Besides, we did nothing to preserve our friendship with Turkey. Years of indifference, and most impolitic scoffings at real reforming enthusiasm, were followed, at the eleventh hour, by total neglect of any conciliating diplomacy, which could even then have kept Turkey out of the war, and shortened it by two years.
For instance, on the outbreak of war with Germany, “without notice, without the most banal of the forms of courtesy, on the very day when the Turkish flag should have been hoisted over the ships handed over to the Ottoman Commission, which had come to England to take charge of them, the dreadnoughts were seized by Great Britain and no offer was made by the British Government to refund, at least, the price of the two ships....” So wrote the late Grand Vizier Hakki Pasha; and one could mention many other, similar, senseless pin-pricks, which may inflame such people almost more than insults of greater import.
During the war my friendship for Turkey proved a serious handicap in hospital work. Anyone jealous of what privileges were by chance accorded to me would hand over a few choice tit-bits—that grew in passing—to the secret police. The French, unless in a fit of really inevitable war-depression, paid scant heed to such reports. The Americans, however, easily took alarm. One, I remember, actually spoke to me about the matter with a terror only equalled, in my experience, by that of the Cabinet Minister’s brother who once asked me: “How I could do anything so foolish as to live in a harem?”
It was a poor compliment to one of Turkey’s greatest statesmen, and to my hostess, his distinguished daughter.
But when I found that Roget’s “Thesaurus” gives as synonym for a harem, “a house of ill fame,” I understood!
Turkey, however, was crushed, defeated and, at Sèvres, humiliated. Were we not courting disaster by such unjust terms? If we remove the foot holding them down—but ever so slightly—will they rebound and strike?
“I cannot understand,” I said to one of their delegates, “how a Turk could be found to sign such a Treaty.” For always, with all their faults, I had known them proud.
“Had we not signed,” he answered, “the Greeks would have entered Constantinople, and God knows when we could have driven them out. What does it matter, the Treaty will not be ratified.”
To keep out the Greeks, to save bloodshed! Maybe he was right.