Part 4

In August 1896 the revolutionaries, having failed to stir up a general rising in Asia determined to adopt desperate measures in Constantinople in the hope of forcing the hands of the Ambassadors. About 1 p.m. on an August afternoon they suddenly attacked with bombs and revolvers the guard of the Ottoman Bank, twelve of whom they killed. They then broke in and seized the European staff as hostages. Besieged in the top story of the bank they threatened to blow up the building with all who were in it, rather than surrender. The Ambassadors hastily appealed to the Porte, who yielded to their importunities on behalf of their nationals and allowed them to guarantee a safe conduct to the conspirators. That night they were quietly smuggled away on Sir Edgar Vincent’s yacht.

Bombs were also thrown in the Grand Rue de Pera, near the Galata Serai, and some of the conspirators who had taken a position upon the roofs of the houses in that, the principal thoroughfare of Constantinople, fired upon the populace in the street below.

There seems little doubt that the revolutionists had contemplated a series of attacks at different important points, to be followed by a more or less general rising of the Armenian population, which numbered from 200,000 to 400,000.

A cry went through the city that the Armenians had risen in revolt and were massacreing the other citizens. Many persons armed themselves with cudgels and, joined by a cosmopolitan mob from Pera and Galata, many of whom were Greeks anxious to pay off old scores on their hated commercial rivals, wreaked vengeance on the Armenian population. The soldiers and police took no part in the killing. It is estimated that about 1,000 persons perished, including those killed by the bombs and revolvers of the conspirators. What happened in London and Liverpool after the sinking of the “Lusitania” affords an idea of how the East End people of London, who claim to be far more highly educated than the Constantinople rabble, would have behaved if German desperados, after murdering twelve of the sentinels on guard at the Bank of England, had been allowed to escape free in deference to the representations of the American and Spanish Ambassadors, especially after the fears and passions of the mob had been aroused by German aliens shooting and bombing from the roofs of the houses. In considering the question of massacre we must always bear in mind that mob law is inevitably cruel and senseless, as witness the excesses committed during the French Revolution and the Commune, the lynchings in America of to-day, and the pogroms of Russia.

MR. SIDNEY WHITMAN was in Constantinople at the time as special correspondent for the _New York World_ in connection with the “so-called Armenian atrocities,” as he terms them. The instructions sent him by Mr. Gordon Bennett were very precise:

The correspondent is to take no sides and express no opinions of his own. In many cases it would appear that the matter sent to the papers by their correspondents in Turkey is biassed against the Turks. This implies an injustice, against which even a criminal on trial is protected.

Mr. Sidney Whitman’s book of “Turkish Memories” throws many interesting side-lights on these events. He says:

There was little or no reason for assuming that the disturbances had their source in religious fanaticism directed against the Christian as such; whilst evidence was accumulating that a vast Armenian conspiracy, nurtured in England, obscured the real issue, to which there were two sides.

Writing of the Press, he observes:

The agitation on the part of the Armenian Committees in the different capitals of Europe had been carried on to such purpose, that there was hardly an American or an English newspaper which had a good word left to say of the Turks. A horde of adventurers of various nationalities, déclassés of every sphere of life, cashiered officers among the rest, who had left their native country for its good, were eking out a precarious livelihood by providing newspaper correspondents, if not Embassies, with backstairs information.

He mentions that:

The agitation carried on in England by Canon McColl and the Duke of Westminster, backed by sundry fervent Nonconformists, had had the effect of exhibiting the fanatical Turk as thirsting for the blood of the Christian.

And yet not a single Christian other than the Orthodox Armenians was molested. With regard to the Jews he tells us how a Jewish money-changer, mistaken for an Armenian, had been set on by the mob: when it was ascertained that he was a Jew, he was released, but the crowd ran after him, and brought him back to collect his money, which was scattered on the ground. Would any other mob in the world have acted thus under similar conditions?

It is a noteworthy fact that from the time when the Jews first found shelter in Turkey from their Christian persecutors and the terrors of the Inquisition in Spain, until the present date, no one has ever even suggested that they have been ill-treated in the Ottoman Dominions; on the contrary, thousands of fugitive Jews, escaping from pogroms in Russia have within the last quarter of a century found security and peace in Turkey. Many Poles fleeing from persecution have found a safe asylum in Turkey, as well as the Hungarian leaders Kossuth, Gorgey and many others after their abortive revolution against Austrian domination. Although threatened with war by both Austria and Russia unless he surrendered the fugitives, the Sultan of Turkey refused to break the sacred laws of hospitality enjoined by Mohammed. On an earlier occasion a Sultan of Turkey had similarly refused to surrender to Russia the King of Ukraine (Lesser Russia), who was a refugee at his court, although he was offered a great reward should he comply, with war as the alternative in case of refusal.

If the Turk were a fanatical persecutor of all persons professing another faith than his own, how is it that for centuries Jews, Roman Catholic and Greek Christians have been allowed free exercise of their religion in all parts of the Turkish Empire, and that Protestant missionaries of many sects have not been interfered with in that country? Does not all this tend to prove that the Armenian trouble is a political and not a religious one?

Mr. Sidney Whitman further says, that in one hospital he visited he found that about forty Turkish soldiers, who were lying there, were wounded by Armenian bombs or revolver shots during the street fighting, and that the correspondents of the different European papers, when asked to inspect a large quantity of bombs found in a house at Pera, refused to do so.

Such was the general disinclination to admit any fact which could tell in favour of the great provocation the Turks had received from the Armenian revolutionists.

The sad case of the late Mr. Melton Prior shows a pleasing exception to the general attitude adopted by the foreign journalists:

The renowned war correspondent confided to me that he was in an awkward predicament. The public at home had heard of nameless atrocities, and was anxious to receive pictorial representations of these. The difficulty was how to supply them with what they wanted, as the dead Armenians had been buried and _no women or children suffered hurt, and no Armenian church had been desecrated_. As an old admirer of the Turks, and as an honest man, he declined to invent what he had not witnessed. But others were not equally scrupulous. I subsequently saw an Italian illustrated paper containing harrowing pictures of women and children being massacred in a church.

VI.

And now within the last two months we find once more the same influences at work, and many of the same men who promulgated the Bulgarian atrocities exploiting fresh massacres of Armenians. There is absolutely no reason why we should implicitly believe the reports which have been so assiduously circulated in the Press and on the platform, simply because, owing to the unfortunate war with Turkey, we are unable to ascertain what has really happened. The exploiters of these stories are under the same disability, having only heard one side, and that an extremely biassed one. The value of certain newspaper information is curiously illustrated by Sir Edwin Pears who, writing about the Bulgarian “atrocities,” says, “I collected a number of rumours (sic!) and made much use of the information which Dr. Long furnished me ... [my account] appeared in the _Daily News_, on the 23rd (June 1876).” Dr. Long, according to Sir Edwin, was a former missionary and correspondent to “an obscure newspaper in America,” and relied for his information entirely upon Bulgarian letters and not on personal investigation. No Englishman worthy of the name would condemn a prisoner on the evidence of the prosecution alone, without first hearing the evidence for the defence. Yet that is exactly what we are now asked to do. The Editor of the _Economist_ is right when he says “Certainly we must not allow our standards of proof to decline in judging reports of atrocities,” and this is especially necessary at a time when truth seems rarer than fiction, and when sensational stories are passed as authentic reports for the acceptance of a public prone to believe anything (witness the stories, all since proved to be entirely fictitious, of the fatal accident, the suicide, and finally the burial of the German Crown Prince).

Captain Granville Fortescue, the well-known American war correspondent, in his recently published book, “What of the Dardanelles,” gives an example of how stories—not to call them by another name—are manufactured and disseminated by means of the Press all over the world:

The rumours of a revolution in Turkey have been so many and frequent, that I must state they have not the least foundation in fact. Why should the British public be fed on these silly canards? Time and again I have read long dispatches from Athens and Mytilene, which purport to describe the troubled conditions in Turkey. I remember an item that told of a riot in Constantinople. Reference was made to the looting of the Pera Palace Hotel by a “stop-the-war” mob. On the date mentioned in the dispatch I was in this hotel. The whole story was pure invention. Personal observation convinced me, that Constantinople was the most normal of all the capitals of the nations at war.

Sir William Osler, the eminent physician, in a speech recently delivered at the Leeds Luncheon Club, said that:

In a great crisis like the present we are all a bit surcharged emotionally. Judgment becomes difficult, and we become weak-minded and believe anything any Ananias says. Who could have dreamt that so early in the war there were so many liars in the country as the men and women who saw the Russian troops? An instability of this sort leaves us an easy prey for the Yellow Press. Think of all the legless, armless, eyeless Belgians that crowded their columns. All had been seen by these perverters; few, if any, by the camera. What a triumph of unstrung nerves was that matter of the war babies.

Russians, mutilated Belgians and “war-babies,” were said to be in our midst, and yet it took us weeks to learn the truth. We shall indeed be hysterical if we allow ourselves to be hoaxed about alleged events in the recesses of Asia Minor.

It is well to recall that Sir Henry Layard in the report of the Bulgarian atrocities, from which we have quoted, stated that: “there are persons, and amongst them I grieve to say Englishmen, who boast that they invented those stories with the object of writing down Turkey, to which they were impelled by a well-known hand.”

No one believes that gentlemen in the position of Lord Bryce, Mr. Noel Buxton, Mr. Aneurin Williams and Sir Edwin Pears would for a minute willingly deceive the British public; but it is indeed more than possible that some “well-known hand” has been deceiving them. May not this hand have been that of the wealthy Armenian Committees which are spread over Europe and America, and who have never hesitated as to the means chosen for the attainment of their objects, because with them the end justifies the means? Even the Earl of Crewe, when on October the 5th, 1915, he replied in the House of Lords to the Earl of Cromer’s question as to “whether His Majesty’s Government had received any information confirmatory of the statements made in the Press to the effect that renewed massacres of Armenians had taken place on a large scale,” based his information on a report he had received from His Majesty’s Consul at Batum, and which he acknowledged was founded upon the statements published in a newspaper at Tiflis. It is certainly most significant that the British Consul at Batum,—a town actually on the frontier—should have had to rely for his information on a newspaper published at Tiflis, nearly 200 miles further back. This newspaper was probably “The Horizon,” an Armenian propagandist organ, and therefore quite unreliable. Likewise, unless he had been wilfully misinformed, it would be difficult to account for Lord Bryce’s statement at the Mansion House, that there was not the slightest basis for the report that the Armenians had themselves provoked the massacre by rising in conspiracy. The facts and probabilities, so far as we know them, are otherwise.

The Turks had just sustained in the Caucasus a severe defeat. They needed every available man and every round of ammunition to check the advancing Russians. It is therefore incredible that without receiving any provocation they should have chosen that particularly inopportune moment to employ a large force of soldiers and gendarmes with artillery to stir up a hornet’s nest in their rear. Military considerations alone make the suggestion absurd.

The Germans had failed in their projected attack on Calais and Dunkirk after suffering enormous losses. The Franco-British forces were massing for the counter-stroke. Russia was almost at the gates of Cracow, Przemysl had fallen, and her armies were descending into the plains of Hungary. The Servians had retaken Belgrade after inflicting a disastrous defeat on the Austrians. The Allied fleets were hammering at the Dardanelles. Greece, Roumania and possibly Bulgaria might at any moment join the Entente Powers. The position of Turkey and the Central Powers appeared worse than it has ever been before or since. It is therefore most unlikely that the Turkish Government without receiving any provocation, and even if, as suggested by Lord Bryce, they entertained the idea of exterminating the Armenians, should have chosen so inopportune a moment to damn themselves and forfeit all hope of magnanimous treatment for their country if defeated, besides running the risk of prejudicing the Christian Balkan States against them. Lord Bryce’s accusation, from the point of view of political expediency, carries its own refutation.

In peace the Turks are a good-natured, easy-going race, hospitable, generous to the poor, and particularly fond of animals and children—a sure sign of a kindly and humane disposition, long-suffering, but when provoked, like all the near Eastern races both Moslem and Christian, exhibiting a fury out of all proportion to the insult according to our Western ideas. In war time the Turks are neither fanatical nor intolerant. They are indeed less so than any of the Western nations with all their supposed superiority.

When Greece was fighting Turkey, the Greeks of Constantinople, although Ottoman subjects, actually dared to fly the Greek flag over their houses, and after the death of their archbishop, which occurred at that same time, paraded his dead body, seated upon the episcopal throne, through the streets of Pera, escorted by their prelates and clergy, without being subjected to any molestation. Annually, too, the Host is borne in procession through the streets of the City of the Khalif. Contrast this extraordinary tolerance with present conditions in London, where German subjects are forbidden to pray in their own churches in the German tongue and where, only a few years ago, the British Government on the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress refused to allow the Host to be borne through the streets of Westminster.

During the Balkan war, when even the mosques were crowded with sick and starving refugees and only the most heroic efforts of the Turkish army, decimated with cholera, were able to keep the victorious Bulgars outside the gates of the city whose very foundations were shaking under the vibration of the enemy’s guns, Greeks, Bulgars and foreign adventurers of every description feasting and making merry in the cafés of Pera openly rejoiced at the misfortune of the Turkish Empire. The principal of Robert College, a Christian school on the shores of the Bosphorus, allowed full play to his sectarian bias, boasting that many of the enemy’s successful generals had been educated at the College, which was founded under the protection and goodwill of the Sultan. Yet during those bitter days, in spite of all this provocation, not a single alien enemy was interfered with by those “fanatical Moslems,” whose hierarchial chief, the Sheik-ul-Islam, set an example by continuing to employ the Greek gardener who had been in his service for many years. The Turks were either too tolerant or too contemptuous to even notice the unseemly and licentious behaviour of the enemies within their gates. Such is the character of a people who would rather go without their dinner than see a poor man hungry, and who, even at a period when Jews were being burnt alive in Christian Spain, Huguenots hunted out of France and priests guilty of saying Mass executed in England, allowed perfect freedom to every race and sect within her dominions.

In the present war we have the overwhelming and convincing testimony of all ranks, from Lord Kitchener downwards, that the Turks have fought gallantly and cleanly, and have treated our wounded and prisoners with kindness and humanity. It is inconceivable, therefore, that these same Turks without any provocation (and Lord Bryce himself has said that there was no religious fanaticism), should have committed the devilries of which they are accused, and in this connection we have the curiously illuminating observation by a celebrated correspondent, on his return from the seat of the last Balkan war, that “paradoxical as it might seem, the Turks were the only Christians in the Balkans”!

This brief examination of the Turkish military and political situation, and of Turkish character, ought sufficiently to refute the suggestion that the Turks were the aggressors and acted without provocation.

On the other hand these same military and political factors, when applied to the Armenian point of view and seen in conjunction with the character of these people, afford good and sufficient reasons for believing that the Armenians themselves commenced the troubles by rising in rebellion. It would indeed have been more than extraordinary had the rebellious section, armed and ready for any mischief, remained quiet under circumstances which were so entirely in their favour.

The defeat of the Turkish army in the Caucasus and the absence of the greater part of the local garrisons and gendarmery, as well as of the able-bodied Moslems, at the front, were entirely favourable to the long matured but hitherto abortive schemes of the revolutionists and russophile Armenians for raising an armed rebellion. Bands of armed Armenian volunteers called “Fedais,” estimated by Lord Bryce at over 8,000, with a probable increase “in the near future” to between 20,000 and 25,000, were already operating in the country as early as last March, and Lord Bryce and the “Friends of Armenia” were appealing for funds to clothe and equip the Armenian Volunteers on April 2nd, almost one month before these alleged unprovoked “massacres.” Furthermore Russia was undoubtedly arming the population and assisting in fomenting a revolution; nor can Russia be blamed for this, seeing that she was then at war with Turkey. Finally the character of the Armenians, so graphically described by Sir Mark Sykes in his account of the people of the Mush plain, and by other travellers whom we have quoted, leaves no doubt that the majority of the Armenian population were quite ready and willing to take advantage of the situation.

What really seems to have occurred in this: about the end of April the Armenians of the Van district believing, after the defeat of Sary Kamish in the Caucasus, that the complete victory of Russia was assured, thought that their opportunity had at last arrived. Urged on by the revolutionaries and Russian agents, and hoping to co-operate with the “Fedais” who had already seized the town of Baskale, 50 miles to the East on the main road from Van to the Persian frontier, they rose in revolt and, as a correspondent of the _Times_, perhaps in an unguarded moment, admits, “finally captured the town of Van and took a bloody vengeance on their enemies.” It was the old story of the massacre of the Zeitun garrison over again. Early in June the revolutionists betrayed the town to the Russian troops.

What happened afterwards is more or less conjecture, but reading the accounts, even those evidently inspired from Armenian sources, it would appear that there were organized risings in other parts of Asia Minor also. For Mr. Henry Wood, the special correspondent at Constantinople of the United Press Agency of America, reported that the Armenians not only were in open revolt but were actually in possession of Van and several other important towns. At Zeitun he said that on the participation of Turkey in the war, when the authorities tried to enforce military service upon the young Armenians (as they were entitled to do by the Constitution), the soldiers were attacked and 300 killed. The town was subsequently retaken, and the population was dispersed and deported. It appears obvious that the Turkish authorities, anxious for the safety of their lines of communication, had no other alternative than to order the removal of their rebellious subjects to some place distant from the seat of hostilities, and their internment there. The enforcement of this absolutely necessary precaution led to further risings on the part of the Armenians. The remaining Moslems were almost defenceless, because the regular garrisons were at the front as well as the greater part of the police and able-bodied men. Already infuriated at the reports of the atrocities committed at Van by the insurgents, in fear for their own lives and those of their relatives, they were at last driven by the cumulative effect of these events into panic and retaliation and, as invariably happens in such cases, the innocent suffered with the guilty.

The Turkish Government has repeatedly been accused of trying to “end the Armenian question by ending the Armenians,” but the evidence of many persons who travelled through the country shortly after the previous disturbances is, that with very rare exceptions only able-bodied men were slain, and not the women, children, or aged. This in itself would confirm the opinion that the measures were purely repressive and, however severe, were taken in the interest of public safety.

VII.