I was, luckily, again in Constantinople for those great days. I saw the hideous tyrant of a few years ago driven through the streets of Pera; I was present at the opening of Parliament; introduced to the Sultan Abdul Hamid and his Grand Vizier Kiamil Pasha.
It was the Vizier’s charming daughter who soon became my dearest friend, and hostess for two subsequent visits. Once she spoke of me to Abdul Hamid’s successor, Mohammed V., as her “English sister” (her favourite term of endearment), and the Sultan replied: “I did not know Kiamil Pasha had any English children.” Poor man, he had a Turkish family of a score!
It was Hamid’s fall that first revealed to me how much Turkey loved England, what she was ready to give for British friendship. I had witnessed the arrival of our Ambassador, the late Sir G. Lowther, and his triumphant entry to Constantinople, when the horses were taken out of his carriage and he was drawn by Turks to the Embassy. As Abdul Hamid had compromised the nation by friendship with Germans, young Turkey threw herself at the feet of Great Britain.
Why could we not respond? Alas, our Ambassador and his French colleague, M. Constant, would openly express their preference for the despotic Abdul Hamid. And what was said, no doubt with no serious thought of offence, reached the ears of the young Turks and stung their pride: “People who visit Constantinople may be divided into two classes: those who like dirt and squalor” (of whom I was one), “and those who do not!”
It was inevitable that the Germans should make their profit from our discourtesy and blind contempt. We ought, from the first, to have known that she would send, as indeed she did, one of her finest diplomats to Constantinople. Marshall von Bieberstein, and his “retriever,” Dr. W—— of the Frankfurter Zeitung lost no opportunity of conciliating the young Turks, to what end we might, surely, have foreseen!
After the Balkan war, I paid a visit to vanquished Turkey; this time as a guest of my “Turkish sister” in Stamboul, whose father had been, meanwhile, banished to Cyprus, where he died. Under the circumstances I could not (for fear of further compromising my friends with the Government) see much of our Ambassador, Sir Louis Mallet, though I met him twice, and found him a charming man.
To all my appeals, at the Embassy and elsewhere, for British friendship and help to put Turkey on her feet again, I met the same foolish, “parrot” reply: “We cannot sacrifice Russia!” Nevertheless, when I returned to London, and published “An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem” (the diary record of private friendships, widely circulated in the East), we, the friends of Turkey, determined to defy the Government, and formed an Ottoman Society for that purpose.
When the war broke out I had just reached Berlin, once more en route for Turkey, Asia Minor, and afterwards Persia and India.
It is obvious that the world-tragedy had even a sharper sting for those of us who were bidden to hate our life-long “best friends” among the enemy peoples. Often enough, moreover, the individual “foe” (as was the case with my Turkish “sister”) could not throw off the heart’s allegiance to England merely because “it was war.”
Can we, indeed, honestly blame the young Turks? In the first place, they did not choose their own path. One man, Enver Pasha, joined Germany against the wishes of a whole nation. As one man, Mr. Lloyd George, would once have drawn the most constitutional of all peoples to fight the Turks, had not General Harington, luckily for them and us, disobeyed his command!