THE ARMENIANS
After three days of Taxim we were told that it had been decided to send
us to Angora, where we would enjoy perfect liberty. None of us had a
very clear idea where Angora was, but we knew it must be a pleasant
change from Taxim.
There were not many preparations to make; no packing. My own luggage
consisted, I remember, of a bit of soap, a tooth-brush, and a few other
odds and ends, all contained in a paper bag tied up with a bootlace: the
sort of bag you buy buns in. And I was one of the richest of the
prisoners. I was rich in another respect, besides this wealth of
luggage, although at that time I did not know it: for my prison hobby,
art, industry, or whatever it may be called, had already started. For
some reason or other the spirit moved me to write verses while a
captive, and the first of all, a short poem entitled "Captivity" was
written before we left Constantinople. This strange, and to me quite
abnormal, habit endured for the whole of my thirty-nine months as a
prisoner. It is good to have a pipe and tobacco in captivity, and it is
good to have blankets, but it is even better than these to have an
absorbing occupation.
We left Taxim early in the morning of the 25th of August and were
ferried across the Bosphorus to Haida Pasha station. Technically
speaking, we stood now for the first time in Asia, though, morally
speaking, where the Turk rules there is Asia. We knew that Angora was a
long journey: two days they told us, and it actually took thirty-six
hours. But I think the vast size of Anatolia was rather a surprise to us
all. In all ordinary atlases Asia Minor is shown on such a tiny scale
that its hugeness is lost to mind.
Several officers and an armed guard accompanied us in the train, but
only two individuals remain in my memory. One was a thick-set, short,
fierce man of early middle age. He had one eye only, and his neck was
almost circled by a frightful scar as though he had been operated upon
by a blunt guillotine and then healed up again like the wolf in the
fairy story who becomes a prince when you cut off his head. Only he had
not gained the true, handsome, debonair appearance of a prince. He
looked, and probably was, a very efficient murderer not yet on pension.
His person bulged with lumps of muscle, daggers and pistols; and I am
sure the interpreter meant to speak the truth when he told me that this
ferocious person was one of the chiefs of the secret police. He was in
charge of the party. The interpreter himself was the other member of our
party who impressed me. He travelled in the same compartment with us,
and talked freely the whole way. He was the "Young Turk" complete, and
ardent upholder of the Union and Progress party. When war broke out
between England and Turkey he was in America, and he hoped to return
there after the war. But, very patriotically, he came back to serve his
country. He sailed in a Dutch ship, and touched at Plymouth on the way,
where, he informed me, he went ashore under the guise of a Persian. He
must, I think, have represented the mental attitude of his party very
fairly. He was an undoubted patriot, and Turkey for the Turks was his
keenest wish: but by the Turks he meant what is really a very small
minority of the Ottoman tribe, and the other subjects of the Empire only
concerned him as obstacles to be removed. He was the first person from
whom we learned anything of the organised massacre of the Armenians
then in progress. He told me that at Van the Turks had killed all the
Armenians, men, women, and children; and he would agree to no
condemnation of this dreadful act. "They were bad people," was his
invariable reply. Nominally this man was a Mohammedan, whose feud with
the Armenians had lasted for centuries, but actually he was an advanced
Turkish freethinker, and, except perhaps subconsciously, I don't think
religious feeling had anything to do with the bitterness he expressed.
It was purely political. The Armenian is very much cleverer than the
Turk, very stubborn, and impossible to assimilate. Turks of my
acquaintance's kind look upon Armenians as an enemy race, a weed that
must at all cost be eradicated. But his ambitions in the direction of
destroying opposition to the Young Turk ideals did not stop with the
slaughter of Christian subjects. Quite logically, from his point of
view, he realised that the reactionary influence of the Old Turk party
was an even more dangerous weed in the garden of progress than was
Christianity. His hatred was directed particularly against the orthodox
Mohammedans, and especially against the teachers and students of Islamic
divinity. "When we have finished this war," he said, "we are going to
kill all the Imams. Their false teaching keeps the race from
advancing."
I wonder if such people ever pursue their thoughts to an ultimate
conclusion! After wiping out all who were not of their own way of
thinking, there would remain a depleted race in a vast undeveloped
territory where no immigrants would dare to settle, even if they were
welcomed. All capital would be frightened away: labour would be scarce:
and the strongest of their neighbours would swallow them up. At the time
I knew no name for this intense feeling, this mental obsession. But in
the light of time it now looks like pure Bolshevism.
It seems that I have drawn a very revolting character. But the
interpreter's was not wholly that. On the whole, he was the best man I
met among the many interpreters who dealt with us during the next three
years. He was fond of some of the beautiful things of life, a lively
critic of literature, a reader of poetry, both English and Turkish, and,
from his own account, a personal friend of those among his compatriots
who were foremost in striving to rouse their countrymen to intellectual
endeavour. I loathed the man's ideas but rather liked the man. It seemed
that he suffered from the absorption of a wrong tone; almost from a
disease of the soul, but an infectious disease, not an innate
deformity: a calamity of environment, not of heredity. There was
something exceedingly sad in the picture he drew of a great national
effort going hopelessly astray because its ideals were false. But he did
not see that the picture was sad. He thought it glorious.
For the first part of the journey we skirted the Sea of Marmora, along
the flanks of bare hills, now tunnelling through promontories, and now
looking down upon blue bays. There were trenches dug all along the
coast, and armed guards at every bridge and culvert. Far away, to the
south-east, we saw forest-covered hills. Then the line turned inland,
past the town and lake of Ismid, through a valley of orchards where the
apples were almost breaking the trees, and up into the foot-hills. This
part of Anatolia is exceedingly fertile wherever the slopes are not too
steep to dig. But the hills are very barren, only fit for the most part
for the nomad life of the Turkish sheep- and goat-herds. We travelled
through hills and valleys all that afternoon, and by dusk had begun the
climb that leads up to the great plateau of Asia Minor. The railway
followed the line of a river up the valley it had cut through the hills.
Followed it up until it became a stream, and followed it on until it
became a rushing mountain torrent crossed and recrossed by the line.
When dawn broke the engine was panting up the last few miles of the
incline, and we ran out into a wide land of rolling downs and farm
country, three thousand feet above the level of the sea. Having lived in
mountains before I foresaw a very cold winter.
It was not very long after this that we began to see the Armenians.
As everyone knows now, the late summer and the autumn of 1915 saw
organised, State-supported massacre of the Armenians carried out in
Turkey on a scale unknown previously in modern history, perhaps
unparalleled in all history. I shall not attempt any comprehensive
account of this national crime, for the whole story is already contained
in the blue book on the subject, printed by the British Government, and
edited by Viscount Bryce. Those who wish to hear the details of how
somewhere about one million men, women and children were outraged,
tortured and done to death can refer to that book. I will only say that
the many isolated facts gathered from many sources during my three years
in Turkey all piece together in that book so completely that no doubt
exists in my mind regarding its truth. The blue book is a sincere and
unexaggerated statement of fact, not a propaganda war book. It rings
true from beginning to end.
The first sight we had of the Armenians who were being deported was a
large straggling camp of women and children close beside the railway
line. We had no idea at the time that their men folk were already dead,
or that they were almost all doomed to death or domestic slavery. It
looked merely like a very large, very ill-organised gypsy encampment.
Those women and children were awaiting trains to convey them hundreds of
miles from their homes into the most inhospitable regions of Asia Minor.
Ahead of them they had days of travel in trains, camps where the girls
would be sorted out again and again until only the ugliest were left;
and, at the end, a march where nearly all of them would die from
fatigue. For the Turkish way is to drive, on and on, wearily on, until
almost all are dead. They did it to the Armenians in 1915, and in 1916
they did it to the captured garrison of Kut-el-Amara.
We passed several trainloads of these wretched refugees. They were in
trucks mostly, terribly overcrowded, and some of them were in sheep
trucks in two stories, the lower tier only able to crouch.
The interpreter told me they were being sent to a very hot district
where they could do no harm. "They are bad people," he added.
There were a few boys among them, and a few old men. The rest had been
murdered.
Englishmen don't like Armenians. I don't myself. Turks loathe them.
Greeks dislike them. In the Caucasus the Georgians hate them. This
almost universal unpopularity is no excuse at all for massacre, but--in
Turkey--it helps to explain it. Where the European avoids, the Turk,
having a different standard, slays. To him they are vermin. Here is a
story told by an Armenian woman to a British officer. It is the story of
a "good Turk"; the expression was the woman's, not the officer's. There
was a batch of Armenian women and girls driven on until their drivers
grew weary that they would not die. Sick at heart they grew of the
perpetual driving of these weeping creatures. There were no pretty ones
left, for the most comely will lose their pitiful beauty when starved
long enough. So there was no interest left in being their custodians.
The drivers grew to hate the work, for there was no end to it, and no
reward. So they were herded together and slain. But two survived, a
woman and her daughter. They hid among the corpses and remained there
until the corpses began to crawl. The corpses of their friends and
relations. They had to leave that place, and in great fear they stole
away by night. There were a few Turkish villages not far away, and in
the morning they met a Turk. This was the good Turk of the story. He
stopped them and asked who they were, and they told him. "Come with me,"
he said to the girl, "and I will feed you." So the girl followed him to
his house, and the mother followed too, though she was not invited. They
reached the house and the Turk went inside. He came out with his gun. "I
do not want the old woman," he said, as he shot her. But to the girl he
gave food, and did not ill-treat her, for he was a good Turk.
Why do these people hate the Armenians so much?
I think it is partly because the Armenian is usually a successful
merchant, outclassing the Turk in commerce, competing on more than equal
terms with the Greek, and at least rivalling the Jew. But it is chiefly
because the Armenian race has been ground under the heel of a people
naturally their inferiors for so many centuries. It is a survival of the
fittest, and it is the Turks who have made the conditions which the
survivors have had to fit. The whole race has been moulded by the hand
of the Turk. For centuries he has slain all those who displayed the
more manly virtues. He has been like a breeder of sheep who hated black
sheep but feared white. For centuries he has slain the white but
contemptuously allowed many of the black to survive. Unconsciously he
has been a selective breeder on a very large scale; and he has bred the
modern Armenian. If we ourselves, we British who are so proud, had
passed through those dark centuries with the Armenians, we too would be
like they are, or not much otherwise. If the Armenians are protected;
allowed to be successful and to enjoy their success themselves; allowed
to be independent and not suffer for their independence; allowed to be
brave and not to die for their courage; allowed, in a word, fair play,
they will grow into a fine people.
When the great massacres took place there was, among the Armenians, one
strange exception to the universal peril. Most Armenians belong to the
Armenian Church, but a certain number of them are Roman Catholics. I do
not know what happened elsewhere, but in Angora the Roman Catholic
Armenians were not killed, or deported, which is the same as being
killed only slower. They were not well-treated, but they did survive.
It is a very remarkable thing to find the power of Rome exerted in so
wonderful a way in a Mohammedan country. And were this the only example
of it one would be inclined to attribute the influence to some local
predilection. But there are two other instances. One was a division of
the prisoners, French and British, by which the Roman Catholics were
sent to a camp where there was at that time considerably more liberty.
The other was quite extraordinary: it was the repatriation of a British
officer who happened to be the nephew of a cardinal. We did not grudge
him his good luck. He stole no march on us. But it certainly was a most
wonderful piece of fortune for him. He was not ill or injured, and he
was not exchanged, but simply repatriated. He gave his parole, and that
was all.
In contrast to the present-day power of the Pope in Turkey it is
interesting to remember that a large percentage of the Jews who are
subjects of the Ottoman are the descendants of Spanish Jews who fled
into the Sultan's dominions to escape from the Spanish Inquisition. Many
of them still speak Spanish. They are not often ill-treated by the
Turks, I believe, though how they manage to avoid it is a miracle.
We reached Angora long after dark and were met by a Bimbashi who
conveyed us in carriages to our new quarters. The men marched, but to
the same destination, and it was after our arrival there that we were
able for the first time to talk with them freely. This was seventeen
days after capture.
We drove through the squalid streets of a corner of the town, and out
about a mile into the country. I think we all shuddered as we drew near
a large barrack and remembered Taxim, and breathed more freely when we
had left it behind. Our destination was not a particularly sweet place,
but it was better than that.
We crossed a bridge, passed a mulberry plantation, and the carriages
halted at the foot of a slope leading up to a group of buildings
surrounded by a high wall. A small, low, iron-studded door, guarded by a
sentry with a fixed bayonet, was opened. We stooped through it, walked
beneath an arched gateway, and came out in a paved courtyard surrounded
by buildings black against the starry sky. As we came in heads popped
out of the windows, and we heard people speaking in French. That sounded
civilized at any rate. Have you who read this ever considered what the
word "civilized" means? It means a good deal when you are in the middle
of Anatolia. Through a door to the left and up a flight of steps we
went, and at the top we were met by three French naval officers, headed
by Commander Fabre, who welcomed us so courteously and kindly that my
heart warms to think of it to the present day.
Everything that a fellow-prisoner could do they had done. And when the
Turks had gone and the gate was locked once more, we sat down with them
to an excellent meal.
Our friends were the officers and crew of the submarine "Mariotte," sunk
in the Dardanelles rather more than a month before. Two of the officers
spoke English fluently, and the third was a dogged striver who had
mastered a great deal of our language before the end of the war.
From them we learned what this strange building was. It was called the
Wank (pronounced Wonk) and was an Armenian monastery, half farm, half
stronghold. What had happened to the monks they did not know, save that
they had been turned out. As a matter of fact they were dead. Very
nearly everything they had had been moved by the Turks, looted by
officials and officers, but we came into joint possession with the
French of a few beds; enough for the officers, the men were not allowed
beds; a divan round three sides of a fairly comfortable room, a
shower-bath, and some framed photographs of various high dignitaries of
the Armenian Church. There were also lamps and a stove. This was a very
great advance on any home we had yet had in Turkey; for, although a
European housekeeper would have been disgusted at the vermin, they were
not sufficiently numerous to keep one awake all night.
We found, too, that the French had managed to establish the custom of
taking in a newspaper, "The Hilal," a German edited, Levantine rag,
which did, at any rate, publish the German _communiques_. So we began
once more to look upon the war and the outside world through that dim
glass which was our only window. Later on we had various other means,
but not up till then.
In addition to the large central sitting-room, where four of us had to
sleep, there were three small bedrooms on the same floor, also a
kitchen, a latrine, and a tiny paved room where the shower-bath hung.
This was an amateur one made out of a kerosine oil tin, and its
existence argued virtue in one Armenian at least. The Turks had not
stolen it. It was of no use to them.
Derrick and I, who had been taken together, were now in a mess of eleven
persons, quite a sizeable community. We began to wake up and make plans
to learn French and to teach English; but that night we slept like
logs.