The most prominent place in our previous narrative has been given to the Assyrian Christians, and especially to the Ashiret mountaineers of Hakkiari, who formed the most virile and independent section of that tiny nation and Church. And it is but fitting that we should again give them precedence in the “Footnote to the History of the Great War” which we are now contributing; since, in this obscure corner of the stage upon which that portentous drama was enacted, they played perhaps the most prominent and assuredly the worthiest part.
The first news of the outbreak of war was brought to Mar Shimun at Qudshanis. He had just returned thither from Van, where he had been discussing Governmental business with the Vali. The discussions had been most amicable; and he had brought back with him a whole crop of promises for the redress of grievances—promises which he had[{360}] accepted with becoming gratitude, but at the recognised rate of discount, having had ripe experience of the value at which they were apt to be redeemed. And he was far from feeling reassured by the startling tidings that now reached him; for all knew the sort of justice that the Ottoman reserved for his helots whenever the eyes of Europe might chance to be diverted elsewhere.
He soon saw an earnest of his misgivings in the sacking of isolated Armenian villages, and in renewed outbreaks of the feuds which were perpetually simmering on the Persian border between the Begzade Kurds and the Assyrians of Mergawar and Tergawar. A general massacre of all Christians began to be openly talked about; and when (in November) the expected happened, and Turkey entered the lists as a combatant, that event was signalised by the pillaging of all the Christian villages near Bashkala with the practically open approval of the local Ottoman authority.
The first open fighting, however, occurred in neutral Persia—a country which should (theoretically) have been out of bounds to both sides. But Urmi, though nominally Persian, had for years been practically administered by the resident Russian “consul,” and the Turks were not altogether unjustified in electing to regard it as enemy territory. A mixed force of Turks and Kurds swept down from the mountains upon Urmi, massacring the wretched Armenians, and driving before them the struggling Assyrians from the villages of Mergawar and Tergawar. They felt so confident of victory that, when within a mile or two of the city, they flung away the reserves of bread that they had brought with them, relying on the promise of their leaders that next day they would be sacking the bazaars. And, verily, it looked as if they would be; for Urmi is only defended by a ruinous mud wall, and its sole effective garrison (apart from the Assyrian auxiliaries) was the Russian consular guard. But it was now discovered that the consul had also in reserve a considerable stock of arms and ammunition, and with these the clansmen were rearmed. An opportune Russian reinforcement arrived in the nick of time from Tabriz, and the great assault on the morrow was decisively and bloodily[{361}] repulsed. The invaders recoiled to the mountains, where their ill-disciplined Kurdish levies dispersed; and soon another defeat of a second Kurdish force near Suj Bulak rendered the position at Urmi, at all events, temporarily secure.
But the Russian commanders were uneasy. Enver Pasha’s invasion of Transcaucasia was by now beginning to make headway, and the Russians were recalling their detachments in Azerbaijan to meet the threat to Batum. They told the American missionaries that the utmost they could promise them was not to withdraw without full notice; and even this guarded promise proved illusory, for the very next morning brought them imperative orders from headquarters directing immediate evacuation. The whole Russian force marched off instantly—and in their train some 10,000 of the Christian population of Urmi, taking with them such scanty provision as they were able at the moment to collect. They saved their bare lives by their flight, and eventually the greater part of them found a miserable asylum at Tiflis; but the hardships of their journey, and of their prolonged exile, exacted a terrible toll.
The fate of those who remained proved that the fugitives’ forebodings had been well grounded. Urmi was abandoned once more to the wretched misrule of the Persians; and the man who obtained chief authority was that same Mejid es Sultaneh of whom we have already spoken on page 215. In those days he had been generally regarded as one of the most enlightened and free-thinking of the Persian nobility. His reforming tendencies had earned him disgrace and exile; and it had been to the generosity of sympathetic English merchants that he had owed the preservation of his forfeited estates. But apparently the only lesson that he had been capable of learning from adversity was the wisdom of truckling to iniquity, and he now reappeared as a pan-Islamic fanatic of the most virulent and reactionary type.
The Persian magnates were as much averse to Turkish domination as to Russian, and might have been expected to evince some gratitude to their Christian neighbours for the prominent share they had taken in repelling the recent[{362}] assault. But apparently they argued in their own minds that the very presence of the Christians had in some sort invited the invasion; that anyway they had helped the hated Russians, and that a general persecution of them would be the best way of conciliating the Turks.
So some hundreds of these poor wretches were massacred during the winter—driven out in batches of 50 or 60 to one or other of the neighbouring villages, and there mercilessly put to death. Among them were a batch of 70 from the Christian villages of Gawar, who had been impressed to act as porters by the Turks in the recent invasion and had given their captors the slip when the invading army took to flight. These were marched back towards Gawar and handed over to the Kurds—possibly the very men who had impressed them—by whom they were all knifed or clubbed to death.
In these massacres perished Mar Dinkha,[154] the Bishop of Mergawar; and we, who have laughed at his oddities must not omit to pay our tribute to the heroism of the old man’s martyrdom. Utterly crippled by his injuries, he spent his last hours in prison crawling to and fro to comfort his fellow-sufferers—his last moments in bestowing absolution upon them as each in turn preceded him to death.
It should be noted by our phil-Islamites that, in nearly every instance, all these victims were offered their lives on the sole condition of apostasy. With Islam (when free to express itself) it is still “the Koran or the sword.”