Part 2 (2/2)
At the end of the narrow ground we were allowed to tread there was a sort of public garden, and in the afternoons the band played there.
Twice we were conducted by a Turkish officer, a kindly old thing, to a bench facing this place of joys, and were allowed to watch the Levantine society that gathered there. We were even allowed to hail the waiter as he pa.s.sed and have coffee handed up for ourselves and our janitor. It was a good time. We could hear music; we could watch children; and we could feel very nearly free.
Except for this narrow s.p.a.ce, the grounds of Taxim barracks, so far as I observed, were a graveyard. Tall stones with carven turbans to indicate men's graves, flat stones for the graves of women, and gloomy cypress trees. And through the trees gleamed the Bosphorus.
CHAPTER III
THE ARMENIANS
After three days of Taxim we were told that it had been decided to send us to Angora, where we would enjoy perfect liberty. None of us had a very clear idea where Angora was, but we knew it must be a pleasant change from Taxim.
There were not many preparations to make; no packing. My own luggage consisted, I remember, of a bit of soap, a tooth-brush, and a few other odds and ends, all contained in a paper bag tied up with a bootlace: the sort of bag you buy buns in. And I was one of the richest of the prisoners. I was rich in another respect, besides this wealth of luggage, although at that time I did not know it: for my prison hobby, art, industry, or whatever it may be called, had already started. For some reason or other the spirit moved me to write verses while a captive, and the first of all, a short poem ent.i.tled ”Captivity” was written before we left Constantinople. This strange, and to me quite abnormal, habit endured for the whole of my thirty-nine months as a prisoner. It is good to have a pipe and tobacco in captivity, and it is good to have blankets, but it is even better than these to have an absorbing occupation.
We left Taxim early in the morning of the 25th of August and were ferried across the Bosphorus to Haida Pasha station. Technically speaking, we stood now for the first time in Asia, though, morally speaking, where the Turk rules there is Asia. We knew that Angora was a long journey: two days they told us, and it actually took thirty-six hours. But I think the vast size of Anatolia was rather a surprise to us all. In all ordinary atlases Asia Minor is shown on such a tiny scale that its hugeness is lost to mind.
Several officers and an armed guard accompanied us in the train, but only two individuals remain in my memory. One was a thick-set, short, fierce man of early middle age. He had one eye only, and his neck was almost circled by a frightful scar as though he had been operated upon by a blunt guillotine and then healed up again like the wolf in the fairy story who becomes a prince when you cut off his head. Only he had not gained the true, handsome, debonair appearance of a prince. He looked, and probably was, a very efficient murderer not yet on pension.
His person bulged with lumps of muscle, daggers and pistols; and I am sure the interpreter meant to speak the truth when he told me that this ferocious person was one of the chiefs of the secret police. He was in charge of the party. The interpreter himself was the other member of our party who impressed me. He travelled in the same compartment with us, and talked freely the whole way. He was the ”Young Turk” complete, and ardent upholder of the Union and Progress party. When war broke out between England and Turkey he was in America, and he hoped to return there after the war. But, very patriotically, he came back to serve his country. He sailed in a Dutch s.h.i.+p, and touched at Plymouth on the way, where, he informed me, he went ash.o.r.e under the guise of a Persian. He must, I think, have represented the mental att.i.tude of his party very fairly. He was an undoubted patriot, and Turkey for the Turks was his keenest wish: but by the Turks he meant what is really a very small minority of the Ottoman tribe, and the other subjects of the Empire only concerned him as obstacles to be removed. He was the first person from whom we learned anything of the organised ma.s.sacre of the Armenians then in progress. He told me that at Van the Turks had killed all the Armenians, men, women, and children; and he would agree to no condemnation of this dreadful act. ”They were bad people,” was his invariable reply. Nominally this man was a Mohammedan, whose feud with the Armenians had lasted for centuries, but actually he was an advanced Turkish freethinker, and, except perhaps subconsciously, I don't think religious feeling had anything to do with the bitterness he expressed.
It was purely political. The Armenian is very much cleverer than the Turk, very stubborn, and impossible to a.s.similate. Turks of my acquaintance's kind look upon Armenians as an enemy race, a weed that must at all cost be eradicated. But his ambitions in the direction of destroying opposition to the Young Turk ideals did not stop with the slaughter of Christian subjects. Quite logically, from his point of view, he realised that the reactionary influence of the Old Turk party was an even more dangerous weed in the garden of progress than was Christianity. His hatred was directed particularly against the orthodox Mohammedans, and especially against the teachers and students of Islamic divinity. ”When we have finished this war,” he said, ”we are going to kill all the Imams. Their false teaching keeps the race from advancing.”
I wonder if such people ever pursue their thoughts to an ultimate conclusion! After wiping out all who were not of their own way of thinking, there would remain a depleted race in a vast undeveloped territory where no immigrants would dare to settle, even if they were welcomed. All capital would be frightened away: labour would be scarce: and the strongest of their neighbours would swallow them up. At the time I knew no name for this intense feeling, this mental obsession. But in the light of time it now looks like pure Bolshevism.
It seems that I have drawn a very revolting character. But the interpreter's was not wholly that. On the whole, he was the best man I met among the many interpreters who dealt with us during the next three years. He was fond of some of the beautiful things of life, a lively critic of literature, a reader of poetry, both English and Turkish, and, from his own account, a personal friend of those among his compatriots who were foremost in striving to rouse their countrymen to intellectual endeavour. I loathed the man's ideas but rather liked the man. It seemed that he suffered from the absorption of a wrong tone; almost from a disease of the soul, but an infectious disease, not an innate deformity: a calamity of environment, not of heredity. There was something exceedingly sad in the picture he drew of a great national effort going hopelessly astray because its ideals were false. But he did not see that the picture was sad. He thought it glorious.
For the first part of the journey we skirted the Sea of Marmora, along the flanks of bare hills, now tunnelling through promontories, and now looking down upon blue bays. There were trenches dug all along the coast, and armed guards at every bridge and culvert. Far away, to the south-east, we saw forest-covered hills. Then the line turned inland, past the town and lake of Ismid, through a valley of orchards where the apples were almost breaking the trees, and up into the foot-hills. This part of Anatolia is exceedingly fertile wherever the slopes are not too steep to dig. But the hills are very barren, only fit for the most part for the nomad life of the Turkish sheep- and goat-herds. We travelled through hills and valleys all that afternoon, and by dusk had begun the climb that leads up to the great plateau of Asia Minor. The railway followed the line of a river up the valley it had cut through the hills.
Followed it up until it became a stream, and followed it on until it became a rus.h.i.+ng mountain torrent crossed and recrossed by the line.
When dawn broke the engine was panting up the last few miles of the incline, and we ran out into a wide land of rolling downs and farm country, three thousand feet above the level of the sea. Having lived in mountains before I foresaw a very cold winter.
It was not very long after this that we began to see the Armenians.
As everyone knows now, the late summer and the autumn of 1915 saw organised, State-supported ma.s.sacre of the Armenians carried out in Turkey on a scale unknown previously in modern history, perhaps unparalleled in all history. I shall not attempt any comprehensive account of this national crime, for the whole story is already contained in the blue book on the subject, printed by the British Government, and edited by Viscount Bryce. Those who wish to hear the details of how somewhere about one million men, women and children were outraged, tortured and done to death can refer to that book. I will only say that the many isolated facts gathered from many sources during my three years in Turkey all piece together in that book so completely that no doubt exists in my mind regarding its truth. The blue book is a sincere and unexaggerated statement of fact, not a propaganda war book. It rings true from beginning to end.
The first sight we had of the Armenians who were being deported was a large straggling camp of women and children close beside the railway line. We had no idea at the time that their men folk were already dead, or that they were almost all doomed to death or domestic slavery. It looked merely like a very large, very ill-organised gypsy encampment.
Those women and children were awaiting trains to convey them hundreds of miles from their homes into the most inhospitable regions of Asia Minor.
Ahead of them they had days of travel in trains, camps where the girls would be sorted out again and again until only the ugliest were left; and, at the end, a march where nearly all of them would die from fatigue. For the Turkish way is to drive, on and on, wearily on, until almost all are dead. They did it to the Armenians in 1915, and in 1916 they did it to the captured garrison of Kut-el-Amara.
We pa.s.sed several trainloads of these wretched refugees. They were in trucks mostly, terribly overcrowded, and some of them were in sheep trucks in two stories, the lower tier only able to crouch.
The interpreter told me they were being sent to a very hot district where they could do no harm. ”They are bad people,” he added.
There were a few boys among them, and a few old men. The rest had been murdered.
Englishmen don't like Armenians. I don't myself. Turks loathe them.
Greeks dislike them. In the Caucasus the Georgians hate them. This almost universal unpopularity is no excuse at all for ma.s.sacre, but--in Turkey--it helps to explain it. Where the European avoids, the Turk, having a different standard, slays. To him they are vermin. Here is a story told by an Armenian woman to a British officer. It is the story of a ”good Turk”; the expression was the woman's, not the officer's. There was a batch of Armenian women and girls driven on until their drivers grew weary that they would not die. Sick at heart they grew of the perpetual driving of these weeping creatures. There were no pretty ones left, for the most comely will lose their pitiful beauty when starved long enough. So there was no interest left in being their custodians.
The drivers grew to hate the work, for there was no end to it, and no reward. So they were herded together and slain. But two survived, a woman and her daughter. They hid among the corpses and remained there until the corpses began to crawl. The corpses of their friends and relations. They had to leave that place, and in great fear they stole away by night. There were a few Turkish villages not far away, and in the morning they met a Turk. This was the good Turk of the story. He stopped them and asked who they were, and they told him. ”Come with me,”
he said to the girl, ”and I will feed you.” So the girl followed him to his house, and the mother followed too, though she was not invited. They reached the house and the Turk went inside. He came out with his gun. ”I do not want the old woman,” he said, as he shot her. But to the girl he gave food, and did not ill-treat her, for he was a good Turk.
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