Next morning I went by steamer to Buyukdere to see the Russian Ambassador, M. de Nelidow, who, through his chief dragoman, M. Maximow, had negotiated the escape of the Armenian bank-breakers. M. Maximow had gone up to the Palace, and by his language, the like of which had never been heard in the decorous precincts, frightened the Palace officials. There was some talk at the time of the British Fleet being ordered up to Constantinople, a rumour which I mentioned to the Russian Ambassador. It did not appear to please him, for he exclaimed rather excitedly: “Oh, par exemple! Nous ne rendrons jamais la clef de notre maison”—a remark the significance of which has never been absent from my thoughts from that day to this in connexion with Turkey and her future.
I then called on Abraham Pasha at his summer residence, also at Buyukdere. I had made his acquaintance a few weeks previously at the Sultan’s Palace, and had been his guest at the Cercle d’Orient. A great landowner and sportsman, as I could see the trophies in the hall of his palatial konak, he was reputed to be the wealthiest and most influential Armenian notability in Turkey, and had always been on the very best terms with Abdul Hamid. He had even had the honour of entertaining his predecessor, Abdul Aziz, at his country seat. I found him in bed, guarded by a body of armed retainers, in a state of great trepidation. “What is this? What is it all coming to? It is really too bad!” he ejaculated as I was ushered into his bedroom. As a matter of fact Armenians had been killed at Buyukdere. So great was the terror among the Armenians of position that one of the wealthiest, the banker Azarian, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction from the London house of Rothschild, closed his place of business and fled to the Prinkipo Islands. It was a novel sensation to see millionaires, thus exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, being pursued like rats, and if caught knocked on the head as little better than vermin.
The most extraordinary feature of this popular rising against the Armenians, at least from an ethnological point of view, was the discrimination exercised by the mob in seeking their victims. Thus, to a stranger, it would be often difficult enough to distinguish between an Armenian and a Greek, an Italian, or a Jew, at least by the cast of his features; and among Armenians there are Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Greek Churchmen. Yet those who belonged to the Orthodox Greek Church, and were thus supposed to be implicated in the revolutionary propaganda fomented in Russia, were sought out and hounded to death. Hardly any Roman Catholic Armenians were molested, for they were reported to have refrained from revolutionary activity. How the unlettered crowd of Kurds, Lazis, and other Turkish tribes constituting the lower classes of Galata were able to exercise such discrimination still remains a mystery to me.
In the midst of the massacres going on in broad daylight a Jewish money-changer in one of the streets of Galata was assailed by a crowd and was on the point of being felled to the ground. In his abject terror the man called out: “For God’s sake, let me go! I am not an Armenian; I am a Hebrew.” The mob, though in a frenzy of passionate excitement, desisted for a moment, and the man’s assertion proving to be true, the crowd released him. The terror-stricken wretch rushed away, leaving the contents of his stall, a mass of gold and silver coins, strewn on the pavement. Several Turks forming part of the murderous crowd pursued him, crying out: “Come back and pick up your money; we don’t want to rob you.”
It is only fair to state that the German colony stood practically alone in not succumbing to the prevailing panic. Even on the 26th of August, when, in the first hours of consternation, public offices of every other nationality were closed, the German Post Office, which is situated close to the Ottoman Bank—in the very centre of the disturbance—remained open and sent off its post-bags as usual. Bearing the German flag aloft, the officials took the sacks of letters over the Galata Bridge to the railway station in Stamboul, where the massacres were at their height. I mention this fact, even after this lapse of time, because the cool-headedness of the Germans on this occasion was one of the contributory causes which, from that time onwards, made them rise in the favour of the Sultan and the officials at the Palace at the expense of the influence of other nationalities, who, for the time being, had apparently lost all sense of proportion. This incident derives its significance not so much from the presence of mind which the Germans displayed as from the fact that it showed that they alone, among the foreign element, were conversant with the political nature of this outbreak, and refused to believe and to be influenced by its supposed religious origin. The Germans knew that as Christians or foreigners they had nothing to fear, whereas the agitation carried on in England by Canon McColl and the Duke of Westminster, backed by sundry fervent Nonconformists, had had the effect of exhibiting the fanatical Turk as thirsting for the blood of the Christian. Thus, when the crisis came, those who had allowed their minds to be dominated by these personages failed to show that calmness and self-possession which are otherwise marked characteristics of the English race when suddenly assailed by peril.
Only a few English families, such as the Whittalls, merchant princes who have lived in Smyrna and Constantinople for generations, and whose name is a household word among the Turks, did not lose their heads. They even exercised their influence to afford shelter to the Armenians whose lives were in danger.
Through a mere chance, brought about, moreover, by my ignorance of the conditions of the Press censorship prevailing at the time at Constantinople, I was enabled to secure a “score” for the New York Herald. For twenty-four hours that paper was the only one in the outside world which had the news of the Armenian attack on the Ottoman Bank and the massacres in Constantinople which were its immediate sequel. This came about as follows: Foreign newspaper correspondents in Constantinople, aware by experience of the difficulties put in their way by the censorship when forwarding news unfavourable to the authorities, were in the habit of sending their contributions by post to Philippopolis, the Bulgarian frontier town, where each of them kept a running account at the post office. From thence their communications were forwarded by telegraph to their destination; a procedure which, for newspaper purposes, involved a loss of twenty-four hours. This I was unaware of, and thus ingenuously sent my telegram direct from Constantinople to Paris, where it arrived the same evening, its contents appearing in Paris and New York the next morning, before the same item of news had even reached Philippopolis. It was afterwards stated that this priority was due to favouritism granted me as correspondent of the New York Herald; but this was not the case. It was simply an oversight on the part of the Press censor, probably due to the extraordinary excitement prevailing generally in Constantinople at the time. In proof of this, I may mention that the telegram I sent off the next day was stopped; indeed, it did not reach its destination at all, and the one I sent on the day after arrived in Paris containing the obviously exaggerated statement that twenty thousand Armenians had been massacred. Any favouritism I was credited with must in this last case have led to the publication of a piece of news very damaging to the Turks. Most of the other assertions made about that time respecting my activity as representative of the New York Herald had no better foundation in fact. The story that the Press censor had been discharged for stopping one of my telegrams was as baseless as the rest. As a matter of fact he retained his post until his death, and when I was last in Constantinople, in 1908, his son, also an Armenian, had been appointed his successor.
One day, immediately following upon the attack on the Ottoman Bank, the police discovered a large quantity of explosive bombs of different sizes in the cellar of a house in Pera, which, it was said, had been brought there with Russian connivance. Now, although the correspondents of the different European papers were invited to inspect the find, which was afterwards publicly exhibited at the Arsenal (Tophanè), such was the general disinclination to admit any fact which could tell in favour of the great provocation the Turks had received from the Armenian revolutionists that hardly any publicity was given to this discovery of bombs.
One morning during the Armenian disturbances a card was brought to me bearing the name of his Excellency Ahmed Midhat Effendi, Vice-Président du Bureau Impérial de Santé Publique (Sanitary Administration of the Ottoman Empire).
A tall, broad-shouldered, black-bearded man, in the prime of life, of imposing bearing and with flashing dark eyes, wearing the fez and dressed in the conventional black coat of high Turkish officials, termed Stambolin, without any decoration, gold braid, or other indication of his status, was shown in. He told me that he had come on the part of his Imperial Majesty the Sultan to place himself at my disposal, in case I should require his services, either to give me introductions, or to serve me as guide and interpreter, as he possessed a perfect command of the French language. He said the Sultan had read several of my communications to the New York Herald, and was pleased that there had come to Constantinople a correspondent who was ready and able to make allowances for the great provocation the Turkish authorities had received from the Armenian revolutionaries, and to treat Turkish affairs from an impartial standpoint.