The Armenians of the Mush Plain are at present an extremely difficult people to manage. They are very avaricious and would object to pay the most moderate taxes; they are also exceedingly treacherous to one another, and often join the revolutionaries to wipe off scores on their fellow villagers. As for the tactics of the revolutionaries, anything more fiendish one could not imagine—the assassination of Moslems in order to bring about the punishment of innocent men, the midnight extortion of money from villages which have just paid taxes by day, the murder of persons who refuse to contribute to their collection-boxes, are only some of the crimes of which Moslems, Catholics, and Gregorians accuse them with no uncertain voice.
The following pen picture of the young Armenian who wept over the punishment of his great nation is a study in itself:
We were saluted by a brisk young Armenian, who said (it afterwards proved false) that he was employed as a tutor to the Shaykh’s sons. He accused Prof. Rendel Harris of having promised him assistance, and then breaking his word. He longed to embrace Mr. Bryce (I should have experienced some pleasure in seeing him accomplish this wish); he had a great admiration for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman; he said he was studying to be an ethnologist, psychologist, hypnotist and poet; he admired Renan, Kant, Herbert Spencer, Gladstone, Spurgeon, Nietzsche and Shakespeare. It afterwards appeared that his library consisted of an advertisement of Eno’s Fruit Salt, from which he quoted freely. He wept over what he called the “Punishment of our great Nation,” and desired to be informed how in existing circumstances he could elevate himself to greatness and power.
It would be unfair to suggest that these very unfavourable descriptions are intended otherwise than as generally characteristic of the Armenian race. The experience of every traveller is that there are both good and bad people to be found in all races, but unfortunately in some races the good are few and the bad are many.
Armenians, as we know, have risen to the highest positions as soldiers, statesmen and financiers both in Turkey and Russia, and have proved themselves good and devoted subjects of their respective governments. Armenian soldiers fought bravely and loyally on the Turkish side in the Balkan war at the very time when their compatriots were pillaging the shops of their Moslem fellow-citizens in Adrianople. The near East is full of these strange contradictions. In Kurdistan Armenians have risked their own lives in protecting Moslems from assassination.
V.
It is important to notice that the so-called Armenian Atrocities have a remarkable family likeness to the “Bulgarian Atrocities,” over which a large number of sentimental people in England developed a frenzy of indignation.
A comparison of Sir Henry Layard’s despatch to Lord Derby on the “Bulgarian Atrocities,” dated 1877, with Sir Mark Sykes’ account of the happenings which commenced with the disturbances at Zeitun in 1895, show exactly how both these events originated and were grossly exaggerated. The history of every alleged massacre in Turkey is almost the same, whether we consider the Bulgarian “atrocities” in 1876, the disturbances in Sassun in 1896, those in Constantinople in the same year, or those at Van in 1915. In every case we find the same charges of connivance by local officials acting under orders from Constantinople, the same gross exaggerations and the same stories of bestiality, in which the traducers of the Turks seem to take a special delight. And it is these same people, as the Near East said in a leading article, who compel the Turks “to listen to sermons about disorders which were deliberately fomented by the preachers themselves or by men preaching in their name.”
Referring, to these “hellish” and “unutterable” forms of torture of which the Turks are so freely accused, ‘Odysseus’ says: