The Armenian population before the late war consisted of about

1,500,000 in the Ottoman Empire, about 1,000,000 in the Russian

Empire, about 150,000 in Persia and about 250,000 in Egypt, Europe and

the United States. Although small colonies of them were to be found in

all parts of the Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them lived in the eastern

provinces, a mountainous tableland on which, with their Turkish

neighbors, they formed a sedentary peasantry among a nomadic

population of Kurds.

In none of these eastern provinces did they constitute a majority of

the population and in this respect they differed sharply from the

Greeks and Bulgarians of the old Balkan provinces. This was not due to

the Ottoman conquest, for the last of the independent Kingdom of

Armenia Major had disappeared in the Seljuk invasion of 1079, and the

Egyptians put an end to Armenia Minor in Cilicia in 1375. It was not

until 1514 that the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, in his campaign against

the Persians, occupied the modern eastern provinces and brought their

tangled populations into the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the

tolerance which distinguished the great Sultans, the Gregorian Church

to which the Armenians belonged, was made a recognized community in

full enjoyment of its ecclesiastical and cultural liberty. Unlike

Greeks and Bulgarians in Europe who did possess majorities and who

consequently had within themselves all the elements of nationhood, the

Armenians enjoyed in their community institutions the only degree of

autonomy which they could have enjoyed. It was comparatively easy for

Greeks and Bulgarians, once Western ideas of nationalism had reached

them, to enlarge the autonomy of their own community institutions into

territorial independence, but any attempt to transfer Armenian

autonomy from a religious to a territorial basis was quite another

matter. The population of the modern eastern provinces was such that a

resuscitation of the old Armenian Kingdom was impossible and it would

have remained impossible until some means had been discovered of

re-writing ten centuries of history.

That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans

in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their

Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration

that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem

was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young

Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by

reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in

the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress the Revolution

swiftly broke down and the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire

remained unsolved.

American missionaries established contact with the Armenian minorities

nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a

number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly

persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized

them, some time in the 1850’s, as a separate _Prodesdan_ community in

enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian

persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries

who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn

into touch with the new _Prodesdan_ community in the Ottoman Empire.

It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into

contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the

Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that

the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering

under Hamidian administration should become known in the United

States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its

tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or

would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that

the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of

bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American

vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the

Hamidian _regime_ in Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks

and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American

missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians’

sufferings alone.

[Illustration: LIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON, G. B. E.,

K. C. B., D. S. O.

Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in

September and October, 1923.]

[Illustration: GENERAL ISMET PASHA

Commander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna

in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania

Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the

Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of

the Second Grand National Assembly.]

In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a

wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the

Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in

Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from

Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of

their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron

hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their

march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman

Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which

closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of

1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was

agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of

1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s

realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most

difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became

the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But

Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty,

had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty

reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs

independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with

them under the Hamidian _regime_. This tendency presently found

further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in

Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of

Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their

headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the

Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New

York.

Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus

far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the

Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating

the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were

still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the

West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia,

sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient

Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees

succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal

community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage

massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly

fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people

whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous

handicap, were generally exempted from blame.

In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in

Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year,

the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged

a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern

provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great

Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence

it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and

Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted

the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh

impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed

to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with

whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian

annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great

Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy

so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian

annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern

provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any

Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians

constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual

annexation.

The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young

Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the

downfall of the Hamidian _regime_. An Armenian _bloc_ was formed in

the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered

into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian

opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived

Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the

reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But

the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted

independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in the

_technique_ of revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be

Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was

the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul

Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may

be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop

to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style

of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to

attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina.

Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but

refrained from landing men.

Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan

Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver

Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia

having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach

some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would

counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily

demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the

Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the

demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of

British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the

Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster,

American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British

officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There

was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which

authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at

Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which

partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These

understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the

“spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.

When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward

Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make

him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to

return to London without having taken up his duties. But American

churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government

at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire,

however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient

length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete

abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in

the management of their schools.

The British Foreign Office had no sooner turned down the Enver

Government’s demand than Russia served its own demands at

Constantinople. The Enver Government appealed to Germany and a

compromise was eventually effected under which a Dutchman and a

Norwegian were appointed Inspectors-General in the eastern provinces.

Neither of them had ever been in the Near East and neither knew any

Near Eastern language. The war began shortly and neither of them ever

reached the Near East.

The Armenian _bloc_ in the Parliament at Constantinople was holding

its 1914 congress at Erzerum in the eastern provinces when the Enver

Government entered the war. Government emissaries visited them there

and laid before them the Pan-Turanian project whose immediate object

was to throw Russia back. A partition of Russian Trans-Caucasia was

proposed, the conquered territory to be divided between Armenians,

Georgians and Tartars, each to be accorded autonomy under Ottoman

suzerainty. The Armenian _bloc_ replied that if war proved necessary

they would do their duty as Ottoman subjects but they advised the

Government to remain neutral. It may be assumed that the Armenian

deputies in the Parliament were still willing, despite the

disappointments of the Enver _regime_, to work the Constitution with

the Turkish deputies. The independence committees, however, found

their inspiration in the West and their program was electrified by the

professed concern for Armenian independence with which the Allied

Powers began the war. The Russian annexationist group was similarly

affected. In their view, Russia’s opportunity to “liberate” the

eastern provinces was at hand.

Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to

mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed

opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun, a town of Armenian

mountaineers who had long enjoyed an almost complete local

independence. Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to

the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty

of those who remained, removed them from the combatant forces and

formed them into labor gangs whose commissariat, to put it mildly,

worked even more decrepitly than that of the combatant troops.

With this situation in his rear, Enver Pasha crossed both the Russian

and Persian frontiers but in January, 1915, he was thrown back behind

his own frontier by the Russian victory at Sarykamish. This victory

fired the annexationist hopes and armed bands of Armenian volunteers

began operating behind the Ottoman Armies. In April, Lord Bryce and

the “Friends of Armenia” in London appealed for funds to equip these

volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them.

Seeing that both Great Britain and Russia were at war with the Ottoman

Government, it would have been surprising if so obvious a move had

been overlooked. These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of

the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred

the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to

the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks

precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed

there in May, 1919. The rumor immediately ran through Asia Minor that

the Armenians had risen.

By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the

Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and

streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia

Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very

gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not

seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have

been chosen by the Enver Government to take wide-spread measures

against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were

immediately necessary. Measures were taken. The provincial governors

in those parts of the Empire which were exposed to the enemy, _i. e._,

the eastern provinces and the Mediterranean coast where British and

French men of war were maintaining a patrol, were ordered to assemble

their Armenians and march them south into the Arab country for

internment. If these deportations were to be carried out in an orderly

fashion, the strongest and most reliable police arrangements were

necessary but these arrangements the Enver Government either could not

or would not make. In general, the deportations only gathered the

Armenians together and exposed them without protection to a population

alarmed and angered by the news from Van. They broke down into a

dreadful business in which Armenian men of military age were shot down

in batches and the remnant of women, children and old persons who had

not already made their way as refugees into Russian Trans-Caucasia,

were finally interned in Mesopotamia and Syria under conditions of the

direst want.

This business deprived Russia of its sole claim to intervention in the

eastern provinces, and the British Foreign Office which shared in the

Anglo-Russian program of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as Persia had

already been partitioned, has naturally made the most of it. Lord

Bryce’s estimate of the number of Armenians who died in the course of

it was 800,000.

X

THE 1907 TREATY AND THE CALIPHATE

GREAT BRITAIN PROMISES CONSTANTINOPLE TO RUSSIA――ARAB NATIONALISM AND

THE HOLY PLACES OF ISLAM――THE HEJAZ BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF

CONSTANTINOPLE――THE BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM――THE CALIPHATE AGITATION

IN INDIA.

The Anglo-Russian _entente_ which had been created by the 1907 Treaty,

went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone

grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south.

The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a

moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern

imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.

Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907

Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British

surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople,

the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was

surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being

made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The

agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government

of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the

subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.

The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed

upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern

provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for

which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern).

Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an

international Western _regime_, and the rest of the Syrian corridor,

together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new

Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to

France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But

the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an

Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on

the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its

Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its

zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of

the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from

Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British

base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government

raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and

Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the

British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force

“D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to

operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open

at Aleppo.

It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The

Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez

Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to

India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the

Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of

British imperialism.

Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the

enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated

in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam

was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener

were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in

Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a

protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly

acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist

Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a

program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been

what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication”

in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our

brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of

entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which

we customarily use….

Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov.

5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once.

In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’s

_Khedive_ and to set up a _Khedive_ of its own. London’s repeated

pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the

final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a

difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the

Agency’s _Khedive_ assuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now

elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed.

Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through

which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streaming

_en route_ to France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed

assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as

Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend

the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown

back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to

establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force

marked time while the _Grand Sherif_ of Mecca communicated the terms

of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made

it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and

the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement

which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not

long detain us here.

What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab

nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of

the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force

marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of

its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor

lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of

the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman

Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government

of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem

opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the

Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in

due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The

Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which

should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.

Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in

the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem

Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British

surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate

was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty

broke it.

The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with the _Grand

Sherif_ of Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the

Hejaz, but the _Sherif’s_ son Feisal drew a cordon around them in

Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British

officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting

the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the

Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the

rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to

British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 the _Grand

Sherif_ declared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the

title of King Hussein I.

The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his

own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox

union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople,

and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the

Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that

day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred

from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the

Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of

the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial

Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.

With its right secured, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now free

to advance on Jerusalem. With British officers on its right fetching

Feisal’s Hejaz Army northward toward Damascus, the E. E. F. wheeled

into the lower end of the Syrian corridor against stubborn

Turco-German opposition. With small French and Italian detachments

posted to it in view of the award of Palestine to an international

Western _regime_, the E. E. F. finally occupied Jerusalem late in 1917

and, having broken up repeated enemy attempts to recover it, rested on

its arms while the Residency at Cairo converted it into a British

_fait accompli_.

When Godfrey de Bouillon captured Jerusalem in a former episode, he

waded through blood to his saddle girth to rescue the Holy Sepulchre,

but mediaevalism has changed its methods. When General Allenby

captured it in 1917, he tacked up an “Out of Bounds” sign on the Holy

Sepulchre, the Residency at Cairo hurried up one of its _attaches_ to

serve as military governor of the town, an assistant city engineer

from Alexandria hurriedly arrived to draw up a new town plan for it

and a landscape artist was hurried down from London to put the new

town plan into effect. So Jerusalem became a British _fait accompli_

and so it remains to this day. And the new town plan, having

presumably served its purpose, has disappeared.

The war has given us all an aptitude for loose thinking and a full

share of loose thought has attached to General Allenby and his

Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Under our Western political tradition, a

majority of the population is given the right to determine its own

destiny, provided it is of a sufficient degree of intelligence to

shoulder its responsibilities. If the faith of that majority in

Palestine happens to be Islam, is not Islam the only one of the three

faiths to which both Christian and Jewish shrines are equally sacred

with its own? Has Islam ever failed in respect to the Christian and

Jewish shrines in Jerusalem during its centuries of trusteeship? And

what has happened to Islam’s shrines in Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo,

in Sicily and Malta, under Christian rule?

At the British demand, the Ottoman Caliph finally withdrew his

garrison from Medina after the armistice in 1918. It is simple enough

to upset the theology of an Ottoman Caliphate, but the British Foreign

Office, despite the Government of India’s specific undertaking to

Moslems in India, has upset the _fact_ of an Ottoman Caliphate and in

the last fifty years the fact and the theology of the matters. The

Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which

are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown

into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian

imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow

Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young

Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam

in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust

its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab

nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon

the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western

imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had

become a protest.

Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government

of India’s undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter

for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as

a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With

these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the

capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the

war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most

formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the

India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off

Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian

Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer

curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that

exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has

been saying to the Defender of the Faith since 1907 and what reply the

Defender of the Faith has been making to the Emperor of India.

XI

THE COLLAPSE OF CZARIST RUSSIA

THE CZAR ABDICATES――THE FRENCH DEPOSE CONSTANTINE AT ATHENS――KEMAL

URGES ENVER TO WITHDRAW FROM THE WAR――MR. LLOYD GEORGE’S NEW WAR AIMS

IN TURKEY――THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907 ABROGATED――PAN-TURANIANISM

LEAPS INTO LIFE ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN ROUT――THE MUDROS ARMISTICE

OPENS THE BRITISH ROAD TO THE CHAOS IN RUSSIA.

Following the East India Company’s lead, the Government of India had

long continued to weave into closer mesh the fabric of British

influence which covered the land-locked Persian Gulf. In Nejd, Koweit

and Mohammerah, in the maintenance for more than a century of an Agent

at Bagdad, there lay the seeds of a British Arabian enterprise

comparable to the great enterprise of British India. The Anglo-Russian

Treaty of 1907 ensued and in 1914 the Government of India diverted a

brigade of Indian Expeditionary Force “A” for Egypt and France, to the

Persian Gulf where it lay off Bahrein Island to make a lightning

stroke against Basra, the key to Bagdad. As soon as war was declared,

it was heavily reinforced and, having been designated Indian

Expeditionary Force “D,” it moved at once on Basra which it occupied

in three weeks. Its Political Officer urged an immediate advance on

Bagdad, but the Government of India was already groaning under the

pressure from London. “D” Force succeeded, however, in advancing

slowly north against a stiffening Turco-German opposition until it

reached Kut-el-Amara.

At this stage, the tired Government of India suddenly woke up and

ordered a bold dash to Bagdad. This turn of events changed the whole

basis of “D” Force’s operations from the defensive to the offensive, a

change for which the Force as then constituted was quite inadequate.

The result was that the Turco-German command was able at Ctesiphon to

throw General Townshend back to Kut-el-Amara where he was surrounded

and held out for five months while the Government of India launched

successive failures to relieve him. Kut-el-Amara was finally starved

into surrender, General Townshend was removed to Constantinople as a

prisoner of war, and the Government of India was forthwith relieved of

its command. Indian Expeditionary Force “D” now became the

Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force under War Office command, although

the Government of India retained its political command in Sir Percy

Cox.

It was not until the end of 1916 that the War Office was ready to

begin operations for the recapture of Kut-el-Amara, and by the end of

February, 1917, the enemy was in full retreat. On the heels of his

rout, Bagdad was occupied on March 11 and, although the Turco-German

command made repeated attempts to recapture the city, its British

defense held and Germany’s Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme was left in the

air.

The Russian Armies by this time had not only advanced deeply into the

eastern provinces but had occupied their zone in northern Persia in

sufficient force to link with the British in Mesopotamia. A very few

of them had even been permitted to travel to Basra and below it to

gaze upon the blue and British waters of the Persian Gulf.

But on March 12, 1917, the Czar abdicated.

On May 16, Kerensky’s Republican Cabinet was set up at Petrograd, and

the British Foreign Office entered at once into cordial relations with

it.

On June 11, the French deposed Constantine at Athens, the Venizelist

Government which was imposed on Old Greece entered the war on the side

of the Allies, and ever since the failure of the British Dardanelles

campaign, there had been an Allied Army based on Salonica, the key to

Constantinople.

In July, Kerensky ordered General Baratoff to withdraw the Russian

Armies from Persian soil. They melted away both from Persia (with the

exception of a small force of die-hards who continued to hold Teheran

hoping that the trouble at Petrograd would soon blow over), and from

the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

On Sept. 30, General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had thrown up his

command of the Sixteenth Army in disgust after a break with Falkenhayn

over the recapture of Bagdad, urged Enver Pasha to make the Russian

collapse the occasion of withdrawal from the war. The disruption of

the country’s economic life and the constant drainage away of its gold

to Germany could have but one end, he wrote from Aleppo. Even with

Russia eliminated, Great Britain and France could not be divided and

they could not be beaten. The British would conquer Palestine, would

set up a Christian Government with which to hold the Suez Canal, and

would isolate the remnant of the Empire from the rest of Islam――“a

sound war policy made possible by our entry into the war against

England, a policy whose success means irreparable loss for us and

whose failure means German domination for us…. Falkenhayn has said

repeatedly to anyone who will listen to him, that he is a German and

is naturally interested first in Germany. If he can hold Palestine, he

will place himself before the world and before our country as one of

the great victors of the war. We shall then lose our own country and

to this end, Falkenhayn will sacrifice every ounce of gold and every

soldier he can squeeze out of us.” But in the wake of the Russian

rout, Pan-Turanianism had leaped into new life. Enver’s reply was to

give Falkenhayn command of the Palestine front and to exile Kemal,

together with Rauf Bey, to Germany in the suite of the Crown Prince.

On Nov. 7, another revolution lifted its head amid the chaos of the

Kerensky administration and Soviet Russia was born, to be attacked at

once by the British Foreign Office with a vindictive hatred which has

not even now run its full course.

On Jan. 5, 1918, Mr. Lloyd George, then barred from access to Soviet

Russia by the bolted Straits, declared in London: “Nor are we fighting

… to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands

of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race…. We

do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the

homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople.”

This declaration was interpreted by what remained of the Opposition in

Constantinople, to mean that the Emperor of India, freed from his

Russian incubus, was in a position to renew his old understanding with

the Caliph.

On Feb. 1, Soviet Russia abrogated the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907

and the British Foreign Office “shook hands with murder” to the extent

of concurring in the abrogation. But the 1907 Treaty had already

worked out to its ghastly fruition. Nothing remained of Persia’s

independence but an imprisoned Shah at Teheran. The Caliphate of Islam

was destroyed, and few countries have ever been flogged into such ruin

as now prevailed in the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire.

On March 2, Germany imposed its peace terms on Soviet Russia at

Brest-Litovsk, detaching the Ukraine from Russia, embedding the Black

Sea firmly in the Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme (the old Berlin-to-Bagdad

scheme had been left in the air by the British capture of Bagdad), and

making over Batum to the Turks. A Turco-German conference at Trebizond

on the Black Sea speedily effected a joint policy for Trans-Caucasia,

under whose terms Baku was named as the capital of a new

Trans-Caucasian State to be christened “Azerbaijan,” presumably after

the Azerbaijan province in north-west Persia which it was proposed to

claim as an irredentum for the new State. An Ottoman Army, accompanied

by a German military mission, now lost no time in moving on Baku and

the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force simultaneously detached a

small body which it designated the “Dunsterforce,” hurriedly

dispatching it across Persia for Tiflis in Trans-Caucasia. Turks,

Germans and British raced for Baku, all three determined now that

Russia had fallen back behind the barrier of the Caucasus Range, to

hold it there.

In the eastern provinces, the Russian rout had left hardly as much as

a street cat alive. In what had been Russian Trans-Caucasia, beyond

the eastern provinces, three small and quarrelsome Governments bobbed

about like corks in the chaos, a Tartar Government at Baku controlled

by the local Russian Soviet, an Armenian Government at Erivan

controlled by the brigand-patriot Antranik, and a Liberal Georgian

Government at Tiflis which feared the Russians and despised the

Armenians. The Ottoman Army drove its way easily to Baku. The British

Dunsterforce reached there first but only in time to flee back to

Persia, for the Ottoman forces stormed the city’s hurriedly

extemporized defensive works, installed their Azerbaijan Government,

signed their treaty of close military alliance with it, organized the

Turkish Federalist Party in its support and set about the task of

fetching all Trans-Caucasia under its rule. Firmly founded on the

German Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme, Pan-Turanianism had finally become

a reality.

Meanwhile on July 3, the Crown Prince succeeded to the Throne at

Constantinople. The Sixth Mohammed took up his abode in the white

marble palace of Dolma Bagtsche on the Bosphorus. But it was not the

Old Turks who girded him with the Prophet’s Sword. Instead of the

Mevlevi _tchelebi_ from Konia, he was girded by the _sheikh_ of the

great Senussi order whose seat is at Jarabub in the Sahara. A German

submarine had taken him aboard at an empty place on the African coast

and had landed him at Pola. Throughout the crossing, he had said his

prayers five times a day in the forward battery compartment, facing

toward Mecca by standard compass.

General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had spent most of a year touring

Germany and Austria-Hungary in disgrace, was now recalled and given

the _Yilderim_ group (Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Armies) on the

Palestine front. But it was too late. Amid the din of a world war

crashing to its close, simultaneous offensives were launched in

September, by the French command at Salonica with Constantinople as

its objective and by the British command in Palestine with Aleppo as

its objective. With General Allenby’s great break-through overrunning

the Syrian corridor, the French imposed an armistice on Bulgaria and

the Enver Government fell in Constantinople. Enver Pasha fled to

Daghestan, a dapper young Turk still in earnest pursuit of the

Pan-Turanian will-o’-the-wisp, and the Opposition inherited the wreck

with its capital gripped by a German garrison and French fingers

reaching for it from the Maritza.

But the great wheel twirled and clicked. From a French command with

the Old Greeks in tow, the new Izzet Government in Constantinople had

nothing to hope. From the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian

incubus, it had everything to hope. Secretly in order not to provoke

the Germans to counter-action, the Izzet Government lost no time in

dispatching General Townshend who was still a prisoner of war on

Prinkipo, to the British naval Commander-in-Chief at Port Mudros

outside the Straits. Rauf Bey, Minister of Marine in the Izzet

Cabinet, followed in hurried secrecy with two colleagues. If their

mission was a success, the German garrison in Constantinople would

have to be confronted with a _fait accompli_.

In the cabin of H. M. S. Agamemnon, Admiral Calthorpe’s flagship at

Port Mudros, Rauf outlined the Izzet Government’s program in seeking

an armistice: (1) a return to the understanding which the Caliph and

the Emperor of India had enjoyed down to 1907; (2) autonomy for the

Arabs under the Caliph’s sovereignty; (3) recognition of the

abrogation of the Capitulations; and (4) temporary financial help, if

necessary. Admiral Calthorpe asked only that the Straits be unbarred

and the road to Soviet Russia be opened. As for Pan-Turanianism, it

might prove useful in holding Russia behind the barrier of the

Caucasus Range. Clause 11 of the Mudros armistice stipulated as

follows: “Immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops from North-West

Persia to behind the pre-war frontier has already been ordered and

will be carried out. Part of Trans-Caucasia has already been ordered

to be evacuated by Turkish troops, the remainder to be evacuated if

required by the Allies after they have studied the situation there.”

Clause 15 added: “Allied control officers to be placed on all

railways, including such portions of Trans-Caucasian railways now

under Turkish control, which must be placed at the free and complete

disposal of the Allied authorities, due consideration being given to

the needs of the population. This clause to include Allied occupation

of Batum. Turkey will raise no objection to the occupation of Baku by

the Allies.”

So “hostilities between the Allies and Turkey” ceased “from noon,

local time, on Thursday, 31st October, 1918.” The Straits were

unbarred and when the French fingers closed upon Constantinople,

British fingers closed with them. General Franchet d’Esperet had to

share his command with General Milne. Between rows of British and

French bayonets, the German garrison marched out of the capital and

the Turks were relieved that the Emperor of India was once again the

friend of the Caliph. Allied fleets, to be strengthened soon by most

of the British Grand Fleet from the North Sea, steamed up the

Dardanelles and anchored in the Bosphorus. Greek battleships followed

them, anchoring under the windows of Dolma Bagtsche palace, and the

Ottoman Caliph, to spare himself the painful sight, repaired to Yildiz

Kiosk which for thirty-two years had been the hermit-home of Abdul

Hamid. With Liberal Russia destroyed, the Church of England was soon

to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with the

Orthodox Church from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Phanar in

Constantinople. Five centuries of history were about to be re-written

and Ottoman Greeks in the capital, trampling their _fezzes_, donned

Western hats in transports of the wildest joy. The remnant of the

Ottoman Armenians did the same; both the Ottoman Empire and Russia

were destroyed and nothing (except ten centuries of history) now

remained to prevent the resuscitation of the mediaeval Kingdom of

Armenia.

But the Ottoman capital had been reduced to a supply base for Denikin.

With an Anglo-French command in firm control of the great city, the

Russians at last began their entry into Constantinople――big Slavs in

uniform who had borne the British to their knees in 1907, huge

slit-eyed men once kings in Kafiristan, now grovelling for crusts in

the gutters of Galata.

XII

THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN WAR OF 1918-’20

HOW MR. LLOYD GEORGE TRIED TO IMPOSE ALONE UPON ISLAM THAT FATE WHICH

GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA HAD AGREED TO IMPOSE TOGETHER IN 1907――THE

ANGLO-PERSIAN AGREEMENT――THE “CENTRAL ASIAN FEDERATION”――THE AMERICAN

MANDATE IN TRANS-CAUCASIA――THE RETURN OF SOVIET RUSSIA.

The war now began in bitter earnest.

Czarist Russia had been a weight upon Islam which had increased until

1907 when, in agreement with Great Britain, the two Powers began

grinding to pieces the last of the independent Islamic States.

Russia’s collapse in 1917 and the resultant abrogation of the 1907

Treaty, coinciding with Germany’s collapse, afforded the British

Government a marvelous opportunity to reconsider its policy toward

Islam. The British had no great enemy left in the East, but apparently

the fact did not occur to Mr. Lloyd George. In the Anglo-Russian war

of 1918-’20, the British Government took over the business of crushing

Islam which Czarist Russia had begun, while attempting to overthrow

the Soviet Government and re-instate in office a Russian Government

which should concur in the fate which the British alone now sought to

impose on the last of the Islamic States. With Constantinople

occupied, the Ottoman Sultans could be reduced to simple Amirs of

Anatolia whenever Mr. Lloyd George chose. In the meantime, what

happened in Turkey hardly mattered. What happened in Russia did

matter.

The little Dunsterforce which had been thrown back into Persia by the

Turkish capture of Baku, was quickly reinforced from Bagdad and became

the British North Persia Force with its base at Kasvin, not far from

Teheran. Here it stood in the heart of the old Russian zone, despite a

small body of Czarist die-hards who still clung to the old Russian

zone in Teheran. Meanwhile the old British zone in the southern half

of Persia had been occupied by the South Persia Rifles whose officer

personnel was British, and early in 1918 the Government of India had

dispatched the East Persia Cordon from Quetta along the Nushki Railway

to the new railhead of Duzdap in the Seistan, whence it ran a lorry

road north through Persia to Meshed in the old Russian zone and flung

out detachments to occupy Askabad and the Merv oasis on the Russian

Trans-Caspian Railway.

Late in 1918, the Mudros armistice enabled the North Persia Force to

re-occupy Baku in Trans-Caucasia (where it left the Turkish Federalist

Party in power) and General Milne occupied Batum from Constantinople.

Ostensibly to hold Denikin’s rear, the British occupation of

Trans-Caucasia was rapidly completed, the Turco-German forces being

evacuated into the eastern provinces and the remnants of the Czarist

forces being rounded up and dismissed to Denikin’s front. At Baku, the

Czarist Caspian Fleet was maneuvred into British hands and removed to

British keeping at Enzeli on the Persian coast. Opposite Baku on the

eastern coast of the Caspian, the East Persia Cordon detached from

Askabad a small garrison for Krasnovodsk, and Persia was now not only

held by British and Indian forces but all its approaches, from north,

south, east and west, were in the same hands.

In Denikin’s rear, General Milne at Constantinople now commanded a

single British front which crossed Trans-Caucasia from Batum to Baku,

which made a British lake of the Caspian, and which extended into

Central Asia from Krasnovodsk to Askabad and the Merv oasis. Over all

of it, the double-headed eagle of Czarist Russia had waved only a year

before. Behind this truly remarkable front, railway projects were

speedily envisaged by which the new British Arabia, British Persia and

British Trans-Caucasia were to be firmly bound to each other and to

British India, a Bagdad-Teheran-Enzeli line to develop Enzeli into a

British naval base which should command the Caspian, and a Batum-Kars-

Tabriz-Duzdap line to fetch the frontiers of British India to the

Black Sea as they had already been fetched to Haifa on the

Mediterranean. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle had not only

been made good, but the collapse of Czarist Russia had made the

British a present of the Constantinople-Kabul line in addition.

British officers were glum with expectation.

Sir Percy Cox, chief political officer of the Mesopotamian

Expeditionary Force, was dispatched to Teheran as British Minister as

soon as the Mudros armistice brought the war to an end on the

Mesopotamia front, and began formulating the Anglo-Persian Agreement

at once. Persia had then been swallowed whole by the British. The

North Persia Force was paying 350,000 _tomans_ a month (roughly

$800,000) to keep the Persian Government in being and 100,000 _tomans_

a month to keep the old Cossack Division quiet. Under these

conditions, Sir Percy Cox began negotiations in January, 1919, with

three Persian grandees and by June the Agreement was ready to be

signed. It provided for a British loan of £2,000,000 to the Persian

Government and for British advisers in the Persian Ministries.

Briefly, it had the effect of reducing Persia to another of the

British Indian frontier States. It was finally approved by the British

Foreign Office and was signed by the three Persians on August 9. It

had been drawn up secretly and no public announcement of its signature

was made until August 15, when it was announced simultaneously that

the Shah had left for a prolonged tour in Europe. It was to take

effect as soon as the Persian Parliament ratified it. At the moment

the Parliament was not in session, the deputies having left Teheran in

1915, intending to re-assemble at Kum to follow the Ottoman Empire

into war against the Anglo-Russian _entente_.

Meanwhile the East Persia Cordon regularized the position of its

garrisons in Meshed and Merv by styling them “Afghan Consulates-General

under armed guard.” It will be recalled that the Amir Habibullah Khan

of Afghanistan, a wild country which tilts up to the roof of the world

above the north-west frontier of India, had stuck loyally to the

British despite a fiery nationalist party which sought to carry him

into the war against the Anglo-Russian _entente_. He was still

sticking loyally to the British when Czarist Russia fell in 1917 and

all of Central Asia fell with it into the most complete confusion.

North of him, Bokhara, a smaller country which adjoins the Afghan

frontier for nearly half its length, had been nominally independent

under the rule of its Emir, Said Mir Alim Khan, in Old Bokhara City,

but actually ruled by the Czarist Resident in the Russian cantonment

of New Bokhara. The Kerensky Cabinet at Petrograd continued this

_regime_, but Soviet Russia recalled the Resident and left the Emir in

control. The mutual abrogation of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 had

the effect of leaving both Bokhara and Afghanistan in enjoyment of

actual independence. The Young Uzbeg Party in Bokhara immediately

began an agitation for the introduction of Parliamentary government,

but the Emir Said Mir Alim lost no time in discovering new friends at

Merv where the Government of India’s East Persia Cordon had set up one

of its “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.”

It had never been possible for the British to dictate their own terms

to Afghanistan as they did to Persia after the Russian retreat, for

the Afghans are made of sterner stuff. Neither the Uzbegs of Bokhara

to the north nor the Punjabis of India to the south have shown much

love for the Afghans. As for the Persians, the Afghans could doubtless

do what they pleased with them. But with the dispatch of the East

Persia Cordon to Meshed and Merv, Said Mir Alim of Bokhara and

Habibullah of Afghanistan reached an understanding respecting a

“Central Asian Federation” which should be “independent of Russian

domination.”

[Illustration: PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI

Until the Ottoman General Election in November, 1919, an Orthodox

priest at Kiskin, near Angora; after the General Election, “acting

metropolitan” of the Turkish Orthodox Church.]

[Illustration: MELETIOS IV

Oecumenical Patriarch from February, 1922, to July, 1923.]

The meaning of Bokhara to British India has already been indicated.

British command of the Caspian now isolated the Trans-Caspian Railway

from Soviet Russia, and with Bokhara detached from Russia and brought

within the British Indian orbit, the only remaining Russian railway to

the back of India, _i. e._, the Moscow-Orenburg-Tashkent line, would

stop at Samarkand as far as its military usefulness to any future

Russia was concerned. The Russian spurs to Termez and Kushklinsky Post

on the northern frontier of Afghanistan which had been nightmares in

British India, would lose their meaning. Any future Russian move

against British India would be countered at Bokhara which lies at a

sufficient distance to prevent the unsettling effect of Anglo-Russian

trouble from making itself felt in India.

But on Feb. 20, 1919, Habibullah was assassinated. Nasrullah seized

the throne but, convicted in open durbar of murdering the Amir, he was

unseated in favor of the Amir’s third son, Amanullah. Nasrullah’s

strong nationalist following rushed pell-mell into an invasion of

British India, but was thrown back by the Indian Army. The East Persia

Cordon was hurriedly withdrawn to Quetta and the announcement of the

Anglo-Persian Agreement’s signature at Teheran was followed three

weeks later by a Bokharan revolution in which the Young Uzbeg party

dethroned Said Mir Alim and set up its Parliament. Possibly the Young

Uzbegs feared a similar British _coup_ at Bokhara City.

Said Mir Alim having fled into Afghanistan, the Soviet Government at

Moscow finally concluded military and commercial treaties with the

Young Uzbegs on March 4, 1921, which purport to recognize the

independence of the Bokhara People’s Soviet Republic. This is

Bokhara’s present title, but the British Foreign Office still

withholds full recognition from any of the Soviet States. Even as late

as May 8, 1923, a note from Lord Curzon to the Soviet Government

demanded _inter alia_ the recall of the Soviet Ministers from Teheran

and Kabul, and a long statement by Said Mir Alim on the subject of

Soviet “treachery” was circulated to the London press on the evening

of June 4….

The East Persia Cordon’s hurried scuttle back to Quetta early in 1919

still left the British in control of Persia and in occupation of

Trans-Caucasia and Constantinople. General Milne still commanded the

Black Sea, the line of the Caucasus Range, the Caspian and the

trans-Caspian town of Krasnovodsk. Denikin still stood between Soviet

Russia and the British.

Having isolated the starving Armenians of Erivan from any possibility

of Russian relief, whether from Denikin or Soviet Russia, the British

permitted Americans to embroil themselves in Armenian affairs as

intimately as they would. If the United States Government had

permitted itself to be rushed into the acceptance of a mandate over

the Armenians in Trans-Caucasia, it is not impossible that the British

would have gratefully accepted the barrier between Soviet Russia and

British Persia which such a mandate would incidentally have furnished.

The Armenians had once constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to

intervention in the eastern provinces of the old Ottoman Empire, and

if that claim had been disposed of to the United States, not only

would an effective barrier have been interposed in front of Russia’s

inevitable return to Trans-Caucasia but the remnant of Turkey would

have been cut off from the rest of Islam.

By the summer of 1919, however, it had become plain that the United

States Government, while anxious to see American relief extended to

the Armenians, was unwilling to incur an inevitable quarrel with the

future Russia, and General Milne in Constantinople announced that

Italy would occupy Trans-Caucasia. Three months later, an Italian

military mission on the spot followed the example which the United

States Government had set and in September, 1919, the necessity of

reinforcing his Constantinople garrison compelled General Milne to

pull in his isolated packet of troops in Krasnovodsk and to evacuate

Trans-Caucasia down to Batum. Will the Royal Army Service Corps ever

issue another ration of caviare in Baku?

Mr. Lloyd George now began peddling Trans-Caucasia all over Europe,

offering the Armenians in turn to Holland, Sweden, Rumania, to the

League of Nations, to Canada and New Zealand, and even flirting with

Turkish Pan-Turanianism. But the spectacle of Mr. Lloyd George bearing

gifts to the world attracted the same scrutiny elsewhere as it had

already attracted at Washington. Presumably anybody who was able to

hold Trans-Caucasia could have had the Armenians in those days (except

Denikin and Soviet Russia who alone were both able and willing to take

them), for demobilization at home was rapidly putting an end to

British ability to hold anything more than Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria,

Egypt, Cyprus and Constantinople.

This sort of thing continued until Denikin began his retreat early in

1920, which sooner or later would expose Trans-Caucasia to the Soviet

Government. Still tub-thumping on the subject of the Armenians, the

British Foreign Office now gave _de facto_ recognition to the Turkish

Federalist Government of Azerbaijian, the _Dashnakoutzian_ Government

of Armenia, and the Liberal Government of Georgia. The British War

Office rushed men and munitions into Trans-Caucasia to stiffen the

three Governments against the approaching Soviet Armies. The British

Admiralty hurried out a naval mission to overhaul the old Russian

Caspian Fleet in the Persian port of Enzeli.

But the Soviet Armies intercepted the Admiralty’s mission at Baku,

threw its personnel into jail, and themselves sent an expedition to

Enzeli to take over the old Russian Fleet from beneath the guns of the

British North Persia Force. That interception announced Russia’s

return to Trans-Caucasia which, since the collapse of Czarist Russia

in 1917, has seen more horrors than any other area on the face of this

small planet.

The Turkish Federalist Government at Baku was quickly overthrown and

on Sept. 30, 1920, the Soviet Government at Moscow concluded peace

with the Government of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic which calls

itself “the first Moslem Republic in the world.”

The _Dashnakoutzian_ Government of Armenia stood for some time. Like

the Armenian independence committees of the old Ottoman Empire, its

inexperienced leadership was engaged in appealing to Mr. Lloyd George

and to American opinion to protect it, and had refrained from any

attempt to achieve that peace with its Russian and Turkish neighbors

which was the very first essential of its existence. In the Treaty of

Sevres, signed at Paris on Aug. 10, 1920, it was awarded a Turkish

frontier which was to be delineated by Mr. Wilson. The American

mandate project having fallen through, the Wilson frontier was

presumably thought to be the next best method of drawing the United

States into Trans-Caucasia. The Wilson frontier had the sole effect of

destroying any hopes which might have existed of a Turco-Armenian

peace. A state of war which neither Turks nor Armenians could afford,

continued to exist until December, 1920, when the Turkish command at

Erzerum put a stop to the streams of Moslem refugees which had been

flowing out of Armenia, by invading the country and occupying Kars. A

Soviet ultimatum stopped Kiazim Karabekr Pasha at Kars. The

_Dashnakoutzian_ Government fled. The Soviet Republic of Armenia

succeeded it and Mr. Lloyd George’s interest in the Armenians abruptly

ceased.

Compelled by the necessity of still further reinforcing his

Constantinople garrison, General Milne finally evacuated Batum in

favor of the Liberal Government of Georgia. Boundary disputes with the

neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenian Governments soon brought the

Georgian Liberals into petty frontier wars and a revolution in March,

1921, overthrew them in favor of what is now the Socialist Soviet

Republic of Georgia.

Soviet Russia was no in contact with Nationalist Turkey and in the

Treaty of Kars which the Turks signed on Oct. 13, 1921, with the

Soviet States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Kars and Ardahan

provinces which had been wrested from the Ottoman Empire in the

Russian War of 1876, were returned to Turkey, and the port of Batum

was opened unreservedly to Turkish commerce.

Soviet Russia was now in contact with Persia also. Here, despite the

fact that the country was occupied by the North Persia Force and the

South Persia Rifles, Sir Percy Cox had been unable to assemble a

Persian Parliament which would ratify the Anglo-Persian Agreement of

1919 and in February, 1921, a Russo-Persian Treaty was signed at

Moscow in which Soviet Russia abandoned all Czarist Russian claims on

the Persian Government and recognized no zones of influence in the

country. Meanwhile the North Persia Force maneuvered the Czarist

die-hards out of Teheran and itself took over the old Cossack

Division, officering it with British personnel. At the last moment,

just before the North Persia Force was to retire to its base at Bagdad

early in the summer of 1921, the Cossack Division marched on Teheran

and installed a new Persian Government which valiantly repudiated the

Anglo-Persian Agreement and proposed to share out the Persian

Ministries among the Allied Governments and the United States,

reserving for the British the right to appoint advisers in the

Ministries of War and Finance only. But the Zia-ed-Din Government

lasted only as long as the North Persia Force lasted. Zia fled to

Bagdad with the last of the North Persia Force in May, 1921. The last

of the British officers were withdrawn from the Cossack Division and

the South Persia Rifles were disbanded. At present, neither British

nor Russians are engaged in reiterating “in the most categorical

manner the undertakings which they have repeatedly given in the past

to respect absolutely the independence and integrity of Persia.”

Soviet Russia has lifted from Islam the weight with which Czarist

Russia once bore it down and Mr. Lloyd George’s Government has not

succeeded in its effort to supply alone the weight it took both

Russians and British to supply in 1907. Mr. Lloyd George could not

prevent Islam in India from joining the Hindus in non-cooperation with

the West. He could not prevent Islam in Persia from following to the

extent of non-cooperation with his Foreign Secretary. That demon which

Sir Edward Grey once lightly referred to as the “spirit” of the

Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, has been slowly departing, wrenching

civilizations apart as it went. Its stubborn retreat from the

countries it wasted and the slow return of Islam to life in its wake,

comprise the background before which the remainder of this narrative

is set.

XIII

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR BEGINS

CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE GROWTH OF GREEK NATIONALISM――SURROUNDED BY

BRITISH FORCES, THE TURKS GO BACK TO PEACE――APPLICATION OF THE SECRET

TREATIES WHICH THE ALLIES HAD DRAWN UP DURING THE WAR――THE OECUMENICAL

PATRIARCHATE BREAKS OFF ITS RELATIONS WITH THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.

As every body knows, a brook called the Sweet Waters of Europe ripples

down into a long bay called the Golden Horn, which divides

Constantinople in Europe into two parts. On the northern side, between

the crowded Golden Horn and the great Bosphorus, lie the suburbs of

Galata and Pera, Galata behind the thicket of masts along its quai and

Pera climbing the steep streets onto the hill beyond. Galata and Pera

constitute the foreign suburbs where the Embassies, armed with the

Capitulations, have never permitted the Ottoman Government to govern,

except during the four years of the war when they were not in a

position to prevent the Government from abrogating the Capitulations.

Here were the Embassies and Legations, all of them except the Persian

Legation, although the Ottoman Government was not here and never has

been.

Between the little Golden Horn and the great green Sea of Marmora, a

bold peninsula curls out to Seraglio Point. Here, within the five-mile

wall which encloses its landward side, lies Stamboul to which Galata

and Pera bear the same cultural and historical relationship as Yonkers

bears to New York. Indeed, one could ignore Galata and Pera as

negligible suburbs of foreigners were it not that by the slow

expansion of the Capitulations through the centuries, these small

foreign suburbs have slowly turned the capital upside down until the

Mudros armistice in 1918 finally ushered the Anglo-French command into

Pera in possession of complete authority. Here in Stamboul was the

seat of the Ottoman Government and here are the greatest monuments of

Islam. The broad peninsula on which Stamboul lies is tipped with the

great shrines of Islamic culture, its sky-line is pierced with the

minarets of its mighty mosques, of _Ayiah Sophia_, _Ahmedieh_,

_Valideh_, _Bayazid_, _Suleimanieh_ and _Mohammed II_.

Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the

head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of

the _Rûm_ community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had

lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the

political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and

commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had

become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman

Government and was appointed by the Ottoman Minister from a list of

three candidates proposed by the Holy Synod. Relations between the

Caliph-Sultan and the Patriarch remained generally peaceful even after

the Old Greeks secured their independence in the 1820’s, and there was

no appreciable Greek nationalism in the _Rûm_ community until the

Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 called upon Moslems and Christians

alike to give up their dividing community institutions and assume the

equal rights and the equal duties of Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman

nation. That call, accompanied by the opening of the Parliament at

Constantinople, brought Greek nationalism from Old Greece into the

Ottoman _Rûm_ community, and the Balkan Wars widened the breach which

was opening between the Ottoman Government and the Phanar. It produced

so difficult a situation that an agreement was finally reached in 1914

between the Old Greek and the Ottoman Governments for an exchange of

minorities, but the outbreak of war suspended its operation. Until the

spring of 1916 the Ottoman Government, in view of the neutrality of

Old Greece, refrained from any steps against its _Rûm_ community, but

when the French command at Salonica imposed the Venizelos Government

on Athens and brought Old Greece into the war as an enemy, the Ottoman

Government took immediate steps to deport its _Rûm_ communicants along

the coast of Asia Minor out of the range of Allied naval activity.

Like the great Armenian deportations of 1915, these Greek deportations

were military in their origin but they were far better controlled

throughout their course than the former had been.

After the Mudros armistice in 1918, these Greeks in Asia Minor began

to flow back to what remained of their homes, and the remnant of the

broken Empire went back with relief to its peacetime pursuits. An

unsurpassed commercial opportunity lay ahead of Asia Minor, for the

Russian collapse had put an end to the great export of wheat from the

South Russian ports. Constantinople, its population swollen by the

Allied military and naval forces, now looked exclusively to Asia Minor

for its sustenance. Western business men had followed the Allies into

the capital in large numbers, and money was available in such

quantities as Constantinople had never known. The Empire having been

“liberated” from the “Ottoman blight,” American capitalists abounded

in the capital, all of them anxious to get in on the ground floor of

the boom. Under the Allied aegis, Western trade faced a prodigious

opportunity and the peasantry of Asia Minor lost no time in seeking

whatever small share of the melon might fall to them. The spring of

1919 found them back at the handles of their rude, ox-drawn plows.

But there were Greek battleships anchored among the Allied men of war

in the Bosphorus, and a Turkish guard was quartered in the great

mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul. Ottoman Greeks in the capital

had gone wildly nationalist, finding their hero in Mr. Venizelos, the

man who had brought Old Greece into the war. The Oecumenical Patriarch

at the Phanar had turned likewise toward Mr. Venizelos, the deliverer

of the “unredeemed” Ottoman Greeks. But Balkan wars break when the

snow melts in the spring. Through the winter of 1918-’19, the

Anglo-French command maintained an outward peace in Constantonople.

Three British high commands held the remnant of the Empire in Asia as

firmly in the British grip as Persia was bring held. The Mesopotamian

Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Bagdad, had pushed its way

up from the flatlands of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin into the

rugged hills of southern Kurdistan, the Turkish administration of

Mosul withdrawing in front of it to Diarbekr. The Egyptian

Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Cairo, had reached the top

of the Syrian corridor at Aleppo and had flung out small detachments

to establish contact with the Bagdad command to the east, and to

occupy Cilicia and the Taurus tunnels of the Bagdad Railway to the

west, the Turkish administration of Cilicia continuing in office

pending an indication of British intentions. Armenian deportees, some

of whom had been interned by the Turks in Syria and some of whom had

made their way into Egypt to be interned by the British, were being

run into Cilicia in large numbers and a few of them were being carried

on along the Bagdad Railway as far as Konia, where the E. E. F.’s

control ended. The British co-command of the Army of the Black Sea

whose Anglo-French G. H. Q. was in Pera, had stationed control

officers along the Bagdad Railway from Konia to its Constantinople

terminus, along the railways in the hinterland of Smyrna and along the

old Russian railways in Trans-Caucasia. The Bagdad Railway had been

broken up into its two original parts. The Bagdad and Cairo commands

had confiscated it from Konia east and their military trains were

rapidly wracking it to pieces. Western Europe was not to be again

permitted to escape the Suez Canal. The Pera co-command, however, was

working the original Anatolian Railway from Constantinople to Angora

and Konia for the _Deutsche Bank_, pending its permanent disposition

in the peace treaty.

The collapse of Czarist Russia had enabled the British to establish

control not only over Asia Minor but over all its approaches from

north, south, east and west, and under the British aegis the secret

treaties which had been drawn up during the war for its partition

(with the exception of Czarist Russia’s share in them) were soon put

into application. The French were admitted to Beirut whence they

posted detachments to the Syrian and Cilician centers, remaining

however under the British high command in Cairo. Italian forces were

disembarked at Adalia and rapidly pushed their way into the hinterland

as far as Konia, still keeping their eyes on Smyrna, the greatest of

the Asia Minor prizes. Smyrna had been made over to Italy in the

secret agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, but the Venizelos

Government at Athens had entered the war after that agreement was

signed. As for Czarist Russia’s share of the spoils, the United States

Government might be persuaded to take the eastern provinces under the

supposition that in this twentieth century they still constituted

Armenia. As for Czarist Russia’s right to Constantinople, the High

Church Party in the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue

of its theological disquisitions with Orthodoxy from the Patriarchate

at Moscow to the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar. Old Greeks

and Ottoman Greeks are alike traders and British naval command of the

Mediterranean served to reinforce the less worldly influences which

moved Greece inevitably into the British orbit. The French who had

brought Greece into the war as soon as Czarist Russia collapsed, only

to be compelled to divide their Constantinople command with the

British, quickly cooled toward the Greeks and waited for the great

wheel to twirl again.

The Anglo-French command in Pera soon divided the Constantinople area,

the British taking over the Galata and Pera suburbs, the French taking

Stamboul itself, and the Italians taking the Asiatic suburbs. The

Ottoman Navy was quickly disarmed and interned in the Golden Horn.

With the French controlling the railways in Europe and the British

controlling the Anatolian railways, the Ottoman Armies began

demobilizing and disarming under Allied supervision, skeleton forces

remaining for _gendarmerie_ purposes. So the Turkish remnant of the

Ottoman Empire went back to the pursuits of peace and in the lack of

Russian exports the Anatolian peasant enjoyed every prospect of a

greater prosperity than he had ever known.

But to Mr. Lloyd George, it was an opportunity to impose alone upon

Islam that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia

had agreed in 1907 to impose together. They were more than Balkan

snows which began to melt when the Oecumenical Patriarchate broke off

its relations with the Ottoman Government on March 9, 1919.

XIV

SMYRNA, 1919

KEMAL RETURNS TO CONSTANTINOPLE――TURKISH CONFUSION IN THE CAPITAL――THE

TURKS ASK FOR AN AMERICAN MANDATE――HOW KEMAL AND RAUF BEY LEFT FOR

SAMSUN AND SMYRNA, RESPECTIVELY――THE GREEK PONTUS PROGRAM――THE GREEK

OCCUPATION OF SMYRNA――THE TURKS GO BACK TO WAR.

General Allenby’s great break-through in Palestine had thrown Mustapha

Kemal Pasha back to Adana in Cilicia, where a cypher telegram from

Constantinople told him that Rauf Bey was on his way to Mudros to sign

an armistice with the British. It was the end of the world for Kemal.

He returned to the capital to find an Anglo-French command quartered

in Pera and the entire Constantinople area under effective military

occupation. None of the twenty-five clauses of the Mudros armistice

seems to have authorized such an occupation. The only mention of

Constantinople which occurred in the armistice was a stipulation in

clause 4 that Allied prisoners of war and interned Armenians were “to

be collected in Constantinople and handed over unconditionally to the

Allies.” Allied “use of all ship repair facilities at all Turkish

ports and arsenals” was provided in clause 9 and clause 11 stipulated

that “wireless telegraphy and cable stations” were “to be controlled

by the Allies, Turkish Government messages excepted.” In accordance

with these clauses, Allied officers had been assigned to all Turkish

ports for control and intelligence purposes. Clause 21 had provided

for “an Allied representative to be attached to the Turkish Ministry

of Supplies in order to safeguard Allied interests,” but the

attachment of an Allied representative would seem to be no more a

synonym for military occupation than the use of ship repair facilities

or the control of wireless and cable stations.

Allied occupation of Batum was provided in clause 15 and Allied

occupation of Baku was mentioned. “Allied occupation of Dardanelles

and Bosphorus forts” was specifically stipulated in clause 1, but is

the Pera suburb of Constantinople one of the “Dardanelles and

Bosphorus forts”? “Secure access to the Black Sea” was stipulated in

clause 1 and clause 7 gave the Allies “the right to occupy any

strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens

the security of the Allies.” But no such situation had arisen at

Constantinople and it is difficult to imagine how it could have arisen

with the capital lying under the guns of as great a fleet of

battleships as lay in the Bosphorus. It is true that the mere

appearance of Allied men of war off the city so affected its Greek

minority as to bring about a most explosive situation, of which Rauf

Bey had warned Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. But a military occupation

seems to be quite a different matter from the temporary landing of

troops to restrain the Greeks. It is also true that Constantinople was

a very useful supply base for Denikin, yet the terms of the Mudros

armistice are down in black and white, with Admiral Calthorpe’s

signature attached to them, and they do not appear to make an Allied

occupation of the capital a legal proceeding.

Rauf Bey had made it plain to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros that no

Ottoman Government could submit to the re-imposition of the

Capitulations. Under the occupation, the Allies re-imposed them. None

of the Allied Governments had recognized their abrogation, but the

Mudros armistice was a military and not a civil instrument. Under

military law, occupying Armies are authorized to administer only the

existing body of enemy civil law and usage, pending the permanent

disposition of their occupied enemy territory in the terms of peace.

The Mudros armistice contained no mention of the Capitulations or of

any other civil matter at issue between the Allied Governments and the

Ottoman Government, and their re-imposition during a state of

armistice does not seem to have been a legal proceeding.

When Mustapha Kemal Pasha reached the capital, he discovered that the

Parliament had been prorogued, the Izzet Government had fallen, and

Damad Ferid Pasha had been sent for by the Sultan to form a new

Government. The Sultan had left Dolma Bagtsche for Abdul Hamid’s late

home at Yildiz Kiosk, and such sound reforms as the Young Turkish

Revolution of 1908 had succeeded in making, the Allies had speedily

unmade. In its golden age, the Ottoman Empire had been broadly

tolerant, but during its last two centuries of agony the Christian

imperialisms of the West had turned its tolerance to poison and since

1908 its own Christian communities had helped to keep the poison

circulating in its veins. Its Christian military occupants now

re-injected as much of the poison as it had succeeded in throwing out,

and this in its capital, the very heart of the country.

With its Parliament prorogued and its press stifled by a military

censorship, Turkish opinion was drifting leaderless into confusion.

Opposition parties are apt to suffer in time of war and the late Enver

Government had so thoroughly broken up its Opposition that the Damad

Ferid Government no longer commanded confidence. The intrigues of

three Allies, each of them cultivating Turkish support, added to the

confusion. Western concession hunters and the Levantinism with which

the capital stank, trailed the slime of money over the scene.

Across this unlovely landscape, the Phanar’s break with the Ottoman

Government fell like a thunderbolt. Rauf Bey had surrendered at Mudros

to an Emperor of India purged of his Russian alliance, but it now

became apparent that the Venizelist Government at Athens had succeeded

to the place in the Anglo-Russian _entente_ which Russia had vacated.

Rauf had applied to Admiral Calthorpe for an Anglo-Turkish alliance,

but it now appeared that no such alliance would be granted and it is

easy to imagine what effect this desperate situation, if it had really

come upon them, had upon the Turks in the capital. The Phanar had now

become openly an enemy in Stamboul itself, the Turkish guard in the

great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ was heavily reinforced, and a French

guard stacked its rifles outside the mosque.

The panic-stricken Turks, still thinking in terms of the Empire, still

blind to the great fallen columns about them, launched their Wilsonian

League as a bid for new friends. The United States had not declared

war against them. The Enver Government had severed diplomatic

relations when Washington joined the Allies, but the break had gone no

further. Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U. S. N., a naval officer on

State Department duty, had occupied the American Embassy in Pera as

High Commissioner, restricting his communication with the Ottoman

Government to the medium of the Swedish Legation pending the

resumption of diplomatic relations. A large colony of Americans had

followed him into Constantinople, part of them business men who

presently became restive under the tardiness of the boom in

materializing, part of them relief workers who discovered to their

surprise that Turks have the same number of eyes and ears and legs and

arms as the rest of us have. Some of the American colony of which

Admiral Bristol was the head, afford this somber narrative a lighter

aspect. All our American types were represented in Constantinople――

deep-breathing bishops: apostolic governors of Kansas: “Y” workers

whose given names were Fred and Henry and Dick: business men who knew

what they wanted and couldn’t get it: courteous and correct Embassy

_attaches_: old missionaries with broken hearts and tight lips:

sailors who blew in from Mersina, oiled up and blew out again to

Samsun: young and autobiographical Near East Relief workers: college

presidents who had lived long in the land and were vaguely concerned

about the Capitulations: young lady missionaries with a sweetly simple

reliance on “these darling British”: and stern “commissioners” of the

Near East Relief on “tours of inspection” who learned from Greeks and

Armenians that the worst they had been told of the Turk was quite

true. At the head of them all was Admiral Bristol, equipped with a

flotilla of American destroyers and charged with the defense of

American interests in the Ottoman Empire. He enjoyed what was probably

the most difficult American position in all of Europe and in it he

proved himself a very tower of American strength.

The colony of which he was the head was divided into two sorts,

American business men who looked to the American Embassy for their

leadership, and American missionary, educational and relief workers

who looked not only to the American Embassy but to the British from

the Foreign Office in London down to the British Army in Pera without

reminding themselves as frequently as they might have done that the

British Army, while one of our most gallant Armies, interests itself,

and quite rightly, in the King’s peace and in no other peace.

In the absence of any Parliament to speak for than, a number of the

most influential Turks in the capital formed themselves into a

delegation from the Wilsonian League and pledged themselves early in

1919 to accept an American mandate over the entire country, provided a

definite term, preferably fifteen or twenty years, was named for it.

This pledge was communicated to Admiral Bristol and forwarded by him

to Washington. If such a mandate would not apply the Westernism of the

Fourteen Points to the case of Turkey, it was reasoned, it would at

least afford the Turks the time they needed to consider their

position.

With Turkish civilian opinion now casting about for substitutes for

the Parliament which the Damad Ferid Government continued to deny it,

Turkish military opinion lost no time in facing the radically new

situation which the Phanar’s break with the Porte had precipitated.

The General Staff had constituted the driving force of reform in 1908

and it did so again in 1919. Inside a ring of British bayonets, the

Asia Minor provinces had been turned loose in semi-independence and

were being rapidly disarmed. The Third Army, reduced in personnel and

equipment, had been permitted by the Allies to base itself on Sivas

and to maintain there a skeleton organization for _gendarmerie_

purposes. Similarly the Ninth Army remained in skeleton form at

Erzerum in the eastern provinces, and Turkish refugees were moving

slowly back into these wasted and silent provinces and resuming the

even tenor of their lives. Greek refugees were being returned to

Smyrna and Samsun, a proceeding which would have remained meaningless

had not the Oecumenical Patriarchate whose communicants these Greeks

were, become openly hostile.

The General Staff had already dispatched agents secretly to the

eastern provinces for the formation of local defense committees. Under

the Allied military occupation, the Armenian Patriarchate at 21 Rue de

Brousse in the Pera suburb of the capital, had openly espoused the

program of the old independence committees. The old Armenian

Parliamentary _bloc_ had not survived the break-up of the Empire and

the old Russian annexationist group had come to a similar end with the

break-up of Czarist Russia. Independence of Russians and Turks alike

had become the Armenian program and the hope of its realization lay in

the British and United States Governments. The former had already

manifested concern for the Armenians on numerous occasions, and two

organizations were at work in the United States, the Armenia-America

Society which was related to the Near East Relief, and the Committee

for Armenian Independence which represented the extreme wing of

Armenian opinion. American relief workers in the Armenian Republic of

Erivan in Trans-Caucasia were already urging the repatriation of

Armenian refugees into the eastern provinces, where they had long

constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention and eventual

annexation. Against this move the General Staff had prepared the

eastern provinces. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha, commander of the Ninth Army

at Erzerum, had a large quantity of arms at his disposal, some

deposited by the Ottoman Armies retreating from Mesopotamia and some

dug up from Russian depots concealed in the mountains.

The Phanar’s break with the Porte was a new development, however,

against which the General Staff had made no preparation. Rauf Bey had

signed an armistice at Mudros with the Allied Powers, but no armistice

had been signed with the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities. If war was

now to develope with the latter, action would have to be taken without

delay. Accordingly it was determined to dispatch Mustapha Kemal Pasha

and Rauf Bey to Samsun and Smyrna, respectively, to form local defense

committees and to meet at Sivas where Kemal was to take over the

administration of Asia Minor. On the basis of these defense

committees, a new political party was to be built up which should

compel the Damad Ferid Government to reassemble Parliament and enable

the country to consider its future. The beginning of such a party

already existed in the capital, but the new National Liberals

naturally led a secret existence under the Allied military occupation

and it was not until Kemal began building up the party organization in

Asia Minor that they openly became the Nationalists.

The surrender of arms to the Allies continued, and in his report to

the British War Office on events in Turkey from the time of the Mudros

armistice to the signature of the Sevres Treaty, General Milne

testifies to the honesty with which disarmament was carried out up to

the time of the Greek occupation of Smyrna. The defense committees

were not directed against the Allies. Large and small Allied forces,

even Allied officers alone, moved freely about the country. The

political program with which Kemal was charged, was directed against

the Damad Ferid Government, his military program against any partition

of the country in favor of Greeks and Armenians. If the _Rûm_ and

_Ermeni_ communities of the old Empire attempted a transfer of their

historic community life from a religious to a territorial basis, the

defense committees would constitute the Turks’ reply.

This program was developed in the utmost secrecy, since the Allied

occupation had loosed more spies in the capital than Abdul Hamid had

ever employed in his palmiest days. The Ottoman Navy having been

interned in the Golden Horn, it was an easy matter to dispatch Rauf

Bey to Smyrna. He left Constantinople early in May, 1919. Kemal Pasha,

however, was a senior Army officer and under the orders of the Ottoman

War Office. It was assumed that the Damad Ferid Government would not

object to having the capital rid of his presence, but his

effectiveness in Asia Minor depended on his authority. He was

ostensibly to be sent out as Inspector-General with command of the

skeleton forces which General Milne had sanctioned for _gendarmerie_

purposes at Sivas and Erzerum, and the instructions which defined his

powers were shown him as soon as they had been drawn up by the General

Staff. In a room at the War Office, Kemal spent three hours

“correcting” them, until they empowered him with authority to act in

every contingency which might conceivably arise. As thus “corrected,”

they were placed hurriedly before Damad Ferid’s War Minister and

signed without having been read. Duplicate copies, destined for

subordinate commanders in Asia Minor, were signed by members of the

General Staff. Thus equipped, Mustapha Kemal Pasha left Constantinople

for Samsun the day after Rauf Bey had left for Smyrna.

Kemal found British craft in Samsun roadstead and a British control

officer in the town with a handful of Indian troops. Greeks were being

disembarked and were pushing into the villages in the immediate

hinterland. A project was under way for the detachment of the Black

Sea littoral, including the ports of Samsun and Trebizond, from the

remnant of the Empire and its erection as an independent Greek State

under the name of the Pontus. If the Pan-Hellenic program at

Constantinople proposed to re-write five centuries of history, if the

Armenian program in the eastern provinces proposed to undo the work of

ten centuries, the Pontus program also proposed to set aside a

half-dozen centuries. It would hardly be fair, however, to judge these

three programs by the standards of practicability which are

customarily applied in politics, for their strength lay outside the

realm of politics. In 1919, we stood in the presence of a Christendom,

damp with centuries of Byzantinism, which proposed to commit the very

errors in Turkey for which it had frequently blamed Islam.

To thoughtful Turks, it had long been plain that the old Empire was

doomed unless it could disentangle itself from the grip of religious

usage. An attempt had been made in 1908 at this precise task of

disentangling religion and politics. It had failed because neither the

Old Turks nor the Christian communities would permit it to succeed.

Christendom and Islam alike proved immovable. Turks, Greeks and

Armenians threshed themselves to pieces in the religious deadlock

which the Young Turks failed to break in 1908 and by 1919 Greeks and

Armenians were prepared to set up new Christian theocracies on the

wreck of an old Moslem theocracy. The _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities

had clung immovably to their full community rights after 1908 and by

1919 the break-up of the Empire had made possible the transfer of

their communities, with the concurrence of Christendom, from their old

religious, to a new territorial, basis.

Kemal rode up into the hills behind Samsun. Under the blue skies of an

Anatolian spring, he made his way from village to village. He reached

Sivas where Colonel Rafet Bey was in command of the skeleton Third

Army, simultaneously with a rumor that Great Britain had given Smyrna

to the Greeks and that the greatest sea-port of Asia Minor had been

the scene of massacres by Greek troops. Telegrams to Angora where a

British control officer was receiving munitions surrendered under the

Mudros armistice, brought a prompt denial. But the rumor grew. What

purported to be stories of the massacres and of the flight of Turkish

civilians from Greek soldiers in the hinterland of Smyrna, accompanied

it. The British control officer at Angora denied it again, emphasizing

the fact that the armistice had been signed by the British Government

and no Greek occupation of Smyrna was possible without British

consent. But a telegram soon reached Sivas from the Ottoman War Office

in Constantinople, announcing that Smyrna had been occupied by the

Greeks and that Admiral Calthorpe had supervised the occupation.

British control officers along the railways fled to Constantinople at

once and most of them were fortunate enough to reach their

destination.

Meanwhile, Rauf Bey had reached Smyrna on May 13. On May 14, Admiral

Calthorpe entered the bay with an Allied naval squadron from

Constantinople. The Allied control officers ashore were ordered to

disarm the Ottoman garrison and confine it to its barracks. At 6:30

o’clock in the evening, Admiral Calthorpe announced that the city

would be occupied by Allied troops the next morning. A vague rumor

that Greek troops were to be used brought a repetition of the

announcement that _Allied_ troops would occupy the city. But the rumor

persisted and as night drew on, the population of the Turkish quarter

withdrew to a hill-top behind the town and gathered around huge

bonfires in an all-night protest meeting.

By 7 o’clock the next morning, the Ottoman garrison had been withdrawn

to its barracks. By 10 o’clock, British marines had disembarked onto

the quai and had occupied the telegraph offices, and Greek troops were

landing from their transports. They marched first to the _konak_, the

seat of the provincial administration, and occupied the building amid

scenes of growing confusion which the Greek commander either could not

or would not control. From the _konak_, they marched to the barracks

and the firing which had already begun culminated in the raking of the

barracks with machine guns. At the barracks and elsewhere, in Smyrna

City and deep into its hinterland, the killing continued for days.

Twice Rauf Bey was overtaken by the rapid Greek advance and had to

flee farther into the hinterland. Events might or might not have

turned out differently if Rauf had landed at Smyrna a month before he

did, but one reason for the lack of any Turkish defense of Smyrna was

the quite simple reason that there had been no time in which to

prepare a defense.

It was disastrous news which Rauf conveyed through the interior as he

continued on his way to join Kemal at Sivas. It affected the Turks far

more than even the Armenian sack of Van had affected them, for in 1915

the Enver Government had at least not been disarmed. Even in

Constantinople itself, Turkish opinion became so inflamed against the

Damad Ferid Government that machine guns were mounted on Galata Bridge

and the Allied High Commissioners were finally compelled to dispatch

an inter-Allied Commission, headed by Admiral Bristol, to put a stop

to the killing behind Smyrna. The Bristol Commission drew up a lengthy

report which fixed immediate responsibility for the Smyrna affair, and

Mr. Lloyd George suppressed it at the demand of Mr. Venizelos. By such

suppressions has the martyr-legend of Near Eastern Christians grown.

The Greek occupation of Smyrna shook the world, from the back hills of

Java to the country towns of the United States. Down in the Turkish

cockpit, the Damad Ferid Government became an Allied puppet, Mustapha

Kemal Pasha brought the skeleton Third Army down to Amasia to prevent

a similar Greek landing at Samsun, a Turkish fighting front was

hurriedly extemporized against the Armenians who were gathering under

the Anglo-French aegis in Cilicia, and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha hewed out

a back door to Central Asia past the Armenian Republic of Erivan in

Trans-Caucasia. In the United States, the religious press opened its

columns to every atrocity-charge against the Turks which Greek and

Armenian minds could devise. In India, pious Moslems began trekking

across the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, fleeing the British

Government at Delhi with motives similar to those with which the

Pilgrim Fathers once fled from England. Down in the hinterland of

Smyrna, the West stood with bayonets fixed, confronting an East which

had been largely disarmed.

It appears to be unquestioned that no clause of the Mudros armistice

authorized the Allies to occupy Smyrna. The only clause which has been

advanced as possibly covering the occupation, is clause 7 which gives

the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a

situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” None of

the dozen Allied officers who had been posted to Smyrna has ever

claimed that a situation existed there which threatened even their own

security, to say nothing of the security of the Allies. Mustapha Kemal

Pasha at Sivas interpreted the occupation as a violation of the

armistice by the Allies themselves and held it accordingly as no

longer binding. The surrender of munitions to the Allies ceased

immediately. The Anatolian peasant left his growing crops and went

angrily back to war.

XV

THE ORTHODOX SCHISM IN ANATOLIA

KEMAL FALLS TO THE STATUS OF A “BANDIT”――TURKISH NATIONALISM BEGINS TO

RE-MOBILIZE AND RE-EQUIP ITS FORCES――THE ERZERUM PROGRAM AND THE

NATIONALIST VICTORY IN THE OTTOMAN ELECTIONS――HOW PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI

BROKE WITH THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE――THE TURKISH ORTHODOX

CHURCH――PAPA EFTIM HIMSELF.

Mr. Lloyd George had announced his program at Smyrna. He proposed to

build a new Near East on the basis of its Christian minorities,

confronting Soviet Russia with a Greek _fait accompli_ across the

Straits on a parity with the American mandate in Trans-Caucasia and

the eastern provinces, the British Persia and the Afghan-Bokharan

business with which it was proposed to confront it elsewhere. As for

Islam, he would impose alone upon it that fate which the British

Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose

together.

The reply to this program was Turkish Nationalism. Rid of the burden

of the old Empire, freed of sole responsibility for the Caliphate,

Mustapha Kemal Pasha proposed to break the religious deadlock in which

the Turks had threshed themselves to pieces and to apply the same

Westernism to his own nation as the West had long applied to its

Greeks and Armenians. Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish

_tekkes_ at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western

backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our

brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent

Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and

Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had

always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be

permitted to poison the country with their political reaction.

Inside a ring of British and Greek bayonets, the Turks flocked to the

new Nationalist Party, not because the mass of Turkish opinion had any

understanding of the meaning of nationalism but because Smyrna had

stripped the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople of the very

small Turkish support with which it had entered office. Beginning in

the eastern provinces which were farthest from the capital, the

defense committees which constituted the framework of the Party,

arrested Damad Ferid’s provincial officials and deported them to

Constantinople, installing Nationalist administrations in their

places. This proceeded so rapidly that Ferid telegraphed Kemal to

return to the capital at once. Despite the fact that Ferid’s orders

bore all the prestige of the _Grand Vizierate_, Kemal disregarded them

and on July 11, 1919, Ferid dismissed him from the Army. From a senior

officer and a military hero, Kemal now fell to the status of a

“bandit,” who knew in all probability that it was only a matter of

time until he would be caught and shot.

The Nationalist Party had a dual program. Its political objective was

to compel the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople to re-assemble

Parliament and permit the country to consider its future. Its military

objective was to prevent the further partition of what it believed to

be Turkish soil. Under the impetus of Smyrna, it was comparatively

easy to take over province after province in Asia Minor and to put the

Government in a position in which it would sooner or later be

compelled to reckon with its new Opposition. Its military objective

was far less easy of attainment. About 20,000 troops had been

permitted to remain at Sivas and Erzerum for _gendarmerie_ purposes. A

quantity of munitions, particularly in the eastern provinces, had not

yet been surrendered. A further quantity was dug up from old Russian

depots, concealed during the great Russian advance of 1915-’16. More

were smuggled across the Black Sea from Denikin’s rear in South

Russia, as soon as it became known that a market for arms had

developed in Asia Minor. Still more, particularly artillery, had been

dismantled by the Allies and left in Turkish possession; these needed

only new breech-blocks and range-finders, the construction of which

began at once out of any scrap metal available. Hidden away in the

secrecy of Asia Minor, Nationalism began to re-mobilize and re-equip

its tattered and frequently bare-footed soldiers.

[Illustration: ASSEMBLY BUILDING AT ANGORA]

So rapidly did the Party grow that two months after the Smyrna

occupation, Kemal and Rauf were able to assemble it in a caucus at

Erzerum in the eastern provinces. Kemal’s staff drove up to Erzerum

along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial

delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through

lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the

Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become

famous under the name of the National Pact.

This document re-stated and amplified the Izzet Government’s position,

as Rauf Bey had conveyed it to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. Autonomy

for the Arabs under the necessary suzerainty of the Caliph at

Constantinople and Allied recognition of the Enver Government’s

abrogation of the Capitulations, were its principal planks. The

break-up of the old Empire was accepted and in the new map of the Near

and Middle East, the Caliphate of Islam was modified to permit the

application of the Western tradition of nationalism to Turks and Arabs

alike, an application to which the Turks claimed as complete a right

as the West had long before acknowledged to Greeks, Bulgarians and

Armenians. From the Greeks, the West had never asked Capitulations. It

would therefore not ask Capitulations from the Turks. As for the

rights of minorities, such rights as the Greeks gave their Moslem

minorities, the Turks would give their Christian minorities. The

Straits would remain open to world commerce, subject only to the

necessary military security of Constantinople, “the seat of the

Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters

of the Ottoman Government.” In the delineation of the new Turkey’s

frontiers, certain border areas were under dispute. Two of these

border areas, Cilicia and the Mosul province, “are inhabited by an

Ottoman Moslem majority united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued

with sentiments of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and

wholly respectful of each other’s racial and social rights and

surrounding conditions,” and these belonged within the Turkish

frontiers. To certain other border areas (Western Thrace and the three

districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum in Trans-Caucasia), the West

could, if it wished, apply the device of the plebiscite with which it

was accustomed to decide the destinies of populations elsewhere. As

for the place of the new Turkey in the family of nations, the Party

repeated Rauf Bey’s statements to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros: “It is

a fundamental condition of our life and continued existence that we,

like every country, should enjoy complete independence and liberty in

the matter of assuring the means of our development, in order that our

national and economic development should be rendered possible and that

it should be possible to conduct affairs in the form of a more

up-to-date regular administration.” On this note, the Party’s platform

closed. Three weeks later, a copy of it lay on Lord Curzon’s desk in

the Foreign Office in London, and Colonel Alfred Rawlinson, a brother

of Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-Chief in India, was returned to

Erzerum to learn what it was that Kemal really wanted.

Having drawn up the Party’s platform, the Erzerum caucus adjourned to

meet in September at Sivas, where a standing council of twelve members

was chosen to sit continuously at Angora, a provincial capital whose

rail and telegraphic communication with Constantinople was more direct

than Sivas’s. The Damad Ferid Government’s position with respect to

the country had now become so impossible that it fell on October 5 and

was replaced by the Ali Riza Government which was authorized by the

Sultan to hold a general election. This was a clean-cut victory for

the Nationalists and two days after the new Government took office,

Kemal telegraphed the Party’s platform to Ali Riza Pasha in

Constantinople, as the terms of peace on which the Nationalists

appealed to the country.

At this junction, the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar forbade

Ottoman Greeks to participate in the elections on the ground that they

were no longer Ottoman subjects. This injunction was of course obeyed

in the capital where Allied troops were in occupation, but a

considerable portion of the _Rûm_ community lived in Asia Minor and

here, already gravely compromised with their Turkish neighbors by the

Phanar’s break with the Porte and by the Greek occupation of Smyrna

which had followed that break, it only added to their difficulties.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what move more dangerous to its own

communicants in Asia Minor the Phanar could have made. It so increased

the suspicion which attached to them in the eyes of the Nationalists

that hundreds of them were clapped into Nationalist jails and were not

released until a Turkish-speaking Orthodox priest from Kiskin, twelve

miles from Angora, announced his intention of breaking with the Phanar

and participating in the elections as an Ottoman subject. He

immediately undertook to effect a similar break on the part of the

Turkish-speaking Orthodox churches in the interior, and the

Oecumenical Patriarch summoned him to report at the Phanar at once. He

disregarded both the Phanar’s summons and the excommunication which

followed it, and continued to align his people with the Nationalists.

Papa Eftim Effendi, acting metropolitan of the Turkish Orthodox

Church, is a subject to be approached with all caution for he may yet

develope into a phase of the new Turkey more important for Christendom

than Kemal himself. Christian solidarity broke down when the Phanar

threw its communicants in Asia Minor into a political position which

brooked not an instant’s neutrality. As long as Ottoman Christians

were given an inferior position under Moslem law, the concern of

Western Christians for the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities of the old

Empire had a legitimate basis. The Byzantinism which colored our

Western concern for Ottoman Greeks and Armenians may have blinded us

at times to the actual position they occupied in the old Empire, but

the legal position which Moslem law gave them was certain ultimately

to be resented. There came a time when thoughtful Turks agreed with

us, not out of concern for non-Moslems but in the belief that the

Empire was being slowly strangled by the religious usages which had

tightened about it. The Young Turks made an honest attempt in 1908 at

reforms designed ultimately to give all races of the Empire an equal

position as Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman State. That attempt broke

down for several reasons. One was that the Young Turkish program was

repugnant to Islam. Another was that the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_

communities stuck to every jot of their community rights. Whether

rightly or wrongly, they would not be given a common position with

their Moslem neighbors. To American missionaries on the spot, the

failure of the Young Turkish program was a bitter disappointment for

they knew what the price of failure would be to Turks, Greeks and

Armenians alike. But American Protestantism in the United States

generally concurred in the refusal of the Ottoman Christians to make

that gesture of confidence without which the Young Turkish program was

bound to fail. The missionaries knew that if the religious deadlock

which the 1908 Revolution sought to break, had finally to be broken by

force, only Western military intervention could save the Christians

from defeat. But their tongues were tied in the United States.

Churchmen at home stiffened the Greeks and Armenians while refusing to

note the very grave problems for which it was essential that the Turks

should discover a solution.

Papa Eftim Effendi, however, has made the gesture of confidence. Under

his leadership, sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior gave up

their church schools on March 1, 1922, their pupils being sent

thereafter to the Government’s schools. The old _Rûm_ community

regarded its schools with considerable pride, for they were centers of

Greek nationalism. In the old Empire, they were centers of Orthodox

reaction just as the mosque schools were centers of Moslem reaction.

These churches in the interior have given up their right to administer

Orthodox civil law. Turkish courts, under the Ministry of Justice, now

administer Orthodox law for Orthodox litigants, supposedly as British

courts administer Moslem law in India. The churches which have formed

the new Turkish Orthodox Church under Papa Eftim’s leadership, are as

free to worship as they have always been (and that freedom has been

possibly greater than Westerners have sometimes attributed to the

Ottoman Government). Politically, however, their communicants have

thrown in their lot with the Turks. Their clergy wear the black robe

and black cylindrical hat of Orthodoxy only while engaged in their

clerical duties. At all other times, they wear the Turkish _kalpak_.

But the wider interest which gathers around Papa Eftim at present lies

in the fact that he has destroyed the old basis of Christian

solidarity and has opened up the possibility of a quite new basis. The

old solidarity, whether rightly or wrongly, has levied a fearful toll

upon Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike during these last few years.

But it is just possible that Papa Eftim has given us the prospect of a

new solidarity upon a purely religious basis. It is a prospect to be

approached with all reserve, for it suggests a new Western attitude

toward the Near and Middle East whose benefits both to Christendom and

to Islam may prove to be incalculable. Time will develope Papa Eftim’s

full significance. Unless hostility to the Turk is an article of the

Christian creed, his is the most meaningful figure in Turkey today.

A note reached me late one morning during my stay in Angora, to the

effect that Papa Eftim Effendi was in the city and was anxious to

call. Two hours later, Djelal Noury Bey, a prominent Turkish editor

and a deputy in the Grand National Assembly, entered with Papa Eftim

following. Eftim was a black-eyed, bushy little man and the figure he

presented, a Turkish _kalpak_ resting on his uncut Orthodox hair and

his long Orthodox beard flowing over the turned-up collar of a

wolfskin coat, is one which may be commended to those who knew the old

Ottoman Empire. The following dialogue ensued:

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?

Djelal Noury (smiling): He is of the Turkish race.

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you of Turkish blood?

Djelal Noury (smiling cordially): The Turkish Orthodox Church was his

own idea. He organized it himself.

Self (to Papa Eftim): Do you speak Turkish?

Djelal Noury (still smiling cordially): He wants to go to the League

of Nations at Geneva. He asks do you think he ought to go?

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?

Djelal Noury (smiling still more cordially): He asks whether you may

be a Protestant. He says if you are, you and he are the same for

neither of you recognize the Pope.

This sort of thing seemed to be of no profit to any of us and the

matter was accordingly allowed to drop, Djelal Noury leaving with Papa

Eftim carefully in tow. We Westerners of course are quite superior to

this device of the carefully staged interview, since our own

politicians in the West are as indifferent to publicity as a cat is to

catnip.

A half-hour later, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual

fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I told him I

had formed the highest opinion of his chaperone but had had no

opportunity to form any opinion of Eftim himself. Something apparently

happened behind the scenes during the next day or two for two evenings

later, Papa Eftim unexpectedly knocked at my door and entered stark

alone. It was two hours afterward when he left and during those two

hours nobody interrupted us. I believe that no lawyer ever put a

witness through a more thorough examination than I put Papa Eftim on

that evening. When he left, his pale thin hands shook with emotion. As

he went out, he stopped in the door-way and this is what he said:

“This is our country and the Turks are our own people. How can we

forsake our country when it needs us?”

I have no means of knowing who put this strangely Western idea into

Papa Eftim’s head originally. Certainly it was not that stronghold of

Easternism, the Oecumenical Patriarchate. Wherever it did come from, I

believe there is not the slightest question of the sincerity with

which Papa Eftim holds it today. His is the almost fanatical sincerity

of a minority which feels itself misunderstood.

The morning after I talked with him, a Turk happened to call and in

the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim.

I made him a non-committal answer to the effect that he seemed to me

to be the merest shadow of a man physically to be cast in such a great

_role_. Fifteen minutes after my Turkish caller left, my door opened

and the largest Orthodox priest I have ever seen loomed in the

door-way, a vast ignorant mound of a man who announced unctuously that

he was one of Papa Eftim’s assistants in the Turkish Orthodox Church.

I looked him over slowly from his huge feet all the way up to his

uncut Orthodox beard and the Turkish _kalpak_ stuck on top of it,

while he watched me with the black ox-like eyes of a people whom no

man has ever long succeeded in budging unless they were willing to be

budged. Then I thanked him and told him he would do quite nicely. He

turned slowly and the stairs creaked beneath his tread as he went

ponderously away.

XVI

THE TREATY OF SEVRES

RAUF BEY TAKES THE NATIONALIST DEPUTIES FROM ANGORA TO CONSTANTINOPLE――

INDIA COMPELS MR. LLOYD GEORGE TO LEAVE CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE TURK AND

GENERAL MILNE BREAKS UP THE PARLIAMENT, DEPORTING RAUF AND MANY OF HIS

COLLEAGUES TO MALTA――THE SEVRES TREATY AND HOW DAMAD FERID PASHA

SECURED AUTHORITY TO SIGN IT.

The elections which the Ali Riza Government held, resulted in a clean

sweep for the Nationalists and a situation of considerable delicacy

was now precipitated. It was hardly possible for the new Parliament,

charged with the execution of the Erzerum program, to function freely

under the enemy occupation in the capital. On the other hand, it was

the country’s legally elected Parliament and it was highly desirable

that it should be recognized as such. Pending decision as to its

course, its deputies assembled at Angora where the Party’s standing

council was in session in the gray granite building which had once

been the provincial headquarters of the Committee of Union and

Progress. Here an intimation reached the deputies that the Allies were

prepared to recognize the new Parliament if its session was held in

the capital and was opened in a legal fashion by the Sultan’s speech,

but that it would not be recognized if it met in Angora. Accordingly a

large proportion of the deputies, headed by Rauf Bey, the

Parliamentary leader of the Party, left Angora for Constantinople and

on Jan. 11, 1920, the new Ottoman Parliament opened its session.

Despite the conditions of military occupation under which it met, Rauf

Bey discharged his duties with inflexible courage and on January 28,

the Erzerum program, now known as the Turkish National Pact, was

legally adopted by the legal Parliament sitting in its legal capital.

Trouble was now plainly in the air. Only the day before the adoption

of the Pact, the re-mobilizing Nationalist forces in Asia Minor had

raided a dump of surrendered munitions on the Gallipoli peninsula.

Behind its Asiatic suburbs, their forces had crept into the very

outskirts of Constantinople. The Allied occupation was becoming a

touch-and-go matter.

Other developments contributed to the gravity of the situation. Mr.

Lloyd George who had been striding up and down the Rubicon, had made a

dismaying discovery. It seemed that there was a place called India.

The British Foreign Office was also having its troubles. Pilgrimage to

Mecca had ceased and Islam was not displaying that gratitude at the

payment of British subsidies to King Hussein of the Hejaz, which Lord

Curzon expected of it. Mr. Lloyd George accordingly ceased striding up

and down the Rubicon and seated himself in a waiting posture on its

bank. On February 26, he told the House of Commons in London that his

statement of Jan. 5, 1918, respecting Constantinople as the Turkish

capital, “was specific. It was unqualified and it was very deliberate.

It was made with the consent of all parties in the community. It was

not opposed by the Labor Party.” Preparations were accordingly made to

leave Constantinople to the Turk in the peace settlement, and London

editors (who as a rule are not Moslems) began turning over projects

for the “Vaticanization” of the Caliphate of Islam.

On the night of March 15-16, during the temporary absence of his

French co-commander, General Milne seized the telegraph offices in

Constantinople, isolated the capital from Asia Minor, executed a

series of lightning raids at midnight, arrested every Nationalist

deputy in the Ottoman Parliament whom he could lay his hands on, and

embarked them on transports for internment on Malta. By dawn of the

16th, British forces held the city securely in their grip, Rauf Bey

and many of his colleagues were _en route_ to barbed wire compounds on

Malta, the rest of the Nationalist deputies were clambering up the

Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus to begin their long trek back to

Angora, General Milne was soon to be recognized as the Allied

Commander-in-Chief, and Constantinople was ready to be left to the

Turk.

On April 6, the Ali Riza Government gave way to a second Damad Ferid

Government. On April 11, Ferid issued a Sultanic edict denouncing

Nationalism, and a similar edict was issued by the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_

who had entered his high office upon the arrest and deportation to

Malta of his predecessor (the German occupation of Belgium during the

war had left Cardinal Mercier unmolested, but no such nice scruples

have troubled the British occupants of Constantinople). Meanwhile,

military events were moving rapidly. The Circassian leader, Anzavur,

who had been launched against the Nationalists, had flickered out

after a few local successes along the Asiatic shore of the Straits,

and it became evident that serious operations would have to be

undertaken if Constantinople was to be held. Every British man of war

in the Mediterranean was ordered to Constantinople and, with the

second Ferid Government launching its religious thunderbolts at the

Nationalists, Allied conferences at Hythe and Boulogne called on the

Greeks behind Smyrna to screen the Straits from the “Kemalists.” In

conjunction with British naval units, the towns along the Asiatic

shore of Marmora were quickly occupied. Thrace was given to the Greeks

in Europe to protect the capital from the Nationalists in its rear,

and a British Constantinople was now firmly embedded in a Greek

setting. The High Contracting Parties were now prepared to “agree that

the rights and title of the Turkish Government over Constantinople

shall not be affected, and that the said Government and His Majesty

the Sultan shall be entitled to reside there and to maintain there the

capital of the Turkish State.”