Others have ingeniously endeavoured to identify the Turks with the lost “Ten Tribes”; these mysterious people have frequently been called upon to act as ancestors to modern nations. I remember well an English matron, mother of a promising family, who tried to foist this ancestry upon the people of Great Britain. However, she was advised to look at her domestic treasures, and the sight of her snub-nosed offspring seriously shook her strange belief.
Perhaps, though it seems no adequate reason, the constant infusion of fresh blood, the mixing by marriage with the women of conquered or conquerors, has prevented a national expression of sentiment based on historic facts, and the Turks, even before they emerged from distant Asia, had absorbed several other races not akin to them, or had been absorbed by some temporarily more powerful nation. There is sufficient reason to suppose that the Iranians, the original inhabitants of Bokhara, were the foundation and predominant note in the tribes which after a while became defined as Turks. The Chinese seem to have been the first to become acquainted with the Turks, and that so long ago as 1300 B.C. Chinese records of 300 B.C. mention a warlike race called Hiung-nu. Vigorous, active, restless, always on horseback, these savages hovered round the frontiers of the Celestial Empire. They were, it seems, divided into tribes, which when not acting in concert on some greater raid, probably behaved much as Scottish clans did not so long ago, and quarrelled and fought amongst each other. So it appears that a clan called the Asena sought the protection of a stronger one, which Gibbon called the Giougen, or Jwen-jwen. The Asena settled for a while in the district where now stands Shan-tan, in which district a hill called Dürkö (helmet), from its shape, is said to have originated the name “Turk.”
In course of time, about a century, the Asena began to feel their strength and tried it on their hosts, the result a massacre of Giougen and their disappearance from the pages of history. Again no epic tells us the stirring story of those days, and what is known is due to the researches of men like Chavannes and E. H. Parker. But the Turks from this time came into the field of history and into the purview of the West; they had gained in strength and importance with astounding rapidity, and were making their presence felt on the nations to westward of their former haunts. They still clung to their habits of nomadic hunters, but, it seems, engaged in trade as well, carrying goods for others in their caravans, connecting East and West with links of doubtful trustiness.
It was through this trading that they first came into contact with the Western world. Persia stood in the way of this young Turkey’s commercial development, and would insist on Turkish silks finding their outlet to the Persian Gulf rather than by the roads of the old Roman Empire of the East. Thus it came that Turkish envoys sought out Emperor Justin at Constantinople. The Emperor was somewhat chary of dealing with these strangers, but little more than half a century later Turkish warriors were assisting Heraclius against the Persians. As the Turks increased in number they felt the need of further expansion, so a section of them made its way north towards Lake Baikal and menaced China, but were subdued in 630. China then set about creating ill-feeling between the two sections of the Turkish people, the northern and the western tribes, and brought about a division which seems to have been final. In the meantime another force had arisen in Asia Minor which was destined to overrun that district, surge into Syria, conquer Egypt and the African countries washed by the Mediterranean Sea, and send its tide up against the barriers of the Pyrenees.
The Arabs had come from out of the desert and, fired by the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, had carried their green banner victorious over the ruins of former Empires. The Caliphate, the Arab Empire, grew as rapidly under the immediate successors of the Prophet as the Turkish State, if it could be so called, had done a century before. Persia went under before the furious onslaught of the Arabs in 639, and the conquerors overflowing into Transoxania had subjected the peoples living there by 714. The Arabs spread westward as well, and only forty-six years after the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, in the seventh century the Sea of Marmora was alive with the lateen sails of the swarthy marauders. They dashed out their souls against the strong defences of Constantinople, the Walls of Theodosius, in successive attempts to capture the City of fabulous wealth, but were forced to retire defeated. However, the Turks, who nearly ten centuries later broke down those stout defences, became subject to the Caliphate.
This applies to the Western Turks only; they vanished as a political entity and gradually became converted to a creed well suited to bring out the qualities of a high-spirited, martial race of nomads. It sanctified their lust of blood and conquest, and gave fuller force to this people’s fighting spirit by imposing the strict discipline of Islam, “obedience,” but made no mention of that broad tolerance breathed by the Founder of Christianity to which the West owes so much of its civilization. It is doubtful though whether those early Turkish tribes, if they had come under the influence of Christianity instead of Islam, would have advanced any further on the path of culture than they have arrived to-day. Though they have been in contact with the West since the seventh century, though they conquered the Empire of the East and made its Christian peoples their subjects, and from the City of Constantine overflowed Eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna, yet the Turk has learnt nothing. This people, still nomad, has taken nothing from the West but a misunderstood, misapplied idea of representative Government which failed at its inception and has hastened the downfall of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It has absorbed nothing but a dim idea of a military organization which when applied to a civilized, cultured nation makes for military perfection, when attempted on nomads leads to such debacles as the plains of Thessaly, the mountainous districts of Macedonia, and the stricken fields of Thrace have recently witnessed.
British naval officers have for years been acting as instructors to the Turkish Navy, which from a collection of obsolete iron tanks has to outward appearance assumed the semblance of a war fleet; left to themselves, what has that fleet done to help Turkey in her present straits? The Greek Navy is afloat and preventing transhipment of Turkish troops from Asia Minor—but the Sultan’s fleet did not move out to help! Only some mines were laid and allowed to float about the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, endangering foreign commerce from which Turkish officials indirectly draw their means of livelihood. The “Hamidieh,” her officers warned time and again to take precautions against torpedo attack, was laid up in dock with a gaping rent in her bows caused by a Bulgarian torpedo, and only the “Khairreddin Barbarossa,” named after Turkey’s greatest sailor, lying at the southern end of the lines of Chatalja, has taken any part in a war in which naval power, properly applied, could have turned the fortunes of the day.[5]
[5] Since this was written the Turkish fleet has emerged from hiding once or twice, and shown some signs of activity. Both Turks and Greeks have laid claim to victories at sea.
The sea-coast of Bulgaria lay exposed; a strong naval force to escort transport would have made practicable a landing of Turkish troops behind the enemy’s lines and threatened his communications, thus checking his advance on Adrianople. But the Turkish Navy was content to throw a few shells into a harmless convent, or monastery, at Varna. Possibly there were no transports, probably there was no definite scheme, but certainly there was no navy commensurate with the power assumed by the Osmanli in the comity of European nations.
Money was spent on the Sultan’s navy, and it failed. Money, much money, was given for the Sultan’s army. The highly trained officers, carefully selected from Europe’s most efficient military organization, were acquired as instructors, and worked hard at what must have seemed the labours of Sisyphus. The Sultan’s army took the field, and all the work of years seemed as if thrown away. Instead of military organization there was chaos. Nominal army corps with staff and commanders figured on paper. In reality commanders of army corps, divisions, brigades waited for the troop trains at wayside stations, and as each tactical unit detrained and fell in on the platforms, these commanders without commands gathered together such units as they thus found and extemporized commands. Transport failed completely, and at Rodosto men landing from Asia Minor cried for bread, hundreds strayed starving in search of food for five and six days on end, and then were driven back by cavalry into the firing line—to fight!