Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  (2) These reports, or others like them, had not gone astray, for in August 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Wangenheim, made a formal protest to the Turkish Government about the massacres.

  There is, then, no doubt that the German Government, when it officially denied the massacres, was perfectly cognisant of them. It was also perfectly capable of stopping them, for they were not local violences, but wholesale murders organised at Constantinople. In support of this view I find an independent witness stating that ‘there is no Turk of standing who will not readily declare that it would have been perfectly possible for Germany to have vetoed the massacres had she chosen.’ Germany had indeed already given assurances that such massacres should not occur. She had assured the Armenian Katholikos at Adana that so long as Germany has any influence in Turkey he need not fear a repetition of the horrors that had taken place under Abdul Hamid. Had she, then, no influence in Constantinople, or how was it that she had obtained complete control over all Turkish branches of government? The same assurance was given by the German Ambassador in April 1915, to the Armenian Patriarch and the President of the Armenian National Council.

  So, in support of the Pan-Turkish ideal, and in the name of the Turkish Allah, the God of Love, Germany stood by and let the infamous tale of lust and rapine and murder be told to its end. The Turks had planned to exterminate the whole Armenian race except some half-million, who would be deported penniless to work on agricultural developments under German rule, but this quality of Turkish mercy was too strained for Major Pohl, who proclaimed that it was a mistake to spare so many. But he was a soldier, and did not duly weigh the claims of agriculture.

  The choice was open to Germany; Germany chose, and let the Armenian massacres go on. But she was in a difficulty. What if the Turkish Government retorted (perhaps it did so retort), ‘You are not consistent. Why do you mind about the slaughter of a few Armenians? What about Belgium and your atrocities there?’

  And all the ingenuity of the Wilhelmstrasse would not be able to find an answer to that.

  I do not say that Germany wanted the massacres, for she did not. She wanted more agricultural labour, and I think that, if only for that reason, she deprecated them. But she allowed them to go on when it was in her power to stop them, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash clean her hand from that stinking horror.

  Here, then, are some of the problems which those who, at the end of the war, will have to deal with the problem of Turkey must tackle. It is just as well to recognise that at the present moment Turkey is virtually and actually a German colony, and the most valuable colony that Germany has ever had. It will not be enough to limit, or rather abolish, the supremacy of Turkey over aliens and martyrised peoples; it will be necessary first to abolish the supremacy of Germany over Turkey. To do this the victory of our Allied Nations must be complete, and Germany’s octopus envelopment of Turkish industries severed. Otherwise we shall immediately be confronted with a Germany that already reaches as far as Mesopotamia. That is done now; and that, before there can come any permanent peace for Europe, must be undone. Nothing less than the complete release of that sucker and tentacle embrace will suffice.

  NOTE

  As throwing a sidelight on the German complicity in the Armenian massacres, the following is of interest. It is known that when Metternich succeeded Wangenheim as German Ambassador in Constantinople, he brought with him a speech, written in Berlin, which, by the Kaiser’s orders, he was to read when presenting his credentials to the Sultan. This contained a sentence which implied that Germany had been unable to stop the Armenian massacres. Talaat refused to allow the speech to be read, obviously because it threw the responsibility of the massacres on to the Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was that they took place with the connivance and even at the instigation of the Germans. Eventually a compromise was arrived at, and the speech in toto was read privately, the part referring to the Armenian massacre not being published.... It is a pity that Germany is always found out....

  CHAPTER VI: ‘THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED’

  Let us commit the crime of lèse-majesté, and assume (though the Emperor Wilhelm II. has repeatedly announced the contrary) that Germany is not at the conclusion of the European War to find herself in possession of the world. She has prepared her plans in anticipation of the auspicious event; in fact she has had a most interesting map of Europe produced which, except by its general shape, is scarcely recognisable. The printing of it, it is true, was a little premature, for it shows what Europe was to have been like in 1916, and the apportionments are not borne out by facts. But assuming that there is some radical error about it all from her point of view, and assuming that there will not be either a conclusive peace favourable to Prussian interests, or even an inconclusive peace, but one in which the Allies will be able to dictate and enforce their own terms, the magnitude of the problems that will await their decision may well appal the most ingenious of their statesmen. And of all those problems none, it is safe to prophesy, will be found more difficult of solution than that which will deal with the future of the corrupt and barbarous Government which has for centuries made hell of the Ottoman Empire. We know more or less what will happen to Alsace and Lorraine, to Belgium, to the Trentino, because in those cases the claims of one or other of our Allies to demand a particular settlement are quite certain to be agreed to by those not so immediately and vitally concerned. But in the Balkans these problems will be more complicated because of conflicting interests, and most complicated of all will they be in Turkey. One thing, however, is certain, that there can be no going back to the conditions that existed there before the war.

  Ever since the Osmanlis came out of remoter Asia into the Nearer East and into Europe, the government of their Empire has gone from bad to worse. In the early days, as we have seen, their policy was to absorb the strength of their subject peoples by incorporating the youth of them into the Turkish army, by giving them Turkish wives, and by converting them to Mohammedanism. Such was the foundation of the Empire and such its growth. But having absorbed their strength, the Sultan’s Government neglected them until they milked them again. They were allowed to prosper if they could: all that was demanded of them was a toll of their strength. They were cattle, and for the right to graze on Turkish lands they paid back a pail of their milk of manhood. But an empire founded on such principles contains within it active and prolific seeds of decay, and, as we have seen, more stringent measures had to be resorted to in order to preserve the supremacy of the ruling people. Instead of absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. And the policy set on foot by him was developed but a few years ago into a scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity has far surpassed the killings of Attila, of whom the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs of the deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, with the exception of such part of it as has escaped into Russian territory, has been exterminated, and similar measures have been planned and indeed begun, against the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Jews.

  In consequence of this, in consequence also of the European War, the policy of the Balance of Power as regards Turkey has been at length abandoned. The Allies have definitely declared in their joint note to President Wilson their aims in the war, and for those they have pledged themselves to fight until final and complete victory wreathes their arms. Among these aims are: —

  (1) The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks.

  (2) The expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilisation.

  For a century that most inharmonious of orchestras called the Concert of Europe has, owing to the exigencies of the Balance of Power, kept Turkey together, and in particular has maintained the centre of its government at Constantinople simply because the Balance of Power would be upset if anybody else held the key of the straits that separate Russia from the Medite
rranean. England, above all others, was instrumental in preserving that precarious Balance, and England now must confess the utter failure of her policy there throughout a century. It is humiliating to acknowledge the complete collapse of that which for so many decades has been the keystone of our ruling with regard to our Eastern Empire, but the arch has collapsed; Germany pulled the keystone out, and all our efforts to exclude Russia from free access to the Mediterranean have only resulted in letting Germany in. To-day she holds Constantinople, and the bitter pill must be swallowed. The situation, as it stands at this moment, is infinitely worse than it could have been for a century back, if at any moment during those hundred years we had done what we always ought to have done, and declared that the anachronism of Turkey being in Europe was more intolerable than anything that could happen in consequence of her expulsion. But we have acknowledged that now. We have also acknowledged the even greater anachronism of Turkey being allowed to dispose of the destinies of any of those peoples who inhabit the territories of the Ottoman Empire, for the Allies, in their joint Note, have declared that the remedy of these two monstrous abuses forms an essential part of their aim in the war, which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years. And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople and the subject peoples of the Turks will have passed from the yoke of that murderous tyranny for ever.

  We will take these two avowed aims of the Allies in order, and first try to draw (though with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will be the confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we pluck the fruits of the great crusade against the barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is quite useless to attempt to keep the map as it was, and peg out claims within the Empire where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks and Armenians shall live in peace, for it is exactly that plan which has formed a century’s failure. At the International Congress of Berlin, for instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the Armenian vilayets. She carried out her promise by slaughtering every Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them. The soi-disant protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations, which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of covenants with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to repeat such outrages: the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, ipso facto, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of whom such a province is placed.

  The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at first appear. We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view. Even the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity of similar adjustments made by the Concert of Europe during the last hundred years. The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and finally abolishing that: they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity, they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began, and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or other of the allied nations. In most cases we shall find that there is a protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and independent provinces.

  The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it. If the reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a million. In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were largely instrumental in butchering them. Their lands have been appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.

  Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The robber-tenants must be evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated. Without exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the pursuing Turks and Kurds. Naturally, this remnant of a people will not nearly suffice to fill their entire province, but in order to satisfy the claims of justice at all adequately, the whole district of Armenia, as Armenia was known before its people were exterminated, must be amputated by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Empire and placed, in an autonomous condition in a new protected province, which will include all the vilayets of Armenia.

  There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done, and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their aims in the war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries of fiendish oppression. With facilities given them for their re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will, beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds. As a nation they are, as we have seen, partly agricultural in their pursuits; but a considerable proportion of them (and these the more intelligent) are men of business, merchants, doctors, educationalists, and gravitate to towns. Constantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them again, where lately they numbered nearly as many as the entire remnant of their nation numbers now; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia in the New Turkey which we are attempting to sketch. They will probably not care to settle in the towns and districts that will remain in the hands of their late oppressors and murderers.

  In the work of their repatriation none will be more eager to help than the American missionaries, who, at the time of the last massacre, as so often before, showed themselves so nobly disregardant of all personal danger and risk in doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and who have explicitly declared their intention of resuming their work. With regard to the eviction of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be remembered that the Kurd is a trespasser on the plains and towns of Armenia, and properly belongs to the mountains from which he was encouraged to descend by the Turks for purposes of massacre. Out of those towns and plains he must go, either into the mountains of Armenia from whence he came, or over the frontier of Armenia into the New Turkey presently to be defined. He must, in fact, be deported, though not in the manner of the deportations at which he himself so often assisted.

  The Armenians who will thus be reinstated within the boundaries of their own territory, will be practically penniless
and without any of the means or paraphernalia of life, and the necessary outlay on supplies for them, and the cost of their rehabilitation would naturally fall on the protecting Power. They will, however, be free from the taxes they have hitherto paid to the Turks, and it should not be difficult for them by means of taxes far less oppressive, to pay an adequate interest on the moneys expended on them. These would thus take the form of a very small loan, the whole of which could easily be repaid by the Armenians in the course of a generation or so. Once back on their own soil, and free from Turkish tyranny and the possibility of it, they are bound to prosper, even as they have prospered hitherto in spite of oppressions and massacres up till the year 1915, when, as we have seen, the liberal and progressive Nationalists organised and executed the extermination from which so few escaped.

  It is hardly necessary to point out who the protecting Power would be in the case of the repatriated Armenians, for none but Russia is either desirable or possible. With one side along the Russian frontier of Trans-Caucasia, the New Armenia necessarily falls into the sphere of Russian influence.

  It has been suggested that not only Armenia proper, but part of Cilicia should also become a district of the repatriated Armenians, with an outlet to the sea. But while it is true that complete compensation would demand this, since Zeitun and other districts in Cilicia were almost pure Armenian settlements, I cannot think that such a restoration is desirable. For, in the first place, the extermination of the Zeitunlis (as carried out by Jemal the Great) was practically complete. All the men were slaughtered, and it does not seem likely that any of the women and girls who were deported reached the ‘agricultural colony’ of Deir-el-Zor in the Arabian desert. It is therefore difficult to see of whom the repatriation would consist. In the second place, the New Armenia will be for several generations to come of an area more than ample for all the Armenians who have survived the flight into Russia, and it obviously will give them the best chance of corporate prosperity, if the whole of them are repatriated in a compact body rather than that a portion of them should be formed into a mere patch severed from their countrymen by so large a distance. Another sphere of influence also will be operating near the borders of Cilicia, and to place the Armenians under two protecting Powers would have serious disadvantages. In addition they never were a sea-going people, and I cannot see what object would be served by giving them a coast-board. In any case, if a coast-board was found necessary, the most convenient would be the coast-board of the Black Sea, lying adjacent to their main territory.