The garrison of Kars—Dr. Lanzoni—A probable outbreak of
typhus—The two Pachas—Whose fault is it?—If God wills it,
there will be no Cholera—If God wills it, the Russians will
not come here—The hospitals full of men suffering from
typhus fever—The International Commission—The Grand Duke
Michael—Gumri—The Armenians and their nationality—The speech
of the Grand Duke—The Master of the Armenian school—You
shall go to prison—The Emperor Nicholas—Religious liberty
granted to Armenians in Russia—The document—The Patriarch's
death—Suspicious circumstances—Cossacks firing upon
Mohammedans—Three children wounded—Clergymen of the Church
of England—Hankering after the idolatrous practices of
the Greek faith—Wolves in sheep's clothing—Colonel Lake—A
little boy shot by the Cossacks—Russia the father of the
fatherless—The Right Hon. R. Lowe, M.P.—The Author of _the
Bulgarian horrors_—English officers and soldiers massacred
in the Crimea—The Court of Inquiry—The Duke of Newcastle's
speech—Russian officers butchering the English wounded.
There were at the time of my visit to Kars about 20,000 troops quartered
in and about the town; but large reinforcements could be sent from
Erzeroum should occasion arise for their services. Later in the day Dr.
Lanzoni, of the Quarantine, called upon me; he is an Italian, and in
the International Service. On my alluding to the state of the streets
in Kars, he remarked that he had written twice to the authorities at
Constantinople, but that no notice had been taken of his letters. "We
shall have an outbreak of typhus or plague in the summer," continued
the doctor. "The mortality will be very great, if we are besieged before
the filth is cleared away."
The civil governor entered the room. He joined in the conversation.
"It is the fault of the military Pacha," he observed. "The soldiers have
made this mess in the streets, and the military Pacha thinks that the
civilians in the town ought to clear it up. I have told him that this
work ought to be done by the troops, but he says that the soldiers are
the Padishah's servants, and that their duty is to fight, and not to be
scavengers."
"What have you done about the matter?" I inquired.
"We have written to Constantinople," replied the governor.
"How long does it take for a letter to go there?"
"About three weeks."
"Yes," said the doctor, "three weeks to go, and three weeks to return,
in all six weeks, without considering the delay there will be in
answering the communication. We may have the cholera here long before
that time."
"If God wills it, there will be no cholera," said the Pacha.
I interrupted him, "You are strengthening your garrison?"
"Yes."
"You will repair the fortifications?"
"Yes."
"You are supplying the troops with Martini-Peabody rifles at a great
expense to your Government?"
"Yes."
"Well," I continued, "why are you doing this?"
"On account of the Russians," said the Pacha, "but why do you ask me
these questions?"
"Because if God wills it, the Russians will not come here, and if He
has decreed that Kars is to fall, nothing that you can do will prevent
that event taking place."
"Then you think that armies are useless?" said the Pacha.
"No, but you would seem to hold that opinion, for you do not take the
trouble to have the streets cleared, and say, if God wills it so, that
there will be no epidemic."
"Allah is all-powerful. He knows everything that has happened and that
will happen," said the governor devoutly. "We are all dust in His sight.
If we have the cholera in Kars, it will be the military Pacha's fault."
Shortly afterwards my visitor left the room.
"I am very glad you spoke to him as you did," said the doctor. "Our
hospitals are full of men suffering from typhoid fever; more than 10
per cent. of the poor fellows do not recover. This is a case in which
the European powers ought to interfere," continued the speaker. "I am
a quarantine officer, and am paid by the International Commission. It
is my duty to prevent the cholera or any other infectious disease being
brought from the East, but these Turks are doing their best to breed
a plague in the heart of their principal fortification. Kars is only
thirty miles from Gumri," he added, "if this place were to fall, the
whole of Asia Minor would follow."
"Do the Armenians in this town like the Russians?" I now inquired.
"Not at all," said the doctor. "Only seven months ago the Grand Duke
Michael visited Gumri, the Russian frontier fortress. When he was there
he inspected the Armenian schools, and made a speech to the girls in
one of these institutions. After a few remarks about the progress they
were making, the Grand Duke concluded his discourse by addressing their
mothers in these words, 'Rappelez-vous bien que le lait avec lequel
vous nourrissez vos enfants doit être le lait Russe.' The Armenians
are immensely vain of their nationality. This speech of the Grand Duke
incensed them very much against him. The Russian prince made himself
still more unpopular a few days later," continued the doctor. "In the
course of a visit to the master of one of the Armenian schools, he
observed some pictures in the schoolroom. 'What pictures are these?' he
inquired. 'They are likenesses of some of the former kings of Armenia,'
replied the schoolmaster. 'You have no right to have any portraits here
save those of the Tzar and of the members of the Imperial family,' said
the Grand Duke, 'you shall go to prison.'"
An Armenian gentleman entered the room; he corroborated everything that
the doctor had said, and presently remarked that many years ago the
Emperor Nicholas had given the Patriarch Mateos a document in which
the Tzar granted full religious liberty to all Armenians in Russia.
"Our Patriarch kept this deed always on his person," continued the
speaker. One day he died very suddenly, and under rather suspicious
circumstances. His successor searched everywhere for the document, but
could not find it. At length he discovered a copy: he then wrote to the
authorities in Tiflis, and asked for a fresh paper. His request was
refused, and at the same time he was informed that no such religious
liberty had ever been granted to the Armenians."
"Is it true that the Russian authorities do not permit the Mohammedans
to leave the Tzar's dominion?" I now inquired.
"Yes," said the doctor; "a very few months ago a case came under my
own observation. Some Mohammedans wished to leave Russia and escape to
Turkey; as they were passing the border-line, a band of Cossacks fired
upon them. They continued their flight, but three children had been
wounded and were afterwards treated in the hospital at Kars."
As I copy the above lines from my note-book, I cannot help thinking of
some few Clergymen of the Church of England who, secretly hankering
after the superstitions attached to the Greek faith, put themselves
forward as champions of Holy Russia. But we need not be surprised. Those
people who are so deadened to a sense of right and wrong as to imagine
that they are doing God service by instilling into the ears of our wives
and children sentences from the foul pamphlet entitled "The Priest
in Absolution," can readily bring themselves to believe that killing
pregnant women,[19] and flogging Christian women and children,[20]
to make them change their religion, is justifiable on the part of
the Russian Government. Priests like these would gladly re-establish
the Inquisition in our midst. They could defend the massacres of St.
Bartholomew, if the victims had been Mohammedans; and on the seventh
day of the week they stand up in their pulpits and preach the doctrine
of peace by advocating the extermination of the Turks.
The above-mentioned way of treating Mohammedan little children is no
novelty on the part of the Tzar's soldiery. Colonel Lake, in his work,
the "Defence of Kars," remarks that, "brought up as savages from their
infancy, some of these Cossacks will not scruple to commit the most
barbarous actions. As an instance of this, on one occasion, during
the earlier period of the blockade, a party of them made a dash at a
small village by the river side called Karaba Kilissa, and though the
inhabitants offered not the slightest opposition to them, they beat
a little boy, twelve years of age, very cruelly with their whips, and
finally shot him—the ball passing through his thigh and breaking the
bone. It was heart-rending to see the poor old mother weeping over her
dying child. He was packed up in an _araba_, or country cart, and sent
down to the hospital, where he was attended by Dr. Sandwith. Every
possible care was taken of the little sufferer, but he died under the
amputation of the shattered limb.
We were told a few months ago by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, M.P., that
Russia was the father of the fatherless; judging from the way she has
treated these Mohammedan children, it would not put her to much expense
to provide for a numerous family.
It was a goodly spectacle this Holy Russia putting herself forward last
autumn as the Champion of the Bulgarians, after she had done her best to
foment[21] the disturbances which led to the massacres in their country.
It may be refreshing to some of the believers in Muscovite philanthropy
if I recall to their recollection what took place very recently in
Central Asia.
"Kill the Turkomans, kill them all!" was General Kauffmann's order
during the Khivan campaign.
"I suppose you mean in the Circassian style," was the dry remark of an
old colonel, well acquainted with the Russian manner of making war upon
the Circassians.
"Yes; kill them all! Spare neither age nor sex! Let none escape!"
Circassian[22] pregnant women cut to pieces!—does this go for nothing
in the eyes of those gentlemen who called out for vengeance on the
Circassians in Bulgaria? Circassian children butchered by Russian
soldiery!—is this nothing to two clergymen of the Church of England, who
denounced in the strongest language an imaginary atrocity of the Turks?
Are these things nothing to the Right Hon. W. Gladstone, M.P., who,
writing last autumn about a friendly power, remarked, "What seems now
to be certain in this sense (besides the miserable daily misgovernment,
which, however, dwindles by the side of the Bulgarian horrors) are the
wholesale massacres—
"Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural!"[23]
the elaborate and refined cruelty—the only refinement of which Turkey
boasts!—the utter disregard of sex and age—the abominable and bestial
lust—and the entire and violent lawlessness which still stalks over the
land."
Two wrongs do not make one right. This is an old saying and a true
one. The atrocities committed by the Russians in the Caucasus are no
excuse for those perpetrated by the Circassians in Bulgaria; but the
Circassians are Mohammedans, the Muscovites profess the doctrines of
Christ. Why was the author of the Bulgarian horrors silent when his
own officials reported the crimes of the Russian soldiery? We have been
told that Russia is the torch-bearer of civilization, and our military
attaché at St. Petersburg, Captain and Lt.-Col. Wellesley, has stated
that he believes the Muscovite soldiers are incapable of the atrocities
laid to their charge. Mr. Gladstone has quoted this officer as an
authority.
It may be that our military attaché is ignorant of what took place
during the Crimean war. He was a child in petticoats at the time. But
Mr. Gladstone cannot assign extreme youth in his own case as an excuse
for bad memory. He was a member of the Cabinet, and, as such, had
access to all official despatches. Let me ask him if he can remember the
circumstances under which many of our officers and soldiers met their
death at the battle of Inkerman, and when they were lying helpless on
the field? Does he know how Captain the Hon. Henry Neville, of the 3rd
battalion of Grenadier Guards, was butchered? and how Captain Sir Robert
Newman, Bart., shared the same fate? Does he know how poor Disbrowe of
the Coldstreams was tortured? _Possibly_ all these things have escaped
from his memory, but the Cabinet to which he belonged did not forget
them at the time.
A Court of Inquiry[24] was held in the Crimea. It investigated the
accusations made against the Russian troops. The proceedings of this
Court of Inquiry, accompanied by a despatch, were forwarded by Lord
Raglan to the authorities at home. In these papers will be found the
names of many British officers and privates who were proved to have been
brutally massacred—by the Russian soldiers—when imploring mercy, and
helpless owing to their wounds. Such horror was created in the minds
of some of the Cabinet, that one of its members, the War Minister, the
late Duke of Newcastle, alluded to the matter on the 12th of December,
1854, in the House of Lords, as follows. I give his own words:—
"The enemy which our men met were not content with the legitimate use
of their weapons, but had the BARBARITY, THE ATROCIOUS VILLAINY, I
will call it, TO MURDER IN COLD BLOOD THE WOUNDED SOLDIERS AS THEY LAY
HELPLESS ON THE FIELD; AND not the ignorant serfs alone did that, but
MEN HOLDING THE POSITION OF OFFICERS. Our men have had to fight the
savage and uncivilized Kaffirs, but in no instance have THEY EXPERIENCED
SUCH BARBARISM AS WITH THE RUSSIAN SOLDIERS!!!!"
A number of families in Great Britain were in mourning after Inkerman.
Many old fathers and mothers thought that their sons had been killed in
fair fight. They have been deceived. The proceedings of the Court of
Inquiry were in the War Office this summer. I challenge the author of
the Bulgarian horrors to ask the Government to lay these papers, with
Lord Raglan's and Marshal Canrobert's despatches relating to them, on
the table of the House of Commons. It is to be hoped that he will do
so. The British public would then be able to judge for itself what sort
of men the Russians are, and how thoroughly Russia merits the terms—The
Torch-bearer of Civilization and the Protector of the Unprotected—which
have been applied to her by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone and the Right
Hon. Robert Lowe.