Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

II.—RETROSPECTIVE

Did any one dream, then, what was to be? Yet one might have known. It was not a question of courage or endurance. Nobody, after the first surprise, doubted that. The famous hordes of Asia—they were indeed just such soldiers as followed Attila and Tamerlane, and the roving horseman who founded the house of Osman. That was the trouble with them. They had not learned that courage and endurance are not enough for modern warfare. All Europeans who have dealings with the Turk know that he is the least businesslike of men. He is constitutionally averse to order, method, promptness, discipline, responsibility. Numbers and calculations are beyond him. It is impossible to imagine him as a banker, a financier, a partner in any enterprise requiring initiative or the higher organising faculties. He simply hasn’t got them, or at all events he has never developed them. Moreover, there is about him a Hamlet-like indecision which he shares with the rest of Asia. He cannot make up his mind. He waits until he is forced, and then he has usually waited too long for his own good.

I could fill pages with anecdotes that were told me before the war, illustrating the endless dilly-dallying that was an inevitable part of every army contract. Soldiers were sent to the front, in consequence, with serious deficiencies in their equipment. There were not boots enough to go around, or overcoats enough, or knapsacks enough, or tents enough. Half the navy, at the beginning of winter, was in white duck, simply because blue serge comes from England and had not been ordered in time. As for ambulances and field-hospitals, there was practically nothing of the kind. Then, although the mobilisation took place with a despatch praised by foreign critics, it became evident that trains were not getting away with anything like clockwork. Regiments left hours, in some cases days, after the time appointed. And there began very early to be rumours that all was not well with the commissariat. A soldier whom I knew wrote back from Kîrk Kil’seh, ten days before the fatal battle, that he and the members of his company lived like dogs in the street, picking up food and shelter wherever they could. We heard the same thing from San Stefano, at the very gates of the capital. And at that time the general staff of the army was quartered there. They apparently had not read, marked, and inwardly digested the opinion put forth at a memorable council of war in that very town by Enrico Dandolo, Doge of Venice, in the year of grace 1203, when he said: “For he that has supplies wages war with more certainty than he that has none.” Regiments arriving by boat were given money to supply their own wants, in the absence of any other provision for them. But the resources of a village were inadequate to feed an army, and many soldiers went hungry. Bread was accordingly baked for them in Constantinople, and continued to be throughout the war. Sometimes, however, a bread train would return to the city unloaded, because it had been nobody’s business to attend to it. And for a while small riots took place in the capital on account of the shortage in the customary supply. The thing was the more serious because bread really is the staff of life in Turkey, and no one makes his own.

In spite of so many straws to show how the wind blew—and I have said nothing about the politics that honeycombed the army, the sweeping changes of personnel that took place no more than a month or two before the war, the mistake of sending first to the front untrained reserves and recruits who had never handled a rifle till they found themselves on the battle-field—the speed with which the allies succeeded in developing their campaign must have surprised the most turcophobe European. As for the Turks themselves, they have always had a fatalistic—a fatal—belief that they will one day quit Europe. Many times before and after the decisive battles I heard the question uttered as to whether the destined day had come. But no Turk can have imagined that his army, victorious on a thousand fields, would smash to pieces at the first onslaught of an enemy inexperienced in war. They forgot that the flower of the troops of the conquering sultans came from those very Balkan mountains.

At first the truth was held back. Long after Kîrk Kil’seh and Lüleh Bourgass and the loss of Macedonia there were men in Constantinople who did not know or could not believe the facts. The case must have been true much longer in the remote corners of Asia Minor. When the truth did come out it was crushing. The Turks had been too sure. Hardly an officer had not promised his friends post-cards from Sophia or Belgrade or Cettinje or Athens. And to have been beaten by the serfs of yesterday! But I, for one, have hardly yet the heart to say they deserved it. I remember too well a bey in civil life whom I knew, whose face two weeks of the war had ravaged like a disease, and the look with which he said, when I expressed regret at the passing of some quaint Turkish custom: “Everything passes in this world.” I quite understood the Turkish girls who went away in a body from a certain international school. “We cannot bear the Bulgarians,” they said. “They look at us—” It was characteristic, however, that they presently went back. One did not like, in those days, to meet one’s Turkish friends. It was like intruding into a house of death. But in this house something more than life had been lost. And I pay my tribute to the dignity with which that great humiliation was borne.

I stood one day at a club window watching a regiment march through Pera. Two Turkish members stood near me. “Fine looking men!” exclaimed one—and he was right. “How could soldiers like that have run away?” The other considered a moment. “If we had not announced,” he replied, “that this was not a holy war, you would have seen!” I am inclined to believe that there was something in his opinion. At the time, however, it reminded me of the young man who complained that the Turks had no peace. They were no quicker to understand the causes of their defeat than they had been to understand the causes of the war.

Not long afterward I spent an evening with some humble Albanians of my acquaintance. Being in a way foreigners like myself, they could speak with more detachment of what had happened, although there was no doubt as to their loyalty to the empire. They asked my views as to the reason of the disaster. I tried, in very halting Turkish, to explain how the Turk had been distanced in the art of war and many other arts, and how war no longer required courage alone but other qualities which the Turk does not seem to possess. I evidently failed to make my idea intelligible. Having listened with the utmost politeness, my auditors proceeded to give me their own view of the case. The one who presented it most eloquently had been himself a soldier in the Turkish army. It was under the old régime, too, when men served seven and nine years. He attributed the universal rout of the Turks less to the incompetence than to the cupidity of the officers. He believed, like his companions, and I doubt if anything will ever shake their belief, that the officers, from Nazîm Pasha down, had been bribed by the allies. What other possible explanation could there be of the fact that soldiers starved amid plenty and that Mohammedans ran—saving my presence!—from Christians? As for the European ingenuities that I made so much of—the ships, the guns, the railroads, the telephones, the automobiles, the aeroplanes—why should the Turks break their heads learning to make them when they could buy them ready-made from Europe? After all, what you need in war is a heart, and not to be afraid to die. My Albanian then went on to criticise, none too kindly, the Young Turk officer. In his day, he said, most of the officers rose from the ranks. They had been soldiers themselves, they understood the soldiers, and they could bear hardship like soldiers. The Young Turks, however, had changed all that. The ranker officers had been removed to make room for young mekteblis, schoolmen, who knew nothing of their troops or of war. They knew how to wear a collar, perhaps, or how to turn up their moustaches, à la Guillaume. But they didn’t know how to march in the rain or to sleep on the ground, and when the Bulgarians fired they ran away.

I am by way of being a schoolman myself, and I blushed for my kind as I heard this tall mountaineer make our indictment. What could I answer him? I knew that in many ways he was right. The schoolmen did not understand the fighting men as the rankers had done. Then there were far too few of them—as there were too many fighting men of the kind first sent to the front, whom I saw being recruited with handcuffs. And there had not been time to establish the new order of things on a sound footing.