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CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS

BY E.F. BENSON

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Preface_

In compiling the following pages I have had access to certain sources of
official information, the nature of which I am not at liberty to specify
further. I have used these freely in such chapters of this book as deal
with recent and contemporary events in Turkey or in Germany in
connection with Turkey: the chapter, for instance, entitled 'Deutschland
über Allah,' is based very largely on such documents. I have tried to be
discriminating in their use, and have not, as far as I am aware, stated
anything derived from them as a fact, for which I had not found
corroborative evidence. With regard to the Armenian massacres I have
drawn largely on the testimony collected by Lord Bryce, on that brought
forward by Mr. Arnold J. Toynbee in his pamphlet _The Murder of a
Nation_, and _The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks,_ and on the pamphlet
by Dr. Martin Niepage, called _The Horrors of Aleppo_. In the first
chapter I have based the short historical survey on the contribution of
Mr. D.G. Hogarth to _The Balkans_ (Clarendon Press, 1915). The chapter
called 'Thy Kingdom is Divided' is in no respect at all an official
utterance, and merely represents the individual opinions and surmises of
the author. It has, however, the official basis that the Allies have
pledged themselves to remove the power of the Turk from Constantinople,
and to remove out of the power of the Turk the alien peoples who have
too long already been subject to his murderous rule. I have, in fact,
but attempted to conjecture in what kind of manner that promise will be
fulfilled.

Fresh items of news respecting internal conditions in Turkey are
continually coming in, and if one waited for them all, one would have to
wait to the end of the war before beginning to write at all on this
subject. But since such usefulness as this book may possibly have is
involved with the necessity of its appearance before the end of the war,
I set a term to the gathering of material, and, with the exception of
two or three notes inserted later, ceased to collect it after June 1917.
But up to then anything that should have been inserted in surveys and
arguments, and is not, constitutes a culpable omission on my part.

E.F. BENSON

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Contents_

CHAPTER I

THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS

CHAPTER II

THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS

THE END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION

CHAPTER IV

THE QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE

CHAPTER V

DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLAH

CHAPTER VI

'THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED'

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.

There must be collecting stations for these tragic colonists, centres to
which they must be herded in from surrounding districts: one at
Osmanieh, let us say, one at Aleppo, one at Ras-el-Ain, one at Damascus.
And since it would be a pity to let so many flowers of girlhood waste
their sweetness on the desert air of Deir-el-Zor, slave markets must be
established at these collecting stations. There would be plenty of
girls, and prices would be low, but the reverend ministers of Allah the
God of Love, the Ulemas, the Padis and the Muftis, should be accorded a
preferential tariff. Indeed they should pay nothing at all; they should
just choose a girl and take her away, and, with the help of Allah the
God of Love, convert her to the blessed creed. No one was too young for
these lessons.... A little abstemiousness would not hurt these pampered
Christians, so when they set out on their marches they need not be
provided with rations or water. Perhaps some might die, but Talaat had
no use for weaklings at his agricultural colonies. Nor must there be any
poking and prying on the part of those interfering American
missionaries; and so Talaat Bey put all the agricultural colonies out of
bounds for foreigners....

There was no hurry over these deportations, for the plea of military
exigencies, which had caused the deportations in Armenia itself to be
terminated by massacre with a rapidity almost inartistic, did not apply
to Armenians so far from the seat of war. Their picnics could be
conducted quietly and pleasantly in the leisurely Oriental manner. Even
the men need not be murdered absolutely out of hand. Strong young
fellows might be stripped and tied down and then beaten to death by
bastinadoing the feet till they burst, or by five hundred blows on the
chest and stomach. Their cries would mingle with the screams of their
sisters in the embrace of Turkish soldiers. And, talking of embraces, if
a woman was desirable, she need not walk all the way to Deir-el-Zor, but
by embracing Islamism be transferred to a harem. But these were details
that might be left to individual taste: there were no precise
instructions save that no Armenian men must be discoverable in the
Ottoman Empire at all, and no women save those who had become Turkish
women, or who were at work on the waterless and the malarial
agricultural colonies.

Talaat Bey reviewed his finished scheme. He thought it would do, and
Enver Pasha agreed with him, and Jemal Bey (who soon after styled
himself Jemal the Great), the Military Governor of Syria, and so
responsible for the last stages of their pilgrimage, thought it would do
very well indeed. And instructions were sent out to every town in the
Empire where there were Armenians, in accordance with the programme of
Talaat Bey.

How Enver carried out his part of the programme in Armenia itself we
have seen, and by the end of the year (1915) his work was done, and
Armenia was Armenia no longer. But operations, as I have said, were
conducted in a more leisurely manner elsewhere, and the agony of that
butchery protracted. But Jemal got to work at once in the thickly
populated district round Zeitun. He had had no success in the campaign
of the winter in the direction of the Suez Canal, and his troops were
hungry for some sort of victory. The Zeitunlis were hardy independent
mountaineers, who were possessed of arms, and Jemal thought it more
prudent not to dally with deportations, but conduct a regular campaign
against them. For two or three months they resisted, entrenching
themselves in the hills, but they could not hold out against artillery
and the modern apparatus of war, and the whole tribe was wiped out. That
done, Jemal became Jemal the Great by reason of his national services,
and paid a visit to Germany. On his return we shall hear of him again.

Meanwhile, from all the reports that have arrived from missionaries and
others, we may take one or two, almost at random. At certain places, as
in the governments of Ismid, Angora and Diarbekr, the Armenian
population was completely wiped out. Sometimes tortures were added, as
at a certain Anatolian town where there was a big Armenian school, in
which a number of professors and instructors, some of whom had studied
in America, in Scotland, and in Germany, had for years been working.

What happened to them was this:--

(1) Professor A served the College thirty-five years, and taught
Turkish and history. He was arrested without charge, the hair of his
head and beard were pulled out in order to secure damaging confessions.
He was starved and hung up by the arms for a day and a night and
repeatedly beaten. He was then murdered.

(2) Professor B, who had served the College thirty-three years, and
taught mathematics, suffered the same fate.

(3) Professor C, head of the preparatory department, had served the
College for twenty years. He was made to witness the spectacle of a man
being beaten almost to death, and became mentally deranged. He was
murdered with his family.

(4) Professor D, who taught mental and moral sciences, was treated in
the same way as Professor A. He also had three finger nails pulled out
by the roots, and was subsequently murdered.

Similarly, at Diarbekr, the Armenians were collected in batches of 600,
taken out of the town, and killed to the last man. Among them was the
Armenian Archbishop; his eyes and nails were dragged out before he was
butchered.

Or let us take a look at some of the collecting camps. At one, described
by an eye-witness, we find that the convoy had arrived after several
months of travel. More than half were already dead, they had been
pillaged by bandits and Kurds seven times. They were forbidden to drink
water when they passed by a stream, three-quarters of the young women
and girls had been kidnapped, the rest were compelled to sleep with the
gendarmes who conducted them. At Osmanieh it was decided to deport the
women and children by train. They lay about the station starving and
fever-stricken. When the train arrived many were jostled on to the line,
and the driver yelled with joy, crying out, 'Did you see how I smashed
them up?'

At another camp typhus broke out; those who died of it were left
unburied, as vouched for by a Turkish officer, in order to increase the
infection....

Urfa was another collecting camp for the Armenians in that district, and
the following account is based on the information of an eye-witness.
Here, before the concentration began, the Armenians living in the town
offered resistance to the Turks, and held out until Fahri Bey, second in
command to Jemal the Great, arrived with artillery, bombarded the town,
and massacred every Armenian there. Quiet being thus restored, the bands
of deported began to arrive. They came by rail or on foot, and, with
the Prussian love of tabulation, were divided into three groups.

The first group consisted of old men, old women, and young children.
They, guarded by gendarmes, were sent marching through the desert to
Deir-el-Zor. Few, if any, ever arrived there, all dying by the way.

The second group, consisting of able-bodied men, was led off in batches
and slaughtered. Among them were Zohrab and Vartkes, Armenian deputies
who had been brought there from Constantinople.

The third group consisted of young marriageable girls. Some, perhaps,
found their way into harems.

From Aleppo (one of the final concentration camps before such as were
left of the convoys set forth for their goal, the swamps or the desert
round Deir-el-Zor) we have the detailed evidence of Dr. Martin Niepage,
High Grade teacher in the German Technical School. This gentleman, with
a courage and a humanity to which the highest tribute must be paid,
addressed a report of protest to the German Ambassador at
Constantinople, and wrote an open letter to the Reichstag on the subject
of what he had seen with his own eyes in that town. In his preliminary
matter he speaks as follows:--

'In dilapidated caravanserais I found quantities of dead, many corpses
being half-decomposed, and others still living among them who were soon
to breathe their last. In other yards I found quantities of sick and
dying people, whom nobody was looking after.... We teachers and our
pupils had to pass them every day. Every time we went out we saw through
the open windows their pitiful forms, emaciated and wrapped in rags. In
the morning our school children, on their way through the narrow
streets, had to push past the two-wheeled ox-carts on which every day,
from eight to ten rigid corpses without coffin or shroud, were carried
away, their arms and legs trailing out of the vehicle.'

From the report itself:--

'Out of convoys which, when they left their homes on the Armenian
plateau, numbered from two to three thousand men, women, and children,
only two or three hundred survivors arrived here in the south. The men
were slaughtered on the way, the women and girls, with the exception of
the old, the ugly and those who are still children, have been abused by
Turkish soldiers and officers.... Even when they are fording rivers they
do not allow those dying of thirst to drink. All the nourishment they
receive is a daily ration of a little meal sprinkled on their hands....
Opposite the German Technical School at Aleppo, a mass of about four
hundred emaciated forms, the remnant of such convoys, is lying in one of
the caravanserais. There are about a hundred children (boys and girls)
among them, from five to seven years old. Most of them are suffering
from typhoid and dysentery. When one enters the yard, one has the
impression of entering a madhouse. If one brings food, one notices that
they have forgotten how to eat.... If one gives them bread, they put it
aside indifferently. They just lie there quietly waiting for death.'

Dr. Niepage wrote this report in the hope of saving such as then (1915)
survived. No notice whatever was taken of it, and his postscript,
written in May 1916, records the fact that 'the exiles encamped at
Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 men, women and
children, were slaughtered to the last one.'[1]

[Footnote 1: It is right to add that at Aleppo an officer called Bekir
Sami guarded 50,000 Armenians whom he had collected from neighbouring
districts, who were threatened with massacre, and I find that a German
missionary states that there were 45,000 Armenians alive in Aleppo. This
forms confirmatory evidence, but at the same time there is nothing to
show that they were not subsequently deported to Deir-el-Zor. In this
case it is highly improbable that any survive.]

In Dr. Niepage's view, as I have stated elsewhere, the Germans are
directly responsible for the continuance of the massacres. Such, too, is
the opinion, he tells us, of the educated Moslems, and his courage in
stating this has lost him his post at Aleppo. It is to be sincerely
hoped that he has escaped the fate of a certain Dr. Lepsius, who, for
drawing attention to the fact that Germany allowed the Armenian
massacres, has been arrested for high treason.

Before the end of 1915 the German authorities, who had refused to
interfere in the massacres, and both in the official press and through
official utterances had expressed their support of this Ottomanisation
of the Empire, began to think that you might have too much of a good
thing, and that the massacres had really gone far enough. Their reason
was clear and explicit: there would be a very serious shortage of labour
in the beet-growing industry and in the harvest-fields, for which they
had sent grain and artificial manures from Germany. There had been some
talk, they said, of saving 500,000 Armenians out of the race, but, in
the way things were going on, it seemed that the remnant would not
nearly approach that figure. Would not the great Ottomanisers temper
their patriotism with a little clemency? Talaat Bey disagreed: he wanted
to make a complete job of it, but Jemal the Great, fresh from his visit
to Germany, supported the idea, and, in spite of Talaat's opposition,
made a spectacular exhibition of clemency, in which, beyond doubt, we
can trace an 'Imitatio Imperatoris,' in the following manner.

There was at the time a large convoy of men and women in Constantinople
which was to be led out for murder and deportation, and Jemal gave
orders that it should be spared and sent back to its highland home. He
gave orders also that the entire convoy should be informed who was their
saviour, and should be led in procession past his house and show their
gratitude. All day the sorry pageant lasted, the ragged, half-starved
crowd streamed by the house of Jemal the Great, with murmurs of
thanksgiving and uplifted hands, and all manner of obeisances, while
Jemal the Great stood in his porch with stern, impassive face, and hand
on his sword-hilt in the best Potsdam manner, and acknowledged these
thanksgivings....[1]

[Footnote 1: In support of Jemal's claim to clemency it must be added
that, according to a report coming from Alexandria, he hanged twelve of
the worst assassins sent to Syria as ringleaders of the massacres. I
cannot find corroboration of this.]

Here, then, is the absurd, the Williamesque side of this ludicrous
popinjay, Jemal the Great, and it contains not only the obvious seeds of
laughter, but the more helpful seeds of hope. He has a strong hand on
the very efficient army of Syria, and his visits to Berlin seem perhaps
to have turned his head not quite in the direction that the
Master-egalo-megalomaniac of Berlin intended. I gather that Jemal the
Great was not so much impressed by the magnificence of William II. as to
fall dazzled and prone at the Imperial feet, and lick with enraptured
tongue the imperial boot polish, but rather to be inspired to do the
same himself, to become the God-anointed of the newly acquired German
province, which is Turkey, and make a Potsdam of his own. This is only a
guess, but the conduct of Jemal the Great in the matter of these
Armenian refugees, and in other affairs, has been distinctly imperial.
In June of this year, for instance, he telegraphed to H.E. the Vali of
Syria, and an extract from his text is truly Potsdamish. 'One and a half
million of sandbags,' he wrote, 'are required for the fortress of
Gaza.... The bags should be made, if necessary, of all the silk-hangings
in houses of Syria and Palestine.' With his army behind him, he has
twice already defied the orders of Talaat, and I am inclined to think
that he is the coming Strong Man of the effete Empire with whom it would
be well worth while to make friends, even at a highish price. The Allied
Powers should keep an undazzled eye on him, for it is quite possible
that, having defied Talaat successfully, he may go on to defy the real
rulers of Turkey, who live in Berlin. His Syrian army, from such sources
as are available, appears to be more efficient than any other body of
troops the Turks can put into the field, and he has them in control.
Probably in the winter of 1917-1918 our troops will come into collision
with them. But in the interval, also quite probably, Jemal the Great may
resent German superintendence.[1]

[Footnote 1: See note at end of this chapter.]

But in addition to his ludicrous side, there is in him a refined
hypocrisy and a subtle cruelty worthy of Abdul Hamid. One instance will
suffice.

There had been some talk that at certain of these concentration camps
there was no water supply, and he gave orders, did Jemal the Great and
the Merciful, that water should be sent. A train consisting of trucks
of water accordingly was despatched to one of those camps, situated in
the desert, with no supply nearer than six miles, and an eye-witness
describes its arrival. The mob of Armenians, mad with thirst, surrounded
it, and, since everything must be done in an orderly and seemly manner,
were beaten back by the Turkish guards, and made to stand at a due
distance for the distribution. And when those ranks, with their parched
throats and sun-cracked lips, were all ready, the Turkish guards opened
the taps of the reservoirs, and allowed the whole of their contents to
run away into the sand. Whether Jemal the Great planned that, or whether
it was but a humorous freak on the part of the officials, I cannot say.
But as a refinement of cruelty I have, outside the page of Poe's tales,
only once come across anything to equal it, and that in a letter from
the _Times'_ correspondent at Berne on April 11, 1917. He describes the
treatment of English prisoners in Germany: 'An equally common
entertainment with those women (German Red Cross nurses) was to offer a
wounded man a glass, perhaps, of water, then, standing just outside his
reach, to pour it slowly on the ground.' Could those sisters of mercy
have read the account of Jemal's clemency, or is it merely an instance
of the parallelism of similar minds?

So the empty train returned, and Jemal the Great caused it to be known
in Berlin that he was active in securing a proper water supply for the
famous agricultural settlements in the desert, and loud were the
encomiums in the press of the Central Powers over the colonisation of
Syria by the Armenians, the progress and enlightenment of the Turks, and
the skilful and humane organisation of Jemal the Great.

There is no difficulty in estimating to-day the number of Armenian men
who survive in the Turkish Empire. All appeals to the Prussian
overlords, such as were made by Dr. Niepage, and the belated
remonstrance of the Prussians themselves when they foresaw a dearth of
labour for the husbandry of beet and cereals, fell on deaf ears, and I
cannot see any reason for supposing that Armenian men exist any more in
the Empire. It is more difficult to judge of the numbers of women who,
by accepting the Moslem creed and the harems, are still alive. Certainly
in some districts there were considerable 'conversions,' and Dr. Niepage
rates them as many thousands. But the willingness to accept those
conditions was not always a guarantee for their being granted, and I
have read reports where would-be converts were told that 'religion' was
a more serious matter than that, and, instead of being accepted, they
were massacred. But even if Dr. Niepage is right, we can scarcely
consider these women as constituting an Armenian element any more in the
country. The work of butchery, the torture, the long-drawn agonies of
those inhuman pilgrimages have come to an end because there are no more
Armenian victims available. Apart from those who escaped over the
Russian frontier, and the handful who sought refuge in Egypt, the race
exists no longer, and the seal has been set on the bloodiest deed that
ever stained the annals of the barbarous Osmanlis. It is not in revenge
on the murderers, but in order to rescue the other subject peoples,
Arabs, Greeks, Jews, who are still enclosed within the frontiers of the
Empire, that the Allied Governments, in their answer to President
Wilson, stated that among their aims as belligerents, was the
'liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of
the Turks.' There is defined their irreducible demand: never again,
after peace returns, will the Turk be allowed to control the destinies
of races not his own. Too long already--and to their disgrace be it
spoken--have the civilised and Christian nations of Europe tolerated at
their very doors a tyranny that has steadily grown more murderous and
more monstrous, because they feared the upset of the Balance of Power.
Now at least such Powers as value national honour, and regard a national
promise as something more than a gabble of ink on a scrap of paper, have
resolved that they will suffer the tyranny of the Turk over his alien
subject peoples to continue no longer. It is the least they can do (and
unhappily the most) to redeem the century-long neglect of their duty.
Even now, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, the direst peril
threatens those other peoples who at present groan under Turkish rule,
and we can but pray that the end of the war will come before Arabs or
Greeks or Jews suffer the same fate as has exterminated the Armenians.
Too often have we been too late; we must only hope that another item
will not have to be added to that miserable list, and that, when the day
of reckoning comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous policy will stay
our hands from the complete execution of that to which we stand pledged.
The Balance of Power has gone the way of other rickety makeshifts, but
there must be no makeshift in our dealings with the Turk, no compromise
and no delay. What shall be done with those who planned and executed the
greatest massacres known to history matters little; let them be hanged
as high as Haman, and have done with them. But what does matter is that
at no future time must it be in the power of a Government that has never
been other than barbaric and butcherous, to do again as it has done
before.

NOTE ON JEMAL THE GREAT

Jemal the Great has very obligingly done what I suggested we might
expect him to do, and has kicked against the German control of the
Syrian army. General von Falkenhayn was sent to take supreme command,
and on June 28th of this year Jemal the Great refused to receive orders
from him. In consequence General von Falkenhayn refused responsibility
for any offensive movement there if Jemal remained in command.

This promised well for trouble between Turks and Germans, but we must
not, I am afraid, build very high hopes on it, for Germany has dealt
with the situation in a masterly manner. Jemal was already Minister of
Marine as well as commander of the Syrian army, so the Emperor asked him
to pay another visit to Berlin, and he has been visiting Krupp's works
and German naval yards, and we shall find probably that in the future
his activities will be marine rather than military, and that von
Falkenhayn will have a free hand in Syria.

But this will prove rather disappointing for Jemal, since it seems
beyond mere coincidence that towards the end of August Herr von
Kuhlmann, the new German Foreign Minister, induced the Turkish
Government (while Jemal was at Berlin) to put their navy and their
merchant fleet under the orders of the German Admiralty, and already
many Turkish naval officers have been replaced by Germans. Thus Jemal
will find himself deprived of his military command, because the navy so
urgently needed his guiding hand, while his guiding hand over the navy
will be itself guided by the German Admiralty.... In fact, it looks
rather like checkmate for Jemal the Great, and an end to the trouble he
might have given the German control.

On the eve of his leaving Germany, as yet unconscious probably of the
subordination of the entire Turkish fleet to the German Admiralty, he
gave an interview to a representative of the _Cologne Gazette_, which
deserves more than that ephemeral appearance. It shows Jemal the Great
in a sort of hypnotic trance induced at Potsdam. 'The German fleet,' he
says, 'is simply spotless in its power, and a model for all states which
need a modern navy--a model which cannot be surpassed.' ... He went for
a cruise in a submarine which proceeded 'so smoothly, elegantly, calmly
and securely that I had the impression of cruising in a great
steamship.' ... He was taken to Belgium, and describes the 'idyllic life
there': in the towns 'the people go for walks all day long,' and in the
country the peasants blithely gather in the harvest with the help of
happy prisoners.' (He does not tell us where the harvest goes to, any
more than the Germans tell us where the Turkish harvests go to.) He was
taken to General Headquarters, which he describes as 'majestic.' Finally
he was taken into the presence of the All-Highest, and seems to have
emerged in the condition in which Moses came down from Sinai.... But one
must not altogether despair of Jemal the Great. It is still possible
that, on his return to Constantinople, when he found that his position,
as Minister of Marine was but a clerkship in the German Admiralty, the
hypnotic trance began to pass off, and his ambitions to re-assert
themselves. He may yet give trouble to the Germans if properly handled.

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter IV_

THE QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE

It is impossible to leave this heart-rending tale of the sufferings of
the Armenian people under the Turks without some account of that devoted
band of American missionaries who, with a heroism unsurpassed, and
perhaps unequalled, so eagerly sacrificed themselves to the ravages of
pestilence and starvation in order to alleviate the horrors that
descended on the people to whom they had been sent. Often they were
forcibly driven from the care of their flocks, often in the
extermination of their flocks there was none left whom they could
shepherd, but wherever a remnant still lingered there remained these
dauntless and self-sacrificing men and women, regardless of everything
except the cause to which they had devoted themselves. They recked
nothing of the dangers to which they exposed themselves so long as
there was a child or a woman or a man whom they could feed or nurse.
Terrible as were the sufferings through which the Armenians passed, they
must have been infinitely more unbearable had it not been for these
American missionaries; small as was the remnant that escaped into the
safety of Persia or Russian Trans-Caucasia, their numbers must have been
halved had it not been for the heroism of these men and women. While the
German Consuls contented themselves with a few faint protests to their
Ambassador at Constantinople, followed by an acquiescence of silence,
the missionaries constituted themselves into a Red Cross Society of
intrepid workers, and, as one well-qualified authority tells us,
'suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaustion as any
proportionate body of workers on the European battlefields.' Fully
indeed did they live up to the mandate of the American board that sent
them out: 'Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and
duties of the Gospel.'

At the opening of the European War the American Missions had been at
work for nearly a hundred years, and were disseminated over Anatolia and
Armenia. They had opened 163 Protestant churches and 450 schools, they
established hospitals, and in every possible way spread civilisation in
a country where the spirit of the governing class was barbarism. It was
not their object to proselytise. 'Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if
he will,' so ran the instructions from which I have already quoted, 'the
Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental,' and
in the same wise and open-minded spirit they encouraged native
Protestant Churches which were independent of them and largely
self-supporting. Naturally in a country governed by monsters like Abdul
Hamid and Enver Pasha in later days, they earned the enmity which is the
tribute of barbarians to those who stand for civilisation, and when,
owing to the extermination or flight of their Armenian flocks, they were
left without a charge, and their schools were closed, we find a paean of
self-congratulation going up from the Turkish press inspired by the
butchers of Armenia. But till the massacres and the flight were
complete, they gave themselves to the 'duties of the Gospel,' and their
deeds shine like a star into the blackness of that night of murder.

I will take as an example of the superb heroism of those men and women
the diary of an American lady attached to the mission at Urmia, a
document that, anonymously, is one of the noblest, least self-conscious
records I have ever read. The period of it extends over five months.

Early in January 1915 the Russian troops were withdrawn from Urmia,
which lies on the frontier between Turkey and Persia, and simultaneously
the Moslem population began to plunder the Christian villages, the
inhabitants of which fled for refuge to the missions in the city.
Talaat's official murder-scheme was not completed yet, but the Kurds,
together with the Turks, had planned a local massacre at Geogtapa, which
was stopped by the American doctor of this mission, Dr. Packard, who, at
great personal risk, obtained an interview with the Kurdish chief, and
succeeded in inducing him to spare the lives of the Christians, if they
gave up arms and ammunition and property. The American flag was hoisted
over the Mission buildings, and before a week was out there were over
ten thousand refugees housed in the yards and rooms, where they remained
for five months, the places of the dead being taken by fresh influxes.
The dining-room, the sitting-room, the church, the school, were all
given over to these destitute people, and from the beginning fear of
massacre, as well as prevalence of disease, haunted the camp. It was
impossible to move dead bodies outside; they had to be buried in the
thronged yards, and every day children were born. But here is the spirit
that animated their protectors. 'We have just had a Praise meeting,'
records the diarist at the close of the first fortnight, 'with fifty or
sixty we could gather from the halls and rooms near, and we feel more
cheerful. We thought if Paul and Silas, with their stripes, could sing
praises in prison, so could we.'

The weeks, of which each day was a procession of hours too full of work
to leave time for anxiety, began to enrol themselves into months, and
the hope of rescue by a Russian advance made their hearts sick, so long
was it deferred. Refugees from neighbouring villages kept arriving, and
there was the constant problem before these devoted friends of their
flock, as to how to feed them. All such were welcome, and eager was the
welcome they received, though every foot of space in the buildings and
in the yards was occupied. But somehow they managed to make room for all
who came, and for those villagers who, under threat of torture and
massacre, had apostatised, there was but yearning and sorrow, but never
a word of blame or bitterness. Sometimes there was a visit of Turkish
troops to search for concealed Russians, and, as our diarist remarks,
'We can't complain of the monotony of life, for we never know what is
going to happen next. On Tuesday morning we had a wedding in my room
here. The boy and girl were simple villagers.... The wedding was fixed
for the Syrian New Year, but the Kurds came and carried off wedding
clothes and everything else in the house. They all fled here, and were
married in the old dirty garments they were wearing when they ran for