Already, of course, German influence was strong in the army, which now was thoroughly trained in German methods, but that army might still be called a Turkish army. Nowadays, by no stretch of language can it be called Turkish except in so far that all Turkish efficient manhood is helplessly enlisted in it, for there is no branch or department of it over which the Prussian octopus has not thrown its paralysing tentacles and affixed its immovable suckers. Army and navy alike, the wireless stations, the submarines, the aircraft, are all directly controlled from Berlin, and, as we have seen, the generalissimo of the forces is Mackensen, who is absolutely the Hindenburg of the East. But thorough as is the control of Berlin over Constantinople in military and naval matters, it is not one whit more thorough than her control in all other matters of national life. Never before has Germany been very successful in her colonisation; but if complete domination—the sucking of a country till it is a mere rind of itself, and yet at the same time full to bursting of Prussian ichor—may be taken as Germany's equivalent of colonisation, then indeed we must be forced to recognise her success. And it was all done in the name and for the sake of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Even now Prussian Pecksniffs like Herr Ernst Marre, whose pamphlet, Die Tuerken und Wir nach dem Kriege, was published in 1916, continue to insist that Germany is nobly devoting herself to the well-being of Turkey. 'In doing this,' he exclaims in that illuminating document, 'we are benefiting Turkey.... This is a war of liberation for Turkey,' though omitting to say from whom Turkey is being liberated. Perhaps the Armenians. Occasionally, it is true, he forgets that, and naively remarks, 'Turkey is a very difficult country to govern. But after the war Turkey will be very important as a transit country.' But then he remembers again and says, 'We wish to give besides taking, and we should often like to give more than we can hope to give.' Let us look into this, and see the manner in which Germany expresses her yearning to impoverish herself for the sake of Turkey.

All this reorganisation of the Turkish army was of course a very expensive affair, and required skilful financing, and it was necessary to get the whole of Turkey's exchequer arrangements into German hands. A series of financial regulations was promulgated. The Finance Minister, during 1916, was still Turkish, but the official immediately under him was a German. He was authorised to deposit with the Controllers of the Ottoman National Debt German Imperial Bills of LT30,000,000, and to issue German paper money to the like amount. This arrangement insures the circulation of the German notes, which are redeemable by Turkey in gold two years after the declaration of peace. Gold is declared to be the standard currency, and no creditor is obliged to accept in payment of a debt more than 300 piastres in silver or fifty in nickel. And since there is no gold in currency (for it has been all called in, and penalties of death have been authorised for hoarders) it follows that this and other issues of German paper will filter right through the Empire. At the same time a German expert, Dr. Kautz, was appointed to start banks throughout Turkey in order to free the peasants from the Turkish village usurer, and in consequence enslave them to the German banks. Similarly a German was put at the head of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank. These new branches worked very well, but it is pleasant to think that one such was started by the Deutsche Bank at Bagdad in October 1916, which now has its shutters up. Before this, as we learn from the Oesterreichischer Volkswirt (June 1916), Germany had issued other gold notes, in payment for gold from Turkey, which is retainable in Berlin till six months after the end of the war. (It is reasonable to wonder whether it will not be retained rather longer than that.) These gold notes were accepted willingly at first by the public, but the increase in their number (by the second issue) has caused them to be viewed with justifiable suspicion, and the depreciation in them continues. But the Turkish public has no redress except by hoarding gold, which is a penal offence. That these arrangements have not particularly helped Turkish credit may be gathered from the fact that the Turkish gold L1, nominally 100 piastres, was very soon worth 280 piastres in the German paper standard, and it now fetches a great deal more.

Again, the Deutsche Orientbank has made many extensions, and is already financing cotton and wool trade for after the war. The establishment of this provoked much applause in German financial circles, who find it to be an instance of the 'far-reaching and powerful Germano-Austrian unity, which replaces the disunion of Turkish finance.' This is profoundly true, especially if we omit the word 'Austrian' inserted for diplomatic reasons. Again we find Germany advancing L3,000,000 of German paper to the Turkish Government in January 1917, for the payment of supplies they have received from Krupp's works and (vaguely) for interest to the German Financial Minister. This, too, we may conjecture, is to be redeemed after the war in gold.

In March of this year we find in the report of the Ottoman Bank a German loan of L1,000,000 for the purchase of agricultural implements by Turkey, and this is guaranteed by house-taxes. In all up to that month, as was announced in the Chamber of Deputies at Constantinople, Germany had advanced to Turkey the sum of L142,000,000, entirely, it would seem, in German paper, to be repaid at various dates in gold. The grip, in fact, is a strangle-hold, all for Turkey's good, as no doubt will prove the 'New Conventions' announced by Zimmermann in May 1917, to take the place of the abolished Capitulations, 'which left Turkey at the mercy of predatory Powers who looked for the disruption of the Ottoman Empire.' Herr Zimmermann does not look for that: he looks for its absorption. And sees it.

The industrial development of Turkey by this benevolent and disinterested Power has been equally thorough and far-reaching, though Germany here has had a certain amount of competition by Hungary to contend against, for Hungary considered that Germany was trespassing on her sphere of interest. But she has been able to make no appreciable headway against her more acute partner, and her application for a monopoly of sugar-production was not favourably received, for Germany already had taken the beet industry well in hand. In Asia Minor the acreage of cultivation early in 1917 had fallen more than 50 per cent. from that under crops before the war, but owing to the importation of machinery from the Central Powers, backed up by a compulsory Agricultural Service Law, which has just been passed, it is hoped that the acreage will be increased this year by something like 30 per cent. The yield per acre also will be greatly increased this year, for Germany has, though needing artificial manures badly herself, sent large quantities into Turkey, where they will be more profitably employed. She has no fear about securing the produce. This augmented yield will, it is true, not be adequate to supply the needs of Turkey, who for the last two years has suffered from very acute food shortage, which in certain districts has amounted to famine and wholesale starvation of the poorer classes. But it is unlikely that their needs will be considered at all, for Germany's needs (she, the fairy godmother of the Pan-Turk ideal) must obviously have the first call on such provisions as are obtainable. Thus, in the new preserved meat factory at Aidin, the whole of the produce is sent to Germany. Thus, too, though in February 1917 there was a daily shortage in Smyrna of 700 sacks of flour, and the Arab and Greek population was starving, no flour at all was allowed to be imported into Smyrna. But simultaneously Germany was making huge purchases of fish, meat, and flour in Constantinople (paid for in German paper), including 100,000 sheep. Yet such was the villainous selfishness of the famine-stricken folk at Adrianople that, when the trains containing these supplies were passing through, a mob held them up and sold the contents to the inhabitants. That, however, was an isolated instance, and in any case a law was passed in October 1916, appointing a military commission to control all supplies. It enacts that troops shall be supplied first, and specially ordains that the requirements of German troops come under this head. (Private firms have been expressly prohibited from purchasing these augmented wheat supplies, but special permission was given in 1915 to German and Austro-Hungarian societies to buy.) A few months later we find that there are a hundred deaths daily in Constantinople from starvation, and two hundred in Smyrna, where there is a complete shortage of oil. But oil is still being sent to Germany, and during 1916 five hundred reservoirs of oil were sent there, each containing up to 15,000 kilogrammes. Similarly during this summer the price of fruit has gone up in Smyrna, for the Germans have reopened certain factories for preserving it and turning it into jam, which is being sent to Germany. The sugar is supplied from the new beet-fields of Konia. But Kultur must be supplied first, else Kultur would grow lean, and the Turkish God of Love will look after the Smyrniotes. It is no wonder that the blockade of Germany does not produce the desired result a little quicker, for food is already pouring in from Turkey, and when the artificial manures have produced their early harvest the stream will become a torrent.[1]

[Footnote 1: The harvest has now come in, and is most abundant.]

But during all these busy and tremendous months of war Germany has not only been denuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the sake of the Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same altruistic spirit she has been vastly increasing the productiveness of her new and most important colony. The great irrigation works at Konia, begun several years ago, are in operation, and the revenues of the irrigated villages have been doubled. In fact, as the report lately issued says, 'a new and fertile province has been formed by the aid of German energy and knowledge.' At Adana are similar irrigation works, financed by the Deutsche Bank. Ernst Marre gives us a most hopeful survey of them, for Adana was already linked up with the Bagdad Railway in October 1916, which was to be the great artery connecting Germany with the East. There is some considerable shortage of labour there (owing in part to the Armenian massacres, to which we shall revert presently), but the financial arrangements are in excellent shape. The whole of the irrigation works are in German hands, and have been paid for by German paper; and to get the reservoirs, etc., back into her own control, it has been agreed that Turkey, already completely bankrupt, will have to pay not only what has been spent, but a handsome sum in compensation; while, as regards shortage of labour, prisoners have been released in large numbers to work without pay. This irrigation scheme at Adana will increase the cotton yield by four times the present crop, so we learn from the weekly Arab magazine, El Alem el Ismali, which tells us also of the electric-power stations erected there.

The same paper (October 1916) announces to the Anatolian merchants that transport is now easy, owing to the arrival of engines and trucks from Germany, while Die Zeit (February 1917) prophesies a prosperous future for this Germano-Turkish cotton combine. Hitherto Turkey has largely imported cotton from England; now Turkey—thanks to German capital on terms above stated—will, in the process of internal development so unselfishly devised for her by Germany, grow cotton for herself, and be kind enough to give a preferential tariff to Germany.

A similarly bright future may be predicted for the sugar-beet industry at Konia, where are the irrigation works already referred to. Artesian wells have been sunk, and there is the suggestion to introduce Bulgarian labour in default of Turkish. As we have seen, Hungary attempted to obtain a monopoly with regard to sugar, but Germany has been victorious on this point (as on every other where she competes with Hungary), and has obtained the concession for a period of thirty years. She reaped the first-fruits this last spring (1917), when, on a single occasion, 350 trucks laden with sugar were despatched to Berlin. A similar irrigation scheme is bringing into cultivation the Makischelin Valley, near Aleppo, and Herr Wied has been appointed as expert for irrigation plant in Syria. There has been considerable shortage of coal, but now more is arriving from the Black Sea, and the new coal-fields at Rodosto will soon be giving an output.

Indeed, it would be easier to enumerate the industries and economical developments of Turkey over which Germany has not at the present moment got the control than those over which she has. In particular she has shown a parental interest in Turkish educational questions. She established last year, under German management, a school for the study of German in Constantinople; she has put under the protection of the German Government the Jewish institution at Haifa for technical education in Palestine; from Sivas a mission of schoolmasters has been sent to Germany for the study of German methods. Ernst Marre surmises that German will doubtless become compulsory even in the Turkish intermediate (secondary) schools. In April 1917, the first stone of the 'House of Friendship' was laid at Constantinople, the object of which institution is to create among Turkish students an interest in everything German, while earlier in the year arrangements were made for 10,000 Turkish youths to go to Germany to be taught trades. These I imagine were unfit for military service. With regard to such a scheme Halil Haled Bey praises the arrangement for the education of Turks in Germany. When they used to go to France, he tells us, 'they lost their religion' (certainly Prussian Got is nearer akin to Turkish Allah) 'and returned home unpatriotic and useless. In Germany they will have access to suitable religious literature' (Gott!) 'and must adopt all they see good in German methods without losing their original characteristics.' Comment on this script is needless. The hand is the hand of Halil Haled Bey, but the voice is the voice of Potsdam. Occasionally, but rarely, Austrian competition is seen. Professor Schmoller, in an Austrian quarterly review, shows jealousy of German influence, and we find, in October 1916, an Ottoman-Austrian college started at Vienna for 250 pupils of the Ottoman Empire. But Germany has 10,000 in Berlin. At Adana (where are the German irrigation works) the German-Turkish Society has opened a German school of 300, while, reciprocally, courses in Turkish have been organised at Berlin for the sake of future German colonists. In Constantinople the Tanin announces a course of lectures to be held by the Turco-German Friendship Society. Professor von Marx discoursed last April on foreign influence and the development of nations, with special reference to Turkey and the parallel case of Germany. A few months later we find Hilmet Nazim Bey, official head of the Turkish press, proceeding to Berlin to learn German press methods. A number of editors of Turkish papers will follow him, and soon, no doubt, the Turkish press will rival Cologne and Frankfort.

So much for German education, but her penetrative power extends into every branch of industry and economics. In November 1916, a Munich expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic society was started in Constantinople on German lines with German instructors. Inoculation against small-pox, typhoid, and cholera was made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have Germans as their acting Ministers. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase. Germany owns the Anatolian railway concession (originally British), with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession, with preferential rights over minerals; they have bought the Mersina-Adana Railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad Railway; they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba Railway, built with French capital. They have secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour concession, thereby controlling and handling all merchandise arriving at railhead from the interior of Asia Minor.[1] Already on the Bagdad Railway the big tunnels of Taurus and Amanus are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be complete. Meanwhile railway construction is pushed on in all directions under German control, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (August 1916) allocated a large sum of German paper money for the construction of ordinary roads, military roads, local government roads, all of which are new to Turkey, but which will be useful for the complete German occupation which is being swiftly consolidated. To stop the mouths of the people, all political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior, for Prussia does not care for criticism. To supply German ammunition needs, lead and zinc have been taken from the roofs of mosques and door-handles from mosque-gates, and the iron railings along the Champs de Mars at Pera have been carted away for the manufacture of bombs. Not long after eight truck-loads of copper were sent to Germany: these, I imagine, represent the first produce of copper roofs and utensils. A Turco-German convention signed in Berlin in January of this year, permits subjects of one country to settle in the other while retaining their nationality and enjoying trading and other privileges. In Lebanon Dr. Koenig has opened an agricultural school for Syrians of all religions. In the Homs district the threatening plague of locusts in February 1917 was combatted by Germans; and a German expert, Dr. Bucher, had been already sent to superintend the whole question. For this concerns supplies to Germany, as does also the ordinance passed in the same month that two-thirds of all fish caught in the Lebanon district should be given to the military authorities (these are German), and that every fish weighing over six ounces in the Beirut district should be Korban also. The copper mines at Arghana Maden, near Diarbekr, are busy exporting their produce into Germany; the coal-mines at Rodosto will very soon be making a large output.[2]

[Footnote 1: The balance-sheets for 1916 of certain of those railways in which the Deutsche Bank has an interest have come to hand. They show a very disagreeable degree of prosperity. The Anatolia Railway Company has large profits with a gross revenue of 25,737,995 marks. The profit on the Haidar-Pasha-Angora Line has risen from 42,566 francs per kilometre to 45,552. The Mersina-Tarsus-Adana Railway has paid 6 per cent. on its preference shares, and 3 per cent. on its ordinary shares. The Haidar Pasha Harbour Company has paid 8 per cent.]

[Footnote 2: Later in this year we find three trains daily leaving Constantinople for Germany, laden with coal and military supplies.]

There is no end to this penetration: German water-seekers, with divining and boring apparatus, accompanied the Turkish expedition into Sinai; Russian prisoners were sent by Germany for agricultural work in Asia Minor, to take the place of slaughtered Armenians; a German-Turkish treaty, signed January 11, 1917, gives the whole reorganisations of the economic system to a special German mission. A Stuttgart journal chants a characteristic Lobgesang over this feat. 'That is how,' it proudly exclaims, 'we work for the liberation of peoples and nationalities.'

In the same noble spirit, we must suppose, German legal reforms were introduced in December 1916, to replace the Turkish Shuriat, and in the same month all the Turks in telegraph offices in Constantinople were replaced by Germans. Ernst Marre gives valuable advice to young Germans settling in Turkey. He particularly recommends them, knowing how religion is one of the strongest bonds in this murderous race, to 'trade in articles of devotion, in rosaries, in bags to hold the Koran,' and points out what good business might be built up in gramophones. Earlier in this year we find a 'German Oriental Trading Company' founded for the import of fibrous materials for needs of military authorities, and a great carpet business established at Urfa with German machinery that will supplant the looms of Smyrna. A saltpetre factory is established at Konia by Herr Toepfer, whose enterprise is rewarded with an Iron Cross and a Turkish decoration. The afforestation near Constantinople, ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture, is put into German hands, and in the vilayet of Aidin (April 1916) ninety concessions were granted to German capitalists to undertake the exploitation of metallic ores. Occasionally the German octopus finds it has gone too far for the moment, and releases some struggling limb of its victim, as, for instance, when we see that, in September 1916, the German Director's stamp for the 'Imperial German Great Radio Station' at Damascus has been discarded temporarily, as that station 'should be treated for the present as a Turkish concern.'

A 'Trading and Weaving Company' was established at Angora in 1916, an 'Import and Export Company' at Smyrna, a 'Trading and Industrial Society' at Beirut, a 'Tobacco Trading Company' at Latakieh, an 'Agricultural Company' at Tripoli, a 'Corn Exporting Company' in Lebanon, a 'Rebuilding Commission' (perhaps for sacked Armenian houses) at Konia. More curious yet will be a Tourist's Guide Book—a Baedeker, in fact—for travellers in Anatolia, and the erection of a monument in honour of Turkish women who have replaced men called up for military duty. Truly these last two items—a guide-book for Anatolia, and a monument to women—are strange enterprises for Turks. A new Prussian day is dawning, it seems, for Turkish women as well, for the Tanin (April 1917) tells us that diplomas are to be conferred on ladies who have completed their studies in the Technical School at Constantinople.

It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none round which it has not cast its feelers—no Semitic moneylender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military, educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold. Turkey's life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, who, among all the Great Powers of Europe, invested their time and their money in the achievement of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Silently and skilfully they worked, bamboozling their chief tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha bamboozled us. As long as he was of service to them they retained him; for his peace of mind at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in Constantinople because so many threatening letters were sent him. But now Enver Pasha seems to have had his day; he became a little autocratic, and thought that he was the head of the Pan-Turkish ideal. So he was, but the Pan-Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and he had not noticed the transformation. Talaat Bey has taken his place; it was he who, in May 1917, was received by the Emperor William, by King Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, and he who was the mouthpiece of the German efforts to make a separate peace with Russia. Under Czardom, he proclaimed, the existence of Turkey was threatened, but now the revolution has made friendship possible, for Russia no longer desires territorial annexation. And, oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia's friend! Enver Pasha has of late been somewhat out of favour in Berlin, and I cannot but think it curious that when, on April 2, 1917, he visited the submarine base at Wilhelmshaven, he was very nearly killed in a motor accident. But it may have been an accident. Since then I cannot find that he has taken any more active part in Pan-Turkish ideals than to open a soup-kitchen in some provincial town, and lecture the Central Committee of the Young Turks on the subject of internal affairs in Great Britain. I do not like lectures, but I should have liked to hear that one.

I have left to the end of this chapter the question of Germany's knowledge of, and complicity in the Armenian massacres. From the tribune of the Reichstag, on January 15, 1916, there was made a definite denial of the existence of such massacres at all; on another subsequent occasion it was stated that Germany could not interfere in Turkish internal affairs.

In view of the fact that there is no internal affair appertaining to Turkey in which Germany has not interfered, the second of these statements may be called insincere. But the denial of the massacres is a deliberate lie. Germany—official Germany—knew all about them, and she permitted them to go on. A few proofs of this are here shortly stated.

(1) In September 1915, four months before the denial of the massacres was made in the Reichstag, Dr. Martin Niepage, higher grade teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, prepared and sent, as we have seen, in his name, and that of several of his colleagues, a report of the massacres to the German Embassy at Constantinople. In that report he gives a terrible account of what he has seen with his own eyes, and also states that the country Turks' explanation with regard to the origin of these measures is that it was 'the teaching of the Germans.' The German Embassy at Constantinople therefore knew of the massacres, and knew also that the Turks attributed them to orders from Germany. Dr. Niepage also consulted, before sending his report, with the German Consul at Aleppo, Herr Hoffman, who told him that the German Embassy had been already advised in detail about the massacres from the consulates at Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Mosul, but that he welcomed a further protest on the subject.

(2) These reports, or others like them, had not gone astray, for in August 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Wangenheim, made a formal protest to the Turkish Government about the massacres.

There is, then, no doubt that the German Government, when it officially denied the massacres, was perfectly cognisant of them. It was also perfectly capable of stopping them, for they were not local violences, but wholesale murders organised at Constantinople. In support of this view I find an independent witness stating that 'there is no Turk of standing who will not readily declare that it would have been perfectly possible for Germany to have vetoed the massacres had she chosen.' Germany had indeed already given assurances that such massacres should not occur. She had assured the Armenian Katholikos at Adana that so long as Germany has any influence in Turkey he need not fear a repetition of the horrors that had taken place under Abdul Hamid. Had she, then, no influence in Constantinople, or how was it that she had obtained complete control over all Turkish branches of government? The same assurance was given by the German Ambassador in April 1915, to the Armenian Patriarch and the President of the Armenian National Council.

So, in support of the Pan-Turkish ideal, and in the name of the Turkish Allah, the God of Love, Germany stood by and let the infamous tale of lust and rapine and murder be told to its end. The Turks had planned to exterminate the whole Armenian race except some half-million, who would be deported penniless to work on agricultural developments under German rule, but this quality of Turkish mercy was too strained for Major Pohl, who proclaimed that it was a mistake to spare so many. But he was a soldier, and did not duly weigh the claims of agriculture.

The choice was open to Germany; Germany chose, and let the Armenian massacres go on. But she was in a difficulty. What if the Turkish Government retorted (perhaps it did so retort), 'You are not consistent. Why do you mind about the slaughter of a few Armenians? What about Belgium and your atrocities there?'

And all the ingenuity of the Wilhelmstrasse would not be able to find an answer to that.

I do not say that Germany wanted the massacres, for she did not. She wanted more agricultural labour, and I think that, if only for that reason, she deprecated them. But she allowed them to go on when it was in her power to stop them, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash clean her hand from that stinking horror.

Here, then, are some of the problems which those who, at the end of the war, will have to deal with the problem of Turkey must tackle. It is just as well to recognise that at the present moment Turkey is virtually and actually a German colony, and the most valuable colony that Germany has ever had. It will not be enough to limit, or rather abolish, the supremacy of Turkey over aliens and martyrised peoples; it will be necessary first to abolish the supremacy of Germany over Turkey. To do this the victory of our Allied Nations must be complete, and Germany's octopus envelopment of Turkish industries severed. Otherwise we shall immediately be confronted with a Germany that already reaches as far as Mesopotamia. That is done now; and that, before there can come any permanent peace for Europe, must be undone. Nothing less than the complete release of that sucker and tentacle embrace will suffice.

NOTE

As throwing a sidelight on the German complicity in the Armenian massacres, the following is of interest. It is known that when Metternich succeeded Wangenheim as German Ambassador in Constantinople, he brought with him a speech, written in Berlin, which, by the Kaiser's orders, he was to read when presenting his credentials to the Sultan. This contained a sentence which implied that Germany had been unable to stop the Armenian massacres. Talaat refused to allow the speech to be read, obviously because it threw the responsibility of the massacres on to the Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was that they took place with the connivance and even at the instigation of the Germans. Eventually a compromise was arrived at, and the speech in toto was read privately, the part referring to the Armenian massacre not being published.... It is a pity that Germany is always found out....



Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VI

'THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED'

Let us commit the crime of lese-majeste, and assume (though the Emperor Wilhelm II. has repeatedly announced the contrary) that Germany is not at the conclusion of the European War to find herself in possession of the world. She has prepared her plans in anticipation of the auspicious event; in fact she has had a most interesting map of Europe produced which, except by its general shape, is scarcely recognisable. The printing of it, it is true, was a little premature, for it shows what Europe was to have been like in 1916, and the apportionments are not borne out by facts. But assuming that there is some radical error about it all from her point of view, and assuming that there will not be either a conclusive peace favourable to Prussian interests, or even an inconclusive peace, but one in which the Allies will be able to dictate and enforce their own terms, the magnitude of the problems that will await their decision may well appal the most ingenious of their statesmen. And of all those problems none, it is safe to prophesy, will be found more difficult of solution than that which will deal with the future of the corrupt and barbarous Government which has for centuries made hell of the Ottoman Empire. We know more or less what will happen to Alsace and Lorraine, to Belgium, to the Trentino, because in those cases the claims of one or other of our Allies to demand a particular settlement are quite certain to be agreed to by those not so immediately and vitally concerned. But in the Balkans these problems will be more complicated because of conflicting interests, and most complicated of all will they be in Turkey. One thing, however, is certain, that there can be no going back to the conditions that existed there before the war.

Ever since the Osmanlis came out of remoter Asia into the Nearer East and into Europe, the government of their Empire has gone from bad to worse. In the early days, as we have seen, their policy was to absorb the strength of their subject peoples by incorporating the youth of them into the Turkish army, by giving them Turkish wives, and by converting them to Mohammedanism. Such was the foundation of the Empire and such its growth. But having absorbed their strength, the Sultan's Government neglected them until they milked them again. They were allowed to prosper if they could: all that was demanded of them was a toll of their strength. They were cattle, and for the right to graze on Turkish lands they paid back a pail of their milk of manhood. But an empire founded on such principles contains within it active and prolific seeds of decay, and, as we have seen, more stringent measures had to be resorted to in order to preserve the supremacy of the ruling people. Instead of absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. And the policy set on foot by him was developed but a few years ago into a scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity has far surpassed the killings of Attila, of whom the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs of the deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, with the exception of such part of it as has escaped into Russian territory, has been exterminated, and similar measures have been planned and indeed begun, against the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Jews.

In consequence of this, in consequence also of the European War, the policy of the Balance of Power as regards Turkey has been at length abandoned. The Allies have definitely declared in their joint note to President Wilson their aims in the war, and for those they have pledged themselves to fight until final and complete victory wreathes their arms. Among these aims are:—

(1) The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks.

(2) The expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilisation.

For a century that most inharmonious of orchestras called the Concert of Europe has, owing to the exigencies of the Balance of Power, kept Turkey together, and in particular has maintained the centre of its government at Constantinople simply because the Balance of Power would be upset if anybody else held the key of the straits that separate Russia from the Mediterranean. England, above all others, was instrumental in preserving that precarious Balance, and England now must confess the utter failure of her policy there throughout a century. It is humiliating to acknowledge the complete collapse of that which for so many decades has been the keystone of our ruling with regard to our Eastern Empire, but the arch has collapsed; Germany pulled the keystone out, and all our efforts to exclude Russia from free access to the Mediterranean have only resulted in letting Germany in. To-day she holds Constantinople, and the bitter pill must be swallowed. The situation, as it stands at this moment, is infinitely worse than it could have been for a century back, if at any moment during those hundred years we had done what we always ought to have done, and declared that the anachronism of Turkey being in Europe was more intolerable than anything that could happen in consequence of her expulsion. But we have acknowledged that now. We have also acknowledged the even greater anachronism of Turkey being allowed to dispose of the destinies of any of those peoples who inhabit the territories of the Ottoman Empire, for the Allies, in their joint Note, have declared that the remedy of these two monstrous abuses forms an essential part of their aim in the war, which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years. And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople and the subject peoples of the Turks will have passed from the yoke of that murderous tyranny for ever.

We will take these two avowed aims of the Allies in order, and first try to draw (though with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will be the confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we pluck the fruits of the great crusade against the barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is quite useless to attempt to keep the map as it was, and peg out claims within the Empire where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks and Armenians shall live in peace, for it is exactly that plan which has formed a century's failure. At the International Congress of Berlin, for instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the Armenian vilayets. She carried out her promise by slaughtering every Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them. The soi-disant protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations, which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of covenants with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to repeat such outrages: the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, ipso facto, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of whom such a province is placed.

The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at first appear. We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view. Even the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity of similar adjustments made by the Concert of Europe during the last hundred years. The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and finally abolishing that: they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity, they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began, and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or other of the allied nations. In most cases we shall find that there is a protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and independent provinces.

The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it. If the reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a million. In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were largely instrumental in butchering them. Their lands have been appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.

Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The robber-tenants must be evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated. Without exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the pursuing Turks and Kurds. Naturally, this remnant of a people will not nearly suffice to fill their entire province, but in order to satisfy the claims of justice at all adequately, the whole district of Armenia, as Armenia was known before its people were exterminated, must be amputated by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Empire and placed, in an autonomous condition in a new protected province, which will include all the vilayets of Armenia.

There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done, and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their aims in the war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries of fiendish oppression. With facilities given them for their re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will, beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds. As a nation they are, as we have seen, partly agricultural in their pursuits; but a considerable proportion of them (and these the more intelligent) are men of business, merchants, doctors, educationalists, and gravitate to towns. Constantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them again, where lately they numbered nearly as many as the entire remnant of their nation numbers now; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia in the New Turkey which we are attempting to sketch. They will probably not care to settle in the towns and districts that will remain in the hands of their late oppressors and murderers.

In the work of their repatriation none will be more eager to help than the American missionaries, who, at the time of the last massacre, as so often before, showed themselves so nobly disregardant of all personal danger and risk in doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and who have explicitly declared their intention of resuming their work. With regard to the eviction of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be remembered that the Kurd is a trespasser on the plains and towns of Armenia, and properly belongs to the mountains from which he was encouraged to descend by the Turks for purposes of massacre. Out of those towns and plains he must go, either into the mountains of Armenia from whence he came, or over the frontier of Armenia into the New Turkey presently to be defined. He must, in fact, be deported, though not in the manner of the deportations at which he himself so often assisted.

The Armenians who will thus be reinstated within the boundaries of their own territory, will be practically penniless and without any of the means or paraphernalia of life, and the necessary outlay on supplies for them, and the cost of their rehabilitation would naturally fall on the protecting Power. They will, however, be free from the taxes they have hitherto paid to the Turks, and it should not be difficult for them by means of taxes far less oppressive, to pay an adequate interest on the moneys expended on them. These would thus take the form of a very small loan, the whole of which could easily be repaid by the Armenians in the course of a generation or so. Once back on their own soil, and free from Turkish tyranny and the possibility of it, they are bound to prosper, even as they have prospered hitherto in spite of oppressions and massacres up till the year 1915, when, as we have seen, the liberal and progressive Nationalists organised and executed the extermination from which so few escaped.

It is hardly necessary to point out who the protecting Power would be in the case of the repatriated Armenians, for none but Russia is either desirable or possible. With one side along the Russian frontier of Trans-Caucasia, the New Armenia necessarily falls into the sphere of Russian influence.

It has been suggested that not only Armenia proper, but part of Cilicia should also become a district of the repatriated Armenians, with an outlet to the sea. But while it is true that complete compensation would demand this, since Zeitun and other districts in Cilicia were almost pure Armenian settlements, I cannot think that such a restoration is desirable. For, in the first place, the extermination of the Zeitunlis (as carried out by Jemal the Great) was practically complete. All the men were slaughtered, and it does not seem likely that any of the women and girls who were deported reached the 'agricultural colony' of Deir-el-Zor in the Arabian desert. It is therefore difficult to see of whom the repatriation would consist. In the second place, the New Armenia will be for several generations to come of an area more than ample for all the Armenians who have survived the flight into Russia, and it obviously will give them the best chance of corporate prosperity, if the whole of them are repatriated in a compact body rather than that a portion of them should be formed into a mere patch severed from their countrymen by so large a distance. Another sphere of influence also will be operating near the borders of Cilicia, and to place the Armenians under two protecting Powers would have serious disadvantages. In addition they never were a sea-going people, and I cannot see what object would be served by giving them a coast-board. In any case, if a coast-board was found necessary, the most convenient would be the coast-board of the Black Sea, lying adjacent to their main territory.

If it seems clear that for New Armenia the proper protecting Power is Russia, it is no less clear that for the freed inhabitants of New Syria, Arabs and Greeks alike, the proper protecting Power is France. Historically France's connection with Syria dates from the time of the Crusades in 1099; it has never been severed, and of late years the ties between the two countries have been both strengthened and multiplied. The Treaties of Paris, of London, of San Stefano, and of Berlin have all recognised the affiliation; so, too, from an ecclesiastical standpoint, have the encyclicals of Leo XIII. in 1888 and 1898. Similarly, it was France who intervened in the Syrian massacres of 1845, who landed troops for the protection of the Maronites in 1860, and established a protectorate of the Lebanon there a few years later, which lasted up till the outbreak of the European War. France was the largest holder, as she was also the constructor, of Syrian railways, and the harbour of Beirut, without doubt destined to be one of the most flourishing ports of the Eastern Mediterranean, was also a French enterprise. And perhaps more important than all these, as a link between Syria and France, has been the educational penetration which France has effected there. What the American missionaries did for Armenia, France has done for Syria, and according to a recent estimate, of the 65,000 children who attended European schools throughout Syria, not less than 40,000 attended French schools. When we consider that that proportion has been maintained for many years in Syria, it can be estimated how strong the intellectual bond between the Syrian and the French now is. The French language, similarly, is talked everywhere: it is as current as is modern Greek in ports of the Levant.

In virtue of such claims few, if any, would dispute the title of France to be the protecting Power in the case of Syria. Here there will not be, as was the case with the Armenians, any work of repatriation to be done. Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot, and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.

It will be with regard to the geographical limits of a French protectorate that most difficulty is likely to be experienced; there will also be points claiming careful solution, as will be seen later, with regard to railway control. Northwards and eastwards the natural delimitations seem clear enough: northwards French Syria would terminate with, and include, the province of Aleppo, eastwards the Syrian desert marks its practical limits, the technical limit being supplied by the course of the Euphrates. But southwards there is no such natural line of demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence. Inset into this long strip of territory lies Palestine.

Now to make one single French protectorate over this very considerable territory seems at first sight a large order, but the objections to any other course are many and insuperable. Should the line of French influence be drawn farther north than the Hedjaz, under what protection is the intervening territory to be left? At present it is Turkish, but inhabited by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the fulness of their declaration not to leave alien peoples under the 'murderous tyranny' of the Turks, Turkish it cannot remain. But both by geographical situation and by racial interest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, and there seems no answer to the question as to what sphere of influence it comes under if not under the French. Just as properly, if we take this view of the question, the Sinaitic Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to Egypt, the French protectorate being defined westwards at Akabah. That the Eastern side of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the same control as the Western has always been an anomaly, admitted even by the sternest opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the absence of any canal corresponding to that of Suez, and debouching into the Red Sea via the Gulf of Akabah, the most advanced champion of French influence in the Near East would see no objection to this rectified frontier. There is no question of competition involved. The proposed change is but a rational rectification of the present status.

This scheme of delimitation leaves Palestine inset into the French protectorate of Syria, and it is difficult to see to whom the protectorate of Palestine should be properly assigned except to France. Italy has no expansive ambitions in that sector of the Mediterranean; England's national sphere of influence in this partition of the districts now occupied by alien peoples in the Ottoman Empire lies obviously elsewhere; and since the Jews, who settled in ever-increasing numbers in Palestine before the war, and will assuredly continue to settle there again, come and will come as refugees from the Russian Pale, it would be clearly inadvisable to assign to Russia the protectorate of her own refugees. The only other alternative would be to create an independent Palestine for the Jews, and the reasons against that are overwhelming. It would be merely playing into the hands of Germany to make such an arrangement. For the last thirty years Germany has watched with personal and special interest this immigration of Jews into Palestine, seeing in it not so much a Jewish but a German expansion. Indeed, when, in the spring of this year, as we have noticed, a massacre and deportation of Jews was planned and begun by Jemal, Germany so far reversed her usual attitude towards massacres in general, and her expressed determination never to interfere in Turkey's internal affairs, as to lodge a peremptory protest, and of course got the persecution instantly stopped. Her reason was that Pan-Turkish 'ideals' (the equivalent for the massacre of alien people) had no sort of meaning in Palestine. But the Pan-Germanic ideals had a great deal of meaning in Palestine, as Dr. Davis Treitsch (Die Jueden der Tuerkei) very clearly states. For 'as a result of the war,' he tells us, 'there will be an emigration of East-European Jews on an unprecedented scale ... the disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany (and) Germans will be only too glad to find a way out in the emigration of those Jews to Turkey, a solution extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all three [sic] parties concerned. There are grounds for talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry.'

Now this is explicit enough; Germany clearly contemplated a protectorate over Palestine, and if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are left independent, there is nothing more certain than that, after the war, her penetration of Palestine will instantly begin. These colonists are, and will be, in want of funds for the development and increase of their cultivated territories, and when we consider the names of the prominent financiers in the Central Empires, Mendelssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid, Bleichroeder, Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in much doubt as to the quarter from which that financial assistance will be forthcoming, on extremely favourable terms. It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during the twenty or twenty-five years before the war, and strong as is the spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet number more than about 120,000, nor have they under crops more than ten per cent. of the cultivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but settlers, and their work is before them. If left without a protectorate they will not be without a protectorate long, but not such an one as the Allies desire. A protectorate there must be, and no reason is really of weight against that protectorate being French. Let that, then, extend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, and from Alexandretta to where the Hedjaz already prospers in its self-proclaimed independence. It will be completely severed from Turkey by tracts under protection of one or other of the Allied Powers, any expedition through which would be an act of war.

The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French protectorate: it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia. Just as no other Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India, and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost, by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen, England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers. Even Germany, in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right—she usually is right in these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical—for she seems dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she guessed it: I only guess that she guessed it.

This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Northern Mesopotamia, as Dr. Rohrbach points out in his Bagdadbahn, needs only the guarantee of security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under a protectorate that insures them against massacre and confiscation of property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread and something of the ancient prosperity return. The land is immensely fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life. The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.

But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally different proposition. The land lies low between the rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility, yields under present conditions but a precarious livelihood to its sparse population. For nine months of the year it is a desert, for three months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. Once, as we all know, it was the very heart of civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out the life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarcely existent, any more than it is existent in Southern or Upper Egypt; but in the days of Babylon the Great there were true rulers and men of wisdom over these desiccated regions, who saw that every drop of water in the river, that now pours senselessly through swamp and desert into the sea, was a grain of corn or a stalk of cotton. They dug canals, they made reservoirs, and harnessed like some noble horse of the gods the torrents that now gallop unbridled through dreary deserts. The black land, the Sawad, was then the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen the might of Babylon, and for centuries later, while the canals still regulated the water supply, it remained the granary of the world. More than a thousand years after Herodotus there were over 12,500,000 acres in cultivation, and the husbandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab invasion, which was bad enough, but colossally worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 'a fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.'

But the potentiality for production of that great alluvial plain is not diminished; the Turks could not dispose of that by massacre, as a means of weakening the strength of their subject peoples. It is still there, ready to respond to the spell of the waters of Tigris and Euphrates, which once, when handled and controlled, caused it to be the Garden of the Lord.

Not long before the present European War Sir William Willcocks, under whose guidance the great modern irrigation works at Assouan were constructed, was appointed adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his report on the Irrigation of Mesopotamia was issued in 1911. He tells us that the whole of this delta of the Sawad is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. It would naturally be a gigantic scheme, and he takes as a basis to start on the question of the refertilisation of 4,000,000 acres. Into the details of it we need not go, but his conclusions, calculated on a thoroughly conservative basis, give the following results. He proposes to restore, of course with modern technical improvements, the old system of canals, and, allowing for interest on loans, estimates the total expense at L26,000,000 (or the cost of the war for about three days). On this the annual value of the crops would pay 31 per cent. The figures need no enlargement in detail and no comment.

But now comes the difficulty: the construction of the irrigation works is easy, the profits are safe so long as the Tigris and 'the ancient river,' the river Euphrates, run their course. But all the irrigation works in the world will not raise a penny for the investor or a grain for the miller unless there are men to sow and gather the crops. A million are necessary: where are they to come from? And the answer is 'Egypt and India.'

This is precisely why the protectorate of Mesopotamia and its future must be in English hands, why no other country can undertake it with hope of success. Even the ingenious Dr. Rohrbach, whose Bagdadbahn I have quoted before, is forced to acknowledge that there is no solution to the man-power problem except by the 'introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail.' It is true that he starts upon the assumption that Mesopotamia will remain Turkish (under a German protectorate, as we read between his lines), with which we must be permitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite correct. Even under German protection he realises that citizens of well-governed states will not flock by the million to put themselves under Turkish control, and he dismisses as inadequate the numbers of Syrians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews who can be transported to Mesopotamia from inside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Their numbers are even more inadequate since the Armenian massacres permitted by Dr. Rohrbach's Fatherland, and even he cannot picture a million of his own countrymen forsaking the beer-gardens for summers in the Sawad. He does not positively state our answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned before, I think he guesses it. His prophetic gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let him state the glorious future, when India and Egypt shall become German, but that, I feel sure, is his vision: 'he sees it, but not now; he beholds it, but not nigh.'

But we can give the answer which he does not quite like to state, since for the English it is clearly more easily realisable. The native labour we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty. But no Power except England can furnish it. And that, I submit, is the solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the world. And I cannot do better, in trying to convey the spirit in which this work of reclamation should be undertaken, than by quoting some very noble words from Sir William Willcocks's report, in which he speaks of the desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked stewardship.

'The last voyage I made before coming to this country was up the Nile from Khartoum to the Equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and forbidding region I was filled with pride to think I belonged to a race whose sons, even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the face of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees and new agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the conditions of life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I have felt, if in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract in the world, I had thought that I was the scion of a race in whose hands God has placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months of the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make can be too great to roll away the reproach of those parched and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven.'

But the harvests of Mesopotamia, when gathered in, must needs be transported, and for that railways are necessary. Water transport would, of course, carry them easily down to the Persian Gulf, but the supply will be mainly, if not wholly, wanted westwards, and it must be conveyed to the shores of the Mediterranean. Already, in preparation for world-conquest, Germany has proceeded far with her construction of the Bagdad Railway, which was intended, after her absorption of Turkey, to link up Berlin with her next Oriental objective, namely, India; the Taurus has been tunnelled, the Euphrates bridged, and but for a hiatus of a few miles the line is practically complete from Constantinople into Northern Mesopotamia. But its route was chosen for German strategic reasons, for the linking up of Berlin with Constantinople and Bagdad. This, it may be permitted to say, does not form part of the schemes of the Allies: it is to snap rather than weld such links that they have taken the field. What we want in the matter of railway transport for the harvests of Mesopotamia, and generally for our Eastern communications, is not a line that passes through Turkish and German soil, and terminates at Berlin, but one which, after the directest possible land-route, reaches the Mediterranean and terminates in suitable ports.

The reader therefore is requested to unthink the present Bagdad Railway altogether, to 'scrap' it in his mind, as it will be probably scrapped on the map, since it is utterly useless for our purposes. For taking Aleppo as (roughly) the half-way house in the existent line, we find that the western half of it lies in Asia Minor, in territory which, as we shall see, will remain Turkish, while the eastern half of it makes a long detour instead of striking directly for Bagdad. After our experience with Turkey there is nothing less conceivable than that we should allow a single mile of our new Mesopotamia Railway to run through the territory of the Turks, for who knows that she might not (say when harvests are ripe and ready for delivery), on any arbitrary pretext, close or destroy the line, even as before now she has closed the Dardanelles? Besides, for our purposes, a line that goes to Constantinople (in whosoever hands Constantinople may be after the war) is out of the way and altogether unsuitable. Eastwards, again, from Aleppo the present Bagdad line is circuitous and indirect, admirably adapted to the German purposes for which it was constructed, but utterly unadapted to ours.

Let us then 'scrap' the existent Bagdad route altogether, and consider not what the Germans want, but what we want, which, as has been already stated, is a direct land communication with suitable Mediterranean ports. Of those there are three obvious ones, Alexandretta, Tripoli, and Beirut, of which Beirut is a long way the first in importance and potentiality of increased importance. Two possible routes therefore would seem to suggest themselves, one running from Alexandretta to Aleppo, and thence following pretty closely the course of the Euphrates till it reaches Hit, and from there striking directly to Bagdad. Aleppo is already connected with Tripoli and El Mina (the actual port of Tripoli), and also with Beirut by branch lines making a junction at Homs, and thus all those ports will be brought together on one system. But if the reader will glance at the map, he will see that by far the most direct communication with Bagdad would be to run the railway direct from there to Homs, thus making Homs rather than Aleppo the central junction of the system. From Homs lines would run northward to Aleppo, due west to Tripoli, and south-west to Beirut. Either of those routes, in any case, would be infinitely preferable to the long loop which the present Bagdad Railway traverses, as planned on German lines and for German requirements. The new railway will thus lie exclusively in territory under French and English protectorate, and will probably be their joint enterprise and property.

Prospectively then, as regards the fulfilment of the solemn pledge of the Allies to liberate subject peoples from the murderous tyranny of the Turks, we have discussed the future of Armenia, of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia. All those are well defined districts, and the demarcation of their respective protectorates should not present great difficulties. But there remains, before we pass on to the problem of Constantinople, a further district less easily defined, largely inhabited by European peoples whose liberty in the future we are pledged to secure. This is the Mediterranean coastline to the south and west of Asia Minor, the towns of which have been so extensively peopled and made prosperous by Greeks and Italians. Similarly among those of our European Allies who are desirous and capable of Eastern expansion, there remains one, Italy, whose rights to partake in this Turkish partition we have not yet considered. In the shifting kaleidoscope of national war-politics, it seems at the moment of writing by no means impossible that Greece, having at length got rid of a treacherous and unstable Reuben of a monarch, may redeem her pledge to Serbia, in which case, no doubt, she too would state the terms of her desired and legitimate expansion. But these would more reasonably be concerned with the redistribution of the Balkan Peninsula, which does not come within the scope of this book, and we may prophesy without fear of invoking the Nemesis that so closely dogs the heels of seers, that Italy will legitimately claim (or perhaps has already claimed) the protectorate of this valuable littoral. Certain it is that, when peace returns, the large population of Greeks and Italians once resident (and soon again to be) on these coasts, must be given the liberty and security which they will never enjoy so long as they remain in Turkish hands, and the hands that have earned the right to be protecting Power are assuredly Italian. Along the south coast a line including the Taurus range would seem to suggest a natural frontier inland from Adana on the east to the south-west corner of Asia Minor, and from there a similar strip would pass up the coast as far as, and inclusive of, Smyrna. That at least Italy has every right to expect, and there seems no great fear that among the International Councils there will arise a dissentient voice. The inland boundary on the west coast is the difficult section of this delimitation, and into the details of that it would be both rash and inexpedient to enter.

II

We pass, then, to the second avowed object of the Allies, namely, the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman rule, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilisation. This must be taken to include not only the expulsion of the Turkish control from Thrace and Constantinople, but from the eastern side as well of the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles. At no future time must Turkey be in a position to command even partially a single yard of that momentous channel through which alone our Allies, Russia and Rumania, have access to the Mediterranean. Though this was not formally stated in the Allies' reply to President Wilson, it is clearly part and parcel of the object in view, for while the Ottoman Empire retains the smallest control on either side of either of the Straits, she is so far able to interfere in European concerns, in which she must never more have a hand. The east shore, then, of the Straits and the Sea of Marmora, as well as the west, must be under the control of a Power, or a group of Powers, not alien to Western civilisation. Germany and her allies therefore, no less than Turkey, must be excluded from the guardianship of the Straits.

As we have had previous occasion to note, this ejection of the Turkish power from Constantinople is the absolute reversal of European and, in especial, of English policy for the last hundred years. No crime that the Ottoman Government could commit, no act of barbarism, would ever persuade us to do away with the anachronism of Turkey's existence in Europe; but at last the seismic convulsion of the war has knocked this policy into a heap of disjected ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again on the old lines. For among our other avowed objects in prosecuting the war to its victorious end, we have pledged ourselves to uphold the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free economic development. But while Turkey can close the Straits at her own arbitrary will, or at the bidding of a superior and malevolent Power, and block the passage of ships from Russian and Rumanian ports into the Mediterranean, the economic development of both these countries is seriously menaced. Three times within the last six years has she exercised that right, and while she holds the shores of the Straits she can at any moment blockade all southern Russian ports. That such power should be in the hands of any nation is highly undesirable; that it should be in the hands of a corrupt despotism like Turkey, especially now that Germany, as things stand, can dictate to Turkey when and what she pleases, is a thing unthinkable by the most improvident of statesmen. Already we have paid dearly enough for the pusillanimity of a hundred years: it is impossible that we should ever allow a similar bill to be again presented. Whatever be the guardianship of the Straits, whoever the holder of Constantinople, it will not be Turkey.

At the beginning of the war, and indeed till after the revolution in Russia, it was announced and stated as an axiom that on the conclusion of peace, Russia should be the door-keeper of what after all is her own lodge-gate. Subsequently, in the unhappy splits and disintegration of her Government, it was announced that she favoured peace without annexation—in other words, that she neither claimed nor desired the guardianship of Constantinople. But I think we should be utterly wrong if we regarded that as an expression of the will of the Russian people: it is far more probable that it was the expression of the will of Germany, directly inspired by German influence with a view to concluding a separate peace with Russia. As we have seen, it had its due effect in Turkey, and Talaat Bey gave vent to pious ejaculations of thanksgiving, that now all cause of quarrel with Russia was removed, and Turkey and she could be friends. It is possible that when out of the confused cries there again rises from Russia the clear call of the people's voice, we shall find her wishing to set in order her own house before she projects herself on new missions, but, as far as the manifesto of 'peace without territorial annexation' goes, we shall be wise to regard it for the present with the profoundest suspicion. It sounds far more like the tones of the Central European wolf than those of Little Red Riding Hood's proper grandmother.

But be Russia's decision what it may, the Turk will hold sway no longer in Thrace or Constantinople, or on the shores of the Straits of the Sea of Marmora. There is, of course, no question of deporting the whole of the Turkish population that lives in those regions, nor would it be desirable, even if it were possible, to realise Gladstone's robust vision of seeing every Turk, 'bag and baggage,' clear out from the provinces they have desolated and profaned. But if not under Russia, then under the joint control of certain of the Allied Powers there will be a complete reconstruction of the administration of those districts. The headquarters of the protectorate will doubtless be at Constantinople, which will be reorganised somewhat on the lines of the Treaty Port of Shanghai, and will be open to the ships of all nations. The security of the town must be assured by a military garrison either of mixed troops of the controlling nations, or possibly by a rotation of troops drawn from the armies of each in turn. More important even than this will be the adequate control of the Straits by sea. A naval base must be formed, which by the gospel of the freedom of the seas (but not according to St. Goeben and the submarine disciples) will constitute a patrolling police force of the waters. Whether the system of fortifications and defences that lately rendered the Dardanelles impregnable shall be retained or not is a question demanding the most careful consideration. Some will hold that they should be maintained in order to insure that none but the guarantors of the freedom of the Straits shall ever take possession of them: others that they shall be utterly dismantled and destroyed, so that the closing of the Straits shall be an impossibility. The matter really turns on the question as to the extent to which the Allies will have the prudence to cut Germany's claws when the war is over. It is eminently to be hoped that they will be cut so short that never again will they be able to show those chiselled talons beyond her velvet—that sense, in fact, will allow sentiment no word to say. Unfortunately, there are a great many people the basis of whose character consists of a washy confidence in the good intentions of everybody. Most mistakenly they call it Christianity.

Here, then, has been outlined the effect of the Allies' declared aims. Such territories as Turkey holds in Europe, such control as she possesses over the free passage of the Straits must pass from her, and the alien peoples, who for centuries have fainted and bled underneath her infamous yoke, must be led out of the land of bondage. As we have seen throughout preceding chapters, it was the fixed policy of the Ottoman Government to rid itself of their presence, and already it has gone far in its murderous mission. Indeed the avowed aims of the Allies, when accomplished, will do that work for her, for the Allies are determined to remove those peoples from Turkey. The difference of execution, however, consists in this, that they will not remove Arabs and Greeks and Italians and Jews, as Turkey has already done with the Armenians by the simple process of massacres, but by a process no less simple, namely, of taking out of the territories of the Ottoman Empire the districts where such peoples dwell. The Allies will accomplish, in fact, for the Turks that policy of Ottomanisation which was the aim of Abdul Hamid, and has been the aim of his more murderous successors. Turkey shall henceforth be for the Turks: she shall no more be in 'danger' from the defenceless nations, who at present exist within her borders. The Sultan of Turkey, in some year of grace now not far distant, will find that his Ottomanisation has been done for him, and, though his realm is curtailed, he will have his rest broken no more by the thought of Arab risings, nor will he have to devise measures that will solve the Arab question. Except for a strip along the west and south coast, all Asia Minor and Anatolia will be his from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, but Syria, Armenia, the coast of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Mesopotamia shall have passed from him. It is no dismemberment of an Empire that the Allies contemplate, for they cannot dismember limbs that never belonged to the real trunk. It was a despotic military control that the Osmanlis had established, they always regarded their subject peoples as aliens, whom they did not scruple to destroy if they exhibited symptoms of progress and civilisation. Henceforth the Turkish Government shall govern Turks, and Turks alone. That for many years has been its aim, and, by the disastrous dispensation of fate, it has been largely able to realise its purpose. Now, though by different methods, the Allies will see thorough accomplishment of it. There will be no question, of course, of turning out or of deporting Turks who live in Syria, in Armenia, in Constantinople, for the ways of the Allies are not those of Talaat and Enver and Jemal the Great. Where to-day Turks dwell, there shall they continue to dwell, but they must dwell there in peace in equal liberties and rights with the once-subject peoples whom the Allies shall have delivered. If they do not like that they can migrate, not by forced marches and under the guardianship of murderous Kurds, but in protection and security, to the lands where they can still enjoy the beneficent sway of their own governors, and be Ottomanised to the top of their bent. But Syrians and Armenians and Greeks and Jews will be Ottomanised no longer.

The Turk was always a fighter, disciplined and courageous, and he has never lost that virtue of valour. But he has been a fighter because he has always lived under a military despotism which demanded his services, and it is much to be doubted whether his qualities in this regard will for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who, when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. And for their lords and governors, who, until Prussia assumed command of the Turkish armies, there will no longer be either the possibility of further conquests as in the old Osmanli days, or, in less progressive times, the necessity for securing Ottoman supremacy over the huge ill-knit lands which it governed. But now, instead of having alien and defenceless tribes within their borders, tribes forbidden to bear arms and chafing at the Turkish yoke, they will see free peoples under the protectorates of Powers that are capable of self-defence and, if necessary, of inflicting punishment. Russia, France, England, Italy, all allied nations, will be established in close proximity to the Turkish frontiers, and the New Turkey will be as powerless for aggression as she will be for defence, should she provoke attack. But within their borders there may the Osmanlis dwell secure and undisturbed, so long as they conform to the habits of civilised people with regard to their neighbours, and it is a question whether, now that the military despotism which has always misguided the fortunes of this people, has no possible fields for conquest, and no need of securing security, the nation will not settle down into the quiet existence of small neutral countries. Perhaps the last chapter of its savage and blood-stained history is already almost finished, and in years to come some little light of progress and of civilisation may be kindled in the abode where the household gods for centuries have been cruelty and hate.



Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VII

THE GRIP OP THE OCTOPUS

It will not be sufficient for the fulfilment of the Allies' aims as regards Turkey to free from her barbarous control the subject peoples dwelling within her borders, for Turkey herself has to be delivered from a domination not less barbaric than her own, which, if allowed to continue, would soon again be a menace to the peace of the world. We have seen in a previous chapter how deeply set in her are Germany's nippers, how closely the octopus-embrace envelops her, and we now have to consider how those tentacles must be unloosed from their grip, and what will be the condition of the victim, already bled white, when that has been done. In the beginning, as we have seen, Germany obtained her hold by professing a touchingly beautiful and philanthropic desire to help Turkey to realise her national ideals, and her Pecksniffs, Tekin Alp and Herr Ernst Marre, were bidden to write parallel histories, the one describing the aims of the Nationalist party, the other the benevolent interest which Germany took in them. Occasionally Herr Ernst Marre could not but remember that he was a German, and permitted us to see the claws of the cat, without quite letting it out of the bag, but then he pulled the strings tight again, and only loud comfortable purrings could be heard, the Prussian musings over the 'liberation' of Turkey which she was helping to accomplish. But nowadays, so it seems to me, the strings have been loosened, and the claws and teeth are clearly visible. It is not so long since Dr. Schnee, Governor of German East Africa, sent a very illuminating document to Berlin from which I extract the following:—

'Do you consider it possible to make a regulation prohibiting Islam altogether? The encouragement of pig-breeding among natives is recommended by experts as an effective means of stopping the spread of Islam....'

That seems clear enough, and I can imagine Talaat Bey, with his sword of honour in his hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in Alice in Wonderland:—

'After such kindness that would be A dismal thing to do.'

But I am afraid that Germany is contemplating (as indeed she has always done) a quantity of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, beginning to let them appear. She has taken the Turkish oysters out for a nice long walk, and when the war is over she proposes to sit down and eat them. And did she not also interfere in the affair of Jewish massacres and declare that 'Pan-Turkish ideals have no sort of meaning in Palestine'? That must have been almost an unfriendly act from Turkey's point of view, for it cannot be stated too clearly that part of the price which Germany paid for Turkey's entry on her side into the war, was the liberty, as far as Germany was concerned, of managing her internal affairs, massacres and the rest, as best suited the damnable doctrines of Ottomanisation. The other Powers could not interfere, for they failed to force the Dardanelles, and Germany promised not to. That promise, of course, was binding on Germany for just so long as it suited her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on the whole, during the Armenian massacres. And in that matter her refusal to interfere is, among all her crimes, the very flower and felicity of her vileness.

Signs are not wanting that Turkey is beginning to realise the position in which she has placed herself, namely, that of a bankrupt dependant at the mercy of a nation to whom that quality is a mere derision. Lately a quantity of small incidents have occurred, such as disputes over the ownership of properties financed by Germany and the really melodramatic depreciation in the German coinage, which unmistakably show the swift ebb of Turkey's misplaced confidence. More significant perhaps than any is a transaction that took place in May 1917, when Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha took the whole of their private fortunes out of the Deutsche Bank in Constantinople, and invested them in two Swiss banks, namely, the Banque Nationale de Suisse, and the Banque Federale: they drew out also the whole funds of the Committee of Union and Progress, and similarly transferred them. This operation was not effected without loss, for in return for the Turkish L1 they received only thirteen francs. But it is significant that they preferred to lose over fifty per cent. of their capital, and have the moiety secure in Switzerland to leaving it in Constantinople.[1] It is certain therefore that at both ends of the scale a distrust of German management has begun. A starving population has wrecked trains loaded with food-stuffs going to Germany, and at the other end the men with the swords of honour and dishonour deem it wise to put their money out of reach of the great Prussian cat. That the Germans themselves are not quite at their ease concerning the security of their hold may also be conjectured, for they are, as far as possible, removing Turkish troops from Constantinople, and replacing them with their own regiments. An instance of this occurred in June 1917, when, owing to the discontent in the capital, it was found necessary to guard bridges, residences of Ministers, and Government offices. But instead of recalling Turkish troops from Galicia to do this, they kept them there in the manner of hostages, mixed up in German regiments, and sent picked bodies of German troops to Constantinople. Fresh corps of secret police have also been formed to suppress popular manifestations. They are allowed to 'remove' suspects by any means they choose, quite in the old style of bag and Bosporus, but the organisation of them is German. And well may the German Government distrust those signs of popular discontent in a starving population: already the people have awoke to the fact that the German paper money does not represent its face-value, and, despite assurances to the contrary, it is at a discount scarcely credible. Three German L1 notes are held even in Constantinople to be the equivalent of a gold L1, while in the provinces upwards of five are asked for, and given, in exchange for one gold pound. It is in vain that German manifestoes are put forth declaring that all Government offices will take the notes as an equivalent for gold, for what the people want is not a traffic with Government offices, but the cash to buy food. Even more serious is the fact that Austrian and Hungarian directors of banks will no longer accept these scraps of paper. In vain, too, is it that the hungry folk see the walls of the 'House of Friendship' rise higher and higher in Constantinople, for every day they see with starving eyes the trains loaded with sugar from Konia, and the harvests raised in Anatolia with German artificial manures guarded by German troops and rolling westwards to Berlin. According to present estimates the harvest this year is so vastly more abundant than that of previous years, that no comparison, as the Minister of Agriculture tells his gratified Government, is possible. But the poorer classes get no more than the leavings of it when the armies, which include the German army, have had their wants supplied. The governing classes, whom it is necessary to feed, are not yet suffering, for the Germans grant them enough, issuing rations to such families as are proved adherents of the German-Turkish combination, and until the pinch of want attacks them we should be foolishly optimistic if we thought that a starving peasantry would cause the collapse or the defection of Germany's newest and most valuable colony. There is enough discontent to make Germany uneasy, but that is all.[2] Long ago she proved the efficiency of her control, and the successful pulling of her puppet-strings, and no instance of that is more complete than the brief story of Yakub Jemil and the extinction of him and his party, which, though it happened a full year ago, has only lately been completely transmitted. Yakub Jemil was an influential commander of a frontier guard near the Black Sea coast. In July 1916 he went to Constantinople, accompanied by his staff (which included the informant from whom this account is derived), and, being cordially received by Enver and Talaat, discussed the situation with them. He pointed out the demoralising effect of the Armenian massacres, and the danger of Jemal the Great's attitude towards the Arabs in Syria, realising, and seeking to make them realise, the stupendous folly of making enemies of the subject peoples, and urging the re-establishment of cordial relations between the Turks and them. That, considering that Enver and Talaat were responsible (under the Germans) for the Armenian massacres, was a brave outspeaking. He went on to say that Turkey was at war not on behalf of herself, but on behalf of Germany, and that it would be wise of the Government to consider the possibility of a separate peace with the Powers of the Entente. He was heard with interest, and took his leave. He remained in Constantinople, and his views obtained him many adherents, not only among Turkish officers whose sympathies were already alienated from Germany, but among members of the Committee of Union and Progress. But before long his adherents began to disappear, and he asked for another interview with Talaat. He was received, as the informant states, 'with open arms,' for Talaat seized and held him, called for the guard, and he was searched, and on him were found certain documents which proved him to hold the views he had already expressed. That now, was enough. He was 'interrogated' for two days (interrogation is otherwise called torture), and was then hanged. Subsequently 111 officers and men in the army also disappeared. Some were marched into the Khiat Khana Valley, opposite Pera, and were stabbed: others were sent under escort to the provinces and murdered. No courts-martial of any kind were held.