The street opens out on to a large square, one side of which is occupied by the Seraskierat, the War Office. From here came the order to the Sultan’s officers that they should pack up their full-dress uniforms for the triumphal entry of the Othman army into Sofia. To-day weary stragglers from the battlefields of Thrace lean against the walls of the Seraskierat, heavy-eyed, hungry, diseased, despondent. Surely there were some whose business is between these walls cognisant of the real state of affairs! It is said that of some eighteen German instructors sixteen declared the Turkish Army to be quite unfit to take the field; yet those holding office at the Seraskierat heeded not and sent hundreds of thousands in smaller tactical units, under-officered, to take what place they could in the fighting line; no scheme was ready, or if there was no one adhered to it, no adequate provision for commands and staff, for communications, for commissariat preceded the flood of miscellaneous soldiery which flowed out to meet the enemy’s advance and then ebbed back, carrying with it all the human wreckage thrown up on to the ill-kept pavements of the mosques of conquerors.
And while this mass of suffering Eastern humanity was but fitfully and quite inadequately cared for by the Turkish authorities, Western humanity was putting forth its finest efforts to alleviate this awful distress by all the means of Western civilization, against which the Turk is making his last stand. In the old Seraglio, at Galata and Pera hospitals have been opened to receive the sick and wounded soldiers of the Sultan, and they now readily make their way to where the Red Crescent flies by the side of the ensigns of Great European Powers. I know fair English women, all unused to the sights and sounds, the aftermath and echo of glorious war, who are giving all their strength to works of mercy, Germans and Austrians, French and Italians, all moved by the spirit which informs Christianity. Do they expect gratitude in return, I wonder! I hope not, for they are likely to be disappointed. One gentle lady I know of, who has worked hard amongst all this misery, asked some of her patients whether in case of a massacre of Christians they would at least protect those who had nursed them back to life. After some deliberation the answer came: “No, not that. But we would kill you first, so that you may escape torture, and worse, from others.” Again, at a meeting where many ladies were busy preparing hospital necessaries, the talk turned to the question of a massacre of Christians. A Turkish lady, a lady of high degree, turned on her fellow-workers and declared that should her people be driven to the last extremity they would certainly wreak vengeance on the Christian population, and she herself would be the first to incite them, to goad them on to murder and rapine, until the streets should run with the blood of Christians, and Christian habitations became a howling wilderness, to show a horror-stricken world in what manner a race of warriors goes out of history.
Personally I do not think any such catastrophe will happen; the Turkish soldiers I saw daily straggling into hospital are too broken in spirit, too sick in mind and body, to carry out such atrocities as those with which they have from time to time sullied the pages of their history. Nevertheless, those two accounts I have given above, of the truth of which I am convinced, prove to me that when the Turk finally leaves Europe he will take with him nothing which the West has tried to teach him, least of all any conception of the divine quality of mercy.
CHAPTER X
The Turkish character—The rise of Turkish power—Earliest days of Turkish history—Conquest of Persia and Egypt—Turkish soldiers of the Caliphate—Samanids’ conquests in India—The rise of the Seljuks—Arslan and his victories—Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—The Crusades—Jenghiz Khan and his people—The first appearance of the Osmanli—Erthogrul—The rule of Othman—Othman and Dundar—The capture of Broussa—Death of Othman—The reign of Orkhan—The army of Ala-ed-din—Orkhan’s capture of Nicæa.
ALTHOUGH I cannot write with approval of Turkish rule and its effect on the European provinces conquered by the now blunted sword of Othman, yet I feel a certain sympathy for the Turk, as individual, in this day of his trial. Sympathy is due to a variety of influences, and I feel that in the present instance my lingering liking for the Turk is based on several grounds. First of all, perhaps, comes the fondness you cannot but feel for a wayward child and its picturesque moods, more especially as I myself was quite the “wandering sheep,” as the hymn says, when young, and am not disinclined towards an excursion off the narrow way even now. Hence a fellow feeling with the nomad Turk, who, though generally placid, is capable of being roused to fury by unseen, unknown influences; in that state, like the wayward child, he is an unmitigated nuisance. In his everyday mood the Turk is gentle and extremely courteous, the courtesy of a strong man, scion of a race of conquerors. This dignified politeness is to be met in certain parts of Spain, where conquering Moors made their impress on native Iberians and valiant Goths. Again, the nomad virtue, hospitality, is strong among the sons of Othman. I have also met fine intellects among the Turks, for instance, in one of the Princes of the Blood, a man of a refined mind, deeply read in Nietzsche, and of no mean skill with the brush. But he was only a painter; his studies from life were excellent, and some have gained admission to the Paris Salon, but creative artist he certainly was not, and the subject pictures evolved out of his inner consciousness treated of matters considered peculiarly French in tone, subconsciously erotic, and generally unhappy in treatment. But then the Turk has little, if any, constructive power, and even the finer intellects among them are apt to waste their treasures on abstract speculations, leading to no practical result; their course may be likened to that of a slender stream of water poured forth on some endless desert waste.
Another bond of sympathy is the history of the Turkish race, which should appeal strongly to every Briton, for in a manner there is much similarity between the rise of Turkish power and that of the British Empire. Wild men from the northern seas, Angles and Saxons, Danes, Vikings, Berserks, seethed into the British Isles, and, mixing with the Romanized native population, rose to greatness through much tribulation. The narrow confines of Britain forced this amalgam to conquests overseas, and thus arose the British Empire. Is there not some analogy between our rule in India and that of the Osmanli in Europe? We, in India, form a separate ruling caste, placed in power by the sword; we do not mix with the many native tribes and nations under the British Raj, many whose duty takes them to India cannot give an accurate account of these various tribes and nations; they know not their languages, their customs are strange to them, and when their work is done they return to enjoy the fruits of their labour with but an imperfect knowledge of the land that gave them what they hold and of the people who lived their mysterious life outside the compound and the courthouse. So it is with the Turk in Europe. His people overflowed from Asia on successive waves of conquest, and made subject many nations with which they have nothing, absolutely nothing, in common, and with whom, unlike the Briton, the Turk does not desire any closer acquaintanceship.
To me, as Briton, the present situation, the happenings of the last few weeks, “give furiously to think.” Here is a powerful Empire, carved out of Europe by the sword, and held by conquerors who despised their alien subjects, and failed to understand their feelings or realize their ambitions, closed their eyes in smug contentment to the portents of the time. Then came the avalanche, and young nations, hitherto disregarded as serious opponents, rose in their strength, tore themselves free, rent province after province from the weak hands of an unprepared overlord, and are now threatening the capital of the Turkish Empire. From the courtyard of the Sublime Porte, where Turkey’s devious policy has been fashioned for so long, from the square in front of the War Office, which suddenly awakened, hurried untrained troops under untrained leaders, without a definite plan, to death by shot and shell, by starvation and disease; you could hear the sound of guns carried on the westerly wind from the lines of Chatalja, the last defences of the capital, where the remnants of the Sultan’s army are standing at bay against the organized forces of young Western nations.
It is a stirring history, full of ups and downs, that of the Turkish people. As we have seen, they emerged from a seething mass of nomadic humanity which infested Central Asia, and threatened those Empires which had settled and acquired civilization, such as China, whence, by the way, come some of the earliest records of the Turks. These nomads had no other use for civilization than to acquire unearned riches; whatever seemed to them undesirable was destroyed, and to this day the Turk has not advanced much further; he frequently changes his abode, and the change is easily effected, as he has few belongings—some rugs, a text or two from the Koran, his cooking utensils. Even in his home he seems to have only dropped in for a week or so, and the curtains instead of doors to separate one apartment from another still further recall his old nomadic habits. So his ancestors roamed about in hordes over the plains of Asia. Where they met with little resistance they abode awhile, moving on when the locality had nothing more to offer, retiring elsewhere when met with determined opposition. As the tribes increased in numbers they went separate ways, some to extinction, others to form ephemeral empires such as that of the Ghaznevids in Eastern Afghanistan, in the latter days of the tenth century.
The influence of the Turks on Western Europe did not make itself felt until after the Crusades, because they had much ado to make and keep their position in Asia Minor. A short time after the Prophet’s death, his general, Khaled, “The Sword of God,” subdued the Persian Army, and gained it for his master, Caliph Abu Bekr, in whose reign Syria was conquered from the Eastern Emperor Heraclius, and Ecbatana and Damascus became Moslem towns like Mecca and Medina. Then followed a noble line of Caliphs, under whose sway Islam extended its frontiers and rolled in threatening waves towards the West. Omar’s general, Amron, added Egypt to the Empire of the Caliphs, who made Damascus their capital. Legend and history tell of those days of the Caliphs, when Arab art, literature, and science flourished under such sovereigns as Haroun-al-Raschid, the contemporary of Charlemagne, Al Mamun, in whose days Western Christianity gave birth to the Order of Benedictines when Gregory IV was Pope in the beginning and middle of the ninth century.