Chapter 4
"The special point for Germany," Dr. Wiedenfeld lays down, in discussing the agricultural possibilities of the Ottoman territories, "is that to a large extent crops can be grown here which supplement our own economic resources in important respects.... In peace time, of course, no one would think of transporting goods of such bulk as agricultural products any way but by sea; but the War has impressed on us with brutal clearness the value for us of being able on occasions of extreme necessity to import cotton from Turkey by land."
Thus Germany's economic activity in Turkey has been not for prosperity but for power, not for peace but for war. In developing Turkey, Germany is simply developing the "Central Europe" scheme of a military combine self-contained economically and challenging the world in arms[29]. Germany is concerned with Turkey, not for her splendid past and future, but for her miserable present; for Turkey--as she is, and only as she is--is a vital chequer on the chess-board where Germany has been playing her game of world power, or "des staatlich-machtlichen Interessens," as Dr. Wiedenfeld would say. Therefore Germany does not eye the lands and peoples under Ottoman dominion with a view to their common advantage and her own. She selects a "piece" among them which she can keep under her thumb and so control the square. Abd-ul-Hamid was her first pawn, and when the Young Turk Party swept him off the board she adopted them and their colour[30]; for by hook or by crook, through this agency or that, Turkey had to be commanded or Germany's play was spoilt.
Germany's control over Turkey depends upon the maintenance of a corrupt minority in power--too weak and corrupt to remain in it without Germany's guarantee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put it at Germany's disposal. A free hand at home in return for servitude in diplomacy and war--the deal is called "Hegemony," and is as old as Ancient Greece. By her hegemony over the Ottoman Government Germany threatens the British and Russian Empires from all the Ottoman frontiers; and with the free hand that is their price the Young Turks inflict on all lands and peoples within those frontiers whatever evils conduce to the maintenance of their pretensions.
As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this political understanding underlies all Germany's economic efforts in Western Asia, and we can see how it has warped them from their proper ends. The track of the Bagdad Railway, for example, has not been selected in the economic interests of the lands and peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach himself admits that
"The Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway cannot be described as properly paying its way. It is otherwise with the" (French) "line from Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar, which links the Anatolian Railway with the older railway system in the West.... The parts of Asia Minor which were thickly populated and prosperous in antiquity lie mostly westward of this first section of the Bagdad Railway, round the river-valleys and" (French and English) "railways leading down to the Aegean."
"There are other once-flourishing parts of the peninsula," he continues, "which the Bagdad Railway does not touch at all"--the Vilayet of Sivas and the other Armenian provinces. The original German plan was to carry the Railway through Armenia from Angora to Kharput, but Russia not unnaturally vetoed the construction, so near her Caucasian frontiers, of a line which, by the nature of the Turco-German understanding, must primarily serve strategic ends[31], and the track was therefore deflected to the south-east. This took it through the most barren parts of Central Anatolia, and in the next section involved the slow and costly work of tunnelling the Taurus and Amanus mountains.
"If merely economic and not political advantages were taken into account," Dr. Rohrbach concedes, "the question might perhaps be raised whether it would not be better to leave the Anatolian section alone altogether and begin the Bagdad Railway from Seleucia" (on the Syrian coast). "The future export trade in grain, wool, and cotton will in any case do all it can to lengthen the cheap sea-passage and shorten correspondingly the section on which it must pay railway freights. The fact that the route connecting Bagdad with the Mediterranean coast in the neighbourhood of Antioch is the oldest, greatest, and still most promising trade-route of Western Asia is independent of all railway projects."
It is worth remembering that a railway, following this route from the Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, has more than once been projected by the British Government. As early as the thirties of last century Colonel Chesney was sent out to examine the ground, and in 1867 the proposal was considered by a Committee of the House of Commons. For the economic development of Western Asia it is clearly a better plan, but then Dr. Rohrbach bases the "necessity for the East Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway" on wholly different grounds.
"The necessity," he declares, "consists in Turkey's military interests, which obviously would be very poorly served" (by German railway enterprise) "if troops could not be transported by train without a break from Bagdad and Mosul to the extremity of Anatolia, and _vice versâ_."
The Bagdad Railway is thus acknowledged to be an instrument of strategy for the Germans and for the Turks of domination--for "_vice versâ_" means that Turkish troops can be transported at a moment's notice through the tunnels from Anatolia to enforce the Ottoman pretension over the Arab lands. Militarily, these tunnels are the most valuable section of the line; economically, they are the most costly and unremunerative. And the second (and longer) tunnel could still have been dispensed with, if, south of Taurus, the track had been led along the Syrian coast. "Economic interests and considerations of expense," Wiedenfeld concedes[32], "argued strongly for the latter course, but--fortunately, as we must admit to-day--the military point of view prevailed." Thus the Turco-German understanding prevented the Bagdad Railway first from beginning at a port on the Mediterranean coast, and then from touching the coast at all[33]. "The spine of Turkey," as German writers are fond of calling it, distorts the natural articulation of Western Asia.
Nemesis has overtaken the Germans in the Armenian deportations--a "political end" of Turkish Nationalism which swept away the "economic means" towards Germany's subtler policy. A month or two before the outbreak of war Dr. Rohrbach stated, in a public lecture, that
"Germany has an important interest in effecting and maintaining contact with the Armenian nation. We have set before ourselves the necessary and legitimate aim of spreading and enrooting German influence in Turkey, not only by military missions and the construction of railways, but also by the establishment of intellectual relations, by the work of German _Kultur_--in a word, by moral conquests; and we are determined, by pacific means, to reach an amicable understanding with the Turks and the other nations in the Turkish Empire. Our ulterior object in this is to strengthen the Turkish Empire internally with the aid of German science, education, and training, and for this work the Armenians are indispensable."
A few months later Germany, as part price of Turkey's intervention in the War, had to leave the Young Turks a "free hand" to exterminate the nation which was the indispensable instrument of her Turkish policy. On the 9th August, 1915, the German Ambassador at Constantinople handed in a formal protest against the deportations, in which his Government "declined all responsibility for the consequences which might result." On the 11th January, 1916, in the German Reichstag, the Chief of the Political Department of the Foreign Office replied to a question from Dr. Liebknecht that "an exchange of views about the reaction of these measures upon the population was taking place," and that "further information could not be given." And while Germany was maintaining this "correct attitude" before the world, she was assisting in Turkey at the destruction of her own work.
Even the atrocities of 1909 had damaged the economic prospects of the Adapa district from which Dr. Rohrbach[34] hoped so much, for
"The first thing the Turkish peasants did was to destroy all the steam-ploughs and nearly all the threshing machines (there were over a hundred of them) which the Armenian villagers had imported for the cultivation of the Civilian plain[35]."
By the atrocities of 1915 the economic life of Western Asia was completely ruined, and the fruits of German enterprise were swept away in the flood.
"I have before me," writes our German memorialised, "a list of the customers of a single Constantinople firm of importers which places its orders principally in Germany and Austria. The accounts which this firm has outstanding amount to date to £13,922 (Turkish), owing from 378 customers in 42 towns of the interior. In consequence of the Armenian deportations these debts are no longer recoverable. The 378 customers, with all their employees, goods, and assets, have vanished from the face of the earth. Any of the owners that are still alive are now beggars on the borders of the Arabian desert."
At Urfa, after the atrocities of 1896, philanthropists of all nations had founded orphanages and started native industries. Attached to the German orphanage there was a carpet factory, with dyeing vats and a spinnery, which Dr. Rohrbach[36], after personal investigation, describes as "an institution to be welcomed as unreservedly from the national as from the humanitarian point of view."
"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides work and bread for 400 persons, but has transplanted one of the most profitable and promising industries of the East into the sphere traversed by the German Railway, where German interests are predominant."
He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of Western Asia, "from which English and other foreign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in German hands. From Armenia's evil, apparently, springs Germany's good--but in 1911 Dr. Rohrbach did not foresee the catastrophe of 1915.
"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes, "Turkey has to thank capitalists and exporters who are almost all Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cotton cultivation introduced by Germany into Cilicia, this carpet industry, in the eastern provinces, has been deprived of the hands essential to it by the Armenian deportations."
Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian community there was massacred in 1915--the third time in twenty years, and this time to extinction--and it points the irony of the situation that the Turkish guns were served by German artillerymen[37].
"I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, the German teacher from Aleppo, "about the opinion of the German officers in Turkey. I often noticed among them an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change the subject, when any German of warm feelings and independent judgment talked in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the Armenians."
This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future of Germany in Western Asia than all the material havoc which the Armenian deportations have caused. For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the Armenians will be on Germany's head:
"'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple Turk's explanation, ... and more sensitive Mohammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe that their own Government has ordered these horrors. They lay all excesses at the Germans' door, for the Germans, during the War, are regarded as Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mollahs declare in the mosques that the German officers, and not the Sublime Porte, have ordered the maltreatment and extermination of the Armenians.... Others say: 'Perhaps the German Government has its hands tied by certain agreements defining its powers, or perhaps it is not an opportune moment for intervention.'
"Our presence had no ameliorating effect, and what we could do ourselves was negligible.... The abusive epithet 'Giaur' is heard once more by German ears....
"We think it our duty to draw attention to the fact that our educational work in Turkey forfeits its moral basis and the natives' esteem, if the German Government is not in a position to prevent the brutalities inflicted here upon the wives and children of murdered Armenians.
"The writer considers it out of the question that the German Government, if it seriously desired to stem the tide of destruction in this eleventh hour, would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to reason....
"If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians as an internal affair of Turkey, which is only important to us because it ensures us the Turks' friendship, then we must change the orientation of our German _Kulturpolitik_. We must stop sending German teachers to Turkey, and we teachers must give up telling our pupils in Turkey about German poets and philosophers, German culture and German ideals, to say nothing of German Christianity.
"Three years ago I was sent by the Foreign Office as higher-grade teacher to the German Technical School at Aleppo. The Prussian Provincial School Board at Magdeburg specially enjoined upon me, when I went out, to show myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me in the grant of furlough to take up this post. I should not be fulfilling my duty as a German official and an accredited representative of German culture, if I consented to keep silence in face of the atrocities of which I was a witness, or to look on passively while the pupils entrusted to my charge were driven out into the desert to die of starvation.
"The things of which everybody here has been a witness for months past remain as a stain on Germany's shield in the minds of Oriental nations."
What will be left to Germany in Western Asia after the war? She may keep her trade, though Wiedenfeld confesses that "the exchange of commodities between Germany and Turkey has never attained any really considerable dimensions," and that "the German export trade commands no really staple article whatever of the kind exported by England, Austria, and Russia"--unless we count as such munitions and other materials of war[38]. Except for the last item, this German trade will probably remain and grow; but the German hegemony, based on railway enterprise and reinsured by "moral conquests," will scarcely survive the Ottoman dominion.
Happily there are other representatives of culture, other indigenous nationalities, other possibilities of economic development, which will remain in Western Asia when the Turk and German have gone, and which may be equal to repairing the ruin they will leave behind.
For nearly a century now the American Evangelical Missions have been doing work there which is the greatest conceivable contrast to the German _Kulturpolitik_ of the last thirty years. A missionary, sent out to relieve the first pioneers, was given the following instructions by the American Board:
"The object of our missions to the Oriental Churches is, first, to revive the knowledge and spirit of the Gospel among them, and, secondly, by this means to operate upon the Mohammedans.
"The Oriental Churches need assistance from their brethren abroad. Our object is not to subvert them: you are not sent among those Churches to proselytise. Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if he will, the Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental.
"Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and duties of the Gospel[39]."
In this spirit the American missionaries have worked. They have had no warships behind them, no diplomatic support, no political ambitions, no economic concessions. As Evangelicals their first step was to translate the Bible into all the living languages and current scripts of the Nearer East. For the Bulgars and Armenians this was the beginning of their modern literature, but the jealousy of the Orthodox and Gregorian clergy was naturally aroused. Native Protestant Churches formed themselves--not by the missionaries' initiative but on their own. They were trained by the missionaries to self-government, and as they spread from centre to centre they grouped themselves in unions, with annual meetings to settle their common affairs. The missionaries also encouraged them to be self-supporting, and in 1908 the contributions of the Native Churches to the general expenses of the missions were twice as large as those of the American Board[40]. The Ottoman Government recognised its Protestant subjects as a religious corporation _(Millet)_ in 1853, and in spite of this the jealousy of the national Churches was overcome. For the work of the Americans was not confined to the new Protestant community. The translation of the Bible led them also into educational work; they laid the foundations of secondary education in Western Asia, and their schools and colleges--still the only institutions of their kind--are attended by Gregorians as well as Protestants, Moslems as well as Christians, Moslem girls as well as boys. As they opened up remoter districts they added medicine to their activities, and their hospitals, like their schools, have been the first in the field. And all this has been built up so unassumingly that its magnitude is hardly realised by the Americans themselves. In the three Turkey Missions, which cover Anatolia and Armenia--the whole of Turkey except the Arab lands--there were, on the eve of the War, 209 American missionaries with 1,299 native helpers, 163 Protestant churches with 15,348 members, 450 schools with 25,922 pupils; Constantinople College and 6 other colleges or high schools for girls; Robert College on the Bosphorus and 9 other colleges for men or boys; and 11 hospitals.
The War, when it came, seemed to sweep away everything. The Protestant Armenians, in spite of a nominal exemption, were deported and massacred like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the boys and girls were carried away from the American colleges, the nurses and patients from the hospitals; the empty buildings were "requisitioned" by the Ottoman authorities; the missionaries themselves, in their devoted efforts to save a remnant from destruction, suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaustion as any proportionate body of workers on the European battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists congratulated themselves that the American work in Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a lecture by a member of the German _Reichstag_, who had declared himself "opposed to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire," a Constantinople newspaper[41] wrote:
"The suppression of the schools founded and directed by ecclesiastical missions or by individuals belonging to enemy nations is as important a measure as the abolition of the Capitulations. Thanks to their schools, foreigners were able to exercise great moral influence over the young men of the country, and they were virtually in charge of its spiritual and intellectual guidance. By closing them the Government has put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous."
But the missionaries' spirit was something they could not destroy.
"When they deported the Armenians," wrote a missionary, "and left us without work and without friends, we decided to come home and get our vacation and be ready to go wherever we could after the War[42]."
After the War the Turks in Anatolia may still be infatuated enough to banish their best friends, but in Armenia, when the Turk has gone, the Americans will find more than their former field; for, in one form or another, Armenia is certain to rise again. The Turks have not succeeded in exterminating the Armenian nation. Half of it lives in Russia, and its colonies are scattered over the world from California to Singapore. Even within the Ottoman frontiers the extermination is not complete, and the Arabian deserts will yield up their living as well as the memory of their dead. The relations of Armenia with the Russian democracy should not be more difficult to settle than those of Finland and Poland; her frontiers cannot be forecast, but they must include the Six Vilayets--so often promised reforms by the Concert of Europe and so often abandoned to the revenges of the Ottoman Government--as well as the Civilian highlands and some outlet to the sea. One thing is certain, that, whatever land is restored to them, the Armenians will turn its resources to good account, for, while their town-dwellers are the merchants and artisans of Western Asia, 80 per cent., of them are tillers of the soil.
What the Americans have done for Armenia has been done for Syria by the French[43]. There are half a million Maronite Catholics in Syria, and since the seventeenth century France has been the protectress of Catholicism in the Near East. In 1864, when there was trouble in Syria and the Maronites were being molested by the Ottoman Government, France landed an army corps and secured autonomy for the Lebanon under a Christian governor. But French influence is not limited to the Lebanon province. All over Syria there are French clerical, secular, and Judaic schools. Beirût and Damascus, Christian and Moslem--for there is more religious tolerance in Syria than in most Near Eastern countries--are equally under the spell of French civilisation; and France is the chief economic power in the land, for French enterprise has built the Syrian railways. The sufferings of Syria during the War have been described; the Young Turks have confiscated the railways and deprived the Lebanon of its autonomy; even Rohrbach deprecates the fact that "only a few of the higher officials in Syria are chosen from among the natives of the country, while almost all, from the Kaimakam upwards, are sent out from Constantinople," and he attributes to this policy "the feeling against the Turks, which is most acute in Damascus." This is Rohrbach's periphrasis for Arab Nationalism, which will be master in its own house when the Turk has been removed. The future status and boundaries of Syria can no more be forecast than those of Armenia at the present stage of the War; yet here, too, certain tendencies are clear. In some form or other Arab Syria will retain her connection with France, and her growing population will no longer be driven by misgovernment to emigration.
Syrians and Armenians have been emigrating for the last quarter of a century, and during the same period the Jews, whose birthright in Western Asia is as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their native land--not because Ottoman dominion bore less hardly upon them than upon other gifted races, but because nothing could well be worse than the conditions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants came almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern Jewry. The movement really began after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881, which threw back reform in Russia for thirty-six years. The Jews were the scapegoats of the reaction. New laws deprived them of their last civil rights, _pogroms_ of life itself; they came to Palestine as refugees, and between 1881 and 1914 their numbers there increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls.
The most remarkable result of this movement has been the foundation of flourishing agricultural colonies. Their struggle for existence has been hard; the pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, unused to outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern conditions; Baron Edmund de Rothschild financed them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were taken over by the "Palestine Colonisation Association," which discovered the secrets of success in self-government and scientific methods.