Part 3

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.

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. 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.

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.