greece had flung down its challenge and it was
here that challenge would have to be picked up. Furthermore, if any
force were to be mobilized to thrust Westernism upon Abdul Hamid in
Constantinople, it was from Salonica that it would inevitably be
launched.
Kemal accordingly abandoned his work in Syria and induced Lutfi Bey to
give him leave under an assumed name to Smyrna, intending to make his
way from there to Salonica. Fearing, however, that Constantinople
would detect his presence in Smyrna, he went to Egypt instead and
sailed from Alexandria to the Piraeus, whence he reached Salonica.
Constantinople was coming more and more completely into the grip of
Abdul Hamid. The General Staff was being periodically broken up and
scattered to the four corners of the Empire, and the Military College
of Medicine was finally locked up and abandoned. Hamid was beginning
in similar fashion to tighten his grip on Salonica and, although Kemal
remained there in strictest hiding, his presence was discovered after
four months and he fled precipitately to Jaffa, where a convenient
outbreak of “trouble” at Akaba on the Red Sea gave him an alibi which
served to soothe the ruffled feelings of the capital. From Akaba he
went back to Damascus and waited there until a change of War Ministers
in Constantinople made it possible for him to request, and secure, a
transfer to the Staff of the Third Army at Salonica. Back in Salonica
again, he threw himself into the work of the secret Young Turkish
organization.
A little group of Ottoman exiles in Paris of whom Ahmed Riza Bey was
the leader, had discovered the formula which was to achieve that
internal unity which the Empire had long enjoyed and without which no
Empire could endure. It was the formula of Ottomanization. “A new
Ottoman Empire one and indivisible” was their dream, an expression
which they had borrowed from the French Revolution. “Oh, non-Moslem
Ottomans――Oh, Moslem Ottomans” was their program. All the races of the
Empire were to be drawn together into “a new nation,” “a new Ottoman
Empire,” whose military strength would enable it to halt its long
retreat and put an end to interference in its internal affairs from
without. To Riza Bey, Moslems and Christians alike were sufferers
under Abdul Hamid’s Easternism. The restoration of the still-born
Constitution of thirty years before, was his objective; with the
Constitution restored, Moslems and Christians would enjoy alike the
rights and the duties of Ottoman citizenship. Moslems would no longer
suffer in silence. Christians would no longer lift their complaints
throughout Europe and the United States. “We shall no longer be
slaves, but a new Ottoman nation of freemen.”
This was the ideal which Riza Bey lifted up in the little
revolutionary periodical _Mechveret_ which was smuggled into every
garrison in the Empire from his little flat in the Place Monge, near
the Montmarte section of Paris. This was the ideal which young Turks
like Enver and Niazi and Kemal were propagating, as they built up the
secret organization which was to compel Abdul Hamid to restore the
Constitution. Throughout the Empire, they had their agents in every
garrison, converting both the officers and the enlisted personnel of
Abdul Hamid’s Army, and assassinating hostile officers and men known
to be spies. Small organizing committees had been planted in all the
larger garrisons and directing committees were functioning in
Constantinople, Salonica, Smyrna, Adrianople, Uskub and Monastir.
Under the Eastern tradition of government, it was the Army which
immediately mattered. Deprived of his Army, Abdul Hamid for the moment
would be caught defenseless.
But in reality the Army was only the instrument of Abdul Hamid’s
power. The substance of his power lay in Moslem law and in the
unswerving devotion to it of the Old Turks. Strong simple men, these
Old Turks were, men who knew nothing of the arts of debate, broadly
tolerant of the usages of others and rigidly conservative of their own
usages, men who took their starkly simple faith very seriously, in
whose lives religion was still the dominating factor. They were found
in the mosque schools rather than in the War Academy, in Konia rather
than in Salonica, and in winning over the Army, the Young Turks were
not touching the vast and silent body of conservative Old Turkish
opinion which formed Abdul Hamid’s real strength. Here was a dead
weight of usage which knew no necessity for change and which would
have resisted to the end if it had. True, there was a section of Old
Turkish opinion in the capital and the larger provincial centers,
which disliked Abdul Hamid the Sultan, but Abdul Hamid the Caliph was
quite another matter. Under the Caliph, Moslem and non-Moslem were
_not_ equal. Non-Moslems had been given far more tolerant treatment
under the Caliph than religious dissenters had sometimes been given
under Christian rule in the West, but the tolerance which the Caliph
guaranteed them did not make them the equals of Moslems.
Whether Moslem law was really thus inflexible was obviously a matter
for Moslems themselves to determine, but the record of India’s Moslems
in accommodating themselves to British rule would have seemed to
indicate otherwise. India’s Moslems, however, were in touch with the
Western world as the Old Turks were not. The very fact of British
rule, not to mention their long contact with Hindus, had given India’s
Moslems a breadth of vision which Old Turkish opinion lacked. Old
Turkish leadership embodied Islam at its best, but in the range of its
experience it embodied Islam at its narrowest.
Meanwhile, the _Rûm_ community whose relations with the Sultan-Caliph
were still generally peaceful, had a very large source of strength
outside the Empire. Had the Young Turks eventually proved successful
in equalizing Moslem and non-Moslem in an Ottoman citizenry, the _Rûm_
community might or might not have accepted the change and undertaken
to work the newly Ottomanized Empire. But if the Young Turks failed,
there were sources of outside strength available to the Oecumenical
Patriarchate in Constantinople which would have broken the Old Turks
by force and substituted a new _regime_ which might be described as
Old Greek. The old Byzantine Empire had been snuffed out as an
independent political entity in 1453, but it still lived as an
ecclesiastical, commercial and political force in the Oecumenical
Patriarchate in the Phanar suburb of Stamboul. Its clergy still
perpetuated its memory in the black cylindrical hats and the black
robes of Orthodoxy, but for the time being their communicants wore the
red _fez_ which marked the Ottoman subject.
The King at Athens whence the challenge of Westernism had first been
flung down to the Empire, had adopted the title of King of the Greeks
and Orthodoxy dominated Old Greece with a degree of intolerance which
had never marked Islam in the Empire. Orthodoxy had established its
hold on Russia and Orthodox Russia had become the most powerful enemy
Islam had ever known. Russia had acquired the protectorship of the
_Rûm_ community in the Empire and the great yellow-brown mosque of
_Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul had become the most sacred irredentum of
the Orthodox. Russia sent thousands of pilgrims annually from Odessa
to Palestine, and built a hospice on the Mount of Olives which
commands Jerusalem in a military sense, with a tower which could not
have been better adapted for the uses of a signal tower if it had been
built for the purpose. Between Orthodoxy and Islam, there had arisen
that state of bitter truce which was typified in the juxtaposition of
a Russian church and a Turkish _serai_.
France which had divorced Church and State at home, still held the
protectorship of the _Katolik_ community in the Ottoman Empire. Italy
whose relations with the Vatican at home had not always been friendly
clung tenaciously to the rights of Italian Catholic orders in
Palestine. Germany whose Lutherans had no specified rights in the
Christian holy places and whose Kaiser had proclaimed himself the
friend of Islam, had planted stronger colonies in Palestine and more
buildings in Jerusalem than any other Western Power, and had built a
hospice on the Mount of Olives “strengthened” by a wall which could
hardly have been better adapted for the uses of military defense if it
had been built for the purpose. So we had a city sacred to Moslems,
Christians and Jews, dominated by Russian and German hospices on the
Mount of Olives, strong fortress-like structures erected _ad gloriam
maiorem Dei_. Meanwhile the Caliph of Islam continued to administer
the city with fairness to the communicants of all three faiths,
keeping his garrison down at Jaffa on the coast except on the
occasions of such religious festivals as required its temporary
presence in Jerusalem.
One expects from American Protestantism and British Nonconformism an
attitude of aloofness from this sort of thing, for both have revolted
against the use of the Church by the State. Both have revolted against
that ritualism which marks the older forms of Christianity and have
set up for themselves a form of service severely simple and
aggressively evangelical. In accordance with the finest of its
evangelical traditions, American Protestantism has carried on a long
and vigorous missionary endeavor in the old Ottoman Empire, but actual
contact with Islam in its own country has done much to make plain to
the missionaries themselves the reasons for the great Moslem
reformation which all but swept Christianity out of existence in the
land of its origin. Whatever may have been thought in the United
States as to the work in which American missionaries have been engaged
in the Empire, that work has been directed towards the reformation of
the decadent survivals of Christian worship. The missionaries
themselves, as distinct from their supporters in the United States,
have rightly observed that Christianity will not command the respect
of Islam until Moslems have been shown a different type of Christian
from that type to which they have been accustomed. The missionaries
accordingly, beginning on one of the outermost fringes of Christendom,
have devoted themselves to work largely among the Armenians and have
drawn away from their Gregorian Church a new community which the
Caliph in Constantinople recognized as the _Prodesdan_ community.
But an important circumstance exists which is inevitably present in
any missionary endeavor in an alien land and of which we sometimes
need to remind ourselves. In actual practice, Islam is not only a
religion but a form of civilization as well and, in the life of any
devout Moslem, it would be very difficult to say where the one ends
and the other begins. Precisely the same is true of American
Protestantism. It might be simple enough to state the theology of
American Protestantism, but that theology would fall far short of
defining the actual missionary. For the missionary is not only a
Protestant but an American as well, and in any alien country he
embodies the American Protestant form of civilization. However rigidly
he may seek to confine his work within the limits of religious
teaching (and I am thoroughly convinced that the overwhelming majority
of missionaries have so sought to confine their work in the Ottoman
Empire), it is impossible for him not to be an American and a center
of American ideas. In actual practice, it proved impossible for him
not to stand as a center of Westernism in an Eastern country to which
the application of Western ideas necessitated the utmost caution. The
Armenians among whom most of the missionaries worked, were the
farthest East of all the Ottoman peoples and among the non-Moslem
communities they were the last to respond to the Western lure. For
centuries they have lived generally in peace under the Caliph’s rule.
Themselves an Eastern people, they had lived under their Eastern
masters in the enjoyment of the autonomy of their community
institutions. The terms under which the _Ermeni_ community conducted
its own affairs in its own way, were the only terms under which they
could have enjoyed the degree of autonomy which they did enjoy, for
they had a majority in no province[1] and the Western idea presupposes
a majority as the first requisite of independence.
If Christian worship as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire was
ever to command the respect of Moslems, in theory it was all to the
good that the missionaries should draw their new Protestant community
out of the old Gregorian Church. But that the Armenians should be
exposed incautiously to Western ideas of nationalism was quite another
matter. Events might have worked out differently had the missionaries
been able to lay aside their Americanism, had they became Ottoman
subjects themselves and confined their work to the propagation of
Protestantism under Ottoman rule. But this sort of thing is not done.
Without the steadying influence of responsibility to the Ottoman
Government, they permitted their work to take them into the most
intimate and delicate parts of the Ottoman structure. Their attitude
toward the Ottoman Government was that of the Capitulations, their
only responsibility was to their American supporters at home to whom
the Ottoman Government was as far away as the moon.
Nobody has ever expected American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire
to become Ottoman subjects. Indeed, nothing could have made such a
proceeding more ridiculous than the mere mention of it, and I am
inclined to believe that in the very ridicule which its mention would
have provoked, there is food for very sober reflection. Among
imperialists, one can thoroughly understand such an attitude, for
imperialism is based on force and prestige is the very necessary
legend of the invincibility of Western force. But do we Christians
also build on force?
Yet the history of Old Greece is by no means an isolated instance of
intolerance in modern Christendom. We Christians have built a world in
which only Christian nations are admitted to equality (the recent
example of Japan to the contrary notwithstanding). Old Greece and Old
Russia we have recognized as complete equals with us and if the
Armenians had gained their independence, presumably we would have
recognized Armenia also as an equal, although every American
missionary who knows the Armenians in their own country knows what
their abilities are. But forgetting that the true worth of a nation
lies in character, we have never recognized Moslem nations as equals
with us. We found in the Turks a people of integrity and tolerance,
but because they refused to turn Christian, we have concurred in the
modern Capitulations and have visited the butcher-legend upon them
while exalting Greeks and Armenians upon an equally artificial
martyr-legend. Among imperialists, one can understand the necessity of
an inflexible attitude of superiority, but among Christians it
corresponds neither to reality nor to the teachings of the First
Christian.
“And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves
that they were righteous, and set all others at nought: Two men went
up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a
publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I
thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust,
adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give
tithes of all that I get. But the publican, standing afar off, would
not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast,
saying, God, be Thou merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you, this man
went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one
that exalteth himself shall be humbled; but he that humbleth himself
shall be exalted…”
The missionaries remained Americans as well as Protestants. They
administered Westernism as well as Protestantism to the Armenians, and
the result of the administration of Westernism was bloodshed. The
example of Nihilism in Russia lured the Armenians on into the secret
society craze. Armenian revolutionary societies answered bloodshed
with more bloodshed, and the tragedy began whose ghastly fruition we
have seen.
Some of the missionaries recoiled from further missionary effort and
opened schools and hospitals instead which they threw open impartially
to all the races of the Empire. These schools were instituted solely
for educational purposes and the largest of them offered as good a
schooling as most American colleges in the United States offered.
Their effort was to offer the best that Americans at home had and even
in such incidentals as the architecture of their buildings, they made
themselves as completely American as possible. Two of the largest of
them were built high on the wooded shores of the Bosphorus and nobody
can glance at them today without knowing at once that they are
American. High above the suburbs of the old capital, they look as if
they had been transported bodily from Chicago.
One can share our pride in our own devices and our own customs, one
can sympathize in our desire to see other countries adapt themselves
to American methods, but it was not the effort of these schools to
strike a balance between American and Ottoman cultures. What these
schools offered was out-and-out Americanism and their attitude toward
the Ottoman Government was the sharply aloof attitude of the
Capitulations. This was obviously a quite unusual proceeding in any
supposedly independent foreign country and the only defense of it
which can be made is that it was the customary thing among all
Westerners in the Ottoman Empire. Behind the Capitulations, Western
schools, Western missionaries, Western traders and a number of less
creditable Westerners, alike found freedom to carry on their own
affairs in their own way. The Capitulations provided Western
imperialists with an opportunity which they were not likely to
overlook and as long as imperialism flourished at Constantinople,
American schools and American missionaries enjoyed a security which
was well-nigh complete, however humiliating this state of things might
have been to the Ottoman Government. Even today there are American
educators and American missionaries in Constantinople to whom the word
“imperialism” means nothing, who say in the dazed manner of men who
have suddenly seen the very ground drop out from under their feet,
“Imperialism has never bothered _us_….”
While Christendom stood thus gazing into the Ottoman cockpit, the Old
Turks were not idle. Abdul Hamid had lifted up the imperilled
Caliphate in Constantinople so that all of Islam could see it. As far
back as 1889, Pan-Islamism had sought to bring the _Shiah_ Moslems of
Persia under the suzerainty of the _Sunni_ Caliph and this scheme
involved considerations so far-reaching in their scope that it finally
brought about a project for a conference of all Islam at Mecca in
1902. But Abdul Hamid had his own imperialism to consider, made
necessary though it was by the Eastern institution of the Caliphate,
and his fear that his Arab populations would use the conference to air
their secessionist program led him to quash the project. Pan-Islamism
gave way to the new Pan-Turanian program under which Turkish and
Tartar Moslems were to shelve the Arabs who had given Islam to the
world, the Turkish tongue was to supplant Arabic as the sacred tongue
of Islam, and all Arabic words were to be rooted out of the Turkish
language. This proved too large a morsel for conservative Islam to
swallow, and Pan-Turanianism prospered no more than Pan-Islamism. It
did live, however, as a political project for welding the Tartar
peoples against Orthodox Russia, for the Turkish ancestry runs deeply
into Central Asia.
Much of this Islamic maneuvring was the work of sophisticated Islamic
capitals. Old Turkish opinion itself continued to place its simple
reliance in the institution of the Caliphate which had now become the
repository of the most venerable of Moslem usages. To the more
thoughtful of the Old Turks, it was a matter of profound re-assurance
that the British Empire contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000
Christians, and that the Emperor of India in London was in friendly
contact with the Caliph. Those were the days when the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_
in Constantinople was one of the last independent interpreters of
Moslem law, and when the British Empire proudly called itself the
greatest Moslem Power in the world.
But King Edward’s first visit to Austria in 1903 disquieted Moslem
opinion both in the Ottoman Empire and in India. The Emperor of India
was growing impatient. His further visits in 1905 and 1907 resulted in
a program of reforms in _gendarmerie_, finances, judiciary, public
works and the Army, which were to be imposed from without upon the
rigidly conservative Empire. To the Young Turks who had been working
feverishly ever since the first visit to Austria in 1903, preparing to
attempt the imposition of their really fundamental reforms from
within, his program was only a step toward the final break-up of the
Empire. Already, instead of securely bridging the gap between East and
West the Empire creaked and cracked as though presently it would
tumble into the widening chasm.
Late in 1907, the Emperor of India’s patience ran out. In the spring
of 1908, Edward VII touched a match to the carefully laid gun-powder
of Young Turkish revolution which lit the Empire with the flare-up of
1908. Ten years later, the blackened ruin of a once noble structure
disappeared from history and the gap between East and West yawned wide
and empty.
[1] My authority for this statement is “Reconstruction in
Turkey,” a book published for private distribution in 1918
by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the
predecessor of the Near East Relief. “The estimate of their
(the Armenians’) number in the empire before the war,” says
Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, “ranges from
1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in
any _vilayet_.”
IV
THE RUSSIAN MENACE
HOW RUSSIA AND GREAT BRITAIN FOUGHT ACROSS THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE――HOW
RUSSIA ENTERED TRANS-CAUCASIA AND CAME INTO CONTACT WITH THE
ARMENIANS――HOW IT APPROACHED THE BACK OF BRITISH INDIA THROUGH CENTRAL
ASIA――HOW GREAT BRITAIN FINALLY SURRENDERED IN THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN
TREATY OF 1907.
Old Russia was a great Eastern absolutism which had looked upon the
modern West and faithfully copied the methods of its imperialism.
These it utilized in its search for a secure outlet to the sea. It had
reached the sea at Archangel on the Arctic, but Archangel is blocked
by ice for nine months of the year. It had reached the sea along the
Baltic shores, but its Baltic ports were as landlocked as the Lake
ports in the United States. The Baltic was commanded by Germany and
Germany in turn was commanded by Great Britain. It had touched salt
water along the Black Sea, but its Black Sea ports were commanded by
the Ottoman Empire astride the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
It was unable to rectify its position in the Baltic without
precipitating a European war and European wars are not only expensive
but to Eastern Powers like Russia are sometimes disastrous. It spent
the better part of a century in trying to solve its Black Sea problem
by hewing back the Ottoman Empire and attempting to fasten its control
over the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople. But the Straits had already
become the most vulnerable spot in the armor of the British Indian sea
lines and the Ottoman Sultan was accordingly backed by all the
influence which the great British Embassy in Constantinople could
exert.
Thus when Russia compelled the Sultan to pay its price for stopping
Mohammed Ali’s drive up the Syrian corridor from Egypt in 1832, Great
Britain did not hesitate to quash Russia’s treaty with the Sultan. And
when the issues which the quashing of that treaty had left unsettled,
were revived twenty years later, Great Britain did not hesitate to
enter the Crimean War to hold Russia back from any further approach to
the Straits. And when twenty years still later, the Mother Slav State,
following the lead of the South Slavs of Serbia, declared war on the
Sultan and smashed its way into San Stefano in the very suburbs of
Constantinople, the British Navy did not hesitate to steam boldly up
the Straits and anchor off the Ottoman capital. For if the Russian
Army had been permitted to occupy it, the British sea lines from India
might easily have been thrown back to the long Cape route and another
Trafalgar necessitated in order to settle again the question of the
command of the Mediterranean, a question which the British Navy did
not propose to re-open.
So we reach that titanic struggle between two outside imperialisms
which kept the Ottoman Empire tied hand and foot but still alive.
Against Russia, Great Britain made common cause with the Ottoman
Empire. The Emperor of India and the Caliph of Islam stood together.
It is our misfortune that the Church of England was not able to avail
itself of the position which its Defender then occupied, to discover
what common ground existed on which the two great monotheistic faiths
of Christianity and Islam might co-operate. Success in such a task
would have placed all of us, Christians and Moslems alike, heavily in
its debt. But Englishmen to this day have never discovered the full
breadth and depth of the meaning of British India.
Despite the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, Great Britain not only
kept the Sultan in command of the Straits but even kept the Black Sea
neutral. East of the Black Sea, however, the British writ did not run.
Here between the Black Sea and the Caspian is the ancient barrier of
the Caucasus Range, below which the Trans-Caucasian plateau forms a
bridge both to the back of the Ottoman Empire and to Persia. Below the
blue peaks of the Caucasus Range lay Tiflis, the capital of the
Georgian Kingdom midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with
the Turkish village of Batum on the Black Sea shores and the Tartar
village of Baku on the Caspian. Turks and Tartars were both Moslem,
but the old Georgian Kingdom was Orthodox and, extending in a broad
belt down through the Ottoman provinces in eastern Asia Minor were
most of the Armenians.
Expanding Russia was not long in bursting the barrier of the Caucasus
Range. More than a century ago, it swallowed the Georgian Kingdom,
snuffed out the eight little Tartar chieftains around Baku and found
itself in contact with the Armenian _Catholicos_ and the eastern
fringes of the _Ermeni_ community in the Ottoman Empire. In further
accord with its policy of undermining that Empire, it availed itself
of the presence of the Armenians in the usual imperialist manner and,
in its war of 1876 against the Sultan, it drove its way deeply into
his eastern provinces, transferring the Armenians from Ottoman to
Russian sovereignty as it went. Its objective was the great bay of
Alexandretta on the Mediterranean which was to free it of its Black
Sea jail, a scheme which Great Britain recognized by secretly taking
over the “administration” of Cyprus from the Sultan. The treaty of San
Stefano stopped the Russian advance hundreds of miles short of
Alexandretta and in front of the new Ottoman frontier, Russia
developed Kars into a great fortress as a base for its further advance
toward Alexandretta when opportunity offered.
Having seized Batum from the Sultan, Russia continued the
consolidation of Trans-Caucasia under its own provincial governors and
stamped the entire region with the unmistakable imprint of a Russian
economic _regime_. It pierced the barrier of the Caucasus Range with a
military highroad to Tiflis, which it prolonged as a railroad to Kars
and the Armenian center of Erivan. It drove its railways past the east
end of the Caucasus Range to make a Russian railhead and a Russian
Caspian port of Baku, around which lay one of the greatest oil-fields
in the world. It developed the village of Batum into a fortified
Russian port on the Black Sea and with its Trans-Caucasian railroads
from Batum _via_ Tiflis to Baku, it made Batum the gate to the Caspian
for all the Western world. Long before, it had driven the Persians
from the Caspian, making a Russian lake of that inland sea, and
Russian steamship lines from Baku to Enzeli, the port of Teheran, now
made Batum the world’s gate to the Persian capital.
From the Trans-Caucasian bridge, the Russian march toward the sea
forked into two directions. The direction in which the Russian Armies
of 1876 turned, was toward Alexandretta on the Mediterranean. The
other direction was indicated later when a railroad was carried from
Kars to the Persian frontier, whence it was to be continued when
requisite to Tabriz and Teheran. This might have exposed the Persian
Gulf to Russia, but the Government of India had already made the Gulf
more British than the Mediterranean. The Gulf had become a land-locked
British lake whose narrow door-way into the Indian Ocean was dominated
by the potential British naval base of Bunder Abbas. If Russia had
succeeded in reaching the Gulf through Persia, a Russian port on its
shores would have been imprisoned by Bunder Abbas, as the Russian
Black Sea ports were already imprisoned by Constantinople and the
Russian Baltic ports by the Sound. For the time being, the Russian
Trans-Caucasian railhead on the north-west frontier of Persia awaited
events.
East of the Caspian, however, a century of Russian advances down
across the Moslem populations of Central Asia had brought the Russian
frontiers all the way down to Persia and Afghanistan. Russian rule
throughout this vast area had been as thoroughly consolidated under
Russian provincial governments as had the Trans-Caucasian bridge. In
time, a line of railway was driven from St. Petersburg _via_ Moscow
and Orenburg to Tashkent at the back of Afghanistan, whence it linked
with the Trans-Caspian Railway from Krasnovodsk, opposite Baku on the
Caspian. Direct communication was thus afforded from St. Petersburg
and from the Trans-Caucasian country to Persia and Afghanistan. With a
Russian resident ruling in the ancient Moslem capital of Bokhara, a
spur had been dropped from the Trans-Caspian line at Bokhara City to
Termez on the northern frontier of Afghanistan whence a caravan road
threads its way up into the passes of the Hindu Kush and down again to
Kabul and the Khyber Pass. From the Merv oasis, also on the
Trans-Caspian line, another spur had been dropped to Kushklinsky Post
on the Afghan frontier whence the traditional Herat-Kandahar-Kabul
road leads to the Khyber Pass and the fat plains of India.
This long loop of line from St. Petersburg and the Caspian to the back
of Afghanistan traversed territory securely held by Russian arms and
the British had no contact with it, except the frontal contact of
their railheads on the southern frontier of Afghanistan, _i. e._,
within India itself. Except for diplomatic exchanges between London
and St. Petersburg, the Government of India had no means of making
itself felt at Bokhara City and the Merv oasis. Indeed, Russia had
made even the Afghan capital of Kabul an intermittent nightmare in
India. Long ago, Russian intrigue in the Afghan capital had compelled
the East India Company in 1839 to dispatch an expeditionary force to
occupy Kabul and unseat its Amir, an expeditionary force which found
Afghanistan so hostile that it was wiped out of existence in such a
disaster as British India has never known before or since. Again in
1879, Russian resentment over the Congress of Berlin led to the
dispatch of a Russian mission to Kabul and when a British mission was
turned back at the frontier, the Government of India sent a second
expeditionary force to set up a new Amir at Kabul. Intrigue at Kabul
became Russia’s favorite reply to any strain in Anglo-Russian
relations, but it was not in Afghanistan that the real weight of
Russian expansion finally made itself felt. Its construction of the
Trans-Caspian railway had given it a base at Askabad on Persia’s
north-east frontier, for an advance down across Persia to the Indian
Ocean outside Bunder Abbas. Here was a project which at one stroke
would not only free Russia of its inner Black Sea jail and its outer
Mediterranean jail, but would enable it to create a second Vladivostok
on the Indian Ocean which would take the British Indian sea lines in
the flank and cut the Indian peninsula bodily out of the British
Empire.
Russia now projected a railway from Askabad to the Persian provincial
capital of Meshed and thence south past the Seistan, reaching the
Indian Ocean presumably at Chahbar or Gwatter Bay. Having filled the
Persian capital of Teheran with Russian intrigue and having thoroughly
Russianized Meshed, Russia now began to close the Seistan gateway
through which the great British Indian fortress of Quetta flanked the
route of its projected railway. Belgian customs officials in the
employ of the Russianized Persian Government, Russian “scientific”
missions and a strange “plague cordon” began mysteriously to break up
the caravans which were moving into and out of the Seistan.
In the meantime, the Government of India had drawn the western
frontier of its Baluchistan province to include Gwatter Bay and had
made a British railhead of Chahbar. Further than this, it was
difficult to go effectively. There was no subject population in the
south of Persia to subvert from its rulers in the north, as was the
case with the Arabs in the adjacent Ottoman Empire. Nor could the
great British Legation at Teheran bolster up the weak Persian
Government as a buffer against Russia, for the Persian capital lay far
away to the north in the very shadow of Russia. Ever since that day a
century ago when Russia burst the barrier of the Caucasus Range, a day
whose dire meaning for India was only beginning to be realized,
Teheran had been exposed to Russia. It lay now only 200 miles from
Enzeli on the Russianized Caspian and some 1,600 miles from Quetta
inside the Seistan, a caravan route so arduous as to be out of the
question. The Government of India’s only road to Teheran was the
800-mile highroad _via_ Bagdad from Basra at the head of the Persian
Gulf.
The situation was a perilous one, however. The Cairo-Calcutta line of
the great British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme would be cut in
Persia by Russia’s projected route from Askabad to the Indian Ocean.
The Government of India had envisaged a line extending from
Constantinople to Kabul as an outworks in front of its Cairo-Calcutta
line. That Constantinople-Kabul line was the common interest of the
Ottoman Caliph and the Emperor of India, but its conception was
hopelessly tardy. It had been broken a century ago when the East India
Company was fretting about France, and Russia was bursting the barrier
of the Caucasus Range to occupy the Trans-Caucasian bridge; for in any
Constantinople-Kabul line, the Caucasus Range is a frontier as
indispensable to the Government of India as the Hindu Kush itself.
Even at Constantinople, the accustomed rule of the British Embassy had
been supplanted by the rising influence of the German Embassy. A
formidable new German enemy was already moving in force along the
roads to British India. Great Britian was losing ground both in
Constantinople and in Persia, which had now become the most vulnerable
spots in its very vulnerable Indian Empire. The Czar was on his way to
become the ruler of the world, and the British Government surrendered.
At the price of a heavy retreat in Persia, it purchased a truce with
its Russian enemy and faced about to meet its new German enemy.
That truce with Russia was the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which
enabled King Edward to meet the Czar at Reval in 1908 to conclude the
Anglo-Russian _entente_ against Germany. Under the terms of this
historic Treaty, Russia abandoned Afghanistan to the Government of
India, and Persia was divided into three “zones of influence,” the
northern half of the country to Russia, most of the arid southern half
a neutral zone, and a small triangle in south-east Persia to the
Government of India, a triangle which was drawn to include all of
Persia’s open seaboard from Bunder Abbas to Baluchistan, including
Chahbar, Gwatter Bay and any other potential ports which Russian
surveyors might have staked out. This division of the country was
accompanied by mutual Russian and British engagements “to respect the
integrity and independence of Persia,” a clause which gives us quite
the correct imperialist touch.
The purpose of the two signatories in drawing this historic Treaty was
“to settle by mutual agreement different questions concerning the
interests of their States on the Continent of Asia,” and this they did
with conspicuous success. They began by breaking Persia. They
continued by breaking the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate of Islam.
They have finished by breaking Christendom.
Possibly in the new humility and the broader tolerance in which
Christendom will one day emerge from its present collapse, we shall
all be the better for it.
V
THE YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION
“ON THE MORNING OF JULY 23, 1908”――THE OLD TURKISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION
AND ITS DEFEAT――HOW ISLAM AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES NULLIFIED THE
YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM――KEMAL’S BREAK WITH ENVER AND HIS RETIREMENT
FROM POLITICS――THE BALKAN WARS AND NATIONALISM.
Three months after King Edward’s visit to Reval in the spring of 1908,
the frightened Young Turks launched their revolution with Niazi Bey’s
mutiny at Resna, fifteen miles from Monastir. On the morning of July
23, 1908, the house walls of Monastir were placarded with mottoes in
Turkish――“Death or Liberty,” “The Nation and Liberty,” “Freedom and
the Constitution.” Enver Bey proclaimed the Constitution at Salonica.
Telegrams from Salonica invited the Sultan to choose between the
Constitution and war. The officers of his Army were Young Turks to a
man. Even the reliable Anatolian regiments refused to march against
the rebels. Abdul Hamid surrendered. Parliamentary government with
free and equal suffrage for all the races of the Empire, was
proclaimed from the Throne. Abdul’s exiles came trooping home to find
Moslem _hojas_ and Orthodox clergy embracing each other and shouting
for the _Padishah_. The magic of that Western word “Constitution”
blended all the Empire in a transport of joy. The Young Turks were
swept into the Government on a wave of rejoicing.
[Illustration: FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA
Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National
Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.]
[Illustration: ALI FETHY BEY
Nationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and
deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of
the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in
November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the
Second Grand National Assembly.]
But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts
to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young
Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire
had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an
Anglo-Russian _entente_, its end was only a matter of time. Already
the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial
Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in
opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to
open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow,
which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two
communions in Constantinople.
The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won
over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay
the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new
Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks
suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with
shouts of “_Sheriat!_” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the
young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on
Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a
week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies――two Turks, a
Christian and a Jew――presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the
demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the
out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his
days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the
Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government.
And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the
Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its
headquarters at Salonica.
Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the
application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems
and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant
difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an
Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their
dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and
equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and
as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more
tightly to their community institutions. The application of
Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as
unpalatable to the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities as to the dominant
Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient
religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead
fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life
ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but
force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the
vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old
Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the
faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used
it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place
their own Christian theocracies.
Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal
education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we
Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the
Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron
control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and
the revolution degenerating for the time being into a mere _coup
d’etat_. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the
fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He
broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the
Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to
reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha
shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to
Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to
Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he
was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he
participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War.
Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as military _attache_ where he
joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance
at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to
Bulgaria.
The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the
Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire,
its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest
which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for
position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia
was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a
hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for
us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia,
preparing at Athens for still another war.
Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of
Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada
and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the
same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy
in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made
their _Rûm_ community more than ever tenacious of its institutions,
and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were
ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the
yellow-brown dome of the great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul.
An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks
were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of
1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into
contact with _Russian_ Orthodoxy and it was only a matter of time
until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in the _Russian_ claim to
the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts
of the Dardanelles.
The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the
direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been
amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were
developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at
amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken
down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and
only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only
alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and
with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy
responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the
Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks,
while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of
the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.
There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its
own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its
borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the
resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish.
It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an
open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any
language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers
which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the
Ministry of _Evkaf_ supplied funds to start a national library and to
subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began
reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds.
It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the Slavic
_Sokols_ and the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of
the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “_I am a Turk, my race and language
are great._” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating
Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their
place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still
had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam,
the Empire still obscured and confused it.
The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the
West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the
verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from
increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raider
_Hamidieh_ during the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy
and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time
against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a
larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by
private subscription before an order could be placed with British
yards for two new battleships.
Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface
peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they
waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of
their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and
Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were
preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of
Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the
“unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian
Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.
The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close
upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it
were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile
the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople,
with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition,
the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the Liberal
_Entente_ Party, but it had a poor time of it.
VI
GERMANY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
BRITISH POLICY AT CONSTANTINOPLE――THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CONCESSIONS――
RUSSIA’S VETO AND THE CHANGE OF ROUTE――THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF
ALEPPO――GERMANY AND ISLAM――THE BRITISH INDIAN FRONTIER IN SERBIA――THE
GREAT WAR.
I must make it plain that we are not here concerned with any aspect of
Germany west of the Balkans. The scene of this narrative lies east of
the Balkans and, insofar as it is possible to do so, we shall restrict
it to its proper _locale_. Although there was no German tradition in
Constantinople comparable to its British and French traditions,
Germany’s highway to the East crossed at the Straits the favorite
Russian route to the Mediterranean and hence afforded to the Ottoman
Government the same protection from its Russian enemy as the British
had once afforded. Nor was the German attraction solely diplomatic.
The Bagdad railway scheme afforded the Empire an opportunity for that
internal economic development which the Capitulations had made it
impossible for the Government itself to finance.
The British had not only supported the Government in Constantinople in
order to bar Russia from the Straits, but incidentally in order to bar
western Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a
potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of
peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking
and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that
imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and
the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters
might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract
economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is
usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow
freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines.
But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade
route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where
native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the
imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British
Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as
well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could
control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing
of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy.
Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to
confine western Europe’s communication with India to the sea lines
which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman
Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and
western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight
facilities to India.
But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the
land lines toward India were at last uncovered. In 1888, the Ottoman
Government transferred to a syndicate formed by the _Deutsche Bank_ of
Berlin a 56-mile railway from Haidar Pasha, a suburb of Constantinople,
to Ismid on the Sea of Marmora, and accompanied the transfer with a
concession to extend the line some 300 miles due east _via_ Eski-Shehr
to Angora. In the acceptance of this transfer and the exploitation of
the concession which accompanied it, Germany began to free itself of
the Suez Canal.
This concession was utilized by a German group calling itself the
Ottoman Anatolia Railway Company, which soon received a further
concession for the construction of a 230-mile extension of the Angora
line to Caesarea. The new concession contemplated still further
concessions through Sivas and Diarbekr to Mosul and thence down the
Tigris to Bagdad, a route which would have cut Russia’s projected
route from Kars to Alexandretta. Russia promptly vetoed it and the
Caesarea concession was dropped. A second concession had been received
at the same time, however, for a 269-mile line from Eski-Shehr on the
Ismid-Angora line to Konia, and Russia’s veto now changed the Konia
line from a feeder line to the main Bagdad line. The necessary
concessions for its extension from Konia through the Taurus Mountains
and on to Bagdad and Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf were
granted in 1903 to the Imperial Bagdad Ottoman Railway Company, which
took over the franchises of the original Ottoman Anatolia Company.
With railways and railway concessions in its possession for a
1,800-mile line from Haidar Pasha to Basra, the Bagdad Railway Company
now compared in its high political significance with the late East
India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated
Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line
through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the
Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta.
Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited
Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which
the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the
Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the
friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to
that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul
and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the
Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled.
Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr
route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south,
all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where
the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than
that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided,
however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to
breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never
wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed,
was only a two days’ march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a
half-day’s steaming from Cyprus, which the British had taken secretly
from the Sultan in 1876. Aleppo became the most vulnerable spot in the
Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme, protected in case of war only by the fact
that prior Russian and French claims upon it might tie the British
hands. Here the Bagdad Railway was to effect a junction with the
French railways which drop down the Syrian corridor to Damascus, and
the Caliph’s inland Hejaz Railway dropped from Damascus down the back
of the Syrian corridor to Medina whence it overlooked Mecca. Had the
British been free in case of war to occupy Aleppo from Cyprus, the
Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme would not only have been cut, but the Ottoman
Empire would have fallen at once into two parts and ultimately into
three. Deprived of the use of the sea, Constantinople would have been
cut off from Syria and the Hejaz immediately and its communication
with Mesopotamia would have been driven north into the heart of Asia
Minor where the inevitable Russian advance from Trans-Caucasia would
have imperilled it. Aleppo became the Achilles’ heel of the Empire,
pointed out to all who know their maps by the tell-tale finger of
Cyprus.
When finally adopted, the route of the Bagdad Railway began at Konia
on the Anatolian plateau, 3,300 feet above sea level, and well back
into the hinterland approached the Taurus whose peaks rear their
snow-clad summits against the sky at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Once
through the Taurus, its route descended to the low plain of Cilicia
and rose again to surmount the 5,000-foot Amanus Range which rims off
the top of the Syrian corridor. Thence it dropped to the 1,200-foot
level of Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was
easy.
Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government
signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its
isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar
Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of
1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to
India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger
traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The
Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the
Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway
from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to
the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic
would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on
to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever
rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system.
It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have
proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in
immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which
it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the
economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally
afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to
Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native
Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own
railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more
closely to the economic needs of the countries through which they
pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us
over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But
the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic
needs of native Governments.
However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might
ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious
attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development
of the East, and this is precisely what it did _not_ receive. Germany
backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same
reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs
of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.
As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a
foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control
of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the
southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the
western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry
was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had
tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down
to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway
now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London
and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its
Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German
railhead, it would have cut the Government of India’s only line of
communication with Teheran and would have menaced at Basra the
Cairo-to-Calcutta line of its great Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme.
The Bagdad Railway, however, did not expose itself to British
diplomatic sabotage as France’s canal across the Egyptian isthmus had
been exposed, for the British Embassy was no longer supreme at
Constantinople. It was in Serbia that the German highway to the East
crossed the Russian line to the Adriatic, and Austria-Hungary was
still seeking a pretext to clear the remnant of the South Slavs from
Germany’s path. In Serbia lay the frontier of British India. Over the
Serbian criss-cross, Great Britain joined Russia in the Anglo-Russian
Treaty of 1907, France joined the two of them after the Agadir crisis
of 1911 in Morocco, and Europe was divided into two armed camps, a
division which pivotted on Serbia.
Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with
Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911,
Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line
linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway
from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the
Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the
Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia.
By 1914, Great Britain had withdrawn its objection to the Bagdad
Railway and had agreed to support no rival railway, exception being
made for a Cairo-Basra line along the Cairo-Calcutta leg of its
Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle. At the same time, negotiations
were nearing completion between France and Germany, but all these
agreements lightly disappeared when the long-expected bugle call
finally sounded out of Serbia on June 28, 1914, and away to the north,
the east and the west, the drums began their answering roll.
VII
CHRISTENDOM AND THE WAR
The effect of the war of 1914-18 upon modern Christendom would not
concern us here if the scene of this narrative were not a Moslem
country to which Christendom, beginning with Old Greece and running
west to the country towns of the United States, has adopted an
attitude of superiority. I do not need to say that the subject of
Christianity itself is very far removed from the realm of controversy,
but its communicants are human beings and are not only subjects of
legitimate controversy but of entirely healthy controversy.
Moslems are usually hospitable to all foreigners and they frequently
respect missionaries personally. They use mission hospitals and
occasionally they avail themselves of the advantages of foreign
schools. But for missionaries as Christians, engaged in spreading a
gospel of peace while their contemporaries at home invent poison gas,
Moslems have neither understanding nor respect. In their Christian
capacities, missionaries are tolerated as long as they do not offend.
The older missionaries know these things. They know that in their
effort to spread Christianity, their greatest enemies have been the
Christians, and most of their work in the Ottoman Empire has been an
effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of
Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to
this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the word
_Christian_ is an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the
Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western
Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in
the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have
built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious
disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend
and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.
The missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in
prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor
traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and
Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian
Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority
become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople
within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of
Islam has been under the Christians’ control for four years and the
sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered
since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern
Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned
that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity “in
principle” rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians
themselves, from British Foreign Secretaries down to the humblest
Greek dive-keepers in Galata, have been converted to the practice of
Christianity, will the missionaries gain the understanding and respect
of Islam.
I am attempting to speak plainly upon a subject which can be no more
than suggested here for it carries us quickly outside the proper scope
of this narrative, but it is necessary to touch upon it if our subject
is to be plumbed to its depths. I believe that American Protestantism
and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them
and that that task lies nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is
nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the
wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.
VIII
THE WAR AND ISLAM
KEMAL HURRIES BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND RAUF BEY ASKS THE BRITISH
EMBASSY TO FINANCE NEUTRALITY――ENVER ENTERS THE WAR AND PERSIA
ATTEMPTS TO FOLLOW HIM――THE HARD POSITION OF ISLAM IN INDIA.
Kemal left his post as military _attache_ at Sofia immediately on the
outbreak of war in Europe, and hurried back to Constantinople, still a
young officer but an officer with a brilliant past, a hatred of the
Enver Government which was both personal and political, and a prestige
in the Army comparable to the prestige in the Navy which Hussein Rauf
Bey had won in the raider _Hamidie_. The probability that Russia would
participate in the European war had afforded the Enver Ministry the
opportunity it sought to achieve its Pan-Turanian project, to carry
the Crescent and Star to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan
province of Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and of the Russian
provinces in Central Asia. Fired by the same crude Westernism as had
turned the eyes of the Old Greeks to the “unredeemed” Greeks of
Constantinople, the Enver Ministry had envisaged a Greater Ottoman
Empire which, while maintaining the Caliphate out of deference to Old
Turkish and Islamic opinion, would “liberate” 40,000,000 “Turks” then
“groaning under the heel of the Russian oppressor” and would emerge
from the war a Great Power extending from the Balkans to Bokhara. The
Arabs to the south would be hammered into that respect for the
Caliphate which they had once manifested, but the Turks’ real future
lay away to the east. So the Enver Ministry concluded its secret
agreement with Germany, the British Government seized the two Ottoman
battleships which were building in British yards, and Germany was soon
to run the Goeben and Breslau into the Straits to take their places.
To Kemal and Rauf, the latter of whom had brought his crew home from
one of the two seized battleships in England, Enver’s Pan-Turanianism
was a program which the Empire could not afford. Both of them were
Westerners, but their Westernism was hard and practical and close to
the ground. Within the limits imposed upon them by the Caliphate,
which made the Empire the leader of Islam, they held that the Turk’s
first duty was to his own country. Russia having entered the war in
Europe, a defense of the eastern frontier would be necessary but the
Empire’s internal condition made it essential that events in Europe
should not be permitted to carry it further than a state of armed
neutrality. In the country’s bankrupt condition, the Enver Ministry
had secured the promise of German loans on condition that it
participated in the war against Germany’s enemies, and Rauf went to
the British Embassy immediately on his return to Constantinople, to
say that payment by the British Government for the two battleships it
had seized would strengthen the hands of the Opposition by enabling it
to finance mobilization on the eastern frontier without resort to
German money.
In this, Rauf spoke not only for the political Opposition but for the
strong British and French traditions in Constantinople to which
Enver’s course was a source of genuine grief. Rauf says, however, that
the British Embassy made him no reply. To quote his precise words:
“England made every effort to get Honduras, Paraguay and Greece into
the war on the side of the Allies, but for us she had no word.” The
Emperor of India and the Caliph had parted company in 1907. Great
Britain remained true to its commitments to Russia. Enver’s
Pan-Turanianism may have been impractical or not, but to any Ottoman
Government, whether headed by Enver or Rauf, there were only two
courses in the face of Russia――either to defend itself or to cease to
exist. The Enver Government secured its loans from Germany on the only
terms on which it could get them and if those terms involved war
against Great Britain, it illy becomes British statesmen to complain.
It was not the Enver Government which drew up the Anglo-Russian Treaty
of 1907.
German naval officers hustled the Enver Government to a break by
bombarding Odessa and dropping the mined nets which closed the
Straits, thus banging and bolting the Black Sea gate to Russia as
their own Navy in the north had already banged and bolted Russia’s
Baltic gate. The Caliph proclaimed a Holy War against all Christians
except Germans and Austrians, a proclamation which presumably was
intended to wreck British India but which had the immediate effect of
wrecking Tokatlian’s restaurant in Pera instead. The Enver Government
abrogated the humiliating Capitulations and proclaimed its war aims:
“Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our
national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us toward the
destruction of our Russian enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural
frontier to our Empire, which should include and unite all branches of
our race.” Enver himself took command on the eastern frontier and his
main body crossed into Russian Trans-Caucasia, while a smaller force
crossed the Persian frontier toward Tabriz. Ahead of him in both
directions lay large Turkish-speaking populations, and behind him in
Constantinople the Opposition had been scattered. Rauf, the hero of
the _Hamidie_, was eventually exiled to a volunteer command in Persia,
a great seaman fighting with the infantry. Kemal was eventually sent
to the Dardanelles, possibly in the hope that a British shell might
put an end to him.
By this time, Austria-Hungary had smashed Serbia out of the way and
both sides now poured out money and intrigue to win over Greece and
Bulgaria. But Greece refused to budge without the promise of
Constantinople which was in course of being promised to Russia, and
Bulgaria demanded Macedonia. Victories, however, are the most telling
arguments when Balkan Governments are sitting on the fence and Great
Britain launched its Dardanelles campaign in 1915, possibly to open
the road to Russia, possibly to enter Constantinople itself, possibly
to impress Greece and Bulgaria, possibly with all three objects. It
was here, in holding up the British before Anaforta, that Kemal became
a military hero in Germany and would have become the hero of his own
country if Enver had not suppressed the story of Anaforta in
Constantinople. Two years later, when it did leak out in the C. U. P.
year-book for 1917, Enver confiscated the entire remaining issue of
the year-book and had it destroyed. The British used to tell a story
of Kemal’s defense of Anaforta by way of showing that the Turks were
better soldiers than the Germans. According to their version, Kemal at
Anaforta telephoned his German superior, Limon von Sanders, for
permission to attack immediately. Von Sanders refused permission and
Kemal, tearing the telephone from the wall in a fit of anger, attacked
on his own responsibility and won. The story is doubtless false, but
it indicates the sort of legend which was growing up around a soldier
who was, firstly, a Turk and who, secondly, looked upon Germans and
British with equal coldness.
The ending of the British Dardanelles expedition, however, failed to
impress either Greece or Bulgaria. It did impress Constantinople and
when Ali Fethy Bey, Ottoman Minister at Sofia, not only supplied
Bulgaria with the necessary promise of Macedonia but made over to it
at once that bend in the Maritza River in which Karagatch, a suburb of
Adrianople, lies, Bulgaria came in and the Enver Government found
itself on the crest of a great wave of popularity. The Berlin-to-Bagdad
highway was now complete and on the afternoon of January 17, 1916, the
first express rolled into Constantinople direct from Berlin, while
Sirkedji Station rang with cheers.
British defeat at the Dardanelles was a severe blow to the legend of
British invincibility, and the promise of friendship to Islam which
the Kaiser had made at Damascus in 1898 now offered a possible means
of escape from the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The Enver Government had shown the way out and Persia which had felt
the weight of the 1907 Treaty most heavily, was not long in following.
The German Legation in Teheran helped it along with much talk of
Kaiser _Hajji_ Wilhelm Mohammed II and that sort of thing, but when
the Persian Parliament fled from Teheran in 1915 to declare war
against the Allies at Kum, the Russian and British Ministers hastened
to the Palace and threatened to complete their partition of the
country the moment the Shah left the capital. Thereafter the Shah
remained a prisoner in Teheran, while Russians, British, Persian
Nationalists and Turks fought across his chaotic country.
As for Afghanistan, the war found the Court at Kabul divided into two
parties, one led by the Amir’s stepmother Bibi Halima which backed him
in sticking loyally to the British, and the other led by his younger
brother Nasrullah Khan which demanded that he seize the chance of
powerful alliance in breaking out of the Anglo-Russian vise.
Nasrullah’s party grew rapidly, despite the fact that the Amir fought
it with every resource at his command. He confronted it personally
when in November, 1914, he strode onto Kabul bridge in royal state
and, holding the Koran in his hand, declaimed to his enemies: “These
_feringhis_ (British) are our friends. They are my friends. I the
Light of Faith, I, the Torch of the Nation, have decreed, and now
repeat my decree, that no subject of mine shall lift a finger against
the _feringhis_.”
As for Islam in India, its position became one of the sheer
curiosities of contemporary history. Its Emperor in London was at war
with its Caliph in Constantinople. As the result of the 1907 Treaty,
its temporal and its religious allegiances were thrown into direct
opposition. Its leaders attempted to harmonize this contradiction in
its loyalties by drawing a distinction between its Caliph and the
Ottoman Sultan, by conceiving of the war as existing between its
Emperor in London and the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, and by
demanding an undertaking from the Government of India that the war
involved purely temporal objectives and was not concerned in any
degree whatsoever with the Caliphate. The Government of India
accordingly gave an undertaking that the question of the Caliphate was
one for Moslem opinion alone to decide, and on this explicit
understanding Moslem troops were enlisted in India for service against
“our brother Turk.”
This use of Indian Moslems against the Ottoman Sultan, one of the most
delicate of operations, formed one of the outstanding British
successes of the war, but Englishmen at home have never succeeded in
discovering that British India exists. Forgetful of the fact that the
British Empire was “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” that it
contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, British
statesmen in England publicly referred to Salonica as “the portal of
Christianity” and to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force which later
advanced into Palestine, as “Crusaders.” At a moment when the
Government of India was making every effort to give its vast country a
sense of security, such references in England made Islam in India
instantly alert for its Caliphate.
IX
THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915
ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH――WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED――AMERICAN
MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS――RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS――GREAT
BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY――ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH
ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES――THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN
DEPORTATIONS.
When the Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned
the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn
the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the
most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be
adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations
and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave
birth.
In themselves, the Capitulations dated back to pre-Ottoman days when
foreigners were accustomed to being governed under their own laws and
usages wherever they happened to live. In the golden days of the
Ottoman Empire, the Sultans confirmed them and as Ottoman prestige
declined, an increasing number of Capitulatory rights grew up outside
the specific rights originally stipulated in the imperial _firmans_.
In general, it may be said of them that they conferred a diplomatic
status on all Westerners in the Empire, attaching them to their own
Consulates instead of to the Ottoman Government in whose country they
lived. They were abrogated by the Enver Government on Sept. 28, 1914,
in a unilateral declaration which the Central Powers were not in a
position to prevent and against which the Allied Powers could only
register their protests.
But the Capitulations were more than merely a legal process. They
constituted a mental attitude toward the Ottoman Government. They made
it the Western habit to disregard that Government and to establish
Western contacts with its subjects quite independently of the fixed
and existing relationships of the country. Under the Capitulations,
the West long ago established contact with the Ottoman Government’s
Christian subjects and a code of governmental conduct was unwittingly
built up which the West has applied to that Government alone. Under
this code, any Ottoman Christian was given the right to rebel against
the Government but the Government, although it was the only body
charged with the maintenance of peace in the country, was denied the
right to put down Christian rebellion. This code the West has applied
to no other Government. Orthodox Russia has repeatedly stamped out
Moslem rebellion in Central Asia with as great brutality as the
Ottoman Government has ever used against its Christians, but the code
which the West has applied to the Ottoman Government it has never
applied to Russia. The West has never acquired the habit of
disregarding the Russian Government in the country in which it was
charged with the duty of administration. Russia is a modern growth
which has never known Capitulations.
If it is possible for us to divest our minds of the last vestige of
the Capitulations, to apply to the Ottoman Government precisely the
same code of governmental conduct which it has been our custom to
apply to the Eastern absolutism of Old Russia, the relationship of the
Ottoman Government to its Armenians may be profitably examined.