TURKEY IN TRAVAIL The Birth of a New Nation 1925 By HAROLD ARMSTRONG (Lately Assistant and Acting Military Attache to the High Commissioner, Constantinople ; Special Service Officer in War Office and on Head-quarter Staff of Allied Army of Occupation, and Supervisor of Turkish Gendarmerie)

This is a remarkable book. As the author admits, it's not meant to be history... but as an honest accounting of personal observations from having gotten up close and personal with the Turks, there is great historical value to be derived.

Harold Armstrong appears to suffer from an identity crisis. As an official representative for His Majesty's Government, he loyally spouts the propaganda that perhaps he convinced himself was the reality, thanks to its endless propagation. He talks about how the Armenians were marked for extermination, for example, in full support of the Bryce and Toynbee directed Wellington House concoctions. Yet everything he puts on the table from his personal observations contradicts the possibility.

To demonstrate how off he is when he tries to explain the "official" history, he relies on "Pan-Turanism" as the motive for extermination. "The Armenians ... were a bar to the realization of the Pan-Turanian policy, and so with ruthless cruelty they were wiped away," he writes. It's a convenient theory, but unsupported by any evidence. There were many other ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire that were just as much a bar to "Turkification," yet they were left alone... and, as David Fromkin explained, the fact that individuals in government have dreams do not necessarily translate into actual government policy.

Another poor historical example is his claim that "Mustapha Kemal and the Bolsheviks formed an alliance and portioned out Armenia between them." We know from the testimony of Armenia's first prime minister that Russia and Turkey were not at all in such cahoots. (And, of course, in the war between Turkey and Armenia in 1920, Turkey took back only what had been Turkish land for centuries, and left the real "Armenia" alone.) In fact, when Russia threatened, Armenia turned to Turkey for help. So Armstrong can't help but be partial to Armenia, loyal to the official line of his government. He writes, as another example, "In 1878 the Treaty of Berlin decided to protect the Armenians, and was the direct cause of their massacre in 1896." No mention of the Armenian terror groups that came into being largely after 1878, and the massacres they committed that forced the Turks' hand. As Kamuran Gurun astutely wrote, "At the very least it would be fair ... to remember how many people lost their lives in rebellions or disorders in their own or other countries, and think how much right they have to use the term massacre."

While Armstrong's recanting of propagandistic "history" is not to be taken seriously, what he has eyewitnessed is another matter. As a POW, the worst of the evidence he provides for the "genocide" boils down to (1) wells filled with bodies, without knowledge of who the killers were or, for that matter, whose bodies were in the wells, (2) bodies by the roadside of Armenians unable to keep up in the marches... certainly a fact, but a jump to conclude the purpose was intentional murder, and (3) Armenian women being sold by gendarmes in bazaars. [He wasn't close to a bazaar as a POW to actually witness the last one.]

In the whole book, however, he refers to the Armenians and Greeks with disdain, not unlike practically all Western travellers who weren't out of their minds with anti-Turkish bigotry, and there isn't one Turk who treats him unfairly.

There is one fellow for whom he displays much wrath, Mazlum Bey (the commander of his POW camp), for having treated British POWs badly and sometimes criminally (yet, when Armstrong decides to put Mazlum in his place, Mazlum hardly goes for Armstrong's throat. Armstrong even remains unpunished after his abortive escape attempts.) Armstrong makes sure to tell the reader Mazlum has Arabic stock.  The author isn't very keen on the Arabs, after having witnessed their bad behavior too many times.

If he eyewitnesses massacres, the massacres are not perpetrated by the Turks. In example after example, he describes how fairly, courteously and honestly the "lovable" Turks have treated him. Armstrong describes the Turks as kind and slow to be roused into anger. As a rule, the characteristic he found in the Turks was honor; one that was sorely missing in the Ottoman Christians.

He distinguishes the cruelty factor at one point as follows: "As always, the actions of the Turkish brigands were mild in comparison with the brutalities, murders and crimes of the Greeks." He gets an idea of the Orthodox mentality by recounting a conversation between the High Commissioner and M. Canelopoulos, when the latter hoped that his fellow Greeks would be murdered because he needed "a raison d’etre for advancing.” Substitute "Armenian" for "Greek," and one gets the exact same M.O.; before the war, the Armenian revolutionists would massacre Turks in hopes of getting their fellow Armenians massacred, providing the "raison d’etre" for the Europeans to step in.

This is why it seemed to me Harold Armstrong was in "denial." He dutifully preserved his nation's propagandistic line without any evidence... but the evidence he does supply directly contradicts how a people so fair and good could evilly and systematically commit the worst crime against humanity.

 

INTRO p v Poets and philosophers have thought and sung of the mutability of human affairs. In all the coloured Romance of History there is hardly a story so illustrative of this mutability, so fantastic, so dramatic, as that of Turkey during the last (8) years. The Fates allowed me to follow that story closely step by step and often in intimate relations with its chief actors and its chief events. I have written herein no chronological and exhaustive history. It is an account of personal adventure jotted down in odd times and often about odd events. But through them all runs the thread of History on which they form a strange and quaintly assorted chaplet. (In Dec. 3 1915, Armstrong was a "defence officer" at  Kut-al-Amarah, where he relates his capture.)   pp. 14-15 I stepped out of the palm-groves to look and there over the open, where for many months no one had dared to walk, came small bodies of men. They were the Turks. I was disappointed. They were dirty, unshaved, ill-dressed, ragged rapscallions of men. I was piqued that we should have surrendered to so tatterdemalion a crew. I had not yet realized that it is only the British soldier who loses his military efficiency when he is dirty. They came in methodically, taking up posts from where they commanded all entrances and exits. The Arabs were shouting with delight, leaping and salaaming and offering them food. They had not starved, these Arabs, by the look of them, and they were offering fresh mutton and white bread free as gifts of peace. The Turks were but little impressed. When they got in the way they drove them on one side. They had had many proofs of their loyalty before. I could have thanked a mounted officer who kicked full in the mouth an Arab who tried to kiss his boot. It was ever so with these Arabs; they sung songs to and cringed before the victors and mutilated the wounded of the defeated. I fell in my men and moved off to our rendezvous. Then I realized that we were prisoners, for we were roughly halted by dirty fellows and searched and disarmed. At every few yards we had to stop and beg leave to advance from apathetic and supercilious young officers. My whole spirit revolted, for I had never learnt to cringe. We concentrated in the palm-groves by the riverbank. There we spent a night of terror. For the first time for many years I was defenceless and unarmed. We had eaten no food at all that day, and the heart sinks when the belly is empty. A low thick fog lay over everything, and out of it now and again loomed groups of men on horses, uncanny and terrible, because they were unknown and spoke in a strange tongue. We set sentries with sticks, who would have been useless in real danger, but it seemed better to be wakened than to be murdered in our sleep. At last that long night came to an end, and in the dawn I dropped asleep, to be wakened by the sound of a scuffle. A short sturdy Turk was endeavouring to tear his water-bottle away from a huge Sikh. The sepoy looked to me for protection. Suddenly I realized that I was helpless; and I was ashamed. A little way off sat a Turkish officer on the side of a water-wheel. I ran to him and called his attention in French, which by the grace of God he more or less understood. He called to his Turk to leave the water-bottle alone. He strode up to the man and beat him on the face. But the fellow obstinately carried on. The officer’s hand flew to his belt, but his revolver was not there. Seeing a pickaxe lying near he caught it up and drove the point through the man. Towards late afternoon we filed out of Kut. The Turks had told us that if we got to Shamran, some eight miles away, we should find food. The Turkish commander Khalil Pasha and his Staff, with the German officers on it, watched us march out in fours. 19 The Turks tried, almost pathetically, to treat us well. They allowed us to transport great bundles of out kit as far as here. But their standards of life and their ways and ours were different, and they soon gave up the attempt. 20 Our energy and courage were coming and with them the spirit of lawlessness, which is a prisoner’s privilege — the fierce resentment against all and every order. The Turks had given up the make-believe of treating us well. We had to conform to the conditions of the country. When ordered to set out on the march, we obstinately refused. We demanded to be allowed to transport all our kit, and I would have taken a regiment of horses to do this. We argued and resisted and refused to move until... the Turkish commandant, in despair, brought us more pack animals and then we agreed to move off.

"Underfed, misused, paid but little and that rarely, ragged and dirty, these Turkish troops were as wretched in their liberty as we were in our captivity."

p. 23

Sometimes we passed battalions of Turkish troops marching down to Bagdad... some 300 miles away... There the Arabs watched, and when occasion served, they killed and looted them, so that we passed many Turkish soldiers on the route. They lay by the roadside with their throats cut, left to rot like carrion for all their officers or Government cared; while far away in Anatolia the women waited eagerly, but in vain, for news of their men. Underfed, misused, paid but little and that rarely, ragged and dirty, these Turkish troops were as wretched in their liberty as we were in our captivity.

26

The Turks had massacred the Armenians

ruined villages where the wells were full of bodies

Turkish gendarmes ... selling Armenian women for a few shillings in the bazaars of Aleppo and Mosul 

28

"marched slowly to death"

I heard the sound of women and children and in the next field were a crowd of Armenians and with them white-bearded priests. I saw them marched away...under the escort of armed gendarmes. They were being marched to death, and the bodies I had seen by the roadside in the Amanus mountains were those of them who could not keep up.

 

34

They were simple, sturdy folk, these Turkish peasants. They made no pretence of wishing to fight in this war. I saw none of the wild enthusiasms of other countries {except for young and excited recruits}... the country and the people were tired of the everlasting wars, and ever and again they cursed Enver Pasha and his German crew.

35

They were a kindly, hospitable people, slowly roused and then capable of terrible anger and tremendous energy. They were the last of the aristocrats, with their vices and their virtues. They ruled as by Divine Right, as part of a caste, and without political theories. They were not vicious or cruel, but they did not understand pain in others. They had a profound contempt for the rest of mankind, and inherent laziness covered by great courtesy. Inefficient to distraction, they were eminently lovable. Their sense of humour was simple. Sleeping round the hot embers of the fire I was night after night awaked by the hideous snores of a carter, who had a face like a frog and slept with his mouth wide open. At last in desperation I begged some one to wake up Balik Pasha, or the “Fish” Pasha, and shut his fly-trap of a mouth. The name stuck. For a week the word “ Balik” roused a roar of laughter. Some one on the march would call for “ Balik Pasha with the fly-trap mouth,” and from end to end of the caravan, drivers and guards and passengers in the carts would shout with laughter and call one to another. People used to wake the little fellow at all times to tell him his nickname and then roar with applause, in which he would join. They would, as is their custom, get up at one or two in the morning, kick the fire into life and light cigarettes, and then one would call “ Balik Pasha
and the whole room would rock with laughter till they lay down to sleep again. Long afterwards a general came to inspect the troops in the area. He heard men talk of “ Balik Pasha,” and incautiously asked who he was. So they brought the little carter before the general...

 

38

Against us, their enemies, I found no animosities. Even the German nurses, though full of fierce patriotism, did all they could for us. The Turkish officers were courteous and polite. They showed no enthusiasm for the war. They avoided all controversial subjects. When we happened to talk of the war, they told me glowing accounts of the success of the British troops. It was a curious trait of the Turks to over-represent the success of the enemy.

 

49

(Relates his escape attempts; he gets caught, but faces no punishment.)

 

THE PRISON CAMP IN ANATOLIA

51

(changes prisons, shown a site where a British submarine dived under mines of the Dardanelles, went to centre of country and opened fire on a train.)

The Turks congratulated me on the courage of the commander. They looked on it as a fine feat and one to be made much of. I could not help thinking that a German or Englishman would have taken a few different  view if it had been in his country.

 

52

The Germans treated the Turks with high contempt, and more than one told me how glad he was to meet another white man in this “native” country.

Everything that went wrong was put down to the Germans... if food was short, it had been shipped to Berlin to feed Germans.

 

It appeared that hopeless inefficiency and callousness of human life was the main causes, while deliberate calculated cruelty was rare. The Turks had treated our worn and starved and diseased soldiers as they treated their own men, and both had died like flies.

p. 56 CHAPTER VII  The Fall of the Ottoman Empire : Release, 1918 As is ever the way with the Turks, they now swung to the other extreme, and our treatment became as liberal as it had before been stringent. I was made staff-officer of the camp. Mazlum Bey was put under arrest with all his officers. To complete the picture, the sergeant of the guard, having no officer to whom to apply, as they were all in prison, and being quite bewildered, came to me for his day’s orders. These I gave to him written out laboriously in my crude Turkish. Mazlum was tried for his foulness, and on the court I was the prosecutor and interpreter. Such was the humour of the situation. We were given more liberty. At times we got opportunities to talk to some of our men imprisoned in another part of the town. We learnt the details of their march up and how all across the Mesopotamian plains and in the unorganized camps both British and Indians had died by the thousand. It appeared that hopeless inefficiency and callousness of human life was the main causes, while deliberate calculated cruelty was rare. The Turks had treated our worn and starved and diseased soldiers as they treated their own men, and both had died like flies. Now in a sort of death-bed repentance at this eleventh hour the Ottoman Government was treating them with great kindness and giving them much liberty. But of the thousands that set out from Kut only a few hundred remained. These were probably better treated than any prisoners have been treated before, except the Russians in Japan. They ran their own affairs, attempted escapes without punishment, and worked as they willed. As to the officers, as a whole they were pretty well treated, but the life of a prisoner-of-war must always be a dreary hardship. The iron chain round us began to relax and, as we gained more liberty, our spirits rose. There were many attempts at escape. We worked night and day in secret preparing and studying any maps we could get, and copying and enlarging passes and plans sent to us from England in split post-cards or cunningly hidden in books. But though it was easy to get out of camp, the country beyond was wild and barren and made a perfect prison wall. It was full of fierce men. It was as if one tried to escape from Kabul through the wild Afghan tribes over the mountains into India. Everywhere there were signs of the Ottoman Empire breaking up. In the town, into which we were now allowed to go under guard, the people talked with open discontent. The hills were full of deserters and brigands. Food was short and the prices crept up till only the rich could buy sugar and tea and the necessaries of life. Our guards had grown slack. I could feel the break... 64 ... As time passed, in every direction and in unexpected places, vast blind forces released by the war became apparent and menacing. To meet them there was little to offer. The armies were contracting with demobilization. The energy and idealism was dying away and left only a tired people. Nowhere had the victory been so crushing as in Turkey. She lay battered down, ruined and broken. Any terms of peace could have been imposed without resistance. Far away in Anatolia the ninth Caucasus army alone remained undefeated, but it was submissive and overawed. There were Allied garrisons all across Turkey. She lay inert, patiently waiting her fate. I found the English people against the Turks. Here and there a few experts and a few cranks spoke on their behalf, but the mass of the people was hostile. The churches remembered the massacres of Christians. The Free Churches were clamouring for the return of Constantinople and St. Sophia and the ejection of the Turk from Europe. The war hatred was strong in those untouched by religion. It was agreed that an end was to be made of Turkey, and Mr. Lloyd George was the spokesman of that idea. But in all matters the decision rested with the Conference in Paris, and there so vast and complex and innumerable were the problems to be settled that Turkey was neglected for the time being. It was felt that she was but the rubbish and bits of the Ottoman Empire that had finally collapsed, and that a sweeping up of those could wait until more urgent problems nearer home were settled. In that delay lay danger, and one by one many of the troubles settled themselves. The first blow came when the Italians on the 29th of March 1919 landed in south-eastern Anatolia, and, despite the protests of the other Allies, began rapidly to take over the country. They had a definite clear-cut policy. They intended to replace Austria in the Near East. They took over the Austrian banks and the Austrian ships. They had been promised the port of Smyrna at the Conference of St. Jean de Maurienne in 1915 and they set out to get it. They were for annexation. Each year, some hundreds of thousands of emigrants leave Italy for other countries. The soil and climate of Anatolia are excellent, and the Italian Government hoped to raise there a stout peasant population and make Italy a world power and an empire. Already there was friction between France and England, for the former thought that she was being kept out of Cilicia, despite all promises and the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement, and that steps were being taken to oust her from Constantinople. It was still possible by immediate action to settle the Near East, but the situation, if delayed, was potentially dangerous.

pp. 78-79 The main work at the Embassy was to avoid being definitely involved with any of the innumerable suitors who sought our help. Thus in inaction time passed, while the problems at hand remained unsolved, while new complications appeared and definite dangers began to raise their heads. The golden opportunity to make a sound adjustment had passed. I found the city of Constantinople little changed since 1916, except that the Allies had replaced the Germans and that the population had without effort transferred its allegiance from the one to the other. I looked in at the old prison. Jemal Bey was gone, but the officials and sentries were as courteous as before. Mazlum Bey was shut away somewhere, but I dared not see him, for I must have struck him. Even here in the centre, there was decay. The War Office door hung on a broken hinge, and the great courtyard was rank with weeds, as if no troops had ever drilled on it. As I wandered about the city I searched for the stout old Turk I had learned to know in Anatolia. He was not there. Gradually I realized that in Constantinople there were no Turks, for they were all Levantines, and that herein lay the basic and fundamental problem of Turkey. Away in Anatolia were 7,000,000 ignorant Turkish peasants. They were hardy, honest and steady, but should anyone of them be taken and educated, he instinctively absorbed that which was superficial and he became a Levantine. Though of stout material, the Turkish peasant cannot be built on, and thus his ruling class is always Levantine. The one hope of the Turk lies in developing his own type of civilization, of educating his people on those lines, and ruling his people in this manner, and not by copying or mimicking the civilization of Europe as he has done hitherto. The Turks are Eastern. Anatolia and Constantinople are Eastern, and there is a great danger of treating them as if they were Western, because their people have white skins and some are Christians. The gulf between us and the Chinese and the Brahmin is no greater than that between us and the populations of Turkey. Constantinople is the capital of Levantinia, and its citizens the Levantines are the evil results of the mating of the East and the West. East and West mate badly. They do not absorb each other satisfactorily. The West has superimposed itself on the East, and there remain but two roads to be taken. Either the East must accept the civilization of the West and the whole East become Levantine, or it must refuse it absolutely and revolt against it. But the moment the East refuses the guidance of the West, I found that the East respected not the spirit but the material results of Western civilization — its motor-cars, its luxuries, and, above all, the power and comfort that it gives. The great city of Constantinople is itself a festering sore. There are in it no great ideals, no inspiration. It is a city of mean men living in mean streets. It is a city of intrigue, of backbiting, of scandal, of cunning, cowardly, treacherous men and dishonest women living in squalid houses. There is vast intrigue in little matters. There is no big idea, no character, no drive, no...

From Smyrna the Greeks pushed out, massacring, burning, pillaging and raping as they went, in the ordinary manner of the Balkan peoples at war. Before them the Turks fled, till the country-side was full, of refugees.

 

pp. 82-95

(GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA)

In the hard years of the war secret treaties had been made to win allies. Italy had been promised great sections of Anatolia. Greece had been promised Western Thrace. Russia had been promised Constantinople. Much of the Middle East had been portioned out between England and France by the Sykes-Picot agreement. Promises had been made to the Arabs and the Christian minorities. By the time that peace arrived the objects of the war had changed. America, the new ally, had no part or lot in all these secret agreements that held her allies. But they were always in the background. They were confused by local and national hatreds and ambitions. They were complicated by the fact that many of them were contradictory, and by the declaration that “ self-determination “ was to decide the future.

The Italians had failed to get any support for their policy of annexation of South-Western Anatolia. The French and British would not stand by the promises they had made to the Italians at St. Jean de Maurienne in 1917, but they could not deny that they had made them. Feeling that facts were better than arguments, the Italians landed and set to work. Very rapidly, with troops and schools and traders, they had established themselves in the south of Anatolia and were rapidly nearing Smyrna. The Greek delegation in Paris strove for its claims in Anatolia, and especially for Smyrna. The French and British heard them with considerable sympathy. The American advisers refused to agree. They saw that Anatolia as a whole needed Smyrna as its window and door on to the world. Special committees could come to no agreement, and the Italians and the Greeks were at every point at variance.

Suddenly events took a dramatic turn. Signor Orlando and President Wilson quarrelled in Paris over Fiume. The former, with all the Italians, left the Conference. There was always in Paris a strong pro-Hellenic party, which now played its cards skilfully.
M. Venizelos presented a sheaf of telegrams to show that the Turks were massacring in the Smyrna area, which was untrue. His subordinates produced excellent, but incorrect, maps to show the preponderance of the Greek population in and round Smyrna. The Great Three did not wish to see the Italians in possession, and they thought it an excellent method of calling Signor Orlando back to heel. He came, but too late, for already the order had been deliberately given by Mr. Wilson without reference to his advisers, and by Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau; and the Greeks were sent to Smyrna, not as a punishment to the Turks, but as a counterpoise to the Italians.

From this small spark arose a fierce conflagration. The Greeks came under the escort of Allied ships, and their occupation was announced to the Governor of Smyrna as that of the Allies. They began to massacre as soon as they landed. The officers and men of the British battleship moored close to the quay were ordered to remain inactive, while, within a few yards of their stern, Greek troops committed murder and foul brutalities. It is said that so difficult was it to prevent the British sailors from interfering that they were all ordered below decks.

From Smyrna the Greeks pushed out, massacring, burning, pillaging and raping as they went, in the ordinary manner of the Balkan peoples at war. Before them the Turks fled, till the country-side was full, of refugees. Having extended beyond the line allowed to them, but having given themselves sufficient room to protect Smyrna, the Greeks sat down to consolidate.
Throughout Turkey awoke a new spirit, the spirit of a Turkish Nation. Once before the Turks had tried to turn their vast heterogeneous empire into a nation. In 1908 the Young Turks had overthrown the tyranny of Abdul Hamid and proclaimed a constitution with equal rights for all. They had set to work to turkify the Empire. The result had been misfortune. The Great Powers had at once reached out greedy hands for spoils. Austria had seized Bosnia and Herzegovina. Aided by Russia, Bulgaria had declared itself independent. The Italians had seized Tripoli and Bengazi. England and France had riveted tighter their economic chains.

The Ottoman Christians refused to become Turks, and in a fury at their disloyalty the Young Turks resorted to the policy of their predecessor, and by fierce massacre endeavoured to cut out of their body politic the cancer that ate their flesh. Their enemies saw their weakness, and then came the Balkan wars, and then finally the Great World War that had brought destruction and ruin. But the idea of a Nation had remained with them, of one loyalty, of one religion, of one blood, and of one tongue. They had been stripped of the vast territories that they held by force alone. They had ceased to be ambitious to become a power in Europe, and their hopes were centred in Asia. Pared and pruned till little superfluous growth remained, the trunk of the Ottoman Empire appeared dead. The sap moved but little.

Now at the threat of final destruction the Turks woke from the dull apathy of defeat. They were to be wiped out. It was proposed to make a great Armenia behind them and perhaps a Greek Pontus State on one flank. There was the red danger of Smyrna in front of them, and the Great Powers were planning to control what was left. As had happened before in their history, in the hour of real disaster, the call went out and slowly the Turks roused themselves. A fierce vitality returned and they set about to save themselves from complete annihilation.

There were dull muttered threats at first. The 9th Caucasian Army stopped disarming. At Erzerum, at Konia and before Smyrna organized bodies came into existence. The refugees were armed. The hills became full of irregular bands that attacked the Greek troops. The peasants were enrolled. The Christians had already surrendered their arms at the orders of the Allies, but the Turks found arms in quantities and at once. The disarmament of the Turkish forces had been neglected by the Allied commanders. The ideas on the subject were grotesque. One staff officer of high rank was heard to say that it was unfair to disarm the Turks without disarming the Greeks as well, and one officer who commanded a detachment, when ordered to retire from Anatolia, brought with him a receipt signed by a Turkish general for the stores and ammunition that he had handed over in considerable quantities.

In Constantinople the renowned sailor, Raouf Bey, both
officially and unofficially organized protest and resistance. Meetings were addressed by priests and fanatics; and that at the Municipal buildings in Stambul on the 20th of May was opened by a fierce appeal from a Turkish woman, one Halide Edeb Hanum, and was concluded with a few words of encouragement from French officers who were on the platform.

Far away in the wilds of Anatolia some form of organization began to show itself almost at once, and one man, Mustapha Kemal, stood out and dominated the situation. He was a capable staff officer of great energy, and a hard, calculating man. He had shown his capacity on many fronts. He had organized the guerrilla warfare against the Italians in Tripoli. He had commanded the gendarmery divisions in Gallipoli and held up the Australian advance and had saved the Turks from defeat. In Syria he had been given a poor handful of men, and with these he had gamely tried to withstand Allenby and to organize a new front at Aleppo. After Enver and his colleagues had fled, Mustapha Kemal had remained, and his influence among the troops and the people was great. He had been appointed as Inspector-General of the northern section of Anatolia, and there he went in March 1919. He left Constantinople determined to organize some show of resistance. He found little response among the tired people, who prayed only for peace and for time to plough their fields. But the landing of the Greeks, the threat of final destruction, and the wave of hatred that ran through the country gave him his chance. He seized it. Help and encouragement came from Constantinople and from every side. On the old framework of the Ottoman army he grafted the hastily raised irregulars, and as it grew the force was directed towards the Greeks.

As yet the Turks had worked with caution. They showed their defiance in sullen disobedience to the Allied Control officers. The efforts at resistance were local and scattered and mainly effective in the danger zones close to the Greeks, where the refugees organized gladly. The leaders of the disaffection had crept away back into the eastern and inaccessible parts of Anatolia, to organize at Siwas and Erzerum. They expected that at any minute the Allies would send troops and crush them down.

If the movement was to be dealt with some immediate action was needed. The British High Commissioner wired repeatedly for permission to act. The Grand Vizier, who believed that the strict carrying out of the Armistice was the one hope of Turkey, became apprehensive and asked leave to deal with the danger. But the Allied Governments were feeling the anti-war reaction. They were being bombarded with demands for demobilization and retrenchment. They dared not involve themselves in further commitments. They gave orders that no steps were to be taken in the matter, which to them appeared to be one between the Sultan and his subjects. They refused to allow the Sultan enough troops or a free hand to deal with the position. They made light of the danger of the situation, and then turned to other problems.

Hassan the bash chavoush and his orderly

Very soon the Turks began to realize that the Allies would not, or could not, take steps against them, and at the end of June they came out more boldly into the open. Irregular troops with a backing of regulars continually harried the Greeks, and sometimes there were fierce engagements. By July a clear-cut organization, grouped round Mustapha Kemal at Erzerum, had come into existence and the hitherto scattered and separate centres of revolt were co-ordinated within it. It was directed by capable brains. It was assisted by great enthusiasm and great hatred. The army grew, and it met with no opposition. The organization and the military forces now began to move westwards, leaving only sufficient troops to guard against aggression from Armenia. They came to the railway at Angora in December 1919, and, making the new head-quarters there, they moved down the railway and took over the junction of Eski-Shehir and the line to Konia. The British had orders to avoid any complications and they retired as the Turks advanced, so that by April 1920 the whole of Anatolia, except the area round Smyrna held by the Greeks, was in the hands of the “Nationalists,” as the Turks under Mustapha Kemal were now called. Behind a screen of irregulars they organized, collected money and formed an administration.

As Mustapha Kemal became a power the government in Constantinople lost in importance. All Turks were united in protest at the landing of the Greeks. But whereas the Sultan and Damad Ferid, the Grand Vizier, believed that the salvation of Turkey lay in obedience to the terms of the Armistice and so winning the confidence and good-will of the Allies, Mustapha Kemal believed not at all in the Allies. He saw that they had decided to destroy Turkey. He believed that the Turks could only save themselves by their own strong right arms. He had already succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The Allies had done nothing against him. The Greeks were tied to their area. Their atrocities had filled him and his supporters with wild rage, for they despised these Greeks as their late subjects. They hated the Allies but little less for sending them. When ordered to return to Constantinople Mustapha Kemal had refused. Damad Ferid was a fierce old man and he dismissed Mustapha Kemal from the army. Personal hatred and pique became an element in the quarrel. A breach opened between the government in Constantinople and the administration in Angora. Then Damad Ferid fell from power and the Nationalists gained control of the Constantinople cabinet. In turn they were ejected, and the Sultan and Damad Ferid Pasha and their supporters, appealing in vain to the Allies for help, set out to crush the “ rebels “ in Anatolia. They employed Circassians to fight them, under a certain Ahmed Anzavour. The breach was complete, and henceforth Angora went its own way from step to step until it proclaimed itself an independent government, while the Constantinople government, tied hand and foot by the Allies, sank to the position of the borough council of Stambul, and the Allied control became valueless.

Finally, feeling their strength and showing the fortitude and courage that more than once in their history saved them from destruction, the Turkish Nationalists had on the 28th of January 1920 published their National Pact. They proclaimed the objects for which they fought and swore that even to annihilation they would strive till they possessed Anatolia, Constantinople and Eastern Thrace, free of foreign interference. It was the declaration of the death of the Ottoman Empire, and of the existence of the Turkish Nation. The birth and rapid growth of this had been ignored by the Allies. Now it stood out aggressively, asserting its claims and its power to enforce them.

The success of the Turkish Nationalists, due as it was to the sudden and unexpected vitality that they had shown, was aided by a complicated mass of other circumstances.

The Greeks had hardly landed before they encountered Italian opposition. As the Greeks pushed out, the Italians continued to advance, until they met as rivals. At one point, on the 2nd of June 1919, their troops opened fire on each other at the village of Cherkes Keuy, and only with great tact was an open breach between Rome and Athens avoided. The Italians, piqued and disappointed, encouraged the spirit of Turkish revolt. Too late they realized that they fanned a fire that would singe their own beards. Before the rising conflagration, which they had helped to light, they retired. There were serious domestic troubles in Italy. The people demanded demobilization and threatened revolution. Rather than be involved in fighting the Italian Government withdrew, and gave up the territory on which they had set their hearts. But as they went they sold their arms and equipment to the Turk, and for many months they were his main source of supply for war material.

Aided thus in the south, the Turks found other helpers in the north. As the Bolsheviks slowly advanced, steadily pushing the armies of counter-revolution under Denikin before them, the British troops retired out of the Caspian and across the Caucasus. Their retreat encouraged the Turks, who received from Moscow welcome messages and more welcome money. The Allies were their common enemies.

The Turkish Nationalists directed their energies primarily against the Greeks, but the Greeks were the agents of the Peace Conference, and rapidly the hostility of the Turks was directed against the Allies. Until it had forced itself upon their attention, the Nationalist movement was viewed with little interest and no hostility by the Supreme Council, despite the constant telegrams of warning from the High Commissioner and the admonitions of the General Officer Commanding-in Chief.

When late in 1919 the position was recognized, the jealousies between the Allies prevented any effective action. The Italians were already at loggerheads with the Greeks and helping the Turks. Compromise between the many conflicting ambitions was the only hope of common action. The British were often stubborn and their subordinates were sometimes unwise, but as a whole they were prepared to sacrifice much to maintain the Entente. From the first days of the Armistice, however, the French were suspicious. They believed that they were to be cheated of the good things of victory. There was no common enemy in the Near East, and there remained only the debris of dead systems, out of which much of value might be extracted. They found the British already in possession. They were determined not to be jockeyed out. For two centuries or more the British and the French had been rivals. In the face of a common foe, for a brief period, they had combined to crush the upstart Germany, and then in 1918 they took up again their ancient quarrel where they had laid it down in 1913. In the Near East the Great War, which was to have been an ending, became no more than a brief interlude in the long struggle between the rivals for the hegemony of Turkey.

Within a week of the signing of the Armistice the French were issuing nationalization papers to enemy subjects who possessed business or property interests in Turkey, and so endeavoured to annex the trade. Monsieur de France, the High Commissioner, and Franchet d’Esperey, the Allied General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, were openly anti-British. They assisted the enemy. Thus the Allied High Commissioners refused passports to the family of Enver Pasha. The French supplied them. The High Commissioners ordered the arrest of Djavid the Salonika Jew, the Minister of Finance to the Committee of Union and Progress. The French smuggled him into France. In May 1919, French officers spoke at public meetings against the Greek landing in Smyrna and encouraged Turkish resistance. As early as June 1919, M. Pichon was in private correspondence with the Prince Heritier, and had promised him assistance to gain Turkish aspirations. The Moniteur, the Stambul and other papers were subsidized with French money to publish anti-British articles. Major Labonne, the French representative at Afion-Kara-Hissar, Colonel Mongin at Angora, and General Bathélémy, the French Military Attaché in Constantinople, were openly with the Turks.

For a short while the French used the Greeks. Even as late as June 1920 they advised them to advance, so as to get the Turks off the railway. Then they threw them over. As it became evident that the English had taken the Greeks under their protection, so, to neutralize this, the French became Turkophile, and in October 1921 M. Franklin Bouillon on behalf of the French Government made a secret treaty at Angora. That treaty was dishonourable not so much in its terms as in the secrecy with which it was made. The French supplied the Turks with information as to the Greek forces and our own. The culmination was the great betrayal at Chanak, when on the 22nd of September 1922 they withdrew and left the British alone to face the oncoming Turks.

These are only a few of the countless similar incidents, but they showed the blind folly that made the Entente in the Near East a delusion. In France suspicion died slowly. England, despite the Entente, still appeared as the cunning monster which had stolen its colonial empire from the French. Sound public opinion throughout England was only too eager to forget the ancient rivalry and to allow France to attain her just aspirations. It realized that Allied solidarity was the one hope of salvation for ruined Europe, but it met with little response; and from the end of 1919 onwards the Entente split until the French gradually whole-heartedly backed the Turks, and the British half-heartedly backed the Greeks.

The Greeks were from the beginning in a bad position. They strained for greatness. Their resources were meagre and their ambitions great. They set out on a crusade backed by the Allies. But as soon as they left the seashore they found themselves in a barren wild country, and were deserted by the Allies and eventually warned that they must evacuate. They endeavoured to annex lands to which they had no rights except those of force, while on the other hand they were opposed by a people fighting desperately for their homes.

They played, moreover, at being the champions of their oppressed fellow-countrymen in Anatolia, but this was but a fancied role. I remember well an incident that aptly illustrated this. One day, M. Canelopoulos came to the Embassy.

I hope,” said the High Commissioner, “that your Excellency’s troops will advance no further into Anatolia, for, if they do, I fear that all the Christians may be murdered.”

“I hope,” replied M. Canelopoulos, “that the massacres begin soon, for we have need of a raison d’etre for advancing.” And I could only think of the incident a few weeks before when, in fear of the Turkish irregulars, the Greek population had flocked out of the village of Aidin behind Smyrna to follow the retreating Greek troops to safety, and how the Commanding Officer had driven them back knowing that they would be massacred because “he needed a raison d’être for advancing into and beyond Aidin.”

At home the Greeks were unstable. They grew tired of war and the suppression of their liberty. In November, 1919, M. Venizelos warned the Supreme Council that Greece could not continue to keep up a huge army to police Smyrna. The Greeks were in the unfortunate position of the man who put one finger into a sausage-machine and then when he wished to withdraw he could not and had to go through and become a sausage altogether.

Aided by the dissensions of the Allies, by their preoccupation and by their inability to take military action, the Turks succeeded. They found many Allies. Central Asia with Bokhara, Samarkand and Afghanistan was prepared to be troublesome. The British retreat out of the Caspian, their withdrawal in Anatolia, their inability to act in Persia and their weakness in India encouraged many to break out. The Kurds were angry at the idea of an Armenian State, and in June 1919 they became a menace to Irak. The Tartars of Nachivan and the Emir Feisal and the Arabs were disgruntled. In all directions were potential allies and Mustapha Kemal with uncommon skill roused dissatisfaction, raised the hopes of resistance or of advantages to be gained, and turned all the eyes of the dissatisfied towards Angora. The Turkish nation was facing a Christian crusade. It became itself the forefront of a crusade and behind it muttered and growled all Asia ready for revolt.

 pp. 153-155

I lived with the Turks, not now as a subordinate or prisoner nor on the lofty eminence of an Embassy but as an equal. I saw with their eyes and heard with their ears and lived their lives. I looked back at my own people from a new position, and I experienced some disappointment. It was as when one has lived long in trenches and they have come to be something large and spacious, and suddenly one sees from a sap-head, that they are to the enemy no more than cheap mounds such as rabbits scratch.

I had watched British life in India. Within it was a dusty edition of suburbia and externally it was like isolated islands in seas of teeming native life. So here in Turkey the British were isolated. They never knew the people nor their ideas nor their ways. They adopted a superior air of patronage and sneered and, if possible, kicked all those who wore fezes. They were ignorant of the most rudimentary facts, and whoever tried to learn these was looked on as a lost man and "gone native." Their superiority did not seem so obvious from outside. In official life they suffered from the acute modern disease of "paper." They waded into paper caring little for live personalities or live facts, but trusted in written words and reports. They submerged themselves in paper till lost beneath it. If they then saw a fact, it was as distorted as the moon through water to a diver in the sea.

There were eight British gendarmerie supervising officers with separate areas, and I was given half the Ismidt Peninsula with some 600 square miles in all. We were given a chance to see Turkish official life from within, as no Englishman had seen it before. I quickly found that the Turkish and the British officials viewed their positions from different angles. In the East an official position is an acquisition to be used. It means money and comfort and the sitting under green trees and the people to be used as servants. Even if only temporary, it is a thing to be enjoyed and to be turned to profit. To the British it means a responsibility. Inspired by this and the sense of power and the instinct to organize and control the affairs of others, they will put away the good things of life and its comfort. They will sit long hours on office-stools in some dingy hole. White with fever, they will work through torrid heat in deserts beyond civilization. The two conceptions are poles apart, and as widely different as the characters of Turk and British.

I found my area in a sad state. Politics and war had torn it into pieces. At the Armistice the British had come and brought with them the ideas of the liberation of Christian minorities. The local Christians believing in these had rallied to them and been freely
used. As the British had withdrawn, the Nationalist Turks had overrun the area and taken revenge on the Christians, and then the Hellenic Greeks had come and the Ottoman Greeks had taken even more brutal revenge. Now the hills were full of brigands and criminals and the villages lay depopulated and many burnt, and, even from within the towns, the brigands carried off the merchants and held them to ransom. Between the Christians and the Moslems was a great gulf of murder and incendiarism and rape and bloodshed.

We set to work under considerable difficulties. ...

pp. 166-167

The moon was up, round and clear, as we came to the pass that runs between the twin breasts of the mountains of Chakal Dagh. The mountain path ran steep and narrow in the shadow where the hills towered up on the right and to the left dropped sheer two hundred feet or more into a gorge. As the leading gendarmes crossed the crest out into the white light a volley of rifle shots ran out and the bullets came with a murderous thud into the cliff-side. I saw the men fall. Their horses turned and galloped back on us. There was confusion and noise and the sound of men running and vague figures and quick panic and contagious fear.

I crept forward in the black shadow, while Hadji held my mare. Beyond me in the light one gendarme stirred a little and groaned. Across the narrow gorge, with its unclimbable precipitous sides, came voices talking and a woman’s laugh, shrill and vulgar. Then in the coarse accent of the Ottoman Greek, that rasps all the soft music out of Turkish, she called filth and abuse on the Turks and bade the gendarmes go home, for now the English ruled in Turkey and the Greeks were free. And I in my broken Turkish called back and cried that I was the English captain, and her men bade her be quiet. As I dared out into the white light in my “topee” I heard the rolling of stones and whisperings as they crept away, and far down below me a stream laughed and played with itself in the loneliness of the rocks.

We collected the men, and Yanni, hidden in his disguise, shivered with fear lest his Greek friends should find him, and so we came to the great forest of Alemdar. I lodged in the empty summer palace of one of the Whittalls, who were Englishmen and the merchant princes of Turkey and had grown so great and so numerous that, as it was said, “They were a family that had narrowly avoided becoming a nation.”

I could not sleep. I got up and walked out in the light of the great moon. The forest lay quiet. Now and again a hidden wind would sigh through the trees and carry up an unknown scent that was a lure. Far away a jackal called. Without warning a nightingale close at hand caught its breath and burst into liquid song, and a dozen more in the forest answered, and from pools a thousand frogs woke the night and the tree crickets called on twenty different notes. Then they died to sleep and left the forest quiet except for the but half-heard ground noises, and the wonder of the night was supreme.

I walked a little way. From a house where the gendarmes slept came the sound of steady blows, not fierce or cruel but steady and methodical and brutal. They were beating Yanni, as they beat all prisoners for information, and his tormented gasps came sighing and droning across the still night like the winter’s wind round an old house. My hair stiffened in sudden anger. And then I remembered the woman of the Village of Jews with her arms a red staircase of wounds and the gendarme as he stirred on the head of the pass and groaned in agony; and I went home to sleep.

p. 178

...and made the villages and roads safe. The small and irregular bands were rapidly eliminated, but those that were large and permanent were difficult to lay by the heels. The eggs, from which they had hatched, had been laid in the unpleasant manure heap of local politics and Greek helped Greek and Turk helped Turk. To the north was a Moslem band under one Tahir the Lazz who had taken to the hills to fight the Greek troops and so had gained the halo of a patriot. To the south, where the Greek villages abounded, Zaffiri and Pavli and Karaoglan still roamed the country-side and made spasmodic raids, and then went to ground among their Greek friends.

I lived close with the people and I began to realize how they looked on us. The Christians had been roused by the promises of the Allied leaders at the Armistice, and still failed to understand that these were not to be fulfilled.

The Turks without exception hated us. They are a proud people, and were prouder than ever in defeat. The British air of superiority drove them to fury, but, forced to keep it pent up, they raged inwardly, and their hatred became as full of bitter poison as an unlanced boil. They were incommunicative people with no power of self-expression nor of propaganda in their own interests, and British officials failed to realize that they were a ruling people and not Hindus or negroes to be treated as subjects. It was only a few years since they had possessed a great empire.

“It may be,” said one during an argument, “that the British make one prosperous, but they do not respect one’s dignity,” and he spat expressively.

The stupidity of many senior officers would have been amusing, if it had not been tragic. One Colonel came inspecting and grew very savage and caustic, because the gendarmes had not spotless buttons on their tattered uniforms. In the course of one day he tried to tell some excellent troops that he would not be ashamed to command them, and explained nicely to the Governor that he fully realized that his pay was in arrears and therefore he recognized that he and his staff, like all Turkish officials, had to be dishonest. He treated the headmen of the villages as if they were his grooms, and he treated his grooms like dogs. And this Colonel was no exception among senior officers. It is a vast pity that each regiment, like kings in the olden days, has no professional fool who might by his frank irony force senior officers to keep a sense of the value of their own importance and their own unimportance.

As I lived on friendly terms with them, the Turks allowed me the doubtful privilege of seeing behind their minds. I heard the scurrilous things they said and believed of our women. They disliked our methods. They did not believe in either our intentions or our promises. As they go through life with closed eyes, so here the British officials imagined that if they brought riches and peace and justice to the people they would be beloved. They never realized the outstanding fact that the people of Turkey, as those of Irak and Persia, prefer the most scandalous Moslem government to the very best that is foreign and Christian.

...off the railway from Eski-Shehir and Kutahia and Afion-Kara-Hissar, but their strategy failed to enable them to catch and destroy the Turkish main armies which, being very mobile, slipped away. The Turks made a counter-attack and failed and began to retreat.

On the 14th of August in the torrid heat that eats up the land of Anatolia, the Greeks moved all their troops in a great concentrated advance on Angora. They pushed the Turks in front of them until they reached the Sakkaria river. This was the last obstacle between them and the Nationalist capital. There across the river they fought a tremendous battle where the issue was constantly in doubt. Both sides fought with a fierce courage. The percentage of casualties was very high. Neither side had a moral superiority over the other, for the Greeks despised the Turks, and the Turks sneered at the Greeks as their old subjects. Both were full of the venom of an hereditary hatred. As a whole it appeared that, in contradiction to previous experience, the Greek soldier surpassed the Turk. In the matter of staffs and commanders the Turks were far the superior.

The Turks held their ground. The Greeks came marching back over the Sakkaria river and formed up in order. Unharassed to any extent by the enemy, they retired back across Anatolia. By the end of September they had taken up the position they had prepared in July, in front of Eski-Shehir and Afion-Kara-Hissar and the railway.

In these military operations the Greeks fell into an error that has been repeated throughout history. The whole and only object of military maneuvres is to pin down and destroy the enemy’s fighting forces. All other movements and destruction are subsidiary to this end. Napoleon points out that the concentration on the capture of an important town has ruined many a commander. In advancing from their poor winter position to the line covering the railway in front of them the Greeks had full justification. Their subsequent plan in August was to rush at Angora 200 miles to the east, destroy it, frighten the Turks and then, having won a moral position, to fall back on the old line and come to terms with the enemy. But Angora was no more than a village, and behind it were unlimited mountains and desert spaces, and men fighting for their homes.

Having failed to obtain their objective, the Greeks endeavoured to attain their end on their retreat by systematic destruction. They destroyed the whole area. They tore up every mile of the permanent way of the railway. They cut down the trees, killed every Turk who was foolish enough to be still there, and for zoo miles behind them left desolation and the villages flat with the ground.

Their new line covered the railway. Its communications with the base were a good road that was well protected and a railway that was open to sudden raids. In due course the Turks reorganized their badly mauled forces, and followed up the enemy. They took up a position facing the Greeks and there for a year, except for outpost encounters, the hostile forces sat immobile. Victory lay with the side that had the greater morale, and the greater amount of grit and staying power.

The odds began to swing over to the Turks.

 

pp. 218-224

THE most difficult problem which confronted the Gendarmerie Supervising Officers was caused by the relations between the Christians and Moslems in Turkey. The more I saw of them, the more complicated they appeared, and the more difficult it became to arrive at just decisions.

The question of the Christian Minorities had its roots in far-distant history. Its influence had spread beyond Turkey and become part of the variegated texture of international diplomacy. The waves of Turkish hordes of invaders, that resulted in the conquest of Anatolia and the supremacy of the Osmanlis, had swept over old civilizations that were stale and long since diseased. They did not destroy them nor yet absorb them, but often they borrowed their worst characteristics. Thus, from the Byzantines, the Osmanlis took the practices of farming taxes and of ill-treating ambassadors.
The Turks made no attempts to absorb the Christian communities that they conquered. As long as they paid taxes and were obedient the Christians were allowed full liberty to rule themselves. Thus it happened that, while the Government of the Ottoman Empire was Turkish, it contained representatives of the Christian communities and these, which produced all the wealth, were semi-self-governing.
For a while the Greeks obtained such influence that at one time they virtually controlled the administration of the Ottoman Empire. This period of what is known as that of the “ Phanariot Rule “ came to an end with the revolt of Greece proper in 1821. From this date onwards each success of the Greeks of Greece spelt disaster for the Greeks of Turkey. It is instructive to remember that the original revolt of the Hellenes was made possible by the rapacity and extortion of their Phanariot Greek rulers.

As long as the Empire was all-powerful the Turks were content ; but times changed. From the defeat in front of Vienna and the death of Suleiman the Magnificent the Turkish power declined rapidly, until by the eighteenth century each and every observer prophesied its immediate dissolution.

In Europe there came an age of expansion and every great nation looked on Turkey with greedy eyes. One by one they pressed in on her, eager for their share of the spoils at her imminent dissolution. The diplomats found a congenial sphere and played one against the other till the tottering Ottoman Empire was buttressed up on every side by the rivals. Jealous of each other they maintained the moribund state, but all were afraid to rush in and complete the destruction. Russia made one bold attempt in the early nineteenth century, and it resulted in her defeat in the Crimean War. Pieces of territory were torn away, when occasion served.

The French seized Algeria. The British took Egypt. The Austro-Hungarians took Herzegovina and Bosnia. But the main body of the Empire, though diseased and paralysed, remained intact.

Direct assault being impossible, the Powers sought other methods. They proclaimed themselves the champions of the down-trodden Christian communities. Russia obtained the right to protect the Orthodox, and France to protect the Roman Catholic subjects of the Porte. Using these rights they fomented rebellion within ; and, adding to them the stringent control of the Capitulations, they reduced the Ottoman Empire to a state of servitude. Turkey had ceased to be a sovereign power, when the sudden and meteoric arrival of Germany threw all the other calculations into confusion.
Nationalism, the child of the French Revolution, had by the twentieth century become the outstanding characteristic of Europe. Its influence came to Turkey. The Christian communities became political organizations, and nationalities engaged in a fierce struggle for existence. The Patriarchs became as it were their Consul-Generals. That struggle was intensified by the interference of the foreign Powers.

But the Turks were impregnated by the same idea. It was the foundation of the Committee of Union and Progress. It was the war-cry of the revolution of 1908. The Turks were determined to “turkify“ Turkey. Instigated by the foreign Powers, the Christians refused to become Turks, and so the breach that had been between Moslem and Christian was now widened.

These and a complication of other facts were the causes of the mutual slaughter of the massacres. Foreign interference was the venom that drove the Christians to obstinate resistance and the Turks to kill. In 1878 the Treaty of Berlin decided to protect the Armenians, and was the direct cause of their massacre in 1896. To the Turks their Christian subjects now threatened their state and their religion and had become traitors. They developed the hatred that, in very similar circumstances, drove the English of the Middle Ages to persecute the Jews. They feared the secret political organizations with their foreign links. The Christians threatened their existence at every point. The Turk for one reason and another had become sterile. Their women, though broad-hipped, produced few children and those born died young. On the other hand the Christians multiplied like flies in a valley of offal.

Economically the Turks were being crushed out. The Christians were the workers and the hoarders, while the Turks were soldiers and spenders. In England we deal with economic problems of wealth distribution by super-tax and such like legal methods. The Turks endeavoured to deal with theirs by murdering the co]lectors of wealth and so taking back by force what had been won from them by work and brains. As an expert once said: “A good Government must always be on the side of the craftiest and cunningest, even the worst section of the population. If the Turk is given ‘good government’ he must come to an end; for if he cannot murder the Greek and the Armenian, they will outbreed him and buy him up.”

Military reasons, especially during the Great War, added their quota. The Greek massacres of 1916 were due to the occupation of Mytilene and the islands off the mainland by the Allies. The Armenians lay between the Turks and their relatives of Central Asia. They were a bar to the realization of the Pan-Turanian policy, and so with ruthless cruelty they were wiped away.

The Armistice found the Turks beaten to their knees. Scattered over Anatolia lay the torn remnants of the Christian Minorities. Their ancient instigators to resistance were now the world victors. In the struggle for nationalism the Turks appeared to have gone under. All the separate sects shouted that they were free and demanded recognition. The Peace Conference lent a ready ear to their demands. They were treated as allies and fully utilized. They believed that the Turks were at an end. They insulted them gratuitously. An Armenian-Greek section was formed in the British Embassy to right all their ancient wrongs. The Greeks of Greece were sent into Anatolia as the Allied police. The Ottoman Greeks claimed their revenge at the British Embassy, and took it in massacring with the Hellenic troops.

They put forward fantastic claims. The bishop and people of Trebizond demanded a Pontus State. The Armenians plotted out their new country to run from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and to cover some 4oo,ooo square miles. They demanded that the Allies should eject all Moslems from this area. They issued delightful booklets over the signatures of M. Aharonian and Boghos Nubar giving tables of their virtues and ending with the delightful qualification for ruling by the Armenian race “which in addition is remarkably prolific.”

The Allies contracted with demobilization and withdrew, leaving their wretched protégés to the mercy of their rulers. In a fury, that can be well understood, the Turks came back with murder in their hearts. To them all the Christians were now traitors. The worst brutalities of the Greek troops had been instigated and assisted, by the Ottoman Christians. The Turks set to work to wipe them out finally, much as a surgeon cuts away some growth which the body cannot absorb and which threatens life.

In all these changes and these fierce struggles of nationalities the Moslem and the Christian showed themselves equally villainous in their bestialities. Whichever side got on top massacred the other. In the Revolt for Independence the Greeks murdered the Turks in the Morea. In 1917 the Turks massacred the Greeks. In 1919 the Greeks retaliated round Smyrna, and again in 1920 and 1921. In 1922 the Turks took their revenge and wiped out the Ottoman Greeks. In 1915 the Turks had massacred the Armenians. In 1916 the Armenian Christian Army of Revenge came down with the Russians and killed all the Moslems of Van, while our noble allies, the Russians wiped out every Turk round Rowanduz. This list could be continued in red entry on red entry. The result of outside interference has been to intensify the brutalities. It can only be said that Greek and Turk and Armenian understand each other far better than we understand any of them, and all would have been better off, if Europe had left them alone. The misery of the peasantry, the ruin of the countryside and the fact that the hills were full of brigands were the direct results of the terrible history of this mutual massacre of neighbours.

We in. the gendarmerie areas were late corners and we saw only the end of the struggle. The Treaty of Sèvres, which we were enforcing, made a last effort to save the Christians. Beyond us now across all Anatolia the limited massacres were replaced by deliberate and careful extermination.

The supervising officers were instructed to see that the peasantry, and especially the Christians, were not ill-treated by the Ottoman officials. It was not an easy task, for though often justice seemed with the Christians, their personal and national characteristics made it hard to stand by them and hold out continually the hand of friendship. Christianity did not come into the question for “our common Christianity was not a living reality, but a historical curiosity.” The Christians often appealed to it, but they found but little response among the British.