Since that January 17th, 1916, the Balkanzug has run regularly from Berlin to Constantinople. The Germans believe that it is as permanent a feature of the new Germanic Empire as the line from Berlin to Hamburg.
CHAPTER XXII
THE TURK REVERTS TO THE ANCESTRAL TYPE
The defeat of the English fleet at the Dardanelles had consequences which the world does not yet completely understand. The practical effect of the event, as I have said, was to isolate the Turkish Empire from all the world, excepting Germany and Austria. England, France, Russia, and Italy, which for a century had held a threatening hand over the Ottoman Empire, had now lost all power to influence or control. The Turks now perceived that a series of dazzling events had changed them from cringing dependents of the European Powers into free agents. For the first time in two centuries they could now live their national life according to their own inclinations and govern their peoples according to their own will. The first expression of this rejuvenated national life was an episode which, so far as I know, is the most terrible in the history of the world. New Turkey, freed from European tutelage, celebrated its national rebirth by murdering not far from a million of its own subjects.
I can hardly exaggerate the effect which the repulse of the Allied fleet produced upon the Turks. They believed that they had won the really great decisive battle of the war. For several centuries, they said, the British fleet had victoriously sailed the seas, and, had now met its first serious reverse at the hands of the Turks. In the first moments of their pride the Young Turk leaders now saw visions of the complete resurrection of their Empire. What had for two centuries been a decaying nation had suddenly started on a new and glorious life. In their pride and arrogance the Turks began to look with disdain upon the people who had taught them what they knew of modern warfare, and nothing angered them so much as any suggestion that they owed any part of their success to their German allies.
“Why should we feel any obligation to the Germans?” Enver would say to me. “What have they done for us which compares with what we have done for them? They have lent us some money and sent us a few officers, it is true, but see what we have done! We have defeated the British fleet—something which the Germans and no other nation could do. We have stationed large armies in the Caucasus, and so have kept busy large bodies of Russian troops that would have been used on the Western front. Similarly we have compelled England to keep large armies in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in that way we have weakened the Allied armies in France. No, the Germans could never have achieved their military successes without us; the shoe of obligation is entirely on their foot.”
This conviction possessed all the leading men in Turkey, and now began to have a determining effect upon Turkish national life and Turkish policy. Essentially the Turk is a bully and a coward; he is as brave as a lion when things are going his way, but cringing, abject, and nerveless when reverses are overwhelming him. And now that the fortunes of war were apparently favouring the Empire, I began to see an entirely new Turk unfolding before my eyes. The hesitating and fearful Ottoman, feeling his way cautiously amid the mazes of European diplomacy, and seeking opportunities to find an advantage for himself in the divided counsels of the European Powers, now gave place to an upstanding, almost dashing, figure, proud and assertive, determined to live his own life and absolutely contemptuous of his Christian foes.
I was really witnessing a remarkable development in race psychology—an almost classical instance of reversion to type. The ragged, unkempt Turk of the twentieth century was vanishing, and in his place was appearing the Turk of the fourteenth and the fifteenth, the Turk who had swept out of his Asiatic fastnesses, conquered all the powerful peoples in his way, and founded in Asia, Africa, and Europe one of the most extensive empires that history has known. If we are properly to appreciate this new Talaat and Enver, and the events which now took place, we must understand the Turk who, under Osman and his successor, exercised this mighty but devastating influence in the world. We must realise that the basic fact underlying the Turkish mentality is its utter contempt for all other races. A fairly insane pride is the element that largely explains this strange human species. The common term applied by the Turk to the Christian is “dog,” and in his estimation this is no mere rhetorical figure; he actually looks upon his European neighbours as far less worthy of consideration than his own domestic animals.
“My son,” an old Turk once said, “do you see that herd of swine? Some are white, some are black, some are large, some are small; they differ from each other in some respects, but they are all swine. So it is with Christians. Be not deceived, my son. These Christians may wear fine clothes, their women may be very beautiful to look upon; their skins are white and splendid; many of them are very intelligent, and they build wonderful cities and create what seem to be great States. But remember that underneath all this dazzling exterior they are all the same—they are all swine.”
I have talked with many of the splendid men and women whom America has sent as missionaries to Turkey. They tell me that, in the presence of a Turk, they are always conscious of this attitude. The Turk may be obsequiously polite, but there is invariably an almost unconscious feeling that he is mentally shrinking from his American friend as something unclean. And this fundamental conviction for centuries directed the Ottoman policy toward its subject peoples. This wild horde swept from the plains of Central Asia and, like a whirlwind, overwhelmed the nations of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, conquered Egypt, Arabia, and practically all of Northern Africa and then poured into Europe, crushed the Balkan nations, occupied a large part of Hungary, and even established the outposts of the Ottoman Empire in the southern part of Russia.
So far as I can discover, the Ottoman Turks had only one great quality, that of military genius. They had several military leaders of commanding ability, and the early conquering Turks were brave, fanatical, and tenacious fighters, just as their descendants are to-day. I think that these old Turks present the most complete illustration in history of the brigand idea in politics. They were lacking in what we may call the fundamentals of a civilised community. They had no alphabet and no art of writing, no books, no poets, no art, and no architecture; they built no cities and thus established no orderly state. They knew no law except the rule of might, and they had practically no agriculture and no industrial organisation. They were simply wild and marauding horsemen, whose one conception of tribal success was to pounce upon people who were more civilised than themselves and plunder them.