Two war years in Constantinople

Front matter

E. Allen translation

TWO WAR YEARS

CONSTANTINOPLE

Sketches of German and Young Turkish Ethics and Politics

DR. HARRY STUERMER

LATE CORRESPONDENT OF THE KÖLNISCHE ZEITUNG IN CONSTANTINOPLE (1915-16)

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

E. ALLEN AND THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DECLARATION

The undersigned hereby declares on his sworn word of honour that in writing this volume he has been in no way inspired by outside influence, and that he has never had any dealings whatsoever, material or otherwise, either before or during the war, with any Government, organisation, propaganda, or personality hostile to Germany or Turkey or even of a neutral character. His conscience alone has urged him to write and publish his impressions, and he hopes that by so doing he may perform a service towards the cause of truth and civilisation.

Moreover, he can give formal assurance that he has expressly avoided making the acquaintance of any person resident in Switzerland until his manuscript should have been sent to press.

Furthermore, he has been actuated by no personal motives in thus giving public expression to his experiences and opinions, for he has no personal grievance, either material or moral, against any person whatsoever.

Dr. H. Stuermer

Geneva, June 1917.

PREFACE

While the author of this work was waiting on the frontier of Switzerland for final permission from the German authorities to enter that country, Germany committed her second great crime, her first having completely missed its mark. She had begun to realise that she was beaten in the great conflict which she had so wantonly provoked with that characteristic over confidence in the power of her own militarism and disdainful undervaluation of the morale and general capacities of her enemies. In final renunciation of any last remnants of humanity in her methods, she was now making a dying effort to help her already lost cause by a ruthless extension of her policy of piracy at sea and a gratification of all her brutal instincts in complete violation of the rights of neutral countries.

It is therefore with all the more inward conviction, with all the more urgent moral persuasion, that the author makes use of the rare opportunity offered him by residence in Switzerland to range himself boldly on the side of truth and show that there are still Germans who find it impossible to condone even tacitly the moral transgression and political stupidity of their own and an allied Government. That is the sole purpose of this publication.

Regardless of the consequences, he holds it to be his duty and his privilege, just because he is a German, to make a frank statement, from the point of view of human civilisation, of what have become his convictions from personal observations made in the course of six months of actual warfare and practically two years of subsequent journalistic activity. He spent the time from Spring 1915 to Christmas 1916 in Turkey, and will of course only deal with what he knows from personal observation. The following essays are of the nature merely of sketches and make no claim whatever to completeness.

With regard to purely German politics and ethics, therefore, the author will confine himself to a few indications and impressions of a personal kind, but he cannot forget the rôle Germany has played in Turkey as an ally of the present Young Turkish Government, nor can he ignore Germany's responsibility for the atrocities committed by them. The author publishes his impressions with a perfectly clear conscience, secure in the conviction that as the representative of a German paper he never once wrote a single word in favour of this criminal war, and that during his stay of more than twenty months in Turkey he never concealed his true opinions as soon as he had definitely made up his mind what these were.

On the contrary, he was rather dangerously candid and frank in speaking to anyone who wanted to listen to him—so much so, that it is almost a miracle that he ever reached a neutral country. After the war he will be in a position to appeal to the testimony of dozens of people of high standing in all walks of life that in both thought and action a deep cleft has always divided him from his colleagues, and that he has ever ardently longed for the moment when he might, freely and without fear of consequences, do his bit towards the enlightenment of the civilised world.

May these lines, written in all sincerity and hereby submitted to the tribunal of public opinion, free the author at last from the burden of silent reproach heaped on him by a mutilated, outraged, languishing humanity, of being a German among thousands of Germans who desired this war.

Several months have passed since the original text of the German and French editions of this little book was written. Baghdad was taken by British troops before the last chapter of the German manuscript had been completed, and since then military operations have been more and more in favour of the Entente. A number of important political events have occurred, such as the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States of America into the war.

Further developments of Russian politics may yet have a direct effect on the final solution of the problems surrounding the defeated Ottoman Empire. But the author has preferred to maintain the original text of his book, written early in March this year, and to make no changes whatever in the conclusions he had then arrived at as a result of the fresh impressions he carried away from Turkey.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I

At the outbreak of war in Germany—The German "world-politicians" (Weltpolitiker)—German and English mentality—The "place in the sun"—England's declaration of war—German methods in Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine—Prussian arrogance—Militaristic journalism 17

CHAPTER II

To Constantinople—Pro-Turkish considerations—The dilemma of a Gallipoli correspondent—Under German military control 35

CHAPTER III

The great Armenian persecutions—The system of Talaat and Enver—A denunciation of Germany as a cowardly and conscienceless accomplice 42

CHAPTER IV

The tide of war—Enver's offensive for the "liberation of the Caucasus"—The Dardanelles Campaign; the fate of Constantinople twice hangs in the balance—Nervous tension in international Pera—Bulgaria's attitude—Turkish rancour against her former enemy—German illusions of a separate peace with Russia—King Ferdinand's time-serving—Lack of munitions in the Dardanelles—A mysterious death: a political murder?—The evacuation of Gallipoli—The Turkish version of victory—Constantinople unreleased—Kut-el-Amara—Propaganda for the "Holy War"—A prisoner of repute—Loyalty of Anglo-Indian officers—Turkish communiqués and their worth—The fall of Erzerum—Official lies—The treatment of prisoners—Political speculation with prisoners of war—Treatment of enemy subjects—Stagnation and lassitude in the summer of 1916—The Greeks in Turkey—Dread of Greek massacres—Rumania's entry—Terrible disappointment—The three phases of the war for Turkey 75

CHAPTER V

The economic situation—Exaggerated Entente hopes—Hunger and suffering among the civil population—The system of requisitioning and the semi-official monopolists—Profiteering on the part of the Government clique—Frivolity and cynicism—The "Djemiet"—The delegates of the German Zentraleinkaufsgesellschaft (Central Purchases Commission)—A hard battle between German and Turkish intrigue—Reform of the coinage—Paper money and its depreciation—The hoarding of bullion—The Russian rouble the best investment 107

CHAPTER VI

German propaganda and ethics—The unsuccessful "Holy War" and the German Government—"The Holy War" a crime against civilisation, a chimera, a farce—Underhand dealings—The German Embassy the dupe of adventurers—The morality of German Press representatives—A trusty servant of the German Embassy—Fine official distinctions of morality—The German conception of the rights of individuals 126

CHAPTER VII

Young Turkish nationalism—One-sided abolition of capitulations —Anti-foreign efforts at emancipation—Abolition of foreign languages—German simplicity—The Turkification of commercial life—Unmistakable intellectual improvement as a result of the war—Trade policy and customs tariff—National production—The founding of new businesses in Turkey—Germany supplanted—German starvation—Capitulations or full European control?—The colonisation and forcible Turkification of Anatolia—"The properties of people who have been dispatched elsewhere"—The "Mohadjirs"—Greek persecutions just before the Great War—The "discovery" of Anatolia, the nucleus of the Ottoman Empire—Turkey finds herself at last—Anatolian dirt and decay—The "Greater Turkey" and the purely Turkish Turkey—Cleavage or concentration? 151

CHAPTER VIII

Religion and race—The Islam policy of Abdul-Hamid and of the Young Turks—Turanism and Pan-Islamism as political principles—Turanism and the Quadruple Alliance—Greed and race-fanaticism—Religious traditions and modern reforms—Reform in the law—A modern Sheikh-ul-Islam—Reform and nationalization—The Armenian and Greek Patriarchates—The failure of Pan-Islamism—The alienation of the Arabs—Djemal Pasha's "hangman's policy" in Syria—Djemal as a "Pro-French"—Djemal and Enver—Djemal and Germany—His true character—The attempts against the Suez Canal—Djemal's murderous work nears completion—The great Arabian and Syrian Separatist movement—The defection of the Emir of Mecca and the great Arabian catastrophe 176

CHAPTER IX

Anti-war and pro-Entente feelings among the Turks—Turkish pessimism about the war—How would Abdul-Hamid have acted?—A war of prevention against Russia—Russia and a neutral Turkey—The agreement about the Dardanelles—A peaceful solution scorned—Alleged criminal intentions on the part of the Entente; the example of Greece and Salonika—To be or not to be?—German influence—Turkey stakes on the wrong card—The results 209

CHAPTER X

The outlook for the future—The consequences of trusting Germany—The Entente's death sentence on Turkey—The social necessity for this deliverance—Anatolia, the new Turkey after the war; forecasts about the Turkish race—The Turkish element in the lost territory—Russia and Constantinople; international guarantees—Germany, at peace, benefits too—Farewell to the German "World Politicians"—German interests in a victorious and in a defeated Turkey—The German-Turkish treaty—A paradise on earth—The Russian commercial impulse—The new Armenia—Western Anatolia, the old Greek centre of civilisation—Great Arabia and Syria—The reconciliation of Germany 258

Appendix 283

TWO WAR YEARS IN CONSTANTINOPLE

CHAPTER I

Anyone who, like myself, set foot on German soil for the first time after years of sojourn in foreign lands, and more particularly in the colonies, just at the moment that Germany was mobilising for the great European war, must surely have been filled, as I was, with a certain feeling of melancholy, a slight uneasiness with regard to the state of mind of his fellow-countrymen as it showed itself in these dramatic days of August in conversations in the street, in cafés and restaurants, and in the articles appearing in the Press. We Germans have never learnt to think soundly on political subjects. Bismarck's political heritage, although set forth in most popular form in his Thoughts and Recollections, a book that anyone opposing this war from the point of view rather of prudence than of ethics might utilise as an unending source of propaganda, has not descended to our rulers in any sort of living form. But an unbounded political naïveté, an incredible lack of judgment and of understanding of the point of view of other peoples, who have their raison d'être just as much as we have, their vital interests, their standpoint of honour—have not prevented us from trying to carry on a grand system of Weltpolitik (world politics). The average everyday German has never really understood the English—either before or during the war; in the latter's colonial policy, which, according to pan-German ideas, has no other aim than to snatch from us our "place in the sun"; in their conception of liberty and civilisation, which has entailed such mighty sacrifices for them on behalf of their Allies; when we trod Belgian neutrality underfoot and thought England would stand and look on; at the time of the debates about universal service, when practically every German, even in the highest political circles, was ready to wager that there would be a revolution in England sooner than any general acceptance of Conscription; and coming down to more recent events, when the latest huge British war loan provided the only fit and proper answer to German frightfulness at sea.

Let me here say a word on the subject of colonial policy, on which I may perhaps be allowed to speak with a certain amount of authority after extended travel in the farthest corners of Africa, and from an intimate, personal knowledge of German as well as English and French colonies. Germany has less colonial territory than the older colonists, it is true. It is also true that the German struggle for the most widespread, the most intensive and lucrative employment of the energies and capabilities of our highly developed commercial land is justified. But at the risk of being dubbed as absolutely lacking in patriotism, I should like to point out that in the first place the resources we had at our disposal in our own colonial territory in tropical and sub-tropical Africa, little exploited as they then were, would have amply sufficed for our commercial needs and colonising capacities—though possibly not for our aspirations after world power! And secondly, the very liberal character of England's trade and colonial policy did not hinder us in any way from reaching the top of the commercial tree even in foreign colonies.

Anyone who knows English colonies knows that the British Government, wherever it has been possible to do so politically, that is, in all her colonies which are already properly organised and firmly established as British, has always met in a most generous and sympathetic way German, and indeed any foreign, trade or other enterprises. New firms, with German capital, were received with open arms, their excellence and value for the young country heartily recognised and ungrudgingly encouraged; not the slightest shadow of any jealousy of foreign undertakings could ever exist in a British colony, and every German could be as sure as an Englishman himself of being justly treated in every way and encouraged in the most generous fashion in his work.

Thousands of Germans otherwise thoroughly embued with the national spirit make no secret of the fact that they would far rather live in a British than a German colony. Too often in the latter the newcomer was met at every point by an exaggerated bureaucracy and made to feel by some official that he was not a reserve officer, and consequently a social inferior. Hints were dropped to discourage him, and inquiries were even made as to whether he had enough money to book his passage back to where he came from!

Far be it from me to wish to depreciate by these words the value of our own colonial efforts. As pioneers in Africa we were working on the very best possible lines, but we should have been content to go on learning from the much superior British colonial methods, and should have finished and perfected our own domain instead of always shouting jealously about other people's. I am quite convinced that another ten years of undisturbed peaceful competition and Germany, with her own very considerable colonial possessions on the one hand, and the possibility on the other of pushing commercial enterprise on the highest scale not only in independent overseas states but under the beneficent protection of English rule with its true freedom and real furtherance of trade "uplift," would have reached her goal much better than by means of all the sword-rattling Weltpolitik of the Pan-Germans.

It is true that in territory not yet properly organised or guaranteed, politically still doubtful, and in quite new protectorates, especially along the routes to India, where vital English interests are at stake, and on the much-talked-of Persian Gulf, England could not, until her main object was firmly secured, meet in the same fair way German desires with regard to commercial activity. And there she has more than once learnt to her cost the true character of the German Weltpolitik.

That is the real meaning, at any rate so far as colonial politics are concerned, of the German-English contest for a "place in the sun." No one who understands it aright could ever condone the outgrowths of our Weltpolitik, however much he might desire to assist German ability to find practical outlet in all suitable overseas territory, nor could he ever forget the wealth of wonderful deeds, wrought in the service of human civilisation and freedom, Englishmen can place to their credit years before we ever began. With such considerations of justice in view, we should have recognised that there was a limit to our efforts after expansion, and as a matter of fact we should have gone further and fared better—in a decade we should have probably been really wealthy—for the English in their open-handed way certainly left us a surprising amount of room for the free exercise of our commercial talents.

I have intentionally given an illustration only of the colonial side of the problem affecting German-English relations, so that I may avoid dealing with any subject I do not know from personal observation.

It was this English people, that, in spite of all their egoism, have really done something for civilisation, that the German of August 1914 accused of being nothing but a nation of shopkeepers with a cowardly, narrow-minded policy that was unprepared to make any sacrifice for others. It was this people that the German of August 1914—and his spokesman von Bethmann-Hollweg, who later thought it necessary to defend himself against the charge of "having brought too much ethics into politics"—expected to stand by and see Belgium overridden. It was this same England that we believed would hold back even when the Chancellor found it impossible to apply to French colonial possessions the guarantee he had given not to aim at any territorial conquests in the war with France!

And so it was with all the more grimness, with all the more gravity, that on that memorable night of August 4th the terrible blow fell. The English declaration of war entered into the very soul of the German people, who stood as a sacrifice to a political miscalculation that had its roots less in a lack of thought and experience than in a boundless arrogance.

About the same time I was a witness of those laughable scenes which took place on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where, in complete misjudgment of the whole political situation Japanese were carried shoulder high by the enthusiastic and worthy citizens of Berlin under the erroneous impression that these obvious arch-enemies of Russia would naturally be allies of Germany. Every German that was not blind to the trend of true "world-politics" must surely have shaken his head over this lamentable spectacle. A few days afterwards Japan sent its ultimatum against Kiao-Tchao!

It was the same incapability of thinking in terms of true world-politics that led us lately to believe that we might find supporters in Mexico and Japan of the piracy we indulged in as a result of America's intervention in the war, the same incapability that blinded us to the effect our methods must have on other neutrals such as China and the South American States. And although one admits the possibility of a miscalculation being made, yet a miscalculation with regard to England's attitude was not only the height of political stupidity, but showed an absence of moral sense. The moment England entered the war, Germany lost the war.

And while the world-politicians of Berlin, having recovered from their first dismay, were making jokes about the "nation of shopkeepers" and its little army which they would just "have arrested"; while a little later the military events up to St. Quentin and the Battle of the Marne seemed to justify the idle mockers who knew nothing of England and had never even ventured their noses out of Germany,—those who had lived in the colonies were uttering warnings against any kind of optimism, and some already felt the war would end badly for us.

I belonged to the latter group. I expressed my conviction in this direction as early as August 6th, 1914, in a letter which I wrote from Berlin for my father's birthday. In it I maintained that in spite of all our brilliant military successes, which would certainly not last, this war was a mistake and would assuredly end in failure for Germany. Littera scripta manet. Never from that moment have I believed in final victory for Germany. Slowly but surely then I veered round to the position that I could no longer even desire victory for Germany.

Naturally I did my military duty. I saw the fearful crime Germany was committing, yet I hurried to the front with the millions who believed that Germany was innocent and had been attacked without cause. There was nothing else to be done, and it must of course be remembered that my final rupture with Germany did not take place all of a sudden. After a few months of war in Masuria I was released as unfit for active service as the result of a severe illness.

Of all the many episodes of my life at the front, none is so deeply impressed on my memory as the silent war of mutual hatred I waged with my immediately superior officer, a true prototype of his race, a true Prussian. I can still see him, a man of fifty-five or so, who, in spite of former active service, had only reached the rank of lieutenant, and who, as he told me himself right at the beginning, in very misplaced confidence, rushed into active service again because in this way he could get really good pay and would even have a prospect of further promotion.

This Lieutenant Stein told me too of the first weeks in Belgium, when he had been in command of a company, and I can still hear him boasting about his warlike propensities, and how his teacher had said about him when he was a boy "he was capable of stealing an altar-cloth and cutting it up to make breeches for himself."

"When we wanted to do any commandeering or to plunder a house," so he told me, "there was a very simple means. A man belonging to my company would be ordered to throw a Belgian rifle through an open cellar window, the house would then be searched for weapons, and even if we found only one rifle we had orders to seize everything without mercy and to drive out the occupiers." I can still see the creature standing in front of me and relating this and many a similar tale in these first days before he knew me. I have never forgotten it; and I think I owe much to Lieutenant Stein. He helped me on the way I was predestined to go, for had I not just returned from the colonies and foreign lands, imbued with liberal ideas, and from the first torn by grave doubts?

The Lieutenant may be an exception—granted; but he is an exception unfortunately but too often represented in that army of millions on its invading march into unhappy Belgium, among officers and non-commissioned officers, whom, at any rate so far as active service is concerned, everyone who has served in the German Army will agree with me in calling on the average thoroughly brutal. Lieutenant Stein gave me my first real deep disgust of war. He is a type that I have not invented, and he will easily be identified by the German military authorities from his signature on my military pass as one of those arch-Prussians who suddenly readopt a martial air, suddenly revive and come into their element again, although they may be sickly old valetudinarians—the kind of men who in civil life are probably enthusiastic members of the "German Colonial Society," the "Naval Union," and the "Pan-German Association," and ardent world-politicians of the ale-bench type.

I found his stories afterwards confirmed to the letter by one of the most famous German war-correspondents, Paul Schweder, the author of the four-volume work entitled At Imperial Headquarters. With a naïveté equal to Lieutenant Stein's, and trusting no doubt to my then official position as correspondent of a German paper, he gave me descriptions of Belgian atrocities committed by our soldiers and the results of our system of occupation that, in all their horrible nakedness, put everything that ever appeared in the Entente newspapers absolutely in the shade.

As early as the beginning of 1916 he told me the plain truth that we were practically starving Belgium and that the country was really only kept alive by the Relief Commission, and that we were attempting to ruin any Belgian industry which might compete with ours by a systematic removal of machinery to Germany. And that was before the time of the Deportations!

Schweder's descriptions dealt for the most part with the sexual morality of our soldiers in the trenches. In spite of severe punishments, so he assured me, thousands and thousands of cases occurred of women and young girls out of decent Belgian and French families being outraged. The soldier on short leave from the front, with the prospect of a speedy return to the first-line trenches and death staring him in the face, did not care what happened; the unhappy victims were for the most part silent about their shame, so that the cases of punishment were very few and far between.

While I was at the front I heard extraordinary things, for which I had again detailed confirmation from Schweder, who knew the whole of the Western Front well, about the German policy of persecution in Alsace-Lorraine. There the system was to punish with imprisonment not only actions but opinions. The authorities did not even scruple to imprison girls out of highly-respected houses who had perhaps made some harmless remark in youthful ignorance, and shut them up with common criminals and prostitutes to work out their long sentence. Such scandalous acts, which are a disgrace to humanity, Paul Schweder confirmed by the dozen or related at first-hand.

He was intelligent enough, too, as was evident from the many statements made by him in confidential circles, to see through the utter lack of foundation, the mendacity, the immorality of what he wrote in his books merely for the sake of filthy lucre; but when I tried one day to take on a bet with him that Verdun would not fall, he took his revenge by spreading the report in Constantinople that I was an Pro-Entente, and doing his utmost to intrigue against me. That is the German war-correspondent's idea of morality!

When I was released from the army in the beginning of 1915, I joined the editorial staff of the Kölnische Zeitung and remained for some weeks in Cologne. I have not retained any very special impressions of this period of my activity, except perhaps the recollection of the spirit of jingoistic Prussianism that I—being a Badener—had scarcely ever come across before in its full glory, and, from the many confidential communications and discussions among the editorial staff, the feeling that even then there was a certain nervousness and insecurity among those who, in their leading articles, informed the public daily of their absolute confidence in victory.

One curious thing at this time, perhaps worthy of mention, was the disdainful contempt with which these Prussians—even before the fall of Przemysl—regarded Austria. But the scornful and biting commentaries made behind the scenes in the editorial sanctum at the fall of this stronghold stood in most striking contrast to what the papers wrote about it.

Later, when I had already been a long time in Turkey, a humorous incident gave me renewed opportunity of seeing this Prussian spirit of unbounded exaggeration of self and depreciation of others. The incident is at the same time characteristic of the spirit of militarism with which the representatives of the German Press are thoroughly imbued, in spite of the opportunities most of them have had through long visits to other countries of gaining a little more savoir faire.

One beautiful summer afternoon at a promenade concert in the "Petit Champs" at Pera I introduced an Austrian Lieutenant of Dragoons I knew, belonging to one of the best regiments, to our Balkan correspondent who happened to be staying in Constantinople: "Lieutenant N.; Herr von M." The correspondent sat down at the table and repeated very distinctly: "Lieutenant-Colonel von M." It turned out that he had been a second lieutenant in the Prussian Army, and had pushed himself up to this wonderful rank in the Bulgarian Army, instinctively combining journalism and militarism. My companion, however, with true Austrian calm, took not the slightest notice of the correction, did not spring up and greet him with an enthusiastic "Ah! my dear fellow-officer, etc.," but began an ordinary social conversation.

Would anyone believe that next day old Herr von M. took me roundly to task for sitting at the same table as an Austrian officer and appearing in public with him, and informed me quasi-officially that as a representative of the Kölnische Zeitung I should associate only with the German colony in Constantinople.

I wonder which is the most irritating characteristic of this type of mind—its overbearing attitude towards our Allies, its jingoistic "Imperial German" cant, or its wounded dignity as a militarist who forgets that he is a journalist and no longer an officer?

CHAPTER II

In Constantinople—Pro-Turkish considerations—The dilemma of a Gallipoli correspondent—Under German military control.

A few days after the fall of Przemysl I set out for Constantinople. I left Germany with a good deal of friendly feeling towards the Turk. I was even quite well disposed towards the Young Turks, although I knew and appreciated the harm caused by their régime and the reproaches levelled against it since 1909. At any rate, when I landed on Turkish soil I was certainly not lacking in goodwill towards the Government of Enver and Talaat, and nothing was further from my thoughts than to prejudice myself against my new sphere of work by any preconceived criticism.

In comparison with Abdul-Hamid I regarded the régime of the Young Turks, in spite of all, as a big step in advance and a necessary one, and the parting words of one of our old editors, a thorough connoisseur of Turkey, lingered in my ears without very much effect. He said: "You are going to Constantinople. You will soon be able to see for yourself the moral bankruptcy of the Young Turks, and you will find that Turkey is nothing but a dead body galvanised into action, that will only last as long as the war lasts and we Germans supply the galvanising power." I would not believe it, and went to Turkey with an absolutely open mind to form my own opinion.

It must also be remembered that all the pro-Turkish utterances of Eastern experts of all shades and nationalities who emphasised the fact that the Turks were the most respectable nation of the East, were not without their effect upon me; also I had read Pierre Loti. I was determined to extend to the Turkish Government the strong sympathy I already felt for the Turkish people—and, let me here emphasise it, still feel. To undermine that sympathy, to make me lose my confidence in this race, things would have to go badly indeed. They went worse than I ever thought was possible.

I went first of all to the new Turkish front in the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula, where everything was ruled by militarism and there was but little opportunity to worry about politics. The combined attack by sea and land had just begun, and I passed the next few weeks on the Ariburnu front. I found myself in the entirely new position of war-correspondent. I had now to write professionally about this war, which I detested with all my heart and soul.

Well, I simply had to make the back fit the burden. Whatever I did or did not do, I have certainly the clear satisfaction of knowing that I never wrote a single word in praise of war. One will understand that, in spite of my inward conviction that Germany by unloosing the war on Europe had committed a terrible crime against humanity, in spite of my consciousness of acting in a wrong cause, in spite of my deep disgust of much that I had already seen, I was still interested in Turkey's fight for existence, but from quite another standpoint.

As an objective onlooker I did not have to be an absolute hypocrite to do justice to my journalistic duties to my paper. I got to know the Turkish soldier with his stoical heroism in defence, and the brilliant attacking powers and courage of the Anatolians with their blind belief in their Padishah, as they were rushed to the defence of Stamboul and hurled themselves in a bayonet charge against the British machine-guns under a hail of shells from the sea. I gained a high opinion of Turkish valour and powers of resistance. I had no reason to stint my praise or withhold my judgment. In mess-tents and at various observation-posts I made the personal acquaintance of crowds of thoroughly sympathetic and likeable Turkish officers. Let me mention but one—Essad Pasha, the defender of Jannina.

I found quite enough material on my two visits to Gallipoli during various phases of the fighting to write a series of feuilletons without any glorification of militarism and political aims. I confined myself to what was of general human interest, to what was picturesque, what was dramatic in the struggle going on in this unique theatre of war.

But even then I was beginning to have my own opinion about much that I saw; I was already torn by conflicting doubts. Already I was beginning to ask myself whether my sympathies would not gradually turn more and more definitely to those who were vainly storming these strong Turkish forts from the sea, under a deadly machine-gun fire, for the cause of true civilisation, the cause of liberty, was manifestly on their side.

I had opportunity, too, of making comparisons from the dead and wounded and the few prisoners there were between the value of the human material sacrificed on either side—on the one, brave but stupid Anatolians, accustomed to dirt and misery; on the other cultured and highly civilised men, sportsmen from the colonies who had hurried from the farthest corners of the earth to fight not only for the British cause, but for the cause of civilisation.

But at that time I was not yet ripe for the decision forced upon me later by other things that I saw with my own eyes; I had not yet reached that deep inward conviction that I should have to make a break with Germany. The only thing I could do and felt compelled to do then was to pay my homage not only to Turkish patriotism and Turkish bravery, but to the wonderful courage and fearlessness of death shown by those whom at that time I had, as a German, to regard as my enemies; this I did over and over again in my articles.

I saw, too, the first indications of other things. Traces of the most outspoken jingoism among Turkish officers became gradually apparent, and more than one Turkish commander pointed out to me with ironical emphasis that things went just as smoothly and promptly in his sector, where there was no German officer in charge, as anywhere else.

On my second visit to the Dardanelles, in summer, I heard of considerable quarrels over questions of rank, and there was more than one outbreak of jingoistic arrogance on the part of both Turkish and German subalterns, leading in some cases even to blows and consequent severe punishment for insubordination. The climax was reached in the scandal of supplanting General Weber, commanding the "Southern Group" (Sedd-ul-Bahr) by Vehib Pasha, a grim and fanatical Turk. In this case the Turkish point of view prevailed, for General Liman von Sanders, Commander-in-Chief of the Gallipoli Army, was determined not to lose his post, and agreed slavishly with all that Enver Pasha ordained.

From other fronts, such as the Irak and the "Caucasus" (which was becoming more and more a purely Armenian theatre of war, without losing that chimerical designation in the official reports!), there came even more significant tales; there German and Turkish officers seemed to live still more of a cat-and-dog life than in the Dardanelles. Of course under the iron discipline of both Turks and Germans, these unpleasant occurrences were never allowed to come to such a pass that they would interfere in any way with military operations, but they were of significance as symptoms of a deep distrust of the Germans even in Turkish military circles.

CHAPTER III

The great Armenian persecutions—The system of Talaat and Enver—A denunciation of Germany as a cowardly and conscienceless accomplice.

In spite of all, I returned to Constantinople from my first visit to the Dardanelles with very little diminution of friendly feeling towards the Turks. My first experience when I returned to the capital was the beginning of the Armenian persecutions. And here I may as well say at once that my love for present-day Turkey perished absolutely with this unique example in the history of modern human civilisation of the most appalling bestiality and misguided jingoism. This, more than everything else I saw on the German-Turkish side throughout the war, persuaded me to take up arms against my own people and to adopt the position I now hold. I say "German-Turkish," for I must hold the German Government as equally responsible with the Turks for the atrocities they allowed them to commit.

Here in neutral Switzerland, where so many of these unfortunate Armenians have taken refuge and such abundance of information is available, so much material has been collected that it is unnecessary for me to go into details in this book. Suffice it to say that the narration of all the heart-rending occurrences that came to my personal knowledge during my stay in Turkey, without my even trying to collect systematic information on the subject, would fill a book. To my deep sorrow I have to admit that, from everything I have heard from reliable sources—from German Red Cross doctors, officials and employees of the Baghdad Railway, members of the American Embassy, and Turks themselves—although they are but individual cases—I cannot regard as exaggerated such appalling facts and reports as are contained for example in Arnold Toynbee's Armenian Atrocities.[1]

In this little book, however, which partakes more of the nature of an essay than an exhaustive treatise, my task will be rather to determine the system, the underlying political thought and the responsibility of Germany in all these horrors—massacres, the seduction of women, children left to die or thrown into the sea, pretty young girls carried off into houses of ill repute, the compulsory conversion to Islam and incorporation in Turkish harems of young women, the ejection from their homes of eminent and distinguished families by brutal gendarmes, attacks while on the march by paid bands of robbers and criminals, "emigration" to notorious malaria swamps and barren desert and mountain lands, victims handed over to the wild lusts of roaming Bedouins and Kurds—in a word, the triumph of the basest brutality and most cold-blooded refinement of cruelty in a war of extermination in which half a million men, and according to some estimates many more, have perished, while the remaining one and a half million of this most intelligent and cultured race, one of the principal pioneers of progress in the Ottoman Empire, see nothing but complete extinction staring them in the face through the rupture of family ties, the deprivation of their rights, and economic ruin.

The Armenian persecutions began in all their cruelty, practically unannounced, in April 1915. Certain events on the Caucasus front, which no number of lies could explain away, gave the Turkish Government the welcome pretext for falling like wild animals on the Armenians of the eastern vilajets—the so-called Armenia Proper—and getting to work there without deference to man, woman, or child. This was called "the restoration of order in the war zone by military measures, rendered necessary by the connivance of the inhabitants with the enemy, treachery and armed support." The first two or three hundred thousand Armenians fell in the first rounding up.

That in those outlying districts situated directly on the Russian frontier a number of Armenians threw in their lot with the advancing Russians, no one will seek to deny, and not a single Armenian I have spoken to denies it. But the "Armenian Volunteer Corps" that fought on the side of Russia was composed for the most part—that at least has been proved beyond doubt—of Russian Armenians settled in Transcaucasian territory.

So far as the Turkish Armenians taking part are concerned, no reasonable being would think of denying Turkey as Sovereign State the formal right of taking stringent measure against these traitors and deserters. But if I expressly recognise this right, I do so with the big reservation that the frightful sufferings undergone for centuries by a people left by their rulers to the mercy of marauding Kurds and oppressed by a government of shameless extortioners, absolutely absolve these deserters in the eyes of the whole civilised world from any moral crime.

And yet I would willingly have gone so far for the benefit of the Turks, in spite of their terrible guilt towards this people, as perhaps to keep my own counsel on the subject, if it had merely been a case of the execution of some hundreds under martial law or the carrying out of other measures—such as deportation—against a couple of thousand Armenians and these strictly confined to men. It is even possible that Europe and America would have pardoned Turkey for taking even stronger steps in the nature of reprisals or measures of precaution against the male inhabitants of that part of Armenia Proper which was gradually becoming a war zone. But from the very beginning the persecutions were carried on against women and children as well as men, were extended to the hundred thousand inhabitants of the six eastern vilajets, and were characterised by such savage brutality that the methods of the slave-drivers of the African interior and the persecution of Christians under Nero are the only thing that can be compared with them.

Every shred of justification for the Turkish Government in their attempt to establish this as an "evacuation necessary for military purposes and for the prevention of unrest" entirely vanishes in face of such methods, and I do not believe that there is a single decent German, cognisant of the facts of the case, who is not filled with real disgust of the Young Turkish Government by such cold-blooded butchery of the inhabitants of whole districts and the deportation of others with the express purpose of letting them die en route. Anyone with human feelings, however pro-Turkish he may be politically, cannot think otherwise.

This "evacuation necessary for military purposes" emptied Armenia Proper of men. How often have Turks themselves told me—I could mention names, but I will not expose my informants, who were on the whole decent exceptions to the rule, to the wrath of Enver or Talaat—how often have they assured me that practically not a single Armenian is to be found in Armenia! And it is equally certain that scarcely one can be left alive of all that horde of deported men who escaped the first massacres and were hunted up hill and down dale in a state of starvation, exposed to attacks by Kurds, decimated by spotted typhus, and finally abandoned to their fate in the scorching deserts of Northern Mesopotamia and Northern Syria. One has only to read the statistics of the population of the six vilajets of Armenia Proper to discover the hundreds of thousands of victims of this wholesale murder.

But unfortunately that was not all. The Turkish Government went farther, much farther. They aimed at the whole Armenian people, not only in Armenia itself, but also in the "Diaspora," in Anatolia Proper and in the capital. They were at that time some hundred thousand. In this case they could scarcely go on the principle of "evacuation of the war zone," for the inhabitants were hundreds of miles both from the Eastern front and from the Dardanelles, so they had to resort to other measures.

They suddenly and miraculously discovered a universal conspiracy among the Armenians of the Empire. It was only by a trick of this kind that they could succeed in carrying out their system of exterminating the entire Armenian race. The Turkish Government skilfully influenced public opinion throughout the whole world, and then discovered, nay, arranged for, local conspiracies. They then falsified all the details so that they might go on for months in peace and quiet with their campaign of extermination.

In a series of semi-official articles in the newspapers of the Committee of Young Turks it was made quite clear that all Armenians were dangerous conspirators who, in order to shake off the Ottoman yoke, had collected firearms and bombs and had arranged, with the help of English and Russian money, for a terrible slaughter of Turks on the day that the English fleet overcame the armies on the Dardanelles.

I must here emphasise the fact that all the arguments the Turkish Government brought against the Armenians did not escape my notice. They were indeed evident enough in official and semi-official publications and in the writings of German "experts on Turkey." I investigated everything, even right at the beginning of my stay in Turkey, and always from a thoroughly pro-Turkish point of view. That did not prevent me however, from coming to my present point of view.

Herr Zimmermann, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, has only got to refer to the date of his letter to the editorial staff of my paper, in which he speaks of my confidential report to the paper on this subject which went through his hands and aroused his interest, and he will find what opinions I held as early as the summer of 1916 on the subject of the Armenian persecutions—and this without my having any particular sympathy for the Armenians, for it was not till much later that I got to know them and their high intellectual qualities through personal intercourse.

Here I can only give my final judgment on all these pros and cons, and say to the best of my knowledge and opinion, that after the first act in this drama of massacre and death—the brutal "evacuation of the war zone" in Armenia Proper—the meanest, the lowest, the most cynical, most criminal act of race-fanaticism that the history of mankind has to show was the extension of the system of deportation, with its wilful neglect and starvation of the victims, to further hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the Capital and Interior. And these were people who, through their place of residence, their surroundings, their social status, their preoccupation in work and wage-earning, were quite incapable of taking any active part in politics.

Others of them, again, belonged to families of high social standing and culture, bound to the land by a thousand ties, coming of a well-to-do, old-established stock, and from traditional training and ordinary prudence holding themselves scrupulously apart from all revolutionary doings. All were surrounded by a far superior number of inhabitants belonging to other races.

This diabolical crime was committed solely and only because of the Turkish feeling of economic and intellectual inferiority to that non-Turkish element, for the set purpose of obtaining handsome compensation for themselves, and was undertaken with the cowardly acquiescence of the German Government in full knowledge of the facts.

Of this long chain of crime I saw at least the beginning thousands of times with my own eyes. Hardly had I returned from my first visit to the Dardanelles when these persecutions began in the whole of Anatolia and even in Constantinople, and continued with but slight intermissions of a week or two at different times till shortly before I left Constantinople in December 1916.

That was the time when in the flourishing western vilajets of Anatolia, beginning with Brussa and Adabazar, where the well-stocked farms in Armenian hands must have been an eyesore to a Government that had written "forcible nationalisation" on their standard, the whole household goods of respectable families were thrown into the street and sold for a mere nothing, because their owners often had only an hour till they were routed out by the waiting gendarme and hustled off into the Interior. The fittings of the houses, naturally unsaleable in the hurry, usually fell to the lot of marauding "mohadjis" (Mohammedan immigrants), who, often enough armed to the teeth by the "Committee," began the disturbances which were then exposed as "Armenian conspiracies."

That was the time when mothers, apparently in absolute despair, sold their own children, because they had been robbed of their last penny and could not let their children perish on that terrible march into the distant Interior.

How many countless times did I have to look on at that typical spectacle of little bands of Armenians belonging to the capital being escorted through the streets of Pera by two gendarmes in their ragged murky grey uniforms with their typical brutal Anatolian faces, while a policeman who could read and write marched behind with a notebook in his hand, beckoning people at random out of the crowd with an imperious gesture, and if their papers showed them to be Armenians, simply herding them in with the rest and marching them off to the "Karakol" of Galata-Seraï, the chief police-station in Pera, where he delivered up his daily bag of Armenians!

The way these imprisonments and deportations were carried on is a most striking confutation of the claims of the Turkish Government that they were acting only in righteous indignation over the discovery of a great conspiracy. This is entirely untrue.

With the most cold-blooded calculation and method, the number of Armenians to be deported were divided out over a period of many months, indeed one may say over nearly a year and a half. The deportations only began to abate when the downfall of the Armenian Patriarchate in summer 1916 dealt the final blow to the social life of the Armenians. They more or less ceased in December 1916 with the gathering-in of all those who had formerly paid the military exemption tax—among them many eminent Armenian business men.

What can be said of the "righteous, spontaneous indignation" of the Armenian Government when, for example, of two Armenian porters belonging to the same house—brothers—one is deported to-day and the other not till a fortnight later; or when the number of Armenians to be delivered up daily from a certain quarter of the town is fixed at a definite figure, say two hundred or a thousand, as I have been told was the case by reliable Turks who were in full touch with the police organisation and knew the system of these deportations?

Of the ebb and flow of these persecutions, all that can be said is that the daily number of deportations increased when the Turks were annoyed over some Russian victory, and that the banishments miraculously abated when the military catastrophes of Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzindjan gave the Government food for thought and led them to wonder if perhaps Nemesis was going to overtake them after all.

And then the method of transport! Every day towards evening, when these unfortunate creatures had been collected in the police-stations, the women and children were packed into electric-trams while the men and boys were compelled to go off on foot to Galata with a couple of blankets and only the barest necessities for their terrible journey packed in a small bag. Of course they were not all poor people by any means.

This dire fate might befall anyone any day or any hour, from the caretaker and the tradesman to members of the best families. I know cases where men of high education, belonging to aristocratic families—engineers, doctors, lawyers—were banished from Pera in this disgusting way under cover of darkness to spend the night on the platforms of the Haidar-Pasha station, and then be packed off in the morning on the Anatolian Railway—of course they paid for their tickets and all travelling expenses!—to the Interior, where they died of spotted typhus, or, in rare cases after their recovery from this terrible malady, were permitted, after endless pleading, to return broken in body and soul to their homes as "harmless." Among these bands herded about from pillar to post like cattle there were hundreds and thousands of gentle, refined women of good family and of perfect European culture and manners.

For the most part it was the sad fate of those deported to be sent off on an endless journey by foot, to the far-off Arabian frontier, where they were treated with the most terrible brutality. There, in the midst of a population wholly foreign and but little sympathetic to their race, left to their fate on a barren mountain-side, without money, without shelter, without medical assistance, without the means of earning a livelihood, they perished in want and misery.

The women and children were always separated from the men. That was the characteristic of all the deportations. It was an attempt to strike at the very core of their national being and annihilate them by the tearing asunder of all family ties.

That was how a very large part of the Armenian people disappeared. They were the "persons transported elsewhere," as the elegant title of the "Provisional Han" ran, which gave full stewardship over their well-stocked farms to the "Committee" with its zeal for "internal colonisation" with purely Turkish elements. In this way the great goal was reached—the forcible nationalisation of a land of mixed races.

While Anatolia was gradually emptied of all the forces that had hitherto made for progress, while the deserted towns and villages and flourishing fields of those who had been banished fell into the hands of the lowest "Mohadjr"—hordes of the most dissipated Mohammedan emigrants—that stream of unhappy beings trickled on ever more slowly to its distant goal, leaving the dead bodies of women and children, old men and boys, as milestones to mark the way. The few that did reach the "settlement" alive—that is, the fever-ridden, hunger-stricken concentration camps—continually molested by raiding Bedouins and Kurds, gradually sickened and died a slower and even more terrible death.

Sometimes even this was not speedy enough for the Government, and a case occurred in Autumn 1916—absolutely verified by statements made by German employees on the Baghdad Railway—where some thousands of Armenians, brought as workers to this stretch of railway, simply vanished one day without leaving a trace. Apparently they were simply shipped off into the desert without more ado and there massacred.

This terrible catalogue of crime on the part of the Government of Talaat is, however, in spite of all censorship and obstruction, being dealt with officially in all quarters of the globe—by the American Embassy at Constantinople and in neutral and Entente countries—and at the conclusion of peace it will be brought as an accusation against the criminal brotherhood of Young Turks by a merciless court of all the civilised nations of the world.

I have spoken to Armenians who have said to me, "In former times the old Sultan Abdul-Hamid used to have us massacred by thousands. We were delivered over by well-organised pogroms to the Kurds at stated times, and certainly we suffered cruelly enough. Then the Young Turks, as Adana 1909 shows, started on a bloodshed of thousands. But after what we have just gone through we long with all our hearts for the days of the old massacres. Now it is no longer a case of a certain number of massacred; now our whole people is being slowly but surely exterminated by the national hatred of an apparently civilised, apparently modern, and therefore infinitely more dangerous Government.

"Now they get hold of our women and children and send them long journeys on foot to concentration camps in barren districts where they die. The pitiful remains of our population in the villages and towns of the Interior, where the local authorities have carried out the commands of the central Government most zealously, are forcibly converted to Islam, and our young girls are confined in Turkish harems and places of low repute.

"The race is to vanish to the very last man, and why? Because the Turks have recognised their intellectual bankruptcy, their economic incompetence, and their social inferiority to the progressive Armenian element, to which Abdul-Hamid, in spite of occasional massacres, knew well enough how to adapt himself, and which he even utilised in all its power in high offices of state. Because now that they themselves are being decimated by a weary and unsuccessful war of terrible bloodshed that was lost before it was begun, they hope in this way to retain the sympathy of their peoples and preserve the superiority of their element in the State.

"These are not sporadic outbursts of wrath, as they were in the case of Hamid, but a definitely thought-out political measure against our people, and for this very reason they can hope for no mercy. Germany, as we have seen, tolerates the annihilation of our people through weakness and lack of conscience, and if the war lasts much longer the Armenian people will have ceased to exist. That is why we long for the old régime of Abdul-Hamid, terrible as it was for us."

Has there ever been a greater tragedy in the history of a people—and of a people that have never held any illusions as to political independence, wedged in as they are between two Great Powers, and who had no real irredentistic feelings towards Russia, and, up to the moment when the Young Turks betrayed them shamefully and broke the ties of comradeship that had bound them together as revolutionaries against the old despotic system of Abdul-Hamid, were as thoroughly loyal citizens of the Ottoman Empire as any of the other peoples of this land, excepting perhaps the Turks themselves.

I hope that these few words may have given sufficient indication of the spirit and outcome of this system of extermination. I should like to mention just one more episode which affected me personally more than anything I experienced in Turkey.

One day in the summer of 1916 my wife went out alone about midday to buy something in the "Grand Rue de Péra." We lived a few steps from Galata-Seraï and had plenty of opportunity from our balcony of seeing the bands of Armenian deportees arriving at the police-station under the escort of gendarmes. Familiarity with such sights finally dulled our sympathies, and we began to think of them not as episodes affecting human individuals, but rather as political events.

On this particular day, however, my wife came back to the house trembling all over. She had not been able to go on her errand. As she passed the "karakol," she had heard through the open hall door the agonising groans of a tortured being, a dull wailing like the sound of an animal being tormented to death. "An Armenian," she was informed by the people standing at the door. The crowd was then dispersed by a policeman.

"If such scenes occur in broad daylight in the busiest part of the European town of Pera, I should like to know what is done to Armenians in the uncivilised Interior," my wife asked me. "If the Turks act like wild beasts here in the capital, so that a woman going through the main streets gets a shock like that to her nerves, then I can't live in this frightful country." And then she burst into a fit of sobbing and let loose all her pent-up passion against what she and I had had to witness for more than a year every time we set a foot out of doors.

"You are brutes, you Germans, miserable brutes, that you tolerate this from the Turks when you still have the country absolutely in your hands. You are cowardly brutes, and I will never set foot in your horrible country again. God, how I hate Germany!"

It was then, when my own wife, trembling and sobbing, in grief, rage, and disgust at such cowardliness, flung this denunciation of my country in my teeth that I finally and absolutely broke with Germany. Unfortunately I had known only too long that it had to come.

I thought of the conversations I had had about the Armenian question with members of the German Embassy in Constantinople and, of a very different kind, with Mr. Morgenthau, the American Ambassador.

I had never felt fully convinced by the protestations of the German Embassy that they had done their utmost to put a check on the murderous attacks on harmless Armenians far from the theatre of war, who from their whole surroundings and their social class could not be in a position to take an active part in politics, and on the cold-blooded neglect and starvation of women and children apparently deported for no other reason than to die. The attitude of the German Government towards the Armenian question had impressed me as a mixture of cowardice and lack of conscience on the one hand and the most short-sighted stupidity on the other.

The American Ambassador, who took the most generous interest in the Armenians, and has done so much for the cause of humanity in Turkey, was naturally much too reserved on this most burning question to give a German journalist like myself his true opinion about the attitude of his German colleagues. But from the many conversations and discussions I had with him, I gathered nothing that would turn me from the opinion I had already formed of the German Embassy, and I had given him several hints of what that opinion was.

The attitude of Germany was, in the first place, as I have said, one of boundless cowardice. For we had the Turkish Government firmly enough in hand, from the military as well as the financial and political point of view, to insist upon the observance of the simplest principles of humanity if we wanted to. Enver, and still more Talaat, who as Minister of the Interior and really Dictator of Turkey was principally responsible for the Armenian persecutions, had no other choice than to follow Germany's lead unconditionally, and they would have accepted without any hesitation, if perhaps with a little grumbling, any definite ruling of Germany's even on this Armenian question that lay so near their hearts.

From hundreds of examples it has been proved that the Germany Embassy never showed any undue delicacy for even perfectly legitimate Turkish interests and feelings in matters affecting German interests, and that they always got their own way where it was a question, for example, of Germans being oppressed, or superseded by Turks in the Government and ruling bodies. And yet I had to stand and look on when our Embassy was not even capable of granting her due and proper rights to a perfectly innocent German lady married to an Armenian who had been deported with many other Armenians. She appealed for redress to the German Embassy, but her only reward was to wait day after day in the vestibule of the Embassy for her case to be heard.

Turks themselves have found cynical enjoyment in this measureless cowardice of ours and compared it with the attitude of the Russian Government, who, if they had found themselves in a similar position to Germany, would have been prepared, in spite of the Capitulations being abolished, to make a political case, if necessary, out of the protection due to one poor Russian Jew. Turks have, very politely but none the less definitely, made it quite clear to me that at bottom they felt nothing but contempt for our policy of letting things slide.

Our attitude was characterised, secondly, by lack of conscience. To look on while life and property, the well-being and culture of thousands, are sacrificed, and to content oneself with weak formal protests when one is in a position to take most energetic command of the situation, is nothing but the most criminal lack of conscience, and I cannot get rid of the suspicion that, in spite of the fine official phrases one was so often treated to in the German Embassy on the subject of the "Armenian problem," our diplomats were very little concerned with the preservation of this people.

What leads me to bring this terrible charge against them? The fact that I never saw anything in all this pother on the part of our diplomats when the venerable old Armenian Patriarch appeared at the Embassy with his suite after some particularly frightful sufferings of the Armenian population, and begged with tears in his eyes for help from the Embassy, however late—and I assisted more than once at such scenes in the Embassy and listened to the conversations of the officials—I never saw anything but concern about German prestige and offended vanity. As far as I saw, there was never any concern for the fate of the Armenian people. The fact that time and again I heard from the mouths of Germans of all grades, from the highest to the lowest, so far as they did not have to keep strictly to the official German versions, expressions of hatred against the Armenians which were based on the most short-sighted judgment, had no relation to the facts of the case, and were merely thoughtless echoes of the official Turkish statements.

And cases have actually been proved to have occurred, from the testimony of German doctors and Red Cross nurses returned from the Interior, of German officers light-heartedly taking the initiative in exterminating and scattering the Armenians when the less-zealous local authorities who still retained some remnants of human feeling, scrupled to obey the instructions of "Nur-el-Osmanieh" (the headquarters of the Committee at Stamboul).

The case is well known and has been absolutely verified of the scandalous conduct of two German officers passing through a village in far Asia Minor, where the Armenians had taken refuge in their houses and barricaded them to prevent being herded off like cattle. The order had been given that guns were to be turned on them, but not a single Turk had the courage to carry out this order and fire on women and children. Without any authority whatsoever, the two German officers then turned to and gave an exhibition of their shooting capacities!

Such shameful acts are of course isolated cases, but they are on a par with the opinions expressed about the Armenian people by dozens of educated Germans of high position—not to speak of military men at all.

A case of this kind where German soldiers were guilty of an attack on Armenians in the interior of Anatolia, was the subject of frequent official discussion at the German Embassy, and was finally brought to the notice of the authorities in Germany by Graf Wolff-Metternich, a really high-principled and humane man. The material result of this was that through the unheard-of cowardice of our Government, this man—who in spite of his age and in contrast to the weak-minded Freiherr von Wangenheim, and criminally optimistic had made many an attempt to get a firmer grip of the Turkish Government—was simply hounded out of office by the Turks and weakly sacrificed without a struggle by Berlin.

What, finally, is one to think of the spirit of our German officials in regard to the Armenian question, when one hears such well-verified tales as were told me shortly before I left Constantinople by an eminent Hungarian banker (whose name I will not reveal)? He related, for example, that "a German officer, with the title of Baron, and closely connected with the military attaché," went one day to the bazaar in Stamboul and chose a valuable carpet from an Armenian, which he had put down to his account and sent to his house in Pera. Then when it came to paying for it, he promptly set the price twenty pounds lower than had been stipulated, and indicated to the Armenian dealer that in view of the good understanding between himself (the officer) and the Turkish President of police, he would do well not to trouble him further in the matter! I only cite this case because I am unfortunately compelled to believe in its absolute authenticity.

Shortsighted stupidity, finally, is how I characterised the inactive toleration on the part of our Imperial representatives of this policy of extermination of the Armenian race. Our Government could not have been blind to the breaking flood of Turkish jingoism, and no one with any glimmer of foresight could have doubted for a moment since the summer of 1915 that Turkey would only go with us so long as she needed our military and financial aid, and that we should have no place, not even a purely commercial one, in a fully turkified Turkey.

In spite of the lamentations one heard often enough from the mouths of officials over this well-recognised and unpalatable fact, we tolerated the extermination of a race of over one and a half million of people of progressive culture, with the European point of view, intellectually adaptable, absolutely free from jingoism and fanaticism, and eminently cosmopolitan in feeling; we permitted the disappearance of the only conceivable counterbalance to the hopelessly nationalistic, anti-foreign Young Turkish element, and through our cowardice and lack of conscience have made deadly enemies of the few that will rise from the ruins of a race that used to be in thorough sympathy with Germany.

An intelligent German Government would, in face of the increasingly evident Young Turkish spirit, have used every means in their power to retain the sympathies of the Armenians, and indeed to win them in greater numbers. The Armenians waited for us, trembled with impatience for us, to give a definite ruling. Their disappointment, their hatred of us is unbounded now—and rightly so—and if a German ever again wants to take up business in the East he will have to reckon with this afflicted people so long as one of them exists.

To answer the Armenian question in the way I have done here, one does not necessarily need to have the slightest liking or the least sympathy for them as a race. (I have, however, intimated that they deserve at least that much from their high intellectual and social abilities.) One only requires to have a feeling for humanity to abhor the way in which hundreds of thousands of these unfortunate people were disposed of; one only requires to understand the commercial and social needs of a vast country like Turkey, so undeveloped and yet so capable of development, to place the highest value on the preservation of this restless, active, and eminently useful element; one only requires to open one's eyes and look at the facts dispassionately to deny utterly and absolutely what the Turks have tried to make the world believe about the Armenians, in order that they might go on with their work of extermination in peace and quiet; one only requires to have a slight feeling of one's dignity as a German to refuse to condone the pitiful cowardice of our Government over the Armenian question.

The mixture of cowardice, lack of conscience, and lack of foresight of which our Government has been guilty in Armenian affairs is quite enough to undermine completely the political loyalty of any thinking man who has any regard for humanity and civilisation. Every German cannot be expected to bear as light-heartedly as the diplomats of Pera the shame of having history point to the fact that the annihilation, with every refinement of cruelty, of a people of high social development, numbering over one and a half million, was contemporaneous with Germany's greatest power in Turkey.

In long confidential reports to my paper I made perfectly clear to them the whole position with regard to the Armenian persecutions and the brutal jingoistic spirit of the Young Turks apparent in them. The Foreign Office, too, took notice of these reports. But I saw no trace of the fruits of this knowledge in the attitude of my paper.

The determination never to re-enter the editorial offices of that paper came to me on that dramatic occasion when my wife hurled her denunciation of Germany in my teeth. I at least owe a personal debt of gratitude to the poor murdered and tortured Armenians, for it is to them I owe my moral and political enfranchisement.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV

It will be necessary to devote a few lines to a review of the principal features of the war, so far as it affected the life of the Turkish capital, in order to have a military and political background for what I saw among the Turks during my twenty months' stay in their country. To that I will add a short description of the economic situation.

When I arrived in Constantinople, Turkey had already completed her first winter campaign in the Caucasus, and had repelled the attack of the Entente fleet on the Dardanelles, culminating in the events of March 18th, 1915. But Enver Pasha had completely misjudged the relation between the means at his disposal and the task before him when, out of pure vanity and a mad desire for expansion, he undertook a personally conducted offensive for "the liberation of the Caucasus." The terrible defeats inflicted on the Turkish army on this occasion were kept from the knowledge of the people by a rigorous censorship and the falsification of the communiqués. This was particularly the case in the enormous Turkish losses sustained at Sarykamish.

Enver had put this great Caucasus offensive in hand out of pure wanton folly, thinking by so doing to win laurels for himself and to have something tangible to show those Turkish ultra-Nationalists who always had an eye on Turkestan and Turan and thought that now was the time to carry out their programme of a "Greater Turkey." It was this mad undertaking, bound as it was to come to grief, that first showed Enver Pasha in his true colours. I shall have something to say about his character in another connection, which will show how gravely he has been over-estimated in Europe.

From the beginning of March 1915 to the beginning of January 1916 the situation was practically entirely commanded by the battles in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. It has now been accepted as a recognised fact even in the countries belonging to the Entente that the sacrifice of a few more ships on March 18th would have decided the fate of the Dardanelles. To their great astonishment the gallant defenders of the coast forts found that the attack had suddenly ceased. Dozens of the German naval gunners who were manning the batteries of Chanakkalé on that memorable day told me later that they had quite made up their minds the fleet would ultimately win, and that they themselves could not have held out much longer. Such an outcome was expected hourly in Constantinople, and I was told by influential people that all the archives, stores of money, etc., had already been removed to Konia.

It is a remarkable fact that for a second time, in the first days of September, the fate of Constantinople was again hanging in the balance—a fact which is no longer a secret in England and France. The British had extended their line northwards from Ariburnu to Anaforta, and a heroic dash by the Anzacs had captured the summit of the Koja-Jemen-Dagh, and so given them direct command of the whole peninsula of Gallipoli and the insufficiently protected Dardanelles forts behind them. It is still a mystery to the people of Constantinople why the British troops did not follow up this victory. The fact is that this time again the money and archives were hurried off from Constantinople to Asia, and a German officer in Constantinople gave me the entertaining information that he had really seriously thought of hiring a window in the Grand' Rue de Péra, so that he and his family might watch the triumphal entry of the Entente troops! It would be easier to enjoy the joke of this if it were not overshadowed by such fearful tragedy.

I have already indicated the dilemma in which I was placed on my first and second visits to the Gallipoli front. I was torn by conflicting doubts as to whom my sympathies ought ultimately to turn to—to the heroic Turkish defender, who was indeed fighting for the existence of his country, although in an unsuccessful and unjust cause, for German militarism and the exaggerated jingoism of the Young Turks, or to those who were officially my enemies but whom, knowing as I did who was responsible for the great crime of the war, I could not regard as such.

In those September days I had already had some experience of Turkish politics and their defiance of the laws of humanity, and my sympathies were all for those thousands of fine colonial troops—such men as one seldom sees—sacrificing their lives in one last colossal attack, which if it had been prolonged even for another hour might have sealed the fate of the Straits and would have meant the first decisive step towards the overthrow of our forces; for the capture of Constantinople would have been the beginning of the end. I am not ashamed to confess that, German as I am, that was the only feeling I had when I heard of the British victory and the subsequent British defeat at Anaforta. The Battle of Anaforta was the last desperate attempt to break the resistance in the Dardanelles.

While the men of Stamboul and Anatolia—the nucleus of the Ottoman Empire—were defending the City of the Caliph at the gate of the Dardanelles, with reinforcements from Arab regiments when they were utterly exhausted in the autumn, the other half of the metropolis, the cosmopolitan Galata-Pera, was trembling for the safety of the attacking Entente troops, and lived through the long months in a state of continual tension, longing always for the moment of release.

There was a great deal of nervous calculation about the probable attitude of Bulgaria among both the Turks and the thousands of thoroughly illoyal citizens of the Ottoman Empire composing the population of the capital. From lack of information and also as a result of Bulgaria's long delay in declaring her attitude, an undue optimism ruled right up to the last moment among those who desired the overthrow of the Turks.

The Bulgarian question was closely bound up with the question of the munitions supply. The Turkish resistance on Gallipoli threatened to collapse through lack of munitions, and general interest centred—with very varied desires with regard to the outcome—on the rare ammunition trains that were brought through Rumania only after an enormous expenditure of Turkish powers of persuasion and the application of any amount of "palm-oil."

I was present at Sedd-ul-Bahr at the beginning of July, when, owing to lack of ammunition, the German-Turkish artillery could only reply with one shot to every ten British ones, while the insufficiently equipped factories of Top-hané and Zeitun-burnu, under the control of General Pieper, Director of Munitions, were turning out as many shells as was possible with the inferior material at their disposal, and the Turkish fortresses in the Interior had to send their supply of often very antiquated ammunition to the Dardanelles. The whole dramatic import of the situation, which might any day give rise to epoch-making events, was only too evident in Constantinople. It is not to be wondered at that everyone looked forward with feverish impatience to Bulgaria's entry either on one side or the other.

But, in spite of all this, the Turks could scarcely bear the sight of the first Bulgarian soldiers who appeared in autumn 1915 in full uniform in the streets of "Carihrad." The necessary surrender of the land along the Maritza right to the gates of the holy city of "Edirne" (Adrianople) was but little to the liking of the Turkish patriots, and even the successful issue of the Dardanelles campaign, only made possible by Bulgaria's joining the Central Powers, was not sufficient to win the real sympathies of the Turks for their new allies.

It was not until much later that the position was altered as a result of the combined fighting in Dobrudja. Practically right up to the end of 1916, the real, short-sighted, jingoistic Turk looked askance at his new ally and viewed with irritation and distrust the desecration of his sacred "Edirne," the symbol of his national renaissance, while the ambition of all politicians was to bring Bulgaria one day to a surrender of the lost territory and more.

Even in 1916 I found Young Turks, belonging to the Committee, who still regarded the Bulgarians as their erstwhile cunning foe and as a set of unscrupulous, unsympathetic opportunists who might again become a menace to them. They even admitted that the Serbs were "infinitely nicer enemies in the Balkan war," and appealed to them very much more than the Bulgarians. The late Prince Yussuf Izzedin Effendi, of whose tragic death I shall speak later, was always a declared opponent of the cession of the Maritza territory.

The possibility of Bulgaria's voluntarily surrendering this territory and possibly much more through extending her own possessions westward if Greece joined the Entente, had a great deal to do with Turkey's attitude during the whole of 1916, and goes far to explain why she dallied so long over the idea of alienating Greece, and used all sorts of chicanery against the Ottoman and Hellenic Greeks in Turkey. Another and much more important factor was, as we shall see, fundamental race-hatred and avarice.

As the question as to which side Bulgaria was to join was of decisive moment for Turkish politics, I may perhaps be permitted to add a few details from personal information. I had an interesting sidelight on the German attempts to win over Bulgaria from a well-informed source in Sofia. Everyone was much puzzled over the apparent clumsiness of the German Ambassador in Sofia, Dr. Michahelles, in his diplomatic mission to gain help from Bulgaria. King Ferdinand, of course, made great difficulties, and at a very early stage of the proceedings he turned to the Prime Minister, Radoslavoff, and said: "Away with your German Jews! Why don't you take the good French gold?" (referring, of course, to the offered French loan).

The king was cunning enough in his own way, but he was a poor politician and utterly vacillating, for he had no sort of ideals to live up to and was prompted by a spirit of unworthy opportunism, and it needed Radoslavoff's threat of instant resignation to bring him to a definite decision. The transference shortly afterwards of the German Ambassador to a northern post strengthened the impression in confidential circles in Sofia that he had been lacking in diplomacy.

The truth was that he had received most contradictory instructions from Berlin, which did not allow him to do his utmost to win Bulgaria for the German cause. The Imperial Chancellor seems even then—it was after the great German summer offensive against Russia—to have given serious consideration to the possibility of a separate peace with Russia, and was quite convinced that Russia would never lay down arms without having humiliated Bulgaria, should the latter prove a traitor to the Slavic cause and turn against Serbia.

In diplomatic circles in Berlin this knowledge and the decision—so naïve in view of all their boasted Weltpolitik—to pursue the quite illusory dream of a separate peace with Russia, seemed to outweigh, at any rate for some time, anxiety with regard to the state of affairs in Gallipoli and the complete lack of munitions shortly to be expected, and lamed their initiative in their dealings with Bulgaria.

It is probably not generally known that here again the military party assumed the lead in politics, and took the Bulgarian matter in hand themselves. In the space of no time at all, Bulgaria's entry on the German side was an accomplished fact. It was Colonel von Leipzig, the German military attaché at the Constantinople Embassy, that clinched the matter at the critical moment by a journey to Sofia, and the whole thing was arranged in less than a fortnight. But that journey cost him his life. On the way back to the Turkish capital Herr von Leipzig—one of the nicest and most gentlemanly men that ever wore a field-grey uniform—visited the Dardanelles front, and on the little Thracian railway-station of Uzunköprü he met his death mysteriously. He was found shot through the head in the bare little waiting-room of this miserable wayside station.

It so happened that on my way to the Dardanelles on that day at the end of June 1915, I passed through this little station, and was the sole European witness of this tragic event, which increased still further the excitement already hanging over Constantinople in these weeks of lack of ammunition and terrible onslaughts against Gallipoli, and which had already risen to fever-heat over the nervous rumours that were going the rounds as to Bulgaria's attitude. The occurrence, of course, was used by political intriguers for their own ends.

I wrote a warm and truly heartfelt appreciation of this excellent man and good friend, which was published in my paper at the time, and it was not till long afterwards, weeks, indeed, after my return, that I had any idea that the sudden death of Herr von Leipzig on his return from a mission of the highest political importance was looked upon by the German anti-English party as the work of English spies in the service of Mr. Fitzmaurice, who was formerly at the English Embassy in Constantinople.

I was an eye-witness of the occurrence, or rather, I was beside the Colonel a minute after I heard the shot, and saw the hole in his revolver-holster where the bullet had gone through. I heard the frank evidence of all the Turks present, from the policeman who had arrived first on the scene to the staff doctor who came later, and I immediately telegraphed to my paper from the scene of the accident, giving them my impression of the affair.

On my return to Constantinople I was invited to give evidence under oath before the German Consulate General, and there one may find the written evidence of what I had to say: a pure and absolute accident.

I must not omit to mention here that the German authorities themselves in Constantinople were so thoroughly convinced that the idea of murder was out of the question, that Colonel von Leipzig's widow, who, believing this version of the story, hurried to Turkey, to make her own investigations, had the greatest difficulty in being officially received by the Embassy and Consulate. I had a long interview with her in the "Pera Palace," where she complained bitterly of her treatment in this respect. I have tarried a little over this tragic episode as it shows all the political ramifications that ran together in the Turkish capital and the dramatic excitement that prevailed.

The day came, however, when the Entente troops first evacuated Anaforta-Ariburnu, and then, after a long and protracted struggle, Sedd-ul-Bahr, and so the entire Gallipoli Peninsula. The Dardanelles campaign was at an end.

The impossibility of ever breaking down that solid Turkish resistance, the sufferings of the soldiers practically starved to death in the trenches during the cold winter storms, the difficulties of obtaining supplies of provisions, drinking water, ammunition, etc., with a frozen sea and harbourless coast, anxiety about the superior heavy artillery that the enemy kept bringing up after the overthrow of Serbia—everything combined to strengthen the Entente in their decision to put an end to the campaign in Gallipoli.

The Turkish soldiers had now free access to the sea, for all the British Dreadnoughts and cruisers had disappeared; the warlike activity which had raged for months on the narrow Gallipoli Peninsula suddenly ceased; Austrian heavy and medium howitzers undertook the coast defence, and a garrison of a few thousand Turkish soldiers stayed behind in the Narrows for precaution's sake, while the whole huge Gallipoli army in an endless train was marched off to the Taurus to meet the Russian advance threatening in Armenia.

But Constantinople remained "unrelieved." And from that moment a dull resignation, a dreary waiting for one scarcely knew what, disappointment, and pessimism took the place of the nervous tension that had been so apparent in those who had been longing for the fall of the Turkish capital.

But the Turks rejoiced. It is scarcely to be wondered at that they tried to construe the failure of the Gallipoli affair as a wonderful and dazzling victory for Islam over the combined forces of the Great Powers. It is only in line of course with Turkish official untruthfulness that, in shameless perversion of facts, they talked glibly of the irresistible bayonet attacks of their "ghazi" (heroes) and of thousands of Englishmen taken prisoner or chased back into the sea, whereas it was a well-known fact even in Pera that the retreat had been carried out in a most masterly way with practically no loss of life, and that the Turks themselves had been caught napping this time; but to lie is human, and the Turks owed it to their prestige to have an unmistakable and great military victory to form the basis of that "Holy War" that was so long in getting under weigh; and when all is said and done, their truly heroic defence really was a victory.

The absurd thing about all these lies was the way they were foisted on a public who already knew the true state of affairs and had nothing whatever to do with the "Holy War."

The Turks made even more of the second piece of good fortune that fell to their lot—the fall of Kut-el-Amara. General Townshend became their cherished prisoner, and was provided with a villa on the island of Halki in the Sea of Marmora, with a staff of Turkish naval officers to act as interpreters.

In the neighbouring and more fashionable Prinkipo he was received by practically everyone with open arms, and once even a concert was arranged in his honour, which was attended by the élite of Turkish and Levantine Society—the Turks because of their vanity and pride in their important prisoner of war, the Levantines because of their political sympathy with General Townshend, who, although there against his will, seemed to bring them a breath of that world they had lost all contact with for nearly two years and for which they longed with the most ardent and passionate desire.

On the occasion of the Bairam Festival—the highest Musulman festival—in 1916, the Turkish Government made a point of sending a group of about seventy Anglo-Indian Mohammedan officers, who had been taken prisoner at the fall of Kut and were now interned in Eski-Shehir, to the "Caliph City of Stamboul," where they were entertained for ten days in different Turkish hotels and shown everything that would seem to be of value for "Holy War" propaganda purposes.

I had the opportunity of conversing with some of these Indian officers in the garden of the "Petit Champs," where their appearance one evening made a most tremendous sensation. I had of course to be very discreet, for we were surrounded by spies, but I came away firmly convinced that, in spite of their good treatment, which was of course not without its purpose, and most unceasing and determined efforts to influence them, the Turkish propaganda so far as these Indian officers was concerned had entirely failed and that their loyalty to England remained absolutely unshaken. Will anyone blame me, if, angry and disgusted as I was at all these Turkish intrigues—it was shortly after that dramatic scene of the tortured Armenian which called forth that denunciation of Germany from my wife—I said to a group of these Indians—just this and nothing more!—that they should not believe all that the Turks told them, and that the result of the war would be very different from what the Turks thought? One of the officers thanked me with glowing eyes on behalf of his comrades and himself, and told me what a comfort my assurance was to them. They had nothing to complain of, he said, save being cut off from all news except official Turkish reports.

The very most that even the wildest fancy could find in events like Gallipoli and Kut-el-Amara was brought forward for the benefit of the "Holy War," but, despite everything, the propaganda was, as we have seen, a hopeless failure. Reverses such as the fall of Erzerum, Trebizond, and Ersindjan, on the contrary, which took place between the two above-mentioned victories, have never to this day been even so much as hinted at in the official war communiqués for the Ottoman public. For the communiqués for home and foreign consumption were always radically different.

It was not until very much later, when the Turkish counter-offensive against Bitlis seemed to be bearing fruit, that a few mild indications of these defeats were made in Parliament, with a careful suppression of all names, and the newspapers were empowered to make some mention of a "purely temporary retreat of no strategic importance" which had then taken place. The usual stereotyped report of 3,000 or 5,000 dead that was officially given out after every battle throughout the whole course of operations in the Irak scarcely came off in this case, however, and, to tell the truth, Erzerum and these countless English dead reported in the Irak did more than anything else to undermine completely the people's already sadly shaken confidence in the official war communiqués.

If there was a real victory to be celebrated, the most stringent police orders were issued that flags were to be flown everywhere—on every building. Surely it is only in a land like Turkey that one could see the curious sight I witnessed after the fall of Bucharest—the victorious flags of the Central Powers, surmounted by the Turkish crescent, flying even from the balconies of Rumanian subjects, because there had been a definite police warning issued that, in the case of non-compliance with the order, the houses would be immediately ransacked and the families inhabiting them sent off to the interior of Anatolia. Under the circumstances, refusal to carry out police orders was impossible. That was the Turkish idea of the respect due to individual liberty.

This gives me an opportunity to say something of the treatment of prisoners. I may say in one word that it is, on the whole, good. Justice compels me to admit that the Turk, when he does take prisoners, treats them kindly and chivalrously; but he takes few prisoners, for he knows only too well how to wield his bayonet in those murderous charges he makes. Indeed, apart from the few hundred that fell into their hands in the Dardanelles or on the Russo-Turkish front, together with the crews of a few captured submarines, all the Turkish prisoners of war come from Kut-el-Amara.

But the primitive Turk is all too sadly lacking in the comforts of life himself to be able to provide them for his prisoners. Without the help of the Commission that works under the protection of the American Embassy for the relief of the Entente prisoners, and sends piles of warm clothing, excellent shoes (which rouse the special envy of the Turks), chocolate, cakes, etc., to the Anatolian camps, these men, accustomed to European ways of life, would be in a sad plight.

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · This and other works on the subject came to my notice for the first time a few days before going to press. Before that (in Turkey, Austria,