An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

Turkey has nothing to fear from either Austria or Italy, but from Bulgaria and Germany—from the former, who will assert her rights; and from the latter, who will eventually play the traitor and crush her.

My conversations at the Sublime Porte, in those shabbily furnished rooms, with seedy officials offering me cups of coffee, were often very amusing. I had really credited the Turk with more shrewdness, for the Oriental is usually supposed to be the finest diplomat in all the world. Yet from the Grand Vizier downwards to the men-in-the-street, they are all held fascinated under the benign smile of Germany.

Assurances were given me during those audiences with the rulers of Turkey that all was being done that could possibly be done in Macedonia; that reports of massacres were exaggerated; that the Turks were actually protecting the Bulgarians, and that the Macedonian question was not at all a serious one.

I will give one instance. It was admitted to me during one of my audiences at the Sublime Porte, that “a few incidents” had occurred, but I was assured that they were not serious, and that all was now quiet in Macedonia.

In reply, I pointed out that on November 7 last (Old Style) a Greek band descended upon the village of Karadjovo, and having disembowelled seven men, killed twenty-five Bulgarians. They then massacred most of the women and children in the village, and calmly went off.

I was then officially informed that it had been discovered that a certain Greek consul had been implicated in this raid, and that arms had been supplied through him. The Turks had therefore made a strong protest to Athens, and sent four battalions in pursuit of the assassins.

At Salonica, ten days later, I saw one of the peasants present at this massacre in question, and the description he gave of it was horrifying. His version of the affair was very different from the official Turkish version, for he declared that the Turks themselves aided the assassins and allowed them to get clear away. Twenty-five women were, he said, outraged and afterwards killed. One woman had her hands cut off, and another’s feet were burnt over a fire. Other facts he told me were too terrible to repeat here.

Though the Porte may have made formal protest to Athens, there is but little doubt that the Turks were implicated in the massacre—as they are in most of those “regrettable incidents,” as they are called, which daily occur in the Land of Black Terror.

Permission was readily granted to me to travel through the country, but it certainly would not have been had it been known that beyond the lake of Ochrida I intended to disregard my Turkish escort and throw in my lot with the Bulgarians, declared by the authorities to be “insurgents” in order to see for myself.

I arrived at the village of Ghilposte, in the Seres district, two days after a Greek band had descended upon the little place, and I saw with my own eyes traces of their terrible atrocities. They had blown up ten houses by dynamite, and capturing four men, two women, and a baby one year old, had deliberately burned them all alive, as well as outraging three other women.