Chapter XXI: The Rebirth of Turkey 229 (3)

In this, Rauf spoke not only for the political Opposition but for the strong British and French traditions in Constantinople to which Enver’s course was a source of genuine grief. Rauf says, however, that the British Embassy made him no reply. To quote his precise words: “England made every effort to get Honduras, Paraguay and Greece into the war on the side of the Allies, but for us she had no word.” The Emperor of India and the Caliph had parted company in 1907. Great Britain remained true to its commitments to Russia. Enver’s Pan-Turanianism may have been impractical or not, but to any Ottoman Government, whether headed by Enver or Rauf, there were only two courses in the face of Russia――either to defend itself or to cease to exist. The Enver Government secured its loans from Germany on the only terms on which it could get them and if those terms involved war against Great Britain, it illy becomes British statesmen to complain. It was not the Enver Government which drew up the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

German naval officers hustled the Enver Government to a break by bombarding Odessa and dropping the mined nets which closed the Straits, thus banging and bolting the Black Sea gate to Russia as their own Navy in the north had already banged and bolted Russia’s Baltic gate. The Caliph proclaimed a Holy War against all Christians except Germans and Austrians, a proclamation which presumably was intended to wreck British India but which had the immediate effect of wrecking Tokatlian’s restaurant in Pera instead. The Enver Government abrogated the humiliating Capitulations and proclaimed its war aims: “Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us toward the destruction of our Russian enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural frontier to our Empire, which should include and unite all branches of our race.” Enver himself took command on the eastern frontier and his main body crossed into Russian Trans-Caucasia, while a smaller force crossed the Persian frontier toward Tabriz. Ahead of him in both directions lay large Turkish-speaking populations, and behind him in Constantinople the Opposition had been scattered. Rauf, the hero of the _Hamidie_, was eventually exiled to a volunteer command in Persia, a great seaman fighting with the infantry. Kemal was eventually sent to the Dardanelles, possibly in the hope that a British shell might put an end to him.

By this time, Austria-Hungary had smashed Serbia out of the way and both sides now poured out money and intrigue to win over Greece and Bulgaria. But Greece refused to budge without the promise of Constantinople which was in course of being promised to Russia, and Bulgaria demanded Macedonia. Victories, however, are the most telling arguments when Balkan Governments are sitting on the fence and Great Britain launched its Dardanelles campaign in 1915, possibly to open the road to Russia, possibly to enter Constantinople itself, possibly to impress Greece and Bulgaria, possibly with all three objects. It was here, in holding up the British before Anaforta, that Kemal became a military hero in Germany and would have become the hero of his own country if Enver had not suppressed the story of Anaforta in Constantinople. Two years later, when it did leak out in the C. U. P. year-book for 1917, Enver confiscated the entire remaining issue of the year-book and had it destroyed. The British used to tell a story of Kemal’s defense of Anaforta by way of showing that the Turks were better soldiers than the Germans. According to their version, Kemal at Anaforta telephoned his German superior, Limon von Sanders, for permission to attack immediately. Von Sanders refused permission and Kemal, tearing the telephone from the wall in a fit of anger, attacked on his own responsibility and won. The story is doubtless false, but it indicates the sort of legend which was growing up around a soldier who was, firstly, a Turk and who, secondly, looked upon Germans and British with equal coldness.

The ending of the British Dardanelles expedition, however, failed to impress either Greece or Bulgaria. It did impress Constantinople and when Ali Fethy Bey, Ottoman Minister at Sofia, not only supplied Bulgaria with the necessary promise of Macedonia but made over to it at once that bend in the Maritza River in which Karagatch, a suburb of Adrianople, lies, Bulgaria came in and the Enver Government found itself on the crest of a great wave of popularity. The Berlin-to-Bagdad highway was now complete and on the afternoon of January 17, 1916, the first express rolled into Constantinople direct from Berlin, while Sirkedji Station rang with cheers.

British defeat at the Dardanelles was a severe blow to the legend of British invincibility, and the promise of friendship to Islam which the Kaiser had made at Damascus in 1898 now offered a possible means of escape from the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Enver Government had shown the way out and Persia which had felt the weight of the 1907 Treaty most heavily, was not long in following. The German Legation in Teheran helped it along with much talk of Kaiser _Hajji_ Wilhelm Mohammed II and that sort of thing, but when the Persian Parliament fled from Teheran in 1915 to declare war against the Allies at Kum, the Russian and British Ministers hastened to the Palace and threatened to complete their partition of the country the moment the Shah left the capital. Thereafter the Shah remained a prisoner in Teheran, while Russians, British, Persian Nationalists and Turks fought across his chaotic country.

As for Afghanistan, the war found the Court at Kabul divided into two parties, one led by the Amir’s stepmother Bibi Halima which backed him in sticking loyally to the British, and the other led by his younger brother Nasrullah Khan which demanded that he seize the chance of powerful alliance in breaking out of the Anglo-Russian vise. Nasrullah’s party grew rapidly, despite the fact that the Amir fought it with every resource at his command. He confronted it personally when in November, 1914, he strode onto Kabul bridge in royal state and, holding the Koran in his hand, declaimed to his enemies: “These _feringhis_ (British) are our friends. They are my friends. I the Light of Faith, I, the Torch of the Nation, have decreed, and now repeat my decree, that no subject of mine shall lift a finger against the _feringhis_.”

As for Islam in India, its position became one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. Its Emperor in London was at war with its Caliph in Constantinople. As the result of the 1907 Treaty, its temporal and its religious allegiances were thrown into direct opposition. Its leaders attempted to harmonize this contradiction in its loyalties by drawing a distinction between its Caliph and the Ottoman Sultan, by conceiving of the war as existing between its Emperor in London and the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, and by demanding an undertaking from the Government of India that the war involved purely temporal objectives and was not concerned in any degree whatsoever with the Caliphate. The Government of India accordingly gave an undertaking that the question of the Caliphate was one for Moslem opinion alone to decide, and on this explicit understanding Moslem troops were enlisted in India for service against “our brother Turk.”

This use of Indian Moslems against the Ottoman Sultan, one of the most delicate of operations, formed one of the outstanding British successes of the war, but Englishmen at home have never succeeded in discovering that British India exists. Forgetful of the fact that the British Empire was “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” that it contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, British statesmen in England publicly referred to Salonica as “the portal of Christianity” and to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force which later advanced into Palestine, as “Crusaders.” At a moment when the Government of India was making every effort to give its vast country a sense of security, such references in England made Islam in India instantly alert for its Caliphate.

IX

THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915

ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH――WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED――AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS――RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS――GREAT BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY――ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES――THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS.

When the Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave birth.

In themselves, the Capitulations dated back to pre-Ottoman days when foreigners were accustomed to being governed under their own laws and usages wherever they happened to live. In the golden days of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultans confirmed them and as Ottoman prestige declined, an increasing number of Capitulatory rights grew up outside the specific rights originally stipulated in the imperial _firmans_. In general, it may be said of them that they conferred a diplomatic status on all Westerners in the Empire, attaching them to their own Consulates instead of to the Ottoman Government in whose country they lived. They were abrogated by the Enver Government on Sept. 28, 1914, in a unilateral declaration which the Central Powers were not in a position to prevent and against which the Allied Powers could only register their protests.

But the Capitulations were more than merely a legal process. They constituted a mental attitude toward the Ottoman Government. They made it the Western habit to disregard that Government and to establish Western contacts with its subjects quite independently of the fixed and existing relationships of the country. Under the Capitulations, the West long ago established contact with the Ottoman Government’s Christian subjects and a code of governmental conduct was unwittingly built up which the West has applied to that Government alone. Under this code, any Ottoman Christian was given the right to rebel against the Government but the Government, although it was the only body charged with the maintenance of peace in the country, was denied the right to put down Christian rebellion. This code the West has applied to no other Government. Orthodox Russia has repeatedly stamped out Moslem rebellion in Central Asia with as great brutality as the Ottoman Government has ever used against its Christians, but the code which the West has applied to the Ottoman Government it has never applied to Russia. The West has never acquired the habit of disregarding the Russian Government in the country in which it was charged with the duty of administration. Russia is a modern growth which has never known Capitulations.

If it is possible for us to divest our minds of the last vestige of the Capitulations, to apply to the Ottoman Government precisely the same code of governmental conduct which it has been our custom to apply to the Eastern absolutism of Old Russia, the relationship of the Ottoman Government to its Armenians may be profitably examined.

The Armenian population before the late war consisted of about 1,500,000 in the Ottoman Empire, about 1,000,000 in the Russian Empire, about 150,000 in Persia and about 250,000 in Egypt, Europe and the United States. Although small colonies of them were to be found in all parts of the Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them lived in the eastern provinces, a mountainous tableland on which, with their Turkish neighbors, they formed a sedentary peasantry among a nomadic population of Kurds.

In none of these eastern provinces did they constitute a majority of the population and in this respect they differed sharply from the Greeks and Bulgarians of the old Balkan provinces. This was not due to the Ottoman conquest, for the last of the independent Kingdom of Armenia Major had disappeared in the Seljuk invasion of 1079, and the Egyptians put an end to Armenia Minor in Cilicia in 1375. It was not until 1514 that the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, in his campaign against the Persians, occupied the modern eastern provinces and brought their tangled populations into the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the tolerance which distinguished the great Sultans, the Gregorian Church to which the Armenians belonged, was made a recognized community in full enjoyment of its ecclesiastical and cultural liberty. Unlike Greeks and Bulgarians in Europe who did possess majorities and who consequently had within themselves all the elements of nationhood, the Armenians enjoyed in their community institutions the only degree of autonomy which they could have enjoyed. It was comparatively easy for Greeks and Bulgarians, once Western ideas of nationalism had reached them, to enlarge the autonomy of their own community institutions into territorial independence, but any attempt to transfer Armenian autonomy from a religious to a territorial basis was quite another matter. The population of the modern eastern provinces was such that a resuscitation of the old Armenian Kingdom was impossible and it would have remained impossible until some means had been discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history.

That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress the Revolution swiftly broke down and the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire remained unsolved.

American missionaries established contact with the Armenian minorities nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized them, some time in the 1850’s, as a separate _Prodesdan_ community in enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn into touch with the new _Prodesdan_ community in the Ottoman Empire. It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering under Hamidian administration should become known in the United States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the Hamidian _regime_ in Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians’ sufferings alone.

Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in September and October, 1923.]

Commander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of the Second Grand National Assembly.]

In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of 1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty, had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with them under the Hamidian _regime_. This tendency presently found further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New York.

Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia, sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous handicap, were generally exempted from blame.

In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year, the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual annexation.

The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the downfall of the Hamidian _regime_. An Armenian _bloc_ was formed in the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in the _technique_ of revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina. Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but refrained from landing men.

Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster, American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the “spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.

When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to return to London without having taken up his duties. But American churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire, however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in the management of their schools.

The British Foreign Office had no sooner turned down the Enver Government’s demand than Russia served its own demands at Constantinople. The Enver Government appealed to Germany and a compromise was eventually effected under which a Dutchman and a Norwegian were appointed Inspectors-General in the eastern provinces. Neither of them had ever been in the Near East and neither knew any Near Eastern language. The war began shortly and neither of them ever reached the Near East.

The Armenian _bloc_ in the Parliament at Constantinople was holding its 1914 congress at Erzerum in the eastern provinces when the Enver Government entered the war. Government emissaries visited them there and laid before them the Pan-Turanian project whose immediate object was to throw Russia back. A partition of Russian Trans-Caucasia was proposed, the conquered territory to be divided between Armenians, Georgians and Tartars, each to be accorded autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty. The Armenian _bloc_ replied that if war proved necessary they would do their duty as Ottoman subjects but they advised the Government to remain neutral. It may be assumed that the Armenian deputies in the Parliament were still willing, despite the disappointments of the Enver _regime_, to work the Constitution with the Turkish deputies. The independence committees, however, found their inspiration in the West and their program was electrified by the professed concern for Armenian independence with which the Allied Powers began the war. The Russian annexationist group was similarly affected. In their view, Russia’s opportunity to “liberate” the eastern provinces was at hand.

Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun, a town of Armenian mountaineers who had long enjoyed an almost complete local independence. Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty of those who remained, removed them from the combatant forces and formed them into labor gangs whose commissariat, to put it mildly, worked even more decrepitly than that of the combatant troops.

With this situation in his rear, Enver Pasha crossed both the Russian and Persian frontiers but in January, 1915, he was thrown back behind his own frontier by the Russian victory at Sarykamish. This victory fired the annexationist hopes and armed bands of Armenian volunteers began operating behind the Ottoman Armies. In April, Lord Bryce and the “Friends of Armenia” in London appealed for funds to equip these volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them. Seeing that both Great Britain and Russia were at war with the Ottoman Government, it would have been surprising if so obvious a move had been overlooked. These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed there in May, 1919. The rumor immediately ran through Asia Minor that the Armenians had risen.

By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have been chosen by the Enver Government to take wide-spread measures against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were immediately necessary. Measures were taken. The provincial governors in those parts of the Empire which were exposed to the enemy, _i. e._, the eastern provinces and the Mediterranean coast where British and French men of war were maintaining a patrol, were ordered to assemble their Armenians and march them south into the Arab country for internment. If these deportations were to be carried out in an orderly fashion, the strongest and most reliable police arrangements were necessary but these arrangements the Enver Government either could not or would not make. In general, the deportations only gathered the Armenians together and exposed them without protection to a population alarmed and angered by the news from Van. They broke down into a dreadful business in which Armenian men of military age were shot down in batches and the remnant of women, children and old persons who had not already made their way as refugees into Russian Trans-Caucasia, were finally interned in Mesopotamia and Syria under conditions of the direst want.

This business deprived Russia of its sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces, and the British Foreign Office which shared in the Anglo-Russian program of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as Persia had already been partitioned, has naturally made the most of it. Lord Bryce’s estimate of the number of Armenians who died in the course of it was 800,000.

X

THE 1907 TREATY AND THE CALIPHATE

GREAT BRITAIN PROMISES CONSTANTINOPLE TO RUSSIA――ARAB NATIONALISM AND THE HOLY PLACES OF ISLAM――THE HEJAZ BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE――THE BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM――THE CALIPHATE AGITATION IN INDIA.

The Anglo-Russian _entente_ which had been created by the 1907 Treaty, went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south. The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.

Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907 Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople, the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.

The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern). Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an international Western _regime_, and the rest of the Syrian corridor, together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force “D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open at Aleppo.

It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of British imperialism.

Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication” in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which we customarily use….

Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov. 5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once. In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’s _Khedive_ and to set up a _Khedive_ of its own. London’s repeated pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the Agency’s _Khedive_ assuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed. Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streaming _en route_ to France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marked time while the _Grand Sherif_ of Mecca communicated the terms of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not long detain us here.

What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.

Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty broke it.

The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with the _Grand Sherif_ of Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the Hejaz, but the _Sherif’s_ son Feisal drew a cordon around them in Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 the _Grand Sherif_ declared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the title of King Hussein I.

The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople, and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.

With its right secured, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now free to advance on Jerusalem. With British officers on its right fetching Feisal’s Hejaz Army northward toward Damascus, the E. E. F. wheeled into the lower end of the Syrian corridor against stubborn Turco-German opposition. With small French and Italian detachments posted to it in view of the award of Palestine to an international Western _regime_, the E. E. F. finally occupied Jerusalem late in 1917 and, having broken up repeated enemy attempts to recover it, rested on its arms while the Residency at Cairo converted it into a British _fait accompli_.

When Godfrey de Bouillon captured Jerusalem in a former episode, he waded through blood to his saddle girth to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, but mediaevalism has changed its methods. When General Allenby captured it in 1917, he tacked up an “Out of Bounds” sign on the Holy Sepulchre, the Residency at Cairo hurried up one of its _attaches_ to serve as military governor of the town, an assistant city engineer from Alexandria hurriedly arrived to draw up a new town plan for it and a landscape artist was hurried down from London to put the new town plan into effect. So Jerusalem became a British _fait accompli_ and so it remains to this day. And the new town plan, having presumably served its purpose, has disappeared.

The war has given us all an aptitude for loose thinking and a full share of loose thought has attached to General Allenby and his Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Under our Western political tradition, a majority of the population is given the right to determine its own destiny, provided it is of a sufficient degree of intelligence to shoulder its responsibilities. If the faith of that majority in Palestine happens to be Islam, is not Islam the only one of the three faiths to which both Christian and Jewish shrines are equally sacred with its own? Has Islam ever failed in respect to the Christian and Jewish shrines in Jerusalem during its centuries of trusteeship? And what has happened to Islam’s shrines in Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo, in Sicily and Malta, under Christian rule?

At the British demand, the Ottoman Caliph finally withdrew his garrison from Medina after the armistice in 1918. It is simple enough to upset the theology of an Ottoman Caliphate, but the British Foreign Office, despite the Government of India’s specific undertaking to Moslems in India, has upset the _fact_ of an Ottoman Caliphate and in the last fifty years the fact and the theology of the matters. The Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had become a protest.

Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government of India’s undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has been saying to the Defender of the Faith since 1907 and what reply the Defender of the Faith has been making to the Emperor of India.

XI

THE COLLAPSE OF CZARIST RUSSIA

THE CZAR ABDICATES――THE FRENCH DEPOSE CONSTANTINE AT ATHENS――KEMAL URGES ENVER TO WITHDRAW FROM THE WAR――MR. LLOYD GEORGE’S NEW WAR AIMS IN TURKEY――THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907 ABROGATED――PAN-TURANIANISM LEAPS INTO LIFE ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN ROUT――THE MUDROS ARMISTICE OPENS THE BRITISH ROAD TO THE CHAOS IN RUSSIA.

Following the East India Company’s lead, the Government of India had long continued to weave into closer mesh the fabric of British influence which covered the land-locked Persian Gulf. In Nejd, Koweit and Mohammerah, in the maintenance for more than a century of an Agent at Bagdad, there lay the seeds of a British Arabian enterprise comparable to the great enterprise of British India. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 ensued and in 1914 the Government of India diverted a brigade of Indian Expeditionary Force “A” for Egypt and France, to the Persian Gulf where it lay off Bahrein Island to make a lightning stroke against Basra, the key to Bagdad. As soon as war was declared, it was heavily reinforced and, having been designated Indian Expeditionary Force “D,” it moved at once on Basra which it occupied in three weeks. Its Political Officer urged an immediate advance on Bagdad, but the Government of India was already groaning under the pressure from London. “D” Force succeeded, however, in advancing slowly north against a stiffening Turco-German opposition until it reached Kut-el-Amara.

At this stage, the tired Government of India suddenly woke up and ordered a bold dash to Bagdad. This turn of events changed the whole basis of “D” Force’s operations from the defensive to the offensive, a change for which the Force as then constituted was quite inadequate. The result was that the Turco-German command was able at Ctesiphon to throw General Townshend back to Kut-el-Amara where he was surrounded and held out for five months while the Government of India launched successive failures to relieve him. Kut-el-Amara was finally starved into surrender, General Townshend was removed to Constantinople as a prisoner of war, and the Government of India was forthwith relieved of its command. Indian Expeditionary Force “D” now became the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force under War Office command, although the Government of India retained its political command in Sir Percy Cox.

It was not until the end of 1916 that the War Office was ready to begin operations for the recapture of Kut-el-Amara, and by the end of February, 1917, the enemy was in full retreat. On the heels of his rout, Bagdad was occupied on March 11 and, although the Turco-German command made repeated attempts to recapture the city, its British defense held and Germany’s Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme was left in the air.

The Russian Armies by this time had not only advanced deeply into the eastern provinces but had occupied their zone in northern Persia in sufficient force to link with the British in Mesopotamia. A very few of them had even been permitted to travel to Basra and below it to gaze upon the blue and British waters of the Persian Gulf.

But on March 12, 1917, the Czar abdicated.

On May 16, Kerensky’s Republican Cabinet was set up at Petrograd, and the British Foreign Office entered at once into cordial relations with it.

On June 11, the French deposed Constantine at Athens, the Venizelist Government which was imposed on Old Greece entered the war on the side of the Allies, and ever since the failure of the British Dardanelles campaign, there had been an Allied Army based on Salonica, the key to Constantinople.

In July, Kerensky ordered General Baratoff to withdraw the Russian Armies from Persian soil. They melted away both from Persia (with the exception of a small force of die-hards who continued to hold Teheran hoping that the trouble at Petrograd would soon blow over), and from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

On Sept. 30, General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had thrown up his command of the Sixteenth Army in disgust after a break with Falkenhayn over the recapture of Bagdad, urged Enver Pasha to make the Russian collapse the occasion of withdrawal from the war. The disruption of the country’s economic life and the constant drainage away of its gold to Germany could have but one end, he wrote from Aleppo. Even with Russia eliminated, Great Britain and France could not be divided and they could not be beaten. The British would conquer Palestine, would set up a Christian Government with which to hold the Suez Canal, and would isolate the remnant of the Empire from the rest of Islam――“a sound war policy made possible by our entry into the war against England, a policy whose success means irreparable loss for us and whose failure means German domination for us…. Falkenhayn has said repeatedly to anyone who will listen to him, that he is a German and is naturally interested first in Germany. If he can hold Palestine, he will place himself before the world and before our country as one of the great victors of the war. We shall then lose our own country and to this end, Falkenhayn will sacrifice every ounce of gold and every soldier he can squeeze out of us.” But in the wake of the Russian rout, Pan-Turanianism had leaped into new life. Enver’s reply was to give Falkenhayn command of the Palestine front and to exile Kemal, together with Rauf Bey, to Germany in the suite of the Crown Prince.

On Nov. 7, another revolution lifted its head amid the chaos of the Kerensky administration and Soviet Russia was born, to be attacked at once by the British Foreign Office with a vindictive hatred which has not even now run its full course.

On Jan. 5, 1918, Mr. Lloyd George, then barred from access to Soviet Russia by the bolted Straits, declared in London: “Nor are we fighting … to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race…. We do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople.” This declaration was interpreted by what remained of the Opposition in Constantinople, to mean that the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian incubus, was in a position to renew his old understanding with the Caliph.

On Feb. 1, Soviet Russia abrogated the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 and the British Foreign Office “shook hands with murder” to the extent of concurring in the abrogation. But the 1907 Treaty had already worked out to its ghastly fruition. Nothing remained of Persia’s independence but an imprisoned Shah at Teheran. The Caliphate of Islam was destroyed, and few countries have ever been flogged into such ruin as now prevailed in the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire.

On March 2, Germany imposed its peace terms on Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk, detaching the Ukraine from Russia, embedding the Black Sea firmly in the Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme (the old Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme had been left in the air by the British capture of Bagdad), and making over Batum to the Turks. A Turco-German conference at Trebizond on the Black Sea speedily effected a joint policy for Trans-Caucasia, under whose terms Baku was named as the capital of a new Trans-Caucasian State to be christened “Azerbaijan,” presumably after the Azerbaijan province in north-west Persia which it was proposed to claim as an irredentum for the new State. An Ottoman Army, accompanied by a German military mission, now lost no time in moving on Baku and the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force simultaneously detached a small body which it designated the “Dunsterforce,” hurriedly dispatching it across Persia for Tiflis in Trans-Caucasia. Turks, Germans and British raced for Baku, all three determined now that Russia had fallen back behind the barrier of the Caucasus Range, to hold it there.

In the eastern provinces, the Russian rout had left hardly as much as a street cat alive. In what had been Russian Trans-Caucasia, beyond the eastern provinces, three small and quarrelsome Governments bobbed about like corks in the chaos, a Tartar Government at Baku controlled by the local Russian Soviet, an Armenian Government at Erivan controlled by the brigand-patriot Antranik, and a Liberal Georgian Government at Tiflis which feared the Russians and despised the Armenians. The Ottoman Army drove its way easily to Baku. The British Dunsterforce reached there first but only in time to flee back to Persia, for the Ottoman forces stormed the city’s hurriedly extemporized defensive works, installed their Azerbaijan Government, signed their treaty of close military alliance with it, organized the Turkish Federalist Party in its support and set about the task of fetching all Trans-Caucasia under its rule. Firmly founded on the German Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme, Pan-Turanianism had finally become a reality.

Meanwhile on July 3, the Crown Prince succeeded to the Throne at Constantinople. The Sixth Mohammed took up his abode in the white marble palace of Dolma Bagtsche on the Bosphorus. But it was not the Old Turks who girded him with the Prophet’s Sword. Instead of the Mevlevi _tchelebi_ from Konia, he was girded by the _sheikh_ of the great Senussi order whose seat is at Jarabub in the Sahara. A German submarine had taken him aboard at an empty place on the African coast and had landed him at Pola. Throughout the crossing, he had said his prayers five times a day in the forward battery compartment, facing toward Mecca by standard compass.

General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had spent most of a year touring Germany and Austria-Hungary in disgrace, was now recalled and given the _Yilderim_ group (Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Armies) on the Palestine front. But it was too late. Amid the din of a world war crashing to its close, simultaneous offensives were launched in September, by the French command at Salonica with Constantinople as its objective and by the British command in Palestine with Aleppo as its objective. With General Allenby’s great break-through overrunning the Syrian corridor, the French imposed an armistice on Bulgaria and the Enver Government fell in Constantinople. Enver Pasha fled to Daghestan, a dapper young Turk still in earnest pursuit of the Pan-Turanian will-o’-the-wisp, and the Opposition inherited the wreck with its capital gripped by a German garrison and French fingers reaching for it from the Maritza.

But the great wheel twirled and clicked. From a French command with the Old Greeks in tow, the new Izzet Government in Constantinople had nothing to hope. From the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian incubus, it had everything to hope. Secretly in order not to provoke the Germans to counter-action, the Izzet Government lost no time in dispatching General Townshend who was still a prisoner of war on Prinkipo, to the British naval Commander-in-Chief at Port Mudros outside the Straits. Rauf Bey, Minister of Marine in the Izzet Cabinet, followed in hurried secrecy with two colleagues. If their mission was a success, the German garrison in Constantinople would have to be confronted with a _fait accompli_.

In the cabin of H. M. S. Agamemnon, Admiral Calthorpe’s flagship at Port Mudros, Rauf outlined the Izzet Government’s program in seeking an armistice: (1) a return to the understanding which the Caliph and the Emperor of India had enjoyed down to 1907; (2) autonomy for the Arabs under the Caliph’s sovereignty; (3) recognition of the abrogation of the Capitulations; and (4) temporary financial help, if necessary. Admiral Calthorpe asked only that the Straits be unbarred and the road to Soviet Russia be opened. As for Pan-Turanianism, it might prove useful in holding Russia behind the barrier of the Caucasus Range. Clause 11 of the Mudros armistice stipulated as follows: “Immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops from North-West Persia to behind the pre-war frontier has already been ordered and will be carried out. Part of Trans-Caucasia has already been ordered to be evacuated by Turkish troops, the remainder to be evacuated if required by the Allies after they have studied the situation there.” Clause 15 added: “Allied control officers to be placed on all railways, including such portions of Trans-Caucasian railways now under Turkish control, which must be placed at the free and complete disposal of the Allied authorities, due consideration being given to the needs of the population. This clause to include Allied occupation of Batum. Turkey will raise no objection to the occupation of Baku by the Allies.”