Mercifully the return of spring brought a respite from this reign of terror. Enver’s invasion of Transcaucasia had been utterly crushed at Sara Hamish. The Russian outposts spread south again, and Urmi was reoccupied once more.
With the Assyrian tribesmen in the mountains the crisis had not developed so rapidly. The Turks themselves were anxious to defer it. Indeed, there is no valid reason to doubt that they would have liked to evade it altogether. This knot of hardy mountaineers ensconced in their rocky fastnesses were far more difficult to eradicate than ten times their number of Armenians—poor, spiritless hucksters[{363}] and husbandmen dispersed in open villages and towns. There was little spoil to be won from them—many more hard knocks than ha’pence—and the force that would be needed to subdue them was wanted rather urgently elsewhere. Moreover, if they could only be cajoled into complacency they might prove quite a useful asset later as independent witnesses to character. The Armenian massacres were now really beginning, and the Turks were inflexibly resolved to persist in them to the uttermost. There could come no protests from Europe, but perhaps from America there might—and the presence of American missionaries in the country rendered it impossible for the facts to be altogether hid. It would be but prudent accordingly to prepare a line of apology, and to invest with some faint plausibility the plea that this monstrous holocaust had been “exaggerated,” and that such “repressive measures” as had been adopted were really no more than were necessary to quell an incipient revolt. Such a plea might gain valuable corroboration from the fact that another Christian millet, living in the same provinces and under the same conditions as the Armenians, had nevertheless continued loyal to their suzerains, and had seen in the Turks’ proceedings no cause of apprehension for themselves. On military grounds also the mountaineers were worth conciliating; for, if Turkish Armenia were invaded, this little garrison on their flank might sensibly hamper the defenders.
Thus, quite high bids were made for what the Turks called Assyrian loyalty, and what the Assyrians (clinging fondly to their traditional but shadowy independence) preferred to style alliance. Their Patriarch, their bishops, and their chiefs were all to be salaried. They were to be armed. They were to be allowed absolute freedom for education. And many of the Assyrian leaders felt certainly much tempted to clinch the bargain, and to adopt what (on the face of things) seemed manifestly the safer course.
But the very magnitude of these Greek gifts aroused the distrust of the majority. They knew well that Turkish[{364}] promises were apt to prove so much “hot air.” The arms and salaries were things that could never be expected to materialise. They doubted even the immunity which all these lavish promises implied. Jehad had been proclaimed, and they were Christians in a Moslem country. Could the Turks guarantee them from the attacks of their turbulent Kurdish neighbours—attacks from which they had never been wholly exempt even in their most tranquil periods, and to which the proclamation of Jehad would now give sanction and cohesion? Could they even rest assured that the Turks themselves would not attack them as soon as their hands were freed from the embarrassments which now beset them? They saw the fate that had overtaken their co-religionists, the Armenians and Jacobites; the fate that had befallen their own fellow-tribesmen in the outlying districts to the East. Every night brought their Patriarch news (for now none dared travel by day) of some fresh massacre perpetrated in some of their isolated villages. One night came five successive messengers from five different villages; and all closed their tidings with the same refrain, “I only am escaped to tell.” Would it not be better to trust to their own right arms? To the chance of help from Russia, to the fainter chance of help from England? These nations had always befriended them, and with them their real sympathies lay.
Yet the peril was great and obvious. They were in the very jaws of the wolf, and who could blame them if they elected to play for safety? They could rest assured at all events that England and Russia would not. They might argue, with their Yezidi neighbours (and with a good many other more enlightened folk in less remote districts than Sheikh Adi) that it was safer to offend a good God, who might forgive, than a malignant Devil who assuredly would not.
Meanwhile the war was still distant, and no final choice was forced on them. Through the winter the nation wavered. But it was significant that the Patriarch quitted Qudshanis (which lay on the outskirts of his territory, and close to the Turkish garrison at Julamerk), and withdrew[{365}] across the Zab into the rugged mountain fastnesses of Diz. This seemed to portend rejection of the Turkish overtures, yet in truth under what other conditions could he continue to negotiate with a Government which had just inaugurated the Armenian massacres by treacherously kidnapping and assassinating their chiefs?
Then, in the spring of 1915, the war took a turn in Russia’s favour. The Turkish invasion of Transcaucasia was defeated, and the Russian invasion of Turkish Armenia began. A Russian army reached Van and relieved the Armenians beleaguered there; and a detachment thrust forward to Bashkala sent a formal invitation to the Assyrians to throw in their lot with the Allies. The invitation was boldly accepted; and the point that seems definitely to have turned the scale in favour of acceptance was the religious character that had been given to the war by the Turkish proclamation of Jehad. The Assyrians felt that they were now called to play their part on the side of Humanity and Christendom; and as soon as the call came definitely they braved all the risks that it involved.
But no doubt it is too much to assert that they were guided entirely by this higher motive. They were (as our previous chapters have indicated) a nation of fighters with a healthy, carnal appetite for what is vulgarly called “a jolly row.” And they were probably swayed in the same direction by the fact that all their neighbours with whom they had long-standing and (in the main) very just causes of quarrel, were ranged on the contrary side. The war-song of Shamasha Ephraim was soon in all men’s mouths in the mountain villages, and some of its spirited lines deserve quoting as evincing the ardour with which they entered the war:
Brothers, up and arm you; ’tis the Turk assails you;
Lo, the day is dawning when we march to meet the foe!
Quit your flocks and cornfields, grip your trusty rifles,
Forth we go to battle in the name of Mar Shimun.
Stand by one another, clansmen of the nation,
Tkhuma by Tyari, and let Baz by Jilu stand.
Like a band of brothers, hearts and hands united,
Forth we go to battle in the name of Mar Shimun.[{366}]