THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

THE REBIRTH OF
TURKEY

BY

CLAIR PRICE

NEW YORK

THOMAS SELTZER

1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY

THOMAS SELTZER, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

ALL AMERICANS

BETWEEN ALASKA AND ANGORA

FOREWORD

This book contains my own observations and my own deductions from them. The responsibility for them is mine alone. I have never engaged in commercial, educational or missionary work. My interest in the Near and Middle East began with a newspaper assignment, and has continued with curiosity as its motive. This book is the result.

My thanks are due to the proprietors of Current History, New York, and Fortnightly Review, London, for their courteous permission to re-print herein parts of certain articles which have previously appeared in their pages.

Clair Price.

THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

I

MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA, THE MAN

HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE—​THE EASTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT UNDER WHICH HE WAS BORN—​THE WESTERN TRADITION WHICH HE HAS SOUGHT TO TRANSPLANT TO HIS COUNTRY—​THE DIVERSION OF THE TURKS FROM A MILITARY TO AN ECONOMIC LIFE, WHICH HE IS BEGINNING—​“DO YOU THINK YOU WILL SUCCEED?”

Having applied at the Foreign Office in Angora for an appointment with Mustapha Kemal Pasha, a message finally reached me about 2 o’clock in the afternoon that a half-hour had been arranged for me at the close of the day’s session of the Grand National Assembly. The gray granite building which houses the Assembly, stands at the foot of Angora, with the red and white Crescent and Star flying above it by night as well as by day. “The Pasha’s” car stood at the curb. He lives in a villa presented to him by the town of Angora, at Tchan-Kaya, a suburb three miles away, and the sight of his car, a long gray machine of German make, is one of the few means of tracing him. He is the easiest of all men to meet, but the most difficult of all men to find.

Within the building, one of Kemal’s aides led me to a large room off the corridor, within which to await the end of the session. It was the room in which I had first met him, a large room with a flat-top desk in the center of one side, with a row of chairs around the four walls, and a sheet-iron stove with a pile of cut wood beside it, in the middle of the carpet. I waited possibly a half-hour, listening to the noise from the Assembly’s chamber and making guesses as to what the trouble was. I had hoped to secure an hour or two with Kemal and had been listing, during the month I spent at Angora, a number of subjects on which I was anxious to secure his opinions. But he is not only difficult to find but difficult to hold for long. I had applied to the Foreign Office a week before and I believe they were not only willing but anxious to secure the appointment I wanted. My application, however, happened to coincide with a crisis in the Assembly and I had to make the best of a half-hour.

The session had no sooner broken up and the clamor of the deputies begun to overflow from the chamber into the corridor, than the aide summoned me. We crossed the corridor into a small room with a flat-top desk and, in the corner behind the desk, the limp folds of a tall green banner inscribed with Turkish letters of gold. From his chair at the desk, the military figure of Kemal himself in civilian clothes rose to greet me—​a man with a face of iron beneath a great iron-gray kalpak. He spoke in French and the flash of much gold in his lower teeth gave sparkle to the military incisiveness of his manner, a manner which conveyed an instant reminder of cavalry.

His face is one of severely simple lines. The lower line of the kalpak comes down close to the straight eyebrows, and there is no waste space between the eyebrows and the eyes themselves. “The Pasha” is reputed to have occasional fits of temper which reveal themselves in a noticeable squint in the pupils of his eyes, but during all the time I talked with him that afternoon, those eyes of pale blue fixed themselves on me and never left me.

There is a story of some famous German general who is reputed to have smiled only twice in his life, once when his mother-in-law died and once when he heard that the Swedish General Staff had referred to certain military works outside Stockholm as a fortress. Applied to Kemal, the story would hardly hold true for he has the gift of making himself genuinely pleasant when he cares to exercise it. I can speak of it only in connection with the handful of Westerners who have lived in Angora during the last four years. Turkey has been not only Turkish but desperately Turkish during these last years, yet no public celebration of its victories has occurred in Angora without the handful of Westerners in the town attending and without Kemal himself making an opportunity to receive them upon its conclusion. On these occasions, they have been received with a sensitive cordiality hardly understandable by those Westerners at home to whom it has never occurred that nations are born, not in debating societies, but in the mud and blood of suffering.

Kemal is, however, a professional soldier, dismissed from the old Ottoman Army by the Damad Ferid Ministry in Constantinople and now occupying a politico-military position at the head of the new Turkish Government. He has brought to Angora the blunt directness of the soldier rather than the statesman, and his remarkable personal prestige has colored his entire Government. Yet it is not sufficient to define him as a soldier. The head of the new Turkish State happens to be a soldier because the dominant tradition of the old Ottoman Empire was the Turkish military tradition. In any country with a great military tradition, the best brains of the country tend to flow into the Army and the best brains of the Army tend to flow into the General Staff. Kemal reached the General Staff of the old Ottoman Army at a time when the best brains in the country were attempting to carry it from those Eastern traditions of government in which it had had a long and rich experience, to the newer Western traditions at which it is still serving its apprenticeship.

If it is possible to press down the difference between these two traditions of government into the limits of a single sentence, it might be said that the Eastern tradition is that of action and the Western tradition is that of argument. Under the Eastern tradition, government is centralized in a single ruler whose power is as nearly absolute as his own personal abilities enable him to make it. Under the Western tradition, the functions of government are decentralized and authority is carried down to a popular electorate, represented by deputies in a parliament to which the Government of the day is immediately responsible. Under the Eastern tradition, all things are possible to an individual ruler as long as he disposes of sufficient force to impose them. Under the Western tradition, all things are possible to an electorate as long as it abstains from force in imposing them. London is the home of the modern Western tradition but to find the home of the Eastern tradition today it is necessary to go farther east than Turkey, to a country like Afghanistan. One episode which illustrates the contrast between the two traditions, is that of an Afghan notable who happened to be in London at a time when the Government fell, and who lost no time in sending an aide into the West End to purchase arms with which to defend himself. For further illustration, I might draw on my own experience. I called on the Afghan Ambassador at Angora in the course of my stay there and discovered, I thought, an astonishing ignorance of our Western ways. His was a charming tea, served by a charming gentleman who kept a charming revolver on his desk throughout the period of our talk and two charmingly brawny Secretaries of Embassy close at hand in case, I suppose, of emergency. It happened, however, that no emergency developed and our talk of an hour’s duration ended as happily as it began.

But if we Westerners have slowly built up our own peculiar traditions of government at home, we have not always carried them with us into the East. In our contacts with Eastern peoples in their own lands, we have tended to adopt the Eastern tradition. We have met force with force and it is possibly difficult to blame the more provincial of Eastern peoples if they conclude from their contacts with us along their own frontiers, that our traditions of government are the same as theirs. We cherish at home the reign of law, but our imperialisms in the East have not always exemplified our love of law. Probably their relatively lawless nature has been justified by necessity, for the complicated machinery of Western trade demands conditions of security if it is to work smoothly. Doubtless imperialism which is the simplest method of affording it a degree of security, will continue as long as it is able to command superior force, although naturally it is a daily humiliation to the strongest of Eastern peoples. Necessity will tend to justify its continuance until Easterners demonstrate that they can adapt our tradition of law to their own needs and that they are themselves able to afford legitimate Western trade (not of the get-rich-quick sort) that security which it has a right to expect. It is this task of adapting the Western tradition of law to Eastern needs, of substituting in the East a new and Eastern regime of law for the lawlessness of imperialism, while disturbing as little as possible the inter-flow of sound and legitimate trade—​it is this task which constitutes the Turkish problem today.

Kemal is a Westerner who was born under the Eastern absolutism of Abdul Hamid. He has known the East, the West and that curious offspring of both of them, imperialism. He is the son of a country which has belonged in the past to any man who proved strong enough to take it and which has rewarded its strong men with prestige or a cup of poison or both. He has been a consistent Young Turk, although his beliefs once flung him out of his country in disgrace and later tossed him the dying remnant of his country to do what he could with it. In his unaffected bearing, he embodies the old Ottoman officer type at its best, and at its best that type was a very fine type indeed. He is a great Turk and as a man among men he towers head and shoulders above the type of man which our Western democracies have sometimes projected into political life. A century from now, the historian of the future will see him in a larger and more adequate perspective than we are able to look upon him as he moves among us today.

He resumed his chair behind the desk, with the green and gold banner hanging limply in the corner behind him, and took from his pocket a string of amber beads with a brown tassel. His cheek bones are rather high, his nose is straight and strong, his mouth is straight and thin-lipped. I think a cartoonist would find him easy to do—​a towering iron-gray kalpak, and beneath it the straight strong lines of the eyebrows, the mouth and the chin. He wore an English shooting suit of tweed, a gray soft collar with a gray tie, and high-laced tan boots with the short vamp which is native to the Near East. Physically, he gives a lean, wiry impression.

He speaks either Turkish or French (he knows no English) in the mildest of tones, hardly above a whisper and with a blunt frankness which manages to remain free from any suggestion of truculence. I formed the impression that he does not find talk congenial; he says what needs to be said but he prefers to listen. Certainly he is quite devoid of that love of talk which sometimes afflicts Western statesmen and which is one of the less beautiful aspects of our Western tradition of popular government. Like any other good soldier, there is not the faintest trace of pose in him. He does not employ to Westerners the, to us, exaggerated courtesies of the East; when he does talk to us, he talks as we ourselves endeavor to talk to each other, with simplicity and directness. At one time in our talk, I asked him for photographs of himself since they were not then obtainable elsewhere in Angora and weeks afterward I happened to mention the matter to a Western friend in Constantinople. “What did he tell you?” “That he would have them sent me the next day.” “And did he?” “Yes.” My friend thought it over; he has lived in Constantinople for some thirty years. “If you can really get any Turk to give you a definite word on any subject under the sun without making you wait a month for it,” he said finally, “its fairly certain there’s been a revolution in the country.”

I had a feeling from the first that I was talking to an iron image, that his brain was miles away busying itself with a thousand and one affairs. He had a manner of dismissing question with question as though he were very busy but desired not to be discourteous, and the heaped-up pile of papers on his very neat and orderly desk made it probable that this was precisely the case. I changed my tactics finally and began firing questions at him abruptly, determined to get his undivided attention. He reached up suddenly with a gesture which might have savored slightly of impatience, and flung aside his kalpak, revealing a tall sloping forehead, fringed at the top with very thin brown hair, a forehead totally out of keeping with the severely simple lines of his face. If his face is the iron face of the cavalry officer, his forehead is the forehead of the statesman.

I kept on firing questions at him until I felt that his brain had paused at its distance to listen. I continued to fire questions at him until I felt that his brain had turned, had rushed down from its distance and was sitting intently behind those fixed blue eyes, staring out at its questioner:

“Suppose Turkey’s Western population leaves the country en masse when it becomes certain that the Capitulations are ended?”

“The West can help us or hinder us greatly,” he said, “but it ought to be remembered that we Turks have our own problem to work out in Turkey.”

“Just what do you mean by your own problem?”

“You have seen the country, you know the condition in which Turkey is. Our villages, our towns, our communications, all need to be built anew from the ground up. We have had a good Army in times past. I don’t believe there has been a better Army in Europe. But we hope soon to be able to demobilize and then our real work will begin. We shall have a potentially rich country on our hands and we shall have the right which we have not had recently, to do what we can with it. We want to make it a country worthy of its name, we want to give it not only the best its own civilization offers it but the best we can take from other civilizations. To that end, we shall welcome the help of others but in the very nature of our task, any help we secure from others must be subordinated to our own efforts. If we can not succeed, nobody else can.”

“Do you think you will succeed?”

“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.”

When my time was up, I left him and walked back in silence to my rooms. I dispatched the aged Armenian maid after tea, took off my shoes and donned my slippers. I felt somewhat as a man does when he has seen a great cavalry charge and has returned to his billet and taken his boots off. I became aware finally of the squeak of ox-carts beneath my windows. A long string of them was passing on its 300-mile trek up from the coast to the Army bases in the interior. The air was filled with their slow screaming squeak, a squeak which with infinite deliberation removed the skin from every note in the chromatic scale, the squeak of wooden axles daubed with tar to tickle the musical palates of a team of oxen. Each cart, a mere wooden platform mounted on wooden wheels, bore a tall mound of hay for the oxen and beneath the hay the rope-handled ends of two or four or six new wooden boxes protruded, the number of boxes depending on the calibre of the shells within. Most of the drivers were Turkish peasant women, jacketed and pantalooned, their feet shod in rope-bound woollens, their faces and hands reddened by exposure. Dead men’s fathers and sons and brothers in the Army, widows and dead men’s daughters behind the Army—​but still the rope-handled boxes squeaked up from the sea….

It is out of the dumb stubborn strength of this peasantry that the Turkish military tradition has been fashioned in centuries past. But can the Turks direct this strength from their native military tradition into a new and Western economic tradition? This is the question mark which hangs over the Turkish problem today and Kemal knows it.

“Do you think you will succeed?” I had asked him.

“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.”

II

THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE

KEMAL’S BIRTH AT SALONICA—​HOW HE BECAME A YOUNG TURK—​WHAT THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS LIKE—​THE DIVISION OF ITS POPULATION INTO RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES—​THE WESTERN CHALLENGE OF ITS Rûm (GREEK) COMMUNITY—​ITS DUTY TO ISLAM.

Forty-two years ago, when Abdul Hamid II ruled in Constantinople and the Ottoman Crescent and Star still floated over Salonica, an underling in the Salonica customs office died, leaving his widow with a small daughter and an infant son on her hands. The daughter in time grew up and married, as is the way of Turkish daughters. The son was intended by his mother for the mosque school and the career of a hoja, as is the way of Turkish mothers, but he became fascinated by the uniforms of the Ottoman Army officers whom he saw about the streets, as is the way of Turkish sons. In time he succeeded in passing the examinations for the military preparatory school at Salonica, where his mathematics teacher became so fond of him that he left off calling him by his given name of Mustapha and dubbed him Kemal, a Turkish name meaning rightness.

The military preparatory school at Salonica, the officers’ school at Monastir and the War Academy at Constantinople finally graduated him, a headstrong youth of 22, into the Army in 1902 with the rank of lieutenant. He had hardly reached the War Academy from Monastir before his adolescent mind became tainted by the political ferment with which the school was secretly permeated. A copy of the forbidden play Watan (The Fatherland) fell into his hands. Abdul Hamid had caused every known copy of it to be confiscated and burned; he had forced its author, despite his very high place in modern Turkish literature, to flee into exile; he had driven out of the capital every Ottoman subject whom his spies suspected of having read it. But Watan gave the young Kemal his first taste of Western ideas and made him secretly a Young Turk and a bitter opponent of Abdul Hamid, which at the time was a rather ridiculous thing to be.

Abdul Hamid was an able Easterner who maintained his grip on his country by such a system of espionage that the life and liberty of no Ottoman subject was safe who was remotely suspected of having heard of the French Revolution, a system of espionage which could not keep Western ideas out of the capital but which could, and did, keep them underground. The military tradition of the country continued to attract its best brains into the Army but the network of espionage which radiated from Yildiz Kiosk had the effect of giving the Army a sort of dual existence. On the surface, it continued to be a military organism, the trustee of an Eastern military tradition, but beneath the surface it became a ferment of forbidden Western ideas and the example of Nihilism in Russia which did much to spread the secret society craze, found no more fertile element to work upon than the yeasty mentality of the War Academy and the Military College of Medicine in Constantinople. So a secret political society which called itself the Society of Liberty was formed among the students at the War Academy and a similar society, the Society of Progress, was launched across the Bosphorus at the Military College of Medicine. But both were mere seeds sprouting underground in the rich and rotting soil of the capital. The country itself, outside the capital, was still a primitive Eastern land ruled by any man who proved himself strong enough to take it.

There were some 600,000 square miles in the old Ottoman Empire when Abdul Hamid came to the Throne. It was a compact area, lying at the junction of three continents. On the west, it ran deeply into the Balkans in Europe; on the east, it extended into Trans-Caucasia and down the frontier of Old Persia in Asia; on the south, it followed the Arabian coast of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and crossed to the African coast to include a waning sovereignty over Egypt. In the Balkans and Asia Minor, it consisted of a mountainous massif tilting up to the high plateau of Trans-Caucasia, its slopes dotted with isolated villages quite out of effective touch with any Government which might exist in Constantinople. Only the larger villages had a gendarmerie post, fewer still had a telegraph key to connect them with the provincial capital and throughout most of the country such Western contrivances as railroads were wholly unknown. With the country’s administration rigidly centralized in Constantinople, only the high prestige of the Padishah linked these scattered villages in their loosely organized provinces.

South of Asia Minor, the mountains dipped into a great desert arched by the Tigris-Euphrates basin on the east and by the green Syrian corridor on the west. Here, except in the Syrian corridor, the inaccessibility of the country from Constantinople and the nomadic nature of its sparse population gave the provincial administrations a degree of semi-independence which increased to complete independence down in the Arabian peninsula. The case of the Syrian corridor was exceptional, however. Compared with the distant Tigris-Euphrates basin, it was easily accessible from Constantinople; it was the home of a settled population with a very high culture of its own; and it was on the only line of land communication with the most venerable holy places of Islam, the Haram-esh-Sherif at Jerusalem, the Prophet’s Tomb at Medina and the sacred Kaaba at Mecca. The first of these lay at the southern end of the corridor and the other two amid the arid mountains which parallel the Arabian coast of the Red Sea.

Over these 600,000 square miles of country, the Sultan at Constantinople maintained the loosest sort of government, permitting his subjects to conduct their own affairs largely in their own ways and confining his administration to the task of keeping the trade routes open and the taxes collected, for under the Eastern tradition this was the whole duty of government. There were about 25,000,000 of his subjects, the overwhelming majority of them Moslems. The great Moslem reformation had swept the entire area centuries ago, but in accordance with the tolerance prescribed by the Prophet, Christians and Jews, while set aside in their own community organizations as dissenters, had been allowed to worship in their own ways. This was quite in accord with the loose Eastern idea of government which permitted every man to go his own way as long he paid his taxes regularly and refrained from disturbing the peace of the country. Even foreigners were likewise set apart under the Capitulations and were permitted to govern themselves under their own laws and customs.

On the surface, the Sultan’s administration of his country from Constantinople was very much like the King’s administration of his realm from London. Both the Ottoman Sultan and the British King were the heads of the dominant faiths in their respective countries. The Sultans had become Caliphs of Islam in 1517, although not all Moslems recognize them as such, just as the British Kings had become Defenders of the Faith in 1521, although not all Christians recognize them as such. The Sultan administered the spiritual affairs of his country through the Sheikh-ul-Islam and its temporal affairs through the Grand Vizier, just as the King in London administers the spiritual affairs of his realm through the Archbishop of Canterbury and its temporal affairs through the Prime Minister. The surface of both countries is feudal and mediaeval, and springs from the same source, but their resemblance in the reign of Abdul Hamid II stopped at the surface. Beneath the surface, England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, was in a state of transition from feudalism to the modern Western idea of democracy. A growing industrial plant was giving rise to trade unions and trade unions, exerting a growing influence on ideas of government, were drawing authority down to a popular electorate. Government was tightening its hold on the lowliest peasant and a civil service was being formed as a permanent body to which the increasing duties of government were entrusted. The country was becoming a powerful industrial unit, able to mobilize the vast new energies which machinery was opening up to it. It was embarking on manufacture and trade on such a scale as had never been dreamed of before. It was becoming the ganglion of a financial nervous system whose sensitive fibres covered the world. The old religious aspect of government was dwindling and in its place we saw a drilled and disciplined industrialism taking form beneath the feudal trappings which still constitute the surface of British government.

HUSSEIN RAUF BEY

Head of the Ottoman Delegation which signed the Mudros Armistice, October, 1918; Nationalist Party Leader in the Ottoman Chamber, January and February, 1920; arrested and deported to Malta, March 16, 1920; Minister of Public Works and Prime Minister of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921.

GENERAL RAFET PASHA

Minister of War and Interior of the First Grand National Assembly until November, 1921; Minister of War until January, 1922; Governor of Eastern Thrace since November, 1922.

But when Abdul Hamid II ascended the Ottoman Throne at Constantinople, religion was still the dominant factor in his primitive and loosely organized country. From its surface to its core, the Ottoman Empire was still Eastern. The Moslem community was still the governing community, a community with a profound self-respect and a knowledge of its own duties as well as of the deference which was due to it. The dissenting communities were exempt by Moslem law from the duty of preserving the peace and hence were able frequently to attain a degree of prosperity which many Moslems never knew. Since the bulk of the Sultan’s revenue was obtained from taxation provided for in Moslem law, foreigners, most of whom were Christians, were naturally exempt from the payment of any but secular taxes such as land tax and customs duties. We Westerners think of it today as a hopelessly mediaeval method of governing a country, but we sometimes forget that it permitted every man in the country a generous liberty which we in the West have lost. It exemplified the Eastern tradition at its best and if we in the West have won for ourselves the blessings of modern industrialism, we have paid for them with a considerable share of the liberties we once enjoyed. What larger liberties our new industrial democracies may yet confer upon us in exchange for the liberties they have taken from us, remain to be seen. We are still evolving our Western tradition of government, but at present it has taken from us feudalism and the open fields and given us in exchange democracy and the machine-shop.

Even before Abdul Hamid II came to the Throne, the Western tradition had begun to make itself felt in the old Empire, for it was obvious that Western industrialism would succeed eventually in generating such power that no non-industrial country could stand against it. The disturbing lure of the Western tradition was heightened by the religious element, for both Islam and Christendom, while divided within themselves, tend to draw together when menaced from without. The Islamic world found its political leadership in Constantinople, its scholastic leadership in Cairo and its juridical leadership in Mecca, and it was natural that it should resent any menace to the old Ottoman Empire within whose frontiers these three centers of leadership lay. At the same time, the memory of the great Moslem reformation had not yet passed from Christendom and it was natural that it should resent the fact of Moslem rule over Palestine and the inferior position necessarily accorded to Christian communities in a Moslem country. There were a number of these Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, but we shall confine ourselves here to the mention of the two of them which most vitally concern us—​the Rûm community which included all members of the powerful Orthodox Church who recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, and the Ermeni community or the Gregorian Church, a small but historic sect whose membership was limited to Armenians. Both these communities were exempt from the operation of Moslem law and subject instead to their own Christian laws. Both were officially established and represented in the Sultan’s Government, the Oecumenical Patriarch himself representing the Rûm community and the Ermeni community, since the seat of its Catholicos is in Trans-Caucasia, being represented by a Patriarch appointed for the purpose in Constantinople. These communities included most of the Christians who had survived the great Moslem reformation and on the whole they lived quite peaceably under Moslem rule. While their Moslem neighbors formed the governing class, they formed the trading class and in any feudal country trading is the occupation of the lower class. Still, their ablest men were frequently utilized by the Sultan in the government of the country and when they were so utilized, they were called upon quite without reference to their position as religious dissenters, just as Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews are utilized in the British Government without reference to their attitude toward the Church of England.

It was through the Greeks, as the Rûm community is called in the West, that the Western tradition of government was first introduced into the Ottoman Empire. They introduced it in its crudest form, a form in which the basis of the State was shifted from religion to race. The Greeks of Old Greece revolted successfully in the 1820’s and were immediately recognized by the West as an independent State. But a curious feature of their State was that it contained none of the provisions for reasonably secure dissent which had marked the Empire. Although the modern Greeks were without experience in the government of dissenters, the West gave them immediate and full control over their entire population without community organizations for dissenters or Capitulations for foreigners. We Christians appear to be characterized by this inability to tolerate dissent. Once we were burning dissenters at the stake and today, although we have won religious liberty for ourselves in the West, we have not even yet succeeded in looking upon all religions and all races with the broad tolerance which distinguishes Islam.

The revolt of the Old Greeks disturbed the peaceful relations which had existed between the Sultan and his Rûm community, but not as violently as might have been expected. In time it disturbed Moslem minds, for if this Western emphasis upon race were to gain any headway in the Empire, there was literally no end to the amount of disruption it could effect. As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country.

To the Greeks of Old Greece, the new Westernism offered the prospect of a reversal of the subordinate position they had occupied ever since the Moslem reformation had all but swept Christianity out of existence in the very land of its origin, and this prospect was heightened by the increasing territorial losses which the Ottoman Empire had suffered for two centuries. The same prospect made itself quickly felt throughout the West, a fact which may afford evidence that the unity of Christendom is greater than it appears to be on the surface, for surely there can be no greater contrast within the limits of a single faith than the contrast between the rich and decadent ritual of Orthodoxy on one hand and the Spartan simplicity of British Non-conformism and American Protestantism on the other.

But the challenge which the Greeks had found it comparatively easy to fling down, was far from easy for the governing Moslems of the Empire to pick up. In the first place, they had built the Empire to the specifications of their own Moslem law and in the second place, quite irrespective of any wishes they might have had in the matter, they bore a heavy responsibility to the rest of Islam for their faithful stewardship of that law. It had come to a time when the Empire was one of the very few Moslem States which were able to interpret Moslem law independently of external pressure, and Islam looked as it had never looked before to its political leadership in Constantinople and its juridical leadership in Mecca. The Sultan was the trustee of that venerable Eastern civilization which was Islam’s own. The Caliphate which Selim the Grim had lightly taken at Cairo in 1517, when Islam was powerful, was now in the days of Islam’s political decline, becoming an actual and heavy responsibility. The position was not a hopeless one, for Indian Moslems who comprise some of the best brains in Islam, had shown in their accommodation to the fact of British India, that Moslem law is not inflexible. But for Moslems both within and without the Empire, the challenge which the Old Greeks had flung down, produced a position about as serious as can be imagined.

The Ottoman Empire was becoming the cockpit of an enormous arena whose slopes extended from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. With the eyes of this worldwide audience upon them, a handful of Young Turks in Constantinople were beginning secretly to grope about after a way out of the apparent impasse in which they found themselves, after some formula which should adapt the Empire, not to the hothouse Westernism of the Old Greeks, but to the maturer and healthier Westernism of England. Luckily, the fact of India’s 70,000,000 Moslems had thrown the Caliph of Islam in Constantinople and the Emperor of India in London into intimate contact.

III

THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM

KEMAL’S ARREST AND HIS EXILE TO DAMASCUS—​HIS EVENTUAL RETURN TO SALONICA—​WHAT THE YOUNG TURKS WANTED—​THE RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM WHICH CONFRONTED THEM—​THE ROLE OF AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND EDUCATORS—​CHRISTENDOM VS. ISLAM.

The young Kemal had no sooner been graduated from the General Staff classes at the War Academy in Constantinople, than he engaged a small apartment in Stamboul to serve as the headquarters of the secret Society of Liberty. But an acquaintance whom he trusted and whom he permitted to sleep in the apartment at night on the plea that he was penniless, proved to be one of Abdul Hamid’s spies and Kemal was arrested. Having been questioned at Yildiz Kiosk, he was held for three months in a police cell and then exiled late in 1902 to a cavalry regiment in Damascus. Fresh from the War Academy, fired with the spirit of revolution and schooled in its technique, he lost no time at Damascus in getting into touch with other exiles from the War Academy and the Military College of Medicine in the capital. His colonel, Lutfi Bey, introduced him to the keeper of a small stationery shop in the Damascus bazaars who had been exiled from the College of Medicine, and the two of them secretly organized a branch of the Society of Liberty among the officers of the garrison. Under the supposed necessity of his military duties, Kemal was soon dispatched to Jaffa and Jerusalem where similar branches were organised, the Jaffa branch attaining considerable strength. He soon became convinced, however, that work in Syria was a mistake, that if the challenge of Westernism which Old Greece had flung down was ever to be picked up, it would have to be picked up where it had been flung down.

The political life of the Empire centered in Constantinople, but the espionage system which radiated from Yildiz had the capital so completely in its grip that revolutionary work there was subject to the greatest dangers. Outside of the capital, the life of the Empire was divided into two categories, that of the coast towns and that of the interior. The life of the former was in a sort of touch with the outside world, but the provincial capitals of the interior were quite self-sufficient. Smyrna, the greatest of all the coast towns, was in touch with all the outside world, but it was confronted in the interior by Konia whose historic dervish tekkes were a well of Islam undefiled. It was the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes at Konia who girded each new Caliph with the Prophet’s sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, and when proud Konia spoke, its voice was weighted with all the venerable conservatism of Islam.

But in Europe the coast town of Salonica was faced by no such conservatism in its hinterland. The raw turbulent races of the Balkans were already in a ferment of Westernism and in their grim way were preparing to disentangle themselves in the wake of the retreating Empire. Salonica, Uskub and Monastir were already seething with forbidden political ideas and if the Empire were ever to halt its retreat, it was here it would have to make its peace with Westernism. It was here that Old Greece had flung down its challenge and it was here that challenge would have to be picked up. Furthermore, if any force were to be mobilized to thrust Westernism upon Abdul Hamid in Constantinople, it was from Salonica that it would inevitably be launched.

Kemal accordingly abandoned his work in Syria and induced Lutfi Bey to give him leave under an assumed name to Smyrna, intending to make his way from there to Salonica. Fearing, however, that Constantinople would detect his presence in Smyrna, he went to Egypt instead and sailed from Alexandria to the Piraeus, whence he reached Salonica. Constantinople was coming more and more completely into the grip of Abdul Hamid. The General Staff was being periodically broken up and scattered to the four corners of the Empire, and the Military College of Medicine was finally locked up and abandoned. Hamid was beginning in similar fashion to tighten his grip on Salonica and, although Kemal remained there in strictest hiding, his presence was discovered after four months and he fled precipitately to Jaffa, where a convenient outbreak of “trouble” at Akaba on the Red Sea gave him an alibi which served to soothe the ruffled feelings of the capital. From Akaba he went back to Damascus and waited there until a change of War Ministers in Constantinople made it possible for him to request, and secure, a transfer to the Staff of the Third Army at Salonica. Back in Salonica again, he threw himself into the work of the secret Young Turkish organization.

A little group of Ottoman exiles in Paris of whom Ahmed Riza Bey was the leader, had discovered the formula which was to achieve that internal unity which the Empire had long enjoyed and without which no Empire could endure. It was the formula of Ottomanization. “A new Ottoman Empire one and indivisible” was their dream, an expression which they had borrowed from the French Revolution. “Oh, non-Moslem Ottomans—​Oh, Moslem Ottomans” was their program. All the races of the Empire were to be drawn together into “a new nation,” “a new Ottoman Empire,” whose military strength would enable it to halt its long retreat and put an end to interference in its internal affairs from without. To Riza Bey, Moslems and Christians alike were sufferers under Abdul Hamid’s Easternism. The restoration of the still-born Constitution of thirty years before, was his objective; with the Constitution restored, Moslems and Christians would enjoy alike the rights and the duties of Ottoman citizenship. Moslems would no longer suffer in silence. Christians would no longer lift their complaints throughout Europe and the United States. “We shall no longer be slaves, but a new Ottoman nation of freemen.”

This was the ideal which Riza Bey lifted up in the little revolutionary periodical Mechveret which was smuggled into every garrison in the Empire from his little flat in the Place Monge, near the Montmarte section of Paris. This was the ideal which young Turks like Enver and Niazi and Kemal were propagating, as they built up the secret organization which was to compel Abdul Hamid to restore the Constitution. Throughout the Empire, they had their agents in every garrison, converting both the officers and the enlisted personnel of Abdul Hamid’s Army, and assassinating hostile officers and men known to be spies. Small organizing committees had been planted in all the larger garrisons and directing committees were functioning in Constantinople, Salonica, Smyrna, Adrianople, Uskub and Monastir. Under the Eastern tradition of government, it was the Army which immediately mattered. Deprived of his Army, Abdul Hamid for the moment would be caught defenseless.

But in reality the Army was only the instrument of Abdul Hamid’s power. The substance of his power lay in Moslem law and in the unswerving devotion to it of the Old Turks. Strong simple men, these Old Turks were, men who knew nothing of the arts of debate, broadly tolerant of the usages of others and rigidly conservative of their own usages, men who took their starkly simple faith very seriously, in whose lives religion was still the dominating factor. They were found in the mosque schools rather than in the War Academy, in Konia rather than in Salonica, and in winning over the Army, the Young Turks were not touching the vast and silent body of conservative Old Turkish opinion which formed Abdul Hamid’s real strength. Here was a dead weight of usage which knew no necessity for change and which would have resisted to the end if it had. True, there was a section of Old Turkish opinion in the capital and the larger provincial centers, which disliked Abdul Hamid the Sultan, but Abdul Hamid the Caliph was quite another matter. Under the Caliph, Moslem and non-Moslem were not equal. Non-Moslems had been given far more tolerant treatment under the Caliph than religious dissenters had sometimes been given under Christian rule in the West, but the tolerance which the Caliph guaranteed them did not make them the equals of Moslems.

Whether Moslem law was really thus inflexible was obviously a matter for Moslems themselves to determine, but the record of India’s Moslems in accommodating themselves to British rule would have seemed to indicate otherwise. India’s Moslems, however, were in touch with the Western world as the Old Turks were not. The very fact of British rule, not to mention their long contact with Hindus, had given India’s Moslems a breadth of vision which Old Turkish opinion lacked. Old Turkish leadership embodied Islam at its best, but in the range of its experience it embodied Islam at its narrowest.

Meanwhile, the Rûm community whose relations with the Sultan-Caliph were still generally peaceful, had a very large source of strength outside the Empire. Had the Young Turks eventually proved successful in equalizing Moslem and non-Moslem in an Ottoman citizenry, the Rûm community might or might not have accepted the change and undertaken to work the newly Ottomanized Empire. But if the Young Turks failed, there were sources of outside strength available to the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople which would have broken the Old Turks by force and substituted a new regime which might be described as Old Greek. The old Byzantine Empire had been snuffed out as an independent political entity in 1453, but it still lived as an ecclesiastical, commercial and political force in the Oecumenical Patriarchate in the Phanar suburb of Stamboul. Its clergy still perpetuated its memory in the black cylindrical hats and the black robes of Orthodoxy, but for the time being their communicants wore the red fez which marked the Ottoman subject.

The King at Athens whence the challenge of Westernism had first been flung down to the Empire, had adopted the title of King of the Greeks and Orthodoxy dominated Old Greece with a degree of intolerance which had never marked Islam in the Empire. Orthodoxy had established its hold on Russia and Orthodox Russia had become the most powerful enemy Islam had ever known. Russia had acquired the protectorship of the Rûm community in the Empire and the great yellow-brown mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul had become the most sacred irredentum of the Orthodox. Russia sent thousands of pilgrims annually from Odessa to Palestine, and built a hospice on the Mount of Olives which commands Jerusalem in a military sense, with a tower which could not have been better adapted for the uses of a signal tower if it had been built for the purpose. Between Orthodoxy and Islam, there had arisen that state of bitter truce which was typified in the juxtaposition of a Russian church and a Turkish serai.

France which had divorced Church and State at home, still held the protectorship of the Katolik community in the Ottoman Empire. Italy whose relations with the Vatican at home had not always been friendly clung tenaciously to the rights of Italian Catholic orders in Palestine. Germany whose Lutherans had no specified rights in the Christian holy places and whose Kaiser had proclaimed himself the friend of Islam, had planted stronger colonies in Palestine and more buildings in Jerusalem than any other Western Power, and had built a hospice on the Mount of Olives “strengthened” by a wall which could hardly have been better adapted for the uses of military defense if it had been built for the purpose. So we had a city sacred to Moslems, Christians and Jews, dominated by Russian and German hospices on the Mount of Olives, strong fortress-like structures erected ad gloriam maiorem Dei. Meanwhile the Caliph of Islam continued to administer the city with fairness to the communicants of all three faiths, keeping his garrison down at Jaffa on the coast except on the occasions of such religious festivals as required its temporary presence in Jerusalem.

One expects from American Protestantism and British Nonconformism an attitude of aloofness from this sort of thing, for both have revolted against the use of the Church by the State. Both have revolted against that ritualism which marks the older forms of Christianity and have set up for themselves a form of service severely simple and aggressively evangelical. In accordance with the finest of its evangelical traditions, American Protestantism has carried on a long and vigorous missionary endeavor in the old Ottoman Empire, but actual contact with Islam in its own country has done much to make plain to the missionaries themselves the reasons for the great Moslem reformation which all but swept Christianity out of existence in the land of its origin. Whatever may have been thought in the United States as to the work in which American missionaries have been engaged in the Empire, that work has been directed towards the reformation of the decadent survivals of Christian worship. The missionaries themselves, as distinct from their supporters in the United States, have rightly observed that Christianity will not command the respect of Islam until Moslems have been shown a different type of Christian from that type to which they have been accustomed. The missionaries accordingly, beginning on one of the outermost fringes of Christendom, have devoted themselves to work largely among the Armenians and have drawn away from their Gregorian Church a new community which the Caliph in Constantinople recognized as the Prodesdan community.

But an important circumstance exists which is inevitably present in any missionary endeavor in an alien land and of which we sometimes need to remind ourselves. In actual practice, Islam is not only a religion but a form of civilization as well and, in the life of any devout Moslem, it would be very difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins. Precisely the same is true of American Protestantism. It might be simple enough to state the theology of American Protestantism, but that theology would fall far short of defining the actual missionary. For the missionary is not only a Protestant but an American as well, and in any alien country he embodies the American Protestant form of civilization. However rigidly he may seek to confine his work within the limits of religious teaching (and I am thoroughly convinced that the overwhelming majority of missionaries have so sought to confine their work in the Ottoman Empire), it is impossible for him not to be an American and a center of American ideas. In actual practice, it proved impossible for him not to stand as a center of Westernism in an Eastern country to which the application of Western ideas necessitated the utmost caution. The Armenians among whom most of the missionaries worked, were the farthest East of all the Ottoman peoples and among the non-Moslem communities they were the last to respond to the Western lure. For centuries they have lived generally in peace under the Caliph’s rule. Themselves an Eastern people, they had lived under their Eastern masters in the enjoyment of the autonomy of their community institutions. The terms under which the Ermeni community conducted its own affairs in its own way, were the only terms under which they could have enjoyed the degree of autonomy which they did enjoy, for they had a majority in no province[1] and the Western idea presupposes a majority as the first requisite of independence.

If Christian worship as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire was ever to command the respect of Moslems, in theory it was all to the good that the missionaries should draw their new Protestant community out of the old Gregorian Church. But that the Armenians should be exposed incautiously to Western ideas of nationalism was quite another matter. Events might have worked out differently had the missionaries been able to lay aside their Americanism, had they became Ottoman subjects themselves and confined their work to the propagation of Protestantism under Ottoman rule. But this sort of thing is not done. Without the steadying influence of responsibility to the Ottoman Government, they permitted their work to take them into the most intimate and delicate parts of the Ottoman structure. Their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was that of the Capitulations, their only responsibility was to their American supporters at home to whom the Ottoman Government was as far away as the moon.

Nobody has ever expected American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to become Ottoman subjects. Indeed, nothing could have made such a proceeding more ridiculous than the mere mention of it, and I am inclined to believe that in the very ridicule which its mention would have provoked, there is food for very sober reflection. Among imperialists, one can thoroughly understand such an attitude, for imperialism is based on force and prestige is the very necessary legend of the invincibility of Western force. But do we Christians also build on force?

Yet the history of Old Greece is by no means an isolated instance of intolerance in modern Christendom. We Christians have built a world in which only Christian nations are admitted to equality (the recent example of Japan to the contrary notwithstanding). Old Greece and Old Russia we have recognized as complete equals with us and if the Armenians had gained their independence, presumably we would have recognized Armenia also as an equal, although every American missionary who knows the Armenians in their own country knows what their abilities are. But forgetting that the true worth of a nation lies in character, we have never recognized Moslem nations as equals with us. We found in the Turks a people of integrity and tolerance, but because they refused to turn Christian, we have concurred in the modern Capitulations and have visited the butcher-legend upon them while exalting Greeks and Armenians upon an equally artificial martyr-legend. Among imperialists, one can understand the necessity of an inflexible attitude of superiority, but among Christians it corresponds neither to reality nor to the teachings of the First Christian.

“And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and set all others at nought: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get. But the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God, be Thou merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled; but he that humbleth himself shall be exalted…”

The missionaries remained Americans as well as Protestants. They administered Westernism as well as Protestantism to the Armenians, and the result of the administration of Westernism was bloodshed. The example of Nihilism in Russia lured the Armenians on into the secret society craze. Armenian revolutionary societies answered bloodshed with more bloodshed, and the tragedy began whose ghastly fruition we have seen.

Some of the missionaries recoiled from further missionary effort and opened schools and hospitals instead which they threw open impartially to all the races of the Empire. These schools were instituted solely for educational purposes and the largest of them offered as good a schooling as most American colleges in the United States offered. Their effort was to offer the best that Americans at home had and even in such incidentals as the architecture of their buildings, they made themselves as completely American as possible. Two of the largest of them were built high on the wooded shores of the Bosphorus and nobody can glance at them today without knowing at once that they are American. High above the suburbs of the old capital, they look as if they had been transported bodily from Chicago.

One can share our pride in our own devices and our own customs, one can sympathize in our desire to see other countries adapt themselves to American methods, but it was not the effort of these schools to strike a balance between American and Ottoman cultures. What these schools offered was out-and-out Americanism and their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was the sharply aloof attitude of the Capitulations. This was obviously a quite unusual proceeding in any supposedly independent foreign country and the only defense of it which can be made is that it was the customary thing among all Westerners in the Ottoman Empire. Behind the Capitulations, Western schools, Western missionaries, Western traders and a number of less creditable Westerners, alike found freedom to carry on their own affairs in their own way. The Capitulations provided Western imperialists with an opportunity which they were not likely to overlook and as long as imperialism flourished at Constantinople, American schools and American missionaries enjoyed a security which was well-nigh complete, however humiliating this state of things might have been to the Ottoman Government. Even today there are American educators and American missionaries in Constantinople to whom the word “imperialism” means nothing, who say in the dazed manner of men who have suddenly seen the very ground drop out from under their feet, “Imperialism has never bothered us….”

While Christendom stood thus gazing into the Ottoman cockpit, the Old Turks were not idle. Abdul Hamid had lifted up the imperilled Caliphate in Constantinople so that all of Islam could see it. As far back as 1889, Pan-Islamism had sought to bring the Shiah Moslems of Persia under the suzerainty of the Sunni Caliph and this scheme involved considerations so far-reaching in their scope that it finally brought about a project for a conference of all Islam at Mecca in 1902. But Abdul Hamid had his own imperialism to consider, made necessary though it was by the Eastern institution of the Caliphate, and his fear that his Arab populations would use the conference to air their secessionist program led him to quash the project. Pan-Islamism gave way to the new Pan-Turanian program under which Turkish and Tartar Moslems were to shelve the Arabs who had given Islam to the world, the Turkish tongue was to supplant Arabic as the sacred tongue of Islam, and all Arabic words were to be rooted out of the Turkish language. This proved too large a morsel for conservative Islam to swallow, and Pan-Turanianism prospered no more than Pan-Islamism. It did live, however, as a political project for welding the Tartar peoples against Orthodox Russia, for the Turkish ancestry runs deeply into Central Asia.

Much of this Islamic maneuvring was the work of sophisticated Islamic capitals. Old Turkish opinion itself continued to place its simple reliance in the institution of the Caliphate which had now become the repository of the most venerable of Moslem usages. To the more thoughtful of the Old Turks, it was a matter of profound re-assurance that the British Empire contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, and that the Emperor of India in London was in friendly contact with the Caliph. Those were the days when the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Constantinople was one of the last independent interpreters of Moslem law, and when the British Empire proudly called itself the greatest Moslem Power in the world.

But King Edward’s first visit to Austria in 1903 disquieted Moslem opinion both in the Ottoman Empire and in India. The Emperor of India was growing impatient. His further visits in 1905 and 1907 resulted in a program of reforms in gendarmerie, finances, judiciary, public works and the Army, which were to be imposed from without upon the rigidly conservative Empire. To the Young Turks who had been working feverishly ever since the first visit to Austria in 1903, preparing to attempt the imposition of their really fundamental reforms from within, his program was only a step toward the final break-up of the Empire. Already, instead of securely bridging the gap between East and West the Empire creaked and cracked as though presently it would tumble into the widening chasm.

Late in 1907, the Emperor of India’s patience ran out. In the spring of 1908, Edward VII touched a match to the carefully laid gun-powder of Young Turkish revolution which lit the Empire with the flare-up of 1908. Ten years later, the blackened ruin of a once noble structure disappeared from history and the gap between East and West yawned wide and empty.

[1] My authority for this statement is “Reconstruction in Turkey,” a book published for private distribution in 1918 by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the predecessor of the Near East Relief. “The estimate of their (the Armenians’) number in the empire before the war,” says Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, “ranges from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in any vilayet.”

IV

THE RUSSIAN MENACE

HOW RUSSIA AND GREAT BRITAIN FOUGHT ACROSS THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE—​HOW RUSSIA ENTERED TRANS-CAUCASIA AND CAME INTO CONTACT WITH THE ARMENIANS—​HOW IT APPROACHED THE BACK OF BRITISH INDIA THROUGH CENTRAL ASIA—​HOW GREAT BRITAIN FINALLY SURRENDERED IN THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907.

Old Russia was a great Eastern absolutism which had looked upon the modern West and faithfully copied the methods of its imperialism. These it utilized in its search for a secure outlet to the sea. It had reached the sea at Archangel on the Arctic, but Archangel is blocked by ice for nine months of the year. It had reached the sea along the Baltic shores, but its Baltic ports were as landlocked as the Lake ports in the United States. The Baltic was commanded by Germany and Germany in turn was commanded by Great Britain. It had touched salt water along the Black Sea, but its Black Sea ports were commanded by the Ottoman Empire astride the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.

It was unable to rectify its position in the Baltic without precipitating a European war and European wars are not only expensive but to Eastern Powers like Russia are sometimes disastrous. It spent the better part of a century in trying to solve its Black Sea problem by hewing back the Ottoman Empire and attempting to fasten its control over the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople. But the Straits had already become the most vulnerable spot in the armor of the British Indian sea lines and the Ottoman Sultan was accordingly backed by all the influence which the great British Embassy in Constantinople could exert.

Thus when Russia compelled the Sultan to pay its price for stopping Mohammed Ali’s drive up the Syrian corridor from Egypt in 1832, Great Britain did not hesitate to quash Russia’s treaty with the Sultan. And when the issues which the quashing of that treaty had left unsettled, were revived twenty years later, Great Britain did not hesitate to enter the Crimean War to hold Russia back from any further approach to the Straits. And when twenty years still later, the Mother Slav State, following the lead of the South Slavs of Serbia, declared war on the Sultan and smashed its way into San Stefano in the very suburbs of Constantinople, the British Navy did not hesitate to steam boldly up the Straits and anchor off the Ottoman capital. For if the Russian Army had been permitted to occupy it, the British sea lines from India might easily have been thrown back to the long Cape route and another Trafalgar necessitated in order to settle again the question of the command of the Mediterranean, a question which the British Navy did not propose to re-open.

So we reach that titanic struggle between two outside imperialisms which kept the Ottoman Empire tied hand and foot but still alive. Against Russia, Great Britain made common cause with the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor of India and the Caliph of Islam stood together. It is our misfortune that the Church of England was not able to avail itself of the position which its Defender then occupied, to discover what common ground existed on which the two great monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam might co-operate. Success in such a task would have placed all of us, Christians and Moslems alike, heavily in its debt. But Englishmen to this day have never discovered the full breadth and depth of the meaning of British India.

Despite the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, Great Britain not only kept the Sultan in command of the Straits but even kept the Black Sea neutral. East of the Black Sea, however, the British writ did not run. Here between the Black Sea and the Caspian is the ancient barrier of the Caucasus Range, below which the Trans-Caucasian plateau forms a bridge both to the back of the Ottoman Empire and to Persia. Below the blue peaks of the Caucasus Range lay Tiflis, the capital of the Georgian Kingdom midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with the Turkish village of Batum on the Black Sea shores and the Tartar village of Baku on the Caspian. Turks and Tartars were both Moslem, but the old Georgian Kingdom was Orthodox and, extending in a broad belt down through the Ottoman provinces in eastern Asia Minor were most of the Armenians.

Expanding Russia was not long in bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range. More than a century ago, it swallowed the Georgian Kingdom, snuffed out the eight little Tartar chieftains around Baku and found itself in contact with the Armenian Catholicos and the eastern fringes of the Ermeni community in the Ottoman Empire. In further accord with its policy of undermining that Empire, it availed itself of the presence of the Armenians in the usual imperialist manner and, in its war of 1876 against the Sultan, it drove its way deeply into his eastern provinces, transferring the Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty as it went. Its objective was the great bay of Alexandretta on the Mediterranean which was to free it of its Black Sea jail, a scheme which Great Britain recognized by secretly taking over the “administration” of Cyprus from the Sultan. The treaty of San Stefano stopped the Russian advance hundreds of miles short of Alexandretta and in front of the new Ottoman frontier, Russia developed Kars into a great fortress as a base for its further advance toward Alexandretta when opportunity offered.

Having seized Batum from the Sultan, Russia continued the consolidation of Trans-Caucasia under its own provincial governors and stamped the entire region with the unmistakable imprint of a Russian economic regime. It pierced the barrier of the Caucasus Range with a military highroad to Tiflis, which it prolonged as a railroad to Kars and the Armenian center of Erivan. It drove its railways past the east end of the Caucasus Range to make a Russian railhead and a Russian Caspian port of Baku, around which lay one of the greatest oil-fields in the world. It developed the village of Batum into a fortified Russian port on the Black Sea and with its Trans-Caucasian railroads from Batum via Tiflis to Baku, it made Batum the gate to the Caspian for all the Western world. Long before, it had driven the Persians from the Caspian, making a Russian lake of that inland sea, and Russian steamship lines from Baku to Enzeli, the port of Teheran, now made Batum the world’s gate to the Persian capital.

From the Trans-Caucasian bridge, the Russian march toward the sea forked into two directions. The direction in which the Russian Armies of 1876 turned, was toward Alexandretta on the Mediterranean. The other direction was indicated later when a railroad was carried from Kars to the Persian frontier, whence it was to be continued when requisite to Tabriz and Teheran. This might have exposed the Persian Gulf to Russia, but the Government of India had already made the Gulf more British than the Mediterranean. The Gulf had become a land-locked British lake whose narrow door-way into the Indian Ocean was dominated by the potential British naval base of Bunder Abbas. If Russia had succeeded in reaching the Gulf through Persia, a Russian port on its shores would have been imprisoned by Bunder Abbas, as the Russian Black Sea ports were already imprisoned by Constantinople and the Russian Baltic ports by the Sound. For the time being, the Russian Trans-Caucasian railhead on the north-west frontier of Persia awaited events.

East of the Caspian, however, a century of Russian advances down across the Moslem populations of Central Asia had brought the Russian frontiers all the way down to Persia and Afghanistan. Russian rule throughout this vast area had been as thoroughly consolidated under Russian provincial governments as had the Trans-Caucasian bridge. In time, a line of railway was driven from St. Petersburg via Moscow and Orenburg to Tashkent at the back of Afghanistan, whence it linked with the Trans-Caspian Railway from Krasnovodsk, opposite Baku on the Caspian. Direct communication was thus afforded from St. Petersburg and from the Trans-Caucasian country to Persia and Afghanistan. With a Russian resident ruling in the ancient Moslem capital of Bokhara, a spur had been dropped from the Trans-Caspian line at Bokhara City to Termez on the northern frontier of Afghanistan whence a caravan road threads its way up into the passes of the Hindu Kush and down again to Kabul and the Khyber Pass. From the Merv oasis, also on the Trans-Caspian line, another spur had been dropped to Kushklinsky Post on the Afghan frontier whence the traditional Herat-Kandahar-Kabul road leads to the Khyber Pass and the fat plains of India.

This long loop of line from St. Petersburg and the Caspian to the back of Afghanistan traversed territory securely held by Russian arms and the British had no contact with it, except the frontal contact of their railheads on the southern frontier of Afghanistan, i. e., within India itself. Except for diplomatic exchanges between London and St. Petersburg, the Government of India had no means of making itself felt at Bokhara City and the Merv oasis. Indeed, Russia had made even the Afghan capital of Kabul an intermittent nightmare in India. Long ago, Russian intrigue in the Afghan capital had compelled the East India Company in 1839 to dispatch an expeditionary force to occupy Kabul and unseat its Amir, an expeditionary force which found Afghanistan so hostile that it was wiped out of existence in such a disaster as British India has never known before or since. Again in 1879, Russian resentment over the Congress of Berlin led to the dispatch of a Russian mission to Kabul and when a British mission was turned back at the frontier, the Government of India sent a second expeditionary force to set up a new Amir at Kabul. Intrigue at Kabul became Russia’s favorite reply to any strain in Anglo-Russian relations, but it was not in Afghanistan that the real weight of Russian expansion finally made itself felt. Its construction of the Trans-Caspian railway had given it a base at Askabad on Persia’s north-east frontier, for an advance down across Persia to the Indian Ocean outside Bunder Abbas. Here was a project which at one stroke would not only free Russia of its inner Black Sea jail and its outer Mediterranean jail, but would enable it to create a second Vladivostok on the Indian Ocean which would take the British Indian sea lines in the flank and cut the Indian peninsula bodily out of the British Empire.

Russia now projected a railway from Askabad to the Persian provincial capital of Meshed and thence south past the Seistan, reaching the Indian Ocean presumably at Chahbar or Gwatter Bay. Having filled the Persian capital of Teheran with Russian intrigue and having thoroughly Russianized Meshed, Russia now began to close the Seistan gateway through which the great British Indian fortress of Quetta flanked the route of its projected railway. Belgian customs officials in the employ of the Russianized Persian Government, Russian “scientific” missions and a strange “plague cordon” began mysteriously to break up the caravans which were moving into and out of the Seistan.

In the meantime, the Government of India had drawn the western frontier of its Baluchistan province to include Gwatter Bay and had made a British railhead of Chahbar. Further than this, it was difficult to go effectively. There was no subject population in the south of Persia to subvert from its rulers in the north, as was the case with the Arabs in the adjacent Ottoman Empire. Nor could the great British Legation at Teheran bolster up the weak Persian Government as a buffer against Russia, for the Persian capital lay far away to the north in the very shadow of Russia. Ever since that day a century ago when Russia burst the barrier of the Caucasus Range, a day whose dire meaning for India was only beginning to be realized, Teheran had been exposed to Russia. It lay now only 200 miles from Enzeli on the Russianized Caspian and some 1,600 miles from Quetta inside the Seistan, a caravan route so arduous as to be out of the question. The Government of India’s only road to Teheran was the 800-mile highroad via Bagdad from Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.

The situation was a perilous one, however. The Cairo-Calcutta line of the great British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme would be cut in Persia by Russia’s projected route from Askabad to the Indian Ocean. The Government of India had envisaged a line extending from Constantinople to Kabul as an outworks in front of its Cairo-Calcutta line. That Constantinople-Kabul line was the common interest of the Ottoman Caliph and the Emperor of India, but its conception was hopelessly tardy. It had been broken a century ago when the East India Company was fretting about France, and Russia was bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range to occupy the Trans-Caucasian bridge; for in any Constantinople-Kabul line, the Caucasus Range is a frontier as indispensable to the Government of India as the Hindu Kush itself.

Even at Constantinople, the accustomed rule of the British Embassy had been supplanted by the rising influence of the German Embassy. A formidable new German enemy was already moving in force along the roads to British India. Great Britian was losing ground both in Constantinople and in Persia, which had now become the most vulnerable spots in its very vulnerable Indian Empire. The Czar was on his way to become the ruler of the world, and the British Government surrendered. At the price of a heavy retreat in Persia, it purchased a truce with its Russian enemy and faced about to meet its new German enemy.

That truce with Russia was the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which enabled King Edward to meet the Czar at Reval in 1908 to conclude the Anglo-Russian entente against Germany. Under the terms of this historic Treaty, Russia abandoned Afghanistan to the Government of India, and Persia was divided into three “zones of influence,” the northern half of the country to Russia, most of the arid southern half a neutral zone, and a small triangle in south-east Persia to the Government of India, a triangle which was drawn to include all of Persia’s open seaboard from Bunder Abbas to Baluchistan, including Chahbar, Gwatter Bay and any other potential ports which Russian surveyors might have staked out. This division of the country was accompanied by mutual Russian and British engagements “to respect the integrity and independence of Persia,” a clause which gives us quite the correct imperialist touch.

The purpose of the two signatories in drawing this historic Treaty was “to settle by mutual agreement different questions concerning the interests of their States on the Continent of Asia,” and this they did with conspicuous success. They began by breaking Persia. They continued by breaking the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate of Islam. They have finished by breaking Christendom.

Possibly in the new humility and the broader tolerance in which Christendom will one day emerge from its present collapse, we shall all be the better for it.

V

THE YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION

“ON THE MORNING OF JULY 23, 1908”—​THE OLD TURKISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND ITS DEFEAT—​HOW ISLAM AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES NULLIFIED THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM—​KEMAL’S BREAK WITH ENVER AND HIS RETIREMENT FROM POLITICS—​THE BALKAN WARS AND NATIONALISM.

Three months after King Edward’s visit to Reval in the spring of 1908, the frightened Young Turks launched their revolution with Niazi Bey’s mutiny at Resna, fifteen miles from Monastir. On the morning of July 23, 1908, the house walls of Monastir were placarded with mottoes in Turkish—​“Death or Liberty,” “The Nation and Liberty,” “Freedom and the Constitution.” Enver Bey proclaimed the Constitution at Salonica. Telegrams from Salonica invited the Sultan to choose between the Constitution and war. The officers of his Army were Young Turks to a man. Even the reliable Anatolian regiments refused to march against the rebels. Abdul Hamid surrendered. Parliamentary government with free and equal suffrage for all the races of the Empire, was proclaimed from the Throne. Abdul’s exiles came trooping home to find Moslem hojas and Orthodox clergy embracing each other and shouting for the Padishah. The magic of that Western word “Constitution” blended all the Empire in a transport of joy. The Young Turks were swept into the Government on a wave of rejoicing.

FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA

Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.

ALI FETHY BEY

Nationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the Second Grand National Assembly.

But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an Anglo-Russian entente, its end was only a matter of time. Already the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two communions in Constantinople.

The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with shouts of “Sheriat!” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies—​two Turks, a Christian and a Jew—​presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government. And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its headquarters at Salonica.

Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more tightly to their community institutions. The application of Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as unpalatable to the Rûm and Ermeni communities as to the dominant Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place their own Christian theocracies.

Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and the revolution degenerating for the time being into a mere coup d’etat. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War. Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as military attache where he joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to Bulgaria.

The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire, its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia, preparing at Athens for still another war.

Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made their Rûm community more than ever tenacious of its institutions, and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the yellow-brown dome of the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul.

An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into contact with Russian Orthodoxy and it was only a matter of time until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in the Russian claim to the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts of the Dardanelles.

The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks, while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.

There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish. It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the Ministry of Evkaf supplied funds to start a national library and to subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds. It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the Slavic Sokols and the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “I am a Turk, my race and language are great.” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam, the Empire still obscured and confused it.

The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raider Hamidieh during the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by private subscription before an order could be placed with British yards for two new battleships.

Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.

The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople, with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition, the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the Liberal Entente Party, but it had a poor time of it.

VI

GERMANY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

BRITISH POLICY AT CONSTANTINOPLE—​THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CONCESSIONS—​RUSSIA’S VETO AND THE CHANGE OF ROUTE—​THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF ALEPPO—​GERMANY AND ISLAM—​THE BRITISH INDIAN FRONTIER IN SERBIA—​THE GREAT WAR.

I must make it plain that we are not here concerned with any aspect of Germany west of the Balkans. The scene of this narrative lies east of the Balkans and, insofar as it is possible to do so, we shall restrict it to its proper locale. Although there was no German tradition in Constantinople comparable to its British and French traditions, Germany’s highway to the East crossed at the Straits the favorite Russian route to the Mediterranean and hence afforded to the Ottoman Government the same protection from its Russian enemy as the British had once afforded. Nor was the German attraction solely diplomatic. The Bagdad railway scheme afforded the Empire an opportunity for that internal economic development which the Capitulations had made it impossible for the Government itself to finance.

The British had not only supported the Government in Constantinople in order to bar Russia from the Straits, but incidentally in order to bar western Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines. But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy. Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to confine western Europe’s communication with India to the sea lines which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight facilities to India.

But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the land lines toward India were at last uncovered. In 1888, the Ottoman Government transferred to a syndicate formed by the Deutsche Bank of Berlin a 56-mile railway from Haidar Pasha, a suburb of Constantinople, to Ismid on the Sea of Marmora, and accompanied the transfer with a concession to extend the line some 300 miles due east via Eski-Shehr to Angora. In the acceptance of this transfer and the exploitation of the concession which accompanied it, Germany began to free itself of the Suez Canal.

This concession was utilized by a German group calling itself the Ottoman Anatolia Railway Company, which soon received a further concession for the construction of a 230-mile extension of the Angora line to Caesarea. The new concession contemplated still further concessions through Sivas and Diarbekr to Mosul and thence down the Tigris to Bagdad, a route which would have cut Russia’s projected route from Kars to Alexandretta. Russia promptly vetoed it and the Caesarea concession was dropped. A second concession had been received at the same time, however, for a 269-mile line from Eski-Shehr on the Ismid-Angora line to Konia, and Russia’s veto now changed the Konia line from a feeder line to the main Bagdad line. The necessary concessions for its extension from Konia through the Taurus Mountains and on to Bagdad and Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf were granted in 1903 to the Imperial Bagdad Ottoman Railway Company, which took over the franchises of the original Ottoman Anatolia Company.

With railways and railway concessions in its possession for a 1,800-mile line from Haidar Pasha to Basra, the Bagdad Railway Company now compared in its high political significance with the late East India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta. Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled. Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south, all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided, however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed, was only a two days’ march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a half-day’s steaming from Cyprus, which the British had taken secretly from the Sultan in 1876. Aleppo became the most vulnerable spot in the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme, protected in case of war only by the fact that prior Russian and French claims upon it might tie the British hands. Here the Bagdad Railway was to effect a junction with the French railways which drop down the Syrian corridor to Damascus, and the Caliph’s inland Hejaz Railway dropped from Damascus down the back of the Syrian corridor to Medina whence it overlooked Mecca. Had the British been free in case of war to occupy Aleppo from Cyprus, the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme would not only have been cut, but the Ottoman Empire would have fallen at once into two parts and ultimately into three. Deprived of the use of the sea, Constantinople would have been cut off from Syria and the Hejaz immediately and its communication with Mesopotamia would have been driven north into the heart of Asia Minor where the inevitable Russian advance from Trans-Caucasia would have imperilled it. Aleppo became the Achilles’ heel of the Empire, pointed out to all who know their maps by the tell-tale finger of Cyprus.

When finally adopted, the route of the Bagdad Railway began at Konia on the Anatolian plateau, 3,300 feet above sea level, and well back into the hinterland approached the Taurus whose peaks rear their snow-clad summits against the sky at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Once through the Taurus, its route descended to the low plain of Cilicia and rose again to surmount the 5,000-foot Amanus Range which rims off the top of the Syrian corridor. Thence it dropped to the 1,200-foot level of Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was easy.

Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of 1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system. It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more closely to the economic needs of the countries through which they pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic needs of native Governments.

However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development of the East, and this is precisely what it did not receive. Germany backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.

As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German railhead, it would have cut the Government of India’s only line of communication with Teheran and would have menaced at Basra the Cairo-to-Calcutta line of its great Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme.

The Bagdad Railway, however, did not expose itself to British diplomatic sabotage as France’s canal across the Egyptian isthmus had been exposed, for the British Embassy was no longer supreme at Constantinople. It was in Serbia that the German highway to the East crossed the Russian line to the Adriatic, and Austria-Hungary was still seeking a pretext to clear the remnant of the South Slavs from Germany’s path. In Serbia lay the frontier of British India. Over the Serbian criss-cross, Great Britain joined Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, France joined the two of them after the Agadir crisis of 1911 in Morocco, and Europe was divided into two armed camps, a division which pivotted on Serbia.

Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911, Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia. By 1914, Great Britain had withdrawn its objection to the Bagdad Railway and had agreed to support no rival railway, exception being made for a Cairo-Basra line along the Cairo-Calcutta leg of its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle. At the same time, negotiations were nearing completion between France and Germany, but all these agreements lightly disappeared when the long-expected bugle call finally sounded out of Serbia on June 28, 1914, and away to the north, the east and the west, the drums began their answering roll.

VII

CHRISTENDOM AND THE WAR

The effect of the war of 1914-18 upon modern Christendom would not concern us here if the scene of this narrative were not a Moslem country to which Christendom, beginning with Old Greece and running west to the country towns of the United States, has adopted an attitude of superiority. I do not need to say that the subject of Christianity itself is very far removed from the realm of controversy, but its communicants are human beings and are not only subjects of legitimate controversy but of entirely healthy controversy.

Moslems are usually hospitable to all foreigners and they frequently respect missionaries personally. They use mission hospitals and occasionally they avail themselves of the advantages of foreign schools. But for missionaries as Christians, engaged in spreading a gospel of peace while their contemporaries at home invent poison gas, Moslems have neither understanding nor respect. In their Christian capacities, missionaries are tolerated as long as they do not offend.

The older missionaries know these things. They know that in their effort to spread Christianity, their greatest enemies have been the Christians, and most of their work in the Ottoman Empire has been an effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the word Christian is an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.

The missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of Islam has been under the Christians’ control for four years and the sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity “in principle” rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians themselves, from British Foreign Secretaries down to the humblest Greek dive-keepers in Galata, have been converted to the practice of Christianity, will the missionaries gain the understanding and respect of Islam.

I am attempting to speak plainly upon a subject which can be no more than suggested here for it carries us quickly outside the proper scope of this narrative, but it is necessary to touch upon it if our subject is to be plumbed to its depths. I believe that American Protestantism and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them and that that task lies nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.

VIII

THE WAR AND ISLAM

KEMAL HURRIES BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND RAUF BEY ASKS THE BRITISH EMBASSY TO FINANCE NEUTRALITY—​ENVER ENTERS THE WAR AND PERSIA ATTEMPTS TO FOLLOW HIM—​THE HARD POSITION OF ISLAM IN INDIA.

Kemal left his post as military attache at Sofia immediately on the outbreak of war in Europe, and hurried back to Constantinople, still a young officer but an officer with a brilliant past, a hatred of the Enver Government which was both personal and political, and a prestige in the Army comparable to the prestige in the Navy which Hussein Rauf Bey had won in the raider Hamidie. The probability that Russia would participate in the European war had afforded the Enver Ministry the opportunity it sought to achieve its Pan-Turanian project, to carry the Crescent and Star to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province of Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and of the Russian provinces in Central Asia. Fired by the same crude Westernism as had turned the eyes of the Old Greeks to the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople, the Enver Ministry had envisaged a Greater Ottoman Empire which, while maintaining the Caliphate out of deference to Old Turkish and Islamic opinion, would “liberate” 40,000,000 “Turks” then “groaning under the heel of the Russian oppressor” and would emerge from the war a Great Power extending from the Balkans to Bokhara. The Arabs to the south would be hammered into that respect for the Caliphate which they had once manifested, but the Turks’ real future lay away to the east. So the Enver Ministry concluded its secret agreement with Germany, the British Government seized the two Ottoman battleships which were building in British yards, and Germany was soon to run the Goeben and Breslau into the Straits to take their places.

To Kemal and Rauf, the latter of whom had brought his crew home from one of the two seized battleships in England, Enver’s Pan-Turanianism was a program which the Empire could not afford. Both of them were Westerners, but their Westernism was hard and practical and close to the ground. Within the limits imposed upon them by the Caliphate, which made the Empire the leader of Islam, they held that the Turk’s first duty was to his own country. Russia having entered the war in Europe, a defense of the eastern frontier would be necessary but the Empire’s internal condition made it essential that events in Europe should not be permitted to carry it further than a state of armed neutrality. In the country’s bankrupt condition, the Enver Ministry had secured the promise of German loans on condition that it participated in the war against Germany’s enemies, and Rauf went to the British Embassy immediately on his return to Constantinople, to say that payment by the British Government for the two battleships it had seized would strengthen the hands of the Opposition by enabling it to finance mobilization on the eastern frontier without resort to German money.

In this, Rauf spoke not only for the political Opposition but for the strong British and French traditions in Constantinople to which Enver’s course was a source of genuine grief. Rauf says, however, that the British Embassy made him no reply. To quote his precise words: “England made every effort to get Honduras, Paraguay and Greece into the war on the side of the Allies, but for us she had no word.” The Emperor of India and the Caliph had parted company in 1907. Great Britain remained true to its commitments to Russia. Enver’s Pan-Turanianism may have been impractical or not, but to any Ottoman Government, whether headed by Enver or Rauf, there were only two courses in the face of Russia—​either to defend itself or to cease to exist. The Enver Government secured its loans from Germany on the only terms on which it could get them and if those terms involved war against Great Britain, it illy becomes British statesmen to complain. It was not the Enver Government which drew up the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

German naval officers hustled the Enver Government to a break by bombarding Odessa and dropping the mined nets which closed the Straits, thus banging and bolting the Black Sea gate to Russia as their own Navy in the north had already banged and bolted Russia’s Baltic gate. The Caliph proclaimed a Holy War against all Christians except Germans and Austrians, a proclamation which presumably was intended to wreck British India but which had the immediate effect of wrecking Tokatlian’s restaurant in Pera instead. The Enver Government abrogated the humiliating Capitulations and proclaimed its war aims: “Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us toward the destruction of our Russian enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural frontier to our Empire, which should include and unite all branches of our race.” Enver himself took command on the eastern frontier and his main body crossed into Russian Trans-Caucasia, while a smaller force crossed the Persian frontier toward Tabriz. Ahead of him in both directions lay large Turkish-speaking populations, and behind him in Constantinople the Opposition had been scattered. Rauf, the hero of the Hamidie, was eventually exiled to a volunteer command in Persia, a great seaman fighting with the infantry. Kemal was eventually sent to the Dardanelles, possibly in the hope that a British shell might put an end to him.

By this time, Austria-Hungary had smashed Serbia out of the way and both sides now poured out money and intrigue to win over Greece and Bulgaria. But Greece refused to budge without the promise of Constantinople which was in course of being promised to Russia, and Bulgaria demanded Macedonia. Victories, however, are the most telling arguments when Balkan Governments are sitting on the fence and Great Britain launched its Dardanelles campaign in 1915, possibly to open the road to Russia, possibly to enter Constantinople itself, possibly to impress Greece and Bulgaria, possibly with all three objects. It was here, in holding up the British before Anaforta, that Kemal became a military hero in Germany and would have become the hero of his own country if Enver had not suppressed the story of Anaforta in Constantinople. Two years later, when it did leak out in the C. U. P. year-book for 1917, Enver confiscated the entire remaining issue of the year-book and had it destroyed. The British used to tell a story of Kemal’s defense of Anaforta by way of showing that the Turks were better soldiers than the Germans. According to their version, Kemal at Anaforta telephoned his German superior, Limon von Sanders, for permission to attack immediately. Von Sanders refused permission and Kemal, tearing the telephone from the wall in a fit of anger, attacked on his own responsibility and won. The story is doubtless false, but it indicates the sort of legend which was growing up around a soldier who was, firstly, a Turk and who, secondly, looked upon Germans and British with equal coldness.

The ending of the British Dardanelles expedition, however, failed to impress either Greece or Bulgaria. It did impress Constantinople and when Ali Fethy Bey, Ottoman Minister at Sofia, not only supplied Bulgaria with the necessary promise of Macedonia but made over to it at once that bend in the Maritza River in which Karagatch, a suburb of Adrianople, lies, Bulgaria came in and the Enver Government found itself on the crest of a great wave of popularity. The Berlin-to-Bagdad highway was now complete and on the afternoon of January 17, 1916, the first express rolled into Constantinople direct from Berlin, while Sirkedji Station rang with cheers.

British defeat at the Dardanelles was a severe blow to the legend of British invincibility, and the promise of friendship to Islam which the Kaiser had made at Damascus in 1898 now offered a possible means of escape from the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Enver Government had shown the way out and Persia which had felt the weight of the 1907 Treaty most heavily, was not long in following. The German Legation in Teheran helped it along with much talk of Kaiser Hajji Wilhelm Mohammed II and that sort of thing, but when the Persian Parliament fled from Teheran in 1915 to declare war against the Allies at Kum, the Russian and British Ministers hastened to the Palace and threatened to complete their partition of the country the moment the Shah left the capital. Thereafter the Shah remained a prisoner in Teheran, while Russians, British, Persian Nationalists and Turks fought across his chaotic country.

As for Afghanistan, the war found the Court at Kabul divided into two parties, one led by the Amir’s stepmother Bibi Halima which backed him in sticking loyally to the British, and the other led by his younger brother Nasrullah Khan which demanded that he seize the chance of powerful alliance in breaking out of the Anglo-Russian vise. Nasrullah’s party grew rapidly, despite the fact that the Amir fought it with every resource at his command. He confronted it personally when in November, 1914, he strode onto Kabul bridge in royal state and, holding the Koran in his hand, declaimed to his enemies: “These feringhis (British) are our friends. They are my friends. I the Light of Faith, I, the Torch of the Nation, have decreed, and now repeat my decree, that no subject of mine shall lift a finger against the feringhis.”

As for Islam in India, its position became one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. Its Emperor in London was at war with its Caliph in Constantinople. As the result of the 1907 Treaty, its temporal and its religious allegiances were thrown into direct opposition. Its leaders attempted to harmonize this contradiction in its loyalties by drawing a distinction between its Caliph and the Ottoman Sultan, by conceiving of the war as existing between its Emperor in London and the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, and by demanding an undertaking from the Government of India that the war involved purely temporal objectives and was not concerned in any degree whatsoever with the Caliphate. The Government of India accordingly gave an undertaking that the question of the Caliphate was one for Moslem opinion alone to decide, and on this explicit understanding Moslem troops were enlisted in India for service against “our brother Turk.”

This use of Indian Moslems against the Ottoman Sultan, one of the most delicate of operations, formed one of the outstanding British successes of the war, but Englishmen at home have never succeeded in discovering that British India exists. Forgetful of the fact that the British Empire was “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” that it contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, British statesmen in England publicly referred to Salonica as “the portal of Christianity” and to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force which later advanced into Palestine, as “Crusaders.” At a moment when the Government of India was making every effort to give its vast country a sense of security, such references in England made Islam in India instantly alert for its Caliphate.

IX

THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915

ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH—​WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED—​AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS—​RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS—​GREAT BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY—​ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES—​THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS.

When the Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave birth.

In themselves, the Capitulations dated back to pre-Ottoman days when foreigners were accustomed to being governed under their own laws and usages wherever they happened to live. In the golden days of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultans confirmed them and as Ottoman prestige declined, an increasing number of Capitulatory rights grew up outside the specific rights originally stipulated in the imperial firmans. In general, it may be said of them that they conferred a diplomatic status on all Westerners in the Empire, attaching them to their own Consulates instead of to the Ottoman Government in whose country they lived. They were abrogated by the Enver Government on Sept. 28, 1914, in a unilateral declaration which the Central Powers were not in a position to prevent and against which the Allied Powers could only register their protests.

But the Capitulations were more than merely a legal process. They constituted a mental attitude toward the Ottoman Government. They made it the Western habit to disregard that Government and to establish Western contacts with its subjects quite independently of the fixed and existing relationships of the country. Under the Capitulations, the West long ago established contact with the Ottoman Government’s Christian subjects and a code of governmental conduct was unwittingly built up which the West has applied to that Government alone. Under this code, any Ottoman Christian was given the right to rebel against the Government but the Government, although it was the only body charged with the maintenance of peace in the country, was denied the right to put down Christian rebellion. This code the West has applied to no other Government. Orthodox Russia has repeatedly stamped out Moslem rebellion in Central Asia with as great brutality as the Ottoman Government has ever used against its Christians, but the code which the West has applied to the Ottoman Government it has never applied to Russia. The West has never acquired the habit of disregarding the Russian Government in the country in which it was charged with the duty of administration. Russia is a modern growth which has never known Capitulations.

If it is possible for us to divest our minds of the last vestige of the Capitulations, to apply to the Ottoman Government precisely the same code of governmental conduct which it has been our custom to apply to the Eastern absolutism of Old Russia, the relationship of the Ottoman Government to its Armenians may be profitably examined.

The Armenian population before the late war consisted of about 1,500,000 in the Ottoman Empire, about 1,000,000 in the Russian Empire, about 150,000 in Persia and about 250,000 in Egypt, Europe and the United States. Although small colonies of them were to be found in all parts of the Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them lived in the eastern provinces, a mountainous tableland on which, with their Turkish neighbors, they formed a sedentary peasantry among a nomadic population of Kurds.

In none of these eastern provinces did they constitute a majority of the population and in this respect they differed sharply from the Greeks and Bulgarians of the old Balkan provinces. This was not due to the Ottoman conquest, for the last of the independent Kingdom of Armenia Major had disappeared in the Seljuk invasion of 1079, and the Egyptians put an end to Armenia Minor in Cilicia in 1375. It was not until 1514 that the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, in his campaign against the Persians, occupied the modern eastern provinces and brought their tangled populations into the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the tolerance which distinguished the great Sultans, the Gregorian Church to which the Armenians belonged, was made a recognized community in full enjoyment of its ecclesiastical and cultural liberty. Unlike Greeks and Bulgarians in Europe who did possess majorities and who consequently had within themselves all the elements of nationhood, the Armenians enjoyed in their community institutions the only degree of autonomy which they could have enjoyed. It was comparatively easy for Greeks and Bulgarians, once Western ideas of nationalism had reached them, to enlarge the autonomy of their own community institutions into territorial independence, but any attempt to transfer Armenian autonomy from a religious to a territorial basis was quite another matter. The population of the modern eastern provinces was such that a resuscitation of the old Armenian Kingdom was impossible and it would have remained impossible until some means had been discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history.

That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress the Revolution swiftly broke down and the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire remained unsolved.

American missionaries established contact with the Armenian minorities nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized them, some time in the 1850’s, as a separate Prodesdan community in enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn into touch with the new Prodesdan community in the Ottoman Empire. It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering under Hamidian administration should become known in the United States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the Hamidian regime in Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians’ sufferings alone.

LIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON,
G. B. E., K. C. B., D. S. O.

Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in September and October, 1923.

GENERAL ISMET PASHA

Commander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of the Second Grand National Assembly.

In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of 1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty, had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with them under the Hamidian regime. This tendency presently found further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New York.

Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia, sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous handicap, were generally exempted from blame.

In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year, the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual annexation.

The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the downfall of the Hamidian regime. An Armenian bloc was formed in the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in the technique of revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina. Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but refrained from landing men.

Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster, American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the “spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.

When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to return to London without having taken up his duties. But American churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire, however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in the management of their schools.

The British Foreign Office had no sooner turned down the Enver Government’s demand than Russia served its own demands at Constantinople. The Enver Government appealed to Germany and a compromise was eventually effected under which a Dutchman and a Norwegian were appointed Inspectors-General in the eastern provinces. Neither of them had ever been in the Near East and neither knew any Near Eastern language. The war began shortly and neither of them ever reached the Near East.

The Armenian bloc in the Parliament at Constantinople was holding its 1914 congress at Erzerum in the eastern provinces when the Enver Government entered the war. Government emissaries visited them there and laid before them the Pan-Turanian project whose immediate object was to throw Russia back. A partition of Russian Trans-Caucasia was proposed, the conquered territory to be divided between Armenians, Georgians and Tartars, each to be accorded autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty. The Armenian bloc replied that if war proved necessary they would do their duty as Ottoman subjects but they advised the Government to remain neutral. It may be assumed that the Armenian deputies in the Parliament were still willing, despite the disappointments of the Enver regime, to work the Constitution with the Turkish deputies. The independence committees, however, found their inspiration in the West and their program was electrified by the professed concern for Armenian independence with which the Allied Powers began the war. The Russian annexationist group was similarly affected. In their view, Russia’s opportunity to “liberate” the eastern provinces was at hand.

Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun, a town of Armenian mountaineers who had long enjoyed an almost complete local independence. Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty of those who remained, removed them from the combatant forces and formed them into labor gangs whose commissariat, to put it mildly, worked even more decrepitly than that of the combatant troops.

With this situation in his rear, Enver Pasha crossed both the Russian and Persian frontiers but in January, 1915, he was thrown back behind his own frontier by the Russian victory at Sarykamish. This victory fired the annexationist hopes and armed bands of Armenian volunteers began operating behind the Ottoman Armies. In April, Lord Bryce and the “Friends of Armenia” in London appealed for funds to equip these volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them. Seeing that both Great Britain and Russia were at war with the Ottoman Government, it would have been surprising if so obvious a move had been overlooked. These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed there in May, 1919. The rumor immediately ran through Asia Minor that the Armenians had risen.

By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have been chosen by the Enver Government to take wide-spread measures against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were immediately necessary. Measures were taken. The provincial governors in those parts of the Empire which were exposed to the enemy, i. e., the eastern provinces and the Mediterranean coast where British and French men of war were maintaining a patrol, were ordered to assemble their Armenians and march them south into the Arab country for internment. If these deportations were to be carried out in an orderly fashion, the strongest and most reliable police arrangements were necessary but these arrangements the Enver Government either could not or would not make. In general, the deportations only gathered the Armenians together and exposed them without protection to a population alarmed and angered by the news from Van. They broke down into a dreadful business in which Armenian men of military age were shot down in batches and the remnant of women, children and old persons who had not already made their way as refugees into Russian Trans-Caucasia, were finally interned in Mesopotamia and Syria under conditions of the direst want.

This business deprived Russia of its sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces, and the British Foreign Office which shared in the Anglo-Russian program of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as Persia had already been partitioned, has naturally made the most of it. Lord Bryce’s estimate of the number of Armenians who died in the course of it was 800,000.

X

THE 1907 TREATY AND THE CALIPHATE

GREAT BRITAIN PROMISES CONSTANTINOPLE TO RUSSIA—​ARAB NATIONALISM AND THE HOLY PLACES OF ISLAM—​THE HEJAZ BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE—​THE BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM—​THE CALIPHATE AGITATION IN INDIA.

The Anglo-Russian entente which had been created by the 1907 Treaty, went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south. The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.

Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907 Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople, the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.

The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern). Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an international Western regime, and the rest of the Syrian corridor, together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force “D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open at Aleppo.

It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of British imperialism.

Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication” in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which we customarily use….

Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov. 5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once. In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’s Khedive and to set up a Khedive of its own. London’s repeated pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the Agency’s Khedive assuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed. Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streaming en route to France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marked time while the Grand Sherif of Mecca communicated the terms of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not long detain us here.

What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.

Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty broke it.

The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with the Grand Sherif of Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the Hejaz, but the Sherif’s son Feisal drew a cordon around them in Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 the Grand Sherif declared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the title of King Hussein I.

The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople, and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.

With its right secured, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now free to advance on Jerusalem. With British officers on its right fetching Feisal’s Hejaz Army northward toward Damascus, the E. E. F. wheeled into the lower end of the Syrian corridor against stubborn Turco-German opposition. With small French and Italian detachments posted to it in view of the award of Palestine to an international Western regime, the E. E. F. finally occupied Jerusalem late in 1917 and, having broken up repeated enemy attempts to recover it, rested on its arms while the Residency at Cairo converted it into a British fait accompli.

When Godfrey de Bouillon captured Jerusalem in a former episode, he waded through blood to his saddle girth to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, but mediaevalism has changed its methods. When General Allenby captured it in 1917, he tacked up an “Out of Bounds” sign on the Holy Sepulchre, the Residency at Cairo hurried up one of its attaches to serve as military governor of the town, an assistant city engineer from Alexandria hurriedly arrived to draw up a new town plan for it and a landscape artist was hurried down from London to put the new town plan into effect. So Jerusalem became a British fait accompli and so it remains to this day. And the new town plan, having presumably served its purpose, has disappeared.

The war has given us all an aptitude for loose thinking and a full share of loose thought has attached to General Allenby and his Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Under our Western political tradition, a majority of the population is given the right to determine its own destiny, provided it is of a sufficient degree of intelligence to shoulder its responsibilities. If the faith of that majority in Palestine happens to be Islam, is not Islam the only one of the three faiths to which both Christian and Jewish shrines are equally sacred with its own? Has Islam ever failed in respect to the Christian and Jewish shrines in Jerusalem during its centuries of trusteeship? And what has happened to Islam’s shrines in Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo, in Sicily and Malta, under Christian rule?

At the British demand, the Ottoman Caliph finally withdrew his garrison from Medina after the armistice in 1918. It is simple enough to upset the theology of an Ottoman Caliphate, but the British Foreign Office, despite the Government of India’s specific undertaking to Moslems in India, has upset the fact of an Ottoman Caliphate and in the last fifty years the fact and the theology of the matters. The Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had become a protest.

Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government of India’s undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has been saying to the Defender of the Faith since 1907 and what reply the Defender of the Faith has been making to the Emperor of India.

XI

THE COLLAPSE OF CZARIST RUSSIA

THE CZAR ABDICATES—​THE FRENCH DEPOSE CONSTANTINE AT ATHENS—​KEMAL URGES ENVER TO WITHDRAW FROM THE WAR—​MR. LLOYD GEORGE’S NEW WAR AIMS IN TURKEY—​THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907 ABROGATED—​PAN-TURANIANISM LEAPS INTO LIFE ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN ROUT—​THE MUDROS ARMISTICE OPENS THE BRITISH ROAD TO THE CHAOS IN RUSSIA.

Following the East India Company’s lead, the Government of India had long continued to weave into closer mesh the fabric of British influence which covered the land-locked Persian Gulf. In Nejd, Koweit and Mohammerah, in the maintenance for more than a century of an Agent at Bagdad, there lay the seeds of a British Arabian enterprise comparable to the great enterprise of British India. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 ensued and in 1914 the Government of India diverted a brigade of Indian Expeditionary Force “A” for Egypt and France, to the Persian Gulf where it lay off Bahrein Island to make a lightning stroke against Basra, the key to Bagdad. As soon as war was declared, it was heavily reinforced and, having been designated Indian Expeditionary Force “D,” it moved at once on Basra which it occupied in three weeks. Its Political Officer urged an immediate advance on Bagdad, but the Government of India was already groaning under the pressure from London. “D” Force succeeded, however, in advancing slowly north against a stiffening Turco-German opposition until it reached Kut-el-Amara.

At this stage, the tired Government of India suddenly woke up and ordered a bold dash to Bagdad. This turn of events changed the whole basis of “D” Force’s operations from the defensive to the offensive, a change for which the Force as then constituted was quite inadequate. The result was that the Turco-German command was able at Ctesiphon to throw General Townshend back to Kut-el-Amara where he was surrounded and held out for five months while the Government of India launched successive failures to relieve him. Kut-el-Amara was finally starved into surrender, General Townshend was removed to Constantinople as a prisoner of war, and the Government of India was forthwith relieved of its command. Indian Expeditionary Force “D” now became the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force under War Office command, although the Government of India retained its political command in Sir Percy Cox.

It was not until the end of 1916 that the War Office was ready to begin operations for the recapture of Kut-el-Amara, and by the end of February, 1917, the enemy was in full retreat. On the heels of his rout, Bagdad was occupied on March 11 and, although the Turco-German command made repeated attempts to recapture the city, its British defense held and Germany’s Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme was left in the air.

The Russian Armies by this time had not only advanced deeply into the eastern provinces but had occupied their zone in northern Persia in sufficient force to link with the British in Mesopotamia. A very few of them had even been permitted to travel to Basra and below it to gaze upon the blue and British waters of the Persian Gulf.

But on March 12, 1917, the Czar abdicated.

On May 16, Kerensky’s Republican Cabinet was set up at Petrograd, and the British Foreign Office entered at once into cordial relations with it.

On June 11, the French deposed Constantine at Athens, the Venizelist Government which was imposed on Old Greece entered the war on the side of the Allies, and ever since the failure of the British Dardanelles campaign, there had been an Allied Army based on Salonica, the key to Constantinople.

In July, Kerensky ordered General Baratoff to withdraw the Russian Armies from Persian soil. They melted away both from Persia (with the exception of a small force of die-hards who continued to hold Teheran hoping that the trouble at Petrograd would soon blow over), and from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

On Sept. 30, General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had thrown up his command of the Sixteenth Army in disgust after a break with Falkenhayn over the recapture of Bagdad, urged Enver Pasha to make the Russian collapse the occasion of withdrawal from the war. The disruption of the country’s economic life and the constant drainage away of its gold to Germany could have but one end, he wrote from Aleppo. Even with Russia eliminated, Great Britain and France could not be divided and they could not be beaten. The British would conquer Palestine, would set up a Christian Government with which to hold the Suez Canal, and would isolate the remnant of the Empire from the rest of Islam—​“a sound war policy made possible by our entry into the war against England, a policy whose success means irreparable loss for us and whose failure means German domination for us…. Falkenhayn has said repeatedly to anyone who will listen to him, that he is a German and is naturally interested first in Germany. If he can hold Palestine, he will place himself before the world and before our country as one of the great victors of the war. We shall then lose our own country and to this end, Falkenhayn will sacrifice every ounce of gold and every soldier he can squeeze out of us.” But in the wake of the Russian rout, Pan-Turanianism had leaped into new life. Enver’s reply was to give Falkenhayn command of the Palestine front and to exile Kemal, together with Rauf Bey, to Germany in the suite of the Crown Prince.

On Nov. 7, another revolution lifted its head amid the chaos of the Kerensky administration and Soviet Russia was born, to be attacked at once by the British Foreign Office with a vindictive hatred which has not even now run its full course.

On Jan. 5, 1918, Mr. Lloyd George, then barred from access to Soviet Russia by the bolted Straits, declared in London: “Nor are we fighting … to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race…. We do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople.” This declaration was interpreted by what remained of the Opposition in Constantinople, to mean that the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian incubus, was in a position to renew his old understanding with the Caliph.

On Feb. 1, Soviet Russia abrogated the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 and the British Foreign Office “shook hands with murder” to the extent of concurring in the abrogation. But the 1907 Treaty had already worked out to its ghastly fruition. Nothing remained of Persia’s independence but an imprisoned Shah at Teheran. The Caliphate of Islam was destroyed, and few countries have ever been flogged into such ruin as now prevailed in the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire.

On March 2, Germany imposed its peace terms on Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk, detaching the Ukraine from Russia, embedding the Black Sea firmly in the Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme (the old Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme had been left in the air by the British capture of Bagdad), and making over Batum to the Turks. A Turco-German conference at Trebizond on the Black Sea speedily effected a joint policy for Trans-Caucasia, under whose terms Baku was named as the capital of a new Trans-Caucasian State to be christened “Azerbaijan,” presumably after the Azerbaijan province in north-west Persia which it was proposed to claim as an irredentum for the new State. An Ottoman Army, accompanied by a German military mission, now lost no time in moving on Baku and the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force simultaneously detached a small body which it designated the “Dunsterforce,” hurriedly dispatching it across Persia for Tiflis in Trans-Caucasia. Turks, Germans and British raced for Baku, all three determined now that Russia had fallen back behind the barrier of the Caucasus Range, to hold it there.

In the eastern provinces, the Russian rout had left hardly as much as a street cat alive. In what had been Russian Trans-Caucasia, beyond the eastern provinces, three small and quarrelsome Governments bobbed about like corks in the chaos, a Tartar Government at Baku controlled by the local Russian Soviet, an Armenian Government at Erivan controlled by the brigand-patriot Antranik, and a Liberal Georgian Government at Tiflis which feared the Russians and despised the Armenians. The Ottoman Army drove its way easily to Baku. The British Dunsterforce reached there first but only in time to flee back to Persia, for the Ottoman forces stormed the city’s hurriedly extemporized defensive works, installed their Azerbaijan Government, signed their treaty of close military alliance with it, organized the Turkish Federalist Party in its support and set about the task of fetching all Trans-Caucasia under its rule. Firmly founded on the German Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme, Pan-Turanianism had finally become a reality.

Meanwhile on July 3, the Crown Prince succeeded to the Throne at Constantinople. The Sixth Mohammed took up his abode in the white marble palace of Dolma Bagtsche on the Bosphorus. But it was not the Old Turks who girded him with the Prophet’s Sword. Instead of the Mevlevi tchelebi from Konia, he was girded by the sheikh of the great Senussi order whose seat is at Jarabub in the Sahara. A German submarine had taken him aboard at an empty place on the African coast and had landed him at Pola. Throughout the crossing, he had said his prayers five times a day in the forward battery compartment, facing toward Mecca by standard compass.

General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had spent most of a year touring Germany and Austria-Hungary in disgrace, was now recalled and given the Yilderim group (Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Armies) on the Palestine front. But it was too late. Amid the din of a world war crashing to its close, simultaneous offensives were launched in September, by the French command at Salonica with Constantinople as its objective and by the British command in Palestine with Aleppo as its objective. With General Allenby’s great break-through overrunning the Syrian corridor, the French imposed an armistice on Bulgaria and the Enver Government fell in Constantinople. Enver Pasha fled to Daghestan, a dapper young Turk still in earnest pursuit of the Pan-Turanian will-o’-the-wisp, and the Opposition inherited the wreck with its capital gripped by a German garrison and French fingers reaching for it from the Maritza.

But the great wheel twirled and clicked. From a French command with the Old Greeks in tow, the new Izzet Government in Constantinople had nothing to hope. From the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian incubus, it had everything to hope. Secretly in order not to provoke the Germans to counter-action, the Izzet Government lost no time in dispatching General Townshend who was still a prisoner of war on Prinkipo, to the British naval Commander-in-Chief at Port Mudros outside the Straits. Rauf Bey, Minister of Marine in the Izzet Cabinet, followed in hurried secrecy with two colleagues. If their mission was a success, the German garrison in Constantinople would have to be confronted with a fait accompli.

In the cabin of H. M. S. Agamemnon, Admiral Calthorpe’s flagship at Port Mudros, Rauf outlined the Izzet Government’s program in seeking an armistice: (1) a return to the understanding which the Caliph and the Emperor of India had enjoyed down to 1907; (2) autonomy for the Arabs under the Caliph’s sovereignty; (3) recognition of the abrogation of the Capitulations; and (4) temporary financial help, if necessary. Admiral Calthorpe asked only that the Straits be unbarred and the road to Soviet Russia be opened. As for Pan-Turanianism, it might prove useful in holding Russia behind the barrier of the Caucasus Range. Clause 11 of the Mudros armistice stipulated as follows: “Immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops from North-West Persia to behind the pre-war frontier has already been ordered and will be carried out. Part of Trans-Caucasia has already been ordered to be evacuated by Turkish troops, the remainder to be evacuated if required by the Allies after they have studied the situation there.” Clause 15 added: “Allied control officers to be placed on all railways, including such portions of Trans-Caucasian railways now under Turkish control, which must be placed at the free and complete disposal of the Allied authorities, due consideration being given to the needs of the population. This clause to include Allied occupation of Batum. Turkey will raise no objection to the occupation of Baku by the Allies.”

So “hostilities between the Allies and Turkey” ceased “from noon, local time, on Thursday, 31st October, 1918.” The Straits were unbarred and when the French fingers closed upon Constantinople, British fingers closed with them. General Franchet d’Esperet had to share his command with General Milne. Between rows of British and French bayonets, the German garrison marched out of the capital and the Turks were relieved that the Emperor of India was once again the friend of the Caliph. Allied fleets, to be strengthened soon by most of the British Grand Fleet from the North Sea, steamed up the Dardanelles and anchored in the Bosphorus. Greek battleships followed them, anchoring under the windows of Dolma Bagtsche palace, and the Ottoman Caliph, to spare himself the painful sight, repaired to Yildiz Kiosk which for thirty-two years had been the hermit-home of Abdul Hamid. With Liberal Russia destroyed, the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with the Orthodox Church from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Phanar in Constantinople. Five centuries of history were about to be re-written and Ottoman Greeks in the capital, trampling their fezzes, donned Western hats in transports of the wildest joy. The remnant of the Ottoman Armenians did the same; both the Ottoman Empire and Russia were destroyed and nothing (except ten centuries of history) now remained to prevent the resuscitation of the mediaeval Kingdom of Armenia.

But the Ottoman capital had been reduced to a supply base for Denikin. With an Anglo-French command in firm control of the great city, the Russians at last began their entry into Constantinople—​big Slavs in uniform who had borne the British to their knees in 1907, huge slit-eyed men once kings in Kafiristan, now grovelling for crusts in the gutters of Galata.

XII

THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN WAR OF 1918-’20

HOW MR. LLOYD GEORGE TRIED TO IMPOSE ALONE UPON ISLAM THAT FATE WHICH GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA HAD AGREED TO IMPOSE TOGETHER IN 1907—​THE ANGLO-PERSIAN AGREEMENT—​THE “CENTRAL ASIAN FEDERATION”—​THE AMERICAN MANDATE IN TRANS-CAUCASIA—​THE RETURN OF SOVIET RUSSIA.

The war now began in bitter earnest.

Czarist Russia had been a weight upon Islam which had increased until 1907 when, in agreement with Great Britain, the two Powers began grinding to pieces the last of the independent Islamic States. Russia’s collapse in 1917 and the resultant abrogation of the 1907 Treaty, coinciding with Germany’s collapse, afforded the British Government a marvelous opportunity to reconsider its policy toward Islam. The British had no great enemy left in the East, but apparently the fact did not occur to Mr. Lloyd George. In the Anglo-Russian war of 1918-’20, the British Government took over the business of crushing Islam which Czarist Russia had begun, while attempting to overthrow the Soviet Government and re-instate in office a Russian Government which should concur in the fate which the British alone now sought to impose on the last of the Islamic States. With Constantinople occupied, the Ottoman Sultans could be reduced to simple Amirs of Anatolia whenever Mr. Lloyd George chose. In the meantime, what happened in Turkey hardly mattered. What happened in Russia did matter.

The little Dunsterforce which had been thrown back into Persia by the Turkish capture of Baku, was quickly reinforced from Bagdad and became the British North Persia Force with its base at Kasvin, not far from Teheran. Here it stood in the heart of the old Russian zone, despite a small body of Czarist die-hards who still clung to the old Russian zone in Teheran. Meanwhile the old British zone in the southern half of Persia had been occupied by the South Persia Rifles whose officer personnel was British, and early in 1918 the Government of India had dispatched the East Persia Cordon from Quetta along the Nushki Railway to the new railhead of Duzdap in the Seistan, whence it ran a lorry road north through Persia to Meshed in the old Russian zone and flung out detachments to occupy Askabad and the Merv oasis on the Russian Trans-Caspian Railway.

Late in 1918, the Mudros armistice enabled the North Persia Force to re-occupy Baku in Trans-Caucasia (where it left the Turkish Federalist Party in power) and General Milne occupied Batum from Constantinople. Ostensibly to hold Denikin’s rear, the British occupation of Trans-Caucasia was rapidly completed, the Turco-German forces being evacuated into the eastern provinces and the remnants of the Czarist forces being rounded up and dismissed to Denikin’s front. At Baku, the Czarist Caspian Fleet was maneuvred into British hands and removed to British keeping at Enzeli on the Persian coast. Opposite Baku on the eastern coast of the Caspian, the East Persia Cordon detached from Askabad a small garrison for Krasnovodsk, and Persia was now not only held by British and Indian forces but all its approaches, from north, south, east and west, were in the same hands.

In Denikin’s rear, General Milne at Constantinople now commanded a single British front which crossed Trans-Caucasia from Batum to Baku, which made a British lake of the Caspian, and which extended into Central Asia from Krasnovodsk to Askabad and the Merv oasis. Over all of it, the double-headed eagle of Czarist Russia had waved only a year before. Behind this truly remarkable front, railway projects were speedily envisaged by which the new British Arabia, British Persia and British Trans-Caucasia were to be firmly bound to each other and to British India, a Bagdad-Teheran-Enzeli line to develop Enzeli into a British naval base which should command the Caspian, and a Batum-Kars-Tabriz-Duzdap line to fetch the frontiers of British India to the Black Sea as they had already been fetched to Haifa on the Mediterranean. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle had not only been made good, but the collapse of Czarist Russia had made the British a present of the Constantinople-Kabul line in addition. British officers were glum with expectation.

Sir Percy Cox, chief political officer of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, was dispatched to Teheran as British Minister as soon as the Mudros armistice brought the war to an end on the Mesopotamia front, and began formulating the Anglo-Persian Agreement at once. Persia had then been swallowed whole by the British. The North Persia Force was paying 350,000 tomans a month (roughly $800,000) to keep the Persian Government in being and 100,000 tomans a month to keep the old Cossack Division quiet. Under these conditions, Sir Percy Cox began negotiations in January, 1919, with three Persian grandees and by June the Agreement was ready to be signed. It provided for a British loan of £2,000,000 to the Persian Government and for British advisers in the Persian Ministries. Briefly, it had the effect of reducing Persia to another of the British Indian frontier States. It was finally approved by the British Foreign Office and was signed by the three Persians on August 9. It had been drawn up secretly and no public announcement of its signature was made until August 15, when it was announced simultaneously that the Shah had left for a prolonged tour in Europe. It was to take effect as soon as the Persian Parliament ratified it. At the moment the Parliament was not in session, the deputies having left Teheran in 1915, intending to re-assemble at Kum to follow the Ottoman Empire into war against the Anglo-Russian entente.

Meanwhile the East Persia Cordon regularized the position of its garrisons in Meshed and Merv by styling them “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.” It will be recalled that the Amir Habibullah Khan of Afghanistan, a wild country which tilts up to the roof of the world above the north-west frontier of India, had stuck loyally to the British despite a fiery nationalist party which sought to carry him into the war against the Anglo-Russian entente. He was still sticking loyally to the British when Czarist Russia fell in 1917 and all of Central Asia fell with it into the most complete confusion. North of him, Bokhara, a smaller country which adjoins the Afghan frontier for nearly half its length, had been nominally independent under the rule of its Emir, Said Mir Alim Khan, in Old Bokhara City, but actually ruled by the Czarist Resident in the Russian cantonment of New Bokhara. The Kerensky Cabinet at Petrograd continued this regime, but Soviet Russia recalled the Resident and left the Emir in control. The mutual abrogation of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 had the effect of leaving both Bokhara and Afghanistan in enjoyment of actual independence. The Young Uzbeg Party in Bokhara immediately began an agitation for the introduction of Parliamentary government, but the Emir Said Mir Alim lost no time in discovering new friends at Merv where the Government of India’s East Persia Cordon had set up one of its “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.”

It had never been possible for the British to dictate their own terms to Afghanistan as they did to Persia after the Russian retreat, for the Afghans are made of sterner stuff. Neither the Uzbegs of Bokhara to the north nor the Punjabis of India to the south have shown much love for the Afghans. As for the Persians, the Afghans could doubtless do what they pleased with them. But with the dispatch of the East Persia Cordon to Meshed and Merv, Said Mir Alim of Bokhara and Habibullah of Afghanistan reached an understanding respecting a “Central Asian Federation” which should be “independent of Russian domination.”

PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI

Until the Ottoman General Election in November, 1919, an Orthodox priest at Kiskin, near Angora; after the General Election, “acting metropolitan” of the Turkish Orthodox Church.

MELETIOS IV

Oecumenical Patriarch from February, 1922, to July, 1923.

The meaning of Bokhara to British India has already been indicated. British command of the Caspian now isolated the Trans-Caspian Railway from Soviet Russia, and with Bokhara detached from Russia and brought within the British Indian orbit, the only remaining Russian railway to the back of India, i. e., the Moscow-Orenburg-Tashkent line, would stop at Samarkand as far as its military usefulness to any future Russia was concerned. The Russian spurs to Termez and Kushklinsky Post on the northern frontier of Afghanistan which had been nightmares in British India, would lose their meaning. Any future Russian move against British India would be countered at Bokhara which lies at a sufficient distance to prevent the unsettling effect of Anglo-Russian trouble from making itself felt in India.

But on Feb. 20, 1919, Habibullah was assassinated. Nasrullah seized the throne but, convicted in open durbar of murdering the Amir, he was unseated in favor of the Amir’s third son, Amanullah. Nasrullah’s strong nationalist following rushed pell-mell into an invasion of British India, but was thrown back by the Indian Army. The East Persia Cordon was hurriedly withdrawn to Quetta and the announcement of the Anglo-Persian Agreement’s signature at Teheran was followed three weeks later by a Bokharan revolution in which the Young Uzbeg party dethroned Said Mir Alim and set up its Parliament. Possibly the Young Uzbegs feared a similar British coup at Bokhara City.

Said Mir Alim having fled into Afghanistan, the Soviet Government at Moscow finally concluded military and commercial treaties with the Young Uzbegs on March 4, 1921, which purport to recognize the independence of the Bokhara People’s Soviet Republic. This is Bokhara’s present title, but the British Foreign Office still withholds full recognition from any of the Soviet States. Even as late as May 8, 1923, a note from Lord Curzon to the Soviet Government demanded inter alia the recall of the Soviet Ministers from Teheran and Kabul, and a long statement by Said Mir Alim on the subject of Soviet “treachery” was circulated to the London press on the evening of June 4….

The East Persia Cordon’s hurried scuttle back to Quetta early in 1919 still left the British in control of Persia and in occupation of Trans-Caucasia and Constantinople. General Milne still commanded the Black Sea, the line of the Caucasus Range, the Caspian and the trans-Caspian town of Krasnovodsk. Denikin still stood between Soviet Russia and the British.

Having isolated the starving Armenians of Erivan from any possibility of Russian relief, whether from Denikin or Soviet Russia, the British permitted Americans to embroil themselves in Armenian affairs as intimately as they would. If the United States Government had permitted itself to be rushed into the acceptance of a mandate over the Armenians in Trans-Caucasia, it is not impossible that the British would have gratefully accepted the barrier between Soviet Russia and British Persia which such a mandate would incidentally have furnished. The Armenians had once constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces of the old Ottoman Empire, and if that claim had been disposed of to the United States, not only would an effective barrier have been interposed in front of Russia’s inevitable return to Trans-Caucasia but the remnant of Turkey would have been cut off from the rest of Islam.

By the summer of 1919, however, it had become plain that the United States Government, while anxious to see American relief extended to the Armenians, was unwilling to incur an inevitable quarrel with the future Russia, and General Milne in Constantinople announced that Italy would occupy Trans-Caucasia. Three months later, an Italian military mission on the spot followed the example which the United States Government had set and in September, 1919, the necessity of reinforcing his Constantinople garrison compelled General Milne to pull in his isolated packet of troops in Krasnovodsk and to evacuate Trans-Caucasia down to Batum. Will the Royal Army Service Corps ever issue another ration of caviare in Baku?

Mr. Lloyd George now began peddling Trans-Caucasia all over Europe, offering the Armenians in turn to Holland, Sweden, Rumania, to the League of Nations, to Canada and New Zealand, and even flirting with Turkish Pan-Turanianism. But the spectacle of Mr. Lloyd George bearing gifts to the world attracted the same scrutiny elsewhere as it had already attracted at Washington. Presumably anybody who was able to hold Trans-Caucasia could have had the Armenians in those days (except Denikin and Soviet Russia who alone were both able and willing to take them), for demobilization at home was rapidly putting an end to British ability to hold anything more than Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus and Constantinople.

This sort of thing continued until Denikin began his retreat early in 1920, which sooner or later would expose Trans-Caucasia to the Soviet Government. Still tub-thumping on the subject of the Armenians, the British Foreign Office now gave de facto recognition to the Turkish Federalist Government of Azerbaijian, the Dashnakoutzian Government of Armenia, and the Liberal Government of Georgia. The British War Office rushed men and munitions into Trans-Caucasia to stiffen the three Governments against the approaching Soviet Armies. The British Admiralty hurried out a naval mission to overhaul the old Russian Caspian Fleet in the Persian port of Enzeli.

But the Soviet Armies intercepted the Admiralty’s mission at Baku, threw its personnel into jail, and themselves sent an expedition to Enzeli to take over the old Russian Fleet from beneath the guns of the British North Persia Force. That interception announced Russia’s return to Trans-Caucasia which, since the collapse of Czarist Russia in 1917, has seen more horrors than any other area on the face of this small planet.

The Turkish Federalist Government at Baku was quickly overthrown and on Sept. 30, 1920, the Soviet Government at Moscow concluded peace with the Government of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic which calls itself “the first Moslem Republic in the world.”

The Dashnakoutzian Government of Armenia stood for some time. Like the Armenian independence committees of the old Ottoman Empire, its inexperienced leadership was engaged in appealing to Mr. Lloyd George and to American opinion to protect it, and had refrained from any attempt to achieve that peace with its Russian and Turkish neighbors which was the very first essential of its existence. In the Treaty of Sevres, signed at Paris on Aug. 10, 1920, it was awarded a Turkish frontier which was to be delineated by Mr. Wilson. The American mandate project having fallen through, the Wilson frontier was presumably thought to be the next best method of drawing the United States into Trans-Caucasia. The Wilson frontier had the sole effect of destroying any hopes which might have existed of a Turco-Armenian peace. A state of war which neither Turks nor Armenians could afford, continued to exist until December, 1920, when the Turkish command at Erzerum put a stop to the streams of Moslem refugees which had been flowing out of Armenia, by invading the country and occupying Kars. A Soviet ultimatum stopped Kiazim Karabekr Pasha at Kars. The Dashnakoutzian Government fled. The Soviet Republic of Armenia succeeded it and Mr. Lloyd George’s interest in the Armenians abruptly ceased.

Compelled by the necessity of still further reinforcing his Constantinople garrison, General Milne finally evacuated Batum in favor of the Liberal Government of Georgia. Boundary disputes with the neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenian Governments soon brought the Georgian Liberals into petty frontier wars and a revolution in March, 1921, overthrew them in favor of what is now the Socialist Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Soviet Russia was no in contact with Nationalist Turkey and in the Treaty of Kars which the Turks signed on Oct. 13, 1921, with the Soviet States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Kars and Ardahan provinces which had been wrested from the Ottoman Empire in the Russian War of 1876, were returned to Turkey, and the port of Batum was opened unreservedly to Turkish commerce.

Soviet Russia was now in contact with Persia also. Here, despite the fact that the country was occupied by the North Persia Force and the South Persia Rifles, Sir Percy Cox had been unable to assemble a Persian Parliament which would ratify the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 and in February, 1921, a Russo-Persian Treaty was signed at Moscow in which Soviet Russia abandoned all Czarist Russian claims on the Persian Government and recognized no zones of influence in the country. Meanwhile the North Persia Force maneuvered the Czarist die-hards out of Teheran and itself took over the old Cossack Division, officering it with British personnel. At the last moment, just before the North Persia Force was to retire to its base at Bagdad early in the summer of 1921, the Cossack Division marched on Teheran and installed a new Persian Government which valiantly repudiated the Anglo-Persian Agreement and proposed to share out the Persian Ministries among the Allied Governments and the United States, reserving for the British the right to appoint advisers in the Ministries of War and Finance only. But the Zia-ed-Din Government lasted only as long as the North Persia Force lasted. Zia fled to Bagdad with the last of the North Persia Force in May, 1921. The last of the British officers were withdrawn from the Cossack Division and the South Persia Rifles were disbanded. At present, neither British nor Russians are engaged in reiterating “in the most categorical manner the undertakings which they have repeatedly given in the past to respect absolutely the independence and integrity of Persia.”

Soviet Russia has lifted from Islam the weight with which Czarist Russia once bore it down and Mr. Lloyd George’s Government has not succeeded in its effort to supply alone the weight it took both Russians and British to supply in 1907. Mr. Lloyd George could not prevent Islam in India from joining the Hindus in non-cooperation with the West. He could not prevent Islam in Persia from following to the extent of non-cooperation with his Foreign Secretary. That demon which Sir Edward Grey once lightly referred to as the “spirit” of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, has been slowly departing, wrenching civilizations apart as it went. Its stubborn retreat from the countries it wasted and the slow return of Islam to life in its wake, comprise the background before which the remainder of this narrative is set.

XIII

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR BEGINS

CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE GROWTH OF GREEK NATIONALISM—​SURROUNDED BY BRITISH FORCES, THE TURKS GO BACK TO PEACE—​APPLICATION OF THE SECRET TREATIES WHICH THE ALLIES HAD DRAWN UP DURING THE WAR—​THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE BREAKS OFF ITS RELATIONS WITH THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.

As every body knows, a brook called the Sweet Waters of Europe ripples down into a long bay called the Golden Horn, which divides Constantinople in Europe into two parts. On the northern side, between the crowded Golden Horn and the great Bosphorus, lie the suburbs of Galata and Pera, Galata behind the thicket of masts along its quai and Pera climbing the steep streets onto the hill beyond. Galata and Pera constitute the foreign suburbs where the Embassies, armed with the Capitulations, have never permitted the Ottoman Government to govern, except during the four years of the war when they were not in a position to prevent the Government from abrogating the Capitulations. Here were the Embassies and Legations, all of them except the Persian Legation, although the Ottoman Government was not here and never has been.

Between the little Golden Horn and the great green Sea of Marmora, a bold peninsula curls out to Seraglio Point. Here, within the five-mile wall which encloses its landward side, lies Stamboul to which Galata and Pera bear the same cultural and historical relationship as Yonkers bears to New York. Indeed, one could ignore Galata and Pera as negligible suburbs of foreigners were it not that by the slow expansion of the Capitulations through the centuries, these small foreign suburbs have slowly turned the capital upside down until the Mudros armistice in 1918 finally ushered the Anglo-French command into Pera in possession of complete authority. Here in Stamboul was the seat of the Ottoman Government and here are the greatest monuments of Islam. The broad peninsula on which Stamboul lies is tipped with the great shrines of Islamic culture, its sky-line is pierced with the minarets of its mighty mosques, of Ayiah Sophia, Ahmedieh, Valideh, Bayazid, Suleimanieh and Mohammed II.

Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of the Rûm community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman Government and was appointed by the Ottoman Minister from a list of three candidates proposed by the Holy Synod. Relations between the Caliph-Sultan and the Patriarch remained generally peaceful even after the Old Greeks secured their independence in the 1820’s, and there was no appreciable Greek nationalism in the Rûm community until the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 called upon Moslems and Christians alike to give up their dividing community institutions and assume the equal rights and the equal duties of Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman nation. That call, accompanied by the opening of the Parliament at Constantinople, brought Greek nationalism from Old Greece into the Ottoman Rûm community, and the Balkan Wars widened the breach which was opening between the Ottoman Government and the Phanar. It produced so difficult a situation that an agreement was finally reached in 1914 between the Old Greek and the Ottoman Governments for an exchange of minorities, but the outbreak of war suspended its operation. Until the spring of 1916 the Ottoman Government, in view of the neutrality of Old Greece, refrained from any steps against its Rûm community, but when the French command at Salonica imposed the Venizelos Government on Athens and brought Old Greece into the war as an enemy, the Ottoman Government took immediate steps to deport its Rûm communicants along the coast of Asia Minor out of the range of Allied naval activity. Like the great Armenian deportations of 1915, these Greek deportations were military in their origin but they were far better controlled throughout their course than the former had been.

After the Mudros armistice in 1918, these Greeks in Asia Minor began to flow back to what remained of their homes, and the remnant of the broken Empire went back with relief to its peacetime pursuits. An unsurpassed commercial opportunity lay ahead of Asia Minor, for the Russian collapse had put an end to the great export of wheat from the South Russian ports. Constantinople, its population swollen by the Allied military and naval forces, now looked exclusively to Asia Minor for its sustenance. Western business men had followed the Allies into the capital in large numbers, and money was available in such quantities as Constantinople had never known. The Empire having been “liberated” from the “Ottoman blight,” American capitalists abounded in the capital, all of them anxious to get in on the ground floor of the boom. Under the Allied aegis, Western trade faced a prodigious opportunity and the peasantry of Asia Minor lost no time in seeking whatever small share of the melon might fall to them. The spring of 1919 found them back at the handles of their rude, ox-drawn plows.

But there were Greek battleships anchored among the Allied men of war in the Bosphorus, and a Turkish guard was quartered in the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul. Ottoman Greeks in the capital had gone wildly nationalist, finding their hero in Mr. Venizelos, the man who had brought Old Greece into the war. The Oecumenical Patriarch at the Phanar had turned likewise toward Mr. Venizelos, the deliverer of the “unredeemed” Ottoman Greeks. But Balkan wars break when the snow melts in the spring. Through the winter of 1918-’19, the Anglo-French command maintained an outward peace in Constantonople.

Three British high commands held the remnant of the Empire in Asia as firmly in the British grip as Persia was bring held. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Bagdad, had pushed its way up from the flatlands of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin into the rugged hills of southern Kurdistan, the Turkish administration of Mosul withdrawing in front of it to Diarbekr. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Cairo, had reached the top of the Syrian corridor at Aleppo and had flung out small detachments to establish contact with the Bagdad command to the east, and to occupy Cilicia and the Taurus tunnels of the Bagdad Railway to the west, the Turkish administration of Cilicia continuing in office pending an indication of British intentions. Armenian deportees, some of whom had been interned by the Turks in Syria and some of whom had made their way into Egypt to be interned by the British, were being run into Cilicia in large numbers and a few of them were being carried on along the Bagdad Railway as far as Konia, where the E. E. F.’s control ended. The British co-command of the Army of the Black Sea whose Anglo-French G. H. Q. was in Pera, had stationed control officers along the Bagdad Railway from Konia to its Constantinople terminus, along the railways in the hinterland of Smyrna and along the old Russian railways in Trans-Caucasia. The Bagdad Railway had been broken up into its two original parts. The Bagdad and Cairo commands had confiscated it from Konia east and their military trains were rapidly wracking it to pieces. Western Europe was not to be again permitted to escape the Suez Canal. The Pera co-command, however, was working the original Anatolian Railway from Constantinople to Angora and Konia for the Deutsche Bank, pending its permanent disposition in the peace treaty.

The collapse of Czarist Russia had enabled the British to establish control not only over Asia Minor but over all its approaches from north, south, east and west, and under the British aegis the secret treaties which had been drawn up during the war for its partition (with the exception of Czarist Russia’s share in them) were soon put into application. The French were admitted to Beirut whence they posted detachments to the Syrian and Cilician centers, remaining however under the British high command in Cairo. Italian forces were disembarked at Adalia and rapidly pushed their way into the hinterland as far as Konia, still keeping their eyes on Smyrna, the greatest of the Asia Minor prizes. Smyrna had been made over to Italy in the secret agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, but the Venizelos Government at Athens had entered the war after that agreement was signed. As for Czarist Russia’s share of the spoils, the United States Government might be persuaded to take the eastern provinces under the supposition that in this twentieth century they still constituted Armenia. As for Czarist Russia’s right to Constantinople, the High Church Party in the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with Orthodoxy from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar. Old Greeks and Ottoman Greeks are alike traders and British naval command of the Mediterranean served to reinforce the less worldly influences which moved Greece inevitably into the British orbit. The French who had brought Greece into the war as soon as Czarist Russia collapsed, only to be compelled to divide their Constantinople command with the British, quickly cooled toward the Greeks and waited for the great wheel to twirl again.

The Anglo-French command in Pera soon divided the Constantinople area, the British taking over the Galata and Pera suburbs, the French taking Stamboul itself, and the Italians taking the Asiatic suburbs. The Ottoman Navy was quickly disarmed and interned in the Golden Horn. With the French controlling the railways in Europe and the British controlling the Anatolian railways, the Ottoman Armies began demobilizing and disarming under Allied supervision, skeleton forces remaining for gendarmerie purposes. So the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire went back to the pursuits of peace and in the lack of Russian exports the Anatolian peasant enjoyed every prospect of a greater prosperity than he had ever known.

But to Mr. Lloyd George, it was an opportunity to impose alone upon Islam that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together. They were more than Balkan snows which began to melt when the Oecumenical Patriarchate broke off its relations with the Ottoman Government on March 9, 1919.

XIV

SMYRNA, 1919

KEMAL RETURNS TO CONSTANTINOPLE—​TURKISH CONFUSION IN THE CAPITAL—​THE TURKS ASK FOR AN AMERICAN MANDATE—​HOW KEMAL AND RAUF BEY LEFT FOR SAMSUN AND SMYRNA, RESPECTIVELY—​THE GREEK PONTUS PROGRAM—​THE GREEK OCCUPATION OF SMYRNA—​THE TURKS GO BACK TO WAR.

General allenby’s great break-through in Palestine had thrown Mustapha Kemal Pasha back to Adana in Cilicia, where a cypher telegram from Constantinople told him that Rauf Bey was on his way to Mudros to sign an armistice with the British. It was the end of the world for Kemal.

He returned to the capital to find an Anglo-French command quartered in Pera and the entire Constantinople area under effective military occupation. None of the twenty-five clauses of the Mudros armistice seems to have authorized such an occupation. The only mention of Constantinople which occurred in the armistice was a stipulation in clause 4 that Allied prisoners of war and interned Armenians were “to be collected in Constantinople and handed over unconditionally to the Allies.” Allied “use of all ship repair facilities at all Turkish ports and arsenals” was provided in clause 9 and clause 11 stipulated that “wireless telegraphy and cable stations” were “to be controlled by the Allies, Turkish Government messages excepted.” In accordance with these clauses, Allied officers had been assigned to all Turkish ports for control and intelligence purposes. Clause 21 had provided for “an Allied representative to be attached to the Turkish Ministry of Supplies in order to safeguard Allied interests,” but the attachment of an Allied representative would seem to be no more a synonym for military occupation than the use of ship repair facilities or the control of wireless and cable stations.

Allied occupation of Batum was provided in clause 15 and Allied occupation of Baku was mentioned. “Allied occupation of Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts” was specifically stipulated in clause 1, but is the Pera suburb of Constantinople one of the “Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts”? “Secure access to the Black Sea” was stipulated in clause 1 and clause 7 gave the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” But no such situation had arisen at Constantinople and it is difficult to imagine how it could have arisen with the capital lying under the guns of as great a fleet of battleships as lay in the Bosphorus. It is true that the mere appearance of Allied men of war off the city so affected its Greek minority as to bring about a most explosive situation, of which Rauf Bey had warned Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. But a military occupation seems to be quite a different matter from the temporary landing of troops to restrain the Greeks. It is also true that Constantinople was a very useful supply base for Denikin, yet the terms of the Mudros armistice are down in black and white, with Admiral Calthorpe’s signature attached to them, and they do not appear to make an Allied occupation of the capital a legal proceeding.

Rauf Bey had made it plain to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros that no Ottoman Government could submit to the re-imposition of the Capitulations. Under the occupation, the Allies re-imposed them. None of the Allied Governments had recognized their abrogation, but the Mudros armistice was a military and not a civil instrument. Under military law, occupying Armies are authorized to administer only the existing body of enemy civil law and usage, pending the permanent disposition of their occupied enemy territory in the terms of peace. The Mudros armistice contained no mention of the Capitulations or of any other civil matter at issue between the Allied Governments and the Ottoman Government, and their re-imposition during a state of armistice does not seem to have been a legal proceeding.

When Mustapha Kemal Pasha reached the capital, he discovered that the Parliament had been prorogued, the Izzet Government had fallen, and Damad Ferid Pasha had been sent for by the Sultan to form a new Government. The Sultan had left Dolma Bagtsche for Abdul Hamid’s late home at Yildiz Kiosk, and such sound reforms as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 had succeeded in making, the Allies had speedily unmade. In its golden age, the Ottoman Empire had been broadly tolerant, but during its last two centuries of agony the Christian imperialisms of the West had turned its tolerance to poison and since 1908 its own Christian communities had helped to keep the poison circulating in its veins. Its Christian military occupants now re-injected as much of the poison as it had succeeded in throwing out, and this in its capital, the very heart of the country.

With its Parliament prorogued and its press stifled by a military censorship, Turkish opinion was drifting leaderless into confusion. Opposition parties are apt to suffer in time of war and the late Enver Government had so thoroughly broken up its Opposition that the Damad Ferid Government no longer commanded confidence. The intrigues of three Allies, each of them cultivating Turkish support, added to the confusion. Western concession hunters and the Levantinism with which the capital stank, trailed the slime of money over the scene.

Across this unlovely landscape, the Phanar’s break with the Ottoman Government fell like a thunderbolt. Rauf Bey had surrendered at Mudros to an Emperor of India purged of his Russian alliance, but it now became apparent that the Venizelist Government at Athens had succeeded to the place in the Anglo-Russian entente which Russia had vacated. Rauf had applied to Admiral Calthorpe for an Anglo-Turkish alliance, but it now appeared that no such alliance would be granted and it is easy to imagine what effect this desperate situation, if it had really come upon them, had upon the Turks in the capital. The Phanar had now become openly an enemy in Stamboul itself, the Turkish guard in the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia was heavily reinforced, and a French guard stacked its rifles outside the mosque.

The panic-stricken Turks, still thinking in terms of the Empire, still blind to the great fallen columns about them, launched their Wilsonian League as a bid for new friends. The United States had not declared war against them. The Enver Government had severed diplomatic relations when Washington joined the Allies, but the break had gone no further. Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U. S. N., a naval officer on State Department duty, had occupied the American Embassy in Pera as High Commissioner, restricting his communication with the Ottoman Government to the medium of the Swedish Legation pending the resumption of diplomatic relations. A large colony of Americans had followed him into Constantinople, part of them business men who presently became restive under the tardiness of the boom in materializing, part of them relief workers who discovered to their surprise that Turks have the same number of eyes and ears and legs and arms as the rest of us have. Some of the American colony of which Admiral Bristol was the head, afford this somber narrative a lighter aspect. All our American types were represented in Constantinople—​deep-breathing bishops: apostolic governors of Kansas: “Y” workers whose given names were Fred and Henry and Dick: business men who knew what they wanted and couldn’t get it: courteous and correct Embassy attaches: old missionaries with broken hearts and tight lips: sailors who blew in from Mersina, oiled up and blew out again to Samsun: young and autobiographical Near East Relief workers: college presidents who had lived long in the land and were vaguely concerned about the Capitulations: young lady missionaries with a sweetly simple reliance on “these darling British”: and stern “commissioners” of the Near East Relief on “tours of inspection” who learned from Greeks and Armenians that the worst they had been told of the Turk was quite true. At the head of them all was Admiral Bristol, equipped with a flotilla of American destroyers and charged with the defense of American interests in the Ottoman Empire. He enjoyed what was probably the most difficult American position in all of Europe and in it he proved himself a very tower of American strength.

The colony of which he was the head was divided into two sorts, American business men who looked to the American Embassy for their leadership, and American missionary, educational and relief workers who looked not only to the American Embassy but to the British from the Foreign Office in London down to the British Army in Pera without reminding themselves as frequently as they might have done that the British Army, while one of our most gallant Armies, interests itself, and quite rightly, in the King’s peace and in no other peace.

In the absence of any Parliament to speak for than, a number of the most influential Turks in the capital formed themselves into a delegation from the Wilsonian League and pledged themselves early in 1919 to accept an American mandate over the entire country, provided a definite term, preferably fifteen or twenty years, was named for it. This pledge was communicated to Admiral Bristol and forwarded by him to Washington. If such a mandate would not apply the Westernism of the Fourteen Points to the case of Turkey, it was reasoned, it would at least afford the Turks the time they needed to consider their position.

With Turkish civilian opinion now casting about for substitutes for the Parliament which the Damad Ferid Government continued to deny it, Turkish military opinion lost no time in facing the radically new situation which the Phanar’s break with the Porte had precipitated. The General Staff had constituted the driving force of reform in 1908 and it did so again in 1919. Inside a ring of British bayonets, the Asia Minor provinces had been turned loose in semi-independence and were being rapidly disarmed. The Third Army, reduced in personnel and equipment, had been permitted by the Allies to base itself on Sivas and to maintain there a skeleton organization for gendarmerie purposes. Similarly the Ninth Army remained in skeleton form at Erzerum in the eastern provinces, and Turkish refugees were moving slowly back into these wasted and silent provinces and resuming the even tenor of their lives. Greek refugees were being returned to Smyrna and Samsun, a proceeding which would have remained meaningless had not the Oecumenical Patriarchate whose communicants these Greeks were, become openly hostile.

The General Staff had already dispatched agents secretly to the eastern provinces for the formation of local defense committees. Under the Allied military occupation, the Armenian Patriarchate at 21 Rue de Brousse in the Pera suburb of the capital, had openly espoused the program of the old independence committees. The old Armenian Parliamentary bloc had not survived the break-up of the Empire and the old Russian annexationist group had come to a similar end with the break-up of Czarist Russia. Independence of Russians and Turks alike had become the Armenian program and the hope of its realization lay in the British and United States Governments. The former had already manifested concern for the Armenians on numerous occasions, and two organizations were at work in the United States, the Armenia-America Society which was related to the Near East Relief, and the Committee for Armenian Independence which represented the extreme wing of Armenian opinion. American relief workers in the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia were already urging the repatriation of Armenian refugees into the eastern provinces, where they had long constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention and eventual annexation. Against this move the General Staff had prepared the eastern provinces. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha, commander of the Ninth Army at Erzerum, had a large quantity of arms at his disposal, some deposited by the Ottoman Armies retreating from Mesopotamia and some dug up from Russian depots concealed in the mountains.

The Phanar’s break with the Porte was a new development, however, against which the General Staff had made no preparation. Rauf Bey had signed an armistice at Mudros with the Allied Powers, but no armistice had been signed with the Rûm and Ermeni communities. If war was now to develope with the latter, action would have to be taken without delay. Accordingly it was determined to dispatch Mustapha Kemal Pasha and Rauf Bey to Samsun and Smyrna, respectively, to form local defense committees and to meet at Sivas where Kemal was to take over the administration of Asia Minor. On the basis of these defense committees, a new political party was to be built up which should compel the Damad Ferid Government to reassemble Parliament and enable the country to consider its future. The beginning of such a party already existed in the capital, but the new National Liberals naturally led a secret existence under the Allied military occupation and it was not until Kemal began building up the party organization in Asia Minor that they openly became the Nationalists.

The surrender of arms to the Allies continued, and in his report to the British War Office on events in Turkey from the time of the Mudros armistice to the signature of the Sevres Treaty, General Milne testifies to the honesty with which disarmament was carried out up to the time of the Greek occupation of Smyrna. The defense committees were not directed against the Allies. Large and small Allied forces, even Allied officers alone, moved freely about the country. The political program with which Kemal was charged, was directed against the Damad Ferid Government, his military program against any partition of the country in favor of Greeks and Armenians. If the Rûm and Ermeni communities of the old Empire attempted a transfer of their historic community life from a religious to a territorial basis, the defense committees would constitute the Turks’ reply.

This program was developed in the utmost secrecy, since the Allied occupation had loosed more spies in the capital than Abdul Hamid had ever employed in his palmiest days. The Ottoman Navy having been interned in the Golden Horn, it was an easy matter to dispatch Rauf Bey to Smyrna. He left Constantinople early in May, 1919. Kemal Pasha, however, was a senior Army officer and under the orders of the Ottoman War Office. It was assumed that the Damad Ferid Government would not object to having the capital rid of his presence, but his effectiveness in Asia Minor depended on his authority. He was ostensibly to be sent out as Inspector-General with command of the skeleton forces which General Milne had sanctioned for gendarmerie purposes at Sivas and Erzerum, and the instructions which defined his powers were shown him as soon as they had been drawn up by the General Staff. In a room at the War Office, Kemal spent three hours “correcting” them, until they empowered him with authority to act in every contingency which might conceivably arise. As thus “corrected,” they were placed hurriedly before Damad Ferid’s War Minister and signed without having been read. Duplicate copies, destined for subordinate commanders in Asia Minor, were signed by members of the General Staff. Thus equipped, Mustapha Kemal Pasha left Constantinople for Samsun the day after Rauf Bey had left for Smyrna.

Kemal found British craft in Samsun roadstead and a British control officer in the town with a handful of Indian troops. Greeks were being disembarked and were pushing into the villages in the immediate hinterland. A project was under way for the detachment of the Black Sea littoral, including the ports of Samsun and Trebizond, from the remnant of the Empire and its erection as an independent Greek State under the name of the Pontus. If the Pan-Hellenic program at Constantinople proposed to re-write five centuries of history, if the Armenian program in the eastern provinces proposed to undo the work of ten centuries, the Pontus program also proposed to set aside a half-dozen centuries. It would hardly be fair, however, to judge these three programs by the standards of practicability which are customarily applied in politics, for their strength lay outside the realm of politics. In 1919, we stood in the presence of a Christendom, damp with centuries of Byzantinism, which proposed to commit the very errors in Turkey for which it had frequently blamed Islam.

To thoughtful Turks, it had long been plain that the old Empire was doomed unless it could disentangle itself from the grip of religious usage. An attempt had been made in 1908 at this precise task of disentangling religion and politics. It had failed because neither the Old Turks nor the Christian communities would permit it to succeed. Christendom and Islam alike proved immovable. Turks, Greeks and Armenians threshed themselves to pieces in the religious deadlock which the Young Turks failed to break in 1908 and by 1919 Greeks and Armenians were prepared to set up new Christian theocracies on the wreck of an old Moslem theocracy. The Rûm and Ermeni communities had clung immovably to their full community rights after 1908 and by 1919 the break-up of the Empire had made possible the transfer of their communities, with the concurrence of Christendom, from their old religious, to a new territorial, basis.

Kemal rode up into the hills behind Samsun. Under the blue skies of an Anatolian spring, he made his way from village to village. He reached Sivas where Colonel Rafet Bey was in command of the skeleton Third Army, simultaneously with a rumor that Great Britain had given Smyrna to the Greeks and that the greatest sea-port of Asia Minor had been the scene of massacres by Greek troops. Telegrams to Angora where a British control officer was receiving munitions surrendered under the Mudros armistice, brought a prompt denial. But the rumor grew. What purported to be stories of the massacres and of the flight of Turkish civilians from Greek soldiers in the hinterland of Smyrna, accompanied it. The British control officer at Angora denied it again, emphasizing the fact that the armistice had been signed by the British Government and no Greek occupation of Smyrna was possible without British consent. But a telegram soon reached Sivas from the Ottoman War Office in Constantinople, announcing that Smyrna had been occupied by the Greeks and that Admiral Calthorpe had supervised the occupation. British control officers along the railways fled to Constantinople at once and most of them were fortunate enough to reach their destination.

Meanwhile, Rauf Bey had reached Smyrna on May 13. On May 14, Admiral Calthorpe entered the bay with an Allied naval squadron from Constantinople. The Allied control officers ashore were ordered to disarm the Ottoman garrison and confine it to its barracks. At 6:30 o’clock in the evening, Admiral Calthorpe announced that the city would be occupied by Allied troops the next morning. A vague rumor that Greek troops were to be used brought a repetition of the announcement that Allied troops would occupy the city. But the rumor persisted and as night drew on, the population of the Turkish quarter withdrew to a hill-top behind the town and gathered around huge bonfires in an all-night protest meeting.

By 7 o’clock the next morning, the Ottoman garrison had been withdrawn to its barracks. By 10 o’clock, British marines had disembarked onto the quai and had occupied the telegraph offices, and Greek troops were landing from their transports. They marched first to the konak, the seat of the provincial administration, and occupied the building amid scenes of growing confusion which the Greek commander either could not or would not control. From the konak, they marched to the barracks and the firing which had already begun culminated in the raking of the barracks with machine guns. At the barracks and elsewhere, in Smyrna City and deep into its hinterland, the killing continued for days. Twice Rauf Bey was overtaken by the rapid Greek advance and had to flee farther into the hinterland. Events might or might not have turned out differently if Rauf had landed at Smyrna a month before he did, but one reason for the lack of any Turkish defense of Smyrna was the quite simple reason that there had been no time in which to prepare a defense.

It was disastrous news which Rauf conveyed through the interior as he continued on his way to join Kemal at Sivas. It affected the Turks far more than even the Armenian sack of Van had affected them, for in 1915 the Enver Government had at least not been disarmed. Even in Constantinople itself, Turkish opinion became so inflamed against the Damad Ferid Government that machine guns were mounted on Galata Bridge and the Allied High Commissioners were finally compelled to dispatch an inter-Allied Commission, headed by Admiral Bristol, to put a stop to the killing behind Smyrna. The Bristol Commission drew up a lengthy report which fixed immediate responsibility for the Smyrna affair, and Mr. Lloyd George suppressed it at the demand of Mr. Venizelos. By such suppressions has the martyr-legend of Near Eastern Christians grown.

The Greek occupation of Smyrna shook the world, from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. Down in the Turkish cockpit, the Damad Ferid Government became an Allied puppet, Mustapha Kemal Pasha brought the skeleton Third Army down to Amasia to prevent a similar Greek landing at Samsun, a Turkish fighting front was hurriedly extemporized against the Armenians who were gathering under the Anglo-French aegis in Cilicia, and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha hewed out a back door to Central Asia past the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia. In the United States, the religious press opened its columns to every atrocity-charge against the Turks which Greek and Armenian minds could devise. In India, pious Moslems began trekking across the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, fleeing the British Government at Delhi with motives similar to those with which the Pilgrim Fathers once fled from England. Down in the hinterland of Smyrna, the West stood with bayonets fixed, confronting an East which had been largely disarmed.

It appears to be unquestioned that no clause of the Mudros armistice authorized the Allies to occupy Smyrna. The only clause which has been advanced as possibly covering the occupation, is clause 7 which gives the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” None of the dozen Allied officers who had been posted to Smyrna has ever claimed that a situation existed there which threatened even their own security, to say nothing of the security of the Allies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha at Sivas interpreted the occupation as a violation of the armistice by the Allies themselves and held it accordingly as no longer binding. The surrender of munitions to the Allies ceased immediately. The Anatolian peasant left his growing crops and went angrily back to war.

XV

THE ORTHODOX SCHISM IN ANATOLIA

KEMAL FALLS TO THE STATUS OF A “BANDIT”—​TURKISH NATIONALISM BEGINS TO RE-MOBILIZE AND RE-EQUIP ITS FORCES—​THE ERZERUM PROGRAM AND THE NATIONALIST VICTORY IN THE OTTOMAN ELECTIONS—​HOW PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI BROKE WITH THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE—​THE TURKISH ORTHODOX CHURCH—​PAPA EFTIM HIMSELF.

Mr. lloyd george had announced his program at Smyrna. He proposed to build a new Near East on the basis of its Christian minorities, confronting Soviet Russia with a Greek fait accompli across the Straits on a parity with the American mandate in Trans-Caucasia and the eastern provinces, the British Persia and the Afghan-Bokharan business with which it was proposed to confront it elsewhere. As for Islam, he would impose alone upon it that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together.

The reply to this program was Turkish Nationalism. Rid of the burden of the old Empire, freed of sole responsibility for the Caliphate, Mustapha Kemal Pasha proposed to break the religious deadlock in which the Turks had threshed themselves to pieces and to apply the same Westernism to his own nation as the West had long applied to its Greeks and Armenians. Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish tekkes at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be permitted to poison the country with their political reaction.

Inside a ring of British and Greek bayonets, the Turks flocked to the new Nationalist Party, not because the mass of Turkish opinion had any understanding of the meaning of nationalism but because Smyrna had stripped the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople of the very small Turkish support with which it had entered office. Beginning in the eastern provinces which were farthest from the capital, the defense committees which constituted the framework of the Party, arrested Damad Ferid’s provincial officials and deported them to Constantinople, installing Nationalist administrations in their places. This proceeded so rapidly that Ferid telegraphed Kemal to return to the capital at once. Despite the fact that Ferid’s orders bore all the prestige of the Grand Vizierate, Kemal disregarded them and on July 11, 1919, Ferid dismissed him from the Army. From a senior officer and a military hero, Kemal now fell to the status of a “bandit,” who knew in all probability that it was only a matter of time until he would be caught and shot.

The Nationalist Party had a dual program. Its political objective was to compel the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople to re-assemble Parliament and permit the country to consider its future. Its military objective was to prevent the further partition of what it believed to be Turkish soil. Under the impetus of Smyrna, it was comparatively easy to take over province after province in Asia Minor and to put the Government in a position in which it would sooner or later be compelled to reckon with its new Opposition. Its military objective was far less easy of attainment. About 20,000 troops had been permitted to remain at Sivas and Erzerum for gendarmerie purposes. A quantity of munitions, particularly in the eastern provinces, had not yet been surrendered. A further quantity was dug up from old Russian depots, concealed during the great Russian advance of 1915-’16. More were smuggled across the Black Sea from Denikin’s rear in South Russia, as soon as it became known that a market for arms had developed in Asia Minor. Still more, particularly artillery, had been dismantled by the Allies and left in Turkish possession; these needed only new breech-blocks and range-finders, the construction of which began at once out of any scrap metal available. Hidden away in the secrecy of Asia Minor, Nationalism began to re-mobilize and re-equip its tattered and frequently bare-footed soldiers.

ASSEMBLY BUILDING AT ANGORA

So rapidly did the Party grow that two months after the Smyrna occupation, Kemal and Rauf were able to assemble it in a caucus at Erzerum in the eastern provinces. Kemal’s staff drove up to Erzerum along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become famous under the name of the National Pact.

This document re-stated and amplified the Izzet Government’s position, as Rauf Bey had conveyed it to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. Autonomy for the Arabs under the necessary suzerainty of the Caliph at Constantinople and Allied recognition of the Enver Government’s abrogation of the Capitulations, were its principal planks. The break-up of the old Empire was accepted and in the new map of the Near and Middle East, the Caliphate of Islam was modified to permit the application of the Western tradition of nationalism to Turks and Arabs alike, an application to which the Turks claimed as complete a right as the West had long before acknowledged to Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians. From the Greeks, the West had never asked Capitulations. It would therefore not ask Capitulations from the Turks. As for the rights of minorities, such rights as the Greeks gave their Moslem minorities, the Turks would give their Christian minorities. The Straits would remain open to world commerce, subject only to the necessary military security of Constantinople, “the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters of the Ottoman Government.” In the delineation of the new Turkey’s frontiers, certain border areas were under dispute. Two of these border areas, Cilicia and the Mosul province, “are inhabited by an Ottoman Moslem majority united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued with sentiments of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and wholly respectful of each other’s racial and social rights and surrounding conditions,” and these belonged within the Turkish frontiers. To certain other border areas (Western Thrace and the three districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum in Trans-Caucasia), the West could, if it wished, apply the device of the plebiscite with which it was accustomed to decide the destinies of populations elsewhere. As for the place of the new Turkey in the family of nations, the Party repeated Rauf Bey’s statements to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros: “It is a fundamental condition of our life and continued existence that we, like every country, should enjoy complete independence and liberty in the matter of assuring the means of our development, in order that our national and economic development should be rendered possible and that it should be possible to conduct affairs in the form of a more up-to-date regular administration.” On this note, the Party’s platform closed. Three weeks later, a copy of it lay on Lord Curzon’s desk in the Foreign Office in London, and Colonel Alfred Rawlinson, a brother of Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-Chief in India, was returned to Erzerum to learn what it was that Kemal really wanted.

Having drawn up the Party’s platform, the Erzerum caucus adjourned to meet in September at Sivas, where a standing council of twelve members was chosen to sit continuously at Angora, a provincial capital whose rail and telegraphic communication with Constantinople was more direct than Sivas’s. The Damad Ferid Government’s position with respect to the country had now become so impossible that it fell on October 5 and was replaced by the Ali Riza Government which was authorized by the Sultan to hold a general election. This was a clean-cut victory for the Nationalists and two days after the new Government took office, Kemal telegraphed the Party’s platform to Ali Riza Pasha in Constantinople, as the terms of peace on which the Nationalists appealed to the country.

At this junction, the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar forbade Ottoman Greeks to participate in the elections on the ground that they were no longer Ottoman subjects. This injunction was of course obeyed in the capital where Allied troops were in occupation, but a considerable portion of the Rûm community lived in Asia Minor and here, already gravely compromised with their Turkish neighbors by the Phanar’s break with the Porte and by the Greek occupation of Smyrna which had followed that break, it only added to their difficulties. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what move more dangerous to its own communicants in Asia Minor the Phanar could have made. It so increased the suspicion which attached to them in the eyes of the Nationalists that hundreds of them were clapped into Nationalist jails and were not released until a Turkish-speaking Orthodox priest from Kiskin, twelve miles from Angora, announced his intention of breaking with the Phanar and participating in the elections as an Ottoman subject. He immediately undertook to effect a similar break on the part of the Turkish-speaking Orthodox churches in the interior, and the Oecumenical Patriarch summoned him to report at the Phanar at once. He disregarded both the Phanar’s summons and the excommunication which followed it, and continued to align his people with the Nationalists.

Papa Eftim Effendi, acting metropolitan of the Turkish Orthodox Church, is a subject to be approached with all caution for he may yet develope into a phase of the new Turkey more important for Christendom than Kemal himself. Christian solidarity broke down when the Phanar threw its communicants in Asia Minor into a political position which brooked not an instant’s neutrality. As long as Ottoman Christians were given an inferior position under Moslem law, the concern of Western Christians for the Rûm and Ermeni communities of the old Empire had a legitimate basis. The Byzantinism which colored our Western concern for Ottoman Greeks and Armenians may have blinded us at times to the actual position they occupied in the old Empire, but the legal position which Moslem law gave them was certain ultimately to be resented. There came a time when thoughtful Turks agreed with us, not out of concern for non-Moslems but in the belief that the Empire was being slowly strangled by the religious usages which had tightened about it. The Young Turks made an honest attempt in 1908 at reforms designed ultimately to give all races of the Empire an equal position as Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman State. That attempt broke down for several reasons. One was that the Young Turkish program was repugnant to Islam. Another was that the Rûm and Ermeni communities stuck to every jot of their community rights. Whether rightly or wrongly, they would not be given a common position with their Moslem neighbors. To American missionaries on the spot, the failure of the Young Turkish program was a bitter disappointment for they knew what the price of failure would be to Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike. But American Protestantism in the United States generally concurred in the refusal of the Ottoman Christians to make that gesture of confidence without which the Young Turkish program was bound to fail. The missionaries knew that if the religious deadlock which the 1908 Revolution sought to break, had finally to be broken by force, only Western military intervention could save the Christians from defeat. But their tongues were tied in the United States. Churchmen at home stiffened the Greeks and Armenians while refusing to note the very grave problems for which it was essential that the Turks should discover a solution.

Papa Eftim Effendi, however, has made the gesture of confidence. Under his leadership, sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior gave up their church schools on March 1, 1922, their pupils being sent thereafter to the Government’s schools. The old Rûm community regarded its schools with considerable pride, for they were centers of Greek nationalism. In the old Empire, they were centers of Orthodox reaction just as the mosque schools were centers of Moslem reaction. These churches in the interior have given up their right to administer Orthodox civil law. Turkish courts, under the Ministry of Justice, now administer Orthodox law for Orthodox litigants, supposedly as British courts administer Moslem law in India. The churches which have formed the new Turkish Orthodox Church under Papa Eftim’s leadership, are as free to worship as they have always been (and that freedom has been possibly greater than Westerners have sometimes attributed to the Ottoman Government). Politically, however, their communicants have thrown in their lot with the Turks. Their clergy wear the black robe and black cylindrical hat of Orthodoxy only while engaged in their clerical duties. At all other times, they wear the Turkish kalpak.

But the wider interest which gathers around Papa Eftim at present lies in the fact that he has destroyed the old basis of Christian solidarity and has opened up the possibility of a quite new basis. The old solidarity, whether rightly or wrongly, has levied a fearful toll upon Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike during these last few years. But it is just possible that Papa Eftim has given us the prospect of a new solidarity upon a purely religious basis. It is a prospect to be approached with all reserve, for it suggests a new Western attitude toward the Near and Middle East whose benefits both to Christendom and to Islam may prove to be incalculable. Time will develope Papa Eftim’s full significance. Unless hostility to the Turk is an article of the Christian creed, his is the most meaningful figure in Turkey today.

A note reached me late one morning during my stay in Angora, to the effect that Papa Eftim Effendi was in the city and was anxious to call. Two hours later, Djelal Noury Bey, a prominent Turkish editor and a deputy in the Grand National Assembly, entered with Papa Eftim following. Eftim was a black-eyed, bushy little man and the figure he presented, a Turkish kalpak resting on his uncut Orthodox hair and his long Orthodox beard flowing over the turned-up collar of a wolfskin coat, is one which may be commended to those who knew the old Ottoman Empire. The following dialogue ensued:

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?

Djelal Noury (smiling): He is of the Turkish race.

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you of Turkish blood?

Djelal Noury (smiling cordially): The Turkish Orthodox Church was his own idea. He organized it himself.

Self (to Papa Eftim): Do you speak Turkish? Djelal Noury (still smiling cordially): He wants to go to the League of Nations at Geneva. He asks do you think he ought to go?

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?

Djelal Noury (smiling still more cordially): He asks whether you may be a Protestant. He says if you are, you and he are the same for neither of you recognize the Pope.

This sort of thing seemed to be of no profit to any of us and the matter was accordingly allowed to drop, Djelal Noury leaving with Papa Eftim carefully in tow. We Westerners of course are quite superior to this device of the carefully staged interview, since our own politicians in the West are as indifferent to publicity as a cat is to catnip.

A half-hour later, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I told him I had formed the highest opinion of his chaperone but had had no opportunity to form any opinion of Eftim himself. Something apparently happened behind the scenes during the next day or two for two evenings later, Papa Eftim unexpectedly knocked at my door and entered stark alone. It was two hours afterward when he left and during those two hours nobody interrupted us. I believe that no lawyer ever put a witness through a more thorough examination than I put Papa Eftim on that evening. When he left, his pale thin hands shook with emotion. As he went out, he stopped in the door-way and this is what he said: “This is our country and the Turks are our own people. How can we forsake our country when it needs us?”

I have no means of knowing who put this strangely Western idea into Papa Eftim’s head originally. Certainly it was not that stronghold of Easternism, the Oecumenical Patriarchate. Wherever it did come from, I believe there is not the slightest question of the sincerity with which Papa Eftim holds it today. His is the almost fanatical sincerity of a minority which feels itself misunderstood.

The morning after I talked with him, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I made him a non-committal answer to the effect that he seemed to me to be the merest shadow of a man physically to be cast in such a great role. Fifteen minutes after my Turkish caller left, my door opened and the largest Orthodox priest I have ever seen loomed in the door-way, a vast ignorant mound of a man who announced unctuously that he was one of Papa Eftim’s assistants in the Turkish Orthodox Church. I looked him over slowly from his huge feet all the way up to his uncut Orthodox beard and the Turkish kalpak stuck on top of it, while he watched me with the black ox-like eyes of a people whom no man has ever long succeeded in budging unless they were willing to be budged. Then I thanked him and told him he would do quite nicely. He turned slowly and the stairs creaked beneath his tread as he went ponderously away.

XVI

THE TREATY OF SEVRES

RAUF BEY TAKES THE NATIONALIST DEPUTIES FROM ANGORA TO CONSTANTINOPLE—​INDIA COMPELS MR. LLOYD GEORGE TO LEAVE CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE TURK AND GENERAL MILNE BREAKS UP THE PARLIAMENT, DEPORTING RAUF AND MANY OF HIS COLLEAGUES TO MALTA—​THE SEVRES TREATY AND HOW DAMAD FERID PASHA SECURED AUTHORITY TO SIGN IT.

The elections which the Ali Riza Government held, resulted in a clean sweep for the Nationalists and a situation of considerable delicacy was now precipitated. It was hardly possible for the new Parliament, charged with the execution of the Erzerum program, to function freely under the enemy occupation in the capital. On the other hand, it was the country’s legally elected Parliament and it was highly desirable that it should be recognized as such. Pending decision as to its course, its deputies assembled at Angora where the Party’s standing council was in session in the gray granite building which had once been the provincial headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress. Here an intimation reached the deputies that the Allies were prepared to recognize the new Parliament if its session was held in the capital and was opened in a legal fashion by the Sultan’s speech, but that it would not be recognized if it met in Angora. Accordingly a large proportion of the deputies, headed by Rauf Bey, the Parliamentary leader of the Party, left Angora for Constantinople and on Jan. 11, 1920, the new Ottoman Parliament opened its session. Despite the conditions of military occupation under which it met, Rauf Bey discharged his duties with inflexible courage and on January 28, the Erzerum program, now known as the Turkish National Pact, was legally adopted by the legal Parliament sitting in its legal capital.

Trouble was now plainly in the air. Only the day before the adoption of the Pact, the re-mobilizing Nationalist forces in Asia Minor had raided a dump of surrendered munitions on the Gallipoli peninsula. Behind its Asiatic suburbs, their forces had crept into the very outskirts of Constantinople. The Allied occupation was becoming a touch-and-go matter.

Other developments contributed to the gravity of the situation. Mr. Lloyd George who had been striding up and down the Rubicon, had made a dismaying discovery. It seemed that there was a place called India. The British Foreign Office was also having its troubles. Pilgrimage to Mecca had ceased and Islam was not displaying that gratitude at the payment of British subsidies to King Hussein of the Hejaz, which Lord Curzon expected of it. Mr. Lloyd George accordingly ceased striding up and down the Rubicon and seated himself in a waiting posture on its bank. On February 26, he told the House of Commons in London that his statement of Jan. 5, 1918, respecting Constantinople as the Turkish capital, “was specific. It was unqualified and it was very deliberate. It was made with the consent of all parties in the community. It was not opposed by the Labor Party.” Preparations were accordingly made to leave Constantinople to the Turk in the peace settlement, and London editors (who as a rule are not Moslems) began turning over projects for the “Vaticanization” of the Caliphate of Islam.

On the night of March 15-16, during the temporary absence of his French co-commander, General Milne seized the telegraph offices in Constantinople, isolated the capital from Asia Minor, executed a series of lightning raids at midnight, arrested every Nationalist deputy in the Ottoman Parliament whom he could lay his hands on, and embarked them on transports for internment on Malta. By dawn of the 16th, British forces held the city securely in their grip, Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues were en route to barbed wire compounds on Malta, the rest of the Nationalist deputies were clambering up the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus to begin their long trek back to Angora, General Milne was soon to be recognized as the Allied Commander-in-Chief, and Constantinople was ready to be left to the Turk.

On April 6, the Ali Riza Government gave way to a second Damad Ferid Government. On April 11, Ferid issued a Sultanic edict denouncing Nationalism, and a similar edict was issued by the Sheikh-ul-Islam who had entered his high office upon the arrest and deportation to Malta of his predecessor (the German occupation of Belgium during the war had left Cardinal Mercier unmolested, but no such nice scruples have troubled the British occupants of Constantinople). Meanwhile, military events were moving rapidly. The Circassian leader, Anzavur, who had been launched against the Nationalists, had flickered out after a few local successes along the Asiatic shore of the Straits, and it became evident that serious operations would have to be undertaken if Constantinople was to be held. Every British man of war in the Mediterranean was ordered to Constantinople and, with the second Ferid Government launching its religious thunderbolts at the Nationalists, Allied conferences at Hythe and Boulogne called on the Greeks behind Smyrna to screen the Straits from the “Kemalists.” In conjunction with British naval units, the towns along the Asiatic shore of Marmora were quickly occupied. Thrace was given to the Greeks in Europe to protect the capital from the Nationalists in its rear, and a British Constantinople was now firmly embedded in a Greek setting. The High Contracting Parties were now prepared to “agree that the rights and title of the Turkish Government over Constantinople shall not be affected, and that the said Government and His Majesty the Sultan shall be entitled to reside there and to maintain there the capital of the Turkish State.”

On May 11, the terms of peace were handed to two of Ferid’s appointees at Paris. These terms proposed to close the Greek pincers about Constantinople, to cut it off from Asia Minor permanently with a garrison restricted to 700 men, to isolate the Straits from Asia Minor by the institution of an International Commission on which Russia and Turkey would be represented if and when they became members of the League of Nations, and to place what remained of Turkey in Asia Minor under the permanent military, economic and financial control of Great Britain, France and Italy. As for Smyrna, “the city of Smyrna and the territory in Article 66 will be assimilated, in the application of the present Treaty, to territory detached from Turkey. The city of Smyrna and the territory defined in Article 66 remain under Turkish sovereignty. Turkey however transfers to the Greek Government the exercise of her rights of sovereignty over the city of Smyrna and the said territory. In witness of such sovereignty the Turkish flag shall remain permanently hoisted over an outer fort in the town of Smyrna. The fort will be designated by the Principal Allied Powers…. The Greek Government may establish a Customs boundary along the frontier line defined in Article 66, and may incorporate the city of Smyrna and the territory defined in the said Article in the Greek customs system…. When a period of five years shall have elapsed after the coming into force of the present Treaty the local parliament referred to in Article 72 may, by a majority of votes, ask the Council of the League of Nations for the definitive incorporation in the Kingdom of Greece of the city of Smyrna and the territory defined in Article 66. The Council may require, as a preliminary, a plebiscite under conditions which it will lay down. In the event of such incorporation as a result of the application of the foregoing paragraph, the Turkish sovereignty referred to in Article 69 shall cease. Turkey hereby renounces in that event in favor of Greece all rights and title over the city of Smyrna and the territory defined in Article 66.” As for Constantinople, it remained the Turkish capital, but “in the event of Turkey failing to observe faithfully the provisions of the present Treaty, or of any treaties or conventions supplementary thereto, particularly as regards the protection of the rights of racial, religious or linguistic minorities, the Allied Powers expressly reserve the right to modify the above provisions, and Turkey hereby agrees to accept any dispositions which may be taken in this connection.”

There being no Ottoman Parliament in session, Damad Ferid Pasha summoned eighty prominent Turks to Yildiz Kiosk to authorize signature of the peace terms. Permitting no discussion of it, Ferid ordered those who favored signature to stand and, scenting trouble ahead, he whispered to the Sultan to stand. Considerations of etiquette bade every one present stand, but the late “Topdjeh” Riza Pasha broke into vigorous protest. In a voice trembling with emotion, he told Ferid that the meeting had risen out of respect to the Padishah and not in resignation to the peace terms, that the meeting had no power to authorize their signature and that, even if it had, it could not authorize their signature as long as Anatolia was in open and armed revolt against them. Without further ado, Ferid declared the signature of the peace terms authorized and added audibly that Anatolia could go to the devil.

So the peace terms were signed by three of Ferid’s appointees (one of them a teacher in an American college near Constantinople) on August 11 at Sevres in the suburbs of Paris. Sevres is in Christendom and the year was 1920.

XVII

ANGORA

FEVZI, RAFET AND KIAZIM KARABEKR PASHAS AND THEIR MILITARY DICTATORSHIP UNDER KEMAL PASHA—​THE “PONTUS” DEPORTATIONS—​MOSUL, THE KURDS AND THE SPLIT IN ISLAM—​THE FRANCO-ARMENIAN FRONT IN CILICIA, THE GREEK FRONT BEFORE SMYRNA, AND THE ALLIED FRONT BEFORE CONSTANTINOPLE—​HOW THE BROKEN PARLIAMENT WAS RECONSTRUCTED AT ANGORA—​FERID’S COUNTER-REVOLUTION AT KONIA.

Angora lies tilted up on its hill, a gray blanket of flat roofs pierced with white minarets and green cypresses, and scarred across its middle with the ruins of 1915. At its foot lies a shallow marsh stretching from the town itself to its railway station, a mile and a half away. Along the rim of the basin up whose southern slope it sprawls, are the summer villas of its wealthier families, secure above the hot-weather malaria of the marsh.

The heart of the town lies along its lower fringes. When the Sivas congress moved the Nationalist Party’s council to Angora late in September, 1919, Kemal himself took up his abode in an upper room at the railway station and a Decauville locomotive was kept fired up night and day beneath his window, in readiness to hurry him farther into the interior on an instant’s warning. The first building one passes upon entering the town from the railway station is the gray granite building once used as the local headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress, with a wooden theatre lying in the center of a garden across the road. Some distance to the left, as one continues into the town, is the old konak, or Government building, where the provincial administration was formerly housed. Across the square in front of it, is the Post and Telegraph Office. On the right hand as the town is entered, a broad street turns off past the theatre and leads around the foot of the town to the beautiful compound of the Sultana College. Almost opposite the theatre as one turns into this road, is a large school building of stone and some distance farther along is the stone building formerly occupied by the local administration of the Public Debt. Still farther along, far out in the outkirts of the town, the blue and white buildings of the Sultana College stand within the walls of their compound. Here Fevzi Pasha, a towering Anatolian Turk with drooping moustaches, and Rafet Pasha, a dapper little figure, were engaged in re-mobilizing and re-equipping the Army. Fevzi Pasha is a dour giant of a man with a gargantuan appetite for work and a complete aversion from social intercourse of any sort. Rafet Pasha has a similar capacity for work but he combines with it a natural genius for social intercourse. I have seen him in a number of widely varying settings, from his quarters in the Sultana College to the mountain passes of Anatolia in the dead of winter, but he is invariably as immaculate both in manner and appearance as if he had just stepped out of a drawing room.

Under Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha ruled Anatolia for the Nationalists, their authority reaching down into the provinces through military governors whom they assigned to the more critical provincial capitals. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha who held the eastern provinces from Erzerum, ought to be mentioned with them. It had been easy enough to take over Anatolia from the Damad Ferid Government, for the Greek occupation of Smyrna undermined Ferid’s hold on the country at a stroke, but to hold Anatolia against Ferid’s efforts to recover it was quite another matter. Fevzi, Rafet and Kiazim were the men who held it, and whatever traditions of personal advantage they inherited from the old Ottoman Government, their personal ambitions were sunk in the common cause of defending the remnant of the country. I believe firmly that this statement holds true of Kemal as well. My impression of him is that he would have joined one of his own labor battalions and dug roads behind his own Army if he thought that by so doing he would be able more effectively to contribute to his country’s defense.

These men constituted a small handful of modern Westerners in control of a vast mediaeval Eastern country, but their task was simplified by the comparative absence of the Levantinism which had poisoned Constantinople. Such as their country was, it was as homogeneous as any between Vienna and Bagdad. There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. Its handful of Americans were soon represented at Angora by two members of the Near East Relief’s corps, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings. Most of their contact was with Rafet Pasha and, despite the serious delicacy of their position, their relations with Rafet Pasha were generally happy.

The military situation in which the Turks found themselves, was shortly to be simplified by the brief war which Kiazim Karabekr Pasha launched from Erzerum against the Armenian Republic of Erivan. This opened a line of retreat to Trans-Caucasia and Central Asia, and if Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas had been forced to drop their archives into their kalpaks and flee, a back door would have been available for their escape into the East.

The Pontus project which the Greeks along the Black Sea littoral had launched, was not so simple to handle. The Greek occupation of Smyrna eventually made it necessary to transfer the Third Army from Amasia to the hinterland of Smyrna and the so-called Pontus had to be held with irregulars under the command of the late Osman Agha, the Laz mayor of Kerasund. The crude terrorism he wielded proved to be such an ugly business that Hamid Bey, one of the best men available in Angora, was dispatched to Samsun as mayor. Hamid Bey is a Rhodes Turk with up-standing hair, Kaiser-like moustaches, a mouth full of gold and a booming voice, a combination apt to give one meeting him for the first time a sense of having met some new species of wild man, but a further acquaintance with him reveals beneath his surface eccentricities a character of solid integrity and ripe judgment. He had been a governor of provinces and the fact that the post of mayor in Samsun was thought worthy of being filled by an ex-governor may be taken as an indication of Rafet Pasha’s anxiety to discover some peaceful solution of the Pontus problem. Osman Agha’s terrorism remained as much of a problem at Angora as the Greek terrorism which it sought to overcome, but a solution was finally discovered for it when Osman, having shot down 900 Greeks and Armenians in Marsovan in reprisal for the knifing of 200 Turks by Greek troops at Ismid, marched to Angora to offer himself and his Laz followers to the Army. He entered Angora as the hero of a goaded and angry population and Kemal, after permitting him to enjoy his ovation to the full, incorporated his followers in the Turkish shock troops with whom they were cut to pieces in the Battle of the Sakaria River. Thereafter there were no more Marsovans in the so-called Pontus, but the problem of its Greeks still remained.

There appears to be no doubt that the Pontus program had reached the status of a definite organization determined on independence, an organization which was peculiarly difficult to combat by reason of the fact that any move against it would be disseminated in the Black Books of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople as evidence of “persecution of the Christians.” Believing that one of the organization’s centers was a body of Greek students which called itself the Pontus Literary Society in the American college at Marsovan, Angora requested Dr. George E. White, president of the college, to suppress the Society. Possibly forgetting that the country was in a state of war and nowhere more bitterly so than in Marsovan, Dr. White refused to suppress the Society. Angora thereupon suppressed the college, deporting its American teaching staff to the coast whence they were removed to Constantinople. A number of Greeks were then arrested in Marsovan on evidence which Angora believed indicated their activity in the Greek organization; they were removed to Angora, placed on trial before a military court under a charge of treason in time of war, convicted and hung. But the tumult in the so-called Pontus still continued. Greek and Turkish irregulars burned each other’s villages and ambushed each other in the fields. This sort of thing dragged along until 1922, when Angora, having failed to break up the Greek organization, deported into the interior the entire Greek population along the Black Sea, men, women and children alike.

Once these deportations had been ordered at Angora, their execution was of necessity left to the local police chiefs and the manner of their execution varied with the temper of the local police chiefs and the amount of supplies available in each province. Both the police chiefs and the amounts of supplies available varied widely, and the treatment of the deportees on the march varied accordingly. The report which Dr. Mark Ward, the Near East Relief worker who was deported from Kharput, made to the British Foreign Office in London as well as to his own Government in Washington, indicates that their sufferings at Kharput were heavy. Dr. Ward in his report laid the blame for their sufferings on Angora. Whether, once other methods had failed to break up the Greek Pontus organization, Angora possessed the means to make deportation a bearable process for the Greeks, is a question which in the lack of conclusive evidence must remain unanswered here. It seems to me more to the point, however, to point out the original guilt of those who landed the Greeks in Asia Minor without the means of protecting them there. The “Pontus” episode is not the first in which Western Powers have permitted the Greeks to expose their own people to danger in the hope that their sufferings will attract Western assistance. There are minorities in every country between Vienna and Bagdad and their exposure to danger constitutes part of the technique of Balkan statecraft. Greek atrocities at Ismid resulted in Osman Agha’s reprisals at Marsovan. It is not impossible that that was the purpose with which Greek atrocities along the Marmora shore began. Certainly it is difficult to find any other purpose in the conduct of Greek regular troops. Thus it is that Balkan peoples draw their new frontiers. Thus it has been for a century and thus presumably it will continue to be, as long as the West permits.

It seems to me (and I must add in fairness that my knowledge of the “Pontus” deportations, while gleaned at Angora and the Oecumenical Patriarchate alike, is purely second-hand) that it is open to question whether Angora’s deportation of Greek women was justified and whether it made the fullest use of such scanty supplies as it had in caring for the deportees on the march. On the other hand, the action of the British in disembarking the Greeks into the “Pontus” without protest from the Oecumenical Patriarchate, could only be justified if the Turks remained helpless and passive. As soon as Nationalism began to gather strength in the interior, the most elemental sense of humanity on the part of the British and the Oecumenical Patriarchate should have prompted negotiations with Angora looking toward the re-embarkation of the “Pontus” women and the humane internment of the men.

The deportation of the “Pontus” Greeks and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha’s victory over the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia kept Angora’s rear open. The British front in the Mosul province of Mesopotamia has never threatened Angora’s rear, for the mountainous nature of the country ahead of them has made impossible any further advance on the part of the British. Here the British have sought to partition the Kurdish population, leaving its northern half to Angora and incorporating its southern half in the Arab State of Iraq. Whether the chiefs of the Kurdish tribes prefer to be under Turkish rule or under Arab rule or independent under the British aegis, is a question to which Angora and Bagdad furnish widely varying answers. It seems probable, however, that Kurdish opinion, such as it is, does not relish partition and if there are Kurdish deputies at Angora, it is because the Turks are the only parties to the Mosul controversy who do not propose to divide the Kurdish country. There is a wider aspect, however, to the Mosul controversy. Turks and Arabs alike are Sunni Moslems and as long as the British can maintain a controversy over Mosul between the new Turkish State and the Arab State of Iraq, Islam remains in a divided condition. It is the desire to abstain from any action over Mosul which might widen that breach, which has prompted Djavid Pasha, the Turkish commander at Diarbekr, to refrain from the use of force in the recovery of Mosul. The sheikh of the Senussi who girded the late Caliph on his accession to the Throne in 1918, and who fled from Brussa to Angora when the Greeks entered Smyrna, has been at Diarbekr for the last three years, attempting to heal the Turco-Arab breach over Mosul. Thus far, the conduct of the Turkish command on the Mosul “front” has been marked by a conspicuous restraint.

As Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas looked toward the West, they were confronted by three military fronts, the Cilician front on their left, the Greek front behind Smyrna on their center, and the Allied occupation of Constantinople on their right. In the winter of 1919-’20, the British high command in Cairo withdrew its forces from Cilicia in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, to Palestine, leaving the French command at Beirut in sole occupation of the northern end of the Syrian corridor and of Cilicia. Here, under the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out and the Turkish administration had withdrawn to Bozanti, a town at the top of the Taurus Range. The French front extended from the Taurus east to the Mosul province, but it was in Cilicia that the weight of the French occupation made itself chiefly felt. The Armenians revenged the undoubted wrongs which they had suffered under the Ottoman Sultans in drastic fashion and there were streets even in Adana itself in which it was not safe for a Turk to show himself after dark. The Turkish towns outside the rim of the French area, possibly inflamed by the tales of Turkish refugees from Adana, soon launched a guerilla warfare against the Franco-Armenian regular troops and began isolating out-lying garrisons. Much of this was directed by the Turkish ex-administration at Bozanti, but it was carried on largely by Turkish irregulars with any following which they could impress into service.

As for the Greek front behind Smyrna, the first defense which was used was that of the Circassian bandit leader, Edhem, but the Greek command soon won him over and made a considerable hero of him. This left Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas without defense and the skeleton Third Army which was hastily transferred from Amasia, covering Samsun, to the Smyrna front was too depleted in strength to offer effective resistance. Nuri Ismet Pasha, a slight deaf man but an able pupil of von der Goltz and the Potsdam War College, was given command on the Smyrna front and the hasty extemporization of munition factories began at Konia in his rear. Until his forces should be built up to an effective strength, however, he restricted himself to keeping in touch with the Greeks, and with all of Asia Minor behind him in which to maneuvre, he traded territory for time whenever the Greeks showed an inclination to move. Luckily for Angora, the Greeks sat waiting on the Allies and attempted little movement after their first rush ended.

Thus hemmed about with enemies, the Nationalist Party had won a clean-cut political victory by installing its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople, and its troops had penetrated into the very suburbs of the capital in search of surrendered munitions with which to re-equip themselves. Although the Mudros armistice had been torn up at the Greek occupation of Smyrna and a state of war again existed, Angora was in close telegraphic communication with Rauf Bey, the leader of its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople. Indeed, with the British Navy commanding those sections of its perimeter which were not in the occupation of enemy Armies, Angora’s wire to Constantinople constituted its only means of communication with the West.

But on the night of March 15-16, 1920, General Milne isolated Constantinople from Anatolia, conducted a series of lightning raids at midnight in Stamboul, arrested Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues for deportation to Malta, and not only cut off Angora from the legal Parliamentary machinery which it had spent eight months in building up, but cut it off from any means of effective communication with the West. This was a staggering blow. Angora immediately ordered the arrest of the few British officers who remained in Asia Minor, chief among them Lord Rawlinson’s brother who was jailed at Erzerum, but with Rauf Bey and his colleagues on their way to Malta as prisoners of the British, the Nationalists lost some of the best brains in the Party. The Italians soon opened their cable from Adalia to Rhodes whence a wireless was in communication with Rome, but Angora’s sole contact with the West was even then at the disposal of a foreign Power.

Within the next few weeks, deputies who had escaped General Milne’s midnight raids in Stamboul, began filtering into Angora and an attempt to reconstruct the shattered Parliament began. A month was allowed for escaped deputies to reach Angora and claim their seats in the new Parliament, and the seats of others who had been interned on Malta were awarded in new “elections,” one of which is said to have been held in the Asiatic suburbs of Constantinople itself where Italian forces were in occupation; Italy has never relished the hurried Greek occupation of Smyrna.

So on April 23, 1920, the reconstructed Parliament, with deputies sitting for constituencies in all the areas covered by the Erzerum program, from Thrace to Mosul, began its session in the old Committee of Union and Progress building in Angora, under the new name of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Mustapha Kemal Pasha was made Commander-in-Chief and President, Fevzi Pasha became Chief of the General Staff and Prime Minister, Rafet Pasha became Minister of War and Interior, and the deputies acquiesced in the military dictatorship which they found at Angora. Even in the West, democracy does not thrive in time of war, nor did it in the war-ringed isolation of Angora. Forty percent requisitions, accompanied by ruinously heavy taxation afforded, not enough money to balance the Assembly’s budgets, but enough to enable Fevzi and Rafet Pashas to continue re-mobilizing and re-equipping the Army.

On April 6, Damad Ferid Pasha again became Grand Vizier in Constantinople and began at once a determined effort to regain a foothold in Anatolia. Fevzi and Rafet Pashas replied to him with a series of so-called Military Courts of Independence, before which any late Ottoman subject suspected of anti-Nationalism could be brought, tried under the Army code for treason in time of war, and if convicted summarily hung. In the Nationalist view, the Ottoman Sultanate and the Ottoman Government had alike ceased to exist on the night of March 15-16, 1920, and Damad Ferid Pasha, with the prestige of the Ottoman Caliphate at his disposal, now added himself to the Western enemies who surrounded Angora in a final struggle for the possession of the new Turkish State.

The Greeks were hurriedly flung in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha making no attempt to oppose them, and from behind them Ferid in Constantinople appealed to Old Turkish opinion at Konia to uphold the conservative usages of Islam and denounce the Nationalists. It was an appeal which had helped to nullify the Young Turkish Revolution in 1908, which had helped to keep the old Empire in the stiff dead grip of religious usage. It was a very powerful appeal and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in re-inforcing it by proclaiming its solicitude for the Caliphate of Islam. Moslem and Christian reaction were the rocks on which the 1908 Revolution had come to grief and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in dropping them into the channel which the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 would have to thread. Since Greeks and Armenians were then at war with Turkey, Christian reaction had no standing at Angora, but Moslem reaction is a rock which Turkey is to this day still engaged in passing and will be for some years to come. Ferid had no more powerful weapon with which to attack the Nationalist hold on the conservative peasantry of Asia Minor and on the dervish tekkes of Konia. The Nationalists could handle their strong but docile peasantry, but if the worst came to the worst at Konia the Nationalists could make it plain that Indian and Algerian Moslems had fought against the Ottoman Government during the war and that in the new Turkish State the needs of the country took precedence over the letter of Moslem law.

From April 6, 1920, when Damad Ferid Pasha re-entered office in Constantinople, a Nationalist coastguard was instituted on the Mediterranean opposite Konia in order to oppose any attempt at a landing, whether by Ferid’s followers from the capital or by Greeks engaged in the interesting business of proclaiming their solicitude for Islam. Konia itself, a dusty wind-swept provincial capital on the Anatolian plateau, replete with old Seljukian and pre-Seljukian mosques, was linked with Angora by a great semi-circle of railway line which bent westward via Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar, and thrice-a-week trains made the journey in eighteen hours. At the same time, this bend of railway line was identical from Eski-Shehr to Afium with another bend from Constantinople to Smyrna. With Smyrna and its hinterland in Greek hands, the Greek command added to its new interest in Islam a scheme for the revival under Greek auspices of the old Seljukian Empire with its seat at Konia. The Seljukian program is another of the ghosts which became stirred to life when the Ottoman Empire went down in 1918 to join the dead.

Ferid’s agents and Greek agents kept slipping through the Greek lines toward Konia and moving back and forth under the coasts of Asia Minor with their eyes on Konia. In the British view, the Ottoman dynasty had lost the Caliphate in 1914 when it was used to declare a holy war against the British and their Allies. Events at Mecca had since changed the British view, but if the Caliphate were not too serious a matter for light speaking, it might be added that in the Nationalist view the British lost the Caliphate in 1920 when they used it to declare a holy war against the Nationalists. Ferid finally recovered Konia in the counter-revolution of October, 1920, but Rafet Pasha hurried 2,000 men down the railway from Angora, occupied Ala-ed-Din hill in the outskirts of the city and drove out Ferid’s administration in three days of sharp fighting. Rafet Pasha appointed as military governor of Konia, Ghalib Pasha, a tall white-haired Albanian who had defended the Caliphate as Ottoman commander in the Hejaz during the war, and the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes whose historic right it had been to gird each Caliph with the Prophet’s Sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, went to Angora as one of Konia’s eight deputies in the Grand National Assembly. So the Seljukian ghost was laid and the Caliphate came into the Nationalists’ keeping.

The Nationalist hold on the interior of Asia Minor now became indisputable. The munition factories in the rear of Ismet Pasha’s slowly growing forces on the Smyrna front, were quickly enlarged and Konia became a war-center of the first importance in the interior. A considerable number of Armenians who had been returned to Konia after the Mudros armistice and who had voluntarily remained in their homes when the British offered to evacuate them at the time of their own evacuation of the Bagdad Railway, had been compromised anew by the Greek occupation of Smyrna and were placed under increasing military surveillance as the number of Turkish munition factories in the town grew. Armenian “indiscretions,” however, finally led to the deportation of men of military age farther into the interior, and the locking up of their churches in Konia. The juxtaposition of a Turkish munition factory and an Armenian church is one which is possibly apt to produce “indiscretions.” When I was last in Konia, the only Armenians there were women and children. A number of mosques in the town had been taken over for military depots, but no Armenian church in the town had been so taken over. The churches were locked up but otherwise untouched. The Armenian women in the town were permitted to receive no mail from the outside world, for the Nationalist censors were supposed to read Turkish and French only, not Armenian. No Turk ever learns Armenian, and apparently there was no Armenian in whose loyalty the Turks had sufficient confidence to enable them to entrust Armenian mail to him for censorship. The Armenian women were being taxed to the point of robbery, and so were their Turkish neighbors. Ghalib Pasha told me that he was treating Turks and Armenians on a basis of scrupulous equality, and I believe that he meant precisely what he said. If there were enough men like Ghalib Pasha in Turkey to fill all the provincial administrations, Turkey would be a model country. But men like Ghalib Pasha are not appointed chiefs of police in highly delicate places like Konia.

Damad Ferid Pasha did not cease his efforts to regain a foothold in Anatolia, after his brief counter-revolution in Konia. With the Greek advance in the spring and summer of 1921, his agents renewed their activities along the coasts. In Smyrna the Greeks welcomed them and in Mersina, the port of Cilicia, the French and Armenians welcomed them. Their work increased with the 1921 Greek offensive, until Nationalist agents boarded the British steamer Palatina at Adalia, discovered Topal Osman and four confederates hidden in a cargo hold, and shot them down. It was a wholly illegal proceeding but it put an end to Ferid’s efforts to return to Anatolia. Incidentally, it so embarrassed the Italians who were occupying Adalia under the secret war-time agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, that they evacuated their zone. Technically, they had been hostile to the Turks but actually their hostility was directed to the Greeks in Smyrna. Their departure now afforded the Nationalists their first access to the Mediterranean, and their first representation in the West was soon at Rome.

REAR-ADMIRAL COLBY M. CHESTER, U. S. N.
(RETIRED)

To whose associates the First Grand National Assembly granted the huge development program known as the Chester Concession.

REAR-ADMIRAL MARK L. BRISTOL, U. S. N.

United States High Commissioner at Constantinople from February, 1919, to the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Turkey.

XVIII

TURKISH NATIONALISM

THE WESTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT TO WHICH THE GRAND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY WAS BUILT—​HOW NATIONALISM WAS CREATED—​GREEK DEFEAT AT THE SAKARIA RIVER—​PEACE WITH THE FRENCH IN CILICIA—​AMERICAN ARMENIANISM AND CILICIA—​HOW A CIVILIAN ADMINISTRATION WAS BEGUN AT ANGORA WHILE FEVZI PASHA WAS RE-MOBILIZING AND RE-EQUIPPING THE TURKISH ARMIES.

When the Grand National Assembly opened its first session on April 23, 1920, in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora, the Crescent and Star went up on the flag-staff atop the building and, although trenches were dug for its military defense if necessary, the Turkish flag has flown there night and day ever since it was first hoisted. At one corner of the grounds, just outside the trenches which encircle the building, a gallows was erected. In a little restaurant near the Assembly building, I have sat at luncheon with that gallows looking in through the window. I have thought several times as I sat there of a number of worthy Americans at home who might have held less simple views on Near and Middle Eastern subjects in days gone by, if they could have sat at luncheon in Angora with the cross-beam and pulley of that gallows looking in upon them.

The Assembly building itself contains a single floor with a corridor down its middle, a row of committee rooms on one side and a comparatively large chamber on the other. The chamber was equipped for the Assembly’s use by the construction of a high desk for “Mr. Speaker” in the center of one wall and a lower desk in front of it to be used by deputies in addressing the Assembly. Grouped in semi-circular fashion around the Speaker’s desk, the small desks to be used by the deputies themselves were crowded upon the floor of the chamber in long rows. Half-way up the side walls, small galleries were built for visitors. The whole equipment was of wood. It looked like a school-room. It was a school-room, possibly as bitter a school-room as any nation has ever attended.

The 342 deputies of the Assembly were in large part, and still are, Easterners engaged in adapting the Western governmental tradition to their own uses, but they have never sold their great Eastern birthright for a mess of Western pottage. When they gathered for their first session at 1 o’clock on April 23, 1920, a small motto, done in Turkish script of white on a blue ground, a quotation from the Koran such as may be found in thousands of devout Moslem homes, was hung on the wall above the Speaker’s desk. A free translation of it into English would be: “Let us meet together in council and discuss.” It was the ground on which the new force of nationalism was carrying the conservative peasantry of Anatolia behind the Caliph in Constantinople to the Koran itself, on which it was wrenching Anatolia away from the Sultan and his Grand Vizier while refraining from any violation of its allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate.

Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o’clock every day but Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western dress and kalpaks, officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army days, and hojas in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both within the chamber and in the corridor without, was continual and the intermittent tinkle of the Speaker’s hand-bell did little to abate it, for the Assembly at Angora is as noisy as all other Parliaments are.

The military dictatorship which Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha wielded over Anatolia was in the Eastern tradition, but in the institution of the Assembly a Western plant began taking root in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. The military dictatorship would pass with the war but the Assembly was intended to be permanent and it was fashioned in readiness to begin functioning as soon as the war permitted. In its structure, the Western tradition was adapted to what were believed to be the country’s needs. It was necessarily fashioned to a theory at first, for the number of enemies who ringed it about made a dictatorship essential. As the war approached its end, as more men and more money became available, practice might modify it but with the loss of the Parliament at Constantinople it afforded the only attempt at an ultimately civilian administration which the country possessed.

This is the theory to which it was built: Under the Ottoman Constitution, as revived by the 1908 Revolution, the powers of declaring war and peace, of dissolving Parliament, of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States, and of appointing the Cabinet and the Senate, had been vested in the Sultan. In the creation of the Grand National Assembly, the Sultan was deposed and his prerogatives were re-distributed. The Assembly itself became the seat of authority and since its sessions were fixed by its fundamental law at two years’ duration, no right of dissolving it was admitted. The power of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States was delegated to the President of the Assembly. The power of appointing the Cabinet was taken by the Assembly and since its Ministers were made individually responsible to the Assembly, both the executive and the legislative functions of government were retained in its hands. The Senate disappeared with the Sultan and the Government of the Grand National Assembly became radically republican in structure. Differences of opinion existed in the Nationalist Party respecting its permanent structure, a small school of monarchist opinion holding that a form of government so unreservedly republican would not show itself suited to the country’s peace-time needs, but for the time being domestic controversies were buried deeply beneath the urgencies of the military situation. No differences of opinion have existed among Westerners who know the East, however. It has long been a belief in the West that the East can only be ruled by Sultans. We Westerners may be right or we may be wrong in our views of the East, but Turkish Nationalism has thrown us a most direct challenge in the out-and-out republicanism of its Grand National Assembly. When the war ends, we shall see what we shall see.

The Grand National Assembly speedily set about the elaboration of a fundamental law which may be taken as the Constitution in embryo of the new Turkish State. It was finally adopted on June 17, 1920, and its more important clauses translate from Turkish into English as follows: “Article I. Sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation. The administration of the nation’s sovereignty is based on the principle of the direct decision of the people.

“Article II. The executive power as well as the legislative power are concentrated in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey which alone represents the nation.

“Article III. Turkey is governed by the Grand National Assembly and its Government is entitled ‘the Government of the Grand National Assembly.’ “Article IV. The Grand National Assembly is composed of members elected by the inhabitants of provinces.

“Article V. The election of members of the Grand National Assembly takes place once in every two years. The duration of membership is two years only. Members may be re-elected. The Assembly continues its session until the new Assembly is convened. In case it is impossible to hold new elections, the session of the Assembly may be prolonged for one year only. Each member of the Grand National Assembly represents not only his province but is also a representative of the nation.

“Article VI. The general session of the Grand National Assembly takes place on the first of November without convocation.

“Article VII. Fundamental rights such as the enactment dispositions of the Sheriat (Moslem law), the making, modification and abrogation of laws, the conclusion of conventions and treaties of peace, and the call for the defense of the country, belong to the Grand National Assembly. The making of laws shall be based on principles of jurisprudence which are most closely adapted to the needs of the nation and to the requirements of its customs and habits. The powers and duties of the council of mandatory Ministers of the nation shall be determined by special laws.

“Article VIII. The Grand National Assembly administers its governmental departments through mandatory Ministers elected by the Assembly, according to rules to be provided in a special law. It is the Grand National Assembly which instructs the mandatory Ministers in executive matters and if necessary changes the Ministers….

“Article XI. In local matters, the province has an autonomous personality. With the exception of internal and external policy, the Sheriat, justice, military affairs, international economic relations, government imposts and inter-provincial matters, the provinces are charged with the administration, under laws to be promulgated by the Grand National Assembly, of the Evkaf (Moslem religious endowments), educational institutions, sanitary services, local economics, agriculture, public works and social services….”

The remaining articles outline the organization of the provincial and sub-provincial administrations. In this fundamental law, the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 undertakes to effect the same decentralization in administration as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 failed to effect. It undertakes infinitely more than that. At a single stroke, it lifts the new Turkish State out of the dead grip of ancient religious usage which strangled the 1908 Revolution, which in fact made effective revolution of any sort a traditional and hackneyed impossibility in the old Ottoman Empire. Whether the new Turkish State will succeed in maintaining its new and highly promising freedom from the stiff religious traditions which imprisoned the old Empire, remains to be seen. Christian reaction has been met and defeated on the field of battle, but Moslem reaction is still suppressed by the iron hand of the Assembly’s Treason Law. Hidden away in the bitter loneliness of Anatolia, the Nationalist Party has used drastic methods in laying the foundations of its Western governmental structure in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. If those foundations have been well and firmly laid, we have something new in the East at last.

Westerners who did not penetrate the thick veil of war which screened Anatolia from the world during its years of seige, will not find it easy to realize the suspicion with which it regarded us in the West. Deceived again and again by Mr. Lloyd George, goaded by repeated Greek atrocities unwittingly reinforced by wild atrocity tales to which the hospitable American press opened its columns, only a man of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s iron patience could have compelled his angry countrymen to persevere in the search for a peaceful escape from the fate which loomed above them on every frontier. Yet amid the suspicion which possessed Anatolia during those hard years, the Nationalist Party created a new and very real human force known as nationalism. Patriotism, love of one’s own soil, is a Western sentiment which would have required a generation under normal circumstances for its transplantation to the Eastern soil of Anatolia, but under the circumstance of a Greek Smyrna, it sprang into existence overnight. The Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, travelling from village to village in Anatolia with a Turkish officer attached to him, added fuel to the new flame of nationalism with his old cry, “I am a Turk; my race and language are great.” Newspaper plants, smuggled out from Constantinople, pieces of press machinery concealed in travellers’ baggage, handfuls of type dropped into travellers’ pockets, produced new dailies and weeklies in Anatolia which poured more fuel on the new flame. The whole culture of the Turks was moved bit by bit from the old capital to the new center of the nation’s life. Rafet Pasha’s Military Courts of Independence suppressed any attempt to quench the new flame. These Courts were a harsh reminder that there was such a thing as a distinctive Middle Eastern civilization and that it had come to a time when there was no longer any room in Anatolia for natives who were not loyal to their own civilization. The old religious divisions which had split the Anatolian population swiftly melted away in the heat of the new flame. Papa Eftim Effendi gave up his community rights and sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior followed him into the new Turkish Orthodox Church, agreeing to appoint no metropolitans except those who could read and write Turkish, who were of Ottoman parentage, who had lived at least five years in the country and who had abstained from “political activity.” They agreed furthermore that metropolitans accused of secular crimes, instead of being immune from arrest without having first been degraded and then being subject to imprisonment only in the Oecumenical Patriarchate, were to be arrested and tried as any other Turkish subject would be. Moslems permitted a new personage called the Minister of Sacred Law to become an ordinary member of the Cabinet at Angora, and the huge wealth which was locked up in the country’s Moslem endowments was opened and placed at the disposition of the provincial administrations. Moslem courts and schools were taken over by the Ministers of Justice and Education, respectively. Although American churchmen still thought in terms of the old Ottoman Empire, still played upon the old religious division between Moslems and Christians which had proved the ruin of them both, the new political force of nationalism was blending them in Turkey as in Syria, in Palestine and in Egypt. Nationalism is a strangely new and Western force in the East today and thus far Anatolia has clung to it in the face of every effort which Mr. Lloyd George and American churchmen could exert to throw the country back into the ruin of its bitter past.

For a year after the Greeks landed at Smyrna on May 15, 1919, they sat in the hinterland of the great port waiting for the Sevres Treaty, while Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha worked like Trojans at Angora. In May, 1920, they threw their screen in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha making no effort to molest them. In November, 1920, Old Greece finally rid itself of Mr. Venizelos, a wedge was driven between Athens and the Phanar, and the French made Constantine an excuse for disentangling themselves from the Greeks. Royalist officers now took over the front behind Smyrna with no respect for the Allied veto on a drive toward Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar. With these two railway junctions occupied, the Greeks would possess the great semi-circle of railway which runs from Constantinople to Smyrna, and the Turks would be deprived of the interior Angora-Konia line with which they were secretly re-mobilizing and re-equipping their Armies on the Smyrna front. Accordingly in January, 1921, the Royalist Greek command tried its strength from Brussa toward Eski-Shehr and retired without encountering Turkish opposition. The situation was now plain. Eski-Shehr and Afium were theirs whenever they cared to take them. As for Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha at Angora, they had imposed a strict embargo on travellers into the interior of Anatolia and the secrecy they succeeded in preserving was one of their striking successes.

Two months later, in March, 1921, the Royalist Greek command launched its double advance, the Southern Army moving on Afium from Ushak, the Northern Army on Eski-Shehr from Brussa. To their surprise, both advances encountered organized Turkish forces of considerable strength. The Southern Army, against stiff opposition, succeeded in occupying Afium but the Northern Army, following the route it had walked over in January, ran into a murderous battle at Inë-Onü and had to fall back to its old position at Brussa, the Southern Army falling back from Afium to Ushak with it. That battle was the first meeting of Greek and Turkish troops in Asia Minor and is today one of the epics of the new Turkey.

Inë-Onü was the first evidence the Greeks had of what Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha had been doing at Angora, and Athens began feverishly to increase its forces in order to administer a “knockout” before Ismet Pasha’s command should be built up into a regular Army. Athens was ready by July and three Armies, starting from the southern, center and northern fronts, were ordered to converge on Kutahia, about half-way between Eski-Shehr and Afium. The operations developed according to plan, Kutahia fell, Eski-Shehr was evacuated under the threat of encirclement and, although Ismet Pasha pounded at the exhausted Greeks in Eski-Shehr for ten days, the Greeks held and Ismet Pasha withdrew to the Sakaria River, covering Angora itself. The Greek command had won the railway junctions of Eski-Shehr and Afium and now possessed the bend of railway line which connects Constantinople and Smyrna. The Turkish command had lost its interior railway line and the only connection between Angora and Konia was now a carriage road over which the two towns were five days apart.

Still lured by the possibility of a “knockout,” the Greek command now rested for a month and then resumed its march. Toward the end of August, it re-established contact with the Turks on the Sakaria River, where Field Marshal Mustapha Kemal Pasha had taken command in person. At Angora the civil Government had made preparations for evacuation to Caesarea, crowds of refugees had thronged the already overcrowded town, and occupants of larger dwellings were dispossessed to make room for military hospitals.

The Battle of the Sakaria River which ensued, was another Inë-Onü but on a larger scale. It lasted three weeks and even Kemal Pasha himself was wounded in the course of it, although the only announcement which was made of his injury in Angora was a brief communique to the effect that he had “fallen from his horse.” Attempting to encircle the Turkish left, the Greek command drove south across an area of desert but Kemal pulled down his forces to meet them. The Greeks drove inland forty miles in a vain endeavor to find the Turkish left, and finally changing their plan of battle, threw themselves against the Turkish lines in a straight frontal engagement, some of the Greek attacks driving all the way through and then being held up by the failure of flanking regiments to follow them. Heavy Turkish counter-attacks finally made it plain that the Greek command had underestimated the Turkish strength and that the long Greek lines of communication exposed it to the risk of a disorderly retreat. By the middle of September, the Greek command began pulling back its forces, burning Turkish villages as they went. By the first of October, the Greeks were back in their old positions covering the railway junctions at Eski-Shehr and Afium and the Turkish recovery of Smyrna became only a matter of time. By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief’s representatives in Angora, compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the Near East Relief’s headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Smyrna.

The Turkish victory on the banks of the Sakaria radically changed the political complexion of the Near and Middle East. For 200 years, the West had been breaking down the old Ottoman Empire, but on the Sakaria River it encountered the Turk himself and when it touched the Turk the tide of history turned. History will one day find in this obscure engagement on the Sakaria one of the decisive battles of our era.

The French Foreign Office which had been waiting on the outer rim of events ever since the Mudros armistice deprived the French Army of its anticipated sole command in Constantinople, now dispatched M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon to Angora, where he negotiated the Franco-Turkish peace agreement of October 20, 1921. Although the covering letter from Yusuf Kemal Bey, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Government, contains the only reference to “economic preference” which marked the result of the Franklin-Bouillon negotiations, the French Foreign Office probably hoped in this agreement not only to put an end to the expensive state of war which the French command at Beirut was facing in Cilicia, but also to salvage the Perier railway concession which had been the subject of French negotiations with the old Ottoman Government in 1914. A French loan of £22,000,000 had been offered the old Government in February of that year of which £16,000,000 was paid in the following April, the French Perier group taking in return a concession for 1,800 miles of railway line in northern and eastern Anatolia. The loan, however, had never been completed, the concession had never been ratified by the old Parliament and it seems quite probable that, even if it had been, the war would have cancelled it. But peace in Cilicia had become an urgent necessity, for the Turkish forces were slowly pushing the Franco-Armenian Armies back toward the sea. To secure peace, as well as any other objectives which M. Franklin-Bouillon may have had in mind, the French Foreign Office surrendered to Turkey a long strip of territory, beginning with Cilicia and running east to the Mosul province, a French company, however, maintaining the right of operating the Bagdad Railway from the port of Mersina in Cilicia to its eastern terminus on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia.

News of this surrender so embittered the French Army that General Dufieux, the French commandant in Cilicia, left Adana immediately for Beirut, leaving behind him only subordinate French officers to carry out the evacuation. It threw the Armenians in Cilicia into a panic. In preparing their independent Armenian State under the French aegis, they had taken a drastic revenge on the Turks in Cilicia and there was doubtless ample ground for their fears that the Turks would continue the ugly business. In order to assuage their fears, the Turkish Government proclaimed a blanket amnesty, exempted them from military service which it had a legal right to claim from them, exempted them from the forty percent requisitions which it exacted from all other Turkish subjects in the country, and guaranteed their security in the strongest terms it could use. To back up these guarantees, it dispatched two of the best men it had available, Muheddin Pasha as military governor of the re-occupied territory and Hamid Bey, who has been mentioned above in connection with Samsun, as political officer. Muheddin Pasha is a representative of the finest type of old Ottoman Army officer. He was one of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s teachers in the War Academy at Constantinople and he has been introduced by Kemal Pasha as “the man who gave us all our ideas of liberty.” He had nothing to do with the Armenian deportations of 1915 or with the Enver Government which ordered them; under the Hamidian regime, he had been exiled four times and twice condemned to death, and during the war he served as Ottoman commander in the Yemen which was about as far from the capital as Enver Pasha could have sent him.

The Turkish re-occupation was timed to begin Dec. 1, 1921, and to be completed by Jan. 4, 1922. On November 20, Muheddin Pasha and Hamid Bey published a proclamation in the Turkish newspaper, Yeni Adana, which was designed to assuage the Armenians’ fears. On November 22, they met a deputation of Armenian leaders in an upper room of the Yenidje railway station, and M. Franklin-Bouillon reached Yenidje later in the day from Angora to repeat their re-assurances. On November 26, they motored to Mersina where some 40,000 Armenians were waiting for ships and met a deputation of 100 Armenian notables in the Government building. On November 29, M. Franklin-Bouillon returned to Mersina alone and held a final conference with the Armenians. Since they had once been Ottoman subjects, the Turkish Government had a probable right in law to forbid their departure from Turkish soil, but it had become clear that no guarantees it could offer would persuade them to remain voluntarily and the Government refrained from keeping them involuntarily. Most of them went to Syria to live on the charity of the Near East Relief at Alexandretta, only a few miles away, and their abandoned homes in Cilicia were put into the hands of a Turkish committee appointed by Hamid Bey to be kept for them for a year’s time. Most of Cilicia was in a devastated condition and there was an appalling amount of work to be done in repairing the ravages of war, but the bulk of the Armenians settled down to live in idleness on American charity at the old Alexandretta barracks.

It may be that some means will yet be discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history in the eastern provinces and five centuries in Cilicia; it may be that some way will yet be opened of transferring the semi-autonomy of the old Ermeni community from a religious to a territorial basis, but with all possible good will, the discovery of it or of the faintest possibility of it has proven beyond the feeble powers of the present writer. If the Armenian problem had ever been really understood in the United States, certainly no sane American would ever have meddled with it. The past, however, is beyond recall. In the tragic position to which the Armenians have been reduced today, three courses suggest themselves as being open to Americans in the future:

First, Congress may declare war on Turkey and by dispatching an expeditionary force of a strength of possibly 200,000 men, we may conquer Cilicia and install an Armenian State which will stand as long as our Army or some other Western Army remains in occupation and no longer; and by so doing, we shall succeed in righting one wrong by committing a greater wrong. Happily, this course is out of the question.

Second, we may continue to support the Armenians with charity and to insist upon “minority rights” in Turkey as distinct from the rights of Turkey’s majorities. This course we have followed consistently since 1918, and it has only succeeded in stiffening the Turks, pauperizing the Armenians, and preventing that peace which is the very first essential of both.

Third, we may permit the Armenians to work out their future alone. This is the course which thoughtful Armenians in Turkey now desire us to adopt, and its principal remaining opponents are certain Armenians who live in New York and are frightfully far from reality. If we adopt this course for the future, it seems quite possible that those Armenians who prefer to live in their own country will in time find their way into Soviet Armenia and those who remain in Turkey will be given equal rights and equal duties with the Turks themselves. Turks and Armenians understand each other well. Until fifty years ago, they had lived together on generally peaceful terms for several centuries and the fact (to come no nearer home) that Czarist Russia has disappeared, seems to promise the possibility of an eventual resumption in the new Turkish State of that peace which once characterized their relationship….

The French evacuation of Cilicia cleared the Turkish left, but the Greeks on the Eski-Shehr-Afium line still confronted the Turkish center and the Allies in Constantinople still confronted the Turkish right. Meanwhile, the British command in the capital executed in a lesser degree the same climb-down as the French had made with respect to Angora. As a result of the Turkish victory on the Sakaria River, the Turkish deportees on Malta were exchanged at Ineboli on the Black Sea coast for British prisoners held in Anatolia. So Rauf Bey came back to Angora.

No Turk has been a greater lover of the British than Rauf Bey (Rauf is of Circassian and Albanian blood, but politically he is a Turk and unlike most Turks his foreign language is English instead of French). He had applied to the British Embassy in 1914 for help in keeping his country neutral, but no reply had been given him. He had applied to Admiral Calthorpe in 1918 for an armistice, but that armistice led to the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Greek occupation of Smyrna. He had acted in good faith upon an intimation from General Milne in 1920 and had brought the Nationalist deputies from Angora to Constantinople, but that action landed him behind British barbed wire on Malta. Is it a matter of wonder that the great tradition which generations of Englishmen had built up in Constantinople, has now disappeared? No Turk has fought harder for the British than Rauf Bey, and few countries have ever more consistently wounded their own friends in Turkey than the England over which Mr. Lloyd George presided. Rauf Bey’s tragic experience at the hands of their country is one which Englishmen might do well to ponder during these new days, when Turkish tugs are piloting British merchantmen into the Gulf of Smyrna.

Ali Fethy Bey, a mild, almost shy, Macedonian Turk whose modest bearing gives no hint of the strength he has contributed to Angora, returned with Rauf and a long list of other deputies in the late Parliament at Constantinople. Here were the civilian brains of which Angora stood in the greatest need and it now became possible for the Grand National Assembly to begin the erection of a civilian administration. Winter was coming on and the military situation would necessarily remain at a stand-still. The Assembly gave its War Office (the Ministry of National Defense is its official title) an immediate shake-up. Rafet Pasha fell and the Ministry of the Interior was separated out and given to Ali Fethy Bey. Here he encountered the same difficulty as so many of the Nationalist leaders encountered—​he knew nothing of Anatolia and it required most of the winter merely to learn the ins and outs of his department. Rauf Bey was given the Ministry of Public Works but in a re-shuffle of the Cabinet, he presently displaced Fevzi Pasha as Prime Minister, a position more nearly commensurate with his very high abilities. The Ministry of Finance was elevated to an actual, as distinct from a figurehead, authority and the Near East Relief’s representatives who had been accustomed to consulting Rafet Pasha on matters of mutual interest, now found themselves referred to Hassan Tahsin Bey, Minister of Finance, when they desired to obtain exemption of relief supplies from the payment of customs duties. Rafet Pasha had been accustomed to pass on their applications as if they were personal matters, but Tahsin Bey was a stranger. With the regime of the Capitulations ended, Americans were finding themselves in a position in which it became necessary to treat a Government official in Turkey as though he were a Government official. For some Americans, the change has proven, and is still proving, a difficult one.

In the meantime, the Foreign Office which had been housed in the old Public Debt building, had signed a treaty of mutual recognition with Soviet Russia on March 16, 1921, at the same time as a similar Russo-Persian treaty was being signed. In the Russo-Turkish treaty, full Russian recognition was given to the Erzerum program, including that clause of it respecting Constantinople and the Straits. No more vivid illustration exists of the meaning of the Russian Revolution than the contrast between the Russo-Turkish Treaty of 1921 and the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

The application of the provisions of the 1921 Treaty to the new Russo-Turkish frontier in the Kars Treaty which was signed Oct. 13, 1921, brought about peace in the eastern provinces, and Azerbaijan and Afghan Ministers, accredited to Mustapha Kemal Pasha, were received in Angora. A Russian Ambassador was also received and the elaboration of consular and commercial treaties was begun.

Only three sections of the frontiers of the Turkish State now remained to be fixed—​the Mosul frontier, the Smyrna frontier and the frontier in Europe. Communication with the West, with a view to the peaceful settlement of these disputed frontiers, was now open to Constantinople direct, the British command having opened the wire from the General Post-Office in Stamboul to “the interior” at the same time as it returned the deportees from Malta. The carriage road from Adabazar which was available by rail from Constantinople, on past the Greek left to Angora was also thrown open, but Greek and Circassian brigands raided it so frequently that its use was impossible without a strong guard. Access to Angora was in practice still confined to the railway from Mersina to Konia and thence by carriage to Angora, or up from the Black Sea coast through the mountains to Angora. Admission to the interior, however, was rarely granted by the Turkish Government’s new representative in Stamboul, for the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar and the war was still on.

Conditions in Anatolia greatly improved during the winter of 1921-’22. The beginnings of a civilian administration appeared, but the military situation necessarily continued to dominate. Fevzi Pasha continued to snap up munitions wherever he could get them. Some came from the Italians, some came from the French (it is not impossible that the American uniforms in which some of the Turkish soldiers have been clad, were originally left as American surplus stocks in France), and some came from the British, for the British Commander-in-Chief and the British High Commissioner in Constantinople were in as happy accord on the subject of the Greeks as the British War Office and the British Foreign Office have been on a number of other Eastern subjects. In the main, however, the Turkish forces were re-mobilized and re-equipped by the native resourcefulness of the Turk himself, as personified in the dour towering figure of Fevzi Pasha. Even after he had secured foreign ammunition, after gangs of peasant women had trekked it up from the coasts in ox-carts and on the backs of mules and camels, machinery had to be scraped together to change the calibre of much of it before it would fit his guns. There is hardly a more remarkable story in modern military history than the story of how Fevzi Pasha re-mobilized and re-equipped the Turkish forces out of left-over lots of dismantled artillery and misfit ammunition. The cost of those forces to Anatolia in its impoverished condition has been appalling, but their creation by Fevzi Pasha under the conditions of siege which prevailed, has been no less than miraculous.

XIX

SMYRNA, 1922

ALLIED EFFORTS TO HITCH THE SEVRES TREATY TO TURKISH NATIONALISM—​GREEKS TRANSFER TROOPS FROM SMYRNA TO EASTERN THRACE FOR A MOVE ON CONSTANTINOPLE AND WHEN FETHY BEY IS REFUSED A HEARING IN LONDON, FEVZI PASHA LAUNCHES HIS ATTACK—​THE TURKISH RECOVERY OF SMYRNA—​MR. LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS AND THE OTTOMAN SULTAN FLEES—​LAUSANNE.

Through the winter of 1921-’22, the Angora scene was a busy one. In the little restaurant near the Assembly building, Cabinet Ministers, deputies and Army officers crowded the pine tables at the luncheon hour, glancing up from their small talk as the unpainted pine door opened to admit others of their number. The Bokhara Mission would be in tomorrow. Somebody had been newly named for the Mission to Kabul. The Minister of the Interior was to make an important statement to the Assembly shortly. From far away the staccato rat-tat of machine-gun practice knocked faintly at the ear without occasioning any more interruption than the squeak of the passing ox-carts outside. But the small talk paused in its flow when two young gentlemen of the Azerbaijan Legation entered and joined three young ladies of the Russian Embassy in a cigarette at their corner table. The small talk recovered slowly. So-and-so Bey, newly arrived from the Ritz in Paris, entered with the announcement that he had been unable to find a room in the town and had had to borrow a soldier and a bucket of whitewash to build himself a house. Could we come up to the housewarming tomorrow night? We could. For somebody else with whom we had promised to dine had had to cancel the invitation on further reflection, the wind being in the wrong direction and his stove smoking in consequence.

Outside the restaurant, the falling snow etched its white tracery across the street panorama of Angora. Peasant women in red ragged pantaloons, turbaned hojas robed in more somber colors, smart Turkish officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman days, Turkish soldiers in somebody’s cast-off khaki, Government officials in kalpaks and European dress, a Turkish policeman in the old Ottoman brilliance of red cuffs and brass buttons, six white-robed male nurses from a Red Crescent hospital bearing on their shoulders a heavy covered stretcher on its way to an empty grave outside the town—​these came and went through the veil of snow. Groups of men, sitting at their coffee around glowing braziers in front of the cafes, lifted their faces from the Constantinople papers at the approaching music of a military band (true, the Constantinople papers were ten days old by the time they reached Angora, but many of these men had left their homes and families in Constantinople, and all they possessed in the world was hidden somewhere in the old capital, awaiting their return). Out of a narrow sidestreet the band moved into sight with a withered little mad woman dancing in her rags beside it. She was fairly well known in Angora. They said that her father and two brothers had been killed in the Balkan Wars, her husband and three sons had been killed in the Great War, and her youngest son had been killed at Inë-Onü. But however these things might have been, she was dancing down the street beside the heavy-shod bandsmen, dancing as lightly as the snowflakes to the crashing rhythms of the Mustapha Kemal Pasha March.

In the wake of the band came the tramping shuffle of a long column of soldiers, stolid men, heavily accoutred, with khaki kalpaks, their rifles tipped with new bayonets. They marched away down the broad road which led past the Assembly building to the railway station, a wooden building with the single word “Angora” in Turkish and English script on its sign-board. A low pall of woodsmoke, belched from the stacks of half a dozen locomotives, hung over the railway yard. A long column of ox-carts was discharging its cargo of new rope-handled wooden boxes into freight cars. With the band playing, the column of soldiers broke ranks and scrambled up into another freight train alongside the station platform. They entrained within a half-hour, a rattle of couplings ran along the length of the train, and it moved out of the station toward the west, where the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar….

On Feb. 21, 1921, the Allied Governments had received delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora in London in an effort to reconcile the Treaty of Sevres and the new force of Turkish nationalism. The Angora delegates were received as technically members of the Constantinople delegation, but the latter delegated its leadership to Bekr Sami Bey, a huge sloping Circassian who was Foreign Minister at Angora. Bekr Sami Bey belongs to a type of leadership which is one of Turkey’s peculiar assets, a type which has enjoyed a long and rich experience in diplomacy and which as a result has developed a genius for stripping away non-essentials and holding fast to essentials. There is an old and true saying to the effect that what an Englishman is at sea, what a Frenchman is on land, a Turk is in diplomacy. It is a statement which closely characterizes men of the type of Bekr Sami Bey.

The Allied Governments offered to institute an international commission for the investigation of population statistics in Eastern Thrace and Smyrna, on condition that Turkey and Greece accepted its findings and that the remainder of the Sevres Treaty stood unaltered. Bekr Sami Bey accepted the offer, subject to certain conditions in the conduct of the investigation and certain reservations as to the remainder of the Sevres Treaty. The Greek delegation would accept no alteration in the Sevres Treaty of any sort.

On March 12, the Allied Governments proposed a series of modifications in the Sevres Treaty, undertaking inter alia that “the region called the Vilayet of Smyrna would remain under Turkish sovereignty and a Greek force would remain in Smyrna town, but in the rest of the sanjak order would be maintained by a gendarmerie with Allied officers and recruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution of the population as reported by an Inter-Allied Commission. The same proportional arrangement, equally according to the report of the Commission, would apply to the administration. A Christian governor would be appointed by the League of Nations and assisted by an elective assembly and an elective council. The governor would be responsible for payments to the Turkish Government of annual sums expanding with the prosperity of the province. This arrangement would in five years be open to review on the demand of either party by the League of Nations.” This pleased neither Greeks nor Turks and the 1921 Greek offensive put a speedy end to its consideration.

On June 21, the Allied Governments offered Greece their intervention, but the Royalist command behind Smyrna was preparing to resume its march toward Angora and intervention was refused.

In March, 1922, the Allied Governments summoned delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora, the Angora delegation headed by Yusuf Kemal Bey who had succeeded Bekr Sami Bey as Foreign Minister. On March 22, an Allied proposal for an armistice in Asia Minor was forwarded to Athens and Angora, and was followed on March 26 by an Allied Note making further modifications in the Sevres Treaty and proposing “the peaceful evacuation of Asia Minor by the Greek forces and the restitution of Turkish sovereignty over the whole of that region” within a period of four months after the armistice. The Greek Government accepted the proposal, but Yusuf Kemal Bey on April 7 stipulated that in his Government’s view an armistice could only be agreed to after the Greek evacuation. The Allied Governments replied on April 15 that the period of the Greek evacuation would be shortened but that it was conditional on a prior armistice. On April 22, Yusuf Kemal Bey offered to meet Allied delegates at Ismid in an effort to explore further peace conditions which the acceptance of the armistice proposal would impose on his Government, conditions which had been left “open to discussion” in the Allied Note of April 15. The Ismid proposal came to nothing and in June, Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior at Angora, was dispatched to Paris and London with the object of discovering the nature of the peace conditions which had not yet been defined by the Allies and effecting an agreement if possible.

On July 22, the Royalist Greek command transferred 20,000 Old Greek troops from its lines behind Smyrna to the Chatalja lines in Eastern Thrace for a move on Constantinople itself, a move which the Allied Governments vetoed. It replaced them behind Smyrna with raw Anatolian Greek levies and on July 30, “autonomy under the guarantee of the Greek Army” was proclaimed upon “Ionia.” This radically changed the military situation, but Fevzi Pasha who was now ready at Angora, was ordered by his Government to withhold action pending news from Fethy Bey. In Paris, Fethy Bey had been well received but when he crossed to London late in July, Lord Curzon’s engagement with him was cancelled and it was only after protests were made on his behalf that Sir William Tyrrell of the Foreign Office received him. Sir William, however, was not empowered to discuss terms of peace and on August 11, Fethy Bey left London for Rome, stopping in Paris long enough to wire the news of his reception in London to Angora. The solution of the Smyrna deadlock was now committed to Fevzi Pasha.

At dawn on August 26, Ismet Pasha attacked the Greek position before Afium-Karahissar. The secrecy which had marked the re-mobilization and re-equipment of the Turkish Armies throughout, had been maintained to the last and Ismet Pasha found the Greeks wholly unprepared. They abandoned Afium and Kutahia and endeavored to stand on September 1 before Ushak, but on September 2, Turkish cavalry drove into Ushak through and over the Greeks, swept up General Tricoupis and his entire staff, and escaped to their own lines. The rest was easy. The distance from Ushak to Smyrna is 160 miles, but the Greeks covered it in eight days, abandoning everything but their rifles, living off the country and stopping only long enough to wreak their last revenge on the villages through which they fled. On September 5, they began streaming into Smyrna and nothing speaks more highly of Fevzi Pasha’s staff work than the fact that all branches of his Army succeeded in keeping pace with them. On September 9, advance Turkish units entered Smyrna. Meanwhile, a secondary attack in the north had been launched against Biledjik on August 30, the Greeks evacuated Eski-Shehr on September 2 and by September 12, their stragglers were crossing from Mudania and Panderma to Eastern Thrace.

From the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States, the Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna shook the world. Islam which had been staggered by the Greek occupation in 1919, threw itself into rejoicing with “our brother Turk.” Christendom which had passed over the Greek occupation in silence, was as staggered by the Turkish re-occupation as if one of the Commandments had dropped out of the Decalogue. Of the three elements which were present in Smyrna, Armenians, Greeks and Turks (to mention them in alphabetical order), American churchmen assumed that it was the Turks who started the fire which razed part of Smyrna town within a week after the re-occupation. As for the Turks themselves, budding Turkish linguists greeted the news from Smyrna with shouts of “Finish imperialisme!”

Only the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek occupation of Eastern Thrace in the Allied rear, now confronted Fevzi Pasha. On September 16, Mr. Lloyd George issued his call to the British Dominions to rally to the defense of “the freedom of the Straits.” Doubtless Mr. Lloyd George knew what he meant by the phrase, but while Soviet Russia and Turkey had repeatedly and publicly defined it, Mr. Lloyd George had refrained from any public definition of it. More was involved, however, than “the freedom of the Straits” in the manifesto of September 16. That manifesto was a direct descendant of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, with the Greek fait accompli across the Straits in process of collapse, the now exposed British command of the Straits and the Black Sea was all that remained of the vast territories which the collapse of Czarist Russia had vacated before an aggressive British imperialism.

On September 30, Mr. Lloyd George sent General Harington, Allied Commander-in-Chief in Constantinople, a six-hour ultimatum ordering the Turkish forces to withdraw from contact with the British lines behind Chanak. If that ultimatum had been served, it would have precipitated an Anglo-Turkish war and with British reinforcements already streaming to the Straits, it is difficult to see with what other purpose it could have been dispatched from London. Instead of serving it, however, General Harington dropped it into his pocket and went to Mudania on October 3 with his Allied colleagues to negotiate an armistice with Ismet Pasha. At dawn on October 11, the Mudania armistice was signed, the Allies agreeing to evacuate the Greeks from Eastern Thrace immediately and to return it to Turkey up to the Maritza River, admitting the Turkish civil administration, supported by a force of 8,000 gendarmes, within a period of thirty days after the Greek evacuation.

On October 19, Mr. Lloyd George who might have written the Mudania armistice in ink instead of in blood, handed his resignation to the King. In Mr. Bonar Law’s Government, however, Lord Curzon remained at the Foreign Office. Preparations were now made for a peace conference, beginning at Lausanne on November 13, for the winding up of hostilities between the Allies and Turkey and between Turkey and Greece. Invitations were issued to, among others, the old Ottoman Government in Constantinople to send delegates to the conference. That Government, from the Sultan-Caliph down, had been stripped of actual authority long before by the Allied occupation of the old capital, and the Grand National Assembly speedily put an end to its technical existence. On November 1, the Assembly reiterated its previous declaration that “the form of government based on personal sovereignty in Constantinople” had ceased to exist on March 16, 1920, adding that “the Caliphate belongs to the Ottoman dynasty and the Grand National Assembly will nominate him of the dynasty who is the most upright and wise in knowledge and character. The Turkish nation is the supporting power of the Caliphate.”

On the morning of November 4, the Constantinople Cabinet handed in its resignation to the Caliph-Sultan and at noon Rafet Pasha took over the administration of Constantinople as one of the provincial capitals of the new Turkish State. In the early hours of November 17, the Caliph-Sultan fled on a British battleship to Malta and on the following day the Grand National Assembly at Angora elected the heir presumptive, Abdul Medjid Effendi, to the Caliphate of Islam. Turkish nationalism was continuing to surmount that Old Turkish conservatism which had helped to wreck the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. As for Islam in India, such was the siege-encircled secrecy in which Turkish nationalism had developed that the end of its historic Ottoman theocracy fell upon it as a severe blow, but it stuck loyally to “our brother Turk.” As for the Emperor of India, he was uncertain whether the seat of the Caliphate was Constantinople or Mecca. The ex-Sherif Hussein had two sons perched on precarious thrones, Feisal at Bagdad and Abdullah at Amman, and had himself been referred to as “Supreme Pontiff of the Islamic world and temporal ruler of Arabia.”

GENERAL MOUHEDDIN PASHA

Military Governor of Cilicia on re-occupation by Turkish forces in January, 1922.

MEHMED EMIN BEY

The Poet of New Turkey.

On November 20, Lord Curzon finally opened the peace conference at Lausanne, with Ismet Pasha, now Foreign Minister in the Turkish Government, heading the only Turkish delegation. Negotiations went forward until Jan. 31, 1923, when Lord Curzon served a draft treaty on Ismet Pasha and on the night of February 4 abruptly left for London. This breach in the negotiations left British military and naval forces in occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek Army facing east along the Maritza; but the snows of the Balkans melted without incident. On April 23, Sir Horace Rumbold, British High Commissioner in Constantinople, took Lord Curzon’s place at the resumed conference and the Treaty of Peace, together with a number of subsidiary documents, was finally signed at Lausanne on July 24.

We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr. Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in 1922 it refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek fait accompli across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907 Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both Turkey and Russia.

The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war, both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions, one of which is that the “maximum force which any one Power may send through the Straits into the Black Sea is not to be greater than that of the most powerful fleet of the littoral Powers of the Black Sea existing in that sea at the time of passage; but with the proviso that the Powers reserve to themselves the right to send into the Black Sea, at all times and under all circumstances, a force of not more than three ships, of which no individual ship shall exceed 10,000 tons.”

By this Convention, Lord Curzon retains access to the southern and Trans-Caucasian ports of Soviet Russia. Ismet Pasha signed it in the course of the general signature at Lausanne on July 24. Soviet Russia signed it at Rome on August 14. Early in September, Mr. Amery, First Lord of the British Admiralty, paid a visit of inspection to Malta where he announced that for the next year or two the principal British squadron would remain in the Mediterranean, and from Malta he continued to Constantinople.

Lord Curzon also succeeded at Lausanne in securing agreement that “the frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the two Governments in the time mentioned, the dispute shall be referred to the Council of the League of Nations.” The Turco-Arab split in Sunni Islam which the Foreign Office engineered in 1915 through the Residency in Cairo, still lives in the Mosul controversy. Arab autonomy under the religious suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliph which Rauf Bey had stipulated to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros in 1918, still awaits, inter alia, the fate of Mosul.

The rest of the Lausanne Conference was a rout. The military victory which Ismet Pasha had won over the Greeks at Smyrna, he duplicated as a diplomatic victory over the Allies at Lausanne. Having salvaged the Straits Convention from the wreck and having postponed the Mosul matter, Lord Curzon abandoned the unhappy scene on Feb. 4, 1923, leaving Sir Horace Rumbold to save what he could when the conference resumed on April 23. Ismet Pasha restricted himself as far as possible to a settlement of the political terms of peace, referring concessionaires to his Government at Angora, but it was not until July 17 that Sir Horace consented to sign peace without the Turkish Government’s acquiescence in the claim of the so-called Turkish Petroleum Company upon the oil of the Mosul province. Excepting for further negotiation over Mosul, the political terms of peace between the Allies and Turkey were signed at Lausanne on July 24. Several of the economic issues of the peace, the most important of which is the question of the currency in which Turkey is to pay interest on its share of the Old Ottoman Public Debt, are still in process of negotiation.

On August 4, terms for the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Turkey were signed at Lausanne. Relations had been severed on April 20, 1917, by the Enver Government at Constantinople and on May 5, 1923, Ismet Pasha had written Joseph C. Grew, American Minister to Switzerland, proposing negotiations looking toward the resumption of regular relations. Two Turco-American Treaties resulted, one a general treaty and the other an extradition treaty, the former recording American acquiescence in the abrogation of the Capitulations which Ismet Pasha had imposed upon the Allies. Under this treaty, Americans and American institutions in Turkey are hereafter to be subject to Turkish law and Turkish taxes, Turkey having voluntarily agreed during negotiations with the Allies to appoint four legal advisers, nationals of countries neutral in the late war, who are to serve for a term of five years and whose function is to be rigorously restricted to the offering of advice. By this abrogation of the Capitulations, Turkey enters into a status of equality in the family of nations. In July, 1894, Buddhist Japan began a five-year probationary period preparatory to its acquisition of that status of equality which previously been the exclusive right of the Christian nations, but in July, 1923, its Treaty of Peace with the Allies conferred upon Moslem Turkey a status of immediate equality with the Christian nations and Japan.

Ratification of the two Turco-American Treaties is to be exchanged at Constantinople “as soon as possible” and the Treaties are to take effect two months after ratification, the intervening period being allowed for the evacuation of the American naval forces from Turkish waters.

Meanwhile, Greco-Turkish agreements signed at Lausanne on Jan. 30, 1923, had preceded Greek participation in the Allied Peace Treaty of July 24. On January 30, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their Moslem and Orthodox nationals, respectively, amounting to a total of possibly 500,000 persons, exception being made for Moslems of Western Thrace and Orthodox of Constantinople, Turkey permitting the Oecumenical Patriarchate to remain at the Phanar in Stamboul subject to its disestablishment and to the departure of Meletios IV, the then Patriarch. With this precedent agreement, Greece recognized in the Peace Treaty of July 24 “her obligation to make reparation for the damage caused in Anatolia by the acts of the Greek Army or administration which were contrary to the laws of war. On the other hand, Turkey, in consideration of the financial situation of Greece resulting from the prolongation of the war and from its consequences, finally renounces all claims for reparation against the Greek Government.” In lieu of reparation, Turkey accepted the suburb of Karagatch across the Maritza from Adrianople, which was surrendered by the Greek Army on September 15 in as wrecked a condition as the towns from which the Greek Army had fled in Anatolia a year before.

On August 23 the Grand National Assembly at Angora ratified the Peace Treaty of Lausanne by a vote of 215 to 20, and on the following day the Allied evacuation of Constantinople and the Straits began, to be completed within a period of six weeks….

To realize the meaning of the Treaty of Lausanne, we shall have to go back some distance into Ottoman history. Sultan Selim III who was deposed in 1808, was possibly the first of the Ottoman reformers. Mahmoud II who succeeded him, was another great Sultan who saw the need of introducing Western methods into his Eastern realm, and it was he who abolished the Janissaries in 1826 as a result of their long opposition to reform. Abdul Medjid I was a third great reformer who proclaimed the Tanzimat in 1839 under whose terms all Ottoman subjects were to be given an equal status in temporal law. The Tanzimat dealt with sweeping reforms in education, in methods of tax collection and in the courts, but Czarist Russia put a stop to Ottoman reform in the aggression of 1853 which resulted in the Crimean War.

Under Abdul Aziz, a Western-trained group of Turks revived Ottoman reform and when Abdul Hamid II became Sultan, Midhat Pasha succeeded in proclaiming a Constitution. Again Czarist Russia put a stop to reform in the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 and the Berlin Congress adopted the title of “the Sick man of Europe” which the Czar had invented for the Sultan. Czarist Russia and Western Europe now took over the problem of Ottoman reform themselves, directing it to the benefit of the Sultan’s Bulgarian and Armenian subjects while passing over the equally urgent needs of his Turkish subjects. Ottoman reform as thus directed now became the fixed objective of Christendom from Czarist Russia to the country towns of the United States, while Islam in time from the Balkans to the back hills of Java became increasingly anxious over “our brother Turk.”

Alarmed by the dividing effect of Ottoman reform in Western hands, the Western-trained Young Turks again revived their own program of reform and when Sir Edward Grey agreed with Czarist Russia in 1907 on the eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks hurriedly revived Midhat Pasha’s Constitution in the Revolution of 1908. But the end was already at hand. Austria-Hungary immediately annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence. Insurrections began in Albania in which Austria-Hungary was not disinterested and in Kurdistan in which Czarist Russia was not disinterested. The Italians landed in Tripoli and the First Balkan War brought the Bulgarians to the Chatalja lines behind Constantinople, putting an end not only to any attempt at Young Turkish reform but almost to the existence of the Empire. In the Western view, this sort of thing constituted Ottoman reform, and in 1914 the Anglo-Russian combination closed on the Empire and reformed it out of existence. The Sevres Treaty in 1920 finally wrote the last chapter in the story of Western reform by proposing to hand over the richest provinces of the Turkish country to Greeks and Armenians while denying the Turks any right whatever to an independent existence. The Sevres Treaty was and still is a full and complete definition of the word “reform” when applied by Allied diplomacy to Turkish lands.

In the meantime, the Young Turks abrogated the Capitulations in 1914 and with their hands untied for the first time in their modern history, a number of other reforms followed in rapid succession despite the fact that they were engaged in a world war. When Rauf Bey met Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros to apply for an armistice in 1918, he stipulated that the abrogation of the Capitulations would have to be recognized, but the first act of the Allies upon occupying Constantinople was to re-impose the Capitulations and to undo every reform which the Young Turks had succeeded in making. Within a few months, the Greek occupation of Smyrna threw the Young Turks into the heart of Anatolia. Turkish nationalism repeated and amplified Rauf Bey’s stipulations at Mudros in the Erzerum program of 1919. The Ottoman Parliament committed itself to the Erzerum program early in 1920 under the name of the National Pact. British officers reformed the Ottoman Parliament out of existence on the night of March 15-16, 1920, but away in the heart of Anatolia Turkish nationalism possessed as free a hand for its own program of reform as its state of siege permitted. What the Sevres Treaty was to Western reform in Turkey, the Grand National Assembly became to Turkish reform in Turkey; and when Soviet Russia recognized the National Pact in 1921, the fingers which had long strangled Ottoman reform were removed, temporarily at least, from the Turkish throat.

Afghanistan quickly recognized the Pact. The three Soviet Republics of Trans-Caucasia recognized it. Insofar as it concerned Cilicia, France recognized it. Soviet Ukrainia recognized it early in 1922. Insofar as it concerned Eastern Thrace, Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary recognized it at the point of the bayonet in the Mudania armistice. But at Lausanne, Ismet Pasha placed the rest of the Pact before Lord Curzon and early in 1923 Lord Curzon, having swallowed a few drops of the nasty stuff, returned to London. There seemed then to be as little chance of Ismet Pasha’s diplomatic success as there had once seemed to be of Fevzi Pasha’s military success, but Turkish reform would not be alive today if it had not learned long ago to achieve the impossible. Little by little, Ismet Pasha dropped away the non-essentials of the Pact while holding fast to the abrogation of the Capitulations which the Enver Government had decreed on Sept. 28, 1914, and on July 24, 1923, the British Foreign Office finally accorded its recognition to the essentials of the National Pact, exception being made for further negotiation over Mosul.

For the last century, the Ottoman Empire has sought justice at the hands of Czarist Russia and the West. Czarist Russia has finally ceased to exist and Turkey has finally gained justice from the West at the point of the bayonet, a fact which we Christians of the West might do well to ponder. It secured from the West at Lausanne a belated recognition of its right to control its own reforms in its own country and since Czarist Russia and the West by their long endeavor to impose reforms from without for the exclusive benefit of the Turk’s minorities, have made it impossible for the Turk and his minorities to live together, the Turk today has only himself to consider in Turkey. Insofar as no further Western attempts are made to strangle Turkish reform (and if the past is any clew to the future, such attempts are quite certain to be made), the future of Turkey now depends on the Turk. We know at last who is responsible in Turkey, and this is a very substantial gain.

XX

THE REAL PROBLEM OF TURKISH NATIONALISM

ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW TURKISH STATE—​MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA OPENS THE SMYRNA CONGRESS—​THE CHESTER CONCESSION A STEP FROM IMPERIALISM TO LAW.

As soon as the Erzerum program had been definitely committed to negotiation at Lausanne, Mustapha Kemal Pasha lost no time in diverting into the ways of peace the energy with which Turkish nationalism had re-mobilized and re-equipped its Armies. For the building up of a new and Western economic tradition with which to supplement the old and Eastern military tradition which had long distinguished its nation, the new Turkish Government had laid its foundations well. It had refrained from the issue of paper money, confining itself to the use of paper issued by the old Ottoman Government during the war. As fast as this paper became worn out, it was sent to the headquarters of the Public Debt administration in Constantinople to be exchanged for clean paper. Unlike a number of post-war European Governments, it had refrained from financing itself by the use of the printing press but the merit of this achievement is of course lessened by the primitive nature of the country which it governed. A country which could survive forty percent requisitions hardly needed to use the printing press. If many of its minor officials and soldiers never saw a pay-day, it was not money which had drawn them into the bitter loneliness of Angora. The deputies in the Assembly were paid out of the Evkaf (Moslem religious endowments) in their constituencies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha himself was paid £T300 a month, a salary which in its buying power in Asia Minor today, is equivalent to about £T75, or $375, pre-war. The cost of living has gone up severely in Asia Minor but not quite as severely as it has in the West. A camel which before the war could have been bought for £T25 gold, will now cost about £T100 paper.

Gold has completely disappeared from circulation, most of it drained away to Germany during the war. There is a little nickel in circulation, but practically all transactions in Asia Minor, however small, are conducted in paper. By the time the Battle of the Sakaria River was fought and won, the Government had collected a gold reserve which amounted to about £T1,000,000 (say $5,000,000) in Ottoman and other gold coins and about 200 kilos of bar gold. Its trade had been destroyed, its population had been broken, it was confronted with great devastated areas in the “Pontus,” in Cilicia, in the eastern provinces and behind Smyrna. Its financial position was about as low as can be imagined, but it must be emphasized that low as its financial position was, it was sound. The foundation was good, and the only question pertaining to it was the durability of the economic structure which the Turk would prove himself able to build upon it.

The abrogation of the Capitulations on Sept. 28, 1914, had turned the customs traiff over to the Government and when Angora inherited the burden of debt and undevelopment which had borne Constantinople down, the customs tariff was increased from five to fifteen times over the old Capitulatory tariff. This was done primarily for protective purposes. Insofar as the war permitted, the development of home industries was to be given every possible stimulus. Even down to such minor industries as the manufacture of men’s headwear, nationalist solicitude for home industries was quickly shown. Presumably one reason why the lamb-skin kalpak has been substituted in the new Turkey for the old Ottoman fez, is the fact that fezzes were manufactured in Austria. Although it deprived the Government of a revenue which was said to amount to £T4,000,000 a year at a time when it needed every piaster it could lay its hands on, country-wide prohibition was voted soon after the Grand National Assembly was convened at Angora.

Since Asia Minor is in large part an agricultural area, the Government’s first economic plans were directed toward the development of agriculture, and a scheme was evolved under which farm machinery was to be purchased abroad by a Government company and distributed through the branches of the Government’s Agricultural Bank. This scheme may or may not materialize as the Government enters more fully into foreign commercial relationships, but its spirit is highly significant. Trade has passed definitely into the hands of the Turks and in the building up of an economic tradition to which the Turks have heretofore been strangers, Turkish nationalism confronts its real problem.

On Feb. 17, 1923, Mustapha Kemal Pasha opened the country’s first economic congress at Smyrna. More than 500 delegates were present. Farmers and producers were given the center block of seats, traders and business men the right block, and skilled workmen the left block, with a special section of the hall given over to an exhibition of agricultural machinery, most of it from the United States. It was a unique event in Turkish history, and its significance may be gathered from Kemal Pasha’s opening address, which merits quotation in part:

“Gentlemen, when history applies itself to searching the causes of the grandeur and of the decadence of a people, it invokes political, military and social reasons. It is evident that ultimately all the reasons spring from social conditions but that which is in closest bearing to the existence, the prosperity and the decadence of a people is its economics. This historical truth is confirmed in our existence and our national history. In fact, if one examines the history of the Turkish people, one will see that her grandeur and her decadence are merely corollaries of her economic life. So in order to raise the new Turkey to the desired level, it is necessary, cost what it may, to accord all our solicitude to the questions which concern her economics.

“In the course of Ottoman history, all the efforts employed, all the activities of her statesmen, have had as their aim, not to satisfy the desires of the people nor to realize their aspirations, but rather to appease petty yearnings and personal ambitions. Comrades, if one examines closely the reigns of Mohammed II, of Selim and of Suleiman, one finds that these great and powerful monarchs based their foreign policy on their desires to satiate their personal leanings and ambitions. They had thus to regulate their internal organization in accordance with their foreign policy. Now foreign policy ought to be, on the contrary, subordinated to the internal organization—​that is to say, foreign policy should be dominated by the internal economic situation.”

Kemal Pasha went on to explain that the monarchical policy of subordinating internal organization to foreign policy, had led to the necessity of allowing conquered elements to retain their national organizations in which they devoted themselves peacefully to economic pursuits while the “essential element” protected them, wielding the sword against their enemies on every frontier of the Empire. “Gentlemen, those who effect conquests by the sword finish by being beaten by those who employ as their arm the plow, and by ceding their place to them. In the struggle between the sword and the plow, it is always the plow which comes out on top.”

As soon as Rauf Bey returned from Malta, he was given the Ministry of Public Works at Angora, where the elaboration of a scheme of railway development was given immediate attention. Negotiations ensued with the representatives of the Ottoman-American Development Company, backed by Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, U. S. N. (retired), who had been in previous negotiation with the old Ottoman Government in Constantinople. On April 11, 1923, the development scheme which the Government had formulated, was made over to the Ottoman-American Company by the Grand National Assembly and on April 30, the Minister of Public Works signed a convention with two representatives of the Company for what has long been famous as the Chester Concession.

This Turkish program falls into three parts—​the construction of 2,714 miles of new railway line, the construction of a new capital city at Angora and of ports at Samsun, Yamurtalik and Trebizond together with the re-construction of towns and villages wrecked by the Greeks, and the exploitation of mineral rights within twenty-kilometer zones on each side of the new railway lines. The convention with the Chester group runs for a term of ninety-nine years unless the Turkish Government chooses to exercise its right of purchase after thirty years. The Turkish company which is to operate the new railway lines is to pay thirty percent of its profits to the Government and is to be subject to all Turkish taxation except customs duties on its construction materials and its coal, the latter of which is to be exempt for a period of ten years only. The company may employ foreign experts (the original Chester project of 1909 stipulated that they were to wear the fez and a Government uniform), but Turks are to be trained to take their places and the labor gangs are to be purely Turkish. There is no kilometric guarantee, nor does the Concession add any financial burden to the burdens which the Turkish Government already bears, until such time as the Government may decide to take over the lines.

The backbone of this Turkish program is its railway scheme, and in this respect it differs widely from the original Chester project of 1909. Czarist Russia having disappeared, the Turkish Government now revives the central Anatolian scheme which was first suggested for the Bagdad Railway and vetoed by Russia. It proposes to extend the Eski-Shehr-Angora line which was orginally intended for the main line of the Bagdad Railway, to Sivas, Kharput, Diarbekr and Mosul, but it adapts its railway program to the needs which have developed during the last four years. It may be assumed that military considerations have played a part in the framing of the Government’s railway scheme, for the war in Europe is not yet ended, and nobody knows how long a breathing space Turkey is to be permitted.

The first line to be built is to be the Yamurtalik-Kharput-Bitlis line, with a branch dropping to Mosul, Kirkuk and Suleimanieh. If and when this line is completed, it will strengthen the Syrian and Mesopotamian frontiers, and its western end, terminating in an excellent harbor at Yamurtalik on the Turkish side of Alexandretta Bay, will afford the Government a port which it sorely needs on the Mediterranean.

The second line to be built is to be the Angora-Erzerum line with branches dropping to Samsun and Trebizond on the Black Sea. At present the Government has no access by rail to any of its Black Sea ports. Possibly if it had had speedy access to the “Pontus” provinces, they would not have been devastated by irregular warfare during these last four years.

The final lines to be built are embodied in a group by which the Angora-Sivas line is to be connected via Caesarea with Ulu Kishla on the Bagdad Railway, and the Erzerum line is to be extended to Bayazid on the Persian frontier. The Erzerum and Bayazid lines in the eastern provinces are of obvious bearing on any future Russian attempt to repeat the great invasion of 1915-’16. They are of more meaning than that. At present Soviet Russia and Turkey are at peace with each other, and if and when the railway program which the Turkish Government has made over to the Chester group is completed, Russia may be afforded an overland outlet to the Mediterranean at Yamurtalik. The Russian and Turkish gauges differ, the former being 5 feet and the latter 4 feet 8½ inches, but the political possibilities in affording Soviet Russia peacefully what Czarist Russia sought by force, are incalculable. Peaceful access to the Mediterranean over the Chester lines might easily reduce the Straits to a very small factor in Russia’s foreign policy. While Turkey is not a Socialist State and presumably will not be, Russo-Turkish peace is the very foundation of any world peace and if the Chester group is able to contribute effectively to an enduring Russo-Turkish peace, it will perform a service of incalculable worth to the cause of world peace.

A month after the grant of the Chester Concession, Allied concessionaires began filtering into Angora from Constantinople, to begin economic negotiations with the Turkish Government simultaneously with the political negotiations which were dragging toward an end at Lausanne. These economic negotiations comprised four subjects: (1) the status of pre-war concessions; (2) the status of modifications authorized by the Ottoman Government after the Mudros armistice; (3) compensation for war damage to the property of concessionaires; and (4) the extension of concessions for a period equal to that in which they had been non-operative during the war. By the middle of June, the Constantinople Telephone Company (British) had reached agreement with the Turkish Government. Early in July, similar agreements had been reached by the Smyrna-Aidin Railway (British) and the Mudania-Brussa Railway (French).

Meanwhile, the Assembly adjourned for new elections. Peace not yet having been signed at Lausanne, the Nationalist Party went to the country on the basis of the National Pact and was returned by an overwhelming majority. It was a war election, somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Lloyd George’s “khaki election” of 1918, and party government with a strong Opposition in the Assembly is hardly to be expected at Angora until after an assured peace has come to Turkey.

The Second Assembly was convened in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora on August 11 and Mustapha Kemal Pasha was re-elected President by 196 of the 197 deputies who had reached the capital. Presumably the lone dissenting vote was the vote of “the Pasha” himself. Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior, was elected Prime Minister in place of Rauf Bey and most of the remaining Ministers were re-elected, Ismet Pasha retaining the portfolio of Foreign Affairs and Fevzi Pasha remaining Chief of the General Staff. The Treaty of Lausanne having been ratified on August 23, the Assembly lost no time in approaching the urgent problem of its own economy and on September 5 Fethy Bey announced the main lines of the Government’s policy. He stressed first the problem of finance and the necessity of readjusting taxation. Further points on which the Government proposed to concentrate, he said, were the schools system and the gendarmerie. His speech was noteworthy for the brevity of its references to foreign affairs. Given peace abroad, the Government’s program as enunciated by Fethy Bey is an internal program.

XXI

THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

With the rebirth of Turkey, this narrative approaches its end. With the coming of a probable peace, the passions which have been raised in the Near and Middle East need sorely to be allayed, and there would be small usefulness in this narrative of the destruction they have worked, if the past did not contain its element of useful guidance for the future.

We in the West are heavily in debt to England. It is England which has slowly and laboriously fashioned our Western tradition of democratic government and that tradition has placed us all incalculably in England’s debt. That tradition is still evolving and England is still, as it has always been, the scene of its evolution. But in acknowledging our debt to England, we need to think clearly, to distinguish sharply between the British democracy and the British Foreign Office. Between the two, there is no effective connection. The Foreign Office is outside the British Constitution and is not subject to the effective control of the British Parliament. British foreign policy in the Near and Middle East neither originates in Parliament nor is controlled by Parliament. This is a state of things which has been at once a source of enormous strength to British diplomacy and a source of enormous danger to world peace.

It was through the British Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey’s Secretaryship, that the British democracy was tied to Czarist Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The British democracy did not know it at the time nor does it realize to this day the meaning of the 1907 Treaty, for its Foreign Office has been as blinkers fastened about its eyes. There came a time in 1914 when Czarist Russia clashed with Germany over the control of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Sir Edward Grey had tied the British democracy to Czarist Russia and in 1914 it remained so tied. Whether Sir Edward Grey permitted his country to believe that the war was to be fought over Belgium and under this impression brought his country into the war, is a question which the British democracy may some day succeed in settling with its own Foreign Office. Events, however, would appear to indicate that Basra was more intimately connected with the Foreign Office’s actual war aims than Belgium was. Three weeks before the Enver Government at Constantinople entered the war, a British Indian brigade lay off Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf and when German naval officers hustled the Enver Government into the war by bombarding Odessa, events played straight into the Foreign Office’s hand. The brigade off Bahrein struck at Basra instantly and Sir Edward Grey, in conjunction with Czarist Russia, began that partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which had been envisaged in 1907. Czarist Russia was to receive Constantinople and the eastern provinces, the Foreign Office was to achieve its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme, and the Ottoman Caliphate of Islam was to be destroyed. But of all this the British democracy knew little until Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and Soviet Russia published the secret treaties which it discovered in the Czarist archives at Petrograd.

Deprived of its Czarist accomplice at the very peak of its history, deprived even of the tame Kerensky regime, the British Foreign Office in 1919 sought American aid in holding its position. Viscount Grey of Fallodon was dispatched to Washington and American churchmen, with the best intentions in the world, attempted to tie upon American eyes the same Armenian blind as they had permitted to be tied upon their own eyes. But the United States Government does not conduct its foreign affairs as the British Foreign Office does. Viscount Grey went back to London and the Armenian mandate scheme fell through. The effort to establish a closer relationship between England and the United States still continues, however, and it would be interesting to know to what extent, if any, it is directed toward an Anglo-American combination against Islam in succession to the Anglo-Russian combination of 1907. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that we in the United States are under an incalculable debt to the British democracy, but to the British Foreign Office we owe nothing.

The Turkish recovery of Smyrna in 1922 stripped the blind from the eyes of the British democracy, but its Foreign Office blinkers are still fastened about its eyes. Mr. Lloyd George has fallen but Lord Curzon still remains. British diplomacy does not lightly change its aims and the Turk whose end was decreed in 1907, is still an unwelcome outsider in the field of British diplomacy. Lord Curzon has held most of his gains in the Arab lands of the old Ottoman Empire, but in the face of the Turkish recovery he has retreated by inches. He still has a Greek frontier on the Maritza River, 250 miles from Constantinople, he still perpetuates the split in Islam which pivots on Mosul, he still refuses to recognize, even in the elaboration of a new regime for the Straits, the indubitable fact of Soviet Russia. Some day the British democracy may succeed in removing the blinkers from its eyes, in reducing its Foreign Office to an ordinary department of its Government, responsible as its other Government departments are, to its Parliament. Some day the Foreign Office may become the mouthpiece of an informed democracy. In a day when diplomacy is passing to the basis of trade, when British Conservatism has already passed to a business basis, the end of the present anachronism at the Foreign Office may be not distant.

We need to be scrupulously fair, however, to Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary. Rid of any actual responsibility to Parliament, they have kicked the beaten Turks into such independence as they have never known since the golden days of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the absolutism which Mr. Lloyd George enjoyed, the Turks have finally attained a degree of nationhood “one and indivisible” which is far beyond what the most visionary Young Turks of 1908 hoped to attain. Their historic Christian communities have been rooted up and deported from the land in which they had lived for four peaceful centuries under the rule of the Ottoman Caliph, and for this truly colossal achievement the thanks of a grateful Christendom are due to Mr. Lloyd George, who attempted to impose alone upon Islam that fate which Sir Edward Grey had agreed in 1907 to impose in conjunction with Czarist Russia.

The disestablished Oecumenical Patriarchate still remains in Constantinople and the departure of Meletios IV on July 10, 1923, may open its doors to the new Turkish Orthodox Church of Anatolia. The day seems to be at hand when the remnant of the Turkish Christians, welded firmly into the Turkish State by the flame of nationalism, may restore the Patriarchate to those exclusively religious functions which in the Western view are the only proper functions of a Church.

Nationalism which proposes to substitute its new Eastern regime of law for the old lawlessness of Western imperialism, is the driving force of Turkey today and Turkey happens to be the key country of the world. Nationalism in Turkey today welds and does not divide. Its cry strikes a sound and healthy note. I heard it in its purest form at Adana. It was in a theatre, filled to overflowing with Turkish officers, Turkish townsmen and Turkish peasants. Beyond the footlights, framed in the little proscenium of the theatre, stood the plump figure of the poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, now an old man of seventy-two, his voice hoarsened to a whisper, the perspiration streaming from beneath his kalpak, as he intoned his verse in liquid Turkish. Once a lonely cry in the wilderness, his voice that night was punctuated with quick applause. For twenty years he has been lifting up his cry and today he is still making his way through the scorched and decimated villages of Turkey, still burning himself out with his old cry:

“I am a Turk;

“My race and language are great.”

Transcriber’s Note:

The one footnote was moved to the end of the chapter in which its related anchor occurs.

Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings, and misspelled words were left unchanged.

Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Duplicate partial words at line endings were removed.

The text of one sentence, in which one or more lines of text were misplaced, was not changed:

However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab nationalism.

Two instances of wrong usage of words were not changed:

“are” should be “the” — “We in are West who are accustomed …”

“no” should be “not” — “… was no in contact …”