E. F. Benson

“ No crime that the Ottoman Government could commit, no act of barbarism, would ever persuade us to do away with the anachronism of Turkey's existence in Europe; but at last the seismic convulsion of the war has knocked this policy into a heap of disjected ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again on the old lines. For among our other avowed objects in prosecuting the war to its victorious end, we have pledged ourselves to uphold the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free economic development. ”

“ To-day, in the name of Kultur, a similar invasion has broken on shores that seemed secure, and it is no wonder that it has found its most valuable victim and ally in the Power that adopted the same methods of absorption and extermination centuries before the Hohenzollerns ever started on their career of highway robbery. But like seeks like, and perhaps it was not wholly the fault of our astonishing diplomacy in Constantinople that Turkey, wooed like some desirable maiden, cast in her lot with the Power that by instinct and tradition most resembled her. ”

“ For Turkey is not a sick man: Turkey is a sickness. He is not sick, nor ever has been, for he is the cancer itself, the devouring tumour that for centuries has fed on living tissue, absorbing it and killing it. It has never had life in itself, except in so far that the power of preying on and destroying life constitutes life, and such a power, after all, we are accustomed to call not life, but death. Turkey, like death, continues to exist and to dominate, through its function of killing. ”

“ Mesopotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, capable of supporting not itself alone, but half the civilised world: nowadays, under the stewardship of the Turk, it has been suffered to become a desert for the greater part of the year and an impracticable swamp for the remainder. Where great cities flourished, where once was reared the pride of Babylon and of Nineveh, there huddle the squalid huts of fever-stricken peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved living from the soil that once supported in luxury and pomp the grandeur of metropolitan cities. ”

“ But so long as there was a palace-guard about the gates to secure the safety of the Sultan and his corrupt military oligarchy, so long as there were houris to divert their leisure, tribute of youths to swell their armies, and taxes wrung from starving subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not one of those who held the reins of government who cared the flick of an eyelash for the needs of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for the cultivation of its soil that would yield a hundredfold to the skilled husbandman, or for the exploitation and development of its internal wealth. ”

“ That such power should be in the hands of any nation is highly undesirable; that it should be in the hands of a corrupt despotism like Turkey, especially now that Germany, as things stand, can dictate to Turkey when and what she pleases, is a thing unthinkable by the most improvident of statesmen. Already we have paid dearly enough for the pusillanimity of a hundred years: it is impossible that we should ever allow a similar bill to be again presented. Whatever be the guardianship of the Straits, whoever the holder of Constantinople, it will not be Turkey. ”

“ Whatever the end of the European War may be, in no circumstances can the dreams of the Nationalists be realised. Even if Germany and her arms were so victorious that Russia lay at her feet a mere inert carcase ready for the chopper, she would no more dream of giving Russian provinces to an independent Turkey than she would hand over to her Berlin itself. ”

“ Where to-day Turks dwell, there shall they continue to dwell, but they must dwell there in peace in equal liberties and rights with the once-subject peoples whom the Allies shall have delivered. If they do not like that they can migrate, not by forced marches and under the guardianship of murderous Kurds, but in protection and security, to the lands where they can still enjoy the beneficent sway of their own governors, and be Ottomanised to the top of their bent. But Syrians and Armenians and Greeks and Jews will be Ottomanised no longer. ”

“ Among other careful and well-thought-out instructions came the order that, when possible, the murders should not take place in the town, but outside it, for clean Allah-fearing Moslems would not like to live in habitations defiled by Christian corpses. But, above all, there must be thoroughness; not a man must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman who must not drag her outraged body, so long as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to, or rather towards those 'agricultural colonies,' as Talaat Bey, in a flash of whimsical Prussian humour, called them. ”

“ They were allowed to prosper if they could: all that was demanded of them was a toll of their strength. They were cattle, and for the right to graze on Turkish lands they paid back a pail of their milk of manhood. But an empire founded on such principles contains within it active and prolific seeds of decay, and, as we have seen, more stringent measures had to be resorted to in order to preserve the supremacy of the ruling people. Instead of absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. ”

“ How should I have felt, if in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract in the world, I had thought that I was the scion of a race in whose hands God has placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months of the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three? ”

“ This was a policy that paid well, for, after having delivered some settlement from the depredations of an inconvenient neighbour, and with their pay in their pocket, they sometimes turned on those who had hired their arms, took their toll of youths, and finally incorporated them in their growing empire. Like an insatiable sponge, they mopped up the sprinklings of disconnected peoples over the fruitful floor of Asia Minor, and swelled and prospered. ”

“ There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done, and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their aims in the war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries of fiendish oppression. With facilities given them for their re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will, beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds. ”

“ Before the last of those who survived the hunger and the pestilence of that pilgrimage had reached Russian soil, it is probable that in all Armenia there was not a man of their race left alive, nor a woman either unless she had accepted Islamism and the life of the harem. A peaceful and progressive nation had been wiped out with every accompaniment of horror and cruelty and bestial lust, and in Armenia itself there would never more be an Armenian question. Abdul Hamid had hinted at the solution of it, and had made, as we have seen, experiments in that direction ”

“ In vain, too, is it that the hungry folk see the walls of the 'House of Friendship' rise higher and higher in Constantinople, for every day they see with starving eyes the trains loaded with sugar from Konia, and the harvests raised in Anatolia with German artificial manures guarded by German troops and rolling westwards to Berlin. ”

“ And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople and the subject peoples of the Turks will have passed from the yoke of that murderous tyranny for ever. ”

“ And then what a glorious future awaits the Power that Europe once thought of as a sick man. 'With the crushing of Russian despotism,' exclaims Tekin Alp, 'by the brave German, Austrian, and Turkish armies, thirty to forty million Turks will receive their independence. With the ten million Ottoman Turks this will form a nation of fifty millions, advancing towards a great civilisation which may perhaps be compared to that of Germany, in that it will have the strength and energy to rise even higher. ”

“ Turkey in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt has been lost, Tripoli also, and the only force that, for the last hundred years has kept alive in Europe the existence of that monstrous anachronism has been the strange political phenomenon, now happily extinct, called the Balance of Power. ”

“ But he has been a fighter because he has always lived under a military despotism which demanded his services, and it is much to be doubted whether his qualities in this regard will for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who, when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. ”

“ Like all previous Turkish immigrations, they came not in any overwhelming horde, with sword in one hand and Koran in the other, but as a small compact body with a genius for military organisation, and the gift, which they retain to this day, of stalwart fighting. The policy to which they owed their growth was absorption, and the people whom they first began to absorb were Greeks and other Christians, and it was to a Christian girl, Nilufer, that Osman married his son Orkhan. ”

“ Except for a strip along the west and south coast, all Asia Minor and Anatolia will be his from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, but Syria, Armenia, the coast of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Mesopotamia shall have passed from him. It is no dismemberment of an Empire that the Allies contemplate, for they cannot dismember limbs that never belonged to the real trunk. It was a despotic military control that the Osmanlis had established, they always regarded their subject peoples as aliens, whom they did not scruple to destroy if they exhibited symptoms of progress and civilisation. ”

“ It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. ”

“ Too long already--and to their disgrace be it spoken--have the civilised and Christian nations of Europe tolerated at their very doors a tyranny that has steadily grown more murderous and more monstrous, because they feared the upset of the Balance of Power. Now at least such Powers as value national honour, and regard a national promise as something more than a gabble of ink on a scrap of paper, have resolved that they will suffer the tyranny of the Turk over his alien subject peoples to continue no longer. ”

“ But it was the Osmanlis who were the cancerous and devouring nation, and it is they who to-day rule over a vast territory (subject to Germany) of peoples alien to them by religion and blood and all the instincts common to civilised folk. Until Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a champion of murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and literature and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare with the anachronism of Turkey being there at all. ”

“ It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. ”

“ Life cannot kill, it is disease and death that kill, and from the moment that Turkey passed from being a nomadic tribe moving westwards from the confines of Persia, it has existed only and thrived on a process of absorption and of murder. When first the Turks came out of their Eastern fastnesses they absorbed; when they grew more or less settled, and by degrees the power of mere absorption, as by some failure of digestion, left them, they killed. They became a huge tumour, that nourished itself by killing the living tissues that came in contact with it. ”

“ As I stand at my window I see one after another of the little bodies carried by ... and the condition of the living is more pitiful than that of the dead--hungry, ragged, dirty, sick, cold, wet, swarming with vermin. Not for all the wealth of all the rulers of Europe would I bear for one hour their responsibility for the suffering and misery of this one little corner of the world alone. ”

“ The native labour we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty. But no Power except England can furnish it. And that, I submit, is the solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the world. ”

“ Even now, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, the direst peril threatens those other peoples who at present groan under Turkish rule, and we can but pray that the end of the war will come before Arabs or Greeks or Jews suffer the same fate as has exterminated the Armenians. Too often have we been too late; we must only hope that another item will not have to be added to that miserable list, and that, when the day of reckoning comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous policy will stay our hands from the complete execution of that to which we stand pledged. ”

“ A ruler with progressive ideas, one who had any perception of the internal prosperity which alone can render an empire stable, would have made the attempt to weld his loose and wavering domination together by encouraging and working for the prosperity of its component peoples, so that he might, though late in the day, give birth to a Turkey that was strong, because its citizens were prosperous and content. ”

“ It is perfectly true that Germany did not understand, and, as seems likely in the light of innumerable other atrocities, never will understand, the psychology of civilised peoples; she has never shown any signs up till now, at any rate, of 'having got the hang of it' at all. But critics of her diplomacy failed to see the root-fact that she did not understand it merely because it did not interest her. It was not worth her while to master the psychology of other civilised nations, since she was out not to understand them, but to conquer them. ”

“ Niepage is right, we can scarcely consider these women as constituting an Armenian element any more in the country. The work of butchery, the torture, the long-drawn agonies of those inhuman pilgrimages have come to an end because there are no more Armenian victims available. Apart from those who escaped over the Russian frontier, and the handful who sought refuge in Egypt, the race exists no longer, and the seal has been set on the bloodiest deed that ever stained the annals of the barbarous Osmanlis. ”