The Passing of the Turkish Empire in Europe

by B. Granville Baker

Of all the costly engines of war ordered and paid for, field telegraphs, field telephones, not one was in evidence. Thousands of Anatolian peasants, greybeards and youths, swelled the ranks, untrained many of them, some only used to muzzle-loading rifles. Some two hundred thousand of these men, Turkish soldiers, clung on to the lines of Chatalja; others, in thousands, stragglers from the battlefield, collected from day to day in the purlieus of Stamboul and returned unwilling to the front. Among these were even officers—an official announcement ordered the imams, the priests, to render to the military police authorities lists of all officers living in the streets of their respective districts—officers here in the capital of an Empire, the existence of which in Europe is threatened as gravely as was ever any Empire of the world, and out in the West, but fifty miles away, is the front, the line of Chatalja’s defences, result of Valentine Baker Pasha’s military skill. Impregnable, they say, are those lines, and that they would be, and will remain, if all available sons of Othman put their backs into the work. Yet there were officers and men of the Sultan’s army frittering away their time and wasting opportunities of at last doing something for the country they profess to love, here in the capital with the enemy hammering at the outer defences. And would it be believed, those lines of Chatalja, just before the debacle of Lüle Burgas, were left in charge of two men, whose function was to see that no thief removed doors, shutters, or any other portable trifles from the many Government buildings on the lines!

It is no wonder that the example set by many officers of the Sultan’s army had discouraged the troops, who, seeing everything going against them, starving, diseased, turned their weary eyes homeward to the East, to Asia, the Turk’s real home, and dragged their tired, wounded limbs over the incredibly bad roads till the soaring minarets and their rivals the cypresses, the domes of mosques built to commemorate the conquests of former warrior Osmanli, gladdened their sight. Beyond those imposing temples lay the sea, and across it, only a little way, Anatolia—Home.

Of the thousands of broken-spirited, ignorant peasant-soldiers who left their country’s colours, a term the inner meaning of which was incomprehensible to the majority of them, many fell by the way. Thousands clambered into railway trucks, on to the roofs, of any train starting for the base, and of these many died and their comrades threw them out by the way; corpses strewed the railway embankments. Many reached St. Stefano, where preliminary peace was signed after another Northern foe, Russia, had defeated the Osmanli in the field. Of these one-third, it is said, died of cholera, exposure, starvation, their festering bodies covering the pavements. Considerable numbers reached Stamboul and took refuge in the mosques, perhaps hoping that Allah might help them out of their affliction. St. Sophia was crowded with sick and despondent humanity, the flotsam and jetsam of a war of East and West: one side all unprepared, purposeless, corrupt; the other in well-ordered array, conscious of power and of purpose, and using intelligently all the dread weapons of modern warfare.

With the fugitive soldiery came columns of refugees, peasants of Thrace and Macedonia, Pomaks—Bulgarian converts to Islam; they came across the rolling plains with all their portable belongings, their trail marked by an occasional grave, by a dead horse or bullock by the roadside. These, too, sought shelter in the courtyards of the mosques; they streamed in at the City gates, chiefly Edirné Kapoo, as the Turks renamed the ancient Gate of Adrianople. I have seen them here herded without the gate awaiting admission, crowded in the courtyard of the Mosque of Mihrama, which occupies the site of a church once dedicated to St. George in the days of old Byzant.

St. George, the patron saint of warriors, was entrusted with the defence of Constantine’s City here where the Walls of Theodosius reach this highest point. A glorious view spreads at your feet from their height; past groves of solemn cypress trees, which cast their long shadows over the graves of faithful followers of the Prophet, thousands of whom in distant ages assailed the strong defences of the City, your eye travels along the hoary walls, over a ruined palace to where Galata arises beyond the Golden Horn. Forests of masts, smoke rising from the funnels of ocean-going steamers or busy ferry-boats speak of commercial activity contrasting with the Oriental repose of Stamboul at your feet. Little wooden houses, some of warm purply greys, others are painted with some bright colour; fig trees and cypresses on the rising ground towards the east, where many mosques, the only lasting monument a Turk builds, stand out above the clustering houses, their blue-grey domes crowned with gleaming crescent, light against the deep blue of the Anatolian mountains, attendant minarets a dazzling white against the southern sky. And then to southward another mosque or so with minaret and sentinel cypress, and over them the sparkling waters of the Sea of Marmora, where the Prince’s Islands seem floating in the fairy haze of a southern summer day. This was when I saw it a few short years ago; to-day the sky is grey and cloudy, the smoke hangs heavy over the leaden waters of the Golden Horn, mosques and minarets loom dark against the faint, watery outlines of the distant hills, the fig trees have shed their leaves and throw out writhing arms against winter’s inclemency, and sullen cypresses bend ungraciously before the north wind. Grey despondency is the keynote of the picture, for from the south-west and the west, and from the north-east, the foes have gathered in strength and hold Constantinople in bonds, and beyond those dark heights to westward an enemy, strong and purposeful, is demanding admission to Turkey’s last foothold in Europe.

The untidy street from Edirné Kapoo to the heart of Stamboul is punctuated here and there by mosques—there is the Mosque of Mihrama, already mentioned, where once stood a Christian church; there is the Mosque of Mohammed II the Conqueror, built on the site of a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles, for long the resting-place of those far-off Byzantine Emperors, the last of whom perished when the City fell before the sword of Othman. Around it stand the academies where are trained those destined to expound the teaching of the Prophet. Under a wintry sky, amidst the squalor of a people incapable of elementary hygiene, the glory of the Conqueror’s deeds is dimmed, and the vanquished, despondent sons of his fierce warriors huddle in groups about this monument to an epoch-making victory. The road leads for a while along an aqueduct attributed to Valens, the Emperor who was killed in battle at Adrianople by the Goths. Bulgarians are this day holding the city of Emperor Hadrian in an iron vice. Along here are other ruins, more recent, the result of a fire probably; no rebuilding has been attempted, everywhere is dirt, squalor, and decay.