Being thus a dead level, Gawar looks as easy a place to cross as well can be. We see our destination before us perhaps twelve miles away, and nothing seems to be necessary but to make a bee-line for it. In reality few things are more difficult than crossing this or a similar plain, unless you know the way or have a guide who knows it. The river is bordered with wide swamps; and such fords as exist upon it (and they are not many) can only be approached from certain directions: while the stranger is constantly liable to stumble (like the luckless Duke of Monmouth) on “rhines” or irrigating channels; the muddy bottoms of which are unfordable for animals, except at certain points known only to the villagers around.
A fertile level like this should swarm with villages and carry a large population; but of the villages that once were here (almost all of which were Nestorian Christian) many are now absolutely deserted, and others have become Kurdish and so do little work in the world. This has been brought to pass, not by the villagers abandoning their Christianity—for that is so rare a thing as to be almost unknown—but by what foreign residents characterize as “the hermit crab Act.”
This process is as follows. Given a village of Christians, with Kurds in the neighbourhood: a party of Kurds (men who have probably made their own village too hot to hold them, or who have quarrelled with their chief) come and settle at free quarters in the place as “guests.” The villagers cannot turn them out; for the intruders are armed,[{178}] and they are not; and stingless worker bees can hardly expel sting-bearing drones. If they appeal to the Government for redress, the official is bribed by the intruders to do nothing (the bakhshish being extorted from the villagers); and the answer is made “have not these Mussulmans the right to reside where they like?” If any man does head an attempt to evict them, a “dead set” is made at him till he is worried into leaving the village and his land; and this the Kurds immediately appropriate, forcing the other villagers to work it for them without pay. The village mill is usually one of the first places taken, and a liberal percentage of the corn goes as a fee for the grinding of it. Meantime, what the presence of these fellows means for the “rayats” in the way of petty oppression, and what the consequences are to the girls of the village, anyone who has some knowledge of human nature can be left to guess for himself.
If the plan prospers other Kurds join; and the leader of the gang presently builds him a small hold, or kala (again with the forced labour of the villagers), and at length the bulk of the Christians are worried out of the country. Only a few are kept, as serfs, to till for their new masters the land that they and their fathers once owned; and what was a Christian village has become Kurd.
If ever one sees a Kurdish village which has good fields, and signs of good cultivation, one can be sure that it was originally Christian, and that it has gone through this process.
Apart from the brutality of the proceeding, the matter illustrates the impossibility of the Turk as a modern governor, unless he is most radically reformed and supervised. One presumes that what the Government wants is a set of peaceable, tax-paying subjects. Yet here, not one village, but scores of villages, inhabited by peaceable rayats who do pay their taxes and ask for nothing better than to be left alone under Ottoman rule; are allowed to be emptied, and filled up by Kurds who let the land go to waste, who never pay taxes at all, and can be trusted not to fight for the Turk in any real emergency.[{179}]
However, the officials of the day benefit by the bahkshish that the Kurds pay them. And here we touch the real root of the matter. The Turk is not deliberately aiming at the extirpation of his Christian subjects. He has no deeper policy in his mind than just to go on eskissi gibi, “in the same old way,” and let the officials fill their pockets in peace. As a man he has many virtues; and there never was an Englishman yet who dealt with him, and did not come to like him: but as a governor he is execrable; in that he is too lazy to see that things go well, and allows an unspeakably corrupt Civil Service to ruin the land as it likes. Will he ever do the one thing that can save him, and allow himself to be administered by some European Power, as Egypt has been? Perhaps a quotation from “Odysseus,” shrewdest of European observers of Turkey, can give the answer. “‘This country is just one big dish of soup,’ said the Vali, ‘and nobody has any real use for soup except to eat it. We eat in the old-fashioned way, with big spoons; you want to come along with gimlets and bore holes in the bottom of it, and suck. Then you propose that eating with spoons shall be abolished as old fashioned, because you know that we have no gimlets, and don’t understand sucking.’”[103]
A level plain like Gawar, with a Government headquarters and garrison at its town of Diza, ought to be as easily controlled a kaimakamlik as one could wish. And so it is normally; though an Albanian kaimakam, Haidar Beg, did rouse rather a storm when he put a recalcitrant Kurdish chief on a donkey, face to the tail, and rode him in that fashion all round Diza town. Still he had the place in order; “Not a dog barked without leave when Haidar ruled,” is the local saying to this day.
Some time after his departure, however, the district was the scene of one of the very few attacks on a British Consul that have taken place in the land. Lawless as the country is, the foreign resident is generally safe; because such trouble follows for everybody if he is interfered with. In twelve years, the writer has only known five deliberate attacks on Europeans (though plenty were planned and did[{180}] not come off); and only one of the five had fatal consequences,—at least to the European. Three of these attacks were on British Consuls—“for the fellows will go wandering into such dangerous places, just to make maps,” as a harassed Ottoman official explained.
In this case the British Consul, accompanied by the writer, had reached the plain of Gawar from Neri. They were “escorted” by a zaptieh provided by the Sheikh of that place and belonging to his tribe; and as it was just subsequent to the incident of the stolen horses, escort and travellers were not on the very best of terms. Zaptieh and muleteers declared that they would stop, early in the afternoon, at a Kurdish village called Alikhan, at the entry into Gawar plain; while the Englishmen had ordered that a push should be made for Diza. The zaptieh waxed so insolent in the dispute that he was summarily dismissed. He dashed off in a fury to the village, and called on the men of the place to come out and plunder the Franks as they passed. These poured out like bees at the call, and a scuffle resulted in which the baggage mule of the party was captured with the bulk of its load. Only the maps and photographic negatives were salved: and the two Englishmen and their kavass were pursued by the crowd for about half an hour, deep into the swamps towards Diza; while the zaptieh (apparently the only man who had a gun) kept firing steadily on them till his cartridges gave out. Perhaps the most discreditable side to the whole affair was that he failed to hit even one of the party in that period; but it was a Turkish Government rifle that he was using; so that probably, under the circumstances, the target was the safest place. The Consul’s Serbian kavass begged most earnestly for permission to try “just one shot” in answer; but the Consul knew too well what the result of that one shot might be, and did not wish to kill.