GREEK INFANTRY
The Turk I found disappointing. I had pictured a romantic individual with a Circassian harem, a stable of Arab steeds, and a fierce and warlike manner. I found the Turk to be rather a shabby individual; monogamous usually (but with the free and easy ideas as to his rights over Christian women which are almost consequent upon his philosophy of life, and cause most of the trouble when the Turk lives by the side of a Christian population); much addicted to sweetmeats—his shops were full of Scotch lollies and English biscuits. Certainly most of the Turks I have encountered were prisoners or dwelling in conquered country. But, making all allowance for that, the traditional fiery Turk of martial fame no longer exists, I should say, in European Turkey. The Turkish prisoners in the hands of the Bulgarians seemed to be glad to have arrived at a fate which meant regular food. In old Bulgaria I found Turks living quite contentedly under Christian rule, and in many cases following menial occupations. The boot-blacks in the streets were Turks, the porters were Turks.
I had a Turkish driver for five days once from Kirk Kilisse to Mustapha Pasha. The first hour of our acquaintance he won my heart by telling me (through an interpreter) that since his horses had been requisitioned by the Bulgarians, he had not been able to get proper food for them, and he embraced his ponies, which were really in rather good condition. I applauded the noble Turk and his love for horses, and bought tobacco for him which he welcomed with tears of joy, as he had been without it for long. The horses carried the cart a gallant thirty miles that day, and we camped at a burned-out village. Mr. Turk set himself to enjoy a smoke over the fire. My own supper I prepared, and gave him some to eke out his bread and cheese, and then told him to water and feed the horses. Because the well was 400 yards away and the tobacco was sweet and the fire comforting, the Turk had no wish to do this, but was ready to let them go through the night without food or water. I had to threaten to flog him (and to start to do it) before he would attend to the horses. Yet after that incident I slept in the cart without a thought that the Turk would consider himself offended and cut my throat. As a matter of fact the touch of the whip did not rankle with him, and at Mustapha Pasha when, the journey ended, I gave him a little money for himself, Mr. Turk prostrated himself in gratitude.
I believe that the warlike virtues have died out of the Turk in Europe. Of other nation-making and nation-maintaining qualities he has none. In all Turkey from the borders of Bulgaria to the lines of Chatalja, I found no roads, no street lamps, no drainage, no water supply (I was not in Adrianople). Except for a few agricultural peasants I found nowhere the Turk doing any useful work. In a characteristic Turkish town the shops were kept by Greeks, the industries carried on by Greeks, Macedonians, and Bulgarians. The Turk was the tax-collector, the official, the soldier, and did none of these things well. That acute observer of the Turkish character, Mr. L. March Phillips, in his book In the Desert upholds that the Turk is impossible as a civilising force:
Or, for a third example, come to the craggy hills of Southern Albania, and mix, if but for half an hour, with the armed shepherds, as wild and intractable as their own crags, or as the gaunt dogs which guard their flocks from the wolves, and whose attentions to strangers you are apt to find such a nuisance. You will understand from the first glance at the men more of the interminable Balkan difficulty than newspapers and books can ever teach you. These are the fellows who swoop down from their peaks on the mixed races of the plains and carry fire and slaughter through village and valley. Their natural aptitude for fighting and foraging, for bearing things with a strong hand, for cowing the weak and feeble, for vindicating the old "might is right" theory, is written all over them. You see it in their gait, glance, walk, and manner, you hear it in every accent of their voice, you feel it in their individuality and presence.
These are specimens of the Moslem type, the type that stops short at the virile virtues, that makes the best host and worst neighbour in the world, that has many splendid qualities to recommend it, but to which all that makes life profound and inexhaustible is a dead letter. It is the most strongly marked and salient type I have ever met with. There is the Moslem walk, the Moslem scowl, the Moslem courtesy, the Moslem dignity, the Moslem carriage and attitudes and features, the Moslem composure, and the Moslem fury. All these traits and characteristics, inspired by the same temper, expressing the same ideal, conspire to depict a figure so notable that you must be a dull observer indeed if you cannot pick him out from a mixed crowd as you would pick out a Chinaman in the London streets.
Some people say it is the religion that creates the type. "There," they say of Mohammedanism, "is a religion that breeds men." It would be truer, I think, to say that Mohammedanism recommends itself to men at a certain stage of their development, and has for that stage a natural affinity. Every race goes through a time when the virile estimate of life and the splendour of self-assertion seem the finest things possible. It is at this time it is open to the attack of El Islam. The Moslem religion answers all its needs at this stage, and lays good hold of it, and having once laid hold of it, it sanctifies the ideas belonging to this stage, and so tends to restrict the race to it. There is no instance on record of a people having embraced Mohammedanism and afterwards achieving a complete, or what gives promise of ever becoming a complete, civilisation.
During my stay in the Balkans I found no certain evidence of Turkish cruelty. There was plenty of evidence offered by the Bulgarians, but it usually smelt of the lamp of some patriotic journalist of Sofia. Once near Mustapha Pasha—when all the war correspondents were cooped up under strict censorship, prevented from seeing any of the operations around Adrianople—the Bulgarians found it necessary to burn a village for strategic reasons. The chance was offered to the Press photographers of seeing this, if it were represented in their pictures as the atrocious burning of a village by the Turks. I believe that the offer was accepted by some. The "atrocities" by Turks, regularly recorded by the Bulgarian Press Bureau were, as far as the main theatre of operations was concerned, founded on similar evidence. During its first phase I believe that the war was very humanely conducted on all sides. In Macedonia, of course, there were some deplorable atrocities, but I believe the normal massacre conditions there were rather bettered than otherwise by the outbreak of war.
To sum up the Turk, I do not think he will survive for long in Europe. As a matter of hard fact there really are not many real Turks left in Europe.