An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

I saw and spoke to two women who had been maltreated by the Greeks, and who still bore wounds. The head of one was bound by a bloodstained rag, and the arm of the other was in a sling.

What they told me was truly horrifying. Both had been outraged and left for dead, without a hand being raised in their defence. And their cases were only two out of several dozen. A child, a little girl of seven, had been decapitated by a brutal Turk, and a mother with her suckling babe had been tortured by slow burning.

Everywhere I went was the same terrible tale, the same cry for the protection of the Powers. At Vranja, in the Melnik district, I saw the gaunt ruins of seven houses which had been recently burnt, and was told how nine women, after being subjected to all sorts of atrocities, were afterwards shot, while at Bashna three men were burnt alive, in a house, and six women shot.

That journey through Macedonia still haunts me like a nightmare. On the one hand, I met the oily Turkish official in frock-coat and fez declaring that the country was quite quiet, and that all reports were exaggerated; while, on the other, I saw with my own eyes the devilish blood-lust of the Greeks, the poor people with their wounds still upon them, the mutilated bodies of innocent Christian women whose blood calls hourly for vengeance.

To Florina, up to Kastoria, and through the terrorised districts around the lakes of Presba and Ochrida I travelled, first under Turkish escort, but not being allowed to see what I wanted, I was permitted by a Bulgarian band to join them, and rode through the various districts. It was a somewhat perilous and exciting time, for I travelled quickly, wishing to get out of the country. Its terrors had got on my nerves, and the gloomy warnings of my friends ever rose within my mind. Greek bands seemed to be operating everywhere, and we never knew when we might not come into close quarters. Our way lay often through deep ravines, affording excellent cover for lurking Greeks.

So life was the reverse of pleasant.

Still I saw with my own eyes sights that appalled me, and I am certain that if the reader had seen what I have witnessed he would cry shame that such an awful state of things should be allowed to exist, and even fostered by a Christian civilised Power.

Does the Christian Kaiser, with all his outward declarations of belief in the direction of the Almighty, ever give a thought to the poor Macedonians butchered with his knowledge—butchered to further the secret aims of the “Fatherland”? Does His Imperial Majesty, when he bends his knee in prayer, remember the first tenets of the Christian faith?

Those who know, as I know, the secrets of German intrigue in Constantinople, cannot but feel contempt and disgust at the shameful sacrifice of human life in Macedonia, where Greeks and Turks outrage, torture, burn, and shoot the poor innocent populace, egged on by “pious” Germany.

Let the ambitious Emperor, who so often invokes God’s blessing upon the German nation, pause for a moment and reflect whether there is no hypocrisy in his political policy, and whether he himself, personally, can expect to receive the Divine aid he so constantly petitions with mock servility.