During my various visits to Turkey I have had ample opportunities of hearing the opinions held by those who have mixed with the best Turks with respect to them. No testimony is more valuable than that of cultured Englishmen who have lived long in the East, more particularly such as have been engaged in a large way in commerce, or held positions in the Turkish naval and military service. In this connexion I may mention the well-known English family of merchant princes of which at that time the late Sir William Whittall was the head. The very name of Whittall has long been a passport throughout Asiatic Turkey, guaranteeing safe conduct in remote regions where scarcely a European is seen for years and years together. Such Englishmen are thorough-going admirers of the Turkish character and are distinct from those who have done so much by journalistic work to estrange England from Turkey, and Turkey from England.
Many are the stories told of the simple-minded attachment of the Turks to their employers, their superiors, even though these be Christians, and thus presumably with little affinity with them. Prince Alexander of Battenberg could not speak too highly of the fidelity of the Mohammedan element among his Bulgarian subjects: their orderliness, their freedom from crime, their childlike loyalty to him. After an important debate in the Sobranje—the Bulgarian Parliament—the Mohammedan members would call upon him privately at the Palace of an evening and seek instructions from him how he wished them to vote.
My old friend, Admiral Sir Henry Woods Pasha, who has been more than thirty years in the Turkish service, could never tell me enough of the devotion of the Turkish sailors under his command. Count Szechenyi Pasha, the Hungarian nobleman who for many years was at the head of the Constantinople Fire Brigade, which he originally organized, after having learned the business as an apprentice under the late Captain Shaw in London, is another of those who hold a high opinion of the fidelity and devotion of the Turks. Such evidence from men in whom the gentleman was innate before they had been lifted into rank and position by the Sultan is most valuable. They were inspired with gratitude towards their benefactor and declined to turn against him in the hour of his difficulties. One who had been approached with this object in view during the Armenian crisis indignantly replied: “No, I cannot, I will not bite the hand that has fed me.” Alas, that there were too few of this stamp among the men Abdul Hamid distinguished by his favour.
There is probably no city, Moscow not excepted, in which so many fires take place as in Constantinople. The flimsy woodwork of the houses in the Turkish quarters, which the heat of a Constantinople sun turns in course of time to tinder, partly accounts for it. Nor must the temptation to arson among the Greeks and Armenian trading element be lost sight of. Most of the insurance is done in English offices, for the English insurance offices have hitherto been those which have met claims most handsomely and with fewest awkward questions. I have repeatedly watched the firemen as, with bare legs and chests, they rushed breathless in a body in the wake of the fire-engine across the Galata Bridge to some fire in the Stamboul quarter. One could not help being impressed by their evident whole-hearted enthusiasm, though they got little pay and no reward, and it was easy to understand how in times gone by a rush of half-naked Turkish warriors, sword in hand, has proved well-nigh irresistible against clumsily moving knights in armour and awkward pikemen. This might even explain victorious inroads up to the very walls of Vienna. The development of modern firearms and tactics, for which the Turk by his temperament is ill-fitted, seems to account for the modern defeats of the Turks far more than any racial decline. Where the virtues of courage, sincerity, piety, and self-sacrifice have admittedly remained unchanged, it would be absurd to talk of degeneration. What can be admitted is that the character of this fine race may be no longer fitted to cope successfully with the intricate demands of a modern, highly systematized civilization.
CHAPTER XIV
TURKISH TRAITS: II
Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart,
Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood,
When man’s worst sin is, he does too much good.
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens