In order to have an adequate comprehension of the events which took
place on the Caucasian front, it would be well to bear in mind that all
the peoples of Trans-Caucasia, including the Armenians, felt great
enmity toward the government of the Czar, whose treatment of them in the
past had been very tyrannical and very brutal. For this very reason, the
Turco-German propaganda had easily won the sympathy of nearly 3,000,000
Tartars and 2,000,000 Georgians. The dream of the Tartars was to join
the Ottoman Turks and re-establish the old great Tartar Empire, which
was to extend from Constantinople to Samarkant, including all the lands
of the Caucasus and Trans-Caspia, while the Georgians, through their
alliance with the Turco-Germans, hoped to regain their lost independence
in the western Caucasus. Only the 2,000,000 Armenians of the Caucasus
were not influenced by the Turco-German propaganda, although they hated
the Russian despotism as much as their neighbors. But, on the other
hand, having very close acquaintance with the psychology of the Turkish
race and with their ulterior aspirations, the Armenians had the
political wisdom and courage to put aside their petty quarrels with
Russian Czarism and throw in their lot with the allied cause.
[Illustration: Armenian volunteers of the Caucasus taking the oath of
allegiance administered by the church dignitaries before leaving for the
battlefield in October, 1914.]
These were the circumstances under which the mobilization of 1914 took
place in the Caucasus. The Armenian reservists, about 160,000 in number,
gladly responded to the call, for the simple reason that they were to
fight the arch enemy of their historic race. Besides the regular
soldiers, nearly 20,000 volunteers expressed their readiness to take up
arms against the Turks. The Georgians, on the other hand, answered the
call very reluctantly, and the Armenian-Georgian relations were greatly
strained from the very beginning. The attitude of the Armenians toward
the despotic Russian government was incomprehensible to the Georgians,
who thought that, because the Armenians sided with Russia,--the
oppressor of all the Caucasian races,--they must be unfriendly to the
Georgians. Many Georgian young men crossed the border from Batoum, went
to Trebizond, and prepared bands of volunteers under the leadership of
Prince Abashizé in order to aid the Turks. As to the Tartars, not being
subject to call, they assumed the role of spectators on the one hand,
and on the other used every means to arm themselves, impatiently
awaiting the arrival of the Turks. The great land-owners of the
provinces of Erivan, Elizavetpol, and Baku began to accumulate enormous
stores, and prepare a huge reserve of sugar and wheat. The price of one
rifle, which was 100 rubles ($50), rose to 1500 rubles ($750). Through
Persia, the Germans took to the Caucasus great sums of money in order to
push forward the task of arming the Tartars from the very first days of
the war. Great numbers of young Tartars went to Persia and joined the
Turkish armies. And all this was carried on in broad daylight under the
very eyes of the short-sighted Russian bureaucracy.
The Russian administration of the Caucasus was more concerned with the
Armenian "danger" and had no time to pay attention to the Georgians and
the Tartars. Was it not a fact that officially no Georgian or Tartar
question was placed on the diplomatic table, whereas the Armenian
question was there? And for that very reason, before the commencement of
the Russo-Turkish hostilities, the second and third army corps of the
Caucasian army, the majority of which were Armenians, were transferred
to the German front and were replaced by Russian army corps. Moreover,
out of the 20,000 Armenian volunteers who responded to the call, only
7,000 were given arms; the authorities objected that they had no rifles
ready, while a few months later the same administration distributed
24,000 rifles to the Kurds in Persia and in the district of Van. It is
needless to say that all the Armenian officers and generals were
transferred to the Western front; only one Armenian general was left as
a specimen on the entire Caucasian front, General Nazarbekoff, and he
was transferred to Persia, away from the Armenian border. Under these
trying conditions commenced the Russo-Turkish war and the
Armenian-Russian co-operation on the Caucasian front in the autumn of
1914. But, in spite of this suspicious and crafty attitude assumed by
the Russian administration, the Armenian inhabitants of the Caucasus
spared nothing in their power for the success of the Russian armies. In
the three main unsuccessful Turkish offensives the battalions of
Armenian volunteers played a great role. Let us now see just what took
place during those offensives.
[Illustration: KERI VARTAN HAMAZASP
Commanders of Armenian volunteers; Keri, of the 4th battalion; Hamazasp,
of the 3rd battalion, and Vartan, of the regiment of Ararat.]
The first serious Turkish offensive took place in the beginning of
December, 1914, when Enver Pasha attempted to reach Tiflis by shattering
the right wing of the Russian army. The Turkish "Napoleon" was anxious
to connect his name with that great victory which seemed certain to his
puny brain. And with that very purpose in view he boarded Goeben, the
German cruiser, and left Constantinople, amid great demonstrations. He
reached Erzeroum in three days, thanks to the German automobiles which
were ready for him at different stops between Trebizond and the
frontier. The offensive was planned with great care, and had great
chances of success if all the three wings of the Turkish army had
reached their objectives on time. Enver had under his command three army
corps--the ninth, the tenth, and the eleventh. The ninth army corps was
to advance toward Ardahan by way of Olti and from there to march on
Tiflis by way of Akhalkalag, when it should receive word that the tenth
army corps had already captured Sarikamish and cut off the retreat of
the Russian army of 60,000 men; while the eleventh army corps was to
attack the centre of the Russian army near the frontier. The ninth army
corps, in three days and without difficulty, reached Ardahan, where the
local Moslem inhabitants assisted it in every possible way. The tenth
army corps, during its march from Olti to Sarikamish, suffered a delay
of twenty-four hours in the Barduz Pass, due to the heroic resistance of
the fourth battalion of the Armenian volunteers which made up the
Russian reserve. This delay of twenty-four hours enabled the Russians to
concentrate a sufficient force around Sarikamish (which had been left
entirely undefended) and thereby force back the ninth corps of the
Turkish army. The Turks were so certain of the success of their plan
that they had no transports with them and no extra supply of provisions.
Opposite Sarikamish, where a battle was waged for three days and three
nights, the Turks suffered a loss of 30,000 men, mostly due to cold
rather than to the Russian arms. But if the Turkish army corps had
reached Sarikamish twenty-four hours earlier, as was expected, it would
have confronted only one battalion of Russian reserves, and that without
artillery. This was the invaluable service rendered to the Russian army
by the fourth battalion of the Armenian volunteers under the command of
the matchless Keri. Six hundred Armenian veterans fell in the Barduz
Pass, and at such a high price saved the 60,000 Russians from being
taken prisoners by the Turks. This great service of the Armenians to the
Russian army was announced at the time by Enver Pasha himself, when he
returned to Constantinople immediately after his defeat. From that time
on the government at Constantinople laid the blame of its defeat at the
door of the Armenians, as a preliminary step in its preparation for the
execution of its already-planned massacres of the Armenian people.
After their defeat at Sarikamish, the Turks attempted in April of 1915
to turn the extreme left wing of the Russian army by marching to Joulfa
through Persia, and from there (in case of success) moving on to Baku,
with the hope that the Tartar inhabitants of the eastern Caucasus would
immediately join them and enable them to cut the only communicating
line of railroad of the Russians, and thereby force the entire Russian
army to retreat toward the northern Caucasus. The work of the
intelligence department of the Turks was very well organized, especially
as the Tartar and Georgian officers of the Caucasus rendered them
invaluable services. The Turks knew very well that the Russians in
Persia at that time had only one brigade of Russian troops under the
command of the Armenian General Nazarbekoff and one battalion of
Armenian volunteers scattered throughout Salmast and Urmia, while their
own army was made up of one regular and well-drilled division of troops
(sent especially from Constantinople) under the command of Khalil Bey
and nearly 10,000 Kurds. Khalil Bey with his superior forces captured
the city of Urmia in a few hours (taking prisoner nearly a thousand
Russians) and victoriously marched on Salmast. Here took place one of
the fiercest battles between the Armenians and the Turks. The first
battalion of the Armenian volunteers, under the command of the veteran
Andranik, strongly enforced in its trenches, repulsed the attacks of
Khalil Bey for three days continuously, until the Russians, with the
newly-arrived forces from the Caucasus, were able to put to flight the
army of Khalil Bey. Thirty-six hundred Turkish soldiers lay dead before
the Armenian trenches in the course of those three days.
In that very month of April, while Khalil Bey was confidently
attempting, as we have seen, to surround the left wing of the Russian
army in Persia, over in Van the Armenians had taken up arms in
self-defence, and for one whole month were fighting another division of
Turkish troops and thousands of Kurds until the first days of May, when
three other battalions of Armenian volunteers, under the command of
General Nikolaeff, came to the rescue, riding a distance of 250
kilometers (155 miles)--from Erivan to Van--in ten days. For one who is
acquainted with the local conditions, it is an undisputed fact that if
the Armenians of Van in April, 1915, by their heroic resistance had not
kept busy that one division of regular Turkish troops and thousands of
Kurds, and had made it possible for them to join the army of Khalil Bey,
the Turks undoubtedly would have been able to crush the Russian forces
in Persia and reach Baku in a few weeks, for the simple reason that from
the banks of the Araxes to Baku the Russians had no forces at all, while
the local Tartar inhabitants, armed and ready, were awaiting the coming
of the Turks before rising en masse to join them. From the very
beginning of the war, Baku has been the real objective of the Turks,
just as Paris has been the objective of the Germans, and that for two
reasons: first, as a fountain of wealth, the Turks knew very well that
the Russian government received from the oil wells of Baku an annual
income of more than 200,000,000 rubles ($100,000,000), a sum which is
more than all the revenues of the bankrupt Turkish government put
together, and they looked upon these financial resources as
indispensable for the accomplishment of their plan of a Pan-Turanian
Empire; second, because the very plan of their Pan-Turanism had been
introduced in Constantinople after 1908 by these very Tartars of Baku.
The commanders of the Turkish forces engaged in Persia and Van--Khalil
and Jevded--understood very well why their plans failed in the month of
April, 1915; and that failure is the explanation of those frightful
massacres which took place on the plains of Bitlis and Moush in June of
the same year, when the armies of the same Khalil and Jevded, defeated
in Persia and Van, were forced to retreat under the pressure of the
Armenian volunteers.
[Illustration: ANDRANIK