Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The harvest has now come in, and is most abundant.

  But during all these busy and tremendous months of war Germany has not only been denuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the sake of the Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same altruistic spirit she has been vastly increasing the productiveness of her new and most important colony. The great irrigation works at Konia, begun several years ago, are in operation, and the revenues of the irrigated villages have been doubled. In fact, as the report lately issued says, ‘a new and fertile province has been formed by the aid of German energy and knowledge.’ At Adana are similar irrigation works, financed by the Deutsche Bank. Ernst Marré gives us a most hopeful survey of them, for Adana was already linked up with the Bagdad Railway in October 1916, which was to be the great artery connecting Germany with the East. There is some considerable shortage of labour there (owing in part to the Armenian massacres, to which we shall revert presently), but the financial arrangements are in excellent shape. The whole of the irrigation works are in German hands, and have been paid for by German paper; and to get the reservoirs, etc., back into her own control, it has been agreed that Turkey, already completely bankrupt, will have to pay not only what has been spent, but a handsome sum in compensation; while, as regards shortage of labour, prisoners have been released in large numbers to work without pay. This irrigation scheme at Adana will increase the cotton yield by four times the present crop, so we learn from the weekly Arab magazine, El Alem el Ismali, which tells us also of the electric-power stations erected there.

  The same paper (October 1916) announces to the Anatolian merchants that transport is now easy, owing to the arrival of engines and trucks from Germany, while Die Zeit (February 1917) prophesies a prosperous future for this Germano-Turkish cotton combine. Hitherto Turkey has largely imported cotton from England; now Turkey — thanks to German capital on terms above stated — will, in the process of internal development so unselfishly devised for her by Germany, grow cotton for herself, and be kind enough to give a preferential tariff to Germany.

  A similarly bright future may be predicted for the sugar-beet industry at Konia, where are the irrigation works already referred to. Artesian wells have been sunk, and there is the suggestion to introduce Bulgarian labour in default of Turkish. As we have seen, Hungary attempted to obtain a monopoly with regard to sugar, but Germany has been victorious on this point (as on every other where she competes with Hungary), and has obtained the concession for a period of thirty years. She reaped the first-fruits this last spring (1917), when, on a single occasion, 350 trucks laden with sugar were despatched to Berlin. A similar irrigation scheme is bringing into cultivation the Makischelin Valley, near Aleppo, and Herr Wied has been appointed as expert for irrigation plant in Syria. There has been considerable shortage of coal, but now more is arriving from the Black Sea, and the new coal-fields at Rodosto will soon be giving an output.

  Indeed, it would be easier to enumerate the industries and economical developments of Turkey over which Germany has not at the present moment got the control than those over which she has. In particular she has shown a parental interest in Turkish educational questions. She established last year, under German management, a school for the study of German in Constantinople; she has put under the protection of the German Government the Jewish institution at Haifa for technical education in Palestine; from Sivas a mission of schoolmasters has been sent to Germany for the study of German methods. Ernst Marré surmises that German will doubtless become compulsory even in the Turkish intermediate (secondary) schools. In April 1917, the first stone of the ‘House of Friendship’ was laid at Constantinople, the object of which institution is to create among Turkish students an interest in everything German, while earlier in the year arrangements were made for 10,000 Turkish youths to go to Germany to be taught trades. These I imagine were unfit for military service. With regard to such a scheme Halil Haled Bey praises the arrangement for the education of Turks in Germany. When they used to go to France, he tells us, ‘they lost their religion’ (certainly Prussian Got is nearer akin to Turkish Allah) ‘and returned home unpatriotic and useless. In Germany they will have access to suitable religious literature’ (Gott!) ‘and must adopt all they see good in German methods without losing their original characteristics.’ Comment on this script is needless. The hand is the hand of Halil Haled Bey, but the voice is the voice of Potsdam. Occasionally, but rarely, Austrian competition is seen. Professor Schmoller, in an Austrian quarterly review, shows jealousy of German influence, and we find, in October 1916, an Ottoman-Austrian college started at Vienna for 250 pupils of the Ottoman Empire. But Germany has 10,000 in Berlin. At Adana (where are the German irrigation works) the German-Turkish Society has opened a German school of 300, while, reciprocally, courses in Turkish have been organised at Berlin for the sake of future German colonists. In Constantinople the Tanin announces a course of lectures to be held by the Turco-German Friendship Society. Professor von Marx discoursed last April on foreign influence and the development of nations, with special reference to Turkey and the parallel case of Germany. A few months later we find Hilmet Nazim Bey, official head of the Turkish press, proceeding to Berlin to learn German press methods. A number of editors of Turkish papers will follow him, and soon, no doubt, the Turkish press will rival Cologne and Frankfort.

  So much for German education, but her penetrative power extends into every branch of industry and economics. In November 1916, a Munich expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic society was started in Constantinople on German lines with German instructors. Inoculation against small-pox, typhoid, and cholera was made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have Germans as their acting Ministers. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase. Germany owns the Anatolian railway concession (originally British), with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession, with preferential rights over minerals; they have bought the Mersina-Adana Railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad Railway; they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba Railway, built with French capital. They have secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour concession, thereby controlling and handling all merchandise arriving at railhead from the interior of Asia Minor.[] Already on the Bagdad Railway the big tunnels of Taurus and Amanus are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be complete. Meanwhile railway construction is pushed on in all directions under German control, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (August 1916) allocated a large sum of German paper money for the construction of ordinary roads, military roads, local government roads, all of which are new to Turkey, but which will be useful for the complete German occupation which is being swiftly consolidated. To stop the mouths of the people, all political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior, for Prussia does not care for criticism. To supply German ammunition needs, lead and zinc have been taken from the roofs of mosques and door-handles from mosque-gates, and the iron railings along the Champs de Mars at Pera have been carted away for the manufacture of bombs. Not long after eight truck-loads of copper were sent to Germany: these, I imagine, represent the first produce of copper roofs and utensils. A Turco-German convention signed in Berlin in January of this year, permits subjects of one country to settle in the other while retaining their nationality and enjoying trading and other privileges. In Lebanon Dr. König has opened an agricultural school for Syrians of all religions. In the Homs district the threatening plague of locusts in February 1917 was combatted by Germans; and a German expert, Dr. Bucher, had been already sent to superintend the whole question. For this concerns supplies to Germany, as does also the ordinance passed in the same month that two-thirds of all fish caught in the Lebanon district should be given to the military authorities (these are German), and that every fish weighing
over six ounces in the Beirut district should be Korban also. The copper mines at Arghana Maden, near Diarbekr, are busy exporting their produce into Germany; the coal-mines at Rodosto will very soon be making a large output.[]

  The balance-sheets for 1916 of certain of those railways in which the Deutsche Bank has an interest have come to hand. They show a very disagreeable degree of prosperity. The Anatolia Railway Company has large profits with a gross revenue of 25,737,995 marks. The profit on the Haidar-Pasha-Angora Line has risen from 42,566 francs per kilometre to 45,552. The Mersina-Tarsus-Adana Railway has paid 6 per cent. on its preference shares, and 3 per cent. on its ordinary shares. The Haidar Pasha Harbour Company has paid 8 per cent.

  Later in this year we find three trains daily leaving Constantinople for Germany, laden with coal and military supplies.

  There is no end to this penetration: German water-seekers, with divining and boring apparatus, accompanied the Turkish expedition into Sinai; Russian prisoners were sent by Germany for agricultural work in Asia Minor, to take the place of slaughtered Armenians; a German-Turkish treaty, signed January 11, 1917, gives the whole reorganisations of the economic system to a special German mission. A Stuttgart journal chants a characteristic Lobgesang over this feat. ‘That is how,’ it proudly exclaims, ‘we work for the liberation of peoples and nationalities.’

  In the same noble spirit, we must suppose, German legal reforms were introduced in December 1916, to replace the Turkish Shuriat, and in the same month all the Turks in telegraph offices in Constantinople were replaced by Germans. Ernst Marré gives valuable advice to young Germans settling in Turkey. He particularly recommends them, knowing how religion is one of the strongest bonds in this murderous race, to ‘trade in articles of devotion, in rosaries, in bags to hold the Koran,’ and points out what good business might be built up in gramophones. Earlier in this year we find a ‘German Oriental Trading Company’ founded for the import of fibrous materials for needs of military authorities, and a great carpet business established at Urfa with German machinery that will supplant the looms of Smyrna. A saltpetre factory is established at Konia by Herr Toepfer, whose enterprise is rewarded with an Iron Cross and a Turkish decoration. The afforestation near Constantinople, ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture, is put into German hands, and in the vilayet of Aidin (April 1916) ninety concessions were granted to German capitalists to undertake the exploitation of metallic ores. Occasionally the German octopus finds it has gone too far for the moment, and releases some struggling limb of its victim, as, for instance, when we see that, in September 1916, the German Director’s stamp for the ‘Imperial German Great Radio Station’ at Damascus has been discarded temporarily, as that station ‘should be treated for the present as a Turkish concern.’

  A ‘Trading and Weaving Company’ was established at Angora in 1916, an ‘Import and Export Company’ at Smyrna, a ‘Trading and Industrial Society’ at Beirut, a ‘Tobacco Trading Company’ at Latakieh, an ‘Agricultural Company’ at Tripoli, a ‘Corn Exporting Company’ in Lebanon, a ‘Rebuilding Commission’ (perhaps for sacked Armenian houses) at Konia. More curious yet will be a Tourist’s Guide Book — a Baedeker, in fact — for travellers in Anatolia, and the erection of a monument in honour of Turkish women who have replaced men called up for military duty. Truly these last two items — a guide-book for Anatolia, and a monument to women — are strange enterprises for Turks. A new Prussian day is dawning, it seems, for Turkish women as well, for the Tanin (April 1917) tells us that diplomas are to be conferred on ladies who have completed their studies in the Technical School at Constantinople.

  It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none round which it has not cast its feelers — no Semitic moneylender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military, educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold. Turkey’s life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, who, among all the Great Powers of Europe, invested their time and their money in the achievement of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Silently and skilfully they worked, bamboozling their chief tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha bamboozled us. As long as he was of service to them they retained him; for his peace of mind at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in Constantinople because so many threatening letters were sent him. But now Enver Pasha seems to have had his day; he became a little autocratic, and thought that he was the head of the Pan-Turkish ideal. So he was, but the Pan-Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and he had not noticed the transformation. Talaat Bey has taken his place; it was he who, in May 1917, was received by the Emperor William, by King Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, and he who was the mouthpiece of the German efforts to make a separate peace with Russia. Under Czardom, he proclaimed, the existence of Turkey was threatened, but now the revolution has made friendship possible, for Russia no longer desires territorial annexation. And, oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia’s friend! Enver Pasha has of late been somewhat out of favour in Berlin, and I cannot but think it curious that when, on April 2, 1917, he visited the submarine base at Wilhelmshaven, he was very nearly killed in a motor accident. But it may have been an accident. Since then I cannot find that he has taken any more active part in Pan-Turkish ideals than to open a soup-kitchen in some provincial town, and lecture the Central Committee of the Young Turks on the subject of internal affairs in Great Britain. I do not like lectures, but I should have liked to hear that one.

  I have left to the end of this chapter the question of Germany’s knowledge of, and complicity in the Armenian massacres. From the tribune of the Reichstag, on January 15, 1916, there was made a definite denial of the existence of such massacres at all; on another subsequent occasion it was stated that Germany could not interfere in Turkish internal affairs.

  In view of the fact that there is no internal affair appertaining to Turkey in which Germany has not interfered, the second of these statements may be called insincere. But the denial of the massacres is a deliberate lie. Germany — official Germany — knew all about them, and she permitted them to go on. A few proofs of this are here shortly stated.

  (1) In September 1915, four months before the denial of the massacres was made in the Reichstag, Dr. Martin Niepage, higher grade teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, prepared and sent, as we have seen, in his name, and that of several of his colleagues, a report of the massacres to the German Embassy at Constantinople. In that report he gives a terrible account of what he has seen with his own eyes, and also states that the country Turks’ explanation with regard to the origin of these measures is that it was ‘the teaching of the Germans.’ The German Embassy at Constantinople therefore knew of the massacres, and knew also that the Turks attributed them to orders from Germany. Dr. Niepage also consulted, before sending his report, with the German Consul at Aleppo, Herr Hoffman, who told him that the German Embassy had been already advised in detail about the massacres from the consulates at Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Mosul, but that he welcomed a further protest on the subject.