SMYRNA
Our first night in the train was rather uncomfortably crowded, but we
would not have minded being piled in heaps on that journey. In the
morning we reached a place called Ushak, and there had rather a shock,
for all thirteen officers were ushered into a dirty shed and informed
that it was a hospital, and that we were all to be examined for cholera.
This was more serious than appears on the face of it, for two of our
party were rather out of sorts, and a Turkish doctor would be quite
liable to mistake this malady for cholera. Then good-bye to hope for
them. They would have been put in some disgusting place with all manner
of afflicted people, and it is by no means improbable that they would
have died. The Turkish doctor had an assistant with a microscope, but we
didn't trust either of them one bit: so we refused to be examined. I
can't enter into details, but we refused unanimously to do what they
required. There was an impasse. We could not proceed without health
certificates, for there were quarantine regulations in force. Of course,
we could, in the last resource, bribe the doctor, but we preferred not
to. We stood fast upon the dignity of British officers, and said they
did not do that kind of thing. It was much cheaper to bluff than to
bribe, and we wanted all our money. I suggested to the Turkish officer
in charge that he should hire a peasant to be examined on our behalf,
and offered to pay the man ten piastres for his courtesy. But that
obviously sound suggestion was ruled out as being unscientific. The
honour of the medical profession and the prestige of the microscope had
to be upheld. It ended in a compromise. The doctor agreed to accept
three delegates as representatives of the whole party. Three strong men
volunteered to be examined, and we threatened them with all manner of
revenge if they proved to have any obscure disease that would hold us
up. But they passed the ordeal safely and we were solemnly granted
thirteen clean bills of health and allowed to proceed.
The men were detained for examination, despite all we could do, but they
reached Smyrna a day later without mishap. As it turned out, they were
lucky to be late.
The approach to Smyrna from inland is a very beautiful journey. The
railway runs through the fruitful valley of Magnina, flanked by great
hills, and full of vineyards and groves of figs and olives.
We were travelling in comfort now. Our second night had been passed in a
truck, rather hilariously, I am afraid, for three of us celebrated an
Old Wykehamist dinner and sang "Domum" most of the night through. For
the last few hours of the journey we had the company of a Roman Catholic
priest, a quiet, gentle, young man from Austria, very sad about the
condition of his country and very much concerned at all the excesses of
the Turks. He found his hard life a very hopeless struggle against
corruption and cruelty of every kind. I had not up to then met so
thoroughly pro-British an enemy.
We reached the Point station at Smyrna early in the afternoon. Where we
were to be lodged we did not know. The Turkish officer in charge of us
had treated us well; he was the only member of the staff of Maslum Bey
who had come through the inquiry without a single charge against him.
But he had no influence, and he was very junior; moreover, he laboured
under unjust suspicion of having assisted the three officers who escaped
the day we left Afion. We heard their fate later on, and it may as well
be recorded here. They had only got two or three days' journey into the
hills when they were captured by brigands, who debated for some time
what to do with them. At last one of them thought he saw a chance of
escape, and made a dash; but he was shot, and the others two were
released and driven away. They were not allowed to assist their
companion, and he was last seen wounded and in the hands of the
brigands. His two companions gave themselves up to the nearest Turkish
authorities and succeeded in getting a search party sent out. They tried
hard to be allowed, on temporary parole, to accompany the party, but
were refused permission and their friend has not been heard of since.
Earlier in the war, after the fall of Antwerp, he had been interned in
Holland, but had escaped, and eventually joined the R.N.A.S. It was
indeed hard luck that he should die in an unsuccessful second escape
only seven weeks before Turkey went out of the war.
Guided by the Turkish officer, we walked through the streets of Smyrna
to the military headquarters, a large building that faced a public
garden, where the band played in the afternoons and children disported
themselves with their nurses.
Our reception was very chilly. Our friendly officer was a very small
person here, and could do nothing for us; and we could not find anyone
who knew anything about us. They had never heard of any Berne Convention
or of any arrangement for exchange of prisoners, and they suspected us
all of having escaped and been sent there for punishment. For a long
time we waited in a passage, wondering what would be the upshot of it
all, and then the usual thing happened, for we were cast into gaol.
After all our visions of a week or two of absolute liberty while waiting
for the ship, this was a terrible anti-climax. We were thrust into the
military lock-up, and two sentries with fixed bayonets were placed at
the door.
It was a dark and very dirty room, with a broken wooden floor that long
experience warned us against lying on, and there were no chairs or
furniture of any kind. Five Indian officers were thrown into it with us,
and were as indignant as we. There was no one to appeal to. Our senior
officer, the only one who spoke Turkish, had remained at the station to
watch our baggage, and the officer who had escorted us had gone back to
him. After a while an interpreter came to us, and we urged him to fetch
a senior officer who could hear our complaint. A long time after this a
very hard-faced and thoroughly Prussianised Turkish colonel came in
with the interpreter, and we explained that we were sick men sent down
for exchange. He listened coldly, and said he knew nothing about that,
and that we were very well where we were. Afterwards the interpreter
told us he was in a bad temper because seven hundred of his regiment had
deserted to the hills, and he had only discovered it that morning.
We looked out through the bars rather dolefully, and watched the rank
and fashion of Smyrna in the garden. There seemed little hope of getting
out, or of getting any food in, and our bedding was at the station.
Again a typically Turkish thing occurred. There was a privy just outside
the door, the other side of the sentries. One officer was compelled to
ask permission to go to it. The request was passed out by the sentries,
and the officer was led out into the garden, before all the women and
children. This was the more unnecessary because the proper place was
there, just across the passage. It may be that Turks do not consider
this sort of exhibition objectionable, but to an Englishman or to an
Indian officer it is more humiliating than any private cruelty. It was a
studied policy of the Turks to play upon our sensitiveness to indecency.
The unspeakable Turk: with all our languages and vocabularies we never
found a phrase to rival that: unspeakable he was and unspeakable he is.
Suddenly the "strafe" ended. The British chaplain had got to know of our
plight, and had gained the ear of someone in authority. After having
paced the streets of Smyrna as comparatively free men on the way from
the station, we were taken in close marching order between guards with
fixed bayonets to a very dirty Turkish officers' hotel and given rooms.
A sentry with a fixed bayonet sat on a chair at the end of the passage.
We of the Old Wykehamist dinner shared a room, and I slept like a top:
the others tossed and moaned, and in the morning slew a vast number of
intruders, many hundreds. But this hotel was our very last experience of
these pests, for life, I hope.
The next day the Vali came to see us, Rahmy Bey, the governor of the
province of Aidin. After his visit all the frowns turned to smiles, for
he was known to favour good treatment of the subjects of the Entente.
A day or two later we moved once more, this time in the greatest
comfort. Can you but gain one gesture of protection from a great man in
an Eastern country, you may go in peace, for the underlings are but
looking-glasses to reflect his mood.
We drove in carriages to the station, and travelled first class a few
miles by rail to the suburb called Paradise. That is its name since
Roman times, and it was Paradise indeed to us.
We were established in the fine buildings of the International College,
an American foundation with a Canadian in charge of it as principal. Dr.
Maclachlan was his name, and he and Mr. Reed, an American gentleman who
is second in command, gave us the warmest, kindest welcome in the world.
They and the ladies of the staff had a sumptuous tea awaiting us, and
everything that man or woman could do they did. We had not known the
like for many years.
There is a little colony of British and Americans at Paradise, and
everyone of them deserves to be there. The whole great building was at
our disposal: dormitories for the men, small rooms for the officers, a
school conduit to wash in, shower baths, electric light, a fine library,
and perfect cleanliness. It was the cleanliness of the building and the
kindness of their hearts that appealed to us. I confess without any
shame that it almost broke me down. And there were children to play
with, bright, merry, little American and English children. As our men
came in, some on crutches, some limping, all of them thin and weary, I
saw one of those kind hosts of ours pick up a crippled Indian sepoy on
his back and carry him up the stairs. They nursed our sick, they mended
and washed our clothes, they cooked dainty little dishes for the
convalescents, and they gave us all heart once more. We were unclean and
uncivilized, queerer perhaps than we knew, and they brought back to us
the knowledge that the world as a whole is good.
It must not be imagined that all our troubles were over. We were still
in Turkey. The officer who had charge of us was a Cretan Turk, a
kind-hearted but rather diffident man. He received his orders from one
army corps, and the officer in charge of the guard from another. The
result was chaos: for while the Cretan gave us very considerable
privileges, his plans were defeated by the officer of the guard, a
conceited little puppy of about nineteen, who did nothing but swagger
about with a sword. He was wholly malicious and possibly a little bit
wrong in the head. He tormented the good lady who nursed our worst cases
by telling her the bloody deeds he itched to do; the finest sensation on
earth, he said, was to feel your steel pass through an enemy's body. But
she turned upon him and told him that in a few months he would be
selling melons on the street for a living. When the Cretan, who was a
senior captain, gave us leave to go out into the ample grounds of the
college, this little squirt ordered the guard to prevent us; and in like
way he made himself so intolerable that Dr. Maclachlan spoke to a higher
power and got him removed. After that things went quite smoothly.
There was a very large playing field attached to the college, twenty
acres, I think it was; there was a chapel with an organ in it, an
auditorium with a grand piano, and a large, well-equipped gymnasium. We
began by using a few rooms of the main building, and ended by filling
the whole establishment, even the chapel. For parties were coming in
almost daily from all over Turkey. At first they were nearly all sick
men, some of them at the very point of death. We lost sixteen men in
Smyrna, who died before they could be exchanged, almost within sight of
home. But later on, when the Turks found they could not make up the
thousand in any other way, all the camps were combed through again, and
a great many of the later arrivals had nothing whatever the matter with
them except the awful disease of prison weariness: a disease that,
fortunately, few people know, but which none who have known it will ever
forget.
It was astonishing at first to realize how few really sick men there
were, but the explanation was not far to seek: the sick had died. Some
of those who passed medical boards were almost ludicrous. One, I
remember, had an abnormally rough and thick skin, had had it all his
life. Another had complained that he felt tired. Another had been late
for the medical board, in fact, he had only gone up for a joke, and at
the last moment; but he pleaded that he had rested so many times by the
way that he could not get there in time. He was one of the best football
players in Turkey, but he was passed.
Another large contingent came from Afion, others from Broussa,
Constantinople, Gedos--the parole camp, where officers who chose to give
their parole could go and enjoy almost complete liberty; from Angora,
and from all the camps in the Taurus mountains. These last were the
weakest of the whole. They were the survivors of a terrible slavery.
The European community of Smyrna, save for about a week near the
beginning of the war, had been allowed to live in their own houses and
to go where they pleased in Smyrna and its widespread suburbs. They will
perhaps disagree with me when I say that they had been very well
treated. This was due to the political sagacity of the Vali, Rahmy Bey,
who seems to have realized from the beginning that Turkey was on the
wrong side. He has been accused of vast speculations, and he certainly
tolerated massacre and wholesale deportation of the Greeks; but he
protected the Armenians in his province, and spread his cloak over the
subjects of the Entente. For that we must be very grateful. I met him
several times and found him clever, strong, and amusing. He is a very
notable Turk, and may rule Turkey some day.
Many of the French and British subjects came to visit us, and, later,
when we were free, we enjoyed much hospitality at their hands. One of
them told me that the dearth of news was so great during the beginning
of the German retreat that smuggled copies of the _Times_ newspaper had
commanded the enormous price of one pound per hour of perusal.
We waited on and on. The college was filled to overflowing, and another
camp was started in another part of Smyrna. Nobody knew when the ship
would come, or even where it would come to. But the resistance of the
enemy was crumbling. Turkish officers told us that their armies were
mere skeleton forces. They estimated that there were six hundred
thousand deserters in the hills. A story was told of a battalion ordered
from Smyrna to the Palestine front, which melted on the railway journey
until there was only one man left besides the C.O. Bulgaria gave way.
The Palestine front gave way, and a Turkish staff officer told me that
their estimate of losses there alone was ninety-two thousand men. It was
plain that the war was coming to an end.
Exactly two weeks before Turkey actually signed the Armistice we were
set free, absolutely free. Some officers were received into the houses
of residents in Bournabat, the chief suburb of Smyrna; some went into
hotels where meals cost whole fortunes; some stayed on in the College;
and, with three others, I rented a small furnished house just outside
the College gates. It belonged to a Mrs. Constantine, the wife of a
Greek gentleman, a master at the College. He was a man who had
travelled, and lived in America, and he was heartily on our side. But
the conscription had netted him in as a transport driver, and he was
believed to be now a prisoner in British hands. We tried to console poor
Mrs. Constantine by telling her that he would be quite safe there, much
safer than with the Turks; but she wanted him back, poor soul, and so
did little Chloe and Aeneas, his children.
During this fortnight we did as we pleased, and enjoyed life.
More than one family among the European residents were exceedingly kind
to us, and made us free of their homes.
It was also my good fortune, through Mrs. Reed, to make the acquaintance
of some Greek ladies, and more whole-hearted fiery patriots I have never
listened to. The Peace Conference is now, as I write, ponderously
considering the future of Turkey, and their fate still hangs in the
balance. The Smyrna Greeks long for union with Greece, long for it as a
sailor longs for the sea, although they know that it may bring them
poverty; for the district of Smyrna is rich in comparison with Greek
proper, and would perhaps be bled to feed Athens. They know that, but
they burn to throw off the tyranny of the Turks. Who can but sympathize
with them?
The European permanent residents, on the other hand, wish for the Turks
to remain, for by accommodating the chief Turkish officials they can
make much money. But they are in a vast minority to the Greeks; they are
aliens, and the Greeks were there two thousand years before the Turks
were. They should have no say in the matter, beyond what is just. Their
say in this matter should be governed by the extent to which they aided
the war, on the Entente side. This I may say without a breach of
hospitality, for of the only two houses I went into, one real English
and the other French, there was not one member who was eligible for
fighting; and the people of Paradise did contribute their sons to the
war, but they are not permanent residents. Under the capitulations a
very strange community grew up in Turkey. All sorts of people assumed
British, French, or Italian nationality for the sake of the protection
it gave them. They speak all tongues, more or less, and the "British"
among them are often less like Englishmen than are the Eurasians of
India. There are many families of "British" who can speak no English at
all; nearly all the rest, except the rare ones who have been educated
"at home," speak what, further East, we call Chichi English. They are
"British" in inverted commas, and they "supported" our cause mostly in
inverted commas too.
Whether the Turks' own claim to Smyrna is a just one I am not competent
to judge. The mere fact that they have hideously misgoverned should not
invalidate their claim provided that they are in a genuine majority, not
a majority obtained by deportation and massacre. For their system of
Government can be improved and kept watch over.
What is to be the future of the Turks, in any case?
That they should hold no subject countries is obvious. But in their own
country, where they do actually form the majority of the population,
what is their future? Their official classes are abominable people. They
can oppress, but they have no aptitude for the wider forms of business
and banking, building and organizing, or any form of creative work. A
Turkish financier is more Hooligan than Hooley. They cannot compete with
the Christians in bloodless ventures. We used to dream of various fates
for them, but the fate that is coming is worse than we dreamed. They are
bankrupt; there will soon be neither pay nor pension for most of them.
While they still ruled Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the
coasts of Arabia, their system was simple. The "educated" Turk got a
post in some branch of the Government service, with small pay, but a
large income. The pay came from the Government, and the income from the
subject peoples. But that time is gone, and, as the Turkish officer was
told, they will soon be selling melons on the streets. Metaphorically
that is what they will be doing. They will be driven to trade; and
wherever a Turk sits down to trade an Armenian will sit and he will
beggar that Turk. They are waiting to do it, and looking forward to it.
The Turks tried to govern by an absolute king, and it failed. They tried
to govern by a _soi disant_ representative assembly, and that failed; it
degenerated into a tyranny by a small clique, and that tyranny failed
too. An oligarchy is out of the question, for there are no families in
Turkey from which it could be recruited. There remain soviets, but the
Turkish peasant is not nearly advanced enough for that. It is even
doubtful if any race on earth is. The Turkish peasant is to the full as
backward as, or more backward than, the Indian peasant, and he has much
fewer brains. It seems to be more a question of evolution than of
revolution for the Turks. From our little way up the cliff of
civilisation we look down to the Turk, and he seems too far away for us
to lend him a helping hand.
The Turkish people do not include a middle class or an aristocracy. The
reasons will be found in any good history of their slave theory of
government, but the reasons concern Europe less than does the fact. With
a small margin of error, all Turks may be described as falling in one of
two categories, namely, officials and peasants. My opinion of the
officials must be plain to anyone who has read thus far, and needs no
reinforcing. But the peasants have a great many very good qualities.
They are brave, cheerful, and very patient people, hospitable and
generous by nature, and the simplest of the simple. They lie and steal
much less than do the Christians in their land, and infinitely less than
their own officials. On the other hand, they are stupid, and they have
been for centuries so inured to brutality that they value human life and
human pain not at all. If you strayed into a Turkish village you would
probably be treated as a guest, and given of their best. But you might
see these same villagers sally forth to burn, rape, and kill in a
neighbouring village of Christians.
The only future for Turkey seems to be for the whole race to go back to
the land until from the soil there rises a middle class able in the
course of time to produce rulers of men. In the meantime, some European
Power or America should have a mandate, not only the League of Nations'
mandate, but the Turks' own mandate, to do for them the things they
cannot do; to provide judges and governors, railway and postal
controllers, and to officer a police force. Personally, I believe they
would, by British or Americans, be the easiest people on earth to rule.
I must write one word on our other enemies, the Germans in Turkey. There
was a German in the Taurus who boasted that, by his treatment of British
prisoners, he had killed more enemies than anyone on the Western front.
But he was almost alone in that respect. With few exceptions, Germans in
Turkey treated Britishers in misfortune as brother white men in an
Eastern land. Especially was this so in the air service, where chivalry
ran higher than in any other branch of the fighting. German airmen who
had brought a Britisher down always treated him well; very often they
went over our lines and, at the risk of their machines or their lives,
dropped a note from the captured one asking that his kit might be sent
along. Then one of our machines would fly back, unmolested, and drop the
kit. There were several officers in Afion who had received their kit in
this way. There was also an officer who had been defeated in a fight in
the air, and to whom his victor gave his own silver watch with an
inscription engraved upon it commemorating the combat. The German passed
through Afion long afterwards, and came to see if he could do anything
more to help his late enemy. Another officer in Afion was taken
prisoner in Palestine, in thin clothes, and had to proceed up to Afion,
where it was cold. In the train he met a German officer who was going on
leave home, and this man divided up his shirts, his socks, and his
underclothes, and fitted the Englishman out. Since coming to England I
have seen in the papers that a clergyman was fined L10 for giving a
German prisoner some tobacco, and a farmer 40_s._ for giving a German
prisoner half a loaf and a bottle of ginger-beer. Is there not a better
way of looking at things than this? I am not pro-German, very far from
it, but I am pro anything generous or kind, and I know what it is to be
a prisoner.