Soon after this interview Sa•d Halim ceased to be Minister for Foreign Affairs; his successor was Halil Bey, who for several years had been Speaker of the Turkish Parliament. Halil was a very different type of man. He was much more tactful, much more intelligent, and much more influential in Turkish affairs. He was also a smooth and oily conversationalist, good natured and fat, and by no means so lost to all decent sentiments as most Turkish politicians of the time. It was generally reported that Halil did not approve the Armenian proceedings, yet his official position compelled him to accept them and even, as I now discovered, to defend them. Soon after obtaining his Cabinet post, Halil called upon me and made a somewhat rambling explanation of the Armenian atrocities. I had already had experiences with several official attitudes toward the persecutions; Talaat had been bloodthirsty and ferocious, Enver subtly calculating, while the Grand Vizier had been testy. Halil now regarded the elimination of this race with the utmost good humour. Not a single aspect of the proceeding, not even the unkindest things I could say concerning it, disturbed his equanimity in the least. He began by admitting that nothing could palliate these massacres, but, he added that, in order to understand them, there were certain facts that I should keep in mind.
"I agree that the Government has made serious mistakes in the treatment of the Armenians," said Halil, "but the harm has already been done. What can we do about it now? Still, if there are any errors we can correct, we should correct them. I deplore as much as you the excesses and violations which– have been committed. I wish to present to you the view of the Sublime Porte; I admit that this is no justification, but I think there are extenuating circumstances that you should take into consideration before judgment is passed upon the Ottoman Government."
And then, like all the others, he went back to the happenings at Van, the desire of the Armenians for independence, and the help which they had given the Russians. I had heard it all many times before.
"I told Vartkes" (an Armenian deputy who, like many other Armenian leaders, was afterward murdered), "that, if his people really aspired to an independent existence, they should wait for a propitious moment. Perhaps the Russians might defeat the Turkish troops and occupy all the Armenian provinces. Then I could understand that the Armenians might want to set up for themselves. Why not wait, I told Vartkes, until such a fortunate time had arrived? I warned him that we would not let the Armenians jump on our backs, and that, if they did engage in hostile acts against our troops, we would dispose of all Armenians who were in the rear of our army, and that our method would be to send them to a safe distance in the south. Enver, as you know, gave a similar warning to the Armenian Patriarch. But in spite of these friendly warnings, they started a revolution."
I asked about methods of relief, and told him that already twenty thousand pounds ($100,000) had reached me from America.
"It is the business of the Ottoman Government,"' he blandly answered, "to see that these people are settled, housed, and fed until they can support themselves. The Government will naturally do its duty! Besides, the twenty thousand pounds that you have is in reality nothing at all."
"That is true," I answered, "it is only a beginning, but I am sure that I can get all the money we need."
"It is the opinion of Enver Pasha," he replied, "that no foreigners should help the Armenians. I do not say that his reasons are right or wrong. I merely give them to you as they are. Enver says that the Armenians are idealists, and that the moment foreigners approach and help them, they will be encouraged in their national aspirations. He is utterly determined to cut forever all relations between the Armenians and foreigners."
"Is this Enver's way of stopping any further action on their part? " I asked.
Halil smiled most good-naturedly at this somewhat pointed question and answered: "The Armenians have no further means of action whatever!
Since not far from 500,000 Armenians had been killed by this time, Halil's genial retort certainly had one virtue which most of his other statements in this interview had lacked-it was the truth.
"How many Armenians in the southern provinces are in need of help?" I asked.
"I do not know; I would not give you even an approximate figure."
"Are there several hundred thousand?"
"I should think so," Halil admitted, "but I cannot say how many hundred thousand."
"A great many suffered," he added, "simply because Enver could not spare troops to defend them. Some regular troops did accompany them and these behaved very well; forty even lost their lives defending the Armenians. But we had to withdraw most of the gendarmes for service in the army and put in a new lot to accompany the Armenians. It is true that these gendarmes committed many deplorable excesses.
"A great many Turks do not approve these measures," I said.
"I do not deny it," replied the ever-accommodating Halil, as he bowed himself out.
Enver, Halil, and the rest were ever insistent on the point which they constantly raised, that no foreigners should furnish relief to the Armenians. A few days after this visit the Under-Secretary of State called at the American Embassy. He came to deliver to me a message from Djemal to Enver. Djemal, who then had jurisdiction over the Christians in Syria, was much annoyed at the interest which the American consuls were displaying in the Armenians. He now asked me to order these officials "to stop busying themselves in Armenian affairs." Djemal could not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, this messenger said, and so he had to punish them all! Some time afterward Halil complained to me that the American consuls were sending facts about the Armenians to America and that the Government insisted that they should be stopped.
As a matter of fact, I was myself sending most of this information, –and I did not stop. CHAPTER XXVII
"I SHALL DO NOTHING FOR THE ARMENIANS" SAYS THE GERMAN AMBASSADOR
Suppose that there is no phase of the Armenian question which has aroused more interest than this: Had the Germans any part in it? To what extent was the Kaiser responsible for the wholesale slaughter of this nation? Did the Germans favour it, did they merely acquiesce, or did they oppose the persecutions? Germany, in the last four years, has become responsible for many of the blackest pages in history; is she responsible for this, unquestionably the blackest of all?
I presume most people will detect in the remarks of these Turkish chieftains certain resemblances to the German philosophy of war. Let me repeat particular phrases used by Enver and other Turks while discussing the Armenian massacres: "The Armenians have brought this fate upon themselves." "They had a fair warning of what would happen to them." "We were fighting for our national existence … .. We were justified, in resorting to any means that would accomplish these ends." "We have no time to separate the innocent from the guilty." "The only thing we have on our mind is to win the war."
These phrases somehow have a familiar ring, do they not? Indeed, I might rewrite all these interviews with Enver, use the word Belgium in place of Armenia, put the words in a German general's mouth instead of Enver's, and we should have almost a complete exposition of the German attitude toward subject peoples. But the teachings of the Prussians go deeper than this. There was one feature about the Armenian proceedings that was new-that was not Turkish at all . For centuries the Turks have ill-treated their Armenians and all their other subject peoples with inconceivable barbarity. Yet their methods have always been crude, clumsy, and unscientific. They excelled in beating out an Armenian's brains with a club, and this unpleasant illustration is a perfect indication of the rough and primitive methods which they applied to the Armenian problem. They have understood the uses of murder, but not of murder as a fine art. But the Armenian proceedings of 1915 and 1916 evidenced an entirely new mentality. This new conception was that of deportation . The Turks, in five hundred years, had invented innumerable ways of physically torturing their Christian subjects, yet never before had it occurred to their minds to move them bodily from their homes, where they had lived for many thousands of
years, and send them hundreds of miles away into the desert. Where did the Turks get this idea? I have already described how, in 1914, just before the European War, the Government moved not far from 100,000 Greeks from their age-long homes along the Asiatic littoral to certain islands in the Aegean. I have also said that Admiral Usedom, one of the big German naval experts in Turkey, told me that the Germans had suggested this deportation to the Turks. But the all-important point is that this idea of deporting peoples en masse is, in modern times, exclusively Germanic. Any one who reads the literature of Pan-Germany constantly meets it. These enthusiasts for a German world have deliberately planned, as part of their programme, the ousting of the French from certain parts of France, of Belgians from Belgium, of Poles from Poland, of Slavs from Russia, and other indigenous peoples from the territories which they have inhabited for thousands of years, and the establishment in the vacated lands of solid, honest Germans. But it is hardly necessary to show that the Germans have advocated this as a state policy; they have actually been doing it in the last four years. They have moved we do not know how many thousands of Belgians and French from their native land. Austria-Hungary has killed a large part of the Serbian population and moved thousands of Serbian children into her own territories intending to bring them up as loyal subjects of the empire. To what degree this movement of populations has taken place we shall not know until the end of the war, but it has certainly gone on extensively.
Certain German writers have even advocated the application of this policy to the Armenians. According to the Paris Temps , Paul Rohrbach "in a conference held at Berlin, some time ago, recommended that Armenia should be evacuated of the Armenians. They should be dispersed in the direction of Mesopotamia and their places should be taken by Turks, in such a fashion that Armenia should be freed of all Russian influence and that Mesopotamia might be provided with farmers which it now lacked." The purpose of all this was evident enough. Germany was building the Bagdad railroad across the Mesopotamian desert. This was an essential detail in the achievement of the great new German Empire, extending from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf. But this railroad could never succeed unless there should develop a thrifty and industrious population to feed it. The lazy Turk would never become such a colonist. But the Armenian was made of just the kind of stuff which this enterprise needed. It was entirely in accordance with the German conception of statesmanship to seize these people in the lands where they had lived for ages and transport them violently to this dreary, hot desert. The mere fact that they had always lived in a temperate climate would furnish no impediment in Pan-German eyes. I found that Germany had been sowing those ideas broadcast for several years; I even found that German savants had been lecturing on this subject in the East. "I remember attending a lecture by a well-known German professor," an Armenian tells me. "His main point was that throughout their history the Turks had made a great mistake in being too merciful toward the non-Turkish population. The only way to insure the prosperity of the empire, according to this speaker, was to act without any sentimentality toward all the subject nationalities and races in Turkey who did not fall in with the plans of the Turks."
The Pan-Germanists are on record in the matter of Armenia. I shall content myself with quoting the words of the author of "Mittel-Europa," Friedrich Naumann, perhaps the ablest propagator of Pan-German ideas. In his work on Asia, Naumann, who started life as a Christian clergyman, deals in considerable detail with the Armenian massacres of 1895-96. 1 need only quote a few passages to show the attitude of German state policy on such infamies: "If we should take into consideration merely the violent massacre of from 80,000 to 100,000 Armenians," writes Naumann, "we can come to but one opinion-we must absolutely condemn with all anger and vehemence both the assassins and their instigators. They have perpetrated the most abominable massacres upon masses of people, more numerous and worse than those inflicted by Charlemagne on the Saxons. The tortures which Lepsius has described surpass anything we have ever known. "What then prohibits us from falling upon the Turk and saying to him: 'Get thee gone, wretch!'? Only one thing prohibits us, for the Turk answers: 'I, too, I fight for my existence!'-and indeed, we believe him. We believe, despite the indignation which the bloody Mohammedan barbarism arouses in us, that the Turks are defending themselves legitimately, and before anything else we see in the Armenian question and Armenian massacres a matter of internal Turkish policy, merely an episode of the agony through which a great empire is passing, which does not propose to let itself die without making a last attempt to save itself by bloodshed. All the great powers, excepting Germany, have adopted a policy which aims to upset the actual state of affairs in Turkey. In accordance with this, they demand for the subject peoples of Turkey the rights of man, or of humanity, or of civilization, or of political liberty-in a word, something that will make them the equals of the Turks. But just as little as the ancient Roman despotic state could tolerate the Nazarene's religion, just as little can the Turkish Empire, which is really the political successor of the eastern Roman Empire, tolerate any representation of western free Christianity among its subjects. The danger for Turkey in the Armenian question is one of extinction. For this reason she resorts to an act of a barbarous Asiatic state; she has destroyed the Armenians to such an extent that they will not be able to manifest themselves as a political force for a considerable period. A horrible act, certainly, an act of political despair, shameful in its details, but still a piece of political history, in the Asiatic manner. . . . In spite of the displeasure which the German Christian feels at these accomplished facts, he has nothing to do except quietly to heal the wounds so far as he can, and then to let matters take their course. For a long time our policy in the Orient has been determined: we belong to the group that protects Turkey, that is the fact by which we must regulate our conduct. . . . We do not prohibit any zealous Christian from caring for the victims of these horrible crimes, from bringing up the children and nursing the adults. May God bless these good acts like all other acts of faith. Only we must take care that deeds of charity do not take the form of political acts which are likely to thwart our German policy. The internationalist, he who belongs to the English school of thought, may march with, the Armenians. The nationalist, he who does not intend to sacrifice the future of Germany to England, must, on questions of external policy, follow the path marked out by Bismarck, even if it is merciless in its sentiments. . . . National policy: that is the profound moral reason why we must, as statesmen, show ourselves indifferent to the sufferings of the Christian peoples of Turkey, however painful that may be to our human feelings. . . . That is our duty, which we must recognize and confess before God and before man. If for this reason we now maintain the existence of the Turkish state, we do it in our own self-interest, because what we have in mind is our great future. . . . On one side lie our duties as a nation, on the other our duties as men. There are times, when, in a conflict of duties, we can choose a middle ground. That is all right from a human standpoint, but rarely right in a moral sense. In this instance, as in all analogous situations, we must clearly know on which side lies the greatest and most important moral duty. Once we have made such a choice we must not hesitate. William II has chosen. He has become the friend of the Sultan, because he is thinking of a greater, independent Germany."
Fig. 52. VIEW OF URFA. One of the largest towns in Asia Minor
Fig. 53. A RELIC OF THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES AT ERZINGAN. Such mementos are found all over Armenia
Such was the German state philosophy as applied to the Armenians, and I had the opportunity of observing German practice as well. As soon as the early reports reached Constantinople, it occurred to me that the most feasible way of stopping the outrages would be for the diplomatic representatives of all countries to make a joint appeal to the Ottoman Government. I approached Wangenheim on this subject in the latter part of March. His antipathy to the Armenians became immediately apparent. He began denouncing them in unmeasured terms; like Talaat and Enver, he affected to r
egard the Van episode as an unprovoked rebellion, and, in his eyes, as in theirs, the Armenians were simply traitorous vermin.
"I will help the Zionists," he said, thinking that this remark would be personally pleasing to me, "but I shall do nothing whatever for the Armenians."
Wangenheim pretended to regard the Armenian question as a matter that chiefly affected the United States. My constant intercession in their behalf apparently created the impression, in his Germanic mind, that any mercy shown this people would be a concession to the American Government. And at that moment he was not disposed to do anything that would please the American people.
"The United States is apparently the only country that takes much interest in the Armenians," he said. "Your missionaries are their friends and your people have constituted themselves their guardians. The whole question of helping them is therefore an American matter. How, then, can you expect me to do anything as long as the United States is selling ammunition to the enemies of Germany? Mr. Bryan has just published his note, saying that it would be unneutral not to sell munitions to England and France. As long as your government maintains that attitude we can do nothing for the Armenians."
Probably no one except a German logician would ever have detected any relation between our sale of war materials to the Allies and Turkey's attacks upon hundreds of thousands of Armenian women and children. But that was about as much progress as I made with Wangenheim at that time. I spoke to him frequently, but he invariably offset my pleas for mercy to the Armenians by references to the use of American shells at the Dardanelles. A coolness sprang up between us soon afterward, the result of my refusal to give him "credit" for having stopped the deportation of French and British civilians to the Gallipoli peninsula. After our somewhat tart conversation over the telephone, when he had asked me to telegraph Washington that he had not hetzed the Turks in this matter, our visits to each other ceased for several weeks.
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story Page 31
