No certain life achieved by other’s death.
Shakespeare, King John
Much that I shall have to say in the course of the next few chapters might be unintelligible, or at least liable to be misunderstood, if I were not to explain the circumstances under which I went to Constantinople as Correspondent of the New York Herald. My visit was, as indicated in the previous chapter, in direct connexion with the so-called “Armenian Atrocities,” and my mission was due to the shrewdness of one man, a great newspaper proprietor.
For some time past the diplomatic and consular representatives of the Powers at Constantinople had sent alarming reports to their respective Governments, and these, passing into the Press, and supplemented by harrowing accounts from the foreign newspaper correspondents in Constantinople, had fanned a flame of resentment directed against the Turks as Mohammedans. This was more particularly the case in England and the United States of America.[[2]] The proprietor of the New York Herald, almost alone among newspaper magnates, had the discernment to perceive that the Armenian question was in the main a political one—in some respects similar to that of Bulgaria a generation previously—and that whatever might be the shortcomings of the Turkish Government and its local Administration, there was little or no reason for assuming that the disturbances had their source in religious fanaticism directed against the Christian as such; whilst evidence was accumulating that a vast Armenian conspiracy, nurtured in Russia and encouraged by the Nonconformist element in England, obscured the real issue, to which there were two sides. Mr. Gordon Bennett saw the chance of a journalistic “score” in giving the Turks an opportunity of making their own version of things known to the world—a chance which had been denied to them by the great English newspapers.
[2]. See English Blue Books for the years 1895–1896.
This was my first experience as a Special Correspondent abroad, and before starting, Mr. Gordon Bennett had given me his ideas of the duties of such as follows: “The Special Correspondent of a great newspaper possesses for the time being something of the influence of an Ambassador from one nation to another. Now, according to an axiom of Machiavelli, an Ambassador should endeavour to make himself persona grata with those to whom he is accredited, if only thereby to gain the best opportunities for obtaining every possible information and to be able to report events in a broad impartial spirit. The correspondent should give his sources wherever possible, and allow the reader to form his own opinion on the facts submitted. The views of the paper itself should be found in the editorial columns. The correspondent is to take no side, and to express no opinions of his own. In many cases it would appear that the matter sent to the papers by their correspondents in Turkey is biased against the Turks. This implies an injustice against which even a criminal on trial is protected.”
Having stated this much, I may add that it would be an error to suppose that it was expected of me to palliate or gloss over the gravity of any excesses which might have taken place, for such would only have frustrated the object in view. As a matter of fact, no foreign correspondent in Constantinople gave more unvarnished accounts than those published by the New York Herald of the terrible events which subsequently took place in the Turkish capital.
One of the salient features of Constantinople is the prevalence of idle gossip, and I had not been there many days before I became aware that my presence and its supposed purpose formed a topic of interest to people whose very existence was unknown to me. One day, entering the Club de Constantinople, near the Pera Palace Hotel, I was addressed in English by a fat, sallow-faced, beardless individual, who told me with the blandest of smiles that he had heard I had come to Constantinople to “write up the Turks,” and that I was to be paid neither more nor less than one million francs to do so. He asked me quite ingenuously whether this was indeed the case.
With such an auspicious opening it could not be a matter for surprise that before long the Herald correspondent became an object of curiosity to the large colony of “gobe-mouches” who supplied current gossip in the guise of personal news to Embassies and newspaper correspondents.
A conviction had gained ground in diplomatic circles, intensified by the Press in general, that the Turkish Government was, if not actually unwilling, at all events unable to prevent the recurrence of massacres. The agitation on the part of the Armenian Committees in the different capitals of Europe had been carried on to such purpose that there was hardly an American or English newspaper which had a good word left to say of the Turks, let alone of the Turkish Government. A horde of adventurers of various nationalities, déclassés of every sphere of life, cashiered officers among the rest, who had left their native country for its good, were eking out a precarious livelihood by providing newspaper correspondents, if not also Embassies, with backstair information. Others were in the pay of the Sultan or his chamberlains, at the same time acting as spies, watching and reporting the doings of people of note in the capital in the interests of the Palace.