During April 13 the reactionaries ruled Constantinople; the members of the Committee of Union and Progress had to take to flight or hide themselves, and several of the Generals crossed the Bosphorus and took refuge in the house of a well-known British merchant. The Liberal Union, which had let loose the forces of disorder, enjoyed but a short triumph. In the evening of the 13th some Deputies met in the House and elected the Liberal Union leader, Ismail Kemal Bey, as President of the Chamber—an illegal proceeding, as there was no quorum, and the Young Turk members who represented the parliamentary majority naturally were not present. In the course of the day Ismail Kemal and some members of the Liberal Union went to the Yildiz and begged the Sultan to appoint Kiamil Pasha, who was a supporter of the Union, as Grand Vizier, but the Sultan refused to listen to their advice. From this time the Liberal Union lost its hold on the people, and was deserted by many members of the party who were good patriots and adherents of the Constitution, for these recognised and were horrified at the mischief that had been wrought by the self-seeking wire-pullers of this so-called “Liberal” organisation.
And in the meanwhile all eyes were turned anxiously to the Yildiz to discover what would be the attitude of the inscrutable monarch at this crisis. In the evening of the 13th, when the Sultan granted an amnesty to the mutineers, called them his children, and yielded to many of their demands, there were lovers of liberty who feared the worst; but when it became known that the Sultan had not taken immediate advantage of the situation to restore absolutism, but, on the contrary, on the resignation of the Young Turk Ministry in the afternoon, had appointed Tewfik Pasha as Grand Vizier and Edhem Pasha as Minister of War, great relief was felt; for these were two trusted and able men, who, though they were no partisans of this or that political group, were undoubtedly men of Liberal principles and no creatures of the Despotism. So the Constitutionalists took heart, and they were still more reassured when on the 15th Nazim Pasha was appointed Commander of the First Army Corps and Assistant Minister of War. The appointment of Nazim Pasha as Minister of War in February last had roused the opposition of the Committee of Union and Progress, and was one of the chief causes of the fall of Kiamil Pasha; but, as the Young Turks clearly explained at the time, it was with Kiamil’s policy that they found fault; Nazim himself was admired and respected by them as a fine soldier and a man of distinctly Liberal views, for which the Palace had made him suffer in his time. It was therefore recognised that the newly created temporary Government was at any rate not a reactionary one, and that the cause of liberty, though still in great peril, was not yet lost.
For twenty-four hours the soldiers celebrated their victory by firing off their rifles in the streets, thereby accidentally killing and wounding a good many people. It was noticed that they had plenty of money to spend, and it was evident that a large sum had been provided by the organisers of the conspiracy to buy the support of the army. As many of the men confessed afterwards, they had succumbed to gifts of money and had been misled by lying preachers who approached them in the name of religion. On April 15 Nazim Pasha, who is popular with the army, though a strict disciplinarian, announced that the severest punishment would be inflicted on any soldiers who fired in the streets, and explained that the Sultan’s amnesty only protected them from punishment for crimes committed during the two previous days. Next he released all officers who had been imprisoned by the mutineers, and warned the soldiers that no mercy would be shown to those who molested these officers or any of the civilian population. The bulk of the troops now returned to their barracks, order was restored, and outwardly Constantinople was once again a city of peace.
But a crime had been committed with what far-reaching evil results to Turkey no man knows yet. This wanton conspiracy, doomed to failure from the beginning, not only threatened the destruction of the Constitution, but, stirring up all the forces of reaction, sent a wave of fanaticism sweeping through Asia that it will be difficult indeed to stem. It has brought about the massacre of Christians, civil war, the fratricidal fighting between Turkish armies, the menace of foreign intervention, and the possibility of the disintegration of the Empire itself. The counter-revolution soon bore its evil fruit. On April 15, telegrams from Mersina, in Asia Minor, announced the beginning of those massacres which have cost the lives of thousands of Armenians. It is probable that the reactionaries planned these massacres, for the fact that certain notable Armenians were warned as to what was about to happen by their Moslem friends, disproves the theory that a chance affray was responsible for all this slaughter; at any rate the outbreak of murderous fanaticism would have been suppressed speedily had not the authority of the Government officials on the spot been destroyed by the revolt in the capital. Then came the news of a rising of the Moslem Albanians, whom the agents of reaction had converted into the bitter enemies of the Young Turks. During these days of doubt and fear for patriotic Turks, but one event of hopeful augury occurred. On April 19 the Turko-Bulgarian Protocol, by which Turkey recognised Bulgaria’s independence, was signed. The provisional Government had acted wisely, for thus was removed the danger of a war with Bulgaria at this very critical time.
A member of the Young Turk party said to me: “If the reactionaries imagine that we will take this lying down they will find themselves much mistaken. We are very strong: practically all European Turkey is on our side, and you will see that we will now set to work to crush the power of the reactionaries once and for all.” And so indeed it has come to pass. When the news of the counter-revolution reached Salonica, the city that is proud that it was the cradle of Turkey’s liberty, the inhabitants—Moslems, Christians, and Jews—were infuriated, and called for an immediate march upon Constantinople. To Salonica flocked the officers and other members of the Committee who had escaped from the capital, and thither, too, hurried the two gallant young leaders of the July revolution, Enver Bey and Hakki Bey, who at the time were the Turkish military attachés in Berlin and Vienna respectively. Niazi Bey, too, in Monastir, sent the word to his Albanian and Bulgarian friends to collect volunteers, and he himself, with the regulars under his command, took train to Salonica. And now it was made manifest that Macedonia, at any rate, remained faithful to the Constitution and to the Young Turk party. The men of the Third Army Corps were eager to be led against the traitorous reactionaries of the capital; the civilian Moslems formed themselves into bands of fedais; all the Bulgarian clubs in Macedonia declared themselves the supporters of the Young Turk cause, and their members expressed their readiness to die in defence of the Constitution, and this despite the fact that the Bulgarians had not been treated fairly during the Parliamentary elections; the famous Bulgarian chiefs, Sandansky and Panitza, and other Bulgarian leaders, brought their bands of enthusiastic mountaineers to Salonica; the Albanian Christian mountain tribes, including my old friends the Miridites, sent their armed men to fight for the cause; the Jews volunteered in numbers; indeed, of the various elements composing the population of Macedonia the Greeks alone appear to have held aloof.
In Constantinople the reactionaries, notwithstanding the appointment of a Ministry that supported the Constitution, had taken it for granted that the success of their cause was assured, and, having seduced the garrison to their side, they but awaited the order of the Sultan to complete their work and give the coup de grace to the régime of liberty. They had apparently omitted to consider whether the rest of Turkey would support their action; for the news from Macedonia came as a shocking surprise to them, and irritated the well-named Volkan, the organ of the League of Mohammed, into an eruption of furious articles of a highly inflammatory and dangerous character. First came the news from Salonica that the Committee of Union and Progress refused to acknowledge the new Government, and that the Macedonians intended to march upon Constantinople. On April 16 a telegram announced that the first sixteen battalions of the Constitutional army (the Third Army Corps) had already entrained at Salonica. Next it became known that the Second Army Corps at Adrianople had agreed to support the Salonica force. On the 19th the advanced patrols of the avenging Macedonian army were at St. Stefano within two leagues of the capital. It was all in vain that the Government sent telegrams and deputations to Salonica to reassure the Young Turks and to explain that the Constitution was in no danger, and would be respected by the Sultan and his new Ministry, for the Young Turks could not be brought to believe that the Constitution was secure while the capital was full of triumphant reactionaries and troops who had been bought over to their cause, acting in the name of a Sultan whom it would be folly to trust again.
So the Parliamentary troops began to concentrate round the capital, and the reactionaries lost heart. The Palace spies and other deeply compromised persons thought it prudent to flee from the capital. A friend of mine, writing from Constantinople, tells me that a panic seized the people, including many Europeans, and that their hurried departure to catch any steamer in the port, bound for no matter where, was comic, but lacking in dignity. On the other hand, the different Liberal political groups, Moslem, Christian, and Jew, agreed to put aside their party differences and to unite in upholding the Constitution. The Committee of Union and Progress recovered much of the influence and popularity that it had lost, for it was recognised that this organisation alone had the power behind it to enforce the will of the people and defeat the reactionaries. It became plain, too, that the Ministry itself was co-operating with the leaders of the Macedonian army, so as to come to some arrangement that would safeguard the Constitution and at the same time prevent, if possible, the shedding of blood. As for the Sultan, he remained in the Yildiz, inscrutable as ever, and had frequent conferences with Tewfik Pasha, his Grand Vizier, who announced that “His Sublime Majesty awaits benevolently the arrival of the so-called constitutional army. He has nothing to gain or fear, since His Sublimity is for the Constitution and is its supreme guardian.”
No preparations for defence or resistance of any sort were made by the Government, and Nazim Pasha and the other Generals in the capital confined themselves to maintaining order in the garrison and preventing any fanatical outbreak on the part of the rough element of the Moslem population. Of the troops forming the garrison a considerable proportion repented that they had taken part in the mutiny, and, acknowledging that they had been misled by lies, were ready to take the oath of fidelity to the Constitution; but, on the other hand, a great many, including the six thousand who were guarding the Yildiz, were faithful to those who had deceived and bribed them, and were prepared to die for the Sultan.
General Husni Pasha rapidly brought up the troops that were to invest the capital, the bulk of them belonging to the Third Army Corps; but the force also included contingents from the Second, or Adrianople, Army Corps and numbers of volunteers, for the most part Moslem Macedonians, Bulgarians, and Albanians, wild-looking men from the mountains clad in their picturesque native dress. General Mahmut Shevket Pasha, the commander of the Third Army Corps, directed the operations, and on the 21st he left Salonica for the front to take over the supreme command of the army of investment. Foreign military observers have spoken in terms of highest praise of the rapidity with which the Third Army Corps was mobilised, the admirable organisation, the discipline, >morale, and excellent condition of the troops, the arrangements for the supply of food, the completeness of the equipment of the force, which included field hospitals, field telegraphs, and other details. The Turkish army has profited much by the splendid training of Baron von der Goltz and the German officers under him, and has become a fighting machine which will be able to give a very good account of itself if the enemies of Turkey venture to attack her.