Monastir was thronged with Turkish warriors, Albanians, Anatolians, and European Turks, soldiers and bashi-bazouks, hale men and halt men; a one-armed soldier and a hump-backed dwarf carried guns, Turk and Turk alike. The vast barracks was overcrowded, tents stretched across the parade ground, otherwise seldom utilised, and climbed high up the mountain behind the caserne. The military hospital was surrounded by tents. A certain subdued delight fills the breast of the gentle Turk, and renders the combative Albanian loyal to the Padisha, when the native rajah gives cause for castigation. There is glory for Mohamed in the despatch of an infidel, and material profit in the plunder reaped.[6] Nearly a hundred thousand Albanian and Turkish soldiers were crowded into the Monastir vilayet to ‘repress’ the ‘armed insurrection,’ and such resident Mohamedans as were not called to the colours sharpened their yataghans and joined unorganised in the work of the army.
With this force on the warpath the town became quiet. Such Bulgarians as had not gone to the mountains became Greeks or Servians, and for a time the race disappeared from the streets. Greeks and Vlachs also kept close to their houses, and some days only soldiers selling plunder held the market place. The army commandeered the better pack-animals and teams as they appeared on the streets, paying for them in paper promises—in consequence whereof all fit animals were soon kept stabled. Honest toil ceased, and only the labour of the struggle continued. In the early morning, before the town stirred, detachments of troops started for the mountains with many pack-ponies, each laden with four ample tins of petroleum. At night, when Monastir was still again, the pack-ponies came back—bringing in the wounded of the Turks.
The revolutionary committee had declared the ‘general rising’ of the peasants with less than ten thousand rifles of all patterns,[7] a meagre force with which to contest the Ottoman authority, and a poor result for the price that had been paid in men and morals. The insurgents had been gathering arms for several years. Many murders had been committed in Macedonia in the forced collection of levied assessments, and some had taken place in Bulgaria; many massacres of innocent peasants had been brought about in the Turkish search for arms; many insurgents had given their lives fetching the arms from friendly and hostile frontiers.[8]
The high chiefs of the committee never expected to defeat the Turks with their inadequate force of untrained peasants; their purpose was to provoke the Sultan to set his soldiers upon the Christians. They were willing to pay the lives of many thousands of their brother Macedonians for the accomplishment of their desire—the country’s autonomy. They were fanatics. The Turks called them Christian fanatics, but it was not only the insurgents who were frenzied; probably 40,000 men, women, and children, the entire population of many villages, went to the mountains unarmed. This was the general rising. And all the Bulgarians who remained in their villages, and many other Macedonians, gave their whole sympathy to the cause of the committajis.
The revolution was declared in the vilayet of Monastir, among other reasons, because of a specific design upon the Greek communities. You have seen in a previous chapter how the Turks at repression recognised no difference between Greeks and Bulgarians, massacring both alike, even though the Greek clergy had some assurance that Bulgarians alone would be ‘repressed.’ The insurgents understood the Turk better. They laid deliberate plans to draw him down upon the communities of hostile politics. By capturing lightly garrisoned towns whose inhabitants adhered to the Greek Church, putting the Turkish soldiers to death, they drew the Turks in force to the retaking of these places, whence they (the insurgents) would cautiously withdraw, leaving the ‘Greeks’ to the vengeance of the Mohamedans. They argued that measure must be met by measure; Greek priests converted by threatening Bulgarian peasants with the Turk.
A TURKISH BAND LEAVING MONASTIR.
BASHI-BAZOUKS.
A storm of protest came from Athens, directed chiefly against one Bakhtiar Pasha, simultaneously commander of the most bloodthirsty body of soldiers and the most rapacious band of bashi-bazouks, who put to the sword and the torch both exarchist and patriarchist community. With the support of ambassadors of the Powers, the Greek Minister at Constantinople demanded the immediate relief of this general from his command ‘in the interest and honour of the Turkish army’; and the Sultan, always tractable under pressure, promised to punish the offending pasha. Forthwith the deviceful monarch despatched a special messenger from Constantinople to Monastir, bearing congratulations and the Order of the Mijidieh in diamonds for Bakhtiar the Brave.