CHAPTER VII

THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter I_

THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS

The maker of phrases plies a dangerous trade. Very often his phrase is

applicable for the moment and for the situation in view of which he

coined it, but his coin has only a temporary validity: it is good for a

month or for a year, or for whatever period during which the crisis

lasts, and after that it lapses again into a mere token, a thing without

value and without meaning. But the phrase cannot, as in the case of a

monetary coinage, at once be recalled, for it has gone broadcast over

the land, or, at any rate, it is not recalled, and it goes on being

passed from hand to hand, its image and superscription defaced by wear,

long after it has ceased to represent anything. In itself it is

obsolete, but people still trade with it, and think it represents what

it represented when it came hot from the Mint. And, unfortunately, it

sometimes happens that it is worse than valueless; it becomes a forgery

(which it may not have been when it came into circulation), and deceives

those who traffic with it, flattering them with an unfounded possession.

Such a phrase, which still holds currency, was once coined by Lord

Aberdeen in the period of the Crimean War. 'Turkey is a sick man,' he

said, and added something which gave great offence then about the

advisability of putting Turkey out of his misery. I do not pretend to

quote correctly, but that was the gist of it. Nor do I challenge the

truth of Lord Aberdeen's phrase at the period when he made it. It

possibly contained a temporary truth, a valid point of view, which, if

it had been acted on, might have saved a great deal of trouble

afterwards, but it missed then, and more than misses now, the essential

and salient truth about Turkey. The phrase, unfortunately, still

continued to obtain credit, and nowadays it is a forgery; it rings

false.

For at whatever period we regard Turkey, and try to define that

monstrous phenomenon, we can make a far truer phrase than Lord

Aberdeen's. For Turkey is not a sick man: Turkey is a sickness. He is

not sick, nor ever has been, for he is the cancer itself, the devouring

tumour that for centuries has fed on living tissue, absorbing it and

killing it. It has never had life in itself, except in so far that the

power of preying on and destroying life constitutes life, and such a

power, after all, we are accustomed to call not life, but death. Turkey,

like death, continues to exist and to dominate, through its function of

killing. Life cannot kill, it is disease and death that kill, and from

the moment that Turkey passed from being a nomadic tribe moving

westwards from the confines of Persia, it has existed only and thrived

on a process of absorption and of murder. When first the Turks came out

of their Eastern fastnesses they absorbed; when they grew more or less

settled, and by degrees the power of mere absorption, as by some failure

of digestion, left them, they killed. They became a huge tumour, that

nourished itself by killing the living tissues that came in contact

with it. Now, by the amazing irony of fate, who weaves stranger dramas

than could ever be set on censored stages, for they both take hundreds

of years to unravel themselves, and are of the most unedifying

character, Turkey, the rodent cancer, has been infected by another with

greater organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is

threatened by a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its

crab-pincers into the cancer that came out of Asia. Those claws are

already deeply set, and the problem for civilised nations is first to

disentangle the nippers that are cancer in a cancer, and next to deprive

of all power over alien peoples the domination that has already been

allowed to exist too long.

The object of this book is the statement of the case on which all

defenders of liberty base their prosecution against Turkey itself, and

against the Power that to-day has Turkey in its grip.

Historical surveys are apt to be tedious, but in order to understand at

all adequately the case against Turkey as a ruler and controller of

subject peoples, it is necessary to go, though briefly, into her

blood-stained genealogy. There is no need to enter into ethnological

discussions as to earlier history, or define the difference between the

Osmanli Turks and those who were spread over Asia Minor before the

advent of the Osmanlis from the East. But it was the Osmanlis who were

the cancerous and devouring nation, and it is they who to-day rule over

a vast territory (subject to Germany) of peoples alien to them by

religion and blood and all the instincts common to civilised folk. Until

Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a

champion of murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and

literature and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare

with the anachronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, in August 1914,

there was hoisted the German flag, superimposed with skulls and

cross-bones, and all the insignia of piracy and highway robbery on land

and on sea, and Germany showed herself an anachronism worthy to impale

her arms on the shield of the most execrable domination that has ever

oppressed the world since the time when the Huns under Attila raged like

a forest fire across the cultivated fields of European civilisation.

To-day, in the name of Kultur, a similar invasion has broken on shores

that seemed secure, and it is no wonder that it has found its most

valuable victim and ally in the Power that adopted the same methods of

absorption and extermination centuries before the Hohenzollerns ever

started on their career of highway robbery. But like seeks like, and

perhaps it was not wholly the fault of our astonishing diplomacy in

Constantinople that Turkey, wooed like some desirable maiden, cast in

her lot with the Power that by instinct and tradition most resembled

her. Spiritual blood, no less than physical blood, is thicker than

water, and Gott and Allah, hand-in-hand, pledged each other in the cups

they had filled with the blood that poured from the wine-presses of

Belgium and of Armenia.

For centuries before the Osmanli Turks made their appearance in Asia

Minor, there had come from out of the misty East numerous bodies of

Turks, pushing westwards, and spreading over the Euphrates valley and

over Persia, in nomadic or military colonisations, and it is not until

the thirteenth century that we find the Osmanli Turks, who give their

name to that congregation of races known as the Ottoman Empire,

established in the north-west corner of Asia Minor. Like all previous

Turkish immigrations, they came not in any overwhelming horde, with

sword in one hand and Koran in the other, but as a small compact body

with a genius for military organisation, and the gift, which they retain

to this day, of stalwart fighting. The policy to which they owed their

growth was absorption, and the people whom they first began to absorb

were Greeks and other Christians, and it was to a Christian girl,

Nilufer, that Osman married his son Orkhan. They took Christian youths

from the families of Greek dwellers, forced them to apostatise, gave

them military training, and married them to Turkish girls. It was out of

this blend of Greek and Turkish blood, as Mr. D.G. Hogarth points out,

that they derived their national being and their national strength. This

system of recruiting they steadily pursued not only among the Christian

peoples with whom they came in contact, but among the settlements of

Turks who had preceded them in this process of pushing westwards, and

formed out of them the professional soldiery known as Janissaries. They

did not fight for themselves alone, but as mercenaries lent their arms

to other peoples, Moslem and Christian alike, who would hire their

services. This was a policy that paid well, for, after having delivered

some settlement from the depredations of an inconvenient neighbour, and

with their pay in their pocket, they sometimes turned on those who had

hired their arms, took their toll of youths, and finally incorporated

them in their growing empire. Like an insatiable sponge, they mopped up

the sprinklings of disconnected peoples over the fruitful floor of Asia

Minor, and swelled and prospered. But as yet the extermination of these

was not part of their programme: they absorbed the strength and manhood

of their annexations into their own soldiery, and came back for more.

They did not levy those taxes paid in the persons of soldiers for their

armies from their co-religionists, since Islam may not fight against

Islam, but by means of peaceful penetration (a policy long since

abandoned) they united scattered settlements of Turks to themselves by

marriages and the bond of a common tongue and religion.

Their expansion into Europe began in the middle of the fourteenth

century, when, as mercenaries, they fought against the Serbs, and fifty

years later they had a firm hold over Bulgaria as well. Greece was their

next prey; they penetrated Bosnia and Macedonia, and in 1453 attacked

and took Constantinople under Mohammed the Conqueror. Still true to the

policy of incorporation they continued to mop up the remainder of the

Balkan Peninsula, and at the same time consolidated themselves further

in Asia Minor. By the beginning of the seventeenth century their

expansion reached its utmost geographical limits, but already the Empire

held within it the seeds of its own decay, and by a curious irony the

force that should still keep it together was derived not from its own

strength, but from the jealousies of the European Powers among

themselves, who would willingly have dismembered it, but feared the

quarrels that would surely result from the apportionment of its

territories. The Ottoman Empire from then onwards has owed its existence

to its enemies.

Its weakness lay in itself, for it was very loosely knit together, and

no bond, whether of blood or religion or tongue, bound to it the

assembly of Christian and Jewish and non-Moslem races of which it was so

largely composed. The Empire never grew (as, for instance, the British

Empire grew) by the emigration and settlement of the Osmanli stock in

the territories it absorbed: it never gave, it only took. From the

beginning right up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it has

been a military despotism, imposing itself on unwilling and alien tribes

whom it drained of their blood, and then left in neglect until some

further levy was needed. None of its conquered peoples was ever given a

share in the government; they were left unorganised and, so to speak,

undigested elements under the Power which had forced them into

subjection, and one by one the whole of the European peoples included in

that uncemented tyranny have passed from under Turkish control. Turkey

in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to the Sea of

Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt has been lost, Tripoli also, and the

only force that, for the last hundred years has kept alive in Europe the

existence of that monstrous anachronism has been the strange political

phenomenon, now happily extinct, called the Balance of Power. No one of

the Great Powers, from fear of the complications that would ensue, could

risk the expulsion of the Turkish Government from Constantinople, and

there all through the nineteenth century it has been maintained lest the

Key of the Black Sea, which unlocked the bolts that barred Russia's

development into the Mediterranean, should lead to such a war as we are

now passing through. That policy, for the present, has utterly defeated

its own ends, for the key is in the pockets of Prussia. But all through

that century, though the Powers maintained Turkey there, they helped to

liberate, or saw liberate themselves, the various Christian kingdoms in

Europe over which at the beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey

exercised a military despotism. They weakened her in so far as they

could, but they one and all refused to let her die, and above all

refused to give her that stab in the heart which would have been implied

in her expulsion from Constantinople.

For centuries from the first appearance of the Osmanlis in north-west

Asia Minor down to the reign of Abdul Hamid, the Empire maintained

itself, with alternate bouts of vigour and relapses, on the general

principle of drawing its strength from its subject peoples. Internally,

from whatever standpoint we view it, whether educational, economic, or

industrial, it has had the worst record of any domination known to

history. Rich in mineral wealth, possessed of lands that were once the

granary of the world, watered by amazing rivers, and with its strategic

position on the Mediterranean that holds the master-key of the Black Sea

in its hands, it has remained the most barbaric and least progressive of

all states. Its roads and means of communication remained up till the

last quarter of the nineteenth century much as they had been in the days

of Osman; except along an insignificant strip of sea-coast railways were

non-existent; it was bankrupt in finance and in morals, and did not

contain a single seed that might ripen into progress or civilisation.

Mesopotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, capable of

supporting not itself alone, but half the civilised world: nowadays,

under the stewardship of the Turk, it has been suffered to become a

desert for the greater part of the year and an impracticable swamp for

the remainder. Where great cities flourished, where once was reared the

pride of Babylon and of Nineveh, there huddle the squalid huts of

fever-stricken peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved living

from the soil that once supported in luxury and pomp the grandeur of

metropolitan cities. The ancient barrages, the canals, the systems of

irrigation were all allowed to silt up and become useless; and at the

end of the nineteenth century you would not find in all Mesopotamia an

agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and

the flails of more than two thousand years ago. But so long as there was

a palace-guard about the gates to secure the safety of the Sultan and

his corrupt military oligarchy, so long as there were houris to divert

their leisure, tribute of youths to swell their armies, and taxes wrung

from starving subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not one of

those who held the reins of government who cared the flick of an eyelash

for the needs of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for the

cultivation of its soil that would yield a hundredfold to the skilled

husbandman, or for the exploitation and development of its internal

wealth. While there was left in the emaciated carcase of the Turkish

Empire enough live tissue for the cancerous Government to grow fat on,

it gave not one thought to the welfare of all those races on whom it had

fastened itself. Province after province of its European dominions

might be lost to it, but the Balance of Power still kept the Sultan on

his throne, and left the peoples of Asia Minor and Syria at his mercy.

They were largely of alien religion and of alien tongue, and their

individual weakness was his strength. Neglect, and the decay consequent

on neglect, was the lot of all who languished under that abominable

despotism.

With the accession in 1876 of Abdul Hamid, of cursed memory, there

dawned on the doomed subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire a day of

bloodier import than any yet. The year before and during that year had

occurred the Bulgarian atrocities and massacres, and the word 'massacre'

lingered and made music in Abdul Hamid's brain. He said it over to

himself and dwelt upon it, and meditated on the nature and possibilities

of massacre. The troubles which massacre had calmed had arisen before

his accession out of the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, which

corresponded to the Greek Patriarchate, and was given power over

districts and peoples whom the Greeks justly considered to belong to

them by blood and religion. Greek armed bands came into collision with

Bulgarian bands, and in order to calm these disturbances by thoroughly

effectual means, irregular Turkish troops were sent into Bulgaria,

charged with the command to 'stop the row,' but with no other

instructions. Indiscriminate killing, with all the passions and horrors

that bloodshed evokes in the half-civilised, followed, and there was no

more trouble just then in the disturbed districts, for there was none to

make trouble. In 1876 Abdul Aziz was deposed by a group of king-makers

under Midhat Pasha, Murad V. reigned shadow-like for three months, and

during the same year Abdul Hamid was finally selected to fill the

throne, and stand forth as the Shadow of God. It was a disturbed and

tottering inheritance to which he succeeded, riddled with the dry-rot of

corruption, but the inheritor proved himself equal to the occasion.

For a little while he was all abroad, and at the bidding of Midhat, who

had placed him on the throne, he summoned a kind of representative

Turkish Parliament, by way of imbuing the Great Powers with the idea

that he was an enlightened Shadow of God bent on reform. This parody of

a Parliament lasted but a short time: it was no more than a faint,

dissolving magic-lantern picture. In the spring of 1877 Rumania, under

Russian encouragement, broke away from Turkish rule. Turkey declared war

on Russia, and in 1878 found herself utterly defeated. At Adrianople was

drawn up the Treaty of San Stefano, creating an independent Bulgarian

state, and, in the opinion of Great Britain and Germany, giving Russia

far greater influence in the Balkan Peninsula than was agreeable to that

disastrous supporter of Turkey, the Balance of Power. In consequence the

Treaty of San Stefano was superseded by the Treaty of Berlin.

In those arrangements Abdul Hamid had no voice, but he was well content

to sit quiet, think about what was to be done with what was left him,

and thank his waning crescent that once again the Balance of Power had

secured Constantinople for him, leaving him free to deal with his

Asiatic dominions, and such part of Europe as was left him, as he

thought fit. He could safely trust that he would never be ejected from

his throne by a foreign Power, and all he need do was to make himself

safe against internal disturbances and revolutions which might upset

him. And it was then that he begot in the womb of his cold and cunning

brain a policy that was all his own, except in so far as the Bulgarian

atrocities, consequent on feuds between Bulgars and Greeks, may be

considered the father of that hideous birth. But it was he who suckled

and nourished it, it was from his brain that it emerged, full-grown and

in panoply of armour, as from the brain of Olympian Zeus came Pallas

Athene. This new policy was in flat contradiction of all the previous

policy, as he had received it from his predecessors, of strengthening

Turkey by tributes of man-power from his subject tribes, but it would,

he thought, have the same result of keeping the Turk supreme among the

alien elements of the Empire. Times had changed; it behoved him to

change the methods which hitherto had held together his hapless

inheritance.

Now Abdul Hamid was not in any sense a wise man, and the ability which

has been attributed to him, in view of the manner in which he

successfully defied the civilisations of Europe, is based on premisses

altogether false. He never really defied Europe at all; he always

yielded, secure in his belief that Europe in the shape of the Balance of

Power, was unanimous in keeping him where he was. He never even risked

being turned out of Constantinople, for he knew--none better--that all

Europe insisted on retaining him there. As regards wisdom, there was

never a greater fool, but as regards cunning there was never a greater

fox. He had a brain that was absolutely impervious to large ideas: the

notion of consolidating and strengthening his Empire by ameliorating its

internal conditions, by bringing it within speaking distance of the

influence of civilisation and progress, by taking advantage of and

developing its immense natural resources, by employing the brains and

the industry of his subject races, seems never to have entered his head.

He could easily have done all this: there was not a Power in Europe that

would not have lent him a helping hand in development and reform, in the

establishment of a solvent state, in aiding the condition of the peoples

over whom he ruled. In whatever he did, provided that it furthered the

welfare of his subjects, whether Turk, Armenian, or Arab, the whole

Concert of Europe would have provided him with cash, with missionaries,

with engineers, and all the resources of the arts and sciences of peace

and of progress. But being a felon, with crime and cunning to take the

place of wisdom, he preferred to develop his Empire on his own original

lines. In Europe he was but suffered to exist. There remained Asia.

The policy of previous Osmanli rulers has already been roughly defined.

They strengthened themselves and the military Turkish despotism round

them by absorbing the manhood of the tribes over which they had obtained

dominion. Abdul Hamid reversed that policy; he strengthened the Turkish

supremacy, not by drawing into it the manhood of his subject peoples,

but by destroying that manhood. In proportion, so his foxlike brain

reasoned, as his alien subjects were weak, so were the Turks strong. A

consistent weakening of alien nations would strengthen the hold of those

who governed the Ottoman Empire. It was as if a man suffered from gout

in his foot: he could get rid of the gout by wholesome living, the

result of which would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. But the

plan which he adopted was to cause his foot to mortify by process of

inhuman savagery. When it was dead it would trouble him no longer.

He was well aware that the Turkish people only comprised some forty per

cent, of the population of the Turkish Empire: numerically they were

weaker than the alien peoples who composed the rest of it. Something had

to be done to bring the governing Power up to such a proportionate

strength as should secure its supremacy, and the most convenient plan

was to weaken the alien elements. The scheme, though yet inchoate, had

been tried with success in the case of the Bulgarians and Greeks, and to

test it further he stirred up Albanians against the inhabitants of Old

Servia with gratifying results. They weakened each other, and he further

weakened them both by the employment of Turkish troops in Macedonia to

quell the disturbances which he had himself fomented. There were

massacres and atrocities, and no more trouble just then from Macedonia.

Having thus tested his plan and found no flaw in it, he settled to adopt

it. But European combinations did not really much interest him, for he

was aware that the Great Powers, to whose sacred Balance he owed the

permanence of his throne, would not tolerate interference with European

peoples, and he turned his attention to Asia Minor. There were

excrescences there which he could not absorb, but which might be

destroyed. He could use the knife on living tissues which the impaired

digestion of the Ottoman Empire could not assimilate. So he hit on this

fresh scheme, which his hellish cunning devised with a matchless sense

of the adaptation of the means to the end, and he created (though he did

not live to perfect) a new policy that reversed the traditions of five

hundred years. That is no light task to undertake, and when we consider

that since his deposition, now nine years ago, that policy has reaped

results undreamed of perhaps by him, we can see how far-sighted his

cunning was. To-day it is being followed out by the very combination

that deposed him; his aims have been fully justified, and for that

precise reason we are right to classify him among the abhorred of

mankind. He had an opportunity such as is given to the few, and he made

the utmost of it, even as his greater successor on the throne of Turkey

for the present, namely Wilhelm II. of Prussia, has done, in the service

of the devil. 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant,' must surely

have been his well-deserved welcome, when he left the hell he had made

on earth for another.

Of all his subjects the Armenians were the most progressive, the most

industrious, the most capable. They therefore contributed, according to

that perverted foxlike mind, one of the greatest menaces to the

stability of his throne, which henceforth should owe its strength to the

weakness of those it governed. They, as all the world knows, are a

peaceful Christian people, and it was against them that Abdul Hamid

directed the policy which he had tested in Europe. The instruments he

employed to put it in force were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race

marching with and mixed up among the Armenians. By this means he had the

excuse ready that these massacres were local disturbances among remote

and insubordinate tribes, one of whom, however, the Kurds, he armed with

modern rifles and caused to be instructed in some elementary military

training. Their task was to murder Armenians, their pay was the

privilege to rape their girls and their women, and to rob the houses of

the men they had killed. The Armenians resisted with at first some small

success, upon which Abdul Hamid reinforced the Kurds with regular

troops, and caused it to be proclaimed that this was a war of Moslems

against the infidel, a Holy War. Moslem fanaticism, ever smouldering

and ready to burst into flames, blazed high, and a fury of massacres

broke forth against all Armenians, east and west, north and south. The

streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before Abdul Hamid

was obliged by foreign civilised Powers to stop those holocausts, he had

so decimated the race that not for at least a generation would they

conceivably be a menace again even to that zealous guardian of the

supremacy in its own dominions of the Ottoman power. Very unwillingly,

when obliged to do so, he whistled off his bands of Kurds, and dismissed

them: unwillingly, too, he gave orders that the Armenian hunts which had

so pleasantly diverted the sportsmen of Constantinople, must be

abandoned: then was decreed a 'close time' for Armenians, the shooting

season was over. There is no exaggeration in this: eye-witnesses have

recorded how at the close of the business day in Constantinople,

shooting parties used literally to go out, and beat the coverts of

tenement houses for Armenians, of whom there were at that time in

Constantinople some 150,000. But when Abdul Hamid had finished his

sport, I do not think more than 80,000 at the most survived. These were

saved by the protests of Europe, and perhaps by the knowledge that if

all the Armenians were killed, there could never be any more shooting.

The Kurds also had lost a considerable number of men, and that was far

from displeasing to the yellow-faced butcher of Yildiz. A little

blood-letting among those turbulent Kurds was not at all a bad thing.

Here, then, we see defined and at work the new Ottoman policy with

regard to its peoples. Hitherto, it had been sufficient to take from

them its fill of man-power, and leave the tribe in question to its own

devices. There was no objection whatever to its developing the resources

of its territory, to its increasing in prosperity and in population.

Indeed the central Power was quite pleased that it should do so, for

when next the gathering of taxes and youths came round the collectors

would find a creditable harvest awaiting them. Such a tribe received no

encouragement or help from the Government; that would have been too

much to expect, but as long as it kept quiet and obedient it might,

without interference, prosper as well as it could. But now, in the last

quarter of the nineteenth century, all that was changed; instead of a

policy of neglect there was substituted a policy of murder. The state no

longer considered itself secure when in various parts of its dominions

its subjects showed themselves progressive and industrious. They had to

be kept down, and clearly the most efficient way of keeping people down

was killing them. Let it not be supposed for a moment that either the

first massacre, or any that followed, was the result of local

disturbances and fanaticism. It was nothing of the sort: each was

arranged and planned at Constantinople, as the official means, invented

by the arch-butcher, Abdul Hamid, of maintaining in power the most

devilish despotism that has ever disgraced the world. Something had to

be done to prevent the alien tribes in Asia slipping out of the noose of

Ottoman strangulation, even as the European tribes had done, and

forming themselves into separate and independent states. A ruler with

progressive ideas, one who had any perception of the internal prosperity

which alone can render an empire stable, would have made the attempt to

weld his loose and wavering domination together by encouraging and

working for the prosperity of its component peoples, so that he might,

though late in the day, give birth to a Turkey that was strong, because

its citizens were prosperous and content. Not so did Abdul Hamid; the

Turkey that he sought to establish was merely to be strong because he

had battered into a blood-stained pulp the most progressive and the most

industrious of the alien peoples over whom he ruled.

It is significant that, while yet the blood of the murdered Christians

was scarcely washed from the streets of Constantinople, the Emperor

Wilhelm II. visited his brother-sovereign at Yildiz, after making his

tour throughout the Holy Land. The two can hardly, in their intimate

conversations, have completely avoided the subject of the massacres; but

after all, that was not such an unmanageably awkward topic, for Wilhelm

II. could tactfully have reminded Abdul Hamid that his own throne also

was based on the murderous progress of the Teutonic Knights. Then there

was the war between Turkey and Greece only lately concluded to discuss,

and there again--for the Emperor's sister was Crown Princess of

Greece--conversation must have been a shade difficult. Altogether, in

spite of the Emperor's lifelong desire to visit the Holy Places in

Palestine, it was an odd moment for a Christian monarch to visit the

butcher of Constantinople. But the truth is that Wilhelm II. had a very

strong reason for going to see his brother, for the fruit of German

policy in Turkey was already ripening and swelling on the tree, and the

minor disadvantages of visiting this murderous tyrant while still his

hands were red with blood was more than compensated for by the

advantages of having a heart-to-heart talk with him on other subjects.

Germany had already begun her peaceful penetration, and the real motive

of the Emperor's visit was, after swords and orders had been exchanged,

to make the definite request that bodies of colonising Germans should be

allowed to settle on the Sultan's dominions in Asia Minor, and a hint no

doubt was conveyed that there would be plenty of room for them now that

there were so many Armenian farms unfortunately without a master. But,

like Uriah Heep, the Emperor had attempted to pluck the fruit before it

was ripe, or, to use a more exact simile, before he was tall enough to

reach it. In vain he represented to Abdul Hamid the immense advantages

which would result to Turkey by the establishment of those Gott-like

German settlers in Asia Minor. Out of his colossal egalo-megalomania, of

which we know more now, he thought that any request which the

All-Highest should deign to make must instantly be granted. But he met

with a perfectly flat refusal, and the baffled All-Highest left

Constantinople in an exceedingly bad temper, which quite undid all the

good that the balm in Gilead and the sacred associations of Jerusalem

had done him. It is pleasant to think of the Pan-Islamic merriment with

which Abdul Hamid must have viewed the indignant exit of his Christian

brother, who had come such a long way to see him, and was so tactful

about the Armenian atrocities. He might perhaps--for those Christians

were very odd pigs--have expressed horror or remonstrance. Not at all:

he was much too anxious to get his request granted, to make himself

disagreeable. But did his Christian brother really think that all those

massacres over which Abdul Hamid had spent so much time and money, had

been arranged in order to settle those nasty progressive Germans in the

lands that had been so carefully depopulated? Why, the whole point of

them had been that the Armenians were too progressive and prosperous,

thus constituting a menace to the central Government, and certainly

Abdul Hamid was not meaning to put in their place settlers even more

progressive and with a stronger backing behind them. So off went the

All-Highest back home again, very much vexed with Abdul Hamid, and

possibly (if that was not sacrilegious) with himself for having been in

too great a hurry. There was more spade-work to be done yet before

Turkey was ripe for open and avowed colonisation by the Fatherland.

The episode, strictly historical, is of a certain importance, for it

shows the date at which Wilhelm II. thought that the time had come for

Germans to colonise Turkey. The peaceful penetration (which now amounts

to perforation) was even then pretty far advanced. But Abdul Hamid seems

to have seen the significance of the request, and for some little while

after that German influence had a certain set-back in Turkey. The date

of this marks an era, and Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' set to work

again, in no way discouraged, to set her cancer-nippers in the cancer

that already had begun to eat the live tissues round it.

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter II_

THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS

In the year 1908 a military group in Constantinople, styling itself the

'Young Turk' party, seized and deposed Abdul Hamid, and shut him up at

Salonika, there to spend the remainder of his infamous days. They put

forth a Liberal programme of reformation, one that earned them at the

moment the sympathy of civilised Europe (including Germany), and the

Balance of Power very mistakenly and prematurely heaved a sigh of

relief. For upwards of a century it had maintained in Constantinople the

corrupt and bloody autocracy of the Sultans, fearing the European

quarrels that would attend the dismemberment of that charnel-house of

decay known as the Ottoman Empire, and now (just for the moment) it

seemed as if a sudden rally had come to the Sick Man, and he showed

signs of returning animation and wholesome vitality. The policy of the

Powers, after a century of failure, looked as if it was justifying

itself, and they were full of congratulations towards Turkey and each

other. But never, in the whole century of their pusillanimous cacklings,

had they made a greater mistake.

Whether the Young Turks ever meant well or not, whether there was or was

not a grain of sincerity in this profession of their policy, is a

disputed question. There are those who say that originally they were

prompted by patriotic and high-minded aims, when they proclaimed their

object of 'Organisation,' and of reform. But all are agreed that it

matters very little what their original aims were, so speedily did their

Liberal intentions narrow down to an Ottomanisation such as Adbul Hamid

had aimed at, but had been unable to accomplish before his evil sceptre

ceased to sway the destinies of his kingdom. In any case this programme

earned its authors the sympathy of Europe, and probably this, and no

more than this, prompted it. They wished to establish themselves,

unquestioned and undisturbed, and did so; and I do not think we shall

be far wrong if we take the original Young Turk programme about as

seriously as we took the parody of a Parliament with which Abdul Hamid

opened (as with a blessing) his atrocious reign. The very next year

(1909) they permitted (if they did not arrange) the Armenian massacres

at Adana, and the Balance of Power began faintly to wonder whether the

Young Turks in their deposition of Abdul Hamid had not slain an asp and

hatched a cockatrice. Given that their aims originally were sincere, we

can but marvel at the swiftness of the corruption which in little more

than a year had begun to lead them not into paths of reform and Liberal

policy, but along the road towards which the butcher they had deposed

had pointed the way. It must have made Abdul Hamid gnaw his nails and

shake impotent hands to see those who had torn him from his throne so

soon pursuing the very policy which he invented, and to which he

nominally owed his dethronement. Strange, too, was it that his overthrow

should come from the very quarter to which he looked for security, for

it was on the army that each Sultan in turn had most relied for the

stability of his throne. But Abdul Hamid, in order, perhaps, to deal

more effectually with the subject races he wished to exterminate, had

introduced a system of foreign training for the officers of his army, a

course of Potsdam efficiency, and it was just they, on whom Sultans from

time immemorial had relied, who knocked the prop of the army away from

him. Though publicly, for the edification of Europe his deposers

professed a Liberal policy, it was not on account of Armenian massacres

that they turned him off his throne, but because of the muddle and

corruption and debility of his rule. Herein we may easily trace the hand

of Germany, no longer publicly beckoning as when Wilhelm II., just after

the first Armenian massacres, made his request of the Sultan for the

establishment in Turkey of German colonists, but working underground,

sapping and mining like a mole. For Germany, her mind already fixed on

securing Turkey as an instrument of her Eastern policy, wanted a strong

Turkey, and without doubt desired to bring an end to the disorganisation

and decay of the Empire, and create and at the same time interpenetrate

an efficient state that should be useful to her. We may take it for

granted that she, like the rest of Europe, welcomed any sign of

regeneration in the Ottoman Empire, but there was an ulterior purpose

behind that. Turkey, already grasped by the Prussian hand, must be in

that hand a weapon fit for use, a blade on which she could rely. She

strengthened the Turkish army by the introduction of Prussian

discipline, and worked on good material. Already she has realised her

ambition in this respect, and now controls the material which she then

worked on.

The troubled years of the Balkan wars which followed this false dawn,

coupled with the loss of all the territory which remained to the Ottoman

Empire in Europe, with the exception of Thrace, caused an immediate

reaction from the open-minded policy of the Young Turks, if we decide to

credit them at the outset with a sincere purpose. Organisation by a

slightly different spelling became Ottomanisation, and the aims of the

Young Turks were identified with those of the Nationalist party which

followed out and developed into a finished and super-fiendish policy the

dreams of Abdul Hamid. He, as we have seen, had invented the idea of

securing Ottoman supremacy in the Empire, not as before by absorption of

the strength of its subject peoples, but by their extermination, and

this formed part of the new programme which was to be more efficiently

administered. Already, in 1909, the experimental massacre at Adana took

place, and the Young Turk party, with its possibly Liberal aims, had

become a party that had as its main object a system of tyranny and

murder such as the world had never seen. Simultaneously Turkey itself,

Nationalist party and all, became enslaved to German influence. Link by

link the chains were forged and the manacles welded on, and before the

European War broke out in 1914, the incarceration of Turkey in Germany

was complete, and Wilhelm II. had a fine revenge for the snub inflicted

on him by Abdul Hamid when he proposed the scheme of German

colonisation in the lands depopulated by the Armenian massacres of 1895.

From the first the aim of the Nationalists, who thus formed so deadly a

blend with the Young Turk party, was Ottomanisation, or the

establishment within the Empire of an Ottoman domination which should be

pure and undefiled, and in which none of the subject peoples, be they

Armenians or Kurds, Arabs or Greeks or Jews, Christian or Moslem, should

have any part. The inception of the scheme was no doubt inspired by the

example given by Prussia's treatment of the Poles, and Hungary's of

Roumans and Slovaks. But in thoroughness of method Prussia's pupil was

to prove Prussia's master, for it aimed not merely at expropriation, but

extermination, and sought to become strong, not merely by weakening

alien elements, but by abolishing them. It did not set this out quite

explicitly in its manifestoes and the resolutions of its congresses, but

two extracts, the first from the proceedings of the 'Committee of Union

and Progress,' held in Constantinople in 1911, have a sinister

suggestiveness about them for which the acts and measures of the

Committee had already supplied the comment.

'The formation of new parties in the Chamber or in the country must be

suppressed, and the emergence of new Liberal ideas prevented. Turkey

must become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem influence must be

preponderant. Every other religious propaganda must be suppressed....

Sooner or later the complete Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects must

be effected; it is clear, however, that this can never be attained by

persuasion, but that we must resort to armed force.... Other

nationalities must be denied the right of organisation, for

decentralisation and autonomy are treason to the Turkish Empire.'

Could there be a completer reversion to the policy of Abdul Hamid, than

this formal resolution, passed within three years of the time when the

Young Turks deposed him? The conviction begins to dawn on one--as it

began to dawn on the Balancers of Power--that he owed his downfall not

to his illiberal and butcherous policy, but because he was not thorough

enough.

The second extract, from a pamphlet by Jelal Noury Bey, may be added,

which defines the policy, not with regard to the Christian or Jewish

subjects of the Turks, but with regard to the Arabs, Moslem by creed,

and the guardians of the Holy Cities.

'It is a peculiarly imperious necessity of our existence for us to

Turkise the Arab lands, for the particularistic idea of nationality is

awaking among the younger generation of Arabs, and already threatens us

with a great catastrophe. Against this we must be fore-armed.'

The design of Ottomanisation soon began to take practical form.

Ottomanisation was to be the highest expression of patriotism, and any

means which secured it, massacres such as, in 1909, had taken place at

Adana, or the treatment accorded to the Greeks and Bulgarians who

remained in Thrace after the Balkan wars, were in accordance with the

new 'Liberal' gospel. Thrace was the only territory left to the Turks in

Europe, and as it was largely populated by Greeks and Bulgarians, it

could not be considered as sufficiently Ottomanised. A massacre under

the very eyes of Europe was perhaps dangerous, so it sufficed to put the

entire non-Turkish population over the frontier and lay hands on their

property. In fact this was the first of the 'deportation' schemes which,

in 1915, proved so successful with the Armenians, and the effect of it

was that neither Greeks nor Bulgarians were left in Thrace. Then

followed the expulsion of Greeks from the Mediterranean sea-board, but

this was never completely carried out because the European war

intervened, and the attention of the Nationalists was claimed by their

over-lord. Later, as we shall see, a further deportation of Greeks was

begun, but again that was stopped, for Germany saw that it would never

do to have her Turkish allies murdering settlers of the same blood as

those she hoped would become her allies. Of course, when it was only a

question of Armenians she did not interfere.

The design, then, of the new 'Liberal' regime, of which those three

measures, the massacres at Adana, the expulsion of Greeks and Bulgarians

from Thrace, and of Greeks from the sea-board of the Mediterranean, were

early instances, was to restore the absolute supremacy of the Turks in

the Ottoman Empire. It was obvious that the problem was one of

considerable difficulty, since the Turks at the time composed only some

forty per cent, of the whole population. They numbered about 8,000,000,

while in the Empire were included about 7,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000

Greeks, 2,000,000 Armenians, and 3,000,000 more of smaller

nationalities, such as Kurds, Druses, and Jews. But the Turks were

backed by Germany, and nowadays, since the abolition of the

Capitulations, which leaves all alien races unprotected by foreign

Powers, such as survive, after the extermination of the Armenians, are

completely at the mercy of the Government in Constantinople. All these

peoples speak a different language from the Turks, and have a different

religion, for the Nationalist party, with a view to the Ottomanisation

of the Arabs, have definitely stated that Arab Moslems are not of the

true faith, and that their own Allah (in whose name they subsequently

exterminated the Armenians) is the God of Love--German equivalent

Got--whereas the Arab Allah is the God of vengeance. The sinister motive

in this discovery needs no comment, for it is obvious that it releases

the Ottoman Government from the prohibition in the Koran, whereby Moslem

may not fight against Moslem. Therefore the Arabs were declared not to

be true Moslems. Later on, that motive was translated into practical

measures.

Among the first tasks with regard to the Arabs that faced the

Nationalist party from what we may call the pacific side of their

mission was to substitute the Turkish language for Arabic. Kemal Bey, a

Nationalist of Salonika, with the help of Ziya Bey, collected round him

a group of young writers, and these proceeded to translate the Koran out

of Arabic into Turkish, and to publish the prayers for the Caliphate in

their own language, and orders went out that these revised versions

should be used in all mosques. Turkish was to be the official language

for use in all public proclamations, and, with Prussian thoroughness, it

was even substituted on such railway tickets as had hitherto been

printed in Arabic. The new Turkish tongue (Yeni Lisan) had also to be

purged of all foreign words, but here some difficulty was experienced,

for Persian and Arabic formed an enormous percentage in the language as

hitherto employed, and the promoters of this Ottoman purity of tongue

found themselves left with a very jejune instrument for the rhapsodies

of their patriotic aims. Poets in especial (for the Nationalists, like

all well-equipped founders of romantic movements, had their bards) found

themselves in sore straits owing to the limited vocabulary; and we read

of one, Mehmed Emin Bey, who was forced to publish his odes in small

provincial papers, since no well-established journal would admit so

scrannel an expression of views however exalted.[1] But the translation

of the Koran was the greatest linguistic feat, and Tekin Alp, the most

prominent exponent of Nationalism, refers to it as one of the noblest

tasks undertaken by the new movement. It mattered not at all that by

religious ordinance the translation of the Koran into any other tongue

was a sin. 'The Nationalists,' he tells us, 'have cut themselves off

from the superstitious prejudice.' A further attempt was made to

substitute Turkish letters for Arabic letters in the alphabet, but this

seems to have presented insuperable difficulties, and I gather that it

has been abandoned.

[Footnote 1: This thwarted poet retired from the Committee of Union and

Progress not long after, and his place was taken by Enver.]

The Ottomanisation of religion and language, then, was among the pacific

methods of spreading Pan-Turkism through the Empire. A monstrous idol

was set up, a Hindenburg idol, in front of which all peoples and

languages, not Christians alone, but Moslems, were bound to prostrate

themselves. Indeed it was against Arabs mainly that these provisions

were directed, for the Arabs constituted the most menacing obstacle to

the spread of Ottomanisation, since they numbered in the Empire only a

million less than the Turks themselves. It was ordained by statute that

no Arab could have a seat on the Committee of Union and Progress, and

the Cabinet similarly was purged of any Greek or Armenian element. Never

any more must there be new parties in the Chamber, never any more must

Liberal ideas (to champion which the New Turk party had come into being)

be allowed to prick up their pernicious heads. For the Nationalist

party, with whom the New Turks were now identical, had taken as their

creed all that the deposed Abdul Hamid stood for, and only differed from

him in that as their schemes developed they looked forward to logical

conclusions far beyond what he had ever dreamed of. But Abdul Hamid may,

I think, be taken to be the true founder of the new Nationalism: at any

rate it was he who had first seen the possibilities of massacre as a

means of maintaining Ottoman supremacy. In the hands of Nationalists

that was to prove a more effective weapon than the printing of railway

tickets in Turkish. But already before the European War the Nationalists

had vastly extended his ideas, and had seen the danger of allowing even

Arabs to have a standing of any kind in the new state. Henceforth all

subject people were to be _rayas_, cattle, as in the old days of the

Sultans who absorbed the strength of the aliens, but did not exterminate

them. But now the cattle were not only to be used for milk, but were to

be slaughtered when advisable. Till then they must be dumb, or speak the

language of their masters only, for this alone can save them from the

shambles. Ahmed Sherif Bey, a prominent Nationalist, lays this down. 'It

is the business of the Porte to make the Arabs forget their own

language, and to impose upon them instead that of the nation that rules

them. If the Porte loses sight of this duty, it will be digging its

grave with its own hands, for if the Arabs do not forget their language,

their history, and their customs, they will seek to restore their

ancient empire on the ruins of Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia.'

Here, then, is the definite statement of the Nationalists' hostility to

all things Arab, and we shall see how they translated it into practice.

Even Moslems were but cattle for them, as also were Armenians and Greeks

and Kurds. Armenians were doomed to be the first complete sacrifice on

the bloody altar of the Nationalists, and, as a Turkish gendarme engaged

in that sacrifice said to a Danish Red Cross nurse, 'First we kill the

Armenians, then the Greeks, and then the Kurds.' And if he had been a

Progressive Minister he would certainly have added, 'And then the

Arabs.'

It was not only within the present limits of the Ottoman Empire that the

Committee of Union and Progress proposed to accomplish their unitive

purpose, for after having seen a glorious and exclusive Turkey arise

over the depopulated territories of their alien peoples, a vaster

vision, for an account of which we are indebted to Tekin Alp, opened

before their prophetic eyes. Out of the 10,000,000 inhabitants of Persia

they claim that one-third are of true Turkish blood, and in the new

Turkey which, so they almost pathetically hope, will be established at

the conclusion of the European War by the help of Wilhelm II., those

Persian Turks must be incorporated into the true fold of Allah, God of

Love. The province of Adarbaijan, for instance, the richest and most

enlightened district of Persia, they claim, is entirely Turkish, and

here the needful rectification will be made in the new atlases that bear

the imprimatur of Potsdam. Similarly, all the country south of the

Caucasus must rank as Turkish territory, since the Turks form from fifty

to eighty per cent, of the population; all Kazan, for the same reason,

is truly Turkish, with the alluvial plains of the Volga, while the

Crimea, so Tekin Alp discovers, is also a lost sheep longing for the

Turkish fold. All this is Turkey (or Turania) Irredenta, and, may we not

add:--

'Jerusalem and Madagascar

And North and South Amerikee.'

And then what a glorious future awaits the Power that Europe once

thought of as a sick man. 'With the crushing of Russian despotism,'

exclaims Tekin Alp, 'by the brave German, Austrian, and Turkish armies,

thirty to forty million Turks will receive their independence. With the

ten million Ottoman Turks this will form a nation of fifty millions,

advancing towards a great civilisation which may perhaps be compared to

that of Germany, in that it will have the strength and energy to rise

even higher. In some ways it will be even superior to the degenerate

French and English civilisations.'

The arithmetic and the enthusiasm of the foregoing paragraph are, of

course, those of Tekin Alp, from whose book, _The Turkish and

Pan-Turkish Ideal_, the quotation is made. The work was published in

1915, and, appearing as it did after the beginning of the European War,

it is but natural to find in it an expression not only of the

Nationalist aims for Turkey, but of the Prussian aims for Turkey, or, to

speak more correctly, of the dream which Prussia has induced in a

hypnotised Turkey. It sets forth in fact the bait which Prussia has

dangled in front of Turkey, the hunger for which has inspired the

projected future which is here sketched out; and significantly enough

this book has been spread broadcast over Turkey by the agency of German

propagandists. The Ottomanisation of the Empire, the vision of its

further extension, free from all consideration of subject peoples, was

exactly the lure which was most likely to keep the Turks staunch to

their Prussian masters. It will be noticed that there is no suggestion

of the Turks recovering their lost provinces and kingdoms in Europe,

Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Servia, and the rest, for it would never do

to let Fox Ferdinand awake from _his_ hypnotic sleep of a sort of

Czardom over the Balkans, or cease to dangle dreams, that included even

Constantinople before the shifty eye of King Constantine So, before

Turkey was spread the prospect of appropriating Russian and Persian

spoils: Prussia had already given the lost Turkish kingdoms in Europe

elsewhere, but would there not be a dismembered Russian Empire to

dispose of? The Crimea, the province of Kazan, the province of

Trans-Caucasia: all these might be held before Turkey's nose, as a dog

has a piece of meat held up before it to make it beg. Then there was the

province of Adarbaijan: certainly Turkey might be permitted to promise

herself that, without incurring the jealousy of Austria or Bulgaria.

Greedily Turkey took the bait. She gulped it down whole, and never

considered that there was a string attached to it, or that, should ever

the time come when Germany, the conqueror of the world, would be in a

position to reward her Allies with the realisation of the dreams she had

induced, the string would be pulled, and up, with retchings and

vomitings, would come these succulent morsels of Russia and Persia.

Indeed these bright pictures flashed on to the sheet as the visions of

Nationalists are but the slides in a German magic-lantern, designed to

keep Turkey amused, and it was with the same object that Ernst Marré, in

his _Die Türken und Wir nach dem Kriege_, was bidden to make other

pictures ready in case Turkey grew fractious or sleepy. 'From the ruins

of antiquity,' he says, when speaking of the Ottoman Empire, 'new life

will spring, if we can manage to raise the treasures which time and sand

have covered.' Then he remembers that he must be less Pan-Germanic for

the moment, and dangles the bait again. 'In doing this,' he adds, 'we

are benefiting Turkey. The Turkish state is no united whole, and it has

always been very difficult to govern. Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians,

Kurds, cannot be welded together. This is a war of liberation for

Turkey.... Only by energetic interference, and by "expelling" the

obstinate Armenian element could the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian

domination.... The non-Turkish population of the Ottoman Empire must be

Ottomanised.'

There is no need for further quotations, which might be multiplied

indefinitely. The Prussian programme is for the moment identical with

the Turkish Nationalist programme: Turkey, in order to be kept 'in with'

Germany, must be encouraged to dream of depopulated Armenia (that dream

has come tragically true) and of annexations in Russia and Persia. All

this fitted in with the Turkish programme: Germany had scarcely to

inspire, only to encourage. That encouragement she gave, for,

simultaneously she was penetrating Turkey as water penetrates a sponge,

and reducing it to the position of a vassal state. To keep Turkey happy

she allowed the Armenian massacres to run their deadly course, and only

interfered with other massacres when they did not suit her purpose. But

supposing (to suppose the impossible) that a peace to the European War

was dictated by Germany, how much of the future Pan-Turkish programme

would be realised? Would there be a Turkey at all? I think not: there

would be a Germany in Europe, and a Germany in Asia, where Turkey once

was. Indeed, in all but name, they are in existence now; so complete, as

we shall see, has been Germany's penetration of the Ottoman Empire. Just

for the present she calls herself Turkey in those regions; that is her

incognito. But Turkey as an independent Power has already ceased to

exist, and Tekin Alp and the Nationalists still dream on with rainbow

visions of Ottomanisation, the vistas of which stretch far into Persia

and the plains of the Volga. And all the while she has been put out like

a candle, and all that is left of her is the smouldering wick ready to

be pinched between the horny fingers of her stepmother. There she

stands, her stepmother, with her grinning teeth already disclosing the

Wolf....

Whatever the end of the European War may be, in no circumstances can the

dreams of the Nationalists be realised. Even if Germany and her arms

were so victorious that Russia lay at her feet a mere inert carcase

ready for the chopper, she would no more dream of giving Russian

provinces to an independent Turkey than she would hand over to her

Berlin itself. And if, as we know, Germany can never be victorious, will

the Allies once more strive to keep the Sick Man alive, or leave in his

ruthless power the peoples whom he is longing to exterminate? Even Tekin

Alp can hardly expect that.

Here then, in brief, is the policy of New Turkey. Its subject

peoples--Armenians, Arabs, Greeks, Kurds, and Jews--are to be totally

unrepresented in its councils, though together they number sixty per

cent, of the population of the Empire. But they are not only to be

unrepresented in Government--they are, if the programme is to be carried

conclusively out, to have no existence. In accordance with the plans of

the murderous ruffians who to-day administer the Nationalist policy,

those of the Armenians who have not fled beyond the frontiers have

already been exterminated, and the same fate threatens Arabs, Greeks,

and Jews. Hence, when the Allied Governments wrote their joint note to

President Wilson, they stated that among their aims in the war was 'the

liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of

the Turks.' From that avowed determination they will never recede.

* * * * *

NOTE.--It is to be hoped that Tekin Alp's pamphlet, _Turks and the

Pan-Turkish Ideal_, may soon be accessible to English readers. The

author is a Macedonian Jew who writes under the pseudonym of Tekin Alp,

and his mind is such that he appears to find romance in the idea of a

united Turkey purged by indiscriminate massacre from all alien elements.

But he sets forth with admirable lucidity the aims of the Nationalist

party and the steps already achieved by them in their progress towards

their ideal. Already the sequestered ladies of the harem have come out

of their retirement and join in the crusade, and not only do men give

lectures to women, but 'women mount the platform and address the men.'

There are corporations to advance economic organisations, boy-scout

centres all over the Empire, and 'intellectual parties' among the guilds

of merchants--England and Russia appear as the most virulent foes of

Pan-Turkism, 'the colossus of darkest barbarism joined with the colossus

of a degenerate civilisation.'

In the second part of his pamphlet Tekin Alp passes on with an

enthusiasm which is as sincere as it is pathetic to the vision of a

tremendous Turkey, extending from Thrace on the west to the Desert of

Gobi on the east. It embraces, as his map shows, Egypt as far south as

Victoria Nyanza, Arabia, Persia, the greater part of India, the littoral

of the Black Sea, the plains of the Volga, the circuit of the Caspian

Sea and the Aral Sea, and in the north-east nearly touches Tomsk. All

this naturally is dependent on complete German victory in the war, and,

pathetically enough, Tekin Alp appears to think that his ideal Turkey

will meet with the approval of Germany. Indeed it is no wonder that his

pamphlet is circulated broadcast by German propagandists, for it is

precisely what Germany wants Turkey to believe.

The romance of the movement appeals also very strongly to Ziya Gök Alp,

the official bard of the butchers of Constantinople. He has written a

sort of Ode to Attila, quoted by Tekin Alp, which is a fine frenzy in

favour of barbarism. This preposterous poem begins:

'I do not read the famous deeds of my ancestors in the dead, faded,

dusty leaves of the history books, but in my own veins, in my own heart.

My Attila, my Huns, those heroic figures which stand for the proud fame

of my race, appear in those dry pages to our malicious and slanderous

age as covered with shame and disgrace, while in reality they are no

less than Alexander and Caesar,' etc. etc.

I have been at present unable to ascertain whether it is true that the

German Emperor has set it to music, under the impression that it refers

to him and the German armies. It is very popular in Prussia, which need

arouse no surprise.

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter III_

THE END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION

We have traced in brief the backward progress of Ottoman domination, and

have seen how, from the rough and ready methods of a military barbarism,

the Turks evolved a more emphatic and a more highly organised negation

of all those principles which we may sum up under the general term of

civilisation. The comparatively humane neglect of the unfortunate alien

peoples herded within the frontiers of earlier Sultans was improved upon

by Abdul Hamid, who struck out the swifter and superior methods of

maintaining the dominating strength of the Turkish element in the

kingdom not by the absorption of subject peoples, but by their

extermination. This in turn, this new and effective idea, served as a

first sketch of an artist with regard to his finished picture, and

starting with that the Nationalist party enlarged and elaborated it

into that masterpiece of massacre which they exhibited to the world in

the years 1915 and 1916 of the Christian Era, when from end to end of

the Empire there flashed the signal for the extermination of the

Armenian race. Abdul Hamid was but tentative and experimental as

compared to their systematised thoroughness, but then the Nationalist

party had learned thoroughness under the tutelage of its Prussian

masters. And in addition to instruction they had had the advantage of

seeing how Prussian firmness, with the soothing balm of Kultur to

follow, had dealt with the now-subject remnant of Belgians. That was the

way to treat subject people: 'the first care of a state is to protect

itself,' as Enver and Talaat could read in the text-books now translated

into Turkish, in copies, maybe, presented to them by their Master in

Berlin, and Turkey could best show the proof of her enlightenment and

regeneration, by following in the footsteps of Prussian Kultur. Perhaps

a few thousand innocent men might suffer the inconvenience of having

their nails torn out, of being bastinadoed to death, of being shot,

burned or hanged, perhaps a few thousand girls and women might die by

the wayside in being deported to 'agricultural colonies,' might fall

victims to the lusts of Turkish soldiers, or have babes torn from their

wombs, but these paltry individual pains signified nothing compared to

the national duty of 'suffering the state to run no risks.' As one of

this party of Union and Progress said, 'The innocent of to-day may be

the guilty of to-morrow,' and it was therefore wise to provide that for

innocent and guilty alike there should be no to-morrow at all. Years

before the statesmanship of Abdul Hamid had prophetically foreseen the

dawning of this day, when he remarked 'The way to get rid of the

Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians,' and temporarily for

twenty years he did get rid of the Armenian question. But when, in 1915,

Talaat Bey completed his arrangements for a further contribution to the

solution of the same problem, he said, 'After this, there will be no

Armenian question for fifty years.' As far as we can judge, he rather

under-estimated the thoroughness of his arrangements.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lately (September 1917), when the massacres were all over,

Talaat, speaking at a Congress of the Committee of Union and Progress,

upheld as right and proper the treatment of the Armenian race.]

The race thus marked out for extermination was one of the oldest

settlements in Asiatic Turkey. Originally it was confined to Armenia

proper, a highland district comprising part of what is now the Russian

province of Trans-Caucasia, part of Persia, notably the province of

Adarbaijan, and, within the Turkish frontier, the province of Armenia,

itself. According to legend, which may well be correct, the Armenians

were the oldest national Christian Church in the world, with a liturgy

that dates from the first century of the Christian Era, while their

translation of the Bible dates from the early years of the fifth century

A.D. Here in these uplands they formed a compact and homogeneous

population, spread over towns and country alike, and were occupied in

the main with agrarian and pastoral pursuits. But they had in addition

much of the versatility and business capacity of the Jews, as well as a

strong liberal-mindedness towards progress and education, and thus,

while they still continued up to the present day their pastoral life in

the countryside, others gravitated towards towns, and by degrees they

spread over a large part of the Turkish Empire, until most of the towns

in Turkey had a progressive and peaceful quota of Armenian citizens,

tolerated by their Moslem neighbours, and, though possessed of no great

share of political influence, powerful, in that the trade and commerce

of inland Turkey was largely in their hands. Wherever they went they

established their schools; many were lawyers, doctors, and professors of

education. Certain repressive measures were brought to bear on them;

they were not, for instance, allowed to carry arms, except when, in

accordance with Turkish conscriptive laws, they served in the Ottoman

army. But many of them, by paying their exemption money, got off

military service, and they confined themselves to the arts of peace,

whether pastorally in their native highlands, or in the shops and

offices of the towns to which they migrated. They were not, till the

time of Abdul Hamid, held to be in any sense a national danger, for,

except in Armenia proper, they were too scattered and too peace-loving

an element of the population to be capable of united action, and never

do they seem to have provoked any outburst of Moslem fanaticism. They

had local quarrels and fights with the more warlike Kurds who encroached

on Armenia, and in the towns where they settled they often incurred the

vague jealousy and dislike which are the penalties of a race superior

morally and intellectually to those among whom they live. But that

superiority constituted in course of time the 'Armenian question,' to

which Abdul Hamid alluded. In all, some sixty years ago their entire

race numbered about 4,000,000 persons, of whom about 1,250,000 inhabited

Russian Trans-Caucasia, about 150,000 were in the province of

Adarbaijan, and there were smaller bodies of them in Austria and India.

The remainder, some 2,500,000, were spread over Armenia, over the

villages and towns of Turkey, notably the eastern edge of the Cilician

uplands, while in Constantinople itself there were certainly not less

than 150,000, and probably as many as 200,000. To-day, the male portion

of the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire has practically ceased to

exist: a quarter of a million men and women escaped over the Russian

frontier, five thousand escaped to Egypt, and there are a few thousand

women and girls (it is impossible to ascertain the exact number) in

Turkish harems. Turkism, as administered by Abdul Hamid first, then, far

more efficiently, by Enver Pasha, and Talaat Bey, has solved the

Armenian question.

The history of its solution falls under two heads, of which the first

concerns the manner in which it was solved in Armenia itself, where the

population was almost exclusively Armenian, both in towns and in the

country. Here the eastern and north-eastern frontiers of Turkey, across

which lie the province of Russian Trans-Caucasia and Persia, pass

through the middle of districts peopled by men of Armenian blood, and

when, in the autumn of 1914, the Turks made their entry into the

European War, their eastern armies, operating against Russia, found

themselves confronted by troops among whom were many Armenians, while in

their advance into the Persian province of Adarbaijan, there were in the

ranks of their opponents, Armenians and Syriac Christians. They advanced

in fact, in the first weeks of the war, into a country largely peopled

with men of the same blood as those on their own side of the frontier.

Though the edict had not yet come from Constantinople for the massacre

of the Armenians (Talaat Bey did not complete his arrangements till the

following April), the slaughter of them began then, first in the advance

of the Turkish armies, and following on that movement, which lasted but

a few weeks, in their subsequent retreat before the Russians. All

villages through which the Turkish armies passed were plundered and

burned, all the inhabitants on whom the Turks could lay their hands were

killed. Sometimes women and children were given to the Kurds, who formed

bands of irregular troops in conjunction with the Turkish army, and

these were outraged before they were slaughtered. A price was put on

every Christian head, and in the Turkish retreat the corpses were thrust

into the wells in order to pollute them. The excuse for this, as given

by German apologists (not apologists, perhaps, so much as supporters and

adherents of the policy), was that since behind the Turkish lines the

country was populated by a race of the same blood as that through which

they advanced, and then retreated, extermination was necessary in order

to prevent or to punish treachery and collusion. But I have been nowhere

able to find that there were instances of such, nor that the Turks put

forward that excuse themselves. Indeed it would have been an unnecessary

explanation, for but a few months after the opening of the war, Talaat

Bey's plans were complete, and the extermination of Armenians hundreds

of miles from any sphere of military operations rendered it needless to

say anything about it, or to invent instances of treachery if there were

actually none to hand.

Simultaneously the massacre of Armenians behind the Turkish lines

began. The whole male population of the district round Bitlis was

murdered, so too were all males in Bitlis itself. Then all women and

children were driven in, as a herdsman might drive sheep, from the

reeking villages round, and, for purposes of convenience, concentrated

in Bitlis. When they were all collected, they were driven in a flock to

the edge of the Tigris, shot, and the corpses were thrown into the

river. That was the solution of the Armenian question in Bitlis.

North-west of Bitlis, and some sixty miles distant, lies the town of

Mush. It used to contain about 25,000 Armenian inhabitants, and in the

district round there were some three hundred villages chiefly consisting

of Armenians. Arrangements were on foot for a general massacre there

when the arrival of Russian troops at Liz, some fifteen hours' march

away, caused the execution of it to be put off for a while, and up till

July a few folk only had been shot, and a few beaten to death, as a

warning to those treacherously inclined. Then the Russians, in the face

of superior forces, had to retire again, and the massacres were put on a

systematic footing. The account which follows is based on four

independent authorities: (1) The statement of a German eye-witness in

Mush in charge of an Armenian orphanage; (2) the statement of a woman

deported from a village near, and subsequently killed by Kurds; (3)

information from refugees escaped to Trans-Caucasia; (4) the journal

_Horizon_ of Tiflis. These supplement each other, often verify each

other, and in no instance are contradictory.

Rumours of an impending massacre reached Mush before the end of 1914, at

a time when the massacres across the frontier had begun. The Mutessarif

of Mush, an intimate friend of Enver Pasha, had openly declared that 'at

an opportune moment' the slaughter of the whole Armenian race was

contemplated, and later Ekran Bey corroborated this in the presence of

the American and German Consuls. Enver indeed seems to have been the

chief organiser with regard to the massacres in Armenia itself, while

Talaat Bey saw to the fate of those dispersed in towns throughout the

rest of Turkey. During the whole of that winter, a very severe one,

signs of the approaching extermination multiplied. In the villages round

fresh taxes were introduced, and when Armenians were unable to pay they

were beaten to death, while, if they resisted, the village in question

was burned. But by July 1915 (after the unavoidable delay caused by the

proximity of Russian troops) all was ready, and the massacre began in

earnest.

Four battalions of Turkish troops arrived from Constantinople, and an

order was given that all Armenians must leave the town within three

days, after 'registering themselves' at the Government office. The women

and children were to remain, but their money and their property would be

confiscated. Within two hours after that, owing, I suppose, to fresh

orders from Constantinople, the guns opened fire on the crowds in the

streets flocking to the registry offices, and after that systematic

house-to-house murder began. Prominent Armenians were tortured to

death, houses containing women and children were set on fire, a body of

men collected together was thrown into the river, girls were outraged

and slaughtered. For two days the massacre continued, and by the end of

the second day the Armenian question was solved as regards Mush.

In the surrounding villages the same Prussian thoroughness was observed,

and out of all the inhabitants of the plain 5000 only seemed to have

survived, who fled to Sasun (there to be subsequently massacred in

1916), while a few from outlying villages escaped to the Russian troops.

In certain villages the girls and young women were given to the Kurd

soldiery, who raped them publicly in the presence of their families, not

sparing girls of eight and ten years of age, who then, bleeding and

violated, were shot in company with the old women, for whom the Kurds

(inspired by Allah, the God of Love) had no use. Elsewhere, as the story

of a deported woman from Kheiban tells us, the women guarded by Kurdish

troops were driven out of their villages, leaving behind the corpses of

the men and of old women who could not walk, and for days were marched

along the roads, nearly naked, under the fierce heat of the July sun.

Once every other day they were given bread, but all did not get it, and

many fell exhausted by the wayside, and were either whipped to their

feet again or allowed to lie down and die. As they passed through

villages Kurds would come out and rape a girl or two, and when they

halted at night their guards would come among them.... Some few escaped;

the rest, in dwindling company, went on through days of blinding sun and

nights of shame till at last there were only a few remaining. It was not

worth while going farther, for the work of Enver Pasha was nearly done,

and the rest were pushed into the river. One alone survived, who could

swim, and she, with her two-year-old baby on her back, got across the

stream and made her way to a village where were a party of Armenians who

had escaped massacre. She arrived there at midnight, and at first they

thought she was a ghost. To them she told her story of the outraged and

ever-dwindling caravan of helpless women and girls driven onwards all

day beneath the smiting arrows of the sun, and encamped by the wayside,

where they halted with their barbarous guards and their lusts for a

terror by night. Of them none but this one was left, who had carried her

baby with her every step of that infernal pilgrimage. Two days

afterwards he died from want of nourishment, and before the week was out

the mother fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, and was

killed.

So the problem of the village of Kheiban was solved, and if in the

history of the crimes that have blackened the earth with wanton cruelty

and made God to hide His face, there is any so atrocious a tale, I do

not know it. But if among the annals of heroism and of mother-love we

want to find a nobler record than that of this woman of Kheiban, equally

am I at a loss as to where we should look for it. Among the true and

golden legends of the world shall that which she did be inscribed for a

memorial of her.

Northward from Mush, and Bitlis lies the province of Erzerum, with the

town of the same name, that contained in the autumn of 1914 some 20,000

Armenians. Here the first hint of coming trouble was the order that all

Armenian soldiers serving in Turkish ranks should be disarmed. This was

followed in June by another order that all the inhabitants of the

hundred villages in the district should leave their homes at two hours'

notice. They numbered between 10,000 and 15,000 persons. Of these a few

took refuge with friendly Kurds, but of the remainder a few only lived

to reach Erzinjan, where they were again deported, and the rest were

murdered as they marched. In Erzerum itself orders were received by

Tahsin Bey, the Vali of the town, that all Armenians were to be killed

without distinction of age or sex. He refused to carry this order out,

but his unwillingness was overruled.[1] Simultaneously, the German

Consul telegraphed protests to his Ambassador at Constantinople, and

was told that Germany could not interfere in the internal affairs of

Turkey.

[Footnote 1: At Angora a similar refusal on the part of the Governor

resulted in his dismissal, and the same thing happened at Konia and at

Kutaia.]

Here the method employed was deportation: the victims were murdered, not

in the town itself, but were given orders to leave their homes, and

under guard march (for no conveyances were given them) to other

districts. The first company was to go to Diarbekr. All these, with the

exception of one man and forty women, were murdered on the first day's

march. The remainder reached Kharput, which was another station or

collecting place for the deported. A German eye-witness tells us what

fate waited them. 'They have had their eyebrows plucked out, their

breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their

feet, or else hammer nails into them as they do in shoeing horses. This

is all done at night-time, in order that people may not hear their

screams and know of their agony. Soldiers are stationed round the

prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles. It is needless to relate

that many died of these tortures. When they die, the soldiers cry, "Now

let your Christ help you."' A second caravan of five hundred families

left Erzerum: at Baiburt they were joined by another contingent deported

from that town, and the account that follows is based on the information

supplied by the Rev. Robert Stapleton, an American minister at Erzerum,

and by an Armenian woman who was among the deported, and whose life was

spared on her embracing Islamism.

The convoy numbered, when it left Baiburt, some 15,000 persons, and it

reached Erzinjan in safety. There the massacres had already taken place,

and the women and children had been deported, for they found no

Armenians there. But the convoy had not yet arrived at its goal, and it

started out again moving south by east till it came to Kamakh. There

bands of Kurds descended on them, and in the space of seven days every

male above fifteen years of age, including an aged priest of ninety, was

killed. Thereafter a pilgrimage of women, as from Kheiban, moved

southwards across plain and mountain, and every day its numbers were

diminished, for the youthful and the good-looking were carried off by

brigands. At night they were halted outside villages, and the gendarmes

and villagers took what they chose. Many died from hunger and

heat-stroke: others were left by the wayside. When they came to the

banks of the river Kara-Su there was a debauch of horror. Women and

girls and little children were raped and mutilated, and the children who

still survived were thrown into the river. Those who could swim were

shot. Thereafter the movements of this caravan are hard to trace.

Probably there was then but little left of it. But others followed on

the same route 'through fields and hillsides dotted with swollen and

blackened corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench.'

Some of them reached Mosul, some reached Aleppo, another collecting

station, where, by the mouth of other witnesses, we shall hear of them

again.

Corroborative and additional evidence is given by the Danish Red Cross

nurses who, with a noble disregard of their own safety, accompanied one

of these caravans from Erzerum to Erzinjan. They speak of the massacres

at Kamakh, of the killing by the river, and of a _battue_ through the

cornfields, where the wheat was high, into which some Armenians had

escaped. At one time these Danish Sisters were in the charge of a

gendarme who had superintended a massacre of 3000 women and children

driven from their homes into the country, rounded up and killed. He told

the Sisters that this was the best method of getting rid of them, for

they should be made to suffer first, and besides it would be

inconvenient for Moslems to live in a village with so many corpses

about. At another place they came to a shambles, where Armenian

soldiers, deprived of their arms, and sent to make roads, had been

slaughtered: at another there were three gangs of labourers, one Moslem,

one Greek, and one Armenian. These latter were guarded. Presently, as

they proceeded along their road, they looked round and saw that the

Armenian gang was being formed up by itself, a little off the

highroad....

And so the ghastly record went on all over Armenia. At one place only,

the town of Van, was any resistance organised. There, after the massacre

had begun, some 1500 Armenians got hold of arms (probably many of these

men were soldiers who had not yet had their arms taken from them), and

for the space of twenty-seven days defended themselves against five

thousand Turkish troops, till the Russian advance relieved them. During

that advance Armenian refugees, into whose districts the massacres had

not yet penetrated, fled for refuge to the invading army, and in all

some 250,000 Armenians under its protection crossed in safety the

Russian frontier into Trans-Caucasia. How many died on the way from

hunger and exhaustion is not known. Cholera, dysentery, and spotted

fever broke out among them, and the path of their passage was lined with

dead and dying. Companies of Kurds made descents upon them, taking toll

of their maidenhood, but, with the Russian line to protect them at their

rear, they struggled on out of the cemetery and brothel of their native

country, and out of the accursed confines of that hell on earth, the

Ottoman Empire, leaving behind them the murdered myriads of their

husbands and their sons, their violated wives and daughters. Through

incredible hardships they passed, but, unlike the other pilgrimages we

have briefly traced, they moved not towards death, but towards safety

and life, and their dark steps were lightened with Hope.

Before the last of those who survived the hunger and the pestilence of

that pilgrimage had reached Russian soil, it is probable that in all

Armenia there was not a man of their race left alive, nor a woman either

unless she had accepted Islamism and the life of the harem. A peaceful

and progressive nation had been wiped out with every accompaniment of

horror and cruelty and bestial lust, and in Armenia itself there would

never more be an Armenian question. Abdul Hamid had hinted at the

solution of it, and had made, as we have seen, experiments in that

direction; but it was reserved for Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey,

enlightened men of the Young Turk party, with the advantages of a

Prussian example, to complete the work. Already Enver had said that he

would never rest until the last Armenian in the Ottoman Empire had been

killed, and before the end of 1915, as far as Armenia itself went, he

was able to see a reasonable prospect of repose before him. But there

was much work still left to do in other provinces.

We have seen that for the extirpation of Armenians in Armenia proper,

the excuse put forward, if not by the Turks themselves, by their German

apologists, was the necessity of guarding against treachery in the

vicinity of the Turkish army, and against spying and collusion between

the Armenians behind the Russian lines and those behind Turkish lines.

The same pretext was put forward for the massacres and deportations from

Thrace, from Constantinople, and from the shores of the Sea of Marmora.

Here, if anywhere, there may be thought to be some justification for

measures which might have been undertaken for the sake of public safety.

At any rate, there were definite charges brought against Armenians in

these districts, and the Armenian boatmen of Silivri, for instance, were

imprisoned, but not, as far as I know, massacred, on the charge of

revictualling English submarines, which at that time, as the reader will

remember, had penetrated into the Sea of Marmora, and indeed had reached

Constantinople itself. It is not, of course, consonant with Turkish or

Prussian justice to substantiate charges before inflicting penalties, it

is sufficient in the new World-justice to accuse. But here round

Constantinople, there was some pretence at procedure before resorting to

murder and deportation. A register was drawn up of all Armenians

resident in the capital, dividing into separate classes those who were

born in Constantinople, and those who were immigrants from Armenia, with

a view to deporting those who were not native to the city. Here, I

think, we may see traces of the Prussian instinct for tabulation, for

classification, for category-mongering. Enver and his colleagues lost

patience with these dilatory tactics. The Armenians of the province of

Brussa were deported wholesale, and long before the registration lists

of Constantinople were finished, all Armenians were moved out of the

town. Ten thousand males were massacred in the mountains of Ismid, and

the Armenian women and children taken into collecting stations for

deportation to 'agricultural colonies' (so the phrase ran in the

Pecksniff language of Prussia) situated in the Anatolian desert, in the

desert of Arabia, and in malarious marshes on the Euphrates. With this

clearing out of Armenians from Thrace, from Constantinople, and from

Armenia itself, we have finished with our first class of the Armenian

atrocities. For it reasons were at least invented by German apologists.

Military necessities, which here, as in Belgium, knew no law, dictated

it; the frightfulness involved was incidental to War. But such

considerations were not even alleged for the second class of the

murder-scheme. Before passing on, it will be well to review, quite

shortly, the reasons which dictated it, and penetrate into the infernal

councils of Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey.

The text of the scheme is to be found in the defined policy of the

Young Turk party as set forth in their Congress of 1911. 'Turkey must

become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem ideas and Moslem

influence must be preponderant.... Sooner or later the complete

Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects must be effected: it is clear,

however, that this can never be attained by persuasion, but that we must

resort to armed force.'

There is the text that was expanded into the discourse of murder; it is

the definition of a policy. Within a few years there followed the

European War, and that probably was the immediate cause of its being put

into effect. No more admirable opportunity for Ottomanisation could

present itself, for the entry of Turkey into the war was most unpopular

with the bulk of the Turkish population, and it was advisable to bribe

them into acceptance of it. The bribe was the houses, the property, the

money and the trade that throughout the length and breadth of Turkey was

in Armenian hands. For the Armenians were by far the wealthiest of the

alien populations, and some 90 per cent. of Turkish trade passed through

their shops and offices. Here, then, was the psychological moment:

Turkey for the Turk was the aim of the Committee of Union and Progress,

and with a discontented population, unwilling to fight, the moment had

come for restoring to the Turk this mass of property which at present

belonged to an alien race. War might have its drawbacks and its clouds,

but war would be seen to have its advantages and its silver linings, if

out of it there came this legacy of Armenian wealth. And by the same

stroke Turkey could get rid of those thousands of meddlesome

missionaries, American and French, who spread religion and learning and

other undesirable things among the cursed race. Once remove the cursed

race, and there would be an end of their instructors also, for there

would be none to instruct. 'Thanks to their schools,' so we read in the

_Hilal_, an organ of the Young Turks, 'foreigners were able to exercise

great moral influence over the young men of the country.... By closing

them (i.e. by exterminating their pupils) the Government has put an end

to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous.'

Such, then, was the spirit that animated Enver and Talaat, and during

the winter of 1914-15 they perfected their plans. The Armenian race was

to cease, and the Valis and other officials were, each in his district,

to see to the thoroughness of its cessation. Sometimes, as happened at

Erzerum, the Vali in question, not having the broad out-look of Enver,

or quaintly and curiously having a womanish objection to the national

duty of flogging men to death and giving over young girls to a barbarous

soldiery, remonstrated with the authorities, or even refused to obey

orders. Such a one was instantly removed from his office, and a

stauncher patriot substituted. All was put on an orderly footing: here

Kurds were to be employed on the old Abdul Hamid formula, who by way of

wage would enjoy the privilege of raping as many women and girls out of

their hapless convoy as seemed desirable, while in agricultural

districts they were allowed also to take over the sheep and cattle of

their murdered victims. Here, in towns where there was more chance of

resistance than in scattered homesteads, it would be wise to employ

regular troops, backed, if necessary, by artillery, to whom would be

entrusted the murder of the whole male population, after suitable

tortures, supposing the executioners had a taste for the sport, and to

them was given the right of general plunder. Then, as soon as the number

and capacity of the vacant houses were telegraphed to Constantinople,

occupiers from the discontented townsfolk and natives of Thrace were

assigned to them. Sometimes there would be a big school building to give

away as well, but that was not always so, for it might be more

convenient to assemble Armenians there for purposes of registration or

so forth, and then, if it happened to catch fire, why Enver would

understand that such accidents would occur. Among other careful and

well-thought-out instructions came the order that, when possible, the

murders should not take place in the town, but outside it, for clean

Allah-fearing Moslems would not like to live in habitations defiled by

Christian corpses. But, above all, there must be thoroughness; not a man

must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman who must not drag her

outraged body, so long as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to,

or rather towards those 'agricultural colonies,' as Talaat Bey, in a

flash of whimsical Prussian humour, called them. One was advantageously

situated in the middle of the Anatolian desert at the village of

Sultanieh. There, for miles round, stretched the rocks and sands of a

waterless wilderness, but no doubt the women and children of this very

industrious race would manage to make it wave with cornfields. Another

agricultural colony, by way of contrast, should be established a couple

of days' journey south of Aleppo, where the river loses itself in

pestilential and malarious swamps. Arabs could not live there, but who

knew whether those hardy Armenians (the women and children, of them at

least who had proved themselves robust enough to reach the place) would

not flourish there out of harm's way? After the swamps one came to the

Arabian desert, and there, a hundred miles south-east, was a place

called Deir-el-Zor; wandering Arab tribes sometimes passed through it,

but, arrived there, the Armenians should wander no more. In those arid

sands and waterless furnaces of barren rock there was room for all and

to spare. Sultanieh, the swamps, and Deir-el-Zor: these were the chief

of Talaat Bey's agricultural colonies.