During our most depressed moments, however, we could always raise a smile over the thought that we were "The honoured guests of Turkey." Enver Pasha himself had told us so at Mosul, where we halted on our four-hundred-mile march across the desert, after the fall of Kut-el-Amara.[4] So it must have been true.
At the time we write this unscrupulous adventurer, Enver—a man of magnetic personality and untiring in his energy to further his personal schemes—has but lately fled to Caucasia. He is a young man, and having held a position of highest authority in Turkey for some years, presumably a rich one. Doubtless he will lead a happy and prosperous existence for many years to come.
There are thousands of sad hearts in England and in the Indian Empire to-day, and hundreds of thousands in Turkey itself, as a result of the utter disregard for human life entertained by this man and a few of his colleagues. Of the massacre of Armenians we will not speak, although we have seen their dead bodies, and although we have met their little children dying of starvation on the roadsides, and have passed by their silent villages; but we should fail in our duty to the men of the British Empire who died in captivity in Turkey did we not appeal for a stern justice to be meted out to the men responsible for their dying.
It may perhaps be said with truth that it was no studied cruelty on the part of the Turkish authorities that caused the death of so many brave men who had given themselves to the work of their country: yet with equal truth it may be said, that it was the vilest form of apathy and of wanton neglect. Where the taking of a little trouble by the high officials at Constantinople would have saved the lives of thousands of British and Indian soldiers, that trouble was never taken. Weak with starvation, and sick with fever and dysentery (we speak of the men of Kut), they were made to march five hundred miles in the burning heat across waterless deserts, without regular or sufficient rations and without transport—in many cases without boots, which had been exchanged for a few mouthfuls of food or a drink of water.
We officers, who had not such a long march as the men, and who were given a little money and some transport, thought ourselves in a bad way. But what of the men who had none? There were no medical arrangements, and those who could not march fell by the desert paths and died. The official White Book gives the number 65 as the percentage of deaths amongst British soldier prisoners taken at Kut, a figure which speaks for itself.
It is a law of the world's civilisation that if a man take the life of another, except in actual warfare, he must pay forfeit with his own life. Take away bribery and corruption and that law holds good in Turkey. Now when a soldier is taken prisoner he ceases to be an active enemy, and the country of his captors is as responsible for his welfare as for that of her own citizens. What if that country so fails to grasp the responsibility that its prisoners are allowed to die by neglect? Should not its rulers be taught such a lesson that it would be impossible for those of future generations to forget it?
It is not enough to obtain evidence of a cruel corporal at that prisoners' camp, or of a bestial commandant at this, and to think that by punishing them we have avenged our dead. These men are underlings. The men we must punish first are those few in high authority, who, by an inattention to their obvious duty, have made it possible for their menials to be guilty of worse than murder.
We pride ourselves on the fact that we are citizens of the most just country of the world. Let us see to it that justice is not starved.