Again the Teuton is stirring. Germany is daily perfecting an already formidable navy, for flank defence first, then for further enterprise; Austria has recently greatly added to the budget for naval and military purposes, and the road to Saloniki is no longer closed by Turkey; Italy with her considerable naval power is allied to Germany and Austria.
What is Great Britain, the vast Empire encircling the moving forces from west to east, doing towards her own safety? When the nations of Europe were well aware of the trouble which has now reached its climax in the Balkan Peninsula, and were beginning to take at least diplomatic action, Great Britain was having holidays and could not be disturbed. So our naval force in the Mediterranean has been weakened to guard against the German’s left flank protection and the coast of Egypt is left insufficiently protected.
While the Balkan Kingdoms were mobilizing the armies which have since swept triumphant over Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, armies composed of the whole manhood of each nation, not of hired soldiers, Great Britain was collecting troops for Cambridgeshire manœuvres, with much self-laudation, and the assistance of the Territorial force, got together a number about equal to Montenegro’s first levy for the war with Turkey; and Montenegro is about half the size of Wales and sparsely populated. Servia, a country hitherto denied a voice in the great Committee of European States, at once mobilized troops exceeding in number the expeditionary force with which Great Britain proposes to take part in an armed conflict of the Great Powers, and moreover that small kingdom proved itself capable of even greater effort and produced as many fighting men as Moltke required to vanquish France.
The Allies acted sharply and decisively. Seven weeks after the declaration of war the Sultan’s troops were forced to retire behind the lines of Chatalja, the outer defences of Constantinople. Constantinople was the seat of Cæsar from the middle of the fourth century until Mohammed the Conqueror made it the capital of his Empire in 1453. From here Ottoman armies marched to victory; Bulgars, Greeks, Serbs were conquered, enslaved, their national identity swamped by the rising tide of Moslems as it flowed on over the plains of Hungary even up to the bastions of Vienna, that bulwark of the Western world.
From Stamboul, where I write, successive Sultans directed the policy of Turkey as their power waned. Here plans were devised, intrigues inaugurated to check the forces that threatened Ottoman supremacy. Here the Sultan in his palace heard of fresh troubles in his Empire, of defeats on the field of battle and in the council chamber. Here between the deep calm of the Orient and the restless striving of the West successive wearers of the sword of Othman must have marked the signs of the times and wondered how disaster might be averted.
But disaster came, a swift retribution for years of indolence. As I write this the sound of firing is borne on the westerly wind into the City of Constantine, Tsarigrad, Stamboul.
I was mightily drawn to revisit this ancient city now in these days of darkness, so I hurried out overland, crossing Germany, Poland, Roumania, till I landed on the banks of the Golden Horn. When I had passed I noted a feeling of deep anxiety, to account for which the present troubles of Turkey are insufficient; there seemed to me an undercurrent of unrest such as perchance preceded the “Völkerwanderung” of some fifteen centuries ago. I came here to record as best I can the doings of these days in Constantinople, the capital of a vanishing Empire, and while I went about the city, revisiting places I have seen bathed in summer sunshine, now gloomy under a lowering sky, as I noted the many signs of “Sturm und Drang,” I was filled with grave forebodings; here where a mighty Empire is tottering to its fall under pressure of the vanguard of a “Völkerwanderung” I pondered whether another world-wide Empire were as secure as that of the Ottoman was till recently supposed to be.
B. G. B.
Constantinople