THE BLIGHT OF ASIA
_BY GEORGE HORTON_
LIKE ANOTHER HELEN
THE LONG STRAIGHT ROAD
THE MONKS’ TREASURE
THE EDGE OF HAZARD
[Illustration: Weeding Out the Men.
All men of military age were torn away from their wives and children and
led away in groups for deportation to the interior.]
THE BLIGHT OF ASIA
_An Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian
Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability
of Certain Great Powers; with the True Story
of the Burning of Smyrna_
_By_
GEORGE HORTON
For Thirty Years Consul and Consul-General of the
United States in the Near East
_With a Foreword by_
JAMES W. GERARD
Former Ambassador to Germany
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1926
BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
PRINTED AND BOUND
BY BRAUNWORTH & CO., INC.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
“What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven
churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and
unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto
Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.”
REVELATION, I:11.
THE MARTYRED CITY
Glory and Queen of the Inland Sea
Was Smyrna, the beautiful city,
And fairest pearl of the Orient she—
O Smyrna, the beautiful city!
Heiress of countless storied ages,
Mother of poets, saints and sages
Was Smyrna, the beautiful city!
One of the ancient, glorious Seven
Was Smyrna, the sacred city,
Whose candles all were alight in Heaven—
O Smyrna, the sacred city!
One of the Seven hopes and desires,
One of the Seven Holy Fires
Was Smyrna, the Sacred City.
And six flared out in the long ago—
O Smyrna, the Christian city!
But hers shone on with a constant glow—
O Smyrna, the Christian city!
The others died down and passed away,
But hers gleamed on until yesterday—
O Smyrna, the Christian city!
Silent and dead are the churchbell ringers
Of Smyrna, the Christian city,
The music silent and dead the singers
Of Smyrna, the happy city;
And her maidens, pearls of the Inland seas
Are gone from the marble palaces
Of Smyrna, enchanting city!
She is dead and rots by the Orient’s gate,
Does Smyrna, the murdered city,
Her artisans gone, her streets desolate—
O Smyrna, the murdered city!
Her children made orphans, widows her wives
While under her stones the foul rat thrives—
O Smyrna, the murdered city!
They crowned with a halo her bishop there,
In Smyrna, the martyred city,
Though dabbled with blood was his long white hair—
O Smyrna, the martyred city!
So she kept the faith in Christendom
From Polycarp to St. Chrysostom,[1]
Did Smyrna, the glorified city!
FOREWORD
Here at last is the truth about the destruction of Smyrna and the
massacre of a large part of its inhabitants by one who was present.
The writer of the following pages is a man, happily, who is not
restrained from telling what he knows by political reasons or by any
consideration of fear or self-interest. He gives the whole story of the
savage extermination of Christian civilization throughout the length and
breadth of the old Byzantine Empire in a clear and convincing manner.
That it should have been possible twenty centuries after the birth of
Christ for a small and backward nation, like the Turks, to have committed
such crimes against civilization and the progress of the world is a
matter which should cause all conscientious people to pause and think;
yet the writer shows conclusively that these crimes have been committed
without opposition on the part of any Christian nation and that the last
frightful scene at Smyrna was enacted within a few yards of a powerful
Allied and American battle fleet.
We turned a deaf ear to the dying Christians when they called to us for
aid, fully aware that America was their only hope, and now it would
appear that there is a growing tendency in this country to whitewash the
Turks and condone their crimes in order to obtain material advantages
from them.
The author takes the position that this can not be done, as the Turks
have put so great an affront upon humanity that it can not easily be
overlooked, and the truth is sure to come out. He claims that high ideals
are more than oil or railroads, and that the Turks should not be accepted
into the society of decent nations until they show sincere repentance for
their crimes.
Fraternizing with them on any other terms creates a suspicion of
sordidness or even complicity. From the outspoken nature of this book
it will be evident to the reader that the writing of it has required
considerable courage and that it has been inspired by no other possible
motive than a desire to make the truth known about matters which it is
important for the world to know.
(Signed) JAMES W. GERARD.
INTRODUCTION
The editor of a great Paris journal once remarked that he attributed
the extraordinary success of his publication to the fact that he had
discovered that each man had at least one story to tell.
I have been for many years in the Near East—about thirty in all—and
have watched the gradual and systematic extermination of Christians and
Christianity in that region, and I believe it my duty to tell that grim
tale, and to turn the light upon the political rivalries of the Western
World, that have made such a fearful tragedy possible.
Though I have served for the major part of that time as an American
consular officer, I am no longer acting in that capacity, and have
no further connection with the United States Government. None of the
statements which I make, therefore, has any official weight, nor have I
in any way drawn upon State Department records or sources of information.
I write strictly in my capacity as a private citizen, drawing my facts
from my own observations, and from the testimony of others whom I quote.
I was in Athens in July, 1908, when, at the instigation of the Young
Turks’ “Committee of Union and Progress” the Saloniki army revolted and
demanded the immediate putting into effect of the Constitution of 1876,
which had become a dead letter, and I noted the reaction produced upon
Greece by that apparently progressive move.
I was in Saloniki shortly after and witnessed the sad awakening of the
non-Mussulman elements of that part of the Balkans to the fact that
the much vaunted “Constitution” meant no liberty for them, but rather
suppression, suffering and ultimate extinction.
I was in Smyrna in May of 1917, when Turkey severed relations with
the United States, and I received the oral and written statements of
native-born American eye-witnesses of the vast and incredibly horrible
Armenian massacres of 1915-16—some of which will be here given for the
first time; I personally observed and otherwise confirmed the outrageous
treatment of the Christian population of the Smyrna vilayet, both during
the Great War, and before its outbreak. I returned to Smyrna later and
was there up until the evening of September 13, 1922, on which date the
city was set on fire by the army of Mustapha Khemal, and a large part of
its population done to death, and I witnessed the development of that
Dantesque tragedy, which possesses few, if any parallels in the history
of the world.
One object of writing this book is to make the truth known concerning
very significant events and to throw the light on an important period
during which colossal crimes have been committed against the human race,
with Christianity losing ground in Europe and America as well as in
Africa and the Near East.
Another object is to give the church people of the United States the
opportunity of deciding whether they wish to continue pouring millions
of dollars, collected by contributions small and great, into Turkey for
the purpose of supporting schools which no longer permit the Bible to be
read or Christ to be taught; whether, in fact, they are not doing more
harm than good to the Christian cause and name by sustaining institutions
which have accepted such a compromise?
Another object is to show that the destruction of Smyrna was but the
closing act in a consistent program of exterminating Christianity
throughout the length and breadth of the old Byzantine Empire; the
extirpation of an ancient Christian civilization, which in recent years
had begun to take on wonderful growth and rejuvenation spiritually,
largely as a result of the labors of American missionary teachers.
Their admirable institutions, scattered all over Turkey, which have
cost the people of the United States between fifty million and eighty
million dollars, have been, with some exceptions, closed or irreparably
damaged, and their thousands of Christian teachers and pupils butchered
or dispersed. This process of extermination was carried on over a
considerable period of time, with fixed purpose, with system, and with
painstaking minute details; and it was accomplished with unspeakable
cruelties, causing the destruction of a greater number of human beings
than have suffered in any similar persecution since the coming of Christ.
I have been cognizant of what was going on for a number of years and when
I came back to America after the Smyrna tragedy and saw the prosperous
people crowded in their snug warm churches, I could hardly restrain
myself from rising to my feet and shouting: “For every convert that you
make here, a Christian throat is being cut over there; while your creed
is losing ground in Europe and America, Mohammed is forging ahead in
Africa and the Near East with torch and scimitar.”
Another reason is to call attention to the general hardening of human
hearts that seems to have developed since the days of Gladstone—a less
exalted and more shifty attitude of mind. This is partly due to the fact
that men’s sensibilities have been blunted by the Great War, and is also
in large measure a result of that materialism which is engulfing our
entire civilization.
G. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TURKISH MASSACRES 19
II GLADSTONE AND THE BULGARIAN ATROCITIES 21
III FIRST STEPS IN YOUNG TURKS’ PROGRAM 27
IV THE LAST GREAT SELAMLIK 38
V PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS IN SMYRNA DISTRICT 41
VI THE MASSACRE OF PHOCEA 46
VII NEW LIGHT ON THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE 52
VIII STORY OF WALTER M. GEDDES 60
IX INFORMATION FROM OTHER SOURCES 67
X THE GREEK LANDING AT SMYRNA 72
XI THE HELLENIC ADMINISTRATION IN SMYRNA 82
XII THE GREEK RETREAT 93
XIII SMYRNA AS IT WAS 97
XIV THE DESTRUCTION OF SMYRNA 112
XV FIRST DISQUIETING RUMORS 117
XVI THE TURKS ARRIVE 126
XVII WHERE AND WHEN THE FIRES WERE LIGHTED 144
XVIII THE ARRIVAL AT ATHENS 155
XIX ADDED DETAILS LEARNED AFTER THE TRAGEDY 159
XX HISTORIC IMPORTANCE OF THE DESTRUCTION OF SMYRNA 168
XXI NUMBER DONE TO DEATH 173
XXII EFFICIENCY OF OUR NAVY IN SAVING LIVES 177
XXIII RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WESTERN WORLD 179
XXIV ITALY’S DESIGNS ON SMYRNA 182
XXV FRANCE AND THE KHEMALISTS 186
XXVI MASSACRE OF THE FRENCH GARRISON AT URFA 195
XXVII THE BRITISH CONTRIBUTION 201
XXVIII TURKISH INTERPRETATION OF AMERICA’S ATTITUDE 203
XXIX THE MAKING OF MUSTAPHA KHEMAL 209
XXX OUR MISSIONARY INSTITUTIONS IN TURKEY 214
XXXI AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS UNDER TURKISH RULE 220
XXXII THE REVEREND RALPH HARLOW ON THE LAUSANNE TREATY 233
XXXIII MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 238
XXXIV THE KORAN AND THE BIBLE 253
XXXV THE EXAMPLE OF MOHAMMED 261
XXXVI THE 50-50 THEORY 266
XXXVII ASIA MINOR, THE GRAVEYARD OF GREEK CITIES 268
XXXVIII ECHOES FROM SMYRNA 275
XXXIX CONCLUSION 281
APPENDIX 285
THE BLIGHT OF ASIA
CHAPTER I
TURKISH MASSACRES, 1822-1909
Mohammedanism has been propagated by the sword and by violence ever since
it first appeared as the great enemy of Christianity, as I shall show in
a later chapter of this book.
It has been left to the Turk, however, in more recent years, to carry
on the ferocious traditions of his creed, and to distinguish himself by
excesses which have never been equaled by any of the tribes enrolled
under the banner of the Prophet, either in ancient or modern times.
The following is a partial list of Turkish massacres from 1822 up till
1904:
1822 Chios, Greeks 50,000
1823 Missolonghi, Greeks 8,750
1826 Constantinople, Jannisaries 25,000
1850 Mosul, Assyrians 10,000
1860 Lebanon, Maronites 12,000
1876 Bulgaria, Bulgarians 14,700
1877 Bayazid, Armenians 1,400
1879 Alashguerd, Armenians 1,250
1881 Alexandria, Christians 2,000
1892 Mosul, Yezidies 3,500
1894 Sassun, Armenians 12,000
1895-96 Armenia, Armenians 150,000
1896 Constantinople, Armenians 9,570
1896 Van, Armenians 8,000
1903-04 Macedonia, Macedonians 14,667
1904 Sassun, Armenians 5,640
-------
Total 328,477
To this must be added the massacre in the province of Adana in 1909, of
thirty thousand Armenians.
So imminent and ever-present was the peril, and so fresh the memory of
these dire events in the minds of the non-Mussulman subjects of the
sultan, that illiterate Christian mothers had fallen into the habit of
dating events as so many years before or after “such and such a massacre.”
CHAPTER II
GLADSTONE AND THE BULGARIAN ATROCITIES
In the list of massacres antedating the colossal crimes which have
come under my own personal observation, is cited the killing of 14,700
Bulgarians in 1876. This butchery of a comparatively few—from a Turkish
view-point—Bulgarians, some fifty years ago, provoked a splendid cry of
indignation from Gladstone. As this narrative develops and reaches the
dark days of 1915 to 1922, during which period whole nations were wiped
out by the ax, the club and the knife, and the Turk at last found the
opportunity to give full vent to his evil passions, it will appear that
no similarly effective protest has issued from the lips of any European
or American statesman.
The curious feature is that, owing to the propaganda carried on by the
hunters of certain concessions, an anti-Christian and pro-Turk school has
sprung up in the United States.
In _A Short History of the Near East_, Professor William Stearns Davis,
of the University of Minnesota, referring to the Bulgarian atrocities of
1876, says:
“What followed seems a massacre on a small scale compared with
the slaughter of Armenians in 1915-16, but it was enough to
paralyze the power of Disraeli to protect the Turks. In all,
about twelve thousand Christians seem to have been massacred.
At the thriving town of Batal five thousand out of seven
thousand inhabitants seem to have perished. Of course neither
age or sex was spared and lust and perfidy were added to other
acts of devilishness. It is a pitiful commentary on a phase
of British politics that Disraeli and his fellow Tories tried
their best to minimize the reports of these atrocities. They
were not given to the world by official consular reports, but
by private English journalists.”
The above is interesting, as it illustrates a quite common method of
government procedure in such cases. The Tory does not seem to be a unique
product of British politics.
While I was in Europe recently, I talked with a gentleman who was in the
diplomatic service of one of the Great Powers and was with me in Smyrna
at the time that city was burned by the Turkish army. This gentleman
was in complete accord with me in all details as to that affair, and
asserted that his Foreign Office had warned him to keep silent as to the
real facts at Smyrna, but that he had written a full memorandum on the
subject, which he hopes to publish.
It is significant that the Turks in 1876 were championed by Jews, while
to-day such Jews as Henry Morgenthau, Max Nordau and Rabbi Wise are
prominent among that group of men who are raising their voices in
behalf of oppressed Christians. It is due to their influence, and to the
voices of such senators as King of Utah and Swanson of Virginia, that
confirmation of the Lausanne Treaty has been deferred until the blood on
the bayonets and axes of the Turks should get a little drier.
Speaking of Disraeli, Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyle: “He is
not such a Turk as I thought. What he hates is Christian liberty and
reconstruction.”
The Bulgarian massacres were made known by an American consular official,
and denounced by Gladstone in a famous pamphlet. They led to the
declaration of war by Russia, the treaty of San Stefano and the beginning
of the freedom of Bulgaria.
In a speech at Blackheath in 1876, Gladstone said:
“You shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall
not be invaded, but never again, as the years roll in their
course, so far as it is in our power to determine, never again
shall the hand of violence be raised by you, never again shall
the flood gates of lust be opened to you.”
In his famous pamphlet, _Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East_,
we have the following, a thousand times truer to-day than when it was
written:
“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only
possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their
Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their
Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage,
shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have
desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most
blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to
those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of
matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which
has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you
like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There
is not a criminal in an European jail, there is not a criminal
in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and
over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which
has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which
has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which
produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous
harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the
air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame.
That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to
the portion of our race which did them; that the door should
be left open to the ever so barely possible repetition would
spread that shame over the world.
“We may ransack the annals of the world but I know not what
research can furnish us with so portentous an example of the
fiendish misuse of the powers established by God for the
punishment of evil doers and the encouragement of them that do
well. No government ever has so sinned, none has proved itself
so incorrigible in sin, or which is the same, so impotent in
reformation.”
[Illustration: RAHMI BEY
Turkish war governor of Smyrna.]
The time will never come when the words of Gladstone, one of the wisest
of English statesmen, will be considered unworthy of serious attention.
The following characterization of the Turk by him has been more aptly
verified by the events that have happened since his death than by those
that occurred before:
“Let me endeavor, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline
what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question
of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded
with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild
Mohammedans of India nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor
the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from
the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great
anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad
line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as
their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view.
They represented everywhere government by force as opposed
to government by law.—Yet a government by force can not be
maintained without the aid of an intellectual element.—Hence
there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world,
a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and
rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone
and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has
all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish
Islam in the element of mind.”
To these words of Gladstone may appropriately be added the
characterization of the Turk by the famous Cardinal Newman:
“The barbarian power, which has been for centuries seated in
the very heart of the Old World, which has in its brute clutch
the most famous countries of classical and religious antiquity
and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of the
earth; and, which, having no history itself, is heir to the
historical names of Constantinople and Nicaea, Nicomedia and
Cæsarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineva and Babylon, Mecca
and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding in its
possession one half of the history of the whole world.”
In another passage Newman describes the Turk as the “great anti-Christ
among the races of men.”
CHAPTER III
FIRST STEP IN YOUNG TURKS’ PROGRAM
(1908-1911)
To comprehend this narrative thoroughly, one must remember that the East
is unchangeable. The Turks of to-day are precisely the same as those who
followed Mohammed the Conqueror through the gates of Constantinople on
May 29, 1453, and they have amply demonstrated that they do not differ
from those whom Gladstone denounced for the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876.
Those who are building hopes on any other conception will be deceived;
they will be painfully deceived if they make treaties or invest large
sums of money on Western ideas of the Oriental character.
I am neither “pro-Greek,” “pro-Turk,” nor anything except pro-American
and pro-Christ. Having passed the most of my life in regions where
race feeling runs high, it has been my one aim to help the oppressed,
irrespective of race, as will be shown by documents submitted later, and
I have won the expressed gratitude of numerous Turks for the aid and
relief I have afforded them on various occasions.
I am aware of the many noble qualities of the Turkish peasant, but I do
not agree with many precepts of his religion, and I do not admire him
when he is cutting throats or violating Christian women. The massacres
already enumerated are a sufficient blot upon the Turkish name. They were
made possible by the teachings of the Koran, the example of Mohammed,
lust and the desire for plunder. They sink into insignificance when
compared with the vast slaughter of more recent years, conducted under
the auspices of Abdul Hamid, Talaat and Company, and Mustapha Khemal.
It should be borne in mind, however, that it was not until after the
declaration of the constitution that the idea “Turkey for the Turks”
took definite shape and developed into the scheme of accomplishing its
purpose by the final extinction of all the Christian populations of that
blood-soaked land—a plan consistent with, and a continuation of, the
general history of Mohammedan expansion in the ancient home lands of
Christianity.
At the time of the declaration of the constitution in 1908, I was in
Athens. My first intimation of the event was a procession of Greeks
carrying Hellenic and Ottoman flags, marching through the streets on
their way to the Turkish legation, where they made a friendly and
enthusiastic demonstration.
The idea in Greece and the Balkans generally was that the constitution
meant equal rights for all in Turkey, irrespective of religion—the dawn
of a new era. Had this conception proved true, Turkey would to-day be
one of the great, progressive, prosperous countries of the world. The
weakness of the conception was that in an equal and friendly rivalry,
the Christians would speedily have outstripped the Ottomans, who would
soon have found themselves in a subordinate position commercially,
industrially and economically. It was this knowledge which caused the
Turks to resolve upon the extermination of the Christians. It was a
reversal of the process of nature; the drones were about to kill off the
working bees.
During these days a member of the Turkish Cabinet made a speech at
Saloniki, advocating the closing of all the foreign missionary schools,
as well as native Christian, arguing: “If we close the Christian
institutions, Turkish institutions will of necessity spring up to take
their place. A country must have schools.”
Immediately after the fall of Abdul Hamid, I was transferred to Saloniki.
There was great rejoicing over the fall of the “Bloody Tyrant,” and the
certainty prevailed that the subjects of Turkey had at last united to
form a kingdom where all should have full liberty to worship God and
pursue their peaceful occupations in security. The fall of Abdul Hamid
had been made possible by the cooperation and aid of the Christians.
But the latter—Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs—were soon cruelly disillusioned.
A general persecution was started, the details of which were reported
to their various governments by all the consuls of the city. This
persecution first displayed itself in the form of sporadic murders
of alarming frequency all over Macedonia, the victims being, in the
beginning, notables of the various Christian communities. A favorite
place for shooting these people was at their door-steps at the moment
of their return home. It became evident that the Turkish Government, in
order to gain control of the territory, was bent upon the extermination
of the non-Mussulman leaders. Many of those murdered had been prominent
in the anti-Abdul movement.
From the extermination of notables, the program extended to people of
less importance, who began to disappear. Bevies of despairing peasant
women who had come to visit the _vali_ (Turkish governor) and demand news
of their husbands, sons or brothers, appeared on the streets of Saloniki.
The answers were usually sardonic: “He has probably run away and left
you,” or “He has probably gone to America,” were favorite replies. The
truth, however, could not long be hidden, as shepherds and others were
soon reporting corpses found in ravines and gullies in the mountains and
woods. The reign of terror, the Turks’ immemorial method of rule, was on
in earnest, and the next step taken to generalize it was the so-called
“disarming.” This meant, as always, the disarming of the Christian
element, and the furnishing of weapons to the Turks.
An order was issued that all persons must give up their guns and other
weapons, and squads of soldiers were sent out through villages to put
this edict into effect. That the object was not so much to collect
hidden arms as to terrorize the inhabitants was soon made evident from
the tortures inflicted during the search. Bastinadoing was a favorite
measure. The feet of the peasants, accustomed to going barefoot, were
very tough; they were therefore tied down and their toes beaten to a pulp
with clubs.
Another form of torment frequently resorted to by the “Government of
Union and Progress,” was tying a rope around the victim’s waist and
slipping a musket between the body and the cord and twisting until
internal injury resulted. Priests were frequent victims of this campaign
of terror and hate, the idea being to render them ridiculous as well as
to inflict hideous suffering. The poor creatures were made to stand upon
one foot while a soldier menaced them with a bayonet. If the priest,
finally exhausted, dropped the upraised foot to the ground, he was
stabbed with the bayonet.
The prisons were bursting with unfortunate people existing in starvation
and filth. An American tobacco merchant related to me that a prominent
Greek merchant disappeared from the streets and for several days screams
were heard issuing from the second story of a certain building. This
Greek was not killed, but was finally released. He showed the American
round pits all over his body. He had been tied naked to a table and hot
oil dropped on him. When he had asked, in his agony, “What have I done?”
his persecutors replied, “We are doing this to show you that Turkey has
been freed for the Turks.” He was doubtless let go to spread the glad
news.
A well-known British correspondent, a pro-Bulgar, stated that he had
sent reports of these persecutions to the British press, but could not
get them published. He had the obsession that the reason was because the
whole British press was owned by Jews, but it is not easy to follow him
in this deduction. The true reason is to be found in some government
policy of the moment.
It was this indiscriminate persecution of Greeks, Bulgars and Serbs which
drove them into the same camp and enabled them to chase the Turk out of
Macedonia, even though they did fall at one another’s throats as soon as
they got rid of the common enemy. Any one inclined to doubt the veracity
of the above description must understand, if he knows anything of Balkan
matters, that it needed a pretty serious state of affairs to cause Greek
and Bulgar to fight on the same side.
The persecution to which all the races in the Empire were subjected, with
the exception of the Turks, is well-depicted in the following article
in the _Nea Aletheia_, a conservative journal published in the Greek
language, in Saloniki, which used all its influence in favor of harmony
and moderation. The following is from the issue of July 10, 1910, or
about two years after the declaration of the famous “Constitution”:
“Before two years are finished a secret committee is unearthed
in Constantinople, with branches all over in important
commercial towns, whose intentions are declared to be
subversive of the present state of affairs. In this committee
are found many prominent men and members of Congress. All
discontent seen in the kingdom has its beginning in this
perverted policy. Our rulers, according to their newly adopted
system of centralization upon the basis of the domination
of the ruling race have given gall and wormwood to all the
other races. They have displeased the Arabs by wishing them
to abandon their language. They have alienated the Albanians
by attempting to apply force, though conciliatory measures
would have been better. They have dissatisfied the Armenians
by neglecting their lawful petitions. They have offended the
Bulgarians by forcing them to live with foreigners brought
purposely from other places. They have dissatisfied the
Serbians by using against them measures the harshness of which
is contrary to human laws.
“But for us Greeks words are useless. We have every day before
us such a vivid picture of persecution and extermination that
however much we might say would not be sufficient to express
the magnitude of the misfortunes which since two years have
come upon our heads. It is acknowledged that the Greek race
ranks second as a pillar of the Constitution and that it is the
most valuable of those contributing to the prosperity of the
Ottoman fatherland.
“We have the right to ask, what have we, Ottoman Greeks, done
that we should be so persecuted? The law-abiding character of
the Ottoman Greeks is indisputable. To us were given promises
that our rights would remain untouched. Despite this, laws are
voted through which churches, schools, and cemeteries belonging
to us are taken and given to others. Clergymen and teachers are
imprisoned, citizens are beaten, from everywhere lamentation
and weeping are heard.
“With what joy we Ottoman Greeks hailed the rise of the 10th
of July! With what eagerness we took part in the expedition of
April, 1909! With what hopes we look forward even to-day to the
future of this country! It is ours, and no power is able to
separate us from it.
“The Greeks are a power in Turkey; a moral and material power.
This power it is impossible for our compatriot Turks to ignore.
When will that day come when full agreement will exist between
the two races? Then only hand in hand will both march forward,
and Turkey will reach the height which is her due.”
The following is from my Saloniki diary, dated December 11, 1910:
“Wholesale arrests, in some of the towns all the prominent
citizens being thrown into jail together.
“Series of assassinations of chiefs of communities, in broad
day, in the streets. Fifty prominent Bulgarians thus shot down,
and many Greeks.
“The following figures were obtained from a report of the
Turkish Parliament and locally confirmed:
“In the Sandjack of Uskub, 1,104 persons bastinadoed; Villayet
of Monastir, 285 persons bastinadoed; Saloniki, 464 persons
bastinadoed; (of these 11 died and 62 were permanently
injured.) Casas of Yenidje-Vardar, Gevgeli, Vodena, 911 persons
were bastinadoed.
“All the prisons are crowded with Christians; many have fled
into Bulgaria and thousands of men, women and children are
hiding in the mountains.”
This was the state of affairs two years after the declaration of the
Constitution, and it was this common suffering which Greeks, Bulgars
and Serbians endured, which drove them together and forced them to
declare the First Balkan War, in October of 1912, in which the Turk was
practically driven out of Europe until Christian statesmen of the Great
Powers brought him back again. Turkish power has always been built upon
Christian dissension and aid.
In the (at that time) pro-Turk _Progres de Salonique_, a journal
published in the French language at Saloniki, appeared an article which
expresses a state of feeling among Oriental peoples which has taken
great distension since the date of the article (July 22, 1910). What
was then a fire bids fair now to grow into a general conflagration, due
to the building up, by Christian powers, of the sinister puissance of
Mustapha Khemal:
“In the space of three years,” says the article, “the Orient,
twice and from its two extremities, has marvelously astonished
the civilized world: first, by the great victory won by the
Japanese over the strongest of Occidental peoples, and next by
the wonderful revolution in Turkey! In fact, it is a marvel
which is being accomplished to-day! There is no comparison
between the Orient of to-day and that of ten years ago. What
is more curious is that this Oriental movement has taken the
form of two separate currents, which, starting from the two
extremities of the Orient, are going to meet and their points
of junction will be, in all probability, India.
“At the head of these movements will be found the peoples
belonging to the same race—the Mongolian. Each one possesses
the unquestionable title to the moral and intellectual
supremacy of the great countries over which their influence
extends.
“The Japanese are incontestably at the head of the peoples
professing Buddhism, the doctrines of Confucius, etc.; the
Turks, defenders of Islam for centuries, are the incontestable
leaders of the people professing Islamism. Therefore, the two
movements, starting from the two extremities of Asia, from the
Bosphoros and Tokio, go spreading, each one in an appropriate
field prepared in advance by history itself to accept it, then,
since they are essentially the same, they will unite at their
point of junction, to form a common and formidable Asiatic
current. With this in view, the Occident is feeling uneasy and
agitated.”
Immediately after the reestablishment of the Constitution, then, the
first step of the dominant race was to solidify its supremacy by measures
of suppression, oppression, and murder. The Turks also deliberately
undertook to force all the non-Turkish races to become in language, laws,
habits and almost all other particulars, “Ottomans.”[2]
It is exactly this policy, in operation, which is referred to in the
clipping from the _Nea Aletheia_, quoted above. A more foolish project
was never conceived by the mind of man—that of forcing whole nations to
change their languages and habits overnight. The impossibility of this
scheme becomes all the more evident when the reader reflects that an
inferior civilization was attempting to impose itself upon a superior
one. The Turk never had any intention of giving equal liberty to all
the peoples who were so unfortunate as to be in his power. Failing to
“Turkify” them, as it has been called, his only next alternative was to
massacre and drive them out, a policy not long in developing.
CHAPTER IV
THE LAST GREAT SELAMLIK
(1911)
A picturesque incident in the process of “Turkifying” took place in
Macedonia in May and June of 1911. Mahomet V arrived in Saloniki on
May thirty-first of that year on a battle-ship escorted by the greater
part of the Turkish fleet. It had been known for some days that he was
coming, as his advance guard, in the shape of tall flabby eunuchs, cooks,
etc., began to appear and lounge about in front of the principal hotels.
The town was liberally beflagged, and the different communities made
demonstrations in his honor, the Bulgarians showing especial enthusiasm.
He visited Uskub and Monastir and, from the former place, proceeded to
the Plain of Kossovo, where the decisive battle was fought which brought
the Turks and the Turkish blight into Europe. There on June 15, 1389, the
Sultan Amurath defeated the heroic Lazarus, King of the Serbians. This
Turkish victory, whose evil consequences have lasted down into our own
times, was made possible by treachery of Christian allies, the real cause
of all Turkish triumphs.
Amurath himself was slain, and it was in the plain where are found his
simple monument and a mosque in commemoration of his name, that Mahomet
V, the witless dotard and befuddled puppet of the Young Turk Committee,
called together all the various picturesque tribes of Turkey in Europe
for a grand _selamlik_, or service of prayer.
Besides civilians, some of whom are said to have walked for days to be
present, there were thousands of troops, and many famous regiments,
carrying ancient battle-torn flags. A huge tent had been erected for
the sultan, and the vast throng seated itself upon the ground. As the
priests recited the service and the thousands of worshippers bent their
foreheads to the earth and sat up again, the sea of red fezzes rose and
fell rhythmically like a wide field of poppies swayed by the wind.
There have been in the world’s history few more picturesque and
impressive sights than this last _selamlik_ on the ill-omened “Plain of
Blackbirds.”
I was presented to Mehmet (or Mohammed V) at Saloniki, and a more flabby,
pitiful, witless countenance it would be difficult to imagine. The bleary
eyes were puffy underneath, the lower lip dropped in slobbery fashion.
His Imperial Majesty was accompanied by several shrewd-faced prompters,
of the Europeanized type, and he never uttered a word without turning to
one of them with a helpless and infantile expression for directions as
to what to say or do. When the interview was finished, Mehmet turned his
back and started to walk away. He had gone but a few steps when one of
the prompters whispered to him, whereupon he faced about ponderously and
slowly twisted his features into a ghastly and mechanical grin. It was as
clear as any pantomime could be made that he had been instructed to smile
when taking leave, and had forgotten a part of his lesson.
Mehmet V had been kept in confinement all his life, practically, by his
brother, the great and cruel Abdul, by whom it was said that he had been
encouraged to absorb daily incredible quantities of _raki_. He was a
kindly harmless soul, who had been selected by Enver and the rest because
he had become practically an imbecile.
The great _selamlik_ made a strong appeal to the Turks, deeply stirring
their religious feelings, but it is needless to say that it did not
accomplish much toward “Turkifying” the Christian element. And all
this time the crafty Abdul, the famous “Sick Man” of Europe, one of
the greatest diplomats and murderers in the history of the world, was
confined with a small army of wives in the Villa Allatini at Saloniki.
CHAPTER V
PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS IN SMYRNA DISTRICT
(1911-1914)
In 1911, I was transferred to Smyrna, where I remained till May of 1917,
when the Turks ruptured relations with the United States. During the
period from 1914 to 1917, I was in charge of the Entente interests in
Asia Minor and was in close contact with Rahmi Bey, the famous and shrewd
war governor-general.
The Greek subjects in Asia Minor were not disturbed for the reason,
as explained by Rahmi Bey, that King Constantine was in reality an
ally of Turkey and that he was preventing Greece from going into the
war. The Rayas, or Greek Ottoman subjects, of the Port were, on the
other hand, abominably treated. These people were the expert artisans,
principal merchants and professional men of the cities, and the skilled
and progressive farmers of the country. It was they who introduced the
cultivation of the famous Sultanina raisins, improved the curing and
culture of tobacco, and built modern houses and pretty towns. They were
rapidly developing a civilization that would ultimately have approached
the classic days of Ionia. A general boycott was declared against them,
for one thing, and posters calling on the Mussulmans to exterminate
them were posted in the schools and mosques. The Turkish newspapers
also published violent articles exciting their readers to persecution
and massacre. A meeting of the consular corps was held and the decision
was taken to visit the _vali_ and call the attention of His Excellency
to the danger that these articles and this agitation might disturb the
tranquillity of a peaceful province.
The consuls visited the _vali_, with the exception of the German
representative, who alleged that he could not join in such a move without
the express authorization of his government. This action of the German
official on the spot is another confirmation of the assertion that
Germany was to a large extent co-guilty with her Turkish allies in the
matter of the deportations and massacres of Christians. In fact, there is
little doubt that Germany inspired the expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks
of Asia Minor at that time, as one of the preliminary moves in the war,
which she was preparing.
The ferocious expulsion and terrorizing by murder and violence of
the Rayas along the Asia Minor littoral, which has not attracted the
attention it merits, has all the earmarks of a war measure, prompted
by alleged “military necessity,” and there is no doubt that Turks and
Germans were allies during the war and were in complete cooperation.
A study of this question may be found in Publication No. 3, of the
American Hellenic Society, 1918, in which the statement is made that one
million, five hundred thousand Greeks were driven from their homes in
Thrace and Asia Minor, and that half these populations had perished from
deportations, outrages and famine.
The violent and inflammatory articles in the Turkish newspapers, above
referred to, appeared unexpectedly and without any cause. They were so
evidently “inspired” by the authorities, that it seems a wonder that even
ignorant Turks did not understand this. Cheap lithographs were also got
up, executed in the clumsiest and most primitive manner—evidently local
productions. They represented Greeks cutting up Turkish babies or ripping
open pregnant Moslem women, and various purely imaginary scenes, founded
on no actual events or even accusations elsewhere made. These were hung
in the mosques and schools. This campaign bore immediate fruit and set
the Turk to killing, a not very difficult thing to do.
A series of sporadic murders began at Smyrna as at Saloniki, the list in
each morning’s paper numbering from twelve to twenty. Peasants going
into their vineyards to work were shot down from behind trees and rocks
by the Turks. One peculiarly atrocious case comes to mind: Two young men,
who had recently finished their studies in a high-grade school, went out
to a vineyard to pass the night in the _coula_ (house in the country).
During the night they were called to the door and chopped down with axes.
Finally the Rayas, to the number of several hundred thousand, were all
driven off from their farms or out of their villages. Some were deported
into the interior, but many managed to escape by means of _caiques_ to
the neighboring islands, whence they spread over Greece. A few thousand
Turks destroyed the region which the Greeks were developing and rendering
fertile, from Pergamus clear down the coast to Lidja. I went over the
whole region and took photographs of the ruined farm-houses and villages.
Goats had been turned into flourishing, carefully tended vineyards and
acres of roots had been dug up for fuel.
Most of the Christian houses in Asia Minor are built of a wooden
framework which serves as an earthquake proof skeleton for the walls
of stone and mortar. The Turks pulled the houses down by laying a
timber across the inside of the window—or door-frame—to which a team of
buffaloes or oxen was hitched. A Turk would reside in one of the houses
with his wife, or with his goats and cattle, and thus tear down a circle
of houses about him. When the radius became too great for convenience,
he moved into the center of another cluster of houses. The object of
destroying the houses was to get the wooden timbers for firewood.
[Illustration: The Long Line That Leads to Death.
Deportation of Christians from their homes to the arid wastes to die.]
Both at this time and during the progress of the Great War, the Rayas
were drafted into the army where they were treated as slaves. They were
not given guns but were employed to dig trenches and do similar work, and
as they were furnished neither food, clothing nor shelter, large numbers
of them perished of hunger and exposure.
The beginning of the work on the “Great Turkish Library” at Smyrna was
peculiarly interesting as a revelation of the mentality of the race.
Christians were used for the labor, the taskmasters, of course, being
Turks armed with whips. When I called the attention of Rahmi Bey, the
governor-general, one day to the fact that there were not sufficient
books existing in his native tongue to justify the construction of so
great an edifice, he replied:
“The first thing is to have a building. If we have a building the books
will necessarily appear to fill it, and even if they don’t, we are going
to translate all the German books into Turkish.”
The structure was never finished, and consequently the books have not
been written.
CHAPTER VI
THE MASSACRE OF PHOCEA
(1914)
The complete and documentary account of the ferocious persecutions of
the Christian population of the Smyrna region, which occurred in 1914,
is not difficult to obtain; but it will suffice, by way of illustration,
to give only some extracts from a report by the French eye-witness,
Manciet, concerning the massacre and pillage of Phocea, a town of eight
thousand Greek inhabitants and about four hundred Turks, situated on
the sea a short distance from Smyrna. The destruction of Phocea excited
great interest in Marseilles, as colonists of the very ancient Greek town
founded the French city. Phocea is the mother of Marseilles. Monsieur
Manciet was present at the massacre and pillage of Phocea, and, together
with three other Frenchmen, Messieurs Sartiaux, Carlier and Dandria,
saved hundreds of lives by courage and presence of mind.
The report begins with the appearance on the hills behind the town
of armed bands and the firing of shots, causing a panic. These four
gentlemen were living together, but when the panic commenced they
separated and each installed himself in a house. They demanded of the
Kaimakam, gendarmes for their protection, and each obtained one. They
kept the doors open and gave refuge to all who came. They improvised four
French flags out of cloth and flew one from each house. But, to continue
the recital in Monsieur Manciet’s own words, translated from the French:
“During the night the organized bands continued the pillage
of the town. At the break of dawn there was continual _très
nourrie_ firing before the houses. Going out immediately,
we four, we saw the most atrocious spectacle of which it is
possible to dream. This horde, which had entered the town,
was armed with Gras rifles and cavalry muskets. A house was
in flames. From all directions the Christians were rushing to
the quays seeking boats to get away in, but since the night
there were none left. Cries of terror mingled with the sound of
firing. The panic was so great that a woman with her child was
drowned in sixty centimetres of water.
“Mr. Carlier saw an atrocious spectacle. A Christian stood at
his door, which the bandits wished to enter, as his wife and
daughter were in the house. He stretched out his arms to bar
the way. This motion cost him his life for they shot him in the
stomach. As he was staggering toward the sea, they gave him a
second shot in the back, and the corpse lay there for two days.
“Fortunately there were two steamers in port, and we managed to
embark the unfortunate Christians in small groups. Despite all
our efforts, these wretched people were in such haste to depart
that they upset the small boats. An odious detail proved the
cynicism of this horde, which, under pretext of disarming those
leaving, shamefully robbed these poor, terrified people of
their last belongings. They tore away from old women packages
and bedding by force. Anger seized me and I blushed to see
these abominations and I told an officer of the gendarmerie
that if this did not stop, I would take a gun myself and fire
on the robbers. This produced the desired effect, and these
unfortunates were enabled to embark with what they had saved
from the disaster, which proves that the whole movement could
have been easily controlled.
“But the plundering was stopped only in our immediate
neighborhood. Farther away we saw doors broken in and horses
and asses laden with booty. This continued all day. Toward
evening I mounted a little hill and saw a hundred camels laden
with the pillage of the city. That night we passed in agony,
but nothing happened.
“The following day the methodical pillage of the city
recommenced. And now the wounded began to arrive. There being
no doctor, I took upon myself the first aid before embarking
them for Mitylene. I affirm that with two or three exceptions,
all these wounded were more than sixty years of age. There were
among them aged women, more than ninety years of age, who had
received gunshots, and it is difficult to imagine that they had
been wounded while defending their possessions. It was simply
and purely a question of massacre.”
[Illustration: Greek Communities in Asia Minor that have been entirely
wiped out (1,700,000. Prof. H. B. Dewing of Bowdoin College)]
[Illustration: The Christians of this region, principally Greeks,
numbered 250,000 (Dr. Karl Dietrich in “Griechentum Klein Asien”) They
have been exterminated or driven out.]
This extract is given from Monsieur Manciet’s description of the sack of
Phocea in 1914, of which he was an eye-witness, for several reasons. It
is necessary to the complete and substantiated picture of the gradual
ferocious extermination of the Christians which had been going on in
Asia Minor and the Turkish Empire for the past several years, finally
culminating in the horror of Smyrna; it is a peculiarly graphic recital,
bringing out the unchanging nature of the Turk and his character as a
creature of savage passions, living still in the times of Tamerlane or
Attila, the Hun;—for the Turk is an anachronism; still looting, killing
and raping and carrying off his spoil on camels; it is peculiarly
significant, also, as it tells a story strongly resembling some of the
exploits of Mohammed himself; it also gives a clear idea of what happened
over the entire coast of Asia Minor and far back into the interior
in 1914, temporarily destroying a flourishing and rapidly growing
civilization, which was later restored by the advent of the Greek army,
only to go out in complete darkness under the bloody and lustful hands of
the followers of Mustapha Khemal; it rings again the constant note, so
necessary to be understood by the European or American, that this was an
“organized movement,” as Monsieur Manciet says:
“We found an old woman lying in the street, who had been nearly
paralyzed by blows. She had two great wounds on the head made
by the butts of muskets; her hands were cut, her face swollen.
“A young girl, who had given all the money she possessed, had
been thanked by knife stabs, one in the arm and the other in
the region of the kidneys. A weak old man had received such
a blow with a gun that the fingers of his left hand had been
carried away.
“From all directions during the day that followed families
arrived that had been hidden in the mountains. All had been
attacked. Among them was a woman who had seen killed, before
her eyes, her husband, her brother and her three children.
“We learn at this moment an atrocious detail. An old paralytic
who had been lying helpless on his bed at the moment the
pillagers entered, had been murdered.
“Smyrna sent us soldiers to establish order. As these soldiers
circulated in the streets, we had a spectacle of the kind of
order which they established; they continued, personally, the
sacking of the town.
“We made a tour of inspection through the city. The pillage was
complete; doors were broken down and that which the robbers had
not been able to carry away they had destroyed. Phocea, which
had been a place of great activity, was now a dead city.
“A woman was brought to us dying; she had been violated by
seventeen Turks. They had also carried off into the mountains a
girl of sixteen, having murdered her father and mother before
her eyes. We had seen, therefore, as in the most barbarous
times, the five characteristics of the sacking of a city;
theft, pillage, fire, murder and rape.
“All the evidence points to this having been an organized
attack with the purpose of driving from the shores the Rayas,
or Christian Ottomans.
“It is inconceivable that all these persons should have had
in their possession so many army weapons if they had not been
given them. As for the Christians of old Phocea, there was not
for one instant an effort at defense. It was, therefore, a
carnage.
“We read in the journals that order had been established, and
that, in the regions of which we speak, the Christians have
nothing further to fear, neither for themselves, nor for their
possessions. This is not a vain statement. Order reigns, for
nobody is left. The possessions have nothing further to fear,
for they are all in good hands—those of the robbers.”
CHAPTER VII
NEW LIGHT ON THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES
(1914-1915)
In 1915, the time of the vast extermination of Armenians, Consul Jesse
B. Jackson was stationed at Aleppo, and greatly distinguished himself by
the aid which he gave these unfortunate people. As Consul Jackson was
in these horrible scenes, it would be interesting to read his reports,
if they were obtainable, but unfortunately they are not. Quotation can
fortunately be made from the account, here published for the first
time, of a native-born American citizen who was at Aleppo and was an
eye-witness of the things which he describes:
“The forerunner of events in which the unfortunate Armenians
were to be massacred and forced to undergo the most severe
hardships occurred at Zeitun, a town situated about five days’
journey north of Aleppo, in February, 1915, when, with great
reluctance, the Armenians were made to submit to disarmament by
the Turks. Following the Zeitun incident, similar action was
taken in Aintab, Alexandretta, Marash, Urfa, etc.
“Shortly after the disarmament of the Armenians in the
above-mentioned places, the deportations began, which were so
destructive to the Armenian race and were carried out on orders
from the Turkish officials in Constantinople.
“Throughout the terrible days of the deportation, Consul
Jackson was repeatedly called upon to render assistance and
to use every effort to prevent the deportation of any one in
Aleppo. This, during the time when he represented fifteen
different countries and was protecting their various interests.
(This was during the war, of course, before Turkey severed
relations with the United States.) It can be readily seen that
his position was a very delicate one, and every move on his
part had to be made with the utmost care in order not to call
down upon him and especially his assistants, the displeasure of
the Turkish authorities.
“While Consul Jackson was endeavoring to the best of his
ability to stop a massacre in Aleppo, news began to leak in
of the terrible atrocities that were occurring in connection
with the deportations from Sivas, Harput, Trebizonde, Bitlis,
Diarbekir, Mardin, Cæsarea, Konia, Adana, Mersina and other
cities and towns in the district.
“Gradually small numbers sent away from the above mentioned
towns began to arrive in Aleppo, relating the harrowing details
of the deportations, or the actual killing of relatives and
friends, or the unbelievable brutalities of the gendarmes
toward young girls, and more attractive women, or the carrying
off by Turks and Kurds of beautiful girls and countless other
atrocious crimes committed against them.
“One of the most terrible sights ever witnessed in Aleppo was
the arrival, early in August, 1915, of some five thousand
terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick women and
children, three thousand on one day and two thousand the
following day. These people were the only survivors of the
thrifty and prosperous Armenians of the province of Sivas,
carefully estimated to have been originally over three hundred
thousand souls. And what became of the balance? From the most
intelligent of those that reached Aleppo, it was learned that
in early spring of 1915 the men and boys over fourteen years
old had been called to the police stations in that province
on different mornings stretching over a period of several
weeks and had been sent off in groups of from one thousand to
two thousand each, tied together with ropes and that nothing
had ever been heard of them thereafter. Their fate has been
recorded in the annals of God, so it is needless to dwell
thereon here. These survivors related the most harrowing
experiences that they endured en route, parting from their
homes as they did before Easter, traveling perhaps a thousand
miles and reaching Aleppo in August, about four months
afterward, afoot, without sufficient food, and even denied
drink by the brutal gendarmes when they came to the wells by
the wayside. Hundreds of the prettiest women and girls had been
stolen by the Turkish tribes who came among them every day.”
Of the fate of the men and boys over fourteen, who were carried away
and never heard of again, many corroborating accounts were received at
Smyrna. It is certain that they were killed, the Turks chopping many of
them to death with axes, to save ammunition.
As we are still dealing with the systematic extermination of Christians
previous to the burning of Smyrna by the Turks, a few pages will be
devoted to the destruction of the Armenian nation, the most horrible
crime in the history of the human race in its details of lust and
savagery and suffering, as well as in extent, and which definitely
outlaws its perpetrators from the society of human beings and from the
fellowship of civilized nations, until such time as full repentance is
convincingly shown and an honest effort made, in so far as possible, to
make reparation.
There have probably been destructive movements that have cost more lives
than that of the extermination of the Christians by the Turks. Tamerlane,
for instance, swept over vast stretches of country, killing and burning
for the mere love of destruction. He spared neither Mussulman nor
Christian. But there were features of fiendish cruelty and long-drawn-out
suffering in the Ottoman persecution of the Christians that did not
characterize the methods of Tamerlane.
Reference will be made to the most notable official collections of
evidence on the subject, and two important documents, reports of American
eye-witnesses, will be given. These latter have never before been
published. One of the fullest and most reliable sources of information
on the Armenian massacres is the official publication of the British
Parliament, 1915, entitled _The Treatment of the Armenians_, containing
documents presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden, Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs, by Viscount Brice. A copy can be found in the Library
of Congress, at Washington. These documents really constitute a large
volume, giving evidence from all sources as to the Armenian butcheries
and extermination by slow torture. Much of the testimony here given is so
revolting, and so outrages all human feelings and sensibilities, that one
refrains from quoting from it.
Lord Grey, then British Secretary of State, on receiving these documents,
wrote to Viscount Bryce:
“My Dear Bryce: It is a terrible mass of evidence, but I feel
that it ought to be published and widely studied by all who
have the broad interests of humanity at heart. It will be
valuable, not only for the immediate information of public
opinion as to the conduct of the Turkish Government toward
this defenseless people, but also as a mine of information for
historians in the future.
(Signed) GREY OF FALLODEN.”
Various opinions of distinguished people are given as to the credibility
of this evidence. Among others, Gilbert Murray, the famous scholar and
poet, says:
“The evidence of these letters and reports will bear any
scrutiny and overpower any scepticism.”
An expert on the matter of evidence, Moorfield Storey, formerly President
of the American Bar Association, writes cautiously but conclusively:
“In my opinion, the evidence which you print is as reliable as
that upon which rests our belief in many of the universally
accepted facts of history, and I think it establishes beyond
any reasonable doubt the deliberate purpose of the Turkish
authorities practically to exterminate the Armenians, and their
responsibility for the hideous atrocities which have been
perpetrated upon that unhappy people.”
Other works to be consulted in this connection, filled with corroborating
and overwhelming testimony are: _Beginning Again at Ararat_, by Doctor
Mabel E. Elliott; _Shall This Nation Die_, by Reverend Joseph Naayem; and
most convincing of all, the _Secret Report on the Massacres of Armenia_,
by Doctor Johannes Lepsius, German missionary and President of the German
Orient Mission. Doctor Lepsius’ explanation of the necessity for the
secrecy of his report, which was made to his “friends of the mission,” is
illuminating:
“Dear Friends of the Mission: The following report which I am
sending to you absolutely confidentially, has been printed as a
manuscript. It can not, either as a whole or in part, be given
to the public, nor utilized. The censor can not authorize,
during the war, publications concerning events in Turkey. Our
political and military interests oblige us with imperious
demands. Turkey is our ally. In addition to having defended
her own country, she has rendered service to us ourselves by
her valiant defense of the Dardanelles. Our fraternity of arms
with Turkey imposes, then, obligations, but it does not hinder
us from fulfilling the duties of humanity. But, if we must be
quiet in public, our conscience does not, however, cease to
speak. The most ancient people of Christianity is in danger of
being wiped out, in so far as it is in the power of the Turks;
six-sevenths of the Armenian people have been despoiled of
their possessions, driven from their firesides, and, in so far
as they have not accepted Islam, have been killed or deported
into the desert. The same fate has happened to the Nestorians
of Syria, and a part of the Greek Christians have suffered.”
Doctor Lepsius prepares his report in the manner of a true German
scholar. It is detailed, exhaustive and authoritative.
A prominent foreign official, not a German, has already been mentioned,
who was constrained to keep silent as to Turkish atrocities. How strong
the Turk is! He can do what he pleases, can break all the laws of God
and man, and everybody, for some reason or other, must keep quiet about
it. A redeeming feature of German complicity in the Armenian horrors
was the acquittal by a German court of the Armenian who wreaked justice
upon Talaat Bey. It is said that the testimony of German missionaries
influenced the court to render that judgment.
The heart-rending and harrowing details of the wholesale murder of the
Armenians can be drawn out indefinitely. Suffice it to say that, in
addition to actual and repeated killings on a grand scale, the plan of
doing to death by the slow torture of deportation is one of the most
devilish that depraved and fiendish brains have ever conceived.
A fresh contribution to the subject confirmatory of all that has hitherto
been written is the report of Walter M. Geddes, of the MacAndrews and
Forbes Company, of New York, which was handed to me by Mr. Geddes a short
time before his unfortunate death in Smyrna. Mr. Geddes being dead, no
fear exists of prejudicing him with the Turks by using his name. It is
perhaps the most remarkable account of a great historic massacre by slow
torture that has ever been written, and derives its vividness of detail
from the fact that the writer describes the things that he actually saw.
[Illustration: Ancient Aqueduct Crossing Meles River at Smyrna.]
CHAPTER VIII
STORY OF WALTER M. GEDDES
“I left here on the sixteenth of September, 1915, for Aleppo.
I first saw the Armenians at Afion Karahissar where there
was a big encampment—probably of ten thousand people—who had
come down from the Black Sea. They were encamped in tents
made of material of all descriptions, and their condition was
deplorable.
“The next place I saw them was at Konia, also a large
encampment. There I saw the first brutality; I saw a woman and
her baby separated from her husband; he was put on our train
while she was forcibly held behind and kept from getting on the
train.
“The next place where there was a large encampment was at
Osmanieh where there was said to be about fifty thousand; their
condition was terrible. They were camped on both sides of
the railway track, extending fully half a mile on each side.
Here they had two wells from whence they could get water, one
of which was very far from the encampment, the other at the
railway station platform. At daybreak, the Armenians came in
crowds, women and children and old men, to get to the well to
get water. They fought among themselves for a place at the
well, and the gendarmes, to keep them in order, whipped several
people. I saw women and children repeatedly struck with whips
and sticks in the hands of the gendarmes. Later I had occasion
to pass through the camp on the way to the town of Osmanieh
and had an opportunity to see the condition of the people.
They were living in tents like those above described and their
condition was miserable. The site of the encampment had been
used several times by different caravans of Armenians and no
attempt at sanitation had been made by either the Turks or the
Armenians themselves, with the result that the ground was in
a deplorable condition, and the stench in the early morning
was beyond description. At Osmanieh, they were selling their
possessions in order to obtain money to buy food. One old man
begged me to buy his silver snuff-box for a piaster in order
that he might be able to buy some bread.
“From Osmanieh, I traveled by carriage to Rajo and passed
thousands of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They were going
in ox-carts, on horseback, donkeys and on foot, the most
of them children, women and old men. I spoke to several of
these people, some of whom had been educated in the American
Mission Schools. They told me that they had traveled for two
months. They were without money and food and several expressed
their wish that they could die rather than go on and endure
the sufferings that they were undergoing. The people on the
road were carrying with them practically all their household
possessions and those who had no carts or animals were carrying
them on their backs. It was not unusual to see a woman with
a big pack wrapped up in a mattress and a little child a few
months old on the top of the pack. They were mostly bareheaded,
and their faces were swollen from the sun and exposure. Many
had no shoes on, and some had their feet wrapped in old pieces
of rags, which they had torn from their clothing.
“At Intily there was an encampment of about ten thousand and
at Kadma a large encampment of one hundred and fifty thousand.
At this place, adjacent to their encampment, were Turkish
troops who exacted “backshish” from them before they would
let them go on the road to Aleppo. Many who had no money had
had to stay in this camp since their arrival there about two
months before. I spoke with several Armenians here and they
told me the same story of brutal treatment and robbery at the
hands of the gendarmes in charge, as I had heard all along the
road. They had to go at least half a mile for water from this
encampment, and the condition of the camp was filthy.
“From Kadma on to Aleppo I witnessed the worst sights of the
whole trip. Here the people began to play out in the intense
heat and no water, and I passed several who were prostrate,
actually dying of thirst. One woman whom I assisted was
in a deplorable condition and unconscious from thirst and
exhaustion, and farther on I saw two young girls who had become
so exhausted that they had fallen on the road and lay with
their already swollen faces exposed to the sun.
“The road for a great distance was being repaired and covered
with cracked stones; on one side of the road was a footpath,
but many of the Armenians were so dazed from fatigue and
exposure that they did not see this footpath and were
walking—many barefooted—on the cracked stones, their feet, as a
result, bleeding.
“The destination of all these Armenians is Aleppo. Here they
are kept crowded in all available vacant houses, khans,
Armenian churches, courtyards and open lots. Their condition
in Aleppo is beyond description. I personally visited several
of the places where they were kept and found them starving and
dying by the hundreds every day.
“In one vacant house, which I visited, I saw women and
children and men all in the same room lying on the floor so
close together that it was impossible to walk between them.
Here they had been for months, those who had survived, and the
condition of the floor was filthy.
“The British Consulate was filled with these exiles, and
from this place the dead were removed almost every hour.
Coffin-makers throughout the city were working late into the
night, making rough boxes for the dead whose relatives or
friends could afford to give them decent burial.
“Most of the dead were simply thrown into two-wheeled carts
which made daily rounds to all the places where the Armenians
were concentrated. These carts were open at first but afterward
covers were made for them.
“An Armenian physician whom I know and who is treating hundreds
of these suffering Armenians who have become ill through
exposure on the trip, hunger and thirst, told me that there are
hundreds dying daily in Aleppo from starvation and the result
of the brutal treatment and exposure that they have undergone
on the journey from their native places.
“Many of these suffering Armenians refused alms, saying that
the little money so obtained will only prolong their sufferings
and they prefer to die. From Aleppo, those who are able to pay
are sent by train to Damascus, those who have no money are sent
over the road to the interior toward Deir-El-Zor.
“In Damascus I found conditions practically the same as in
Aleppo; and here hundreds are dying every day. From Damascus,
they are sent still farther south into the Hauran where their
fate is unknown. Several Turks whom I interviewed told me that
the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race, and in
no instance did I see any Moslem giving alms to Armenians, it
being considered a criminal offence for any one to aid them.
“I remained in Damascus and Aleppo about a month, leaving for
Smyrna on the twenty-sixth of October. All along the road I
met thousands of these unfortunate exiles still coming into
Aleppo. The sights I witnessed on this trip were more pitiful
than those I had seen on my trip to Aleppo. There seems to be
no end to the caravan which moves over the mountain ridge from
Bozanti south; throughout the day from sunrise to sunset, the
road as far as one can see is crowded with these exiles. Just
outside of Tarsus I saw a dead woman lying by the roadside
and farther on passed two more dead women, one of whom was
being carried by two gendarmes away from the roadside to be
buried. Her legs and arms were so emaciated that the bones were
nearly through her flesh and her face was swollen and purple
from exposure. Farther along, I saw two gendarmes carrying a
dead child between them away from the road where they had dug
a grave. Many of these soldiers and gendarmes who follow the
caravan have spades and as soon as an Armenian dies they take
the corpse away from the roadside and bury it. The mornings
were cold and many were dying from exposure. There are very
few young men in these caravans, the majority are women and
children, accompanied by a few old men over fifty years of age.
“At Bairamoglou, I talked with a woman who was demented from
the sufferings she had undergone. She told me that her husband
and father had both been killed before her eyes and that she
had been forced for three days to walk without rest. She had
with her two little children and all had been without bread for
a day. I gave her some money which she told me would be taken,
in all probability, from her before the day was over. Turks
and Kurds meet these caravans as they pass through the country
and sell them food at exorbitant prices. I saw a small boy
about seven years old riding on a donkey with his baby brother
in his arms. They were all that was left of his family.
“Many of these people go without bread for days, and they
become emaciated beyond description. I saw several fall from
starvation, and only at certain places along this road is there
water. Many die of thirst. Some of the Armenians who can afford
it hire carriages. These are paid for in advance and the prices
charged are exorbitant.
“At many places like Bozanti, for example, where there is an
encampment of Turkish soldiers, there is not enough bread for
these Armenians and only two hours from Bozanti I met a woman
who was crying for bread. She told me that she had been in
Bozanti for two days and was unable to obtain anything to eat,
except what travelers like myself had given her. Many of the
beasts of burden belonging to the Armenians die of starvation.
It is not an unusual sight to see an Armenian removing a pack
from the dead animal and putting it on his own shoulders. Many
Armenians told me that although they were allowed to rest at
night, they get no sleep because of the pangs of hunger and
cold.
“These people walk throughout the whole day at a shuffling gait
and for hours do not speak to one another. At one place where
I stopped along the road for lunch I was surrounded by a crowd
of little children all crying for bread. Many of these little
tots are obliged to walk barefooted along the road and many of
them carry little packs on their backs. They are all emaciated,
their clothes are in rags and their hair in a filthy condition.
The filth has given rise to millions of flies and I saw several
babies’ faces and eyes covered with these insects, the mothers
being too exhausted to brush them away.
“Diseases broke out in several places along the road, and in
Aleppo several cases of typhus fever among the Armenians were
reported when I left. Many families have been separated, the
men being sent in one direction and the women and children
in another. I saw one woman, who was with child, lying in
the middle of the road crying, and over her stood a gendarme
threatening her if she did not get up and walk. Many children
are born along the way and most of these die as their mothers
have no nourishment for them.
“None of these people have any idea where they are going or
why they are being exiled. They go day after day along the
road with the hope that they may somewhere reach a place where
they may be allowed to rest. I saw several old men carrying on
their backs the tools of their trade, probably with the hope
that they may some day settle down somewhere. The road over the
Taurus Mountains in places is most difficult and often times
crude conveyances drawn by buffalos, oxen and milch cows are
unable to make the grade and are abandoned and overturned by
the gendarmes into the ravine below. The animals are turned
loose. I saw several carts, piled high with baggage on the
top of which were many Armenians, break down and throw their
occupants in the road. One of the drivers, who was a Turk,
and who had collected an advance from the people whom he was
driving, considered it a huge joke when one woman broke her leg
from such a fall.
“There seems to be no cessation of the stream of these
Armenians pouring down from the North, Angora and the region
around the Black Sea. Their condition grows worse every day.
The sights that I saw on my return trip were worse than those
on my trip going, and now that the cold weather and winter
rains are setting in, deaths are more numerous. Roads in some
places are almost impassable.”
CHAPTER IX
INFORMATION FROM OTHER SOURCES
I have often been impressed with the hopelessness of making people who
have not been eye-witnesses, comprehend the dreadful character of the
massacres which were carried on by the Turks against the Christian
population of the Orient. I have never been able to describe sights
that I have witnessed in such manner as to make my listeners actually
see and understand. It frequently happens that people, sitting in their
comfortable houses, lay aside an article or book on the subject, with the
remark: “We are fed up on Armenian atrocities.”
Here is another strong point of the Turk’s position: he has killed so
many human beings and over so long a period of time that people are tired
of hearing about it. He can, therefore, continue without interference.
In Doctor Elliott’s _Beginning Again at Ararat_, she gives the following
story of a young girl, heard in the rescue home in Turkey, of which she
was in charge:
“I was twelve years old, I was with my mother. They drove us
with whips and we had no water. It was very hot and many of us
died because there was no water. They drove us with whips, I
do not know how many days and nights and weeks, until we came
to the Arabian desert. My sisters and the little baby died on
the way. We went to a town, I do not know its name. The streets
were full of dead, all cut to pieces. They drove us over them.
I kept dreaming about that. We came to a place on the desert, a
hollow place in the sand, with hills all around it. There were
thousands of us there, many, many thousands, all women and girl
children. They herded us like sheep into the hollow. Then it
was dark and we heard firing all around. We said, ‘The killing
has begun.’ All night we waited for them, my mother and I, we
waited for them to reach us. But they did not come, and in the
morning, when we looked around, no one was killed. No one was
killed at all. They had not been killing us. They had been
signaling to the wild tribes that we were there. The Kurds came
later in the morning, in the daylight; the Kurds and many other
kinds of men from the desert; they came over the hills and rode
down and began killing us. All day long they were killing; you
see, there were so many of us. All they did not think they
could sell, they killed. They kept on killing all night and in
the morning—in the morning they killed my mother.”
This quotation is given because it condenses in a few vivid and
convincing words the clearest description that has appeared anywhere of
the character of the Turkish “deportations” of the Armenians. All the
official documents and the testimony of a host of American, German and
other eye-witnesses corroborate the accuracy of this picture.
In the report of the Military Mission to Armenia, commonly known as
the “Harbord Mission,” published by the American Association for
International Conciliation, in June, 1920, is to be found the following
passage:
“Meanwhile there have been organized official massacres of the
Armenians ordered every few years since Abdul Hamid ascended
the throne. In 1895, one hundred thousand perished. At Van,
in 1908, and at Adana and elsewhere in Cilicia in 1909, over
thirty thousand were murdered. The last and greatest of
these tragedies was in 1915. Massacres and deportations were
organized in the spring of 1915, under a definite system, the
soldiers going from town to town. Young men were first summoned
to the government building in each village and then marched out
and killed. The women, the old men and the children were, after
a few days, deported to what Talaat Pasha called “Agricultural
Colonies,” from the high, breeze-swept plateaus of Armenia to
the malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of
Syria and Arabia. The dead, from this wholesale attempt on the
race, are variously estimated at from five hundred thousand to
a million, the usual figure being about eight hundred thousand.
Driven on foot under a hot sun, robbed of their clothing and
such petty articles as they carried, prodded by bayonets if
they lagged, starvation, typhus, and dysentery left thousands
dead by the trail side, etc., etc.”
I have in my possession another report of a credible European who
witnessed the destruction of the Armenians at Aleppo and elsewhere,
which gives many details similar to those found in the memorandum of
Mr. Geddes, but I refrain from offering it here for fear of wearying
the readers. In view of the difficulty of producing the testimony of
eye-witnesses, and as this report has never been published, it is a
valuable historical document. Enough has been said, however, to convince
the reader that the extermination of the Christians of Turkey was an
organized butchery, carried out on a great scale, and well under way
before the Greeks were sent to Smyrna. We have seen it in operation
in the days of Abdul Hamid, “the butcher,” we have seen it more fully
developed and better organized under Talaat and Enver, those statesmen of
the “Constitution.” We shall behold it carried out to its dire finish by
Mustapha Khemal, the “George Washington” of Turkey.
This part of the story would not be complete if I passed over in
silence the systematic extermination, and the satiating of all the
lowest passions of man or beast which characterize Turkish massacres of
the Greeks and Armenians of the Pontus. There have been, from time to
time, descriptions of the massing of bands of these wretched people at
different points on the shores of the Black Sea where they had arrived
after long journeys on foot and indescribable hardships, and of the
relief given them by American organizations. Often officers of these
organizations, or American missionaries, have uttered cries of protest,
which have caused a momentary feeling of wonder in the minds of the
American people, or have passed unheeded. Yet the systematic massacre,
deportation, plundering and violation that went on among the Christians
of the once prosperous region of the Black Sea is one of the darkest and
foulest pages even in Turkish history.
The flourishing communities of Amasia, Cæsarea, Trebizonde, Chaldes,
Rhodopolis, Colonia, centers of Greek civilization for many hundreds of
years, have been practically annihilated in a persistent campaign of
massacre, hanging, deportation, fire and rape. The victims amount to
hundreds of thousands, bringing the sum total of exterminated Armenians
and Greeks in the whole of the old Roman province of Asia up to the
grand total of one million, five hundred thousand. Thus has been created
that “regenerated” Turkey which has been compared in some quarters to
Switzerland and the United States.
CHAPTER X
THE GREEK LANDING AT SMYRNA
(May, 1919)
I returned to Smyrna in 1919, shortly after the Greek army had landed
in the city. As the Turkish plan of extermination was well under way
before the arrival of the Greek troops, the Christian peasants had been
driven out of the entire region with the exception of the city itself,
and many had perished, their farms and villages being destroyed. They
had scattered over the Greek islands and the continent, and at Saloniki,
where the Greek government had constructed barracks to house them, there
was a considerable settlement of them.
Much has been said of atrocities and massacres committed by the Greek
troops at the time of their landing at Smyrna on May 15, 1919. In fact,
the events that occurred on that and the few succeeding days have been
magnified until they have taken on larger proportions in the public mind
than the deliberate extermination of whole nations by the Turks, and no
consideration seems to have been given to the prompt suppression of the
disorders by the Greek authorities and the summary punishment of the
principal offenders, several of them by death.
The facts of the case, as learned from American missionaries, business
men and others of undoubted veracity, are as follows: The evening before
the disembarkment there was a reunion of the Allied naval commanders and,
according to one of those present, there was a discussion as to the plan
under which this action ought to be carried out. My informant stated that
the American commander was in favor of cooperating with the Greeks by
policing the different sections of the city with Allied Marines, but that
the Englishman advocated letting the Greeks “run the whole show” alone.
This information is given second hand and its accuracy can not be vouched
for, but it seems probable.
At any rate, the advice attributed to the American was practical, but
could not be followed for evident reasons. We could not disembark because
we were, as usual, “observing”; and there was such strong jealousy
among the Allies regarding Asia Minor, that they could not go ashore
either together or separately. This was the first indication of the lack
of united support that ultimately caused the Greek disaster and the
destruction of Smyrna.
The whole responsibility was therefore thrown upon the Greeks, who landed
among a population, so far as the Turks were concerned, more insulted by
their advent than the white citizens of Mobile would be if it were given
over to a mandate of negro troops. To the Turk, the Hellene is not only a
“dog of an unbeliever,” but he is a former slave.
As the Greeks proceeded in the direction of the _Konak_, or Government
House, situated in the Turkish quarter, they were sniped at. I was
informed by numerous eye-witnesses, not natives of Smyrna, that the
sniping grew into a fusillade.
The sanitary expert of the American hospital, situated in the region of
the _Konak_, related to me the following incident: Hearing the sniping,
he ran out into the yard of the hospital, fearing that if shots were
discharged from there they might draw the Greek fire. He saw a Turk
with a rifle up in a tree of the hospital yard. He pointed a revolver
at him and told him to come down. The Turk obeyed. This informant was a
native-born American citizen, not of Greek or Armenian extraction.
The Greeks took a number of prisoners whom they marched down the quay
in the sight of the Allied and American battle-ships, making them
hold up their hands. They are said to have stabbed several of their
prisoners with bayonets in sight of the people in the houses and on
the ships. There was no massacre, in the sense of a general killing of
prisoners, but some few they did thus kill; this act appears murderous,
contemptible and idiotic, and the Greeks may be left to explain it as
best they may.
There was an uprising in the town, something in the nature of a riot,
and some more Turks were killed. Various estimates have been given by
Americans who were present as to the number killed, ranging from fifty to
three hundred. The latter is a high estimate. There was also considerable
looting, both in Smyrna and the outlying regions.
Speaking of this affair in a pamphlet entitled _The Great Powers and the
Eastern Christians_,[3] William Pember Reeves says:
“So far as the persons killed in Smyrna were Turks, they
numbered, I am told, seventy-six, killed partly by Greek
soldiers and partly by the town mob. About one hundred of
other nationalities were killed also. The ring leaders in
the business were executed by the Greek authorities and
compensation paid to the families of the victims.”
Where Mr. Reeves obtained his information is unknown to me, but it
coincides with that which was given me by Americans who were present and
whom I saw a short time after the landing of the Greek troops. I was
present in Smyrna when the ringleaders in the disturbances of May second
were condemned and shot.
It was here that the Greek governor-general displayed that resolution
and marked ability which characterized his entire régime at Smyrna. He
suppressed the disturbances completely in a very short space of time and
severely punished the evil-doers. Three of the ringleaders, Greeks, were
taken out to a square beside the railroad connecting Boudja and Smyrna
and publicly shot and buried where their graves could be seen by all the
people passing between that popular summer resort and the main city. This
trio had been previously tried by court-martial and sentence had been
executed immediately.
Many others were tried and received lesser sentences. The populace was
informed that Greeks disturbing the peace would be more severely punished
than Turks, a policy which was carried out during the entire Hellenic
administration and contributed no little to the unpopularity of the
governor-general among the native Christian population.[4]
Mr. Sterghiades, the Greek governor-general, ordered all those who had
loot in their possession to give it back immediately, under pain of
heavy punishment, and specified a certain warehouse on the Rue Franque
where it was to be delivered, and practically all the plunder was given
up. All Turks who claimed to have been robbed were invited to present
their claims to the government and these were accorded with so little
question that numerous Turks profited immensely by presenting false or
exaggerated demands. In addition, many Greek landed proprietors and
prominent inhabitants of the smaller towns went out into the country and
by haranguing the peasants and protecting the Turks, contributed greatly
to the restoration of order in the rural regions.
Prominent among these was a certain Mr. Adamopolos, owner of a very large
estate at Develikeuy, a village about thirty-five miles out of Smyrna,
who proceeded there and compelled his peasants to restore sheep and other
belongings, and threatened with dire punishment any Greek who should harm
a Turk.
There was also a lawyer by the name of Athinogenis who calmed an uprising
of Greek villagers at Boudja by explaining to them the real meaning of
the Greek landing. Mr. Athinogenis came to America in behalf of the
autonomy of Asia Minor and created a good impression here.
To this list must be added a certain Mrs. Baltadzis, wife of a
naturalized American citizen, who visited a farm owned by her near Smyrna
and kept the peasants in order. Tranquillity was soon restored, as much
by the influence of the better-class Greeks as by the severe measures
taken by the Hellenic civil administration. That it could be so restored,
was nothing less than a miracle when one considers the persecutions which
the Greeks had so recently suffered. Many of the Greek peasants had been
robbed and abused by the very Turks whom they would now gladly get even
with.
One incident will be sufficient to illustrate the sort of thing that
was smarting in the memory of the Christian peasantry: A small farmer
with a large family had planted a field of beans for food for his wife
and children—beans being one of the principal articles of food for
these people. A Turkish officer staked out his horse in this field,
whereupon the farmer asked him if he might not put the animal in a grass
plot, where was excellent pasturage. The reply was a horse-whipping,
accompanied by abusive and contemptuous epithets in the presence of
his family and the village, by the officer. This is a mild incident
illustrative of the general conduct of the Turks toward the Christians.
It is given because it came within my personal observation, and I knew
the farmer, who was a very worthy and self-respecting man.
Great numbers of the Greeks had almost unforgettable insults and injuries
smoldering in their hearts. Standing on the balcony of the Consulate, I
have seen a Turkish cabman pass a Greek confrère and lash him with his
whip, a cowardly act, because resistance on the part of the latter would
have meant death and there was no one to whom he could have recourse for
justice. In many cases the Greeks who took the Turks’ sheep were only
trying to get their own back, previously taken.
One sinister event occurred in a village not far from Smyrna, which
will be understood in this country especially in the Southern States. A
certain powerful Turk had made free with several Christian girls, and
soon after the landing the fathers and brothers seized and hanged him.
The virtue of their women is an extremely sensitive point with Greeks.
Mr. Sterghiades, the Hellenic high-commissioner, or governor-general,
was a remarkable man in many ways. A Cretan, like Mr. Venizelos, he had
been selected by the latter for the post, and a more difficult it would
not be easy to imagine. Possessed of a strict sense of justice and a high
ideal of duty, he lived as a hermit, accepting no invitations and never
appearing in society. He wished, he informed me, to accept no favors
and to form no ties, so that he might administer equal justice to all,
high and low alike. It soon became known that when he issued an order he
expected it to be obeyed.
On one occasion I was present at an important service in the Orthodox
Cathedral, to which the representatives of the various powers, as well as
the principal Greek authorities had been invited. The high-commissioner
had given the order that the service should be strictly religious and
non-political. Unfortunately, Archbishop Chrysostom (he who was later
murdered by the Turks) began to introduce some politics into his sermon,
a thing which he was extremely prone to do. Sterghiades, who was standing
near him, interrupted, saying: “But I told you I didn’t want any of this.”
The archbishop flushed, choked, and breaking off his discourse abruptly,
ended with, “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen,” and
stepped off the rostrum.
The high-commissioner was once on his way to a country village to
officiate at the dedication of a school when one of his companions said:
“Some ugly stories are told about the priest out there. He refused to say
the prayers over the dead body of a poor woman’s child, because she did
not have the full amount of his fee, and it was buried without the rites
of the church.”
The high-commissioner made no reply to this and expressed no opinion. On
his arrival at the village a delegation came down to meet him, including
the mayor, the priest, etc. Upon being presented to the father, the
high-commissioner slapped the latter soundly in the face, saying:
“Wretch! I don’t want to know you. You are a disgrace to the Church and
to the Greek nation.”
“But this isn’t the same priest, Excellency,” explained the bystanders.
“This is a good man. We sent the other away.”
“Give him a hundred drachmas for his poor,” said His Excellency to his
secretary, and thus the incident was closed. At any rate, he had forcibly
expressed his opinion of the sort of man the guilty priest was.
CHAPTER XI
THE HELLENIC ADMINISTRATION IN SMYRNA
(May 15, 1919—September 9, 1922)
Despite many difficulties, the Greek civil authorities, as far as their
influence extended, succeeded in giving Smyrna and a large portion of
the occupied territory, the most orderly, civilized and progressive
administration that it has had in historic times. Mr. Sterghiades, who
continued to the last his policy of punishing severely all offenders of
Greek origin against the public order, lost, for that reason, popularity
in Asia Minor. When he left Smyrna after the debacle of his troops he
was hooted by the people of the town who had not come loyally to his
support. He was, indeed, a great man who made a supreme effort to perform
a superhuman task and who is suffering from the obloquy that always
attaches to failure.
Here are some of the civilizing reforms which the Hellenic administration
introduced into the Smyrna region: 1. During the war, under Turkish rule,
the morality of the Christian inhabitants of all nationalities had
greatly deteriorated. The Turk had no respect or regard for non-Mussulman
women, whom he regards as his legitimate prey. All the American residents
of Smyrna during this epoch will remember the orgies indulged in by a
certain high Turkish official and his friends and the example set the
European colony by a prominent Anglo-Levantine lady who became his
acknowledged and public mistress. The lady in question was proud of her
position and afterward explained it by saying that she had accepted it to
use her influence to prevent persecutions and that a monument should be
set up in her honor.
In one of the first conversations which I had with Mr. Sterghiades after
his arrival, the governor-general told me that the Christian people had
been debauched by the Turks and had lost their self-respect and their
morality, and that they needed an awakening of their pride of race and
religious instincts.
One of his first acts was to suppress the disorderly houses located in
the central portions of the town, and in this he met with determined
opposition from various of the foreign consuls whose subjects owned
these houses and conducted them. Helpless to enforce an edict against a
European subject, he stationed gendarmes in front of the establishments
in question who took down the names and addresses of all frequenters and
thus caused their patronage so to dwindle that they were obliged to close.
Playing of baccarat and other forms of gambling for high stakes had also
become a crying evil in Smyrna, resulting in the ruin of several people
and even in suicides. Mr. Sterghiades suppressed gambling in the clubs,
and private houses, wherever it came to his notice.
2. The Hellenic Administration supported and aided in every way possible
educational institutions. Its support and encouragement of American
educational and philanthropic institutions will be taken up later. It is
chiefly to be praised, however, for the measures which it took, paid for
out of the Greek Treasury, for the maintenance and improvement of Turkish
schools. It continued the Moslem secondary schools at its own expense,
the taxes for their support having been taken over by the Ottoman public
debt as security for a loan contracted by the Ottoman Government.
The Greek administration supported by funds from its treasury, two Moslem
high schools in Smyrna, two at Magnesia and Odemish, and two seminaries
in the provinces, paying therefor yearly seventy thousand Turkish pounds.
It kept in vigor the Turkish system of primary education, appointing
prominent Mussulmans in the various villages to superintend the same.
It maintained a Polytechnic school at Smyrna at which two hundred and
ten poor Mussulman children were educated and supported, paying therefor
thirty-six thousand Turkish pounds yearly.
[Illustration: White Tower at Saloniki, formerly seaward terminal of
ancient wall.]
In addition to this, it was especially helpful to those American
institutions and schools which operated in the Turkish quarter and among
Turkish children.
3. The Greek administration made a serious and intelligent effort
to organize a sanitary service for the compiling of statistics, the
betterment of sanitary conditions and the suppression of epidemics and
contagious diseases, such as malaria, syphilis, etc.
A microbiological laboratory was established for the diagnosis of
infectious diseases with an equipment of sanitary motor cars for bringing
in the sick from distant points, small wagons for the transportation of
infected articles and portable outfits for disinfection on the spot. To
describe the work of this service alone, which was organized on a large
scale and abundantly supplied with means, material and money, would
require a good-sized pamphlet. As a result of these measures, plague,
exanthematic fever and smallpox were got so under control that they
disappeared as epidemic diseases in the occupied zone. Needless to say
that systematic war was waged against lice and rats.
A Pasteur institute was opened at Smyrna by the Greeks on the eighteenth
of August, 1919, under the direction of a specialist working in
conjunction with a staff of experts. Out of over one thousand five
hundred patients treated during the first two months of its existence who
had been bitten by dogs, jackals or wolves, only four died. Treatment
was free in this institute. Previously sufferers had been obliged to go
to Constantinople or Athens and those who could not raise the funds were
left to die. I have myself assisted poor Turks, frantic with fear, to
make the trip to Constantinople for treatment.
One section of the University of Smyrna, founded by the Greek
administration, was that of the Institute of Hygiene, divided into two
sections, hygiene and bacteriology. It was all ready for business when
the Turks burned Smyrna, possessing an installation similar to that of
the great universities of Europe, including a good library and complete
equipment of appliances. It would never have lacked money or support, and
would have been at the service of all classes, irrespective of creed or
race.
Here is the program which it was about to put in operation:
Gratuitous bacteriological, hygienic and industrial
examinations for all classes of the community.
The preparation and gratuitous distribution of all healing and
diagnostic inoculations, serums, antitoxins, antigonococcus,
etc.
The sanitation of the town on an extensive scale, sewerage,
water-supply, streets, etc.
Sanitary works for the combatting of malaria, the draining of
marshes, etc.
The combatting of trachoma.
The combatting of phthisis on a large scale, (dispensaries,
asylums, convalescent homes, special hospitals, sanitation of
houses, etc.)
For infants: dispensaries, _gouttes de lait_, _crèches_,
foundling homes, etc.
For children: various philanthropic institutions.
For mothers: pre-natal puericulture.
Education and training of doctors to compose the service of
public health.
Training for midwives and nurses.
Organization of a registry office of births and deaths.
Organization of special medical statistical service.
4. Financial aid on a large scale was furnished, as was the distribution
of flour, clothing, etc., to refugees caused by the Khemalist raids in
the interior and the destruction in 1919 of the cities of Aidin and
Nazli. Among those so succored were thousands of Turks.
5. All American missionaries, as well as educational and charitable
workers in Smyrna and its hinterland during the Greek occupation, will
verify the statement that the Hellenic administration showed itself most
helpful and cooperative in many ways, aiding their labors among Turks as
well as Christians.
Here is a list of certain benevolent acts toward these institutions:
The high-commissioner granted to the Y. M. C. A. a large house on the
quay, one of the biggest and finest in Smyrna, for use as a “Soldiers’
Home.” He also helped its management in many ways by detaching Greek
soldiers for its service.
An adequate building was also given to be used as a “Soldiers’ Home” at
Magnesia, where many facilities were afforded.
The civil department of the Y. M. C. A. was in need of an adequate
building for its installation. The Greek authorities requisitioned a café
belonging to a Greek for that purpose. It was still in operation at the
time of the burning of the city.
The same Y. M. C. A. organized on a large estate near Smyrna an
installation for the study of agriculture by young men. The Greek
administration helped this organization by furnishing tents, blankets and
other requisites from the quartermaster’s department and a motor-car for
transportation.
The Y. M. C. A. had also organized at Phocea, near Smyrna, a summer camp
for boys. The Greek administration helped by furnishing lumber, a boat
and other materials, and allowed the importation of a motor-car free of
duty.
The Y. W. C. A., which was managed by Miss Nancy McFarland, was helped in
many ways by the Greek administration in the form of considerable sums of
money, lumber and supplies.
A branch of the girls’ school, known as the Intercollegiate Institute,
was started at Guez Tepe by Miss Minnie Mills for Mussulman women. The
high-commissioner furnished a part of the equipment for this.
For the N. E. R. at Smyrna the high-commissioner gave Miss Harvey five
hundred pounds Turkish to be used in favor of poor Mussulman women.
The American College near Smyrna is situated in a place contiguous to
a marsh formerly flooded by stagnant water causing malaria. The Greek
administration drained the swamp and repaired the road passing by the
college.
All the agricultural implements which were imported for the use of the
returning Greek refugees or for resale at cost price or on credit for
the purpose of restoring the destroyed areas were purchased by the high
commission exclusively from American factories at my request. Thus
thousands of plows were brought in to be distributed among Turks as well
as Christians.
A farm of thirty thousand acres situated at Tepekeuy, used by the
Greek administration for the study of motor-culture, was bought and
made exclusive use of American motor-plows. As a result, students
completing the course recommended to the landowners the use of American
motor-plows.[5]
During the Greek administration, I traveled frequently over a large part
of the occupied territory and visited many of the interior villages.
I found perfect security everywhere, native Greeks and Turks living
together on friendly terms. In general there would be in each village
a small administrative office in charge of a petty officer and two or
three aides. I noticed the persistent effort which these people made
to fraternize with the Turks and to placate them. Very often have I
taken my coffee in the public square of some small town with the Greek
officials, the Turkish hodja,[6] and various of the Mohammedan notables.
I remember particularly shortly before the Greek defeat sitting thus with
a venerable hodja and a Greek surgeon under a plane-tree, helping to
celebrate the marriage of the hodja to his fourth wife, which had taken
place the day before.
The dark side of this seemingly idyllic picture is that quite frequently
the two or three Greek officials would be found some morning with their
throats cut, whereupon an order would be sent to the village that the
names of the assassins must be revealed or the town would be burned.
This, if I remember correctly, was modeled upon our so-called “punitive
expeditions” in the Philippines, which the Greek authorities often cited
to me in speaking of the matter. In no case did the Turks reveal the
names of the offenders and at least twice my office has been invaded by
the notables of some town who complained that their village had been
burned. On each occasion, I asked: “Were the Greek officials in your town
murdered last night?” And the answer on both these occasions was, “Yes,
but we could not tell the names of the offenders because we did not know
who they were.”
There were also sporadic acts of great ferocity committed against
the peaceful Christian inhabitants of the country which were always
attributed by the Turks to roving bands of Chetas. Who these Chetas
were, I do not know, but it is my opinion that they did not come
from far. I remember one particularly atrocious case—the massacre and
disemboweling of a Greek miller and his wife and their two children.
CHAPTER XII
THE GREEK RETREAT
(1922)
For years the Greek army had been holding a long line without sufficient
food and clothing. Many of these troops had been sent by the Allies to
fight for them in Russia where they had suffered severe losses. They were
reduced to a state of extreme demoralization. They were fleeing from
an implacable enemy from whom they could expect no mercy, if captured.
They covered, such of them as got away, the distance from the front to
the coast in record time. The entire Moslem population through which
they passed was hostile and well-armed. That they found time to do much
massacring or that they were in a state of mind to stop by the way for
the purpose of attacking women seems hardly credible. That they did
burn and lay waste the land may be taken for granted. The Greeks have
claimed military necessity for this, and it would appear that they could
plead such necessity if ever it can be pleaded. They certainly had more
reason for laying bare the country between themselves and the advancing
Khemalists than had our own Sherman on his “March to the Sea.”
There is one thing which any one who has ever traveled through
Turkish-ruled lands will see at a glance. Whatever nuclei of civilization
existed in the Ottoman Empire outside of Constantinople were Greek,
Armenian or something besides Turkish. The non-Mussulmans built the good
houses and the better parts of the towns. Many of the Christian houses
and towns had already been destroyed by the followers of Talaat and
Enver, leaving little of any permanent value in the path of the Greek
army.
A Turkish villager’s house usually consists of one room without any
furniture. At one side is piled, often as high as the wall, a supply of
thick quilts. When he goes to bed he takes down one or more of these
and sleeps on the floor, or, in the better houses, on a bench that
runs around the wall. When he eats he sits on the floor with his heels
under him. He cooks in the fireplace. His culinary outfit consists of
one earthen pot, a large wash-basin out of which the family eats their
_pilaff_, one big spoon for each member of the household and a small one
for stirring the coffee. A _briki_, or long-handled coffee pot, is an
important part of his installation.
Many who have dined with rich denatured Turks at Constantinople or with
some pasha will deny the accuracy of this picture, but it is in the
main correct and describes the houses that compose ninety-nine out of
a hundred Turkish villages wherever found. It is for this reason that
the Turk may be able to carry on for a long time without business,
manufactures, imports or any of the accessories of civilization. His
crude agriculture will suffice for his primitive wants. If the region
which he occupies really belongs to him, then he may say that he has a
right to the kind of civilization, or lack of it, that suits him best and
for which he is most adapted. Whether the Christian world should have
looked on and aided him while exterminating the non-Mussulman population
of Asia Minor is another question.
The difficulties of the Greek retreat are well illustrated by an incident
narrated to me by the Reverend Dana Getchell who came into my office from
the interior a few days before the arrival of the Khemalists. He said
that when he had gone to bed in the evening in his small hotel everything
had been quiet, but that he had been awakened in the morning by the sound
of tumult in the streets, and looking from the window, he saw the whole
Christian population rushing toward the railroad station, carrying such
of their belongings as they had been able to snatch. On inquiring what
the trouble was he was informed that the Turks were coming. He went to
the station himself and saw a long train of cars on to which a small
detachment of Greek soldiers was attempting to embark the frightened
people. While this operation was being conducted the Mussulman villagers
came out from their houses, all armed, and began to fire upon the
soldiers and the train. A battle ensued in which the officer commanding
the detachment and several of his soldiers were killed. But the soldiers
stood their ground well and succeeded finally in getting away with the
larger part of the Christians.
This specific incident throws light upon the Greek retreat as it shows
that the Moslems were, in general, in possession of concealed weapons and
that they did not hesitate to use them.
CHAPTER XIII
SMYRNA AS IT WAS
The burning of Smyrna and the massacre and scattering of its inhabitants
has aroused widespread humanitarian and religious interest on account
of the unparalleled sufferings of the multitudes involved. But there is
another element in the United States, not numerous, that has been more
deeply saddened by the fate of this ancient town—the classical scholars
and historians.
The eyes of scholars, ever since the great discoveries of Schliemann,
have been turned toward the island of Crete, where it is now known that
a highly developed civilization existed, contemporaneous with early
Egyptian, and of which the ancient cities of Tyrins and Mycenæ were
outposts. It is believed that the ancestors of the royal houses of
these settlements came originally from Asia Minor, and it is possible
that the conception of the grim old lions above the gate of Mycenæ,
symbolizing the courage of its kings, may have been imported from Asia.
Theseus, that attractive and romantic hero, who finally became one of
the rulers of the Mythical Age of Athens, is connected with Asia Minor
through the Amazons, who were feminine priestesses of the old cult of the
many-breasted nature goddess of Ephesus.
From Ionia, the mother civilization spread to old Greece, to Sicily,
to Italy and along the shores of the Black Sea, and finally to Europe
and America! It is more than probable that Homer was a Smyrniote, or an
inhabitant of Asia Minor, and for countless years his writings were a
sort of Bible or sacred book, molding the character of millions. Perhaps
the earliest conception of monogamy, certainly the most beautiful, comes
from Homer’s poems. Our conception of the family is Greek; we get it from
the Odyssey, very probably written in Smyrna, thousands of years ago.
During the days of the Byzantine Empire, that splendid, romantic and
tragic power which developed a magnificent civilization and kept the
lamp of learning alight all through the darkness of the Middle Ages,
Asia Minor flourished and was the province which contributed most to the
strength and firmness of the general fabric. The exploits of Nikephoros
Phokas and the romance of Diogenes Akritas, immortalized in verse, are
well known even to those scholars who are not Byzantine specialists.
Those were the days of the great land barons who kept regal state and
whose forgotten history should be a vast treasure-house for romantic
novelists. Later, Ionia is of intense interest to the whole Christian
world. It is the land of the Seven Cities of the Revelation, of the Seven
Churches and the wonderful mystical poem of St. John the Divine. Six of
the candles went out in eternal darkness long ago, but that of Smyrna
burned brightly until its destruction on the thirteenth of September,
1922, by the Turks of Mustapha Khemal and the death of the last of its
great bishops whose martyrdom fitly ended its glorious Christian history.
Polycarp, the patron saint of Smyrna during the long years of its
existence as a Christian city, was burned alive in an ancient stadium
whose contour is still plainly visible, on February twenty-sixth, in the
year A. D. 156; Chrysostom was tortured and torn in pieces by a Turkish
mob in front of the military headquarters of the Khemalist forces in
Smyrna on September ninth, A. D. 1922. In Asia Minor were held the great
Christian assemblies: at Nicæ, Ephesus and Chalcedon, were born the
Church fathers, St. Paul and the two Gregories. It was at Ephesus, near
Smyrna, that St. Paul fought with beasts after the manner of men.
Greek civilization has again and again developed in Asia Minor to be
crushed by Asiatic invasion. At its height it produced the immortal
cities of Pergamus, Smyrna, Colophon, Philadelphia, Ephesus,
Halicarnassus. The whole land was dotted with lesser towns adorned with
schools of art and beautiful temples from many of which sprang famous
philosophers and poets. Ionia is a graveyard of ancient Greek cities
and marble villages toward which the interest of American scholars has
been turning more and more. A pioneer in this field was J. R. Sitlington
Sterrett, who has left an unforgettable name among American archeologists.
The climate of Smyrna resembles very much that of Southern California.
Snow rarely, if ever, falls in winter, and during the summer the country
is daily refreshed by a breeze from the sea, the _embates_, or, in the
Smyrna dialect, the _imbat_.
The route to Smyrna from Athens lies between Eubœa and Andros and between
the islands of Chios and Mytilini, the ancient Lesbos, famous as the home
of Sappho. It skirts the great promontory of Kharabounou and enters the
Hermian Gulf. To the left is the ancient city of Phocea. A colony from
Phocea founded Marseilles, France, some thousands of years ago. It is
interesting to know that the massacre and expulsion of the inhabitants in
June, 1914, excited special interest and sympathy in the modern French
city.
[Illustration: Turkish public letter-writer, at Smyrna, receiving
dictation of illiterate but amorous maiden.]
The harbor of Smyrna is one of the best in the world, comparable to
that of Vancouver. At the bottom of the Hermian Gulf we come to a sort
of sea-gate, the entrance to the harbor proper, in which the largest
sea-going craft can safely anchor. Smyrna has attained great importance
in late years as a commercial port. While other harbors, especially that
of its ancient rival, Ephesus, have been filled by deposits brought down
by the rivers, that of Smyrna has not suffered the same fate, the silt of
the delta of the Hermus having tended only to narrow its mouth.
Among the first objects pointed out to the traveler on entering the bay
are the “Two Brothers,” or twin mountain peaks which are identical in
appearance. At the right is the ancient fortress bombarded by the British
fleet during the war whose guns can plainly be seen by passengers upon
steamers. Soon after passing the fortress, Smyrna appears nestling in the
arms of a long, white, semicircular bay, resembling that of Naples, to
which it is scarcely second in beauty, and climbing the slopes of Mount
Pagus, crowned by an ancient wall and fortress. The city itself, with its
suburbs, stretched far around the semicircle on both sides.
At the time of its destruction it is probable that the inhabitants
exceeded five hundred thousand in numbers. The latest official statistics
give the figure as four hundred thousand, of whom one hundred and
sixty-five thousand were Turks, one hundred and fifty thousand Greeks,
twenty-five thousand Jews, twenty-five thousand Armenians, and twenty
thousand foreigners: ten thousand Italians, three thousand French, two
thousand British and three hundred Americans.
The principal promenade was the quay, on which were located the American
theater, the prettiest building of its kind in the Ottoman Empire, many
cinemas, the best hotels, various modern and well-constructed office
buildings, besides the residences of the most prosperous merchants, among
whom were Greeks, Armenians and Dutch. On this street also were several
of the Consulates, the building owned by the French Government being an
imposing structure, suitable even for an embassy.
The residences mentioned were elegant in appearance and contained
treasures of rugs, expensive furniture, works of art and Oriental curios.
The city was divided largely into quarters, though this was not a rigid
arrangement. The Turkish lay to the east and south, and, as is usual in
all mixed Ottoman towns, occupied the highest part, extending up the
sides of Mount Pagus, (and does still, for that matter, as it was not
burned). Architecturally it is a typical jumble of ramshackle huts, with
very few, if any, buildings of a superior order. To the east are grouped
most of the Jews, while the Armenian quarter lay to the north of the
Turkish and contiguous with it. The Greek area was north again of the
Armenian.
In speaking of the population of Smyrna one should not forget to mention
the “Levantines.” There seems to be some doubt in the American mind as
to who these really are. The term is usually applied to any inhabitant
of the Near East, and is supposed to carry with it an implication of
deceit and sharpness in business. A “Levantine” is really a foreigner
whose forefathers settled in that country one or more generations ago,
who has become thoroughly versed in Oriental dealings, who speaks the
languages, and some of whose ancestors may have intermarried with Greeks
or Armenians.
As the Oriental understands it, the population of that country consists
of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantines. The latter have thriven
immensely, and there are two small towns, Boudja and Bournabat, both
within half an hour by rail from the metropolis, inhabited principally
by descendants of British, French and Dutch, whose ancestors settled a
hundred years or so ago in the Near East. These two villages are very
beautiful. Many of the residences are imposing, and the parks and rose
gardens surrounding them are not surpassed anywhere in the world. Their
owners lived, (or live, such of them as have gone back) the lives of
merchant princes. They have been able, protected by the capitulations,
to amass great fortunes. These people generally resent being called
“Levantines,” and cling to their original nationality. During the Great
War their sons enlisted with enthusiasm, and the German and Turkish
cannon and other instruments of destruction took heavy toll of the
debonair and wealthy youth of Boudja and Bournabat.
The principal business thoroughfare of Smyrna was the Rue Franque, on
which were situated the great department and wholesale stores of the
Greeks, Armenians and Levantines. At the shopping hour in the afternoon,
this street was so crowded that one moved through it with difficulty, and
among the motley throng ladies in costumes of the latest fashion, looking
for that sort of merchandise that ladies shop for everywhere, formed a
large part.
Social life presented many attractions. Teas, dances, musical afternoons
and evenings were given in the luxurious _salons_ of the rich Armenians
and Greeks. There were four large clubs: the _Cercle de Smyrne_,
frequented mostly by British, French and Americans; the “Sporting,” with
a fine building and garden on the quay; the Greek Club and a Country Club
near the American college with excellent golf links and race course.
In no city in the world did East and West mingle physically in so
spectacular a manner as at Smyrna, while spiritually they always
maintained the characteristics of oil and water. One of the common sights
of the streets was the long camel caravans, the beasts passing in single
file, attached to ropes and led by a driver on a donkey in red fez and
rough white-woolen cloak. These caravans came in from the interior laden
with sacks of figs, licorice root, raisins, wood, tobacco and rugs. While
the foreigner is apt to be afraid of these ungainly beasts, one often saw
a Greek or Armenian woman in high-heeled boots and elegant costume, stoop
and lift the rope between two camels and pass under. At the north end of
the city is a railroad station called “Caravan Bridge,” because near by
is an ancient stone bridge of that name over which the camel caravans
arriving from as far away as Bagdad and Damascus, used to pass.
Reference has already been made to the gaiety of the natives. One of
the chief institutions of Smyrna about which naval men always inquire,
was the _Politakia_, or orchestras of stringed instruments, guitars,
mandolins and zither. The players added great zest to the performance by
singing to their own accompaniment native songs and improvisations. The
various companies gave nightly concerts in the principal cafés and were
often called upon for entertainments in private houses.
The lightheartedness of the Smyrniotes was well-nigh irrepressible
and continued almost until the last days when it was extinguished
forever. During the Great War the British bombarded the fortress. At
first the sound of the big guns terrified the inhabitants, but when
it was discovered that there was no intention of throwing shells into
the city itself the whole population gathered on the house-tops and at
the cafés to witness the flashes and the bursting of the projectiles.
The cannonading was plainly visible from the quay and became a regular
theatrical performance, chairs on the sidewalks being sold at high prices.
Passing from the European quarter—Greeks and Armenians are here classed
as Europeans—into the Turkish, one found himself in the days of the
_Arabian Nights_. The civilization, the manners, the isolation of the
women, who were either not seen at all or passed through the streets
closely veiled, were all such as one finds described in the _Thousand and
One Nights_. Mention should be made particularly of the letter-writers,
generally kindly old hodjas who sat at tables taking down the
love-letters and other missives that were whispered in their ears. Groups
of befezzed Mussulmans sat about smoking their water pipes beside antique
fountains or in the shade of clambering grape-vines.
The American interests in Smyrna were very important. Besides the
omnipresent Standard Oil Company, there were the great McAndrews and
Forbes licorice firm with its spacious offices and thousands of employees
and laborers, all the principal tobacco companies whose business amounted
to millions yearly, the exporters of figs and raisins and carpets, and
after the Greek occupation, the importers of agricultural implements and
automobiles.
There were important American educational and humanitarian institutions
as well as archeological expeditions to Sardis and Colophon. The
excavators at Sardis during their last campaign made a notable discovery
of thirty gold coins of Crœsus, which were taken charge of by me and
brought to the United States immediately after the Smyrna disaster. They
also, with my aid, succeeded in obtaining the first large consignment of
original marbles that has ever been sent to any American museum. These
latter were shipped to America for the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
All these marbles and coins were, for political reasons, sent back to
Constantinople from New York.
I shall permit myself to digress sufficiently at this point to make the
observation that I took keener satisfaction in bringing these remarkable
antiquities to the United States than in any other single act of my
entire consular career. This satisfaction was shared by the late Howard
Crosby Butler, who added to my pleasure by his unstinted commendation.
Perhaps if this great scholar and courtly gentleman had not died suddenly
in Paris, he might have prevented the sacrifice of these treasures to
business and political interests—futilely and unreasonably sacrificed.
Among the interesting ancient monuments existing in Smyrna are two
aqueducts which can be seen from the railroad running to Boudja. There is
also the so-called “Tomb of Tantalus,” the mythical founder of the town.
The excellent water supply of the city is still derived from an ancient
source known as the “Baths of Diana.”
The road from Smyrna to Boudja skirts the beautiful Valley of St. Anne,
so named because she is supposed to have been buried there. Through this
flows the river known as the Meles, by the banks of which Homer may have
composed his great epics.
The civilization of this ancient and beautiful city was essentially
Greek. The great mills of Nazli, which before the war supplied an
excellent quality of flour not only to Smyrna vilayet but to the rest of
Turkey and even exported to Europe, were founded by a Greek. Of the three
hundred and ninety-one factories at Smyrna, three hundred and forty-four
were Greek and fourteen Turkish. Statistics of this nature could be
multiplied indefinitely.
The two principal native schools—both Greek—were the Homerion, an
institution for girls, and the Evangelical School for Boys, the latter
under British protection. These were academies of great merit, affording
a liberal course of education, and their graduates, many of them
successful men and women, are to be found in all parts of the world.
The library of the Evangelical School was recognized by scholars as
containing a large and invaluable collection of books, manuscripts and
inscriptions, many of which can never be replaced.
Among other irreparable losses caused by the fire should be mentioned two
very ancient copies of the Bible, one kept in a church in Smyrna, and
the other the special charge of a small community of Christians who are
said to have fled from Ephesus when that city was sacked by the Turks
centuries ago, and to have founded a small village whose sole object was
the preservation of this venerable book. This part of the tale should not
be finished without reference to the records of the American Consulate.
Smyrna was one of the oldest of our foreign offices and contained many
despatches signed by Daniel Webster and others equally famous in our
history, besides interesting references to incursions of the Barbary
pirates, and an account of the saving of a famous Polish patriot by
a small American cruiser, which cleared for action and demanded his
release from an Austrian battle-ship. There have been many thrilling
and inspiring episodes in the history of our navy where commanders have
acted on their own responsibility in behalf of justice and humanity. Such
episodes were more frequent before the perfection of the wireless and the
submarine telegraph. It is a consolation to reflect that the spirited
incident mentioned above occurred in the harbor of Smyrna, to balance, as
it were, the history of the locality.
I was engaged before the fire in going through the ancient records
and preparing a resumé of their contents. Among the treasures of
the Consulate were twelve magnificent old wood-prints of the battle
of Navarino, giving different stages of the action, with faithful
reproductions of the various ships with their names, which, as they were
my personal property, I had intended to present to our navy department. I
believe that there are no other copies of these prints in existence.
Smyrna is now a mass of ruins and a Turkish village. It should be borne
in mind, however, that history repeats itself. Smyrna was rebuilt by
Greeks after its destruction by Lydians, and Hellenic civilization again
reasserted itself after the ferocity of the Turkish pirates of 1084, and
the frightful butcheries of Tamerlane. A great city is the flower of
industry and a peaceful and prosperous civilization. When the farmers
swarm over the plains and the sailors go down to the sea in ships, then
the bazaars and warehouses are built, the banks and the counting-houses
and the shops of the cunning artisans. Smyrna will grow great again
when a live and progressive Western civilization once more develops in
Ionia. History has demonstrated that the Greeks, from their geographical
position, their industrial and economic enterprise, and their relative
maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean are the people ultimately
destined to carry European progress into Asia Minor unless, indeed,
Christianity should utterly fail, and with it, the civilization founded
upon it. Smyrna is too near Europe for Turkish retrogression and blight
to rest there indefinitely. Its fields are too rich and too valuable to
the human race to remain permanently in the hands of a sparse population
of incompetent shepherds. The question is often asked: “When will the
Turks rebuild Smyrna?” Turkish Smyrna was not burned.
CHAPTER XIV
THE DESTRUCTION OF SMYRNA
(September, 1922)
The last act in the fearful drama of the extermination of Christianity
in the Byzantine Empire was the burning of Smyrna by the troops of
Mustapha Khemal. The murder of the Armenian race had been practically
consummated during the years 1915-1916, and the prosperous and populous
Greek colonies, with the exception of Smyrna itself, had been ferociously
destroyed. The idea has been widely circulated, and seems to be gaining
credence, that the Turk has changed his nature overnight.
The destruction of Smyrna happened, however, in 1922, and no act ever
perpetrated by the Turkish race in all its bloodstained history, has been
characterized by more brutal and lustful features, nor more productive
of the worst forms of human sufferings inflicted on the defenseless
and unarmed. It was a fittingly lurid and Satanic finale to the whole
dreadful tragedy. The uncertainty which at one time existed in the public
mind as to the question, “Who burned Smyrna?” seems to be pretty well
dispelled. All statements that tend to throw doubt on the matter can be
traced to suspicious and interested sources. The careful and impartial
historian, William Stearns Davis, to whom reference has already been made
in this work, says: “The Turks drove straight onward to Smyrna, which
they took (September 9, 1922) and then burned.”[7]
Also, Sir Valentine Chirol, Harris Foundation lecturer at the University
of Chicago in 1924, made this statement: “After the Turks had smashed the
Greek armies they turned the essentially Greek city (Smyrna) into an ash
heap as proof of their victory.”[8]
Men of this stamp do not make assertions without having first gone
carefully into the evidence.
We have already seen by what methods the Greeks had been eliminated from
the coastal region of Asia Minor. The murders and deportations have been
described by which a flourishing and rapidly growing civilization had
been destroyed, villages and farm-houses wrecked and vineyards uprooted.
Large numbers of Greeks, however, who had managed to escape by sea,
returned to their ruined homes after the landing of the Hellenic army
in May of 1919, and set to work industriously to restore their ruined
properties.
Mustapha Khemal now determined to make a complete and irretrievable
ruin of Christianity in Asia Minor. _Carthago delenda est._ The plan,
revealed by its execution, was to give the city up for some days to lust
and carnage; to butcher the Armenians, a task which has always given a
special pleasure to the Turk; to burn the town and to carry the Greek men
away into captivity.
The main facts in regard to the Smyrna fire are:
1. The streets leading into the Armenian quarter were guarded by Turkish
soldier sentinels and no one was permitted to enter while the massacre
was going on.
2. Armed Turks, including many soldiers, entered the quarter thus guarded
and went through it looting, massacring and destroying. They made a
systematic and horrible “clean up,” after which they set fire to it in
various places by carrying tins of petroleum or other combustibles into
the houses or by saturating bundles of rags in petroleum and throwing
these bundles in through the windows.
3. They planted small bombs under the paving stones in various places
in the European part of the city to explode and act as a supplementary
agent in the work of destruction caused by the burning petroleum which
Turkish soldiers sprinkled about the streets. The petroleum spread the
fire and led it through the European quarter and the bombs shook down
the tottering walls. One such bomb was planted near the American Girls’
School and another near the American Consulate.
4. They set fire to the Armenian quarter on the thirteenth of September,
1922. The last Greek soldiers had passed through Smyrna on the evening
of the eighth, that is to say, the Turks had been in full, complete and
undisputed possession of the city for five days before the fire broke out
and for much of this time they had kept the Armenian quarter cut off by
military control while conducting a systematic and thorough massacre. If
any Armenians were still living in the localities at the time the fires
were lighted they were hiding in cellars too terrified to move, for the
whole town was overrun by Turkish soldiers, especially the places where
the fires were started. In general, all the Christians of the city were
keeping to their houses in a state of extreme and justifiable terror for
themselves and their families, for the Turks had been in possession of
the city for five days, during which time they had been looting, raping
and killing. It was the burning of the houses of the Christians which
drove them into the streets and caused the fearful scenes of suffering
which will be described later. Of this state of affairs, I was an
eye-witness.
5. The fire was lighted at the edge of the Armenian quarter at a time
when a strong wind was blowing toward the Christian section and away
from the Turkish. The Turkish quarter was not in any way involved in the
catastrophe and during all the abominable scenes that followed and all
the indescribable sufferings of the Christians, the Mohammedan quarter
was lighted up and gay with dancing, singing and joyous celebration.
6. Turkish soldiers led the fire down into the well-built modern Greek
and European section of Smyrna by soaking the narrow streets with
petroleum or other highly inflammable matter. They poured petroleum in
front of the American Consulate with no other possible purpose than
to communicate the fire to that building at a time when C. Claflin
Davis, Chairman of the Disaster Relief Committee of the Red Cross,
Constantinople Chapter, and others, were standing in the door. Mr. Davis
went out and put his hands in the mud thus created and it smelled like
petroleum and gasoline mixed. The soldiers seen by Mr. Davis and the
others had started from the quay and were proceeding toward the fire.
7. Dr. Alexander Maclachlan, President of the American College, and a
sergeant of American Marines were stripped, the one of his clothes and
the other of a portion of his uniform, and beaten with clubs by Turkish
soldiers. A squad of American Marines was fired on.
CHAPTER XV
FIRST DISQUIETING RUMORS
My wife and I were at Sevdikeuy, a Greek village a few miles south of
Smyrna on the Ottoman railway, when the news that the Greek army was
meeting with serious reverses arrived. These rumors were not believed at
first, but they grew more and more insistent, throwing the population
into an agony of fear.
At last the report became a certainty. The official news was received
that the Greek army had suffered a terrible and irretrievable defeat and
that nothing now prevented the Turks from descending to the coast. The
population began to leave, a few at first, then more and more until the
flight developed into a veritable panic.
The town was fast filling with refugees from the interior. The majority
of these refugees were small farmers who had lived on properties that
had descended from father to son for many generations. Their forebears
had settled in Asia Minor before the Turks had begun to develop into
a nation. They were children of the soil, able to live and care for
themselves in their little houses and on their few acres, each family
with its cow, its donkey and its goat. They were even producing tobacco,
figs, seedless raisins and other products for export. They were expert
in the cultivation and manipulation of the better qualities of cigarette
tobacco and the priceless raisins, of which latter Asia Minor produces
the best quality in the world. This valuable farmer element, the very
backbone of the prosperity of Asia Minor, had again been reduced to
beggary and thrown upon American charity. They were arriving by thousands
in Smyrna and all along the seacoast. They were filling all the churches,
schools and the yards of the Y. M. and Y. W. C. A. and the American
mission schools. They were sleeping in the streets. Many were getting
away during those first days on steamers and sailing craft. The _caiques_
in the harbor, loaded with refugees and their effects, were a picturesque
sight. For the man whose heart has not suffered atrophy as a result of
the Great War, the spectacle of great numbers of helpless little children
was particularly moving. Unfortunately, atrophy of the human heart has
been one of the most noticeable phenomena of the great Armageddon. Doctor
Esther Lovejoy, of New York, already referred to, used an expression
with regard to certain Americans who were present during the scenes of
suffering and outrage.
“Their minds did not seem to register.” Had she said “hearts,” she would
have been nearer the truth. The refugees carried with them as much of
their belongings as their strength permitted and one often saw a little
child sitting on top of a great bundle of bedding, the whole supported on
the shoulders of some man or woman stumbling along.
In normal times the sick are not seen, as they are in the houses lying in
bed for the most part. In case of a great fire or panic one is surprised
at the number of sick or disabled thus brought to light. Many of the
refugees were carrying sick upon their shoulders. I remember especially
one old gray-haired woman stumbling through the streets of Smyrna with an
emaciated feverish son astride her neck. He was taller than the mother,
his legs almost touching the ground.
Then the defeated, dusty, ragged Greek soldiers began to arrive, looking
straight ahead, like men walking in their sleep. Great numbers—the more
fortunate—were sitting on ancient Assyrian carts, descendants of the very
primitive vehicles used in the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
In a never-ending stream they poured through the town toward the point
on the coast to which the Greek fleet had withdrawn. Silently as ghosts
they went, looking neither to the right nor the left. From time to time
some soldier, his strength entirely spent, collapsed on the sidewalk
or by a door. It was said that many of these were taken into houses
and given civilian clothes and that thus some escaped. It was credibly
reported that others whose strength failed them before they got into
the city were found a few hours later with their throats cut. And now
at last we heard that the Turks were moving on the town. There had been
predictions that the Greek troops, on entering Smyrna, would burn it,
but their conduct soon dispelled all such apprehensions. In fact the
American, with the British, French and Italian delegates had called
upon General Hadjianesti, the Greek commander-in-chief, to ask him what
measures he could take to prevent acts of violence on the part of the
disorganized Greek forces. He talked of a well-disciplined regiment from
Thrace which he was expecting and which he promised to throw out as a
screen to prevent straggling bands from entering the city and even of
organizing a new resistance to the Turks, but could give the delegates no
definite assurance. He was tall and thin, straight as a ramrod, extremely
well-groomed, with a pointed gray beard and the general air of an
aristocrat. He was a handsome man, with the reputation of a lady-killer.
That was the last time I saw him, but when I read later of his standing
before a firing squad in Athens, I still retained a vivid mental picture
of that last interview in the military headquarters in Smyrna. If it
was he who was responsible for sending away the flower of his troops to
threaten Constantinople at a time when they were most needed in Asia
Minor, he deserved severe punishment or confinement in a lunatic asylum.
He had the general reputation of being a megalomaniac, with not too great
ability. Certainly none but a fool would have accepted the Smyrna post
at that time for the sake of glory. What was needed was a man of energy
with a clear understanding of the situation who would have taken hurried
and wise measures to save as much as possible of the wreckage. But
Hadjianesti was busy furnishing in gorgeous style and repairing a palace
on the quay which he had requisitioned for a residence. He deserved to be
pitied, for it is probable that he was not well-balanced mentally.
It was definitely asserted that the Turkish cavalry would enter the town
on the morning of September 9, (1922). The Greek general staff and the
high-commissioner with the entire civil administration, were preparing to
leave. The Greek gendarmes were still patrolling the streets and keeping
order. These men had gained the confidence of every one in Smyrna and
the entire occupied region by their general efficiency and good conduct.
Whatever accusations may be substantiated against the Greek soldiers,
nothing but praise can be said of the Greek gendarmes. All my former
colleagues at Smyrna and all residents of the district will bear me out
in this statement. There would be an interval between the evacuation
of Smyrna and the arrival of the Turkish forces when the town would be
without a government of any kind. Some of the representatives of foreign
governments went to the high-commissioner and asked him to leave the
gendarmes until the Turks had taken over, under an assurance from the
latter that they would be allowed to depart without molestation. The
high-commissioner did not grant this request. I did not join in it. The
Greek officials all left. Mr. Sterghiades had but a few steps to go from
his house to the sea where a ship was awaiting him, but he was hooted
by the population. He had done his best to make good in an impossible
situation. He had tried by every means in his power to make friends of
the implacable Turks, and he had punished severely, sometimes with death,
Greeks guilty of crimes against Turks. He founded a university at Smyrna,
bringing from Germany a Greek professor with an international reputation
to act as president.
One of the last Greeks I saw on the streets of Smyrna before the entry
of the Turks, was Professor Karatheodoris, president of the doomed
university. With him departed the incarnation of Greek genius of culture
and civilization in the Orient.
The Hellenic forces left, civil and military, and the interregnum of a
city without a government began. But nothing happened. Mohammedans and
Christians were quiet, waiting with a great anxiety. The supreme question
was: How would the Turks behave? The French and Italian delegates assured
their colonies that Khemal’s army consisted of well-disciplined troops
and that there was nothing to fear. I had no anxiety for the native-born
Americans, but was very uneasy about the two hundred or more naturalized
citizens, many of them former Ottoman subjects. I, therefore, did not
take the responsibility of assuring the native population, Greeks and
Armenians, that they would be perfectly safe, neither did I say anything
that might tend to create panic. Many ladies, American and others, left
at this time. I counseled my wife to go, but she refused, thinking that
her staying might give comfort to those who remained. I decided to select
a place of rendezvous for the American citizens and to notify all of
them to keep in the neighborhood of this place as much as possible and,
in case of serious disorders and general danger, to take refuge there.
I picked out the American theater, a large and suitable building on the
quay, for the purpose and called the leading members of the American
colony, native and naturalized, to a meeting in my office and advised
them of the measures taken, to be applied in case of need. When I told
them that the meeting was dismissed, Mr. Rufus W. Lane, now a merchant of
Smyrna but formerly American consul there, arose and said: “We did not
come here solely to save our own skins. The refugees that are pouring
by thousands and thousands into the city are dying of starvation and
nobody to help them. I had hoped that this meeting had been called
together to take measures to succor these poor people.” A Provisional
Relief Committee was organized on the spot and a sufficient sum of money
contributed to begin operations. All the leading American firms offered
their lorries and automobiles and their personal services. Bakers were
hired and set to work, stocks of flour found and purchased, and in a few
hours this organization was feeding the helpless and bewildered refugees
who were crowding into the city. But for the American colony in Smyrna
thousands would have died of starvation before the Relief Unit could
arrive from Constantinople.
In the meantime I was insistently telegraphing for American men-of-war to
come to Smyrna. If there was ever a time when a situation demanded the
presence of naval units, this, I thought, was that occasion. Though our
colony was not great, our business interests and property holdings were
very considerable indeed, to say nothing of our large schools with their
staffs of teachers and professors.
The navy in those waters was under the control of that very fine officer
and gentleman, Admiral Mark L. Bristol. I had reason to think that the
admiral had perfect confidence in the good intentions and administrative
abilities of the Turks and believed that the latter would bring a kind
and benevolent administration to Smyrna. In response to telegraphic
insistence with the State Department a wire was received to the effect
that destroyers would be sent to Smyrna, as cruisers were not available,
for the protection of American lives and property. Two small destroyers
were accordingly sent. Naval units of Great Britain, Italy, France and
the United States were present at Smyrna, and anchored but a few hundred
yards or nearer from the houses on the quay during the appalling,
shameful and heart-rending scenes which followed.
CHAPTER XVI
THE TURKS ARRIVE
On the morning of the ninth of September, 1922, about eleven o’clock,
frightened screams were heard. Stepping to the door of my office, I found
that a crowd of refugees, mostly women, were rushing in terror upon the
Consulate and trying to seek refuge within, and that they were very
properly being kept out by the two or three bluejackets assigned for the
defense of the consular property.
One glance from the terrace which overlooked the quay made evident the
cause of their terror. The Turkish cavalry were filing along the quay,
on their way to their barracks at the _Konak_ at the other end of the
city. They were sturdy-looking fellows passing by in perfect order. They
appeared to be well-fed and fresh. Many of them were of that Mongolian
type which one sees among the Mohammedans of Asia Minor.
From the fact that not all the troops of Mustapha Khemal were provided
with the smart uniforms of his picked troops, much has been made
by Turkish apologists of the difference between “regulars” and
“irregulars.” Any one who saw those mounted troops passing along the
quay of Smyrna would testify, if he knew anything at all of military
matters, that they were not only soldiers, but very good soldiers indeed,
thoroughly trained and under perfect control of admirable officers. And
any one who knows anything of Turkish character will testify that the
Turk is essentially a soldier, extraordinarily amenable to the orders of
his superiors. The Turk massacres when he has orders from headquarters
and desists on the second when commanded by the same authority to
stop. Mustapha Khemal was worshipped by that army of “regulars” and
“irregulars,” and his word was law.
As the Turkish cavalry was entering Smyrna on the morning of the ninth,
some fool threw a bomb. The Turkish officer commanding the cavalry
division received bloody cuts about the head. All the testimony is to
the effect that he rode unconcernedly on. That is what a Turk would do,
for of the courage of the race there is no doubt. It has been stated
that this bomb was thrown by an Armenian, but I have seen no proof of
the assertion, nor can the statement that the throwing of this bomb
precipitated the massacre of the Armenians, be reconciled with the
Turkish claim that their troops were so exasperated with the atrocities
of the Greek army that they could not be restrained when reaching
Smyrna. Armenians are not Greeks, and the fury of the Turks burst first
upon their usual victims.
On the evening of the ninth, the looting and killing began. Shooting was
heard in various parts of the town all night, and the following morning
native-born Americans, both men and women, began to report seeing corpses
lying about in the streets in the interior of the town. Nureddin Pasha,
the Turkish commander-in-chief, issued a command that everybody was to go
peacefully about his business and that order should be preserved. This
caused a momentary feeling of security among a certain element of the
non-Mussulman population, so that a number of shops that had been closed
were reopened.
But this confidence was not of long duration, for the looting spread
and the savagery increased. At first, civilian Turks, natives of the
town, were the chief offenders. I myself saw such civilians armed with
shotguns watching the windows of Christian houses ready to shoot at
any head that might appear. These had the air of hunters crouching and
stalking their prey. But the thing that made an unforgettable impression
was the expression on their faces. It was that of an ecstasy of hate and
savagery. There was in it, too, a religious exaltation, but it was not
beautiful, it was the religion of the Powers of Darkness. One saw, too,
all the futility of missionary work and efforts of conversion. Here was
complete conviction, the absolute triumph of error and the doctrine of
murder and pitilessness. There was something infinitely sad in those pale
writhing faces on which seemed to shine the wan light of hell. One could
not help pitying those men even while they were killing. One thought of
lost souls and the torments of the damned. Those killers were unhappy.
The last Greek soldiers disappeared from Smyrna on the evening of the
eighth and the Turks rapidly took over the town. Mounted patrols and
little squads of soldiers began to appear on the streets, serving as
police.
These were well enough behaved. There were credibly reported instances
of minor Turkish officers interfering with the looters and evil-doers,
and even of instances of kindness being shown to non-Mussulman natives. I
saw no such kindness, however. If I had, I should be eager to report it,
but I am willing to accept the testimony of others. The panic among the
native Christians was now increasing to an alarming extent.
As the looting spread and the killing increased the American institutions
were filled with frightened people. These institutions in Smyrna were the
Intercollegiate Institute, a seminary for young girls; the Y. W. C. A.,
housed in a large building and surrounded by a garden and tennis court,
and the Y. M. C. A.
The night of the tenth the shooting could still be heard in the Christian
quarters and frightened people were besieging the doors of these
institutions and screaming and begging in God’s name to be let in. A
number of bluejackets were stationed in both the girls’ school and the Y.
W. C. A., and if any of them chance to read these lines they will confirm
the statement that the conduct of the American women teachers connected
with the American institutions in and about Smyrna was without exception,
above praise. There was not one who showed the least indication of fear
or nervousness under the most trying circumstances; not one who flinched
or wabbled for an instant throughout a situation which had scarcely a
parallel in the history of the world for hideousness and danger. They
endured fatigue almost beyond human endurance, that they might do all
in their power to save their charges and give comfort and courage to
the frightened hunted creatures who had thrown themselves on their
protection. Such women as these throw imperishable luster on the name
of American womanhood. Since none of them gave up or showed the white
feather, we may conclude that they were worthy representatives of a
worthy sisterhood—the American Woman. For the men nothing need be said,
for American men are expected to come up to the mark. I was proud of my
whole colony at Smyrna.
Mention should be made of Jacobs, director of the Y. M. C. A. He was and
is still, doubtless, famous for a genial smile which he himself calls the
“Y. M. C. A. smile.” Proceeding along the quay on an errand of mercy in
connection with the refugees, he was stopped by several Turkish soldiers,
searched and robbed of a sum of money. Continuing his route, he hailed a
Turkish officer to whom he complained. The officer asked him:
“Did they take it all?”
“Fortunately, no,” replied Jacobs.
“Well then,” said the officer, “hand over what you have left,” which
Jacobs was compelled to do. As he left he was shot at, but fortunately
not hit. This incident I did not see, but it was related to me by other
Americans.
The Turks were now making a thorough and systematic job of killing
Armenian men. The squads of soldiers which had given the inhabitants a
certain amount of comfort, inspiring the belief that the regular army
was beginning to function and would protect the citizens, were chiefly
engaged in hunting down and killing Armenians. Some were dispatched on
the spot while others were led out into the country in squads and shot,
the bodies being left in piles where they fell. The Americans belonging
to the various charitable institutions whose duties took them into the
interior of the town, reported an increasing number of dead and dying in
the streets.
A native-born American reported that he had seen a man beaten to death
with clubs by the Turks, “till there was not a whole bone left in his
body.” The unwillingness of all the eye-witnesses to say anything that
might offend the Turks and thus compromise their interests, shows how
difficult it has been to get the full extent of the hideous and shameful
truth.
Another native-born American, representative of a well-known tobacco
firm, came white and trembling into the Consulate and reported that
he had seen a terrible sight, “just around the corner.” A number of
Turkish soldiers had stopped an old man and commenced talking to him. The
old man had thrown up his hands, the fingers spread in an attitude of
supplication, whereupon one of the soldiers had split his hands with a
sword, cut off his wrists and hewn him down.
The loot was now being driven out of the bazaars and the Armenian quarter
by the cartload, and cartloads of corpses, as of beef or sheep, were
being sent into the country.
The following is found in my memoranda dated September 12, 1922: “A
party of Americans saw nine cartloads of dead bodies being carried off in
the neighborhood of the _Konak_ (Turkish government house) and another
party saw three such cartloads in the neighborhood of the Point Station.”
Captain Hepburn, one of the naval officers, counted thirty-five dead
bodies on the road leading to Paradise, a small village near Smyrna,
where the American International College is situated.
At Boudja, another village, largely inhabited by English and other
foreigners, there was a well-known and wealthy Dutch family by the name
of De Jong. It was reported that Mr. and Mrs. De Jong had been murdered
by Turkish soldiers. Concerning this affair, the following details were
furnished me by Mr. Francis Blackler, one of the prominent members of the
American community at Smyrna, head of the well-known firm of Griffith and
Company, that does an extensive business with America. Mr. Blackler may
be mentioned as neither he nor his wife, a lady of exceptional culture
and refinement, has any idea of returning to Smyrna, at least under
present conditions.
“I believe I was the first,” he said, “to find and recognize
the bodies of the De Jongs. I was passing along the street
after the Turkish cavalry had passed through and I saw two
bodies lying on the road. I stooped down and looked and
immediately exclaimed, ‘Why, that’s Mr. De Jong!’ Glancing at
the other, I saw that it was Mrs. De Jong. The bodies were
perforated with bullet holes. I notified the relatives and we
took them away and buried them.”
About this time, Sir Harry Lamb, the distinguished and able British
consul-general, came to me and asked if I could send two automobiles
to Bournabat to get Doctor Murphy and the women of his family. Besides
my own car, there were quite a number of autos at my disposal, as the
Americans of Smyrna owned many, practically all of which they had put at
the disposition of the Consulate and the Relief Organization.
Doctor Murphy was a retired army surgeon who had been in the British
Indian service. He was living with his two daughters on pension at
Bournabat, an aged man with a high record. Sir Harry related that Turks
had entered the Murphy home and told the doctor not to be frightened, as
they meant harm to no one. They had simply come to violate the women.
His daughters, fortunately, had hidden themselves in a room up-stairs,
but the eyes of the Turks fell upon a young and pretty servant. They
attempted to seize her, when she fell on her knees and threw her arms
about the legs of the aged doctor and begged him to save her. The old
hero tried to protect the girl in so far as his feeble strength would
allow, but he was beaten over the head with muskets, kicked, and the girl
torn from him by the Turks. They then proceeded to accomplish their foul
purpose. Sir Harry added that the doctor was in a desperate state and the
women nearly dying from fright. The automobiles were sent and the Murphys
brought down. The doctor died of his injuries.
The Archbishop Chrysostom came to the Consulate but a short time before
his death, together with the Armenian Archbishop. Chrysostom was dressed
in black. His face was pale. This is the last time that I saw this
venerable and eloquent man alive. He was a constant friend of Americans
and American institutions and used all his influence with the clergy
and the government in favor of the support of our schools, our Y. W. C.
A. and Y. M. C. A. It is doubtful if there is any member of our foreign
missionary, educational and philanthropic institutions who will dispute
this statement. He frequented them all and often addressed their members.
As he sat there in the consular office, the shadow of his approaching
death lay upon his features. Some who read these lines—some few,
perhaps—will understand what is meant. At least twice in my life I have
seen that shadow upon a human visage and have known that the person was
soon to die.
Monseigneur Chrysostom believed in the union of Christian churches,
in a united effort in the cause of Christ and the better education of
the Eastern clergy. Neither he nor the Armenian bishop spoke to me of
their own danger, but they asked me if nothing could be done to save the
inhabitants of Smyrna.
The tales vary as to the manner of Chrysostom’s death, but the evidence
is conclusive that he met his end at the hands of the Ottoman populace. A
Turkish officer and two soldiers went to the offices of the cathedral and
took him to Nureddin Pasha, the Turkish commander-in-chief, who is said
to have adopted the medieval plan of turning him over to the fanatical
mob to work its will upon him. There is not sufficient proof of the
veracity of this statement, but it is certain that he was killed by the
mob. He was spit upon, his beard torn out by the roots, beaten, stabbed
to death and then dragged about the streets.
His only sin was that he was a patriotic and eloquent Greek who believed
in the expansion of his race and worked to that end. He was offered a
refuge in the French Consulate and an escort by French Marines, but he
refused, saying that it was his duty to remain with his flock. He said
to me: “I am a shepherd and must stay with my flock.” He died a martyr
and deserves the highest honors in the bestowal of the Greek church and
government. He merits the respect of all men and women to whom courage
in the face of horrible death makes an appeal.
Polycarp, the patron saint of Smyrna, was burned to death in the stadium
overlooking the town. The Turk roams over the land of the Seven Cities
and there is none to say him nay, but the last scene in the final
extinction of Christianity was glorified by the heroic death of the last
Christian bishop.
Looking from the door of the Consulate, I saw a number of miserable
refugees with their children, bundles and sick, being herded toward the
quay by several Turkish soldiers. One gray-haired old woman was stumbling
along behind, so weak that she could not keep up, and a Turkish soldier
was prodding her in the back with the butt of his musket. At last he
struck her such a violent blow between the shoulder-blades that she fell
sprawling upon her face on the stony street.
Another old woman came screaming to me, crazy with grief, crying, “My
boy! My boy!” The front of her dress was covered with blood. She did not
say what had happened to her boy, but the copious blood told its own
story.
[Illustration: Smyrna burning, with populace on quay.]
Mrs. Cass Arthur Reed, wife of the dean of the American College at
Paradise, near Smyrna, thus describes the stripping and beating of
her father, the venerable president, as also of Sergeant Crocker, an
American navy officer:
“On September 11, 1922, American Marines who were on the
lookout from the roof of the college notified their chief that
the American settlement house, belonging to the college, was
being looted by the Turkish soldiers. So the chief and father
rode over to the settlement house in the college car, carrying
the American flag. They informed the men that this was American
property they were looting and asked why they were doing it?
Father explained it was a community house and served the Turks
as well as Christians in its work. They seized both men and
stripped them of their clothes, valuables and money, shoes and
stockings, and beat them both with a club five feet long and
three inches in diameter. Sergeant Crocker was the officer who
was beaten. He took the club over to the college afterward.
Before he was stripped of his clothes he, of his own accord,
took off his revolver and showed the Turkish soldiers that he
did not mean to hurt them. They beat both men severely and
separated them so they could not stand together. They beat
them with the butt end of their rifles and with this big club
I have mentioned. Then they demanded of Doctor MacLachlan that
he hand over the Marines guarding his college. He said he was
not a military man and had no control over the Marines, who had
been sent by the American Government to protect the American
property and the refugees in it.
“They hit him on the head, limbs, crushed the big toe of his
right foot, all the time lunging at him to run, which he
refused to do knowing they would put bullets in his back if he
did. What he considered saved his life was that he kept calm
through the whole procedure, saying they could kill him if
they wished but he wanted to explain why he was there and why
he wanted them to stop robbing the American property. One man
lunged at him with a bayonet, and father put out his hand to
grasp it and cut his palm. When the soldier drew back to get
another lunge at him, the bayonet remained in father’s hand.
He was naked all this time. Then they lamed his left foot,
breaking the tendons in the back of his knee so that he fell
to the ground. He endeavored throughout the whole thing to
keep his feet and he saved the blows on his head by putting up
his arms. Several times they stood him up a few yards away and
threatened to blaze at him.
“During this time, one of the Turkish students, who had seen
the thing from the college, ran over. While the guns were
pointed at father, he threw himself on the butt ends of the
rifles and beseeched the men not to kill him, that he was a
good man. They then accused this student of being an infidel
and he swore that he was a true Moslem and he was wearing
Khemal’s picture on his arm and also wearing a fez. Sergeant
Crocker had given the order to his men on the roof of the
college not to fire or use their machine guns. Two of the
Marines chased over to help when they saw what was going on.
Sergeant Crocker ordered them to retreat in order to save
Doctor MacLachlan’s and his own life. The Turks placed Doctor
MacLachlan up against a wall and were about to shoot him
when, at the very moment, a young Turkish officer appeared on
horseback and ordered them to desist.”
They obeyed immediately and went away, proving by their immediate
obedience that they were regular troops under good discipline.
The following details concerning the attack on President MacLachlan and
Sergeant Crocker were furnished me by another eye-witness of the scene:
“When the bluejackets in the main building saw the predicament
of their chief and that he was in danger of being ill-treated,
they ran to his rescue. Sergeant Crocker spreading his arms
motioned them backward, saying: ‘Retire! Retire! Don’t shoot!
Retire!’
“This they did, and after they had covered some distance in
this manner, he gave the order: ‘Wheel and run!’
“They obeyed, whereupon the Turkish soldiers opened up a lively
fusillade on the running Marines, and their rifle fire was
so rapid and continual that it reminded me of a machine gun.
Fortunately none of the Americans was hurt.”
The following looting of American property occurred at Paradise, as
described to me by an American lady connected with the college:
“In September, 1922, every American house at Paradise had an
American flag, back and front, and all have been broken into
except two.
“Lately, while the chief of the Turkish army, who had billeted
himself at the president’s house, was eating there with his
band playing on the campus, the Turks looted the dean’s house,
right on the same campus.”
Meanwhile, in the city of Smyrna itself, the hunting and killing of
Armenian men, either by hacking or clubbing or driving out in squads into
the country and shooting, caused an unimaginable panic. There was no
help anywhere in sight. The battle-ships of the Great Powers, including
America, could not interfere for various reasons and there were instances
of persons who had reached them being sent back to the shore.
This man hunt was now being participated in by squads of the Turkish
army. Armenians soon disappeared from the streets, either through death
or concealment. The proclamation had been issued that any one concealing
an Armenian in his house would be brought before the court-martial—a
justly dreaded tribunal. One instance will show what terror this edict
inspired in the hearts of all—even foreign subjects:
A prominent Dutch subject related the following incident, which he
witnessed from the deck of his small private yacht:
“Over by Cordelio (a suburb of Smyrna), I saw a young couple
wade out into the sea. They were a respectable, attractive pair
and the man was carrying in his arms a small child. As they
waded deeper and deeper into the water, till it came nearly up
to their shoulders, I suddenly realized that they were going
to drown themselves. I therefore pushed out to them in a boat
and with the promise that I would do what I could to save
them, managed to get them to shore. They explained that they
were Armenians, and knowing that the man would certainly be
killed and the wife, who was young and pretty, either outraged
or taken into a harem and their baby left to die, they had
determined to drown themselves together. I took them to several
places and tried to get them in, but without success. I finally
conducted them to a large school whose building and garden were
full of people, rang the bell, and, when a sister came to the
door explained the situation to her. When she heard that they
were Armenians, she shut the door. I went away leaving them
sitting on the steps of the school.”
And there we shall leave them with the hope that in some miraculous way
they were saved, which is not probable.
This incident is not related to throw discredit on the personnel of the
foreign school. They thought that if they took in an Armenian couple,
they might endanger the safety of the hundreds of people whom they were
protecting, most, if not all of whom were of their own religion and
therefore their especial charges.
As the Armenians had all disappeared from the streets, it was supposed
that the men who had escaped had taken refuge in their own quarter,
a well-built, Europeanized section of the town, within well-defined
limits. Before proceeding to what happened next, it should be explained
that the soldiers were helped in picking out Armenians in the streets
by native spies, who accompanied them and pointed out victims. I could
not recognize the nationality of those foul and slimy reptiles, the
spies. I was told by some that they were Jews, but I have no proof
to substantiate the statement. Of course many of the informers were
Turks, and it is possible that they were all of that race, as they would
naturally aid their own troops.
When Armenian hunting became too poor in the streets of Smyrna, their
precinct was closed to all except Turks by soldiers stationed at the
street entrances, after which the sack and massacre were conducted
methodically. I did not myself attempt to enter the Armenian section,
but I was repeatedly informed by those with whom I was in contact that
ingress was not permitted. Americans who saw into the quarter from their
windows, stated that there was not a house that escaped, so far as could
be seen. All were broken into, looted, the furniture smashed and thrown
into the streets. What happened to the inhabitants can easily be left to
the imagination. It is easy to form a mental picture of those families,
cowering in their homes, with their wives, their daughters and their
babes, waiting for the crash of a rifle butt on their doors.
CHAPTER XVII
WHERE AND WHEN THE FIRES WERE LIGHTED
It was after this complete gutting of the Armenian portion of the
town that the Turkish soldiers applied the torch to numerous houses
simultaneously. As has already been mentioned, they chose a moment when
a strong wind was blowing directly away from the Mohammedan settlement.
They started the conflagration directly behind the Intercollegiate
Institute, one of the oldest and most thorough American schools in
Turkey, in such a way that the building would be sure to fall an early
prey to the flames. The pupils of that school have always been largely
Armenian girls, and its buildings were, at that time, crowded with
refugees. Miss Minnie Mills, its dean, a brave, competent and admirable
lady, saw Turkish soldiers go into various Armenian houses with petroleum
tins and in each instance after they came out, flames burst forth. In
a conversation held with me on the thirtieth of January, 1925, on the
occasion of the Missionary Convention that took place in the City of
Washington, Miss Mills confirmed the above statements and added the
following details:
“I could plainly see the Turks carrying the tins of petroleum
into the houses, from which, in each instance, fire burst forth
immediately afterward. There was not an Armenian in sight, the
only persons visible being Turkish soldiers of the regular army
in smart uniforms.”
On the same occasion Mrs. King Birge, wife of an American missionary to
Turkey, made the following statement:
“I went up into the tower of the American College at Paradise,
and, with a pair of field-glasses, could plainly see Turkish
soldiers setting fire to houses. I could see Turks lurking in
the fields, shooting at Christians. When I drove down to Smyrna
from Paradise to Athens, there were dead bodies all along the
road.”
During the same conversation Miss Mills told me of a great throng of
Christians crowded into a street the head of which was guarded by Turkish
soldiers. The flames were approaching and the soldiers were forcing these
people to go into the houses. An American automobile passed and the poor
wretches stretched out their hands, crying: “Save us! The Turks are going
to burn us alive.” Nothing could be done, of course, and the car passed
on. Later two Catholic priests came up and said to the Turks, “This is a
fiendish thing you are doing,” and they allowed an old woman to come out
of one of the houses.
It will be seen that the situation was such that only the Turks were in
position to light the flames. Now we have the testimony of eye-witnesses
of the highest credibility who actually saw them commit the act. I
remember on various occasions in the past talking with Miss Mills
concerning Turkish atrocities which were continually occurring and the
missionary policy of remaining silent for fear of endangering the lives
of colleagues working in the interior of Asia Minor. “I believe,” said
she, “that the time for that policy has passed and not even regard for
the safety of our workers should prevent us from telling the truth.” She
was right, of course, for a full understanding of what has been going on
in Turkey by the civilized world might have caused such a development
of Christian sentiment as might have led to the taking of measures to
prevent the wholesale horrors that have been perpetrated.
The following extract from a letter written by a lady connected with the
American missions in Turkey has recently fallen into my hands. It is
dated September 21, 1922, and was sent to a friend in the United States:
“Our Murray house across the street was locked up and protected
only by an American flag hung from an upper window, but we
had several Marines from the American destroyers with us who
behaved splendidly all through and were a great comfort to
us. Of course we had many trying things during the time we
were there together, from Saturday, September ninth, until
Wednesday, thirteenth, when we left, because the place was
on fire. Most of the people who had fled to us for refuge
behaved wonderfully patiently under the lack of bread and many
difficulties. We had eighty small babies and one born there.
We organized a hospital, etc., and had gotten the commissariat
running with the difficulty overcome, as we supposed, of lack
of bread.
“All ovens in the Christian quarters, where we were, at least,
and probably everywhere, had been ordered closed from Sunday
until Wednesday, when the city burned. It looks now to me like
a definite attempt to starve the population out.
“The Red Cross insisted on ovens being opened for them and the
people were then burned out.
“The looting and murder went on steadily under our eyes—a
murdered man lay before our Murray house door for days, under
the American flag, his blood spattered over our steps, etc.
There were dead and dying every where. The silence of death
finally reigned over us and was broken during the last three
days only by the fierce Chetas breaking in doors of houses,
shooting the poor cowering inhabitants, looting, etc., and at
night the howling of homeless dogs and the feet of wandering
horses clanging over the rough stones of the street. After the
third day of the occupation of Khemal’s army, fires began to
break out in the Christian quarter of the city. Miss Mills and
some of our teachers saw soldiers preparing fires. I myself saw
a Cheta carrying a load of firewood on his back up an alley,
from which later on the fire that caught our building came.
“It is quite clear in my mind that there was a definite plan to
burn out the Christian quarter after it had been looted. The
time for starting the great fire was when the wind was blowing
away from the Turkish quarter. I remarked when the fires began:
‘I am sure the Turkish authorities will say one of two things,
either that the retreating Greek army set the city on fire, or
the Armenians.’ Exactly this has been published in Italian and
French papers. _Do not believe a word of it!_ We were in the
Christian quarter where the fires began. Almost all Armenians
except those we were sheltering had been looted and killed
a day or two—even longer—before any fires began. The Greek
soldiers had passed quietly through the suburbs about three or
four days before.
“The whole city had been completely under military control
since Saturday afternoon and the fires began on Wednesday which
finally destroyed the city. The Turks, Chetas or regulars,
or both, burned the city to dispose of the dead after having
carried away their loot.”
The writer of this letter is neither Armenian nor Greek and is a person
of the highest repute. I do not agree with the reason stated in it for
the burning of Smyrna.
The torch was applied to that ill-fated city and it was all
systematically burned by the soldiers of Mustapha Khemal in order to
exterminate Christianity in Asia Minor and to render it impossible for
the Christians to return.
By the time the Turkish soldiers had set fire to Smyrna, September 13,
1922, I had succeeded in getting hold of practically all of my colony
(about three hundred in number) most of them naturalized citizens. These,
together with their families and relatives were huddled in the _Theatre
de Smyrne_, on the quay, owned by a naturalized American citizen. Just
across the road was the harbor where the American cruiser, the _Simpson_,
was moored, ready to take them off. There was a guard of bluejackets with
a machine-gun inside the theater.
Soon after the conflagration took on serious proportions, I went up on
the terrace of the Consulate to look. The spectacle was one of vast dark
clouds of smoke, arising from a wide area, for the fire had been started
simultaneously in many places.
As it was evident that the time was fast approaching when it would be
necessary to evacuate the colony, I was kept very busy during those few
remaining lurid hours in signing passes for such as were entitled to
American protection and transportation to Piræus.
The flames consumed the Armenian quarter with such appalling rapidity as
to make it certain that the Turks were augmenting them with inflammable
fluids. Bluejackets sent to the scene reported that they saw Turkish
soldiers throwing rags soaked in petroleum into Armenian houses.
The buildings of Smyrna were much more inflammable than they appeared at
a casual glance. The city had suffered in times past from earthquakes
and the stone and plaster walls contained a skeleton of wooden beams and
timbers to prevent their being easily shaken down. When a wall became
very hot from a contiguous fire these wooden timbers caught inside the
plaster and the masonry crumbled. As the conflagration spread and swept
on down toward the quay where were the beautiful and well-built offices
and warehouses of the great foreign merchants and the residences of the
rich Levantines, Greeks and Armenians, the people poured in a rapidly
increasing flood to the water-front, old, young, women, children, sick
and well. Those who were unable to walk were carried on stretchers, or on
the shoulders of relatives.
The aged Doctor Arghyropolos, long a well-known figure on the streets of
Smyrna, being ill, was brought down on a stretcher to the quay where he
died.
The last Miltonic touch was now added to a scene of vast, unparalleled
horror and human suffering. These thousands were crowded on a narrow
street between the burning city and the deep waters of the bay.
The question has been frequently asked, “What efforts were made to put
out the fire at Smyrna?” I did not see any such efforts. If the Turks
did anything along this line it was merely the sporadic attempt of some
petty officer who had not been informed. What measures they took for
saving the American consular building have already been described.
Great clouds of smoke were by this time beginning to pour down upon the
Consulate. The crowd in the street before this building, as well as that
upon the quay, was now so dense that the commanding naval officer told me
that in ten minutes more I should not be able to get through. The hour
had struck for me to evacuate my colony, to find some refuge for it in a
Christian country, and to find means for its temporary sustenance.
I was profoundly stirred by the plight of these people and was determined
that they should get the kindest, most generous and patient treatment
possible. I therefore loaded a few trunks into a waiting automobile, as
well as a few bundles of my fine collection of rugs, which fortunately
were lying packed up, waiting to be taken out of their casings for winter
use, grabbed whatever was dearest to me that happened to be in sight, and
with my wife and a Greek servant started for the quay and the waiting
destroyer.
The naval officers and men acted with the greatest efficiency and both
myself and wife were treated with extreme courtesy. In the somewhat
difficult task of getting us through the frantic crowds and on to the
launch, the young native-born Americans were also cool-headed and
capable. There was great danger of the launch being rushed and swamped by
the desperate, terrified people swarming the wharf. One frightened man
who jumped into it was thrown into the sea by a young American. He was
promptly fished out again and went away ashamed and very wet. It was this
incident, happening at a psychological moment, and the determined guard
kept by bluejackets and a few native-born Americans which enabled us to
embark and get away.
The last view of the ill-fated town by daylight was one of vast
enveloping clouds rolling up to heaven, a narrow water-front covered with
a great throng of people—an ever-increasing throng, with the fire behind
and the sea before, and a powerful fleet of inter-allied battle-ships,
among which were two American destroyers, moored a short distance from
the quay and looking on.
As the destroyer moved away from the fearful scene and darkness
descended, the flames, raging now over a vast area, grew brighter and
brighter, presenting a scene of awful and sinister beauty. Historians and
archeologists have declared that they know of but one event in the annals
of the world which can equal in savagery, extent and all the elements
of horror, cruelty and human suffering, the destruction of Smyrna and
its Christian population by the Turks, and this was the demolition of
Carthage by the Romans.
Certainly at Smyrna, nothing was lacking in the way of atrocity, lust,
cruelty and all that fury of human passion which, given their full play,
degrade the human race to a level lower than the vilest and cruelest of
beasts. For during all this diabolical drama the Turks robbed and raped.
Even the raping can be understood as an impulse of nature, irresistible
perhaps, when passions are running wild among a people of low mentality
and less civilization, but the repeated robbing of women and girls can
be attributed neither to religious frenzy nor to animal passions. One of
the keenest impressions which I brought away with me from Smyrna was a
feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race.
At the destruction of Smyrna there was one feature for which Carthage
presents no parallel. There was no fleet of Christian battle-ships at
Carthage looking on at a situation for which their governments were
responsible. There were no American cruisers at Carthage.
The Turks were glutting freely their racial and religious lust for
slaughter, rape and plunder within a stone’s throw of the Allied and
American battle-ships because they had been systematically led to
believe that they would not be interfered with. A united order from the
commanders or from any two of them—one harmless shell thrown across the
Turkish quarter—would have brought the Turks to their senses.
And this, the presence of those battle-ships in Smyrna harbor, in the
year of our Lord 1922, impotently watching the last great scene in the
tragedy of the Christians of Turkey, was the saddest and most significant
feature of the whole picture.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ARRIVAL AT ATHENS
The destroyer reached Piræus very early in the morning, and I obtained,
after some negotiations, permission from the authorities to land my
colony. I was soon convinced that I had made no mistake in undertaking
this task myself.
I herded my refugees temporarily in the compound of the custom-house,
and immediately appointed a committee of the most capable to attend
to the details of obtaining provisions, etc., and to distribute among
the families the necessary sums for their daily needs from a small
amount which had been provided at Smyrna for immediate necessities by
the representatives of the Near East Relief. I then set about finding
lodgings for my people and telegraphed to Washington an account of
the situation and asked for funds. I found Piræus, as well as Athens,
already crowded to saturation with refugees from Turkey. It soon became
apparent that it would be next to impossible to find lodgings for these
new arrivals. After running about frantically all day, toward evening I
obtained permission to make use of a large steamer that was undergoing
repairs in the harbor.
My appeal to Washington for financial help brought an immediate
telegraphic order for two thousand dollars, and about two weeks later,
Consul Oscar Heizer arrived from Constantinople with ample funds. A small
room in the basement of the American Consulate at Athens was accorded
to the personnel of the Smyrna office. This was crowded all day with
refugees and their innumerable relatives.
It was necessary to study carefully the case of each and determine to
what extent he was entitled to relief from the American Government, a
matter rendered doubly difficult by the lack of essential records. The
painfulness of the task was augmented by the fact that while American
citizens could be repatriated, many of those dependent on them could not
be sent to the United States.
The consular officials were obliged, therefore, actually to engage in
the gruesome business of tearing families apart, even to the extent of
separating aged parents from children, and to act as the agents of an
uncompromising system which was not rising to the emergency. A more
pleasant feature of the task was that of helping in the reuniting at
Athens of scattered families and in obtaining news of missing relatives.
This work, begun by me, was developed into an efficient system later by
the Athens Red Cross.
[Illustration: Other scenes of Smyrna in flames.]
It was very painful to me to be thrown into daily contact with the
beggared inhabitants of Asia Minor, whom I had known such a short time
before as self-supporting and prosperous. I remember with peculiar
distinctness the old guide of my hunting expeditions, an industrious
small farmer from the village of Develikeuy. Many an unforgettable day
have I spent in the pine woods with him, shooting woodcock and hare and
swapping Greek and American hunting yarns in his native tongue. The day
before I left Athens, I met him wandering about the streets in a dazed
condition. He told me that his beautiful and intelligent young daughter,
who was soon to have been married, had disappeared; he feared that she
had suffered a fate worse than death.
Mr. Heizer, on taking over the work, asked me the peculiar feature of the
job. I knew he was a very competent man, as he had done most of the work
of the Constantinople Consulate for years, so I replied, “The quality
most needed in this task is a human heart and not to try too much to
repress its promptings.”
From his reply I understood that he was aware of this requisite and
agreed with me. I therefore left my people with him without apprehension
and sailed to the United States on leave granted me by the department.
CHAPTER XIX
ADDED DETAILS LEARNED AFTER THE TRAGEDY
At Athens, at Paris, and later in the United States, I met various
eye-witnesses of the great disaster who related to me things that they
had seen. I have made notes of the testimony of several of these persons,
carefully excluding all such as were Greek or Armenian, not with the
feeling that statements made by such would necessarily be unreliable, but
rather that it might be impugned as prejudiced.
American relief workers, standing on the deck of a ship which left Smyrna
soon after the _Simpson_, related that they saw a man throw himself into
the sea and swim toward the vessel. A Turkish soldier raised his rifle,
took aim and blew the man’s head off. Another American, in relating
the same incident to me, added the detail that the Turk pointed his
rifle over the shoulder of a British Marine. Teachers and others of the
American Girls’ school told me that they saw a lady who resided in the
house directly across the street standing in the road surrounded by
Turkish soldiers, who were robbing her and tearing the rings from her
fingers. When they finished, one of them stepped back and cut one of her
hands off with his sword. The lady was never seen again and doubtless
died as the result of her injuries.
The story has frequently been told by Americans and others who were at
Smyrna that a crowd of residents, men, women and children, had gathered
on a lighter lying in the harbor but a short distance from the pier, with
the hope that some Entente or American launch would tow them to a ship
and save them. The Turks threw petroleum on them and burned them all to
death. A confirmation of this dreadful story was furnished me by Miss
Emily McCallam, directress of the Intercollegiate Institute of Smyrna.
She arrived in that ill-fated city on the morning of September 14, 1922,
after the fire set by the Turks had been raging all night, and saw a
number of charred bodies floating in the harbor, which she was informed
were the corpses of the people cremated on the lighter.
A prominent Dutch merchant of Smyrna, who had taken refuge on his yacht
during the fire, related to me at Athens that all through the night of
the dreadful thirteenth he heard fearful screams from the shore, ending
suddenly in a queer watery gurgle. He learned the next morning that a lot
of throats had been cut.
A book of great human interest could be written by any one who cared to
interview the refugees and set down the stories he would thus hear of
hair-breadth escapes and the desperate and ingenious expedients resorted
to. One wealthy woman with a large family of small children saved them
all in the crush and panic by tying a long rope around their waists, the
other end of which she attached to her own. A lady living at Vourla,
a large town near Smyrna, saved her beautiful daughter by skilfully
disguising her as a bent and ugly crone. A woman in the United States,
an American citizen, wrote me that her baby girl, four years old, whom
she had left in Smyrna with grandparents, had turned up in one of the
islands. During the massacre this little tot had crept into an open grave
where she lay as still as a mouse for many hours, until she heard people
speaking English, when she made herself known and was rescued by friendly
hands.
There are horrible tales told of the burning of the sick in the hospitals
and of children in the schools. The pupils in the American schools and
institutions were practically all saved, as also the orphans entrusted to
our care.
Just before I left the city the Greek high-commissioner turned over to
me a considerable sum of money belonging to an orphan asylum which he
had founded at Boudja, a suburb of Smyrna, and asked me to take charge
of the institution and the children in it. I did so and organized an
American committee to carry on the work. The children were all saved
and got away to Saloniki, owing largely to the heroism of Mr. Murman, a
young American. There is no doubt, however, that many Greek children,
attendants of the schools in the center of the burned area, perished in
the flames, and that numerous sick lost their lives in the same way. What
the number was can not be determined, but in view of the rapidity of the
spread of the fire, any safe evacuation of the hospitals was evidently
impossible.
Wholesale violation of women and girls was one of the outstanding
features of the Smyrna horror. It is necessary to mention this disgusting
subject, though not to dwell upon it; it can not be possible that the
Christian people of America for material advantages will be in sympathy
with a policy of coddling a race that specializes in such conduct. On
this point a letter is submitted by Doctor M. C. Elliott, a noted and
native-born American physician who for several years was engaged in
hospital work in the Near East. Doctor Elliott’s testimony that she has
never yet seen a Mussulman woman who had been violated is significant
and, incidentally, is high tribute to the Greek soldier. It will be seen,
also, that Turks confine their lustful orgies to Christian girls. Here is
Doctor Elliott’s letter:
AMERICAN WOMEN’S HOSPITALS
NEAR EAST BRANCH
GREEK UNIT
Athens, Greece, June 2, 1923.
Consul-General George Horton, American Legation, Athens, Greece,
My dear Mr. Horton:
How true Gladstone’s famous statement was in regard to the
Turk’s character has been most amply proved in the late Smyrna
disaster.
My position as a woman physician makes me peculiarly well
placed to know about the treatment of young girls by the Turks.
In my four-year experience in Turkey I think it is a rather
remarkable fact that I have yet to see the Turkish girl or
woman who has been ravished. As a marked contrast to this I
have seen hundreds of Christian girls who have been in the
hands of Turkish men. The late Smyrna disaster was no exception
to this and I can justly come to the conclusion from what I
have seen with my own eyes that the ravishing of Christian
girls by Turks in Smyrna was wholesale. I have actually
examined dozens of such girls and have had the story from
them of the experiences of other girls with them. By actual
examination I have proved that their story in regard to this
was not exaggeration, so I have no reason to believe that the
statement they made in regard to their companions was not true.
The treatment of girls in Smyrna during the late disaster of
1922 is unspeakable and I am willing to go on record as an
American physician and as director of an organization doing
a very large medical work in Greece following the Smyrna
disaster, as having made this statement.
Sincerely,
(Signed) Doctor M. C. Elliott,
Director American Women’s Hospitals,
Athens, Greece.
Among other witnesses of the Smyrna outrage was an employee of the great
firm of MacAndrews and Forbes, of New York. Their offices at Smyrna were
in the fire-devastated area. This man saw Turks throwing hand-grenades
into buildings which later caught fire.
A prominent Y. M. C. A. official, a native-born American, related to me
the following:
“I was standing with several others on the deck of a ship,
watching the fire, when I saw some persons throwing some
liquid against one of the large buildings directly on the sea,
and very soon the building burst into bright flames. Turkish
soldiers were patroling up and down in front of the building at
the time and did not interfere.”
A well-known Y. M. C. A. worker informed me at Athens that he saw women
stabbed with bayonets by Turks and the bodies of children who had been
thus stabbed. His progress through the town in an automobile while on
errands of mercy, was impeded by corpses.
While I was in Washington during 1922 and 1923, I saw much of Doctor
Esther Lovejoy, the well-known woman physician of New York. Doctor
Lovejoy had arrived in Smyrna while the refugees were still on the
quay and the evacuation was going on. She literally threw herself into
the work of giving medical aid to the sick and wounded, and especially
to women in childbirth. She described vividly to me the robbing of the
refugees by Turks, soldiers and civilians—both on the water-front and
at the moment of their embarking. While our men were helping these
unfortunate people to get away, the Turks were pawing them over, women
and men, searching through their clothes for any money or valuables that
they might have on them.
One of the most outrageous features of the Smyrna horror was the carrying
away of the men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. These were
inoffensive farmers and others, in nowise responsible for the landing of
the Hellenic army in Asia Minor. They were the bread winners and their
forcible detention left the widows and orphans to be supported by the
so-called “Christian nations,” especially the United States. It requires
but little imagination to picture the scene as it was described to me by
Doctor Lovejoy and others, who told of children throwing their arms about
the legs of their fathers and shrieking for mercy, and of wives clinging
to husbands in a last despairing embrace; and it takes less imagination
to visualize the manner in which these couples were torn asunder.
This last scene on the Smyrna quay reveals the whole diabolical and
methodically carried-out plan of the Turks. The soldiers were allowed
to glut their lust for blood and plunder and rape by falling first on
the Armenians, butchering and burning them and making free with their
women and girls. But the Greeks, for whom a deeper hatred existed, were
reserved for a slower and more leisurely death. The few that have been
coming back tell terrible tales. Some were shot down or killed off in
squads. All were starved and thousands died of disease, fatigue and
exposure. Authentic reports of American relief workers tell of small
bands far inland that started out thousands strong.
The Turks allege that they carried off the male population of Smyrna and
its hinterland to rebuild the villages destroyed by the Greek army on
its retreat. This has a ring of justice and will appeal to any American
unacquainted with the actual circumstances. The Greek peasants of Asia
Minor were Ottoman subjects, in nowise responsible for the acts of the
Hellenic government. Very few enlisted voluntarily in its armies and they
used every influence and subterfuge imaginable to avoid fighting. Had the
Greeks of Asia Minor been a stout warlike race and had they cooperated
strongly with the Greeks of the mainland they could have kept the Turks
at bay.
The object of Khemal, as we have seen, was one of simple extermination.
The reason alleged was one of those shrewd subterfuges used by the Turks
to fool Europeans. But not all the unfortunates carried away by the Turks
were Greek men. Many thousands of Christian women and girls still remain
in their hands to satisfy their lusts or to work as slaves. A report
submitted to the League of Nations gives the number as “upward of fifty
thousand,” but this seems a very conservative estimate. The United States
should sign no treaty with Turkey until these people are given up.
Mustapha Khemal made a stupendous blunder when he burned Smyrna and
maltreated its inhabitants. Had he used them kindly, irrespective of
religion, they would all have rallied loyally around him and he would
have shown himself a really great man. Moreover, such a move would have
been a splendid triumph for Mohammedanism.
CHAPTER XX
HISTORIC IMPORTANCE OF THE DESTRUCTION OF SMYRNA
The destruction of Smyrna by the Turks was an event of great significance
in Church history. At the time of the birth of the Prophet, about A. D.
570, Christianity had covered, in addition to the area known in general
to-day as “Europe,” the ancient province of Asia, extending as far east
as the Caspian Sea, a broad strip of Syria, and a wide belt of North
Africa clear across to the Atlantic Ocean.
In A. D. 30, according to Kurtz, historian of the Christian Church, there
were five hundred Christians in the world; they had increased to five
hundred thousand by A. D. 100, and they numbered thirty million in the
year 311.
Asia Minor and Africa are famous in the history of the Church as the
habitat of many of the most famous Christian fathers and martyrs, such
as Polycarp of Smyrna, Tertullian of Carthage, Clement of Alexandria,
Chrysostom of Antioch, Origen of Tyre, Cyprian of Carthage and a host of
others. Saint Paul was born in Tarsus of Cilicia.
In the eighth century, Timotheus sent a band of missionaries from
Mesopotamia to convert the Tartars, who went as far as the Caspian Sea,
and even penetrated into China, “planting and reviving in those parts a
knowledge of the gospel.” The Seven Churches of Revelation were in Asia
Minor, and the fact that Smyrna was the last of these, and kept her light
burning until 1922, emphasizes the significance, in Church history, of
her destruction by the Turks.
The object of the Emperor Constantine in founding his capital was to
build a distinctly Christian city that should be the metropolis of
Christendom. Its splendors, its refinement, its art and culture, its
wealth, its power, its fame as a center of learning and of piety are
unforgettable even to-day. In the presence of its gentlemen and great
dames, the knights and ladies of Western Europe were mere boors and
hoydens. Wrecked, plundered and mismanaged by the Latin knights, a
calamity from which it never recovered, there was enough of its culture
left, when the Turks finally laid hands on it, to scatter over Europe and
regenerate the West. The Renaissance, that wonderful awakening from the
darkness of the Middle Ages, was largely due to the learning brought into
Europe by the scholars of Constantinople, fleeing from the Turk. Those
scholars had kept the light of the old classic culture burning during
all the years of European darkness and ignorance.
If Constantinople could have been spared and Christianity saved in the
Near East, the results to civilization would have been incalculable.
What a glorious city a Greek Constantinople would be to-day, if it had
always stayed Greek, with its long traditions and its immense treasures
of ancient culture! Another and more beautiful Paris, bestriding the
Bosphorus, great in commerce, learning, science and all the graces and
influences of Christian civilization.
Thus says Sir Edwin Pears, in his well-known history:
“The New Rome of Constantine Augustus passed under the power of
a horde of Oriental adventurers, Turanians by original descent,
mongrels by polygamy. This was the greatest victory ever won
by Asia in her debate with Europe. For many decades thereafter
there seemed at least a possibility that the East might destroy
all the fruit of Marathon.”
Quoting again from the same author:
“Under the rule of its new masters Constantinople was destined
to become the most degraded capital in Europe, and became
incapable of contributing anything whatever of value to the
history of the human race. No art, no literature, no handicraft
even, nothing that the world would gladly keep, has come since
1453 from the Queen City. Its capture, so far as human eyes
can see, has been for the world a misfortune almost without
any compensatory advantage—poverty as the consequence of
misgovernment is the most conspicuous result of the conquest
affecting the subjects of the Empire. Lands were allowed to go
out of cultivation. Industries were lost. Mines were forgotten.
Trade and commerce almost ceased to exist. Population
decreased. The wealthiest state in Europe became the poorest;
the most civilized the most barbarous. The demoralization
of the conquered people and of their churches was not less
disastrous than the injury to their material interests. The
Christians lost heart. Their physical courage lessened.”
This description of the condition of Asia Minor as the result of the
capture of Constantinople continued down to the ultimate complete
destruction of the Christians by the Turks. Nothing changed in the nearly
five centuries that have passed. The Turk has not altered either in his
character or his methods. The scenes described by Pears as following the
taking of the Queen City, the massacres and violation of women, were
duplicated at Smyrna, with the added horror of the sufferings of the
Christians on the quay.
After Constantinople, Smyrna, “Ghiaour Smyrna,” became the last
stronghold of Christianity and Greek culture in the Near East. It had its
great and valuable libraries, its learned men, its famous schools. The
Greeks and Armenians could at any time have attained safety by abjuring
their faith. Yet, though there have been apostates, they have, in
general, kept the faith and have suffered.
The only civilization that has existed in Turkey since that black year,
1453, has been that supplied to it by the Christian remnant of the old
Byzantine Empire. For that reason the work of the American and other
missionaries took on a great importance. They went out originally to
Turkey to convert Moslems. They found that they could not do this, but
that their real mission was with the Christians, who were eager to be
uplifted and enlightened. The recent rapid development of the latter in
advanced agriculture, industries, commerce, education, was restoring
Christianity in the Orient and reknitting the wasted and torn fabric of
the old Byzantine Empire. To the great Christian Powers was given a tardy
and last opportunity of repairing the wrong that was done the world when
St. Sophia, the Temple of the Eternal Wisdom, fell into the hand of the
Turk.
CHAPTER XXI
NUMBER DONE TO DEATH
How many were massacred in Smyrna and its dependent towns and villages?
It is impossible to make any estimate at all accurate, but the efforts to
minimize the number must at first glance fail of credence.
Official statistics give the Armenian inhabitants of Smyrna as
twenty-five thousand and it is certain that the larger part of the men of
this community were killed, besides many women and girls, also numerous
Greeks. A despatch to the _London Daily Chronicle_ of September 18, 1922,
says: “The lowest estimate of lives lost given by the refugees places the
total at one hundred and twenty thousand.”
Reuter’s Agency, in a despatch of the same date, makes the following
statement: “From none of the accounts is it possible to give the exact
figures of the victims, but it is feared that in any case they will be
over one hundred thousand.”
Mr. Roy Treloar, newspaper correspondent, wired as follows:[9] “Nureddin
Pasha commenced a systematic hunting down of Armenians, who were
gathered in batches of one hundred, taken to the _Konak_ and murdered.”
The _London Times_ correspondent telegraphed: “The killing was carried
out systematically. Turkish regulars and irregulars are described as
rounding up likely wealthy people in the streets and, after stripping
them, killing them in batches. Many Christians who had taken refuge in
the churches were burned to death in the buildings which had been set on
fire.”
Mr. Otis Swift, correspondent of the _Chicago Tribune_, visited the Greek
islands on which refugees had been dumped by the rescue steamers and saw
many of the victims of the tragedy, whose stories and the nature of whose
wounds bore additional testimony to the ferocity of the Turks. Here is a
short quotation from Mr. Swift’s report:
“Hospitals of the Greek islands are crowded by people who had
been beaten and attacked by the Turks. In a hospital at Chios I
saw a child who still lived, although shot through the face by
a soldier who had killed its father and violated its mother. In
the same hospital there was a family of six orphan Armenians.
A four-year-old baby of this family had been beaten with rifle
butts because no money had been found sewn in its clothes.”
There is no doubt that many thousands of the defenseless inhabitants of
Smyrna and the surrounding country were done to death by Turks.
[Illustration: Smyrna at the Height of the Fire.]
To the number actually killed on the days of the massacre must be added
the deported Greeks who perished, the people who died in the flames or
were killed by falling walls, those who expired on the quay and those
who have since succumbed from want, injuries or grief. The extent of the
catastrophe can be realized from the magnitude of the relief work that
has been carried on ever since, and from the immense sums which have been
raised, principally in America, for the maintenance of the widows and
orphans.
The following statement is from Mr. Charles V. Vickery, Secretary of the
Near East Relief, 151 Fifth Avenue, New York:
“In regard to the amount of money which has been spent on
relief, I would say that so far as the Near East Relief is
concerned the total of money and supplies contributed by the
American people has amounted to approximately ninety-five
million dollars. So far as I know there are no available
statistics of the amounts spent by other countries. The largest
contributor has of course been Great Britain, but we do not
have any figures here in our office.
“In answer to your second inquiry as to how much is still
necessary, would say that it is extremely difficult to make an
answer that would be reliable as there are so many uncertain
factors in the problem, as you know only too well. So far as
the Near East Relief is concerned, our program should very
rapidly diminish after another year or two and the Executive
Committee has definitely adopted a resolution to the effect
that there shall be some sort of coordination or amalgamation
of Near East agencies at the end of five years or sooner if
practicable. This resolution was adopted approximately nine
months ago.
“Near East Relief will need around four million dollars a year
for the next two years if present indications are reliable.”
One of the most important reports connected with the fire is that of the
Reverend Charles Dobson, British chaplain of Smyrna, and a committee
of prominent Englishmen, all inhabitants of the district, including
the British chaplains of Bournabat and Boudja. This report throws the
responsibility of the fire upon the Turks, “whose fanatic elements, fed
by the license of three-days’ looting, fired the city in the hope of
driving out the non-Moslem and non-Jewish elements.” Such a report from
such a source, leaves no doubt as to the fact that Smyrna was burned by
Turks, although these gentlemen do not take into account the circumstance
that the town was in complete control of Khemalist troops at the time
and that regular soldiers of the Turkish army, in uniform, were seen by
abundant witnesses to set the fires. It is pertinent in this connection
in that it relates incidents of greater ferocity than I have yet given,
but which I refrain from quoting.[10]
CHAPTER XXII
EFFICIENCY OF OUR NAVY IN SAVING LIVES
The following radio messages were received by me on the evening of
September thirteenth, while at sea, en route to Athens, and after:
Litchfield 9-13-22.
_Simpson_
0113 fire has almost reached Consulate. Consulate has escaped
with practically all official matter of value. A large number
of other Americans have been taken on board and now being taken
on board but have no complete muster as yet. Entire population
on water front have placed many orphans and employees of
American benevolent associations on _Winona_ with request but
not order to evacuate them to Athens promising your assistance
in matter of their landing, 2220 Litchfield Capt.
* * * * *
_Simpson_ 9-14-22.
For Horton. _Winona_ leaving 4 P. M. to-day for Piræus with
three hundred and fifty refugees directed to report to you for
instructions about evacuation. Simpson awaits arrival _Winona_
due about 9 A. M. Friday signed Hepburn—1130 Capt. (file)
* * * * *
_Simpson_ rdo 9-15-22
0800
Direct for Horton. 0114 ref my 0114 dash 1136 _Winona_ will
have about 1000 refugees destroyer _Odsall_ left 7 A. M. for
Salonica with 600 all she could carry. Please announce and
assist evacuation if possible Hepburn 1900—
* * * * *
_Simpson_ rdo 9-15-22.
7 A. M. date
_S. S. Winona_ 848
Consul-General Horton, _U. S. S. Simpson_—_Winona_ arrives
11 A. M. to-day with refugees. Please arrange to expedite
debarkation. Short of provisions—Walter Master.
* * * * *
_Simpson_ rdo 9-15-22.
Time 0850
Litchfield 848
_Simpson_
1014 for Horton Am Consul September 14th, 5 P. M. Consulate
completely destroyed by fire last night. Code funds and
valuable documents saved. Three-fifths of city now burning
and no apparent possibility of stopping fire. Your personal
property including car lost Credit Lyonnais in midst of fire
zone and manager and staff gone. Signed, Barnes.
CHAPTER XXIII
RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
Concerning the manner in which the Turk has always profited from the
conflicting interests and jealousies of Christian powers, Lord Morley
made the following shrewd remark years ago:
“This peculiar strife between Ottoman and Christian gradually
became a struggle among the Christian Powers of Northern and
Western Europe to turn tormenting questions in the East to the
advantage of private ambitions of their own.”
This comment of the famous Englishman was voiced before the full dawn of
the Petroleum Age, and while as yet America’s chief interest in Turkey
was the protection of a few missionaries.
A brief review of the political situation which afforded the Turks
unbridled license to “raise the hand of violence,” is here necessary. It
will be evident that they have again profited by their well-known policy
of exploiting the dissensions and conflicting interest of Christian
powers. They have been as sensitive as a barometer to the least sign
of dissension among European governments or peoples, and have shown
extraordinary shrewdness in provoking or augmenting it.
The Turk was the ally of the Germans during the Great War, and perhaps
his most useful one. Practically all the gold disappeared from Turkey
and there is only one place to which it could have gone. The Turkish
Empire was ransacked for wheat and other food supplies. Long train-loads
of foodstuffs, marked “Berlin” were moved with great frequency toward
Constantinople from Smyrna and other distant points. He held the Straits
stoutly against the British and French, and one of his proudest and most
frequent boasts to-day is that he defeated them there. Germany, one of
the great civilized powers, was the ally of the Turks while they were
carrying on the extermination of the Armenians. After the defeat of
Germany, it was taken for granted that the bad days of the Christians of
the Ottoman Empire were over. Turkey was paralyzed.
Mustapha Khemal, who burned Smyrna and completed the destruction of
the Christians, is a creature of Europe. It can not be denied that the
original plan of the Allies included the partition of the Ottoman Empire
and that various projects were formed and promises made which could not
be realized on account of conflicting interests, and that the Turks were
aided by one or the other of the Powers either secretly or openly to
defeat the ambitions of rivals.
In the course of this sad history, Christians were armed against their
hereditary oppressors and then left to the vengeance of the latter. In
general, they were abandoned, as no Christian power desired to offend
the Turk, from whom great benefits were expected, to be in turn showered
on the subjects of the power that showed itself most Turkophile. The
United States did not abstain from this gruesome competition. In the
beginning, interest prompted the spread of what came to be a well-nigh
universal pro-Turk propaganda in Christian countries. When the fearful
death harvest of this sinister sowing began to be reaped, fear of popular
indignation and disapproval gave rise to a policy of suppression of the
truth and to anti-Christian propaganda.
During my days in Saloniki, 1910-14, both Italy and Austria were supposed
to be looking forward to an early occupation of that city and their
battle-ships made frequent visits there, vying with one another in the
lavishness of their hospitality to the inhabitants. The common subject of
conversation was, “Which will have Saloniki, Austria or Italy?”
CHAPTER XXIV
ITALY’S DESIGNS ON SMYRNA
Austria’s imperial designs were extinguished by the outcome of the Great
War. Italy’s, however, burned more brightly than ever. In an article in
_Foreign Affairs_ of June 15, 1923, Mr. Francesco Coppola says:
“Although Italy entered the war to combat the German attempt at
hegemony and to wrest her historic frontiers and the control
of the Adriatic from Austria, Italy’s traditional instinct
really aimed to secure the indispensable modicum of security
and freedom for expansion. It was for this reason that in the
fundamental pact of alliance—the Treaty of London of April,
1915—Baron Sonnino stipulated for Italian colonial compensation
in Africa in the event of a Franco-English partition of the
German colonies, and for a corresponding zone in Southern
Anatolia in the event of Allied acquisitions in the Levant.
It was also for this reason that, later on, when he got wind
of the complete plan of a tripartite division of the Ottoman
Empire, (disloyally concluded in 1916 between France, Russia,
and England without the knowledge of Italy, who had been
fighting for more than a year by their side), he forced the
Allies to reopen the question and to give an adequate share to
Italy. The new treaty was discussed in April, 1917, between
Sonnino, Ribot and Lloyd George at St. Jean de Maurienne—from
which it took its name—and was concluded and signed in London
in August of the same year. While leaving Constantinople and
the Caucasus, Armenia and part of the Anatolian coast of
the Black Sea to Russia, Syria and Cilicia to France, and
Mesopotamia and the protectorate over Arabia to England, this
treaty assigned to Italy Southwestern Anatolia, the whole
vilayet of Aidin with Smyrna, the whole vilayet of Konia with
Adalia and a small part of the vilayet of Adana. But this very
treaty contained the poison which was later to weaken it.
Even before the war was over, the Allies hastened to avail
themselves of the pretext of the absence of Russia’s signature
to denounce the Treaty of St. Jean de Maurienne. Thus it
came about that in the spring of 1919, Lloyd George, taking
advantage of the weakness and temporary absence of Orlando, and
violating the treaty of St. Jean de Maurienne and the armistice
of Mudros, was able to arrange that Smyrna and the surrounding
neighborhood be given to Greece. This was done with the full
consent of Wilson, who, absolutely ignorant of European and
Mediterranean affairs, blindly allowed himself to be governed
by idealistic impulses and natural prejudices and with the
approbation of Clemenceau, who was only too delighted to be
able to ‘_jouer un mauvais tour a l’Italie_.’”
Some of the Italian publicist’s conclusions are open to discussion but
his article sets forth the Italian frame of mind. There was much talk at
Smyrna during the time of the Greek occupation in military circles and
among the Levantines about Italian efforts to build a port farther to the
south, in the vicinity of ancient Ephesus, that would become the chief
harbor of Asia Minor and leave Smyrna to sink into insignificance. Many
stories were told also of Italian efforts to win the affections of the
Turk. In any case, it is certain that bands of Turkish marauders were in
the habit of crossing the line from the Italian zone and of attacking and
killing Greeks, after which they would take refuge with the Italians,
where they could not be pursued.
The statement that the Turks received munitions and many arms from
Italian shippers was persistently repeated, and has never been
successfully refuted. The Italian view-point has already been explained.
They considered that Smyrna had been promised them and that the Hellenic
forces had been hurried there by their unfaithful allies to forestall
their own landing. Italy can consider herself very fortunate that she
did not beat the Greeks to Smyrna, for even with her own resources, so
superior to those of King Constantine, she would have had her hands full.
But, the point is, her attitude contributed to the Greek defeat, the
burning of Smyrna and the final destruction of the Christians of Asia
Minor. Much valuable Italian property was destroyed as well as that of
others. An aftermath of Italian antipathy to Greece may be seen in the
bombardment of Corfu and the seizure of the island by the Italian fleet
on August 31, 1923.
On the twenty-seventh of the same month, five Italian members of the
commission for the delimitation of the frontier between Albania and
Greece were waylaid on a lonely road in Albania and foully murdered
by unknown persons. The demands of the Italian Government, including
a payment of fifty million liras, were refused by the Greeks, on the
ground that culpability had not been established. A request by Greece
that the affair be referred to the League of Nations was refused and the
island bombarded, with the result that sixty-five civilians, largely
refugees, were killed or wounded. The indignation of the Italians is
easily understandable, but a knowledge of preceding events is necessary
to explain the wholly unnecessary bombardment of a Greek island on
insufficient data and the killing or the wounding of sixty-five entirely
innocent persons. As these latter were killed by cannon, they were not,
of course, murdered.
CHAPTER XXV
FRANCE AND THE KHEMALISTS
France’s participation in the Near Eastern tragedy is well known. Her
motives are not far to seek: A frank, bitter and undiluted hatred of King
Constantine and everything connected with him, and suspicion of England’s
expansion in a region to which France herself has been devoting great
attention for many years. French capitalists and the French Government
have been investing heavily in Turkey and Gallic propaganda has been
pushed by a vast network of Catholic schools officially supported, whose
object, in so far as the government’s interest is concerned, has been
to catch the natives young and make Frenchmen of them. British or other
expansion and predominating influence in Turkey has meant the imperiling
of the great sums invested and the annulment of years of patient labor.
This invasion of the Ottoman Empire is admirably set forth in a lecture
delivered in 1922 by Monsieur Passereau, Director of the French
Commercial Bureau of Constantinople, and published _in extenso_ in the
_Echo de France_ of Smyrna. Extracts are herewith given:
“To-day one unconsciously associates such places as
Constantinople, Jerusalem, Beirut, Syria and the Lebanon
with French influence, and here are in fact presented almost
innumerable proofs of the many ways in which the French now
exert and have for a long time exercised a vast and beneficial
influence from one end of the Orient to the other.
“Our schools, our welfare institutions, hospitals, asylums
for the aged, homes for the foundlings and orphanages are
established in every port in the Levant. In every city of the
interior, in all of the important villages, along the entire
length of the railways completed or under construction, there
are French instructors, people who teach the children our name,
our language and our history.
“Let us now make a survey of French financial interests in the
Ottoman Empire and see to what extent French influence has made
itself felt in this connection. Some of these interests are
herewith listed and enlarged upon:
“_Ottoman Public Debt_: France’s share of the Public Debt,
external and internal, is 250,000,000,000 francs, or 60.31% of
the capital of the entire debt. The remainder of the debt is
principally divided between England and Germany, the former
holding 14.19% and the latter 21.31%;
“_Turkish Loans_: The history of governmental loans in Turkey
dates back to the Crimean War. Since that time, France has
without cessation, upon every occasion where the public debt
was threatened by internal difficulty, intervened either in the
form of assistance in reorganization or financial subscription.
“_French Private Enterprises in Turkey_: France has
approximately 1,100,000,000 francs invested in private concerns
in the Ottoman Empire. Her participation in the industrial
activities of the Empire aggregates 53.5% of the total, as
opposed to 13.68% enjoyed by Great Britain and 32.77% by
Germany. These organizations embracing activities in the form
of banks, railways, ports, electric power plants, telephones,
tramways, etc., extend over the entire domain of Turkey and
surround the economic life of the Orient with a network of
French interests. (Among interests of this sort mentioned by
the lecturer are the Imperial Ottoman and other banks, the
tobacco monopoly, etc.)
“_Railways_: France has under construction and exploitation
2,077 kilometres, with an invested capital of 550,238,000
francs, as opposed to Germany’s 2,565 kilometres and England’s
610. France has 42,210,000 francs invested in mines in Turkey,
besides about 80,000,000 in quays and ports.”
In addition, the lecturer gives a list of thirty-nine important
miscellaneous enterprises, including industrial, commercial, insurance,
shipping and other corporations. It should be remembered that the
investments listed above were made in gold.
French sentiments, especially as regards England, are revealed in a work
by the French writer, Michel Paillares, entitled _Le Khemalism devant Les
Allies_, published in 1922. Monsieur Paillares is one of the editors of
the journal _L’Eclaire_ of Paris.
The following quotation is from one of the conversations held by
Paillares with French officers at Constantinople, showing their strong
pro-Turk, anti-Christian and anti-English feelings:
“I am introduced to an officer in command. He is a man all
of one piece. He does not mince his words. He is like a man
carved out of rock, for he is unmovable in his sympathies and
his antipathies. Like the lieutenant of the Navy whom we have
already heard, but more furiously still, he is the enemy of the
Armenians, the Greeks, the Jews and—the English.
“‘As for me,’ he snaps, ‘there is not even room for discussion!
We ought to be completely, absolutely Turkophiles—I will say
more, Turko-enthusiasts. (Turcomanes.) I love the Mussulmans
and I hate their non-Mussulman subjects, who are rubbish.
Assure these brave men their independence and their territorial
integrity and we shall have in them the most faithful and
the most loyal of allies. What do we seek here? A rampart
against Russia and British imperialism? The maintenance of our
prestige? The free development of our commerce, the expansion
of our language? The respect of our schools and colleges? The
safeguarding of our financial interests? We shall have all
that by means of a French-Turkish collaboration. We ought no
longer to hear the Jeremiads of the Armenians and the Greeks
and the Jews. We must no longer play the game, neither of
England nor of Russia. Russia, although split up by Bolshevism,
must always be watched. She has intentions with regard to this
country which we must not encourage. But I do not think that
she is an immediate danger. It is Great Britain which, above
all, is becoming troublesome. We are, nearly all of us (French
officers) for the Khemalists and against the British and the
Greeks.”
Though this is the opinion of a single individual, it expresses pretty
clearly the general French attitude of mind as shown by French policy
since the Armistice. It is evident that the sentiments of this French
officer and of his colleagues, for whom he speaks, display a keen note of
discord among the Allies, helpful to the Turk even in his gruesome work
of massacring Christians.
Professor Davis says in _A Short History of the Near East_:[11]
“In August, 1922, apparently with French munitions and French
counsellors, the Khemalists suddenly attacked the Greek
positions in Bithynia. The Greeks were in poor morale, worn
out by long campaigning and miserably led. Their army was
utterly routed and evacuated Anatolia with almost incredible
speed. The Turks drove straight onward to Smyrna which they
took (September 9, 1922) and then burned. The world was again
horrified by one of the now standardized Ottoman massacres of
conquered populations.”
It is to be noted that neither the French nor the Italians permitted
the Greek navy to search the ships of their nationals proceeding to
Turkish ports, which is in itself a breach of neutrality and can have
but one interpretation—that they were carrying arms and supplies to the
Khemalists, with the consent and protection of their governments.
For these reasons the battle-ships of the brave and chivalric French,
“Protectors of the Christians in the Orient,” were obliged to sit quietly
among the dead bodies floating in the Bay of Smyrna and watch the
massacre going on.
The following typical incident illustrates the perfect harmony prevailing
in naval circles in the Harbor of Smyrna resulting from international
discords and how punctiliously the amenities were observed: Am admiral
of a battle-ship had been invited to dine with one of his colleagues. He
arrived some minutes late and apologized for the delay, which had been
caused by the dead body of a woman getting tangled up in the propellor of
his launch.
That lucid and well-informed writer, Doctor Herbert Adams Gibbons, in
an article in the _Century Magazine_ for October, 1921, gives the best
analysis of the French and Italian attitude with regard to the Turks that
I have seen anywhere. It can not, of course, be reproduced _in extenso_
here, but a few quotations will be sufficient to show that French support
of the Turks was due to fear and jealousy of the British. Says Doctor
Gibbons:
“The British regarded Greece as a sort of protectorate,
financially and militarily under the control of Great Britain.
The scheme was spoiled by the fall of Venizelos and the
subsequent defeat of the Greek armies in Asia Minor.
“The Near East had been culturally French since the Crusades.
From Saloniki to Beirut, France was determined to reign
supreme. Palestine represented the very last concession that
it was possible for the French to make. Of course the French
did not hope to possess Constantinople, but they were not going
to let the British settle themselves on the Bosphorus, as they
had done at Gibraltar and Port Said, in Malta and Cyprus. For
this would mean British domination of the Mediterranean and
the Black Seas, and for British capital and British goods the
priority in markets which had been traditionally French.
“I am not conjecturing. The trend of the French press, inspired
by the government, leaves no room for doubt as to what is
prompting France to send arms and money to Khemal Pasha.
“During the war one of the telling indictments against Germany
was her friendship for and alliance with Turkey when the
Armenians were being massacred. Germany was held responsible
for the massacres on the ground that she could have stopped
them had she used her influence with her ally. This was
true; but is it not equally true now that France must bear
the opprobrium and in a measure the responsibility, of the
Armenian and Greek massacres of 1920 and 1921? A French
general negotiated with the Nationalists in Cilicia without
stipulating that the massacres should cease. French diplomats
have negotiated with the Angora Government of Khemal Pasha,
conniving at the massacres of Armenians and Greeks. The sole
thought of the Germans during the war was to use the Turks and
not run any risk of offending them by protesting against the
massacres. This is exactly what the French are doing now.”
This is plain talk and—horrible. The question that naturally arises in
the mind of any decent American is, what, if anything, was the United
States, the great Christian country, the hope of the world and fountain
of missionary activities, doing while all this was going on? What
influence was she using, what resounding note of protest and horror was
she giving utterance to?
Various historical events connected with the French pro-Turk, but really
anti-English activities, are interesting to the student of diplomatic
psychology, and the ease with which peoples can be influenced in their
predilections and hatreds by those governing them.
At a critical period of the War, on the Balkan front, the Allies demanded
the demobilization of the Greek army, the surrender of half of the Greek
fleet and a great part of the Greek artillery. King Constantine, after
his successful campaigns in the Balkans, had become an object of almost
divine worship to the Greeks, and the Allies were afraid of him. On
December 2, 1916, a party of French Marines marched into Athens to take
possession of the Greek material demanded. They were fired on by Greek
soldiers and a number of French Marines were killed.
This was a most regrettable act on the part of the Greeks, and foolish.
It was more foolish to send a few foreign Marines into a capital city
to drag off its artillery and expect them to be received with open arms.
This unfortunate event is the basis to-day of deep-seated hatred of
French against Greek. G. F. Abbott, in his work, _Greece and the Allies_,
gives the results of the so-called “Battle of Athens,” as follows:
“And so the ‘pacific demonstration’ was over, having cost
the Greeks four officers and twenty-six men killed and four
officers and fifty-one men wounded. The Allied casualties were
sixty killed, including six officers, and one hundred and
seventy-six wounded.”
On April 10, 1920, the Khemalists treacherously massacred the French
garrison at Urfa, killing one hundred and ninety men and wounding about
one hundred more, and on October 20, 1921, Franklin Bouillon, in the
name of the French Republic signed a separate treaty with the Turks.
Immediately after the burning of Smyrna he rushed to the still-smoking
city and, seizing Mustapha Khemal in his arms, kissed him.
This kiss of Franklin Bouillon has become historic, and while bearing no
resemblance to a certain other famous and sinister caress, deserves to
rank with it as one of the two most famous kisses in sacred and profane
history.
CHAPTER XXVI
MASSACRE OF THE FRENCH GARRISON AT URFA
The facts of the massacre of the French garrison at Urfa, obtained from
original sources, took place under the following conditions:
The Nationalists had been besieging the small French force in Urfa
during the early days of April, 1920, and at length Commander Hauger was
compelled to capitulate. On the eighth of April he decided to evacuate
the city and did so under the following terms: That all Christians should
have ample protection; that the houses occupied by the garrison should
not be reoccupied by the Turks until the garrison had left the city; that
the graves of the fallen should be respected; that sufficient transport
should be supplied to convey their arms, ammunition, etc.[12] One officer
of the gendarmerie and ten men would accompany them for safe convoy.
These were agreed to by the Mutessarif of Urfa and the commander of the
Turkish Nationalist forces, but, notwithstanding this arrangement the
French were attacked shortly after they had left the town and nearly
annihilated.
[Illustration: Portion of the three hundred thousand persons who fled to
the water-front in the destruction of Smyrna. They were a human wall two
miles long, the blazing city behind and the Ægean Sea before them.]
A native-born American who chanced to be in Urfa on relief work and
who desired to proceed to Aleppo decided to accompany the ill-fated
expedition and was an eye-witness of what happened. The following account
may be interesting as a chapter of authentic history, never before
published:
“We left Urfa at one-thirty A. M. on Sunday the eleventh of
April, 1920, Captain Perraut being with the advance guard, four
gendarmes leading the way, in center of column the officer
of gendarmerie, Emir Effendi, who was to accompany us to our
destination.
“On passing the crest of the hill we observed several gendarmes
and we were informed that this was their post. The ascent was
very difficult as the horses were in bad condition owing to
lack of food and exercise. The camels delayed us as they were
well-laden and climbed very slowly. We halted as usual ten
minutes to the hour, the rear guard consisting of one hundred
and fifty to one hundred and sixty men, being two kilometers in
the rear.
“At six A. M., passing through a ravine on to a straight
stretch of road, we were suddenly attacked from the rear and
both flanks, the enemy having machine guns among them. The
firing commenced before the camels had passed out of the
ravine. They were in the bend and halted. Previous to the
attack, I had been marching with Commander Hauger and five
minutes before the firing commenced was riding on a Red Cross
wagon containing two wounded. When the firing commenced, two
wagons which preceded the others, having their horses and
mules wounded or killed, were forced to halt. I jumped down,
taking cover in a hollow at the roadside, and finding that I
was exposed to fire from the hilltops, decided to make my way
forward trusting to find the Commander who I knew was only two
yards in advance.
“By this time the attack had taken a formidable form. The
ground here formed a basin surrounded by hills and bare of any
cover so that the column was forced to go forward to find a
position of defence, which they did five hundred yards ahead.
The transport with the above exception, was thus cut off,
most of the horses by that time being killed. Firing by this
time had become extremely heavy, and going forward I joined
Commander Hauger and two other officers in a hole in the
hillside which had been left by some stone cutters and from
where he directed operations. We were afterward joined by two
other officers and the Turkish officer of gendarmerie, who was
then disarmed, and two interpreters.
“About nine A. M., the rear guard were heard and the firing
became very heavy. We were shortly joined by the officer who
had been in charge of them, who gave us a thrilling account of
what had happened; they had been ambushed in a gulley, very few
escaping.
“From a hill to the north, we observed the Turkish Nationalist
flag. Shortly after this several Kurds were seen coming over
the hills, apparently a tribe. At ten o’clock or thereabouts,
Commander Hauger held a conference and decided to surrender.
“At this time the line was broken to the east, the transport
was lost and the rear guard cut up and many wounded were coming
in. He then told the officer of the gendarmerie to go out with
a flag of truce.
“As we had several Armenians with us who needed protection,
I suggested that I might accompany him. To this he agreed,
and taking my interpreter carrying the American flag, myself
carrying the white flag with the gendarme in the center,
we proceeded toward the enemy’s position. We were fired on
continually. On reaching the destroyed transport column, we
came upon a large body of troops and asked for their commander.
We were informed that they were without one, being irregular
troops, ‘Chetas, etc.’
“I then instructed the officer of the gendarmerie to send off
messengers to stop the fire and this was accomplished about
ten twenty A. M. A few minutes afterward a mob of Kurds rushed
from the hills toward the French positions, and the battle
recommenced. Seeing that it was impossible to do anything _as
they refused the truce_, I told the officer of gendarmerie to
ride to Urfa, a distance of about nine miles, to inform the
Mustessarif of what had happened and to bring carriages for the
wounded and this he did.
“Here I witnessed the killing of wounded and the killing of
men, _who were surrendering their arms_. To this, there are
many witnesses, including Lieutenant Deloir, who at present is
a prisoner in Urfa. I demanded a guard of gendarmes who had
by this time arrived to accompany me to Urfa. We proceeded,
encircling a hill and striking the road at a natural cistern
where we were able to get water. The officer commanding the
gendarmes of Urfa arrived and gave me a further guard of six
men, instructing them to get to the city as soon as possible,
the tribesmen showing great hostility. We proceeded by a
circuitous route through a ravine, arriving in Urfa about two
thirty P. M., having walked for twelve hours, and bringing with
me a Syrian, Jacob, who had been working at the Swiss mission
at Urfa.
“I was unable to save any Armenians as they were not to be seen.
“Note: the prisoners, some fifty, are in hospital and perhaps
another fifty are in prison. There may be more, but at present
it is impossible to say as there is a possible chance that
some may still be with the Kurds. The official report of the
Mutessarif says that they buried one hundred and ninety, and
one hundred in hospital and prison brings the number to roughly
three hundred, whereas the garrison when en route numbered more
than four hundred.
“Sundry notes: Lieutenant Deloir, before mentioned, was
stripped by Turkish regular cavalry and rescued in a nude
condition by Kurds who found him some time afterward and who
fed him and brought him to Urfa.
“The Syrian Yakub, whom I brought back with me and who was
trying to escape to Aleppo is now in Urfa. The Armenians have
not been heard of.
“When crossing the battle-field, I observed a company of
Turkish infantry regulars and the machine section with mule
transport proceeding toward the French positions. They were,
perhaps, a little late unless there had been action in the
hilltops and were going forward to continue to fight.
“The attack took place in the hills west of Urfa about nine
miles from town and two miles from junction of Arab Punar, and
Seroudj roads.”
The above story is given precisely as received by me, without alteration,
even of punctuation. The characteristic features of this incident are:
The breaking of the agreement; the use of so-called “irregulars” by the
Turkish authorities to escape responsibility and the presence of regulars
in case of need; the killing of the wounded and of those giving up their
arms.
There were present in Urfa during the siege Mrs. Richard Mansfield, widow
of the famous actor; Mr. G. Woodward, accountant of the Near East Relief;
and Mary Caroline Holmes, a heroic American lady who wrote a book on her
experiences, entitled _Between the Lines in Asia Minor_, published by the
Fleming H. Revell Company.
The part played by Italy and France which so greatly contributed to the
extermination of the Christian population of Turkey, and the fearful
events at Smyrna, are well summed up by George Abbott in the work above
referred to, in the following words:
“France, who since the Armistice had displayed a keen jealousy
of England’s place in a part of the world in which she claims
special rights, presently concluded a separate agreement with
Turkey—an example in which she was followed by Italy—and gave
the Turks her moral and material support against the Greeks;
while England, while refusing to reverse her policy in favor of
their enemies, contented herself with giving the Greeks only a
Platonic encouragement, which they were unwise enough to take
for more than it was worth.”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE BRITISH CONTRIBUTION
Unfortunately, I am restrained from writing many interesting facts
connected with a history of this kind; some of the things that came to
my knowledge in my official capacity. To the honor of Great Britain,
however, I believe that there were moments when she came within a hair’s
breadth of living up to her best traditions. What prevented her at the
critical moment, I have never learned.
At any rate, the British contribution to the Smyrna horror did not
consist in active aid of the Turks, neither did she furnish them with
arms or munitions. But, though she was largely responsible for the
landing of the Greeks in Asia Minor, and the latter were defending
her interests, she afforded them no aid, but gave them fallacious
encouragement which led them to their doom. As far as England was
concerned, Greece was the victim of British internal politics which
seized upon the government’s policy in the Near East as an object
for attack. If Lloyd George was pro-Greek, his political opponents
became—_ipso facto_—rabid pro-Turk. If the Hellenic soldiers were mere
tools of the British, as both the Italians and French believed, then it
certainly was not “playing the game” to desert them in their extremity;
and this desertion carries a graver responsibility with it, inasmuch as
it made possible the fearful catastrophe of Smyrna and its hinterland.
CHAPTER XXVIII
TURKISH INTERPRETATION OF AMERICA’S ATTITUDE
Of our American responsibility for the destruction of the Christians of
the Near East, I write with great hesitation and sorrow and must confine
myself to the statement of certain universally known facts.
The days and months leading up to the fearful events at Smyrna were noisy
with the Chester concession and pro-Turk propaganda. The enthusiastic
pro-Turk articles in the press of the two Chesters—father and son—are
still fresh in the public memory. Other pro-Turk and anti-Christian
writers were busy, some among them doubtless earning their daily bread.
The Turks were in funds. They had been busy picking the bones of the
Christians and had laid their hands on great sums.
The shrewd Europeanized group of Turks who inhabit Constantinople overdid
themselves in the courtesies and hospitality which they lavished on
foreign diplomats. This sort of Oriental is the most plausible and
fascinating man in the world. The educated hanum, also, is extremely
charming, and has a seductive grace that is hardly granted to her alien
sisters. If a few of them take off their veils and show their lovely
faces in Constantinople, they have little difficulty in persuading
diplomats that they are emancipated and that polygamy is a thing of the
past among Mohammedans; that the Greeks burned Smyrna, that a million and
a half Christians practically committed suicide and were not actually
massacred, or anything else they wish.
What can one do but believe when he is taken back to the days of
Haroun-al-Raschid, and floats off to a palace perfumed with roses of
Cashmere on an enchanted carpet?
Our representative at Constantinople, Admiral Mark L. Bristol, is an
extremely attractive personality: honest, brave, generous, with frank
and winning manners. By the sheer magnetism of his genial and engaging
character he gathers about himself, wherever he is, a school of admirers
and disciples who ardently defend the admiral and everything that he
thinks and does.
The naval officers who came to Smyrna at the Consulate’s request were
typical of the American naval officer in general, high-type intelligent
gentlemen, of an efficiency that may be described as well-nigh perfect.
They were under certain orders at Smyrna which it was incumbent upon
them to carry out. They accomplished all their duties there thoroughly
and correctly and performed prodigies after the fire in saving refugees.
I was somewhat puzzled, however, when an American lady at Smyrna informed
me that one of the officers had told her that he was “pro-Turk.” Another,
a commander, made the same remark at Athens, at luncheon, during one of
the trips which the destroyers were making back and forth between that
city and Smyrna.
While stopping at the Army and Navy Club in Washington in 1922, I asked
a naval officer of high rank if it was true that he was pro-Turk, and he
replied:
“Yes, I am, because I was brought up as a boy to the belief
that the Turks were always chasing Greeks and Armenians around
with a knife. Well, I have been over there to Constantinople
several times and I have never seen anything of the kind, so I
have come to the conclusion that it is all buncombe.”
This is all right. Every man is entitled to his opinions, no matter on
what evidence or process of reasoning founded. My surprise was due to the
fact that I had thought that the officers who came to Smyrna were under
orders to be neutral.
I was sitting in the ward room of one of our destroyers moored in the
harbor of Smyrna. At a moment when the massacre had begun to assume
alarming proportions, a newspaper correspondent, a passenger on the same
naval unit, entered the room, opened his typewriter and began to write.
When he had finished about half a page, he read it carefully, took it
out of the machine, and said: “I can’t send this stuff. It’ll queer me
at Constantinople. I must get busy on Greek atrocities.” I have often
wondered what he meant. I was sitting quite close to him and heard him
very distinctly.
Let us briefly review the situation which enabled the Turks in the year
of our Lord, 1922, to complete the extinction of Christianity in the
Near East: The Germans were, as long as they lasted, the active allies
of the Turks, and during this period nearly a million Armenians and many
thousands of Greeks perished; after the Armistice and during the period
which led up to the destruction of Smyrna and the accompanying massacre,
the French and Italians were allies of the Turk, and furnished him
moral and material support; the British gave no aid to the Greeks, but
contented themselves with publishing an account of the dreadful events
that had been taking place in the Ottoman Empire; the Americans gained
the reputation of being pro-Turk, true friends, who would ultimately, on
account of this friendship, be given the permission to put through great
schemes which would result in the development of the Ottoman Empire and,
incidentally, fill certain American pocketbooks. The Turks confidently
believed that commercial avarice would prevent us from interfering with
their savagery, or even strongly condemning it.
Never in the world had the Turk so good an opportunity to glut his lust
for Christian blood without fear of interference or criticism.
The first Lausanne Conference closed, after reaching no agreement, on
February 7, 1923, and the second opened on April twenty-third of the same
year. On April tenth, still of the same year, the National Assembly at
Angora ratified the Chester Concession. As the terms of this concession
conflicted sharply with British and French interests, the date of its
ratification is highly suggestive.
This concession is dead now, and there was never enough in it to cause a
serious row between the United States and any European power. The State
Department has denied the official support of this scheme and must be
believed. This, however, has not prevented a general conviction in Turkey
that it was a project under the especial protection of the American
Government. Such a belief is very easy to create in Turkey, where even
the Mission Schools are popularly supposed to be government institutions.
At any rate, it is not probable that great sums of American capital will
flow into Turkey under present conditions. Whatever public sentiment
may be, or whatever apathy may exist as to the fate of some millions of
our fellow creatures, who howl annoyingly when they are massacred or if
their families are torn apart, or if they are robbed of homes, capital is
cautious; it does not believe in railroads built in a country of ruined
cities, nor does it connect massacre with prosperity and progress.
And in all this tangle of conflicting interests, during which the
Turk continued massacring, the thoughtful observer is impressed with
one thing—the clearness of John Bull’s vision and the directness and
tenacity of his purpose; he knew what he wanted and he took it. There are
copious oil wells at Maidan i Naftun, from which the oil is piped down
to Mukamra, not far from Basra, on the Persian Gulf, where the British
landed early in the war. There are rich oil fields at Mousul. General
Townsend was on his way there when the Turks stopped him at Kut el Mara,
but that did not stop Cousin John. He is at Mousul now and the Turks
would have liked to give Mousul to Admiral Chester and the others. No
wonder the State Department says that it kept out of that.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE MAKING OF MUSTAPHA KHEMAL
The building up of Mustapha Khemal by certain Christian countries was one
of the unwisest, most pernicious and most dangerous deeds that Occidental
diplomacy, intrigue and jealousy has ever perpetrated. It is a legend
among Mohammedan peoples that the Turk is the “Sword of Allah,” “the
Defender of Islam,” and “the Scourge of the Unbeliever.” As he is the
lowest of Mohammedans intellectually, with none, or at best few, of the
graces and accomplishments of civilization, with no cultural history, the
other disciples of the Prophet do not consider him as their intellectual
or moral equal.
In only one particular has he always kept abreast of the age, and that
is in the art of war. He is perhaps the only example of a great and
scientifically warlike nation that is great in nothing else. He destroys
but can not construct. Even the other Mohammedans who have been subjected
to his rude and blighting sway, have continually fought to be freed from
it, and have only joined him in common cause against the Christians.
Of him, the historian Butler says:
“The Goth might ravage Italy, but the Goth came forth
purified from the flame which he himself had kindled. The
Saxon swept Britain, but the music of his Celtic heart
softened his rough nature. Visigoth and Frank, Heruli and
Vandal, blotted out their ferocity in the very light of the
civilization they had striven to extinguish. Even the wildest
Tartar from the Scythian waste was touched and softened in
his wicker encampments, but the Turk, wherever his scimitar
reached—degraded, defiled and defamed, blasting with eternal
decay Roman, Latin civilization, until when all had gone he sat
down satisfied with savagery to doze into hopeless decrepitude.”
But Mohammedans do not forget that it was the Turk who took the great and
splendid city of Constantinople, the last bulwark of Europe against the
devastating and enslaving hordes of Asia; that it was the Turk who firmly
established himself in Europe on the field of Cossova; that it was the
Turk who destroyed the flower of the Hungarian chivalry—twenty thousand
together with their king—on the stricken field of Mohacz in 1526, and
three years later arrived at the gates of Vienna, which he besieged; that
a little over a hundred years later a Turkish horde again stormed the
Austrian capital, which only the timely arrival of a Polish army saved.
At the close of the Great War the Turk was beaten to his feet and his
prestige ruined. “The Sword of Islam” had been broken. The victory over
the Greeks, though with the aid of European officers and material,
and the spectacular destruction of Smyrna with the massacre of its
inhabitants, revived the legend of the conquering and avenging Turk. “The
Sword of Islam” had been welded again, to conquer and destroy. The noise
of that event resounded and is still echoing throughout the Moslem World,
in Egypt, in India, in Northern Africa and in Syria.
And more than that, the rise of Mustapha Khemal, creature of divided
Christendom, of the mutually jealous and internecine Occident, has given
new courage to all the yellow and black and brown peoples whom Kipling
describes as “the White Man’s Burden,” who while they may cut one
another’s throats over the question of Mohammed or Confucius or Buddha,
are united in their hatred of the white man.
The ferment in the East is the bubbling up of a deeper feeling than
the careless or unobservant thinker wots of: It is the revelation of a
profound and fundamental antipathy. The East is tired of being civilized
by superior peoples; of being educated and converted; of being shoved off
the sidewalks; of being called “Eurasians” and having their daughters
ostracized if they marry whites; of having their children excluded from
white schools; of being discriminated against in immigration laws.
One can not say that the West is entirely wrong in attempting to maintain
its prestige and its Occidental civilization, but he can safely affirm
that the hatred that has been steadily growing in the Orient is deep and
implacable, and that the result will be murders, uprisings, little wars,
big wars. The maker of this statement may be set down as an alarmist.
So is the man who sticks up the sign at the railway crossing, “Stop!
Look! Listen!” The dissension in the Western World that made it possible
for the Turks to make a clean sweep of Christian civilization in the
Ottoman Empire, to burn Smyrna and massacre its inhabitants in sight of
a powerful fleet of European and American war vessels, has added unknown
weight to the “White Man’s Burden.”
That a mutual hatred of the West is bringing together peoples hitherto
antagonistic and of different creeds is confirmed by Lothrop Stoddard in
his book, _The New World of Islam_, quoting the writer, R. Vambery, the
authority on Moslem affairs:
“The change in Moslem sentiment can be guaged by the numerous
appeals made by the Indian Mohammedans at this time to
Hindus, as may be seen from the following sample, entitled
significantly, ‘The Message of the East’:
“‘Spirit of the East,’ reads this noteworthy document, ‘arise
and repel the swelling flood of Western aggression! Children of
Hindustan, aid us with your wisdom, culture and wealth; lend
us your power, the birthright and heritage of the Hindu! Let
the Spirit Powers hidden in the Himalayan mountain peaks arise!
Let prayers to the God of Battles float upward; prayers that
right may triumph over might; and call to your myriad gods to
annihilate the armies of the foe!’”
Let the reader compare this appeal of Mohammedan to Hindu with the
spirit of the article from the _Progres de Salonique_ of July 22, 1910,
quoted in an early chapter of this book, in which Turkish Mohammedans
and Japanese Buddhists, etc., are conceived as having common cause
against Western civilization. That Oriental peoples believe that their
opportunity will come from the dissensions and wars of Western nations,
which they are watching with much interest and satisfaction, was
expressed as early as 1907 by Yahya Siddyk, an Egyptian judge and writer
of Mohammedan faith, who seems to have foreseen the Great War:
“Behold these Powers ruining themselves in terrifying
armaments; measuring each other’s strength with defiant
glances; menacing each other; contracting alliances which
continually break and presage those terrible shocks which
overturn the world and cover it with ruins, fire and blood!”
CHAPTER XXX
OUR MISSIONARY INSTITUTIONS IN TURKEY
Some of our missionary schools and colleges in the Ottoman Empire are
open for business, and reports of the Mission Board describe them as
flourishing. They are either continuing or resuming operations after
having suffered their share of pillage and massacre. The Board of
Missions is making an earnest and vigorous campaign for raising more
American money to be sent into Turkey for their upkeep.
As a church member, as an ex-official who has been of service to those
institutions on many occasions, I am obliged to state that I have serious
doubts as to the wisdom of contributing further money to our religious
establishments in the Ottoman Empire under present conditions. Before
doing so the fact should be widely advertised in Turkey that their real
object and that of the men and women working in them, is, by hook or
crook, to convert the Turks to Christianity, which is considered to be
a religion superior to Mohammedanism. American church people should be
informed frankly that the prohibition of the teaching of Christianity
or the holding of Christian religious exercises has been accepted by the
Mission Board; and that no effort to convert Turks is countenanced by
the Ottoman Government. But this is really no new thing, as Christian
proselytizing in Turkey has never been possible; the understanding that
religious teaching is to be confined by the missionaries to the members
of their own families and to teachers already of the Christian faith, is
recent.
Soon after the entrance of the Khemalists into Smyrna a committee of
Moslems visited one of our schools and expressed the most friendly
sentiments to the teachers:
“We hope you will keep right on with your good work and we
promise you every support, only you understand that there is to
be no more religious teaching.”
When I mentioned this to Mr. Jacobs, of the Y. M. C. A., he replied:
“Where L—— is and C——” mentioning two missionaries, “Christ will be
taught somehow.” But, if that is so, the Turks ought to know it. Any
other course is not quite honest nor up to the standard of the old
time Christians who testified in heathen lands and suffered martyrdom.
Moreover, the Mohammedan’s contempt of the Christians is very easy to
arouse and it would be a sad thing should it enter the mind of the Turks
that some of the missionaries were willing to forego the teaching of
their faith to save their buildings and their jobs. Even though this is
not true, it would not be difficult to create this impression.
It seems hardly probable that the Mission Board would come out and
officially inform the contributing church members of the United States:
“We have no intention or desire, either immediate or ultimate,
of converting Mussulmans in Turkey. We are running secular
schools there with the hope of raising their general moral
standing and making Mohammedans of them.”
If the board can raise money for such a purpose, that would be a frank
honest proposition for both Turk and Christian.
It is logical for the devout Christian to give money for the conversion
of the Moslem. The faith of the Nazarene is one of the proselytizing
religions, as Professor Max Muller said in his famous lecture in
Westminster Abbey in 1873. It can not be possible, however, that there
is any mental impulse in this country which would lead Americans to
contribute large sums for the support of purely secular schools in
foreign countries. Even from a humanitarian standpoint, there are more
crying needs for their charity.
[Illustration: MISS MINNIE MILLS
Teacher in American Girls’ College at Smyrna, who saw Turkish soldiers
engaged in firing Armenian houses.]
The one thing that the missionary working in Turkey really fears is
that some Turk may be converted. Should this occur a storm of fanaticism
and violence would break upon his head that might close his school and
end his career. It is not possible to convert Mohammedans in Turkey,
nor even let them get wind that one is trying to do such a thing. In
my thirty years of service in the Near East I have known of but one
Moslem really converted. I remember distinctly the uneasiness which his
impending public confession caused among his teachers, imperiling, as it
did, all their future activities. He was persuaded by the missionaries
that the time was not ripe for him to proclaim his change of faith, but
the Mohammedans became aware of it and promptly murdered him. According
to the best information available it cost between forty-five and eighty
million dollars to convert that unfortunate young man and he did not last
long.
The Moslem who renounces his religion suffers ostracism, forfeiture of
his goods and practically commits suicide. During the War and before the
Turks severed diplomatic relations with the United States, the Germans
were anxious to seize the beautiful and expensive buildings of the
International College of Smyrna and turn them into barracks. I had much
to do in preventing this. On one occasion, while talking with Rahmi Bey,
the Turkish governor (_vali_) of Smyrna at that time, he said to me:
“The only reason that I can protect that college is that I have never
seen any disposition on the part of its president and faculty to convert
Moslems. Should any such attempt be made I could no longer shield it.”
This was the argument which the _vali_ used with the authorities at
Constantinople. It was this clean record which saved the college.
The missionaries in Turkey now find themselves in the position of
hostages. They have seen many of their buildings destroyed, their native
teachers, Armenians and Greeks butchered, their pupils scattered. They
have received no help from the American Government. They are in the hands
of the Turks. Many of them have spent their lives in the work and not a
few of them own comfortable modern homes, which they have paid for in
part or entirely.
That very shrewd and capable Scot, Doctor Alexander MacLachlan, has
built up the International College at Smyrna by a lifetime of earnest
and persistent effort. Its beautiful and expensive buildings, erected
with money raised in America, his own substantial home, the delightful
residences of the faculty, situated in charming gardens, are all resting
on a powder mine. An outburst of fanaticism might sweep this idyllic
picture from the face of the earth at a moment’s notice; might make it
one with the desolate ruins of Smyrna but a few minutes’ distant. It
would need but a tiny spark to set off the powder mine—some adverse
criticism of the Turk, the conversion of a Mohammedan. The danger for
this, as well as for similar institutions, is augmented by the fact that
the ignorant, fanatical population of the Ottoman Empire is greatly in
the majority, and there is abundant evidence that the Spirit of the
Prophet is abroad, impatient of reform.
One missionary, at least, has been in the United States loudly
proclaiming Mustapha Khemal the George Washington of Turkey, and
comparing the soldiers who burned and sacked Smyrna and violated its
women with the veterans of Valley Forge. This has doubtless got back
to Asia Minor and has produced a salutary effect. One word more: Our
missionaries have been operating in Turkey for nearly a century. They
did admirable work among the native Christians, but what evidence have
the Turks shown in their conduct of any results obtained from the vast
sums sent into their country for their enlightenment and moral uplifting?
It is impossible to argue with a religious devotee of any creed. The
question is put to the normal men and women of America.
CHAPTER XXXI
AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS UNDER TURKISH RULE
This cursory account of the methodical extermination of Christianity
at the hands of the Turk should convince any one that he now has no
intention of allowing it to be revived and propagated in his domains
in foreign schools. An earlier chapter gave an account of the aid and
support, both moral and financial, furnished American missionary and
philanthropic institutions by the Greeks during their occupation of
the Smyrna region, and at Saloniki. The following statement of their
treatment under Turkish rule is from the pen of Dana K. Getchell, well
known in missionary circles:
“In 1914, when the World War began, Anatolia College, Marsovan,
Turkey, had an enrollment of four hundred twenty-five students
and the Girls’ School had about three hundred; a total of about
one thousand individuals all together were on the American
premises, including professors’ families, servants and their
families and the American colony. At the close of 1914, the
Americans had just finished the building of a large hospital
which was occupied by the Turks before the American doctor had
the opportunity of moving in.
“In 1915, the Armenian deportation took place in the early
spring of that year. Out of our faculty of fifteen native
teachers and a servant list of fifteen more, twenty of these
individuals, men, were deported and, as far as the college
authorities knew, were killed, as they have never been heard
from since.
“Our college steward, during this time, went to the market for
his usual work and never returned. A noted Turkish lawyer of
the city, at that time connected with the college, informed me
that if I would go with him to a certain spot in a vineyard
near the city he would show me the well into which this man’s
body was thrown. He was perfectly in sympathy with this deed
that was committed.
“During the month of June, 1915, I escorted a party of ten
American ladies and children to Constantinople, via Angora, the
Black Sea route having been closed. While in Constantinople, I
learned of the deportation of the Armenians in the interior,
especially from Marsovan and vicinity. I worked for days to
get permission from Talaat Pasha to return to Marsovan but his
excuse was that ‘things were doing’ in the interior and it was
not a good time for foreigners to be traveling. Later, upon
hearing that more than four hundred Armenians had crowded into
the American premises, information was taken to Talaat and his
promise received that no Armenian within the American premises
should be deported. Upon the strength of this promise, I sent
a telegram to my associates in Marsovan, and having received
permission to travel in those days, I hastened back to my work.
Upon my arrival in Marsovan, I found that the first great
deportation of those sheltered in the American premises had
taken place the day before.
“Two days later, the Turkish gendarmes and police came to our
premises and demanded the girls, forty-nine in number, from
the American school. These demands were persisted in and on
that day, by the order of the Turkish Government, all these
girls were started on the road to Sivas, a journey of six days
interior from Marsovan. Two of the American teachers, Miss
Willard and Miss Gage, by persistence, secured permission to
follow these girls one day after they had started on their
journey and overtook them just as they were entering Sivas,
six days later. By working with the _vali_ of the province for
days, permission was finally given to these American ladies for
all these girls to return to the Girls’ School at Marsovan.
“At the beginning of the deportations in 1915, Marsovan was
inhabited by twelve thousand Armenians. When the deportations
were finished scarcely one thousand of that nationality
could be found in the city. This complete destruction of the
Armenians in this city is only an example of what took place
throughout the Vilayet of Sivas.
“In January, 1916, the Greek deportations from the Black Sea
began. These Greeks came through the city of Marsovan by
thousands, walking for the most part the three days’ journey
through the snow and mud and slush of the winter weather.
Thousands fell by the wayside from exhaustion and others came
into the city of Marsovan in groups of fifty, one hundred
and five hundred, always under escort of Turkish gendarmes.
Next morning these poor refugees were started on the road and
destruction by this treatment was even more radical than a
straight massacre such as the Armenians suffered before.
“In 1917, in the dead of winter, a second deportation of
Armenians from the Black Sea coast began and the same treatment
was undergone by those who were obliged to flee from their
homes.
“On May 16, the fifteen Americans, men, women and children
were obliged to undergo this hardship—to leave their homes
and property—for this long overland journey. On that date the
American premises were occupied by Turkish soldiers and the
buildings all taken over as a base hospital.
“Six weeks later four of this group returned to Marsovan by
permission from Talaat Pasha, with the understanding that
they would be able to occupy their homes and use the school
buildings for educational purposes. The buildings, with the
exception of the houses, which were obtained with great
difficulty, were never returned but were in constant use by the
Turkish military authorities up to the time of the Armistice,
March, 1919.
“The treatment of Americans and American property throughout
Turkey was the same as that experienced by the Americans in
Marsovan. The schools and colleges in Sivas, Cæsarea, Harput,
Aintab and other places were closed and for the most part
the American workers were sent out of the country. Since the
Armistice, this same treatment of Americans throughout the
interior has continued. The schools have not been allowed to
open and property to the value of many thousands of dollars has
continually been occupied by Turks.”
In December of 1914, Turkish soldiers seized the American mission
property of Afion Kara Hissar and occupied the church, school and
pastor’s house for a period of four years, leaving the buildings with
doors, windows and roofs wrecked and generally defiled with human offal.
The Turks pulled the Cross down from the church and put the Crescent up
in its place. In 1919, the Turks seized these buildings again and housed
soldiers in them.
The proposition under which our Christian schools may now operate in
Turkey is about as follows: Will you please let us repair our buildings
at our own expense with money raised in America, and reopen them in those
places where enough human beings remain to furnish a few pupils, and
educate Turkish boys in English, arithmetic, etc., if we give our solemn
word that we will not teach them any Christianity?
Much consolation is derived in certain quarters from the fact that no
religious education of any kind is permitted in Turkish schools, and
it is argued that the measure is not aimed particularly at Christian
institutions. People who obtain comfort from this feature of the case are
evidently not aware that the Turk is familiar with all the different ways
of skinning a cat. They do not give him credit for the peculiar brand of
intelligence which he certainly possesses. At any rate, the result is the
same, in so far as the continuation of foreign evangelical work in Turkey
is concerned.
The above is a very moderate and unprejudiced account of what has been
done, in part, to the American educational institutions in Turkey, but
gives no idea of the actual ferocity shown to students and teachers and
the material damage wrought.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
I was talking recently to a prominent clergyman, friend of the one-time
president of one of the greatest missionary colleges in Turkey, who made
the following statement:
“Some time ago, I was talking with the President of one of
the American Colleges in Turkey who told me of the frightful
treatment of the people in the town where he was located. He
told me the college was closed and the professors, their wives
and families driven out and some sixty or seventy of them were
put to death. The tears streamed down his cheeks as he said: ‘I
can see those dear, good people at this moment, as they were
marched away by the heartless Turk.’”
Regarding the conditions under which the American missions are now
operating in Turkey, Samuel M. Zwemer says, (1924):
“Recent regulations regarding foreigners in Turkey and the
prohibition of Christian teaching to Moslem children in Mission
schools do not indicate a larger degree of liberty under
Islamic Nationalist Government, but rather a recrudescence of
the old spirit.”
If the reverend gentleman had said, “A continuance of the steadfast and
unalterable policy,” he would have been nearer the truth.
Doctor James L. Barton, Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions, of Boston, Massachusetts, has an interesting
article in the _Homiletic Review_ of January, 1924, on _The Present
Status of Missionary and Educational Work in Turkey_.
Doctor Barton is very eminent in missionary work, to which he has devoted
the best part of his life, and he is naturally anxious to save as much as
possible of the ruins of the magnificent edifice which the Mission Board
built up in Turkey with millions of American money, and to keep going
somehow. Here are some quotations from Doctor Barton’s article:
“Some of the American schools have been closed because of the
exchange of populations approved by the Lausanne Conference,
as, for instance, Euphrates College at Harput, Central Turkey
College at Aintab, Teachers’ College at Sivas, and the College
at Van, all in the Eastern section of Turkey are no longer
in operation. These were conducted almost if not wholly for
Christian students, that is, Armenians for the most part, but
with a few Greeks and Syrians. Under the deportations the
country was almost wholly depopulated of this part of its
inhabitants. The teachers were deported or left the country
so that these institutions are to-day closed. Central Turkey,
which was at Aintab, however, is aiding some work in Aleppo,
which is in the French mandate, to which a large number of the
people of Aintab have fled, but the constituency of the other
institutions are scattered far and wide.
“Anatolia College, which was at Marsovan, is in practically the
same condition, although it had many Turkish students, but its
teachers are scattered.”
This is a very carefully worded statement and does full justice to the
doctor’s well-deserved reputation for diplomatic ability. There is
nothing in it that might in any way offend the Turks. The general subject
of the extermination of the Armenians and Greeks, and the massacre of
a million of the former, the real reason of the closing of most of
the schools, is obscured by reference to the “Exchange of populations
approved by the Lausanne Conference.”
The teachers of Anatolia College are “scattered.” This is doubtless
a correct expression to apply to people, many of whom have suffered
martyrdom and are in Heaven, along with many of the teachers of other
colleges. Let us breathe the pious wish that they are not too widely
“scattered” up there, as they will certainly long to get together and
talk over their experiences. Continuing, the doctor says:
“Just at the present time in the absence of regulations, the
schools are hampered in their religious teaching. The Turks
have given orders that there shall be no religious instruction
and for the present there is nothing in the form of direct
instruction during school hours and none of the students can
be required to take Biblical studies or be present where
religious instruction is given. Under present circumstances,
it seems wise to those who are conducting schools in the Near
East to comply with these regulations until a more substantial
understanding can be reached and the educational system of the
country be put on a sound basis.”
If by a “sound basis” the doctor means—and he can not mean anything
else—the permission of the Turkish Government to convert Turks in
Turkey to Christianity, he will wait a long time. The “sound basis,” to
arrive at which the Turks have been shedding rivers of Christian blood,
has already been achieved. And in the meantime, some of the Christian
missionaries have accepted to cease preaching Christ. It is about time
for the cock to crow. Doctor Barton continues:
“It is well known by Turks as well as by foreigners that Turkey
needs what these institutions can give, in order to enable her
to organize her present administrations on a basis that would
give her a worthy place in the sisterhood of nations.”
When Jesus appeared to the Eleven, as they sat at meat after the
Crucifixion, He enjoined them: “Go ye into all the world and preach the
gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be
saved. But he that believeth not shall be damned.”
He said nothing about educating foreigners so that they could put their
administrations on a sound basis. This is a laudable object but should be
done and paid for by the foreigners themselves.
I am informed that the distinguished and erudite Rabbi Stephen Wise, of
New York, has estimated the entire value of the American Mission property
now existing in Turkey as being not more than ten million dollars. His
has been one of the most eloquent voices raised in behalf of the martyred
Christians in the Near East.
I wish it distinctly understood that nothing I have said is meant in any
way as a reflection on American missionaries in general. I have known
so many noble men and women consecrated to spreading the doctrines of
the Master in foreign lands that I am incapable of saying or thinking
anything derogatory of this saintly band of pioneers, or of their work.
I have already described the gallant conduct of the missionary girls and
men at Smyrna, and the same story has been repeated over and over in many
dark corners of the globe in times of stress and danger.
I am not in sympathy with the policy of certain missionaries with regard
to Turkey, and I believe that the utter failure of Christianity to direct
the policy of governments, as shown in this sad narrative, renders any
campaign in Moslem countries a well-nigh hopeless task. I am convinced,
also, that an examination of our private lives and conduct, will convince
any one that the conversion of Americans is a more crying need than that
of Mohammedans.
What America needs, and what Europe needs, is a great spiritual
awakening. Christ is all right. He is unutterably wonderful and lovely.
Let us all unite under His banner, and then think about advancing into
foreign lands.
The ruin wrought to our missionary institutions in Turkey, which has
inspired so much caution with regard to the fate of the remainder, is
epitomized in the following table issued in 1923 by the American Board of
Foreign Missions:
Missionary Churches: 90% closed.
American Colleges: Work suspended in six out of eight.
Hospitals: One-half operating.
College Heads: Two dead, one deported, three refused permission
to return.
Village Schools: (Estimated at 1000). Abandoned.
High Schools: Only three out of forty-one now open.
Property loss: Estimated at $2,880,000.
Native workers: Two-thirds dead; others in exile.
Constituency: 95% dead or deported or enslaved in harems.
American Workers: Fifty deported.
This chapter can have no more appropriate ending than the following
quotation from the pen of the Reverend Ralph Harlow, formerly Missionary
to Turkey, and now Professor of Biblical Literature and Comparative
Religion at Smith College, Massachusetts:
“One hundred years or more ago, our fathers sent forth to Asia
Minor the first American missionary. For all these years our
churches have carried on the glorious task of awakening and
renewing among the peoples of that land, loyalty to the person
and principles of Jesus Christ. Schools and colleges, hospitals
and churches have been built. A host of men and women have come
to love, generation by generation, the people of that land. It
was the land that gave our faith birth; it was its cradle; it
planted the seed from which the church sprang in the blood of
the martyrs.
“To-day the Turkish Government announces that in the future
there will be no Christians in that land, and that no
Protestant missionary work will be permitted.
“For five hundred years, the Christians of Asia Minor have been
the objects of persecution, while Christian civilization has
stood by and looked on. In more recent years the barbarity of
that persecution has shocked the conscience of humanity. In the
’eighties came the Bulgarian horrors; in the ’nineties came the
Armenian atrocities; in 1909 Adana ran red with the blood of
slaughtered thousands and echoed to the wail of countless women.
“In each case the Turk was restored to power; in each case
lengthy promises of good conduct to his Christian subjects were
extracted.
“From 1915 to 1918 came that series of atrocities such as the
world of our day had hardly the emotions and conscience to
comprehend, even amid the horror of the other cruelties of
those other years. Those of us who were in the land at that
time, who saw these things with our own eyes, have never told
half of the truth of those dark hours. The Allied nations swore
by all that was sacred, by the crosses of their fallen dead,
that these things should not again be possible. One million
five hundred thousand is a conservative estimate of the lives
struck down in lust and torture. America sent in workers and
dollars to the relief of the starving and tattered fragments of
the people who survived the blast.
“The man most responsible for all this horror was Talaat Bey.
What is the attitude of the government of Mustapha Khemal
to Talaat and his methods? When Talaat died the government
at Angora held a service in his honor. The _Yeni_ gun, the
official organ of the Nationalist party, came out with great
mourning bands of black. In the editorial were these sentences:
‘Talaat wrote the most glorious pages in Turkish history. Let
the eyes that do not weep become blind. Let the heart that does
not ache cease to beat.’ Khemal has followed in the footsteps
of Talaat. Massacres, deportations, cruelty, outrage and
terror, have marked the reign of the Nationalist government.
The Smyrna tragedy has taken place in hundreds of villages on
a smaller scale. The innocence of childhood, the sacredness of
womanhood, the tears of mothers, the cries of the helpless,
make no appeal at all to the armies or the courts of this
government.”
CHAPTER XXXII
THE REVEREND RALPH HARLOW ON THE LAUSANNE TREATY
In proof of the statement that many eminent followers of Christ are
not in entire sympathy with certain missionaries in their policy with
regard to the Turks, I am quoting again from the Reverend Ralph Harlow.
The following extracts are from an article and two letters written by
him. The article appeared in the _Outlook_ of October 25, 1922, and in
it, among other things, the author describes an interview with the late
Theodore Roosevelt:
“At that time, I had just returned from Asia Minor where I had
witnessed the fearful deportations on the Bagdad Railroad, and
could give him first-hand information of the awful atrocities
going on. He asked me a number of questions, continually
shaking his head and saying, ‘terrible, terrible, terrible.’
“Then with a tense expression on his face, he said, ‘Mr.
Harlow, the greatest regret that I have as I look back on my
administration is the fact that when the awful Adana massacre
occurred, this government did not take steps against the
outrage on civilization!’”
A further quotation from the same article indicates that the men on
destroyers did not fully share the pro-Turk sentiments of their officers:
“I have just listened to the contents of a letter sent by one
of our boys on an American destroyer at Smyrna. He tells of
having to stand by while the brutal Turkish soldiers seized
beautiful Christian girls and tore them screaming from their
mothers and outraged them right on the public quay of Smyrna.
He saw these brutal soldiers shooting down helpless women
with children in their arms, unarmed men beaten to death by
the butts of these Turkish soldiery. And then he tells of the
anguish that he felt because the orders of our government were
such that he had to stand by, helpless, before such atrocities.”
I have been told that many such letters were written by our navy boys
at Smyrna to relatives and friends in the United States. In a letter to
me, Mr. Harlow says that he believes it to be his duty to tell the truth
about affairs in the Near East, and he continues:
“Doctor MacLachlan and Reed demanded my resignation and said
that I ‘endangered the college.’ I resigned. I have been made
to feel that I ought to keep still, but justice seems to me
greater than buildings and institutions. At the time of the
Lausanne Conference and after, I claimed that our American
Board (of Foreign Missions) ought to have stood four square
against the wretched treaty. Dr. Barton did not like the
openness of my criticisms and I lost a position as Board
Secretary through his opposition to me.”
[Illustration: American Consular Building, Smyrna, before which Turkish
soldier poured inflammable liquids. It was completely consumed.]
The second letter referred to gives Mr. Harlow’s opinion of the Lausanne
Treaty and is addressed to the Reverend Doctor Barton, Foreign Secretary
of the American Board of Foreign Missions. As some of the missionaries
who are desirous of saving the remnants of their installations in Turkey
have come out in favor of the treaty, Mr. Harlow’s opinion on the
subject, and his reasons, may be of interest:
“At the time of the conference, and following it, I was asked
to discuss the situation in numerous addresses, so that I read
up carefully everything I could get, which would throw light
on the subject. All the evidence goes to show that the men who
went to Lausanne were influenced from the very first in all
their decisions to protect the oil interests, which featured
largely behind the scenes in the Conference discussions.
That those interests were so strong as to overshadow the
humanitarian and missionary interests I have accepted without
question, until I read your paragraph.
“I turn now to some of my sources of information, for which you
ask. Unfortunately, most of my material on this subject is in
my files at Northampton, but I have with me references which
will perhaps indicate why I have associated oil with blood in
connection with Lausanne. I would refer you to the following
articles and I might name numerous others:
“‘American Blood and Oil,’ _Literary Digest_, December 30,
1922; ‘Oil and Glory at Lausanne,’ _Literary Digest_, July
28, 1923; ‘Blind Forces at Lausanne,’ _Asia_, April, 1923;
‘Britain’s Mesopotamian Burden and Oil,’ _Literary Digest_,
December 15, 1922; ‘Issues at Lausanne,’ _Living Age_, January
6, 1923; ‘Lausanne and its Antecedents,’ _Fortnightly
Review_, January, 1923; ‘Uncle Sam Mixing in the Turkish
Broil,’ _Literary Digest_, December 23, 1922; ‘The Tragedy of
Lausanne,’ _Association Men_, March or April, 1923; ‘The World
Race for Oil,’ _Literary Digest_, January 20, 1923.
“If you will take the time and trouble, as I have, to read even
these few articles, and the _Literary Digest_ quotes from many
other sources, you will find that the main theme is that the
humanitarian interests at Lausanne were sold out, because of
oil interests, and that the missionary interests got nowhere.
“A regular official of the Standard Oil came to Lausanne before
the Conference opened. Lewis Heck, who was in the business in
Constantinople came to Lausanne as a member of the American
delegation.[13]
“‘Young MacDowell, who had many railroad concessions in Turkey
which dovetailed into the Chester concessions, was in Heck’s
Constantinople office. Heck knows Turkey well. I will be
willing to defend the thesis that the entire course of events,
which made the Lausanne Treaty possible, was determined by the
ambitions of the commercial oil interests, and that, in this
race for Turkish favors, the Americans led the way.’”
Mr. Harlow quotes many editorials and articles in the American and
British press, the general tenor of which can be gleaned from one or two
examples:
“Lausanne was all that an International Conference ought not
to be. It was the sacrifice of all human and humanitarian
questions to expediency.” _New York Journal of Commerce_, July,
1923.
“Mosul and freedom to give us a chance in the scramble for oil
has been the object of all the negotiations, but the United
States might be better occupied to-day than looking after the
interests of oil kings. Peace and civilization may be talked
about in public, but in private there is talk of oil, because
territories where the future concessionaires will be at pains
to insure their rights, are at stake.” _New York Times._
“Although America would accept no humane responsibility in
the Near East, saying that it must be free from troubles and
depravities of the Old World, America’s blood boils over the
burning question of oil. When the word ‘oil’ is mentioned, the
recluse bursts from its retirement upon the instant. America
has no concern with Asia Minor while the Turk butchers his
Christian subjects by the hundreds of thousands.” _Pall Mall
Gazette._
CHAPTER XXXIII
MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY
It is difficult for Americans, living in this Christian country, to
understand the position of a missionary who goes into a Mohammedan
community with the intention of converting its members.
The problem is exactly that which would confront a Moslem hodja, or
priest, should he appear with two or three veiled wives in a devout
Methodist community in Michigan and open up a campaign in behalf of the
Prophet. As for the results of education upon a Mohammedan, whenever
he is made to doubt his own religion, when he is educated out of it,
he generally becomes an atheist. The spectacle of the Great War has
profoundly influenced all non-Christian peoples and has made missionary
work more difficult than ever. “Christ is not the Prince of Peace,” they
say; and no amount of preaching can make them believe it. “Prince of
Peace,” they sneer, “He is the Prince of the submarine, the bomb-throwing
aeroplane, poison gas, the machine gun.” The supposed results of the
teachings of Christ are more evident than the teachings themselves. One
element of strength of the Mohammedan religion is that it is sincere
and gives free play to the passions and impulses of man’s lower nature.
Whatever the teachings of the Koran as to spreading its doctrines by the
sword—for the interpreters of that sacred book are legion, and one may
find anything he wishes in it—there is no doubt as to the example set by
Mohammed, who founded his kingdom sword in hand, who was a polygamist,
a robber of camel caravans and gave orders for the assassination of his
enemies. This is not said in a spirit of defamation of the Prophet,
but as a statement of well-known historic facts. While advocating many
virtues, the Koran gives more play to the human passions and makes a
greater appeal to the natural man than the asceticism of Christianity and
hence spreads more rapidly among primitive peoples and those of a lower
grade of civilization.
I once met a sweet missionary woman returning from Africa with her little
child, who had fallen sick of fever, to America for medical treatment.
She described the great advance of Mohammedanism in Africa and the
seemingly hopeless task of the Christian missionaries there. She made a
sort of map of mission stations and explained: “We are trying to put a
barrier across Africa to prevent Mohammedanism spreading to the South,
beyond the equator,” “From what you say to me,” I observed, “you can not
do it.” “We can’t,” she said, “but God can.” This seems unanswerable and
must appeal strongly to the religious devotee, but there is an answer and
it is this: “God can, of course He can; but He doesn’t, and probably He
will not.” It seems probable that the great gift of Christianity has been
so abused and shamed by the so-called Christian nations that God is weary
of them, and considers it presumptuous for them to send out missionaries
to convert people of another faith. It has been abundantly shown to
all reasonable human beings, who are not religious zealots, that money
expended in the attempt to convert Moslems is money thrown away. Even the
missionaries themselves in Turkey seem to have given it up.
The same story is heard everywhere. In _The Crescent in Northwest
China_, by G. Findlay Andrew, a missionary, the author says: “Islam has
often been referred to as the challenge to Christian missions. During
the past few years a few Hwei-Hwei (Chinese Moslems) have been reached
with the Gospel and, after a profession of faith, have been accepted
as church members or as inquirers. The number has, however, been very
small, and of those who have ‘kept the faith’ only about one remains in
church fellowship at the time of writing.” And yet the good missionary
sums this gloomy report up with, the remark: “Great as the problem is,
yet the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent in Kansu is assured.”
It is difficult to follow the process of reasoning which derives this
conclusion from these premises.
The attention of the reader has already been called to the fact that
the Turks are the lowest of the Moslem races and it would not be fair
to Mohammedans in general to say that they approve of butchery and rape
as carried out by that people, so well characterized by Gladstone and
many historians. In fact the Turks are not the greatest danger to the
Christian church. They have accomplished their fell task, and their
influence as a proselytizing power will not spread beyond their own
dominions unless they wage another successful war.
A few quotations from that penetrating book, _The New World of Islam_,
by Lothrop Stoddard, will suffice to show how Islamism is ousting
Christianity in those places where it meets it face to face. The
strongest and best organized proselytizing order among the Moslems are
the Senussiya, well described by Mr. Stoddard:
“The beginning of systematic, self-conscious pan-Islamism dates
from about the middle of the nineteenth century. The Sennussi
are careful to avoid a downright breach with European Powers.
Their long-headed, cautious policy is truly astonishing. For
more than half a century the order has been a great force,
yet it has never risked the supreme adventure. In many of
the fanatic risings which have occurred in various parts of
Africa, local Sennussi have undoubtedly taken part, and the
same was true during the Italian campaign in Tripoli and the
late war, but the order itself has never officially entered
the lists. The Sennussi program is the welding, first, of
Moslem Africa, and, later of the whole Moslem world into the
revived “Imamat,” of Islam’s early days; into a great theocracy
embracing all true believers—in other words, pan-Islamism.
But they believe that the political liberation of Islam from
Christian domination must be preceded by a profound spiritual
regeneration. Year after year and decade after decade the
Sennussi advance slowly, calmly, coldly. They are covering
North Africa with their lodges and schools; and to the
southward converting millions of pagan negroes to the faith of
Islam. Every candid European observer tells the same story. As
an Englishman remarked some twenty years ago: ‘Mohammedanism
is making remarkable progress in the interior of Africa. It
is crushing Paganism out. Against it the Christian propaganda
is a myth.’ And a French protestant missionary remarks in
the same vein: ‘We see Islam on its march, sometimes slowed
down, but never stopped, toward the heart of Africa. It fears
nothing. Even Christianity, its most serious rival, it views
without hate. While Christians dream of the conquest of Africa,
Mohammedans do it.’ These gains are being made at the expense
of African Christianity as well. The European missions lose
many of their converts to Islam, while across the continent,
the ancient Abyssinian Church, so long an outpost against
Islam, seems in danger of submersion by the rising Moslem tide.
There is to-day in the Moslem world a wide spread conviction
that Islam is entering on a period of Renaissance and renewed
glory.”
Mohammedanism to-day covers the northern part of Africa from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Red Sea, nearly to the equator, far below which it has
passed on the East; it surrounds Abyssinia, an island of degenerate
Christianity; it holds solidly Arabia, Persia, Afganistan, Turkestan and
has overrun large portions of China and Russia, where it is making rapid
progress. It is one of the leading religions of India, and has reached
the Dutch Indies and Philippines.
Pierre Andre, in his work _Islam et les Races_, gave the total number
of Mohammedans in the world in 1917, as 246,920,000; Laurence Martin of
the Library of Congress, in an article in _Foreign Affairs_ for March,
1923, gives the total number as 230,000,000 a slightly more conservative
figure; but any estimate must be revised yearly, as the number is
increasing with astounding rapidity. It is probable that the number of
Mohammedans in the world to-day is about 250,000,000.
To the above vast portions of the earth’s surface which have already
been mentioned as solidly Mohammedan must now be added Asia Minor, the
last hope and outpost of Christian civilization in the Near East, which
was rapidly spreading and developing with the aid of our own and other
Christian schools, but which has recently been cleared out by fire and
massacre with the aid and connivance of the Christian powers.
It has already been asserted that conversions from Mohammedanism to
Christianity are extremely rare, while the former is taking heavy toll
from Christian converts. It seems also that there are well-authenticated
cases of Europeans and Americans having embraced Islam. Professor T.
W. Arnold in his ingenious defense of Mohammedanism, _The Preaching
of Islam_, cites the case of an English solicitor, Mr. William Henry
Quillam, who embraced Mohammedanism and became a missionary of that faith
in the city of Liverpool. By 1897, ten years after his own conversion,
Mr. Quillam had made one hundred and thirty-seven proselytes.
An American, Mr. Alexander Russell Webb, at one time United States Consul
to Manila, after having embraced Mohammedanism, opened a mission. Mr.
Webb had been brought up as a Presbyterian. In 1875, a Methodist preacher
named Norman became converted to Mohammedanism and began to preach it in
America.
While I was in Smyrna a native-born American, who was weary of a devoutly
Christian and ascetic wife, so good that he could not get a divorce from
her, became a Mohammedan in order to marry a young woman with whom he
had fallen in love, and with whom he was living happily, as man and
wife according to Mohammedan law, up until quite recently. There is also
the well-authenticated story, which, for obvious reasons, has not been
given wide publicity, of the American missionary woman who married a rich
Turk and became a member of his already well-stocked harem. A number of
her former associates went to see her and endeavored to persuade her to
return to them. She replied: “I have always desired to be married and
live the natural life of a woman, for which God intended me. I saw the
years slipping away, with no chance in sight of fulfilling the functions
for which the Creator made me and I rebelled. No Christian man has ever
made me an honorable proposal of marriage, though several have paid
me court with shady intentions. This man offered me a union honorable
according to his religion and the laws of the country, and I accepted.
I would rather have a quarter of a man than none at all. I am soon to
become a mother; I am perfectly happy, and I don’t want ever to hear
anything more about missionaries or missionary work.”
The two last cases are significant as they reveal one of the reasons why
Mohammedanism is less difficult to preach convincingly, under favorable
conditions, than Christianity. It solves, both for men and women, some of
the inconveniences of our civilization, which exist despite the greater
and greater efficiency of our divorce courts.
These pages are written without any spirit of fanaticism and with
the sole object of giving the world, especially the Christian world,
the truth about certain matters of great historic significance. The
Mohammedans, in the organized propaganda which they are making against
Christianity, both by written arguments and by their extensive system
of lay missionaries, are well aware of the unchristian history of the
Christian world, and the fearful spectacle of the Great War has added a
powerful argument to their already full quiver. They are aware also that
the teachings of Christ, while never having dictated to any great extent
the policies of governments, have also failed to regulate as they should
the lives of individuals. Mohammedanism does not ask so much of the
individual as does Christianity, and hence is easier to live up to. There
is consequently less hypocrisy. For instance, the marriage relation is
very lax in the Prophet’s creed and polygamy is permitted. A Mohammedan
writer says that the social evil is unknown in Mohammedan countries,
and a writer in _Armenia_, the defunct Boston periodical of that name,
replies that this is true for the reason that the Moslem is permitted by
his religion to make his own home a brothel. The Moslem propaganda argues
that their various women have an open and honorable standing, while the
Christian has illicit relations, which frequently ruin his victims, whom
he abandons to a life of dishonor.
But we are approaching the Mohammedan in the matter of loose marriage
relations, and in the need of missionary work at home. In 1922, more
than one out of every eight married couples were divorced in the United
States, and it is frequent with us to have a succession of partners,
rivaling the Mohammedan in this particular. In 1922 there were 184,554
divorces in the United States, as against 112,036 in 1916. In 1922
there were fifty-two lynchings in the United States. In 1922 there were
4,931,905 illiterates in this country, and in the same year a percentage
that reached nearly twenty-three of illiteracy among the negroes of seven
Southern States.[14]
The Koran does not permit the use of wine, and devout Mohammedans abstain
from the use of intoxicants. In the United States the Constitution is
very generally violated by large masses of the population and the day of
Christ’s Nativity is largely celebrated by drunken orgies. Secret vice is
prevalent in the United States to a much larger extent than many people
dream of. Every few days some automobile overturns, killing a guilty
couple, or some girl, in fear of the vice inspector, jumps out of a
window, revealing depravity in circles where it was least expected.
Christianity lost her power as a world-conquering religion—and thus
became an easy prey to Mohammedanism—as soon as she became obscured
in a smoke-screen of controversy. The innumerable and bewildering
quibbles which arose, giving rise to many sects, and the violent
hatreds and schisms engendered, form a history in themselves. At the
time when Mohammed appeared on the scene, the Church was already split
into quarreling sects, who had lost sight of the simple teachings of
the Master. Christians had become depraved and general immorality and
degeneracy were rife.
To-day the Christian world is about evenly divided between Protestants
and Catholics, rival sects, showing little spirit of compromise. Recent
statistics, given by _Whittaker’s Almanak_, place the total number of
Catholics in the world at 272,860,000 and of Protestants and other
denominations, (like the Eastern Church) who deny the jurisdiction
of the Pope, at 290,000,000. Any one who has lived for any time in
countries where missionaries are active will testify to the saintly
character of Catholic Sisters, and the devotion of the Brothers. They
will equally bear witness to the high character, courage and beauty of
life of Protestant missionaries, men and women. But the two sects are
antagonistic.
In Smyrna during the Greek administration, a Y. M. C. A. was started and
was doing excellent work, as also a Y. W. C. A. A notice was posted in
all the Catholic churches that such institutions were of darkness and
not of light and that all true Christians must keep away from them. A
Catholic teacher in the Y. W. C. A. who was being paid a good salary
and who needed it was compelled to resign her post. This is but one
instance of many that could be given. When a Mohammedan is asked to be
a Christian, a common answer is, “What kind? There are so many kinds of
you, each warning us against the others.” There is less hope to-day of
pan-Christianity than of pan-Islamism. Says Kurtz, already referred to:
“To-day Mohammedanism is the one rival of Christianity to become a world
religion,” and a writer in the _Moslem World_ for January, 1925: “The
Christian Church, after thirteen centuries of hard struggle finds Islam
still a most baffling problem. It is true historically that Islam has
been born after Christianity and has displaced it almost wherever it has
spread. The history of the whole of North Africa, Palestine and Syria,
and present Asia Minor shows this plainly.”
The Reverend George Bush in his _Life of Mohammed_, published by the
Harpers in 1830, makes the following reflection:
“Indeed in this, as in every other instance where the fortunes
of an individual are entirely disproportionate to the means
employed, and surpass all reasonable calculation, we are forced
to resolve the problem into the special Providence of God.
Nothing short of this could have achieved such mighty results.”
If there is no other explanation of Mohammedan success, it is evident
that the Divine intention has not varied in the last ninety years. This
is the view-point of the deeply religious man, who believes in God’s
personal management of all the affairs of this world, attributing to
reasons of Divine wisdom matters too deep for human penetration. The
student of history will understand the spread of Mohammedanism at the
expense of Christianity, and the chief reasons have appeared or will
become plain in the course of this narrative.
A stouter and more virile figure than Mohammed attempted to establish a
similar creed on this continent. He failed to become a world influence, a
permanent factor in history, for geographical reasons, mainly. The part
of the world in which Brigham Young planted his polygamous creed was
not so well adapted to its expansion as the scene of Mohammed’s early
activities. Western civilization, following close on the heels of the
gold rush, overwhelmed the American apostle and intimate of the Angel
Gabriel. The chief reason why Christianity has lost so much ground
before Mohammedanism, and is likely to lose much more, is that there has
never been much _real_ Christianity in the world.
The history of the so-called “Christian Nations” has been a long tale
of bloody wars, of treachery and robbery, of St. Bartholemew Days and
of Catholics martyrized by Protestants; of persecutions, of saints and
witches burned at the stake.
And the situation among the “Christian Nations” that allowed the Turks to
burn Smyrna and massacre and abuse its inhabitants was such a culmination
of infamy and shame as shows that the world is becoming less Christian as
the years go by.
Surely there is no reason to expect God to aid Christian missionaries,
after such a disappointment and travesty. If, as the Reverend Bush
remarks, the wonderful spread of Mohammedanism can only be explained
as some special Providence of God, He may be inspiring the Sennussi
to spiritualize their religion and develop the better features of it.
If the Christian faith has had so feeble effect upon the conduct of
Christian nations and has so little harmony that it lacks the force to
convert Mohammedans, then the only alternative open to wisdom, finite
or infinite, would be to make the best of some other creed. When our
missionaries have finished putting the Turkish administrations “on a
sound basis,” they might come home and teach us to be better Christians.
Unless Christianity is saved in those countries where it still has a
nominal existence, it is doomed, and their civilization will go with
it. The Bolsheviks understand this, as witness the war they are waging
against religion.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE KORAN AND THE BIBLE
The peculiar state of mind which has enabled the Turk to commit outrages
on humanity that have shocked and insulted the entire race have been
due to three things: his own nature, the teachings of the Koran and the
example of the Prophet. This is what Gladstone means when he speaks of
the “combination of his nature and his religion.”
This is better understood when we take into consideration that other
branches of the Mohammedans have made great contributions to the progress
and culture of the world. The Arabs have distinguished themselves in
architecture, science, poetry, art and letters. It is the opinion of that
distinguished churchman, Canon William Barry, expressed in an article in
_The Nineteenth Century and After_ for August, 1919, that other Moslems
should repudiate the Turk and his outrages. Canon Barry says:
“Wise Moslems, instead of being stirred up in defense of a
system condemned by history and experience, should be led to
perceive in the Turk, not any ‘Bulwark of Islam,’ but a stain
upon their civilization, a lapse from the glory of their
illustrious Caliphs, a scandal and a weakness not to be
endured any more.”
In support of this, one has only to hark back to the splendid days of
Bagdad and Cordova.
In the days of Haroun al Raschid, Bagdad was renowned as the greatest
city in the world, a center of refinement, learning and art. This monarch
is described as having gathered about him a brilliant company of poets,
jurists, learned men and wits. That civilization has left behind one
classic which has immortalized it—even though it naively treats of a
monarch who had a new wife every night whose head he cut off in the
morning.
But here we have the same old story: Bagdad fell into insignificance
after it came under the sway of the Turks; and at the time of its final
capture in 1638 by the Sultan Murad IV, that monarch massacred most of
its inhabitants, contrary to the terms of capitulation.
The Moors have left behind them in Spain monuments of architecture
which are to this day a delight to the world; we have only to cite
the Mosque—now the Cathedral—at Cordova, and the Alhambra of Grenada.
The famous Algebra of Omar Khayyám was written in Arabic and many
contributions to science and literature have first appeared in that
language. The Arab of Africa is described by travelers as the noblest
specimen, physically, of the human race, and even the casual tourist who
has touched at Algiers, has confirmed this fact by observation of the men
in its streets. The difference, mentally, between the Arab and the Turk,
is thus depicted by Buckhardt:
“The Arab displays his manly character when he defends his
guest at the peril of his own life and submits to the reverses
of fortune, to disappointment and distress with the most
patient resignation. He is distinguished from the Turk by the
virtues of pity and gratitude. The Turk is cruel, the Arab is
of a more kindly temper; he pities and supports the wretched
and never forgets the generosity shown him even by an enemy.”
Without having gone deeply into the subject, I am convinced that the
Turks are the only branch of the Mohammedan faith which has never made
any contributions to the progress of civilization or produced anything
which, as Sir Edwin Pears says, “the world would gladly keep.” They have
been destructive and not constructive.
To understand how human beings could have developed such traits of
ferocity and have left such a record of massacres, and for the benefit of
those who believe that a high state of civilization is now to be built up
by these people who have definitely rejected the teachings of Christ, let
us cast a glance at the comparative doctrines of the Koran and the Bible.
That the teachings of the New Testament are infinitely more softening
and uplifting than those of the Koran, no one can deny after a brief and
intelligent comparative study. The general spirit of the latter book—and
the statement is made despite the contention of those commentators who
hold the contrary—is that of spreading its doctrines and the power and
dominion of its followers by the sword; to destroy the unbeliever or make
him pay tribute. It is polygamous in its teachings.
It is founded on the Old Testament and in it appear the chief historical
characters of that book. It is completed, or rounded out, by much of
Oriental fable and belief in supernatural beings, such as the Jinns of
the _Arabian Nights_; to which are added the so-called _Revelations
of the Prophet_. Some of these are merely for the purpose of allowing
Mohammed to gratify his own desires, as, for instance, the case in which
one of his friends is commanded by the angel to give his beautiful wife
to the Prophet.
A great literature of commentary has grown up around the Koran, and
it would be possible for its defenders to find much in it preaching
tolerance, but its general effect upon its disciples, combined with the
example of the Prophet’s life, convincingly prove that Mohammedanism
is a creed to be spread by the sword. Written originally in Arabic, it
is claimed for it that its beauties can only be appreciated in that
language and that the lines in which it is composed make a peculiar
appeal to its readers and linger in the memory.
[Illustration: Scene on railroad pier, Smyrna, where refugees embarked.]
This contention can only be understood, of course, by those who are
versed in the Arabic. It was for a similar reason that _Tupper’s
Proverbial Philosophy_ was at one time universally popular. I have read
the New Testament in the original Greek, in Latin, French, English and
portions of it in German and Swedish and I am competent to state that the
words of Christ lend themselves to translation because of the beauty and
value of the thought intrinsically, and because of the universal appeal,
in every age, which it contains.
The Sermon on the Mount is as overwhelmingly touching and irresistible
in English, French or German, as it is in the original Greek. The same
may be said of the Lord’s Prayer, and of most of the words of the
Master. This is why, when Christianity is blotted out of vast areas of
the earth’s surface by the sword, the club, by the ax and fire, we can
consider that the world has retrograded for some thousands of years in
those regions, and that the interests of the race have in general been
irretrievably injured, no matter who gets the concessions.
The New Testament advocates purity of life and even leans toward
asceticism. Christ himself was unmarried and was of spotless purity.
The Koran is sensual in its teachings, both as to this life and the life
hereafter. It promises the true believer an allotment of paradisiacal
females when he arrives in the other world. What the relation of the
earthly wives will be to this new group is more or less uncertain. This
doctrine of the Koran throws the light very clearly on the contemptuous
regard in which woman is held by the followers of Mohammed.
Such a lofty, pure and beautiful Idyl as the life and death of Lord
Tennyson and his lady is not possible to a creed of polygamy and heavenly
houries. Heaven is thus described in the Koran:
“Therein shall receive them lovely damsels refraining their
eyes from beholding any but their spouses, whom no man shall
have touched before, neither any Spirit (Jinn) and having
complexions like rubies and pearls.”
In connection with this, one must remember that Mohammedans hold the
Koran in deep reverence and believe it literally. Among the great mass
of them, there is not that advanced thought and development of education
which might cause them to regard skeptically their sacred book, as is the
case among Christians. When a Mohammedan dies on the field of battle he
actually believes that he is going straight to a beautiful garden where a
bevy of voluptuous females await him.
According to the Koran, divorce is easy and can be obtained by the
husband simply proclaiming that he is weary of his spouse. The wife, on
the other hand, can only obtain divorce for sufficient cause. In fact,
matrimonial ties in Mohammedan countries are flimsy. No better example of
the ease of Mohammedan divorce can be given than that of Mustapha Khemal,
the Turkish leader, and his wife. The American papers explained that
Khemal himself pronounced the decree, his priestly functions enabling
him so to do; but the fact is that divorce in Mohammedan countries is an
extremely simple process for both high and low.
The Koran teaches non-indulgence in wine, and in general devout believers
are absolute tee-totalers. The cultivation of the grape and the making of
wine does not prevail among the followers of Mohammed.
Circumcision, non-eating of pork, objection to statues and photographs
are all borrowed from the Old Testament, the last named from the
commandment, “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image.”
Not one Turk in a thousand, if that many, can read the Koran, as it is
written in Archaic Arabic, but the general conception that they are
the faithful and all others are “dogs of unbelievers” is well fixed in
their minds as also the few broad articles of faith hitherto enumerated.
Illiteracy is generally prevalent among the Turkish people, and the
hodjas or priests do not do much in the way of teaching except crying
from the minarets “God is God and Mahomet is His Prophet.” Nevertheless,
during the horrible days of massacre, fire and rape in Smyrna, the Turks
were chanting, with joy: “Their wives shall be widows and their children
orphans.” Hearing this, and thinking of the thousands of babes who were
being made fatherless, or subjected to suffering and death, I could not
help remembering the words: “Suffer the little children to come unto me,
for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Mr. Geddes in his statement asserts that in no instance did he see any
Moslem giving alms to Armenians, it being a criminal offense for any one
to aid them, the object of the deportations being “the extermination of
the race.” The teachings of the Mohammedan cult render it possible to
issue such an order to an entire nation, with the certainty that it will
be universally obeyed.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE EXAMPLE OF MOHAMMED
Though there have been great Mohammedan civilizations that have
contributed much to the world’s progress and have left imperishable
monuments, they have not lasted. They have arisen through the
fundamentally noble character and intelligence of the peoples that have
founded them, and have flourished for a relatively short time rather
in spite of their creed than because of it. And, as is the case in all
religions, the example set by the originator has had a greater influence
on his disciples than his book. The Prophet is deeply reverenced by all
Mohammedans who regard even one hair from his beard as having miraculous
power.
The main facts of his life and his general character are known to them.
These salient facts will now be set forth without bias of hostility or
irreverence. They are authentic and well established. The reader is
invited to confirm them and determine for himself whether or not they are
correctly stated:
1. Mohammed was a polygamist;
2. After leaving Mecca and proceeding to Messina, where he established
himself for a time, he organized and conducted raids against caravans,
which he robbed to replenish his depleted treasury;
3. He besieged and plundered towns for the booty, which acts he justified
by “revelations”;
4. He ordered eight hundred Jewish prisoners to be separated from their
wives and children and butchered and their bodies thrown into a trench.
Their wives and families were sold into captivity. This was the first
Mohammedan massacre;[15]
5. He ordered ferocious and inhuman punishments to be inflicted;[16]
6. He removed his enemies by murder and assassination.
We have seen how faithfully this example has been followed by the Turks
throughout the years since the fall of Constantinople, and especially
by the Young Turks since their accession to power. But although other
branches of the Mohammedan race have shown conspicuous qualities of heart
and of head, yet a general study of the spread of that religion from its
inception reveals only too clearly the influence of the Prophet’s example
as well as of his teachings. Says Pears, already quoted:
“The history indeed, of Egypt, of Syria and of Asia Minor had
been a long series of massacres, culminating perhaps in that
of Egypt where in 1354, when the Christians were ordered to
abjure their faith and accept Mohammedanism and refused, a
hundred thousand were put to death.”
Adrian Fortescue, in his work, _The Lesser Eastern Churches_, has this
paragraph:
“In 1389, a great procession of Copts who had accepted Mohammed
under fear of death, marched through Cairo. Repenting of their
apostasy, they now wished to atone for it by the inevitable
consequence of returning to Christianity. So as they marched,
they announced that they believed in Christ and renounced
Mohammed. They were seized and all the men were beheaded in
an open square before the women. But this did not terrify the
women; so they, too, were all martyred.”
Regarding the Armenian massacres of our own time, Doctor Johannes
Lepsius, to whose masterly _Secret Report_ reference has been made in
earlier pages, makes the following statement:
“We have lists before us of 550 villages whose surviving
inhabitants were converted to Islam with fire and sword; of
568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed to the
ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques;
of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Gregorian (Armenian) who
were, after enduring unspeakable tortures, murdered after
their refusal to accept Islam. We repeat, however, that these
figures reach only to the extent of our information, and do not
by a long way reach to the extent of the reality. Is this a
religious persecution or is it not?”
Christianity, then, has been cleaned out of North Africa and the old
Byzantine Empire, the home of the early Fathers of the Church and of the
Seven Cities, largely by massacre; the Turk, when he burned Smyrna and
made Asia Minor solidly Mohammedan, finished a work that has been going
on for centuries.
Not only have these methods been used for propagating Mohammedanism, but
the “Law of Apostates” prescribes death, forced separation from wife and
family, and loss of property and legal rights for any Moslem who forsakes
his faith and adheres to another. The fear of these dreadful punishments
is one of the reasons why there are so few converts from Mohammedanism to
Christianity. Doctor Samuel M. Zwemmer, the learned writer on Mohammedan
matters, gives many examples of the application of this law in his recent
work, _The Law of Apostasy in Islam_.
An example which came within my personal observation, the murder of the
convert of the International College at Smyrna, has already been referred
to. This is probably the same case as that cited by the Reverend Ralph
Harlow, one time pastor of the International College at Smyrna, in a
pamphlet: “Outside the Walls of Smyrna his body was found, stabbed in
many places.”
The Law of Apostasy, according to Zwemmer, is summed up by the
Mohammedan law-givers in the following words:
“As for Apostates, it is permitted to kill them by facing
them or coming upon them from behind, just as in the case
of Polytheists. Secondly, their blood, if shed, brings no
vengeance. Thirdly, their property is the spoil of true
believers. Fourthly, their marriage ties become null and void.”
The educated, Europeanized Turk of Constantinople is a shrewd and
polished gentleman of seductive manners; but one thing must never be
forgotten by those interested, financially or otherwise, in the future of
Turkey; that country has been made “homogeneous” by a series of ferocious
massacres carefully planned and relentlessly carried out by just such
polished and seductive gentlemen, who have exploited Moslem fanaticism
for their purposes, and it is on that fanaticism that their power rests.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE “50-50” THEORY
One of the cleverest statements circulated by the Turkish propagandists
is to the effect that the massacred Christians were as bad as their
executioners, that it was “50-50.” This especially appeals strongly to
the Anglo-Saxon sense of justice, relieves one of all further annoyance
or responsibility, and quiets the conscience. But it requires a very
thoughtless person indeed to accept such a statement, and extremely
little thought is required to show the fallacy of it.
In the first place, the Christians in the power of the Turk have never
had much opportunity to massacre, even had they been so disposed. If a
few Turks have been killed in the long history of butcheries that have
soaked the empire with blood, the reckoning, mathematically, will not be
50-50, nor even one to ten thousand. In addition to this, even with the
shortcomings of the Christians of the world, in general, the teachings
of Christ have made it better. In all the former Ottoman provinces that
have succeeded in casting off the Turkish blight—Hungary, Bulgaria,
Serbia, Greece—there is very little, if any, record of Turks massacred by
Christians.
The conduct of the Greeks toward the thousands of Turks residing in
Greece, while the ferocious massacres were going on, and while Smyrna was
being burned and refugees, wounded, outraged and ruined, were pouring
into every port of Hellas, was one of the most inspiring and beautiful
chapters in all that country’s history. There were no reprisals. The
Turks living in Greece were in no wise molested, nor did any storm of
hatred or revenge burst upon their heads. This is a great and beautiful
victory that, in its own way, rises to the level of Marathon and Salamis.
One naturally asks what other Christian nation could have done any
better? In fact, the whole conduct of Greece, during and after the
persecution of the Christians in Turkey, has been most admirable, as
witness also its treatment of the Turkish prisoners of war, and its
efforts for the thousands of refugees that have been thrown upon its
soil. I know of what I am speaking, for I was in Greece and saw with my
own eyes. No one, I think, will have the courage to dispute these facts.
Had the Greeks, after the massacres in the Pontus and at Smyrna,
massacred all the Turks in Greece, the record would have been
50-50—almost.
CHAPTER XXXVII
ASIA MINOR, THE GRAVEYARD OF GREEK CITIES
The possibilities of Asia Minor for Aryan civilization are better
understood when one casts an eye back on that country to the period when
it was covered with teeming millions and dotted with cities that were
mothers of art, literature, philosophy, industry and all that is most
useful and beautiful in human development. All this has been repeatedly
swept over by Asiatic and Mongol invasion and is now covered with the
Turkish blight.
In a paper read in December, 1922, by W. H. Buckler, of Baltimore, the
well-known diplomat and archeologist, he calls attention to the great
wealth of opportunity for archeological research in New Turkey, and he
urges American scholars to concentrate their attention upon Anatolia and
its new capital, Angora, and he expects that “the development of towns,
roads, etc., will be much more rapid than formerly, and this change will
be most marked at Angora, which, from a village must shortly transform
herself into a metropolis.”
It is possible that a few new buildings may be put up at Angora in the
near future, but the process of reasoning which connects the carrying
out of massacres on a hitherto unprecedented scale with a freshly
acquired ability for administration, agriculture, commerce and finance is
incomprehensible.
On this point, precisely, Sir Valentine Chirol, already quoted, very
opportunely says:
“The Turk’s only real business was, and always has been, war.
But it is difficult to see how far Turkey has profited by
exchanging a narrow religious fanaticism for an equally narrow
racial fanaticism. All we need consider is what Turkey is
to-day. Her population is estimated at between six million and
eight million decimated by the war and believed to be shrinking
as it was already doing before the war, from congenital
disease. It will, it is true, be for the first time, an almost
purely Turkish population, for of the Greeks and Armenians
who in 1914 still numbered some three million in Asia Minor,
only the scantiest remnants are left. Yet they were the most
intelligent and economically valuable communities of the old
Ottoman Empire. She (Turkey) can hardly aspire to a much higher
position than that of a third rate power barely equal in
general resources to any of the Balkan states over which she
used to rule, and she has herself abdicated the prestige and
influence which the possession of the Khalifate had conferred
upon her.”[17]
But the very learned and accomplished writer, Doctor Buckler, brings out
some facts of stupendous importance and significance. To quote his words:
“The range of Anatolian historical monuments and documents
covers about five thousand years. The periods represented by
remains extend from the third millennium B. C., with its South
Cappadocian Cuneiform tablets to the fifteenth century A.
D., with its Seljuk architecture and inscriptions. Among the
subjects of history on which Anatolian remains throw light are:
Law, politics, economics, education, art, (including sculpture)
philosophy, literature.”
He goes on to say that the term “Anatolia,” as here used, covers all of
Asia Minor lying west of a line running north from Alexandretta to the
Black Sea, and a list of ancient cities and towns having mints of their
own in the fourteen classical districts included within that area, works
out as follows:
Lycia, Pamphylia and Pisidia 95 towns
Lycaonia, Isauria and Cilicia 82 ”
Phrygia and Galatia 61 ”
Bithynia, Paphlagonia and Pontus 34 ”
Ionia, Lydia and Caria 84 ”
---------
Total 356 ”
Among the sites already excavated, or earmarked for excavation, he
mentions Pergamon, Miletus, Sardis, Colophon, Priene, Cnidus; and among
those partly spoiled for excavation by their mere existence as modern
towns, are Smyrna, Halicarnassus, Adalia, Philadelphia, Thyatira and
Ankyra. The last named is now the Turkish capital, Angora. The most, if
not all, of the cities mentioned by Doctor Buckler were centers of Greek
or Christian culture, or both.
It is natural that the archeologists, in their anxiety to obtain
permission to work in Asia Minor with safety should be very careful to
say nothing that might offend the sensibilities of the Turk. They must
use all their diplomacy in dealing with him in order that as much as
possible may be unearthed of the treasures of Greek art and wisdom that
lie buried beneath the land now in the hands of the Khemalists, still wet
with the blood of the last survivors of an ancient civilization.
We have then, the following classes who find themselves in the same
situation with regard to the Turk, that is to say, who are prevented
from saying anything that might offend him: Certain missionaries; the
business men with interests still in Turkey; the concession hunters; the
diplomats; the archeologists. I believe that many of these are sincere in
their admiration of the Turk, founded on the supposition that his crimes
have been greatly exaggerated and were more or less justified.
This conviction I do not share and I am convinced that it would have
been better for the whole Western world and the Turks as well, if the
non-Moslem minorities had been protected, and Christian civilization
given a chance to develop in the Ottoman Empire.
[Illustration: Byron Settlement.
Houses near Athens erected for Asia Minor refugees by the Greek
Government.]
As to the great commercial and industrial activity which Professor
Buckler foresaw in 1922, the two following extracts from the press of
1925 are apropos. A writer in a February number of the _Gazetta del
Popolo_, of Turin, Italy, recently returned from Smyrna, says:
“The appearance of Smyrna is tragic. Even two years and a half
after the tragedy the ruins are untouched. For two kilometers
along the quay stretch the skeletons—the ghosts of houses.
And behind are more miles of streets, lined by other phantom
houses, like an endless morgue.
“This phantom city is a terrible symbol of all Turkey. That
which above all attracts attention is the disappearance of the
Greeks, swept out, extirpated from that city, which was their
metropolis in the Levant, and where they dominated all forms of
activity. The Armenians have also completely disappeared. The
Jews endure with difficulty the handicaps which they undergo in
their sphere of life.
“The Europeans try to make the best of a bad situation, but
those who are not supplied with ample capital, sufficient
to allow them to face a thousand daily vexations, which the
authorities inflict, are faced with the necessity of themselves
retiring.
“All forms of activity in Turkey during the past ages
were created by non-Turks. There was nothing of theirs
except the army. Ruthlessly the Turks condemn to death all
enterprise—commercial and industrial—in which they can not
themselves succeed.
“At present Turkey has only three custom houses—Constantinople,
Smyrna and Messina. Since the first of January of this year,
when the law concerning the customs went into effect, all
other ports have been obliged to suspend entirely their
traffic. It is not possible for commercial activity to
exist in them any more; traffic with Europe has practically
ceased entirely. All goods shipped to and from Turkey must
be unloaded at one of these towns; go through the vexatious
customs formalities, and be reloaded and reshipped to their
destinations.[18]
“The rug industry no longer exists. The Armenians and Greeks,
who were its personnel, have fled and settled in Rhoades,
Piræus, and some at Bari. There no longer remains any one in
Smyrna who knows how to make carpets.
“Ten years ago, by the Armenian massacres and deportations,
Asia Minor was laid desolate. To-day, the industrious
and productive portion of its population has completely
disappeared. It will soon become, if not a desert, a
wilderness. Everywhere along the coast are cities which were
abandoned to the Turks two years ago and are now completely
depopulated. The tillers of the soil have become shepherds and
nomads—the land no longer belongs to any one. “Within a few
years, if God does not work a miracle, and endow the Turks with
gifts which they have always lacked, Asia Minor will become a
desert in the heart of Mediterranean civilization.”
And a writer in a recent number of _Le Temps_ of Paris says:
“Constantinople is a dying city. The Bosphorus, once thronged
with the world’s shipping, is now all but deserted; the
offices of foreign business houses are winding up their
affairs; the banks will loan money only at the most exorbitant
rates. The troubles with the Greeks and Armenians have resulted
in the expulsion en masse of those peoples. Even the Turkish
population proper is emigrating in the hope of finding brighter
commercial prospects.
“As the prosperity of the great city declines, its ancient
rivals, Alexandria, Beirut, Saloniki and Piræus are receiving
the benefits of its former trade.”
How can it be otherwise?
Efficiency to massacre does not mean ability in industry and commerce,
and the fanatical destruction of great industrial masses has always
proved a serious blow to the prosperity of the country where the crime
has occurred, as witness the persecution of the Huguenots in France. In
Turkey it has meant ruin.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
ECHOES FROM SMYRNA
As throwing some light on the spirit in which the foregoing pages have
been written, I append the following letters, the first two from American
missionary associations, the third from a committee of prominent Turks at
Smyrna:
“AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS
Incorporated 1812
Congregational House,
14 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts.
March 22, 1923.
“Doctor George Horton, American Consul-General, Care Consular
Bureau, State Dept., Washington, D. C.
“Dear Doctor Horton:
“Enclosed is a letter written by Mr. Getchell in behalf of the
missionaries of Smyrna, addressed to Doctor Barton, to have
been handed to you on board the steamer which you in some way
failed to take.
“It was thus delayed and reached my hands only yesterday.
“Please accept the sentiments expressed although unfortunately
so long delayed in transmission. The original of the letter
addressed to Doctor Barton was delivered when the party reached
America and was read by him on his return from China.
“We are watching events in the Near East with the greatest
interest and, as one of the missionaries has said, ‘with hopes
that scarce know themselves from fear.’
“I have heard that the American Consulate is again functioning
in Smyrna and it is possible that you are there once more. If
so, it will be a comfort and a relief of many persons whose
interests are still largely centered in that city.
“I trust that you and your family have maintained your health
despite the terrible strain upon you and that you will be able
to continue in the splendid cooperation with our missionaries
that has characterized your work in the past.
“Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) “Ernest W. Biggs.”
The letter referred to as “enclosed” was as follows:
“Athens, Greece, October 12, 1922.
“Reverend James L. Barton, D. D., Secretary of the American
Board, 14 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.
“Dear Doctor Barton:
“At a recent station meeting of the Smyrna missionaries now
refugees in the city of Athens (numbering fourteen adults),
a vote was passed recognizing the exceedingly helpful and
sympathetic services of our Consul-General, Doctor Horton,
during the days of the late Smyrna tragedy. The vote also
expressed the desire that a copy of this letter be sent to the
State Department, Washington, D. C., and one also to Doctor
Horton himself.
“During those days of Turkish fire, pillage and massacre,
which laid the beautiful city of Smyrna in ashes and rendered
homeless her Christian population of not less than 500,000
people, including the refugees from the surrounding towns and
villages, Doctor Horton passed through more trying, exacting
and dangerous experiences than I could imagine any official of
the United States Government, doing service abroad, has ever
been called upon to undergo.
“Under such circumstances, when our American Consulate was
crowded with helpless human beings, all looking to the consul
for help and advice, Consul Horton kept cool but never cold.
His warm sympathetic heart went out to each sufferer, and aid
was extended wherever possible.
“The missionaries are especially grateful for the assistance
rendered by Doctor Horton in helping to rescue teachers and
pupils from the schools, with the result that not one teacher
from the American Girls’ Institute, at Smyrna, is missing; and
most of the girls, who were in the burning building, have been
saved.
“Since the flight to Athens, Doctor Horton has been most
energetic in helping to feed, clothe and house the needy
refugees.
“We wish to put on record our appreciation of Doctor Horton’s
brave and sympathetic efforts for ourselves, as well as the
natives of the city.
“On behalf of the missionaries of Smyrna Station, I remain,
“Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) “Dana K. Getchell.”
The third and following letter was received by me in Washington, August
20, 1923, in the Turkish language. Among the signers are Ilimdar Zade
Edhem, President of the Islamic Emigration Committee and Hali Zeki,
proprietor of the well-known _Shark Gazette_.
My constant policy during the long time that I was in the Near East, was
to befriend, in so far as my official position permitted, all who might
be in need of help, irrespective of race or religion.
“30 July, 1339 (Turkish date)
“Since the appointment of His Excellency, George Horton as
Consul-General of the United States in Smyrna, His Excellency
has won the heart of the whole Turkish nation by the sympathy
and good will which His Excellency has always shown every
Turkish man.
“During the Greek occupancy of our country His Excellency, Mr.
George Horton, gave full protection and kindly treatment to
those of the Turks who went to him for protection and the right
of humane existence.
“We therefore beg to express our heartiest thanks to His
Excellency, Mr. George Horton, for all the interest and kindly
services rendered by him for the Turkish nation, which has also
created in our hearts a deep and eternal affection for his
honorable nation.
(Signed)
“Ilimdar Zade Edhem, President of
the Islamic Emigration Committee
Sahlebdji Zade Midhat, Merchant
Hussein Djemal, Chemist
Beshir Zade, Merchant
Ali Rifki
Mehmet Nourri, Carpet Merchant
Hali Zeki, Proprietor of _Shark Gazette_
Hassan Fewzi, Lawyer
Shaih Kadri
Eyyub Sabri, Merchant
Mehmet Emin, Merchant
Mehmet Hamdi, Merchant
Kesreli Hadji Ali, Tobacco Merchant
Berkeli Zade Hadji Bedriddin
Mkr. Ahmet
Kantardji Zade
Mustapha Nouriddin
Mehmet Zeki, Hat Merchant.”
Of these and of many other Turks that I have known personally, I have the
most friendly and even affectionate recollections. I wish them well and
would gladly welcome an occasion that would allow me to be of service to
them again.
It is necessary, however, for the honor of the Turkish race that some
of its members should denounce the massacres and publicly declare that
they are and have always been opposed to them. If the Koran does not
advocate the putting to death of the unbeliever as some of its expounders
maintain, then it should seem indispensable to the good name of
Mohammedanism in general, that all the other Moslems should denounce the
Turkish massacres.
The above testimonial was forwarded to me by Mr. Rufus Lane, formerly
American consul at Smyrna, who writes among other things:
“I thought it would be a pleasure to you to have as a souvenir
of your stay here, a few lines from some of your Turkish
friends, attesting their sympathy for you.
“One man declares that you saved the lives of his entire family
in 1916, by providing them with food, a doctor and a nurse when
his mother, his wife and three children were all down with
typhus. I know the man well, as also the circumstances, which
no doubt you have forgotten.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
CONCLUSION
The outstanding facts in the preceding narrative are the following:
1. Smyrna was burned by the Turks, as the concluding, at present, act in
a consistent policy that has been shaping Moslem history and expansion
for centuries, and especially Turkish history since the coming to power
of the Young Turks, as displayed in the “Turkifying” murders, tortures
and persecutions in Macedonia that led to the First Balkan War (1912);
the killing and driving from their homes of the Greeks of Asia Minor
during the period just preceding the outbreak of the World War and
the destruction of their flourishing villages, (as described by the
Frenchman Manciet, writing of the scenes at Phocæa); the deportation
of Greeks, men, women and children in the midwinter of 1916, from the
Black Sea region, forcing them to walk in the inclement weather till
many thousands perished (as mentioned by Dana K. Getchell, in his letter
given above); the doing to death of between eight hundred thousand and a
million Armenians in 1915-16; the burning of Smyrna and the massacre of
thousands of its inhabitants in 1922.
2. Smyrna was burned by Turkish soldiers at a time when they were in full
and complete possession of the city, and the fires were applied first in
the Armenian quarter, in which the Turks had been plundering, murdering
and raping for several days and where no Armenian was to be found, with
the possible exception of such survivors as might be hiding in cellars.
3. Credible non-Greek or non-Armenian witnesses testified to the manner
of the burning of Smyrna.
4. A Turkish soldier poured petroleum, or petroleum mixed with gasoline,
in the street before the American consular building, causing the fire to
be led up to and communicated to the building and endangering the lives
of those within.
5. The burning of Smyrna and the massacre and abuse of its Christian
inhabitants in the year of our Lord, 1922, was made possible through
the mutual jealousies and conflicting commercial interests of certain
Christian powers, and the actual aid, moral and material, furnished by
some of them to the Turks.
6. The Turks committed their fearful acts against the Christians and
humanity in general in the full conviction that they would meet with no
opposition nor even criticism from the United States. They were led to
this belief by a loud pro-Turk and anti-Christian propaganda carried on
in the American press by certain concession hunters, and other interested
writers.
7. No Gladstonian note of horror, protest or revulsion has as yet issued
from any official American source, though the Turks have surpassed
anything that Gladstone ever dreamed of.
8. The Turks can not regain the confidence and respect of the civilized
world until they repent sincerely of their crimes and make all
restitution in their power.
9. Concealing such deeds as have been recounted in these chapters or
misrepresenting them with the purpose of obtaining material advantages
or saving property, reveals a low state of morality, consistent with the
spirit of this commercial age.
10. One of the many reasons why Mohammedanism is outstripping
Christianity in the latter’s ancient birthplace and territory, and in
general wherever the two religions meet face to face, is that Christ
has been unworthily followed by the people who are sending out the
missionaries.
11. Church people in America should become aware of the fact that
American missionaries in Turkey can not convert Turks, nor conduct
religious exercises at which Turks are present and that the schools in
the Ottoman Empire are now being conducted on that basis; and that,
if they should convert any Turks, the latter would be killed, and the
missionaries and their buildings be in danger of attack.
But the chief lesson of these pages is the growing feebleness of
Christianity—divided, insincere, permeated with materialism; undermined
and befuddled, in much of its old sturdy and childlike credence, by
modern scientific discovery.
Whoever has attended, as I have done at the city of Washington, a general
meeting of missionaries, can not have failed to be impressed with the
devotion, enthusiasm and spiritual fervor of those noble men and women
who carry the beautiful doctrines of Christ to heathen lands. I saw them
and heard them soon after my return from the Near East and the Smyrna
horror, and I could scarcely refrain from rising to my feet and crying:
“Come home and save us, before it is everlastingly too late!”
THE END
APPENDIX
The fearful and cataclysmic drama of anti-Christ unrolled in these pages
is still developing, in all its phases. In the _Christian Advocate_ of
June 18, 1925, appeared the following editorial, as the leading article,
which I quote in full:
A NAME! A NAME!
What’s in a name? asks the poet, as if “Nothing” must be the
inevitable answer. Yet it is the experience of mankind that
the proper answer would be “Everything.” For around the name
cluster all the qualities of the thing named. The color and
scent of the queen of flowers flash out before the imagination
at the very name of “rose.” So precious are the names of
articles of commerce that we find manufacturers of soaps and
tooth-pastes, gasolines and lubricants, bread, salves and
cigarettes, paying large sums to secure a distinctive name for
their special brand, and registering it with the government and
defending their sole right to its use with all the authority
the laws confer. Shut your eyes and let some one speak the
words “Ford” and “Rolls-Royce,” and no more ask what’s in a
name?
There is a Name that is—or must we say was?—above every name.
What has happened to it?
A remarkable thing has recently taken place in Turkey. The
government called into consultation Asa Kent Jennings, an
American resident of Asia Minor (whose name is still borne
with honor on the rolls of the Northern New York Conference of
the Methodist Episcopal Church). During the war between the
Turks and Greeks he had displayed qualities of character which
won him the good opinion of both nations. He was told that
the Turkish Republic was seeking to discover some educational
method or social agency that would promote the physical,
intellectual and moral excellence of the young men and women
of the nation. In conference with him a plan was worked out
for a system of associations or clubs in large centers, where
everything which distinguishes the threefold program of the
Young Men’s Christian Association shall be put in practice
under the official patronage and with the support of the
Turkish Government, which is Mohammedan in religion, but under
the direction of Mr. Jennings, who is a “Y” secretary and a
Methodist preacher. The first of these clubs is to be opened
at Angora, the new capital, and the man in charge will be
another Methodist preacher, John B. Ascham, of West Ohio, whose
illuminating contributions on the European political situation
since the war have appeared in these columns from time to
time. But it was stipulated by the Angora government these
institutions, though redolent of the spirit of Christ, must not
bear the name of Christian. That is a fundamental condition.
Everything Christian, except the label!
How can this be? The explanation is obvious. From the time of
the Crusades, when the wearers of the Cross clashed with the
wearers of the Crescent, the name of Christian has been forever
tarnished with memories of massacre and war. None of the fruits
of the Spirit, the virtues which the Western world likes to
connect with the word Christian, come to the mind of the Turk
when he sees that name. Thus Christianity, named for the Elder
Brother of all mankind, is for a whole nation synonymous with
racial and religious enmity.
There are European nations where the name that should be above
every name has been dragged in the dust. A London writer
who was commissioned to create a Christian literature for
the boys of Czecho-Slovakia proposed to initiate a series
of hero-biographies with a life of Jesus Christ. A man who
was better acquainted with the people of that country warned
him that a life of Christ would kill the series. During the
long period of Austrian tyranny over these lands the Church
of Rome had so identified itself with the ruling despotism,
that everything bearing the Christian name shared the evil
reputation of that partnership of oppression and superstition.
The Kaiser was gone and the Church disestablished, but a
book with the label of Christian would still be viewed with
suspicion by the people, as being propaganda for their former
masters. Consequently the series will start off with Abraham
Lincoln because groups calling themselves Christian have made
the name of Christ a reproach.
Mahatma Gandhi of India tells the missionaries that Christ wins
him, but Christianity as exemplified by Western political,
social and economic standards he does not recognize as a
New Testament product. China looks lovingly toward Christ,
but becomes suspicious of Christian nations when they are
represented by warships, machine guns, and extra-territorial
courts, or by predatory foreign business corporations, wringing
the last cent from coolie labor at the expense of decency and
life itself. “If this is Christ,” they say, “let us stick to
Confucius!”
Nor is it necessary to go abroad to find the golden name of
Christ debased and counterfeited. The purity of the coinage
is entrusted to every one who has named for himself the name
of Christ. The excellence of His precepts is sure to be judged
by the performance of His professed followers. Many a sermon
has failed to convince, convict and convert the sinner,
chiefly because the sinner could point to men and women in the
congregation whose lives, known and read by their associates,
tended to discredit the minister’s appeal. Thus, the Name
before which every knee should bow commands no homage.
The nation or the individual that takes the name of Christian
incurs a weighty responsibility. In some degree the Name
of Christ is committed to them. Upon the manner in which
that person, church, society, or nation discharges its
responsibility will measurably depend the esteem which others
will give to that Name.
I have read this editorial time and time again, and all that I can get
from it is that the name of Christ, of a soap, of a tooth-paste, of a
salve, of a grease, of a cigarette, should be used as long as it produces
results, but when no longer potent, should be dropped. This is certainly
what has been officially done in Turkey with the Name. What the church
people of America should understand is that Mohammedanism is marching
on with firebrand and scimitar, the greatest enemy of Christianity in
the world, and that dropping the Name of Christ and the teaching of the
Master, by great Christian organizations, is another victory for the
Prophet. No sophistry, however ingenious, can obscure this fact. Let us
hope that this move on their part is the prelude to a great awakening and
revulsion on the part of Western Christians:
And as Peter was beneath in the palace, there cometh one of the
maids of the high priest:
And when she saw Peter warming himself, she looked upon him,
and said, And thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth.
But he denied, saying, I know not, neither understand I what
thou sayest. And he went out into the porch; and the cock crew.
But Peter afterward testified in quite a different manner. There can
be no working for Christ in any place where his Name is dropped. That
concession is in itself a victory for the Powers of darkness.
In the press of October 25, 1925, appeared an article by George
Seldes, describing the persecution of the Christian Chaldeans, on the
Turkish-British frontier, near Mosul. It was announced as the first of a
series, but the other articles have not been published. It is so similar
to the other well authenticated happenings of a like nature described
in the foregoing pages, that it forms a logical continuation of the
narrative. I quote from the _Washington Post_ of October 25, 1925:
Mosul, Mesopotamia, October 18 (By Mail to Cairo).—In a
beautiful village oasis called Zakho, on the British-Turkish
frontier in the biblical country, amidst peaceful
surroundings, I found witnesses to-day to a terrible tragedy
which Mohammedan Arabs as well as Christians asked me to relate
to the Christian world.
It is the story of the deportation of eight thousand Chaldean
Christians from the frontier, of their march into the interior
of Turkey, of how the Turks murdered men, violated women and
threw infants over precipices. It is a story of suffering
unparalleled in recent times and every word here written is
sworn to on the Bible by chieftains of villages and their
priests and attested by Archbishop Timothy, their spiritual
father.
OLD AND ILL SLAIN
“Will the Christian world believe that such things can happen
now?” asked Archbishop Timothy as the Mukhtar—or sheif—of
Murga, knelt and told his story. What the Mukhtar told in
Arabic was this:
“As God is my witness and by the blood of Christ I swear that
on the march north the Turks killed five men who, on account of
their age, could not keep up with the procession. Three women
who were ill they stoned to death. On the first night we camped
near a fountain. The Turkish officers and soldiers put out the
lights and seized all the young pretty girls and carried them
to the fields. All night we heard the screams and cries of the
girls and women. They clouded the skies with their mournful
cries and it was like the day of judgment.
“On the third day one of the women was in the pangs of
childbirth. The Turks waited until the baby was born. Other
women took the baby, but the mother was too feeble to march, so
she was shot. At the Ozozan Mountains three men and two women
who tried to escape were shot to death. Their young orphaned
children were then killed.”
This statement, in colder official form, I saw later in records
sworn to and attested by the British governor of Mesopotamia.
A letter has just been received by me (October, 1925) from Doctor George
E. White, President of the ill-fated missionary college at Marsovan,
Turkey. This important and once flourishing institution has been reopened
at Saloniki, Greece. I quote the following from its circular:
The refugee peoples of the Near East deserve all the sympathy
they receive from American friends. This tragic “movement
of populations” is the greatest of its kind in all history.
There are 160,000 refugees in the city of Saloniki, 800,000
in the province of Macedonia, and 1,500,000 in the whole of
Greece.... The Greek Government has revised its laws for the
express purpose of welcoming American education.... Saloniki
is building mightily at the present time; it is the point
where the Greek seaman from the South meets the Slav plowman
from the North; Moslem Jew and Christian have felt at home for
many generations; Saloniki is moving forward under a Christian
government reestablished in 1912, after alien domination since
1430.
Let us hope that this Christian college will “build mightily” in its
new habitat, where it has a great and sacred mission: so to diffuse the
spirit of the Master through the Balkans that race hatreds will diminish
in those regions, wars cease, and the remnants of the glorious old
Byzantine Empire will be able to reestablish that Christian civilization
which the Turk has driven out of Asia Minor. Or, if that is too much, let
us at least hope that the influence of its teachings may be sufficiently
great to prevent any of the Balkan States from joining with the Moslems
or the Bolsheviks to destroy their neighbors.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Martyred at Smyrna, September, 1922.
[2] Professor Davis’ _Short History of the Near East_.
[3] Published by the Anglo-Hellenic League, No. 49.
[4] In all seventy-four sentences were passed on those convicted of
disturbing public order on the days immediately following the landing
of the Greek military authorities: three of death; four of hard labor
for life; two of hard labor for a term of years; twelve of long and
fifty-three of shorter terms of imprisonment. Of the seventy-four
sentenced, forty-eight were Greeks; thirteen Turks; twelve were Armenians
and one a Jew. The three persons executed were Greeks, one of them a
soldier.
[5] While I was in Saloniki during the war, the American Y. M. C. A. was
greatly aided, both financially and morally, by the Greek authorities,
both Mr. Venizelos and the Greek archbishop being friendly to this
institution and present at the dedication of its new house.
The American missionaries, who had an agricultural college and a school
there, were at first viewed with suspicion by the Greeks for the reason
that they all spoke Bulgarian and continued to preach in that language
after the Greek occupation. I brought the missionaries and the Greek
authorities together and since then the said authorities have been most
benevolent to the missionaries and helpful to them in many ways. At my
invitation the late King Alexander came to Saloniki to visit the various
missionary and educational institutions and assured them of his friendly
interest and support.
[6] A teacher in the secondary Turkish school attached to a mosque.
[7] _A Short History of the Near East_, page 393.
[8] _The Occident and the Orient_, page 58.
[9] September 20, 1922.
[10] The entire report can be found in the _Gibraltar Diocesan Gazette_,
No. 2, vol. 6, November, 1922.
[11] Page 393.
[12] Their own transport being sadly depleted.
[13] Lewis Heck had been closely associated with the Chester interests,
and Admiral Chester’s son was also at Lausanne.—R. H.
[14] _A Survey of Southern Illiteracy_, published by the Education Board,
Southern Baptist Convention, Birmingham, 1923.
[15] Draycott’s _Mahomet_, page 234 et sq.
[16] Draycott, 253-254.
[17] _Occident and Orient_, Chirol, pp. 65-67.
[18] This system of concentrating the business of the country at these
three places creates the fictitious appearance of increased activity at
these ports, at the expense of all the others. Macri, which formerly had
fifteen thousand inhabitants, has now a miserable two thousand survivors.
The same is also true of Adalia, formerly important, and now completely
dead.Project Gutenberg
The blight of Asia : $b An account of the systematic extermination of Christian populations by Mohammedans and of the culpability of certain great powers; with the true story of the burning of Smyrna
Horton, George
Chimera68
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