> a ~ ow 
 oe OO sii = —- > 
 ~~ ees — me le 
 een ne Spl: ees 
 ener sara e Wet. ee 
 
 SS eee 
 
 ae a aie es Ee 
 
 THE LIBRARIES 
 
 Columbia Gniversity 
 inthe City of Hew Park 
 
THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 IN GREECE AND TURKEY 
 
 A STUDY IN THE CONTACT OF CIVILISATIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE 
 
 ‘For we are also His offspring.’ 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 f BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 1923 
 
«4 
 «| 
 y 
 | 
 | 
 c 
 “tag 
 : x 
 . 
 J 
 (Tar 4 } | 
 { \ - 2 
 ]3@ 
 3 we 4 
 4S éf ee ff 
 a te Ce we f 
 2 a 
 ihe an 
 C4 a 
 
 ; 4 
 ;% \ | 
 j . ' 
 { 
 9 
 , emf 
 “ed .¥ ee 
 : ae <) dy J | 
 , = 
 re 0? — | 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by T. and A, ConstaBLEe LTtp 
 at the University Press, Edinburgh 
 
ss 
 
 af 
 
 TO 
 THE PRESIDENT AND FACULTY OF THE 
 AMERICAN COLLEGE FOR GIRLS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY 
 
 —_ m 
 
 THE AUTHOR AND HIS WIFE 
 IN GRATITUDE FOR THEIR HOSPITALITY 
 AND IN ADMIRATION OF THEIR NEUTRAL-MINDEDNESS 
 IN CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH NEUTRALITY IS 
 
 ‘HARD AND RARE’ 
 
 ——— 7 —~—= —— 
 
q 
 
 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 Tue preface to the first edition of this book was written on 
 the 22nd March 1922, the day on which the Foreign Ministers 
 of the Principal Allied Powers met at Paris in a last vain 
 attempt to arrive at a settlement with Turkey and Greece 
 before the catastrophe. I am writing this preface to the 
 second edition on the 20th November of the same year, the 
 opening day of the Peace Conference at Lausanne. During 
 the intervening eight months so much has happened that 
 I must explain why I have not made greater changes in the 
 text of my work. 
 
 On re-reading it, I find that I have comparatively little 
 to correct, partly for the melancholy reason that I have 
 been a true prophet of evil, and partly because the book is 
 mainly a record of historical events which, having once 
 happened, are irrevocable, and does not present a political 
 programme coloured by the situation of the moment at 
 which it was written, and therefore stultified by subsequent 
 developments. In the final chapter, I ventured to draw 
 some general conclusions (pp. 320-2) from the facts which 
 I had passed in review, and to follow them up with some 
 still more general suggestions. I have left these unaltered, 
 since they appear to me to be if anything better founded 
 now than they were when I originally put them forward. 
 
 Again, I have little to add, for the events with which I 
 dealt possess a certain inner unity. I carried my history 
 of the recent relations between Greece, Turkey, and the 
 West down to the autumn of 1921, when Greece failed in 
 
 vii 
 
Viil THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 her supreme effort to break the military power of Turkish 
 Nationalism in Anatolia. I was writing during the ensuing 
 period of stalemate, when the indifference of the West 
 towards this Eastern tragedy was particularly profound. 
 All the time, I was conscious of the shadow of the thunder- 
 cloud, and was making the most of the unnatural lull which 
 assuredly portended the bursting of the storm. My object 
 was to put on record, for the benefit of Western readers, 
 those facts and events in the East to which the majority 
 of them had been, and were, giving little or no attention, 
 but which might arouse their curiosity as soon as the 
 lightning began to strike unpleasantly near their own 
 houses. My subject, in fact, was the unnoticed ante- 
 cedents of a catastrophe which was going to give people 
 a shock when it came to pass. 
 
 This subject, I feel, remains of interest in itself. The 
 fundamental problems of the ‘Western Question’ are 
 illustrated by it a good deal better than they are by the 
 subsequent melodramatic dénowement, in which the subtler 
 lights and shadows are blurred, and in which almost every 
 event has been merely an inevitable consequence of these 
 previous developments that I have tried to analyse. Nor 
 does this epilogue need a historian. The rest of the acts 
 of my dramatis personae, are they not written, week by week, 
 in the headlines of the Press and in the telegraphic 
 despatches of a goodly company of special correspondents ? 
 For once in a way, the indifference of the West has been 
 broken through ; the pachyderm has been pricked into a 
 momentary consciousness of the existence in his proximity 
 of other varieties of the genus homo insipiens; and the 
 unfortunate inhabitants of the regions which the storm has 
 ravaged up to the moment—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and 
 Western residents—may at least congratulate themselves 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION ix 
 
 that in the process of being destroyed by Western states- 
 manship they have shaken one or two of the mighty out of 
 their seats and have given the Western public a bad quarter 
 of an hour. 
 
 Who, indeed, would have believed beforehand that the 
 tragedy in Anatolia would become good copy for a news- 
 paper ‘stunt,’ or that the Conservative Party in Great 
 Britain would be able to turn it to account for getting rid 
 of Mr. Lloyd George? Certainly the British and French 
 Governments imagined that they could make pretty much 
 what mess they pleased in the East at the expense of the 
 local peoples, and few observers expected that they would 
 
 play their game so clumsily as to get themselves into serious - 
 
 trouble with their constituents at home. Personally (I will 
 confess it) I supposed, almost up to the last moment, that 
 our respective statesmen, having been warned since May 
 1919 of the impending catastrophe by their able diplomatic, 
 military, and naval representatives on the spot, would. be 
 induced by the instinct of self-preservation to patch up 
 some kind of a settlement before the worst occurred. I 
 never dreamed that they would allow their rivalries and 
 prejudices to paralyse them until the Greek moral broke, 
 the remainder of Western Anatolia was devastated, the 
 Entente was brought to the verge of rupture, and our own 
 country came within an ace of a new Turco-British war. 
 However, the incredible has happened, and it will not fail 
 to leave its mark on the public memory. 
 
 I therefore feel myself absolved from overloading this 
 book with a réchauffé of what everybody knows and will 
 not forget in a hurry. Accordingly, I have contented 
 myself with bringing up to date the table of dates at the 
 end, which several students of Eastern politics have found 
 useful (as they have been kind enough to tell me), and with 
 
x THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 correcting errors which have been brought to my knowledge 
 by reviewers and private correspondents. I have left the 
 additional notes where they originally stood, in order to 
 avoid the labour of re-indexing; and to make room for 
 such matter as I have added, I have somewhat regretfully 
 omitted the list of books, which was meant to lead on from 
 my own essay to the wider aspects of my subject. 
 
 At the risk of taking myself too seriously, I must now 
 turn to details and say something regarding such of my 
 forecasts as have proved more or less correct, and other 
 points which require some comment, addition, or modifica- 
 tion. I must do this in order to justify myself for leaving 
 my text practically as it stands, but I can honestly say that, 
 so far as I have proved right, I get little satisfaction out of 
 being able to say ‘I told you so.’ The reader will notice 
 that all my prophecies of evil were made contingent upon 
 the Powers failing to take the action necessary to avert 
 them; and I did my best (though of course the political 
 influence of private individuals without organisations 
 behind them is infinitesimal) to render them abortive 
 myself by speaking and writing, both while I was abroad 
 and after my return, whenever I had the opportunity. 
 During my journeys I acquired an affection not only for 
 Smyrna (which had an indescribable charm of its own) but 
 for Manysa, Bergama, Aivali, and other smaller places in 
 the hinterland, and I made friends with a number of people 
 of almost every denomination and nationality. These 
 beautiful towns are now desolated, these amiable people 
 killed, exiled, ruined, or tormented by the most appalling 
 mental and physical agonies, and this through the wanton- 
 ness of Western statesmen who hardened their hearts and 
 stopped their ears against their own expert advisers. In 
 these circumstances it gives me no satisfaction that in spite 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi 
 
 of myself I have in many cases prophesied right, and my 
 only feeling besides sorrow for the victims is one of indigna- 
 tion that the real criminals should have got off so cheaply. 
 After causing hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings 
 to lose everything that makes life worth living, they have 
 themselves lost nothing more irretrievable than office and 
 reputation. . 
 
 The following are, I think, the chief points on which, in 
 the first edition, I anticipated developments which have 
 come to pass—or, more frequently, have merely come into 
 notoriety—in the interval, and in regard to which, changes 
 in the text therefore seem unnecessary. Throughout 
 (e.g. on pp. 44, 104, 106), I maintained that the ancient 
 Anglo-French rivalry in the East was not only still in full 
 vigour, but that it was one of the dominant and most 
 dangerous factors in the present situation. I need not 
 amplify this by describing here the tension between the two 
 countries over Eastern Thrace and Chanak in the earlier 
 stages of the present crisis. I emphasised (e.g. on pp. 56-60) 
 the profound repugnance of the Western public (a repugnance 
 which transcends the geographical frontiers between Italy, 
 France, and Great Britain) towards fighting on in the East 
 when once the fighting had ceased in Europe. At the time 
 when I wrote, this repugnance had already produced the 
 Franklin-Bouillon Agreement ; since then it has made it 
 good business for English newspapers to conduct a ‘stop- 
 the-war ’ agitation and has clouded the political prospects 
 of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill. While 
 the British Government, in a half-hearted way, have been 
 taking the French to task for treachery, and the French the 
 British for war-mongering, the public in the two countries 
 has been actuated (and itself actuating the Governments, 
 whenever it has come to the point) by the same fundamental 
 
xii THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 determination to preserve the peace. The only difference 
 is that the French became conscious earlier than we did of 
 our common state of mind—and this not at all because they 
 are a cleverer or a more logical nation, but simply because 
 the Turkish Nationalist Army made hostile contact with 
 the French garrisons in Cilicia and Syria as early as January 
 1920, while the Greeks kindly interposed between them and 
 the British garrisons at Chanak and Constantinople until 
 September 1922. When the question ‘ Will you fight 2?’ 
 was put in this concrete form, the British ‘No’ proved as 
 emphatic as the French ‘No’ had been. There is not much 
 to choose between our two nations in respect of common- 
 sense, or between our two Governments touching the lack 
 of it. I also prophesied that the game of using the local 
 nationalities as pawns, to which both our Governments have 
 had recourse, would prove very poor economy (p. 62). In 
 the light of what has happened, would we not eagerly cancel 
 the services which the Greek Army has rendered to us during 
 the last four years, if only we could at the same time avoid 
 the damage which the Turkish Army has inflicted or still 
 may inflict upon us? It were better indeed for the British 
 Empire that the Greek Army had never set foot in Anatolia 
 rather than that the Turkish Army should thereby be 
 restored (as it has been) to life; and it were better for the 
 French Republic, with her economic interests in Turkey 
 and her Islamic provinces in Africa, that Great Britain 
 should have established her ascendency at the Straits 
 rather than that both Powers should be bundled out of 
 Constantinople, bag and baggage, by the victorious protégé 
 of one of them. 
 
 The danger that Western civilisation may be frozen out 
 of Anatolia (p. 155) has only given place to the actualities 
 of a more rapid destruction by fire. The fate of Smyrna 
 
 2 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xiii 
 
 hangs over Constantinople, and the Capitulations are laid 
 upon the conference-table at Lausanne. 
 
 As for the Caliphate (pp. 29-31 and 182-5), I was right 
 in pointing out the divergence between the policies of the 
 Turkish Nationalists and of the Indian Muslims, and in 
 hinting that they must sooner or later come into collision. 
 The flight of the Sultan-Caliph on a British battleship from 
 Dolma-Baghché to Malta and his installation there in the 
 Artillery Mess is a welcome piece of comic relief, by which 
 the disgruntled potentate has caused the maximum amount 
 of embarrassment not only to both the sheep and the goats 
 in his spiritual flock but to his Christian ‘ persecutors and/or 
 protectors.’ Certain English publicists have dwelt with 
 pardonable but blundering malice on the bétise which they 
 imagine Angora to have committed and on the ludicrous 
 position in which they conceive that this has placed the 
 Indian Caliphate Committee. Undoubtedly the latter were 
 ill-advised in selecting their somewhat academic war-cry 
 without acquainting themselves with the realities of Turkish 
 politics, and the Angora Government may possibly have 
 been rash in ignoring Indian susceptibilities. But since 
 a quarrel over the Caliphate between Turkey and India 
 could not possibly work together for good to any party 
 except the British Empire, while the two Muslim parties 
 concerned at present decidedly prefer to work together for 
 our undoing, it is childish to suppose that they will allow 
 themselves to be frustrated by logic or consistency, which 
 have never carried the day against sentiment or utility, either 
 in Islam or in Christendom. The Turks and the Indians will 
 certainly continue to feel themselves brothers because 
 they have a common bugbear to hold them together 
 and no common frontier over which to fall out, and 
 their respective theories concerning the Caliphate will be 
 
xiv THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 accommodated to these realities without undue difficulty 
 or delay. 
 
 My readers are likely to agree with me now, if not before, 
 that the Turkish National Pact is a more interesting—and, 
 I may even venture to add, more important—document 
 than the Treaty of Sévres (p. 188); and that the failure of 
 the Greek campaign in Anatolia in the autumn of 1921 
 marked a turn in a tide which had been flowing for over 
 200 years (p. 211). On the technical military question, I 
 conjectured that the Graeco-Turkish war would not be 
 terminated by a military decision, but either by diplomatic 
 intervention or by a break-down of moral, and that, in the 
 latter event, the Greeks’ moral would break down first 
 (pp. 212 and 239-46). This conjecture has, I think, been 
 borne out. At any rate, my information is to the effect 
 that the sudden expulsion of the Greek Army from Anatolia 
 in the course of August and September 1922 was due to a 
 failure of nerve and will rather than to inferiority in numbers, 
 equipment, positions, generalship, or any other military 
 factor. 
 
 I also prophesied (p. 299) that the Greek forces (regular 
 and irregular) would eclipse their previous record of atrocities 
 and devastations if they left the country under such condi- 
 tions, and that—under the same conditions—a civilian 
 Greek population numbering at least half a million would 
 leave with them (pp. 241-2), partly in order to escape 
 reprisals, and partly because national antipathies in the 
 Near and Middle East have reached a point at which no 
 nationality can go on living under the government of its 
 neighbours. ‘These two forecasts, the most melancholy of 
 all, have unhappily been more than fulfilled. The climax 
 of misery has come at the end, and the philanthropists of 
 the West are staggering under the burden which the states- 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XV 
 
 men of the West have cast upon their shoulders. America 
 alone has the resources for coping with the need, and she 
 cannot and will not attempt this unless the political passions 
 of the exasperated local nationalities and of the discordant 
 West-European Powers are brought under restraint by some 
 sense of decency, if not of humanity. Given a fair field, 
 however, America might perform a noble and characteristic 
 service by helping the survivors among the minorities, who 
 have lost their homes through an all-pervading national 
 fanaticism, to strike fresh roots within the frontiers of their 
 respective national states. In this part of the world, at 
 any rate, there are hardly any minorities left to protect in 
 situ. The main hope for their survival now lies in inter- 
 migration and re-plantation, and these processes require 
 time, capital, organisation, and the good offices of a neutral 
 party trusted by both sides. If America does not assume 
 this role, the work will be left undone, and hundreds of 
 thousands of innocent men, women, and children will perish 
 —innocent Turks in the devastated Anatolian war-zone, 
 innocent Greeks and Armenians in the refugee camps on the 
 other side of the Aegean. Innocent the vast majority of 
 these victims undoubtedly are, for the direct or indirect 
 authors of atrocities are seldom overtaken by poetic justice 
 and generally manage to deflect the reprisals for their 
 misdoings upon the heads of those who have had no part or 
 lot in them. The politicians and the chettés are unlikely 
 to be found among these homeless and starving masses, and 
 we cannot harden our hearts against their misery in the 
 comfortable belief that they are suffering for their own 
 crimes. Neither did they sin, nor their fathers, that the 
 tower has fallen upon them ; but we shall not have clear 
 consciences if we do not do our utmost to extricate them 
 from the ruins and then to buttress the surviving buildings. 
 
xvi THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 There are other points on which I must make some 
 comments and additions. I was premature in suggesting 
 that the Rumans, Serbs, and Bulgars had seen the last of 
 Turkey and Islam (p. 27). The re-establishment of Turkish 
 sovereignty in Eastern Thrace has restored the old Turco- 
 Bulgarian frontier, and the Turkish claim to Western Thrace 
 threatens to keep Bulgaria shut out from the open sea as 
 effectively as she has been excluded from it during the last 
 two years by the Greek occupation of the same province. 
 The Greek break-down brought Bulgaria to a parting of the 
 ways. She might have done what she did in 1915 and 
 have thrown in her lot with Turkey in order to get her 
 revenge upon her European neighbours. This policy had 
 its attractions, for behind Turkey stood Slavonic Russia, 
 and Bulgaria had a chance of making favourable terms for 
 herself by acting as the strategic link between them—the 
 position she occupied in 1915-18 between Turkey and the 
 Central Powers. Instead of this, however, she has made 
 overtures to the Little Entente, and this time it appears 
 that she has not knocked at their door in vain. Rumania, 
 at any rate, with Turkey at the Straits again and Russia 
 threatening her on the Dniester, cannot afford to let 
 Bulgaria go over into the enemy camp, and the reward for 
 Bulgaria’s friendship will no doubt be the support of her 
 claim to an outlet on the Aegean. Nor is this claim likely 
 any longer to be opposed by Greece, to whom Western 
 Thrace was chiefly of value as a corridor to the larger 
 Eastern portion of the province. Now that Eastern Thrace 
 is lost, it cannot pay Greece to prolong her feud with Bul- 
 garia by denying her facilities in a strip of territory that is 
 vital to Bulgaria and of secondary importance to Greece 
 herself. On the contrary, it is to the advantage of Greece 
 that a demilitarised zone should be interposed between 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XVii 
 
 European Greece and European Turkey. Probably Greece 
 will now be less concerned to thwart Bulgaria than to follow 
 her example ; for she, on her side, cannot afford to remain 
 outside the Little Entente when Bulgaria has become a 
 member of it. Thus the return of Turkey to Europe has 
 brought the ideal of a South-East European union nearer 
 towards realisation than would have been thought possible 
 a few months ago, and this constructive (though quite un- 
 intentional) consequence of Turkey’s successes at least 
 counterbalances the drawbacks of her return to the Euro- 
 pean side of the Straits. The most hopeful feature of this 
 Balkan rapprochement is that it is a spontaneous product 
 of Balkan statesmanship. One by one, the Near Eastern 
 peoples are becoming wary of the Western wire-pullers. 
 The naive attempt of British diplomacy to play off Rumania 
 and Jugoslavia against France on the question of Eastern 
 Thrace fell flat ; but these countries are reorienting them- 
 selves to the new situation in their own way and are pro- 
 viding for their mutual security without burning their 
 fingers. In this part of the field, the prospects are dis- 
 tinctly brighter than they were when I wrote pages 43-4. 
 My allusions to Cyprus (pp. 51 and 75) now need underlin- 
 ing. About 80 per cent. of the population of this island are 
 Greeks in language and Orthodox in religion, and since the 
 Armistice they have expressed in unmistakeable terms 
 their desire for union with their National State. The late 
 Coalition Government in Great Britain, which supported 
 the claims of Greece to Anatolian territories containing a 
 Turkish majority and encouraged her in the military 
 adventure which has involved her in disaster, did not carry 
 their ostentatious ‘ Philhellenism ’ to the length of granting 
 self-determination to a Greek majority in a country recently 
 annexed to the British Empire. Generous in giving away 
 b 
 
XViii THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 what lawfully belonged to the Turks, they drew the line at 
 surrendering what they themselves were holding with the 
 slenderest legal title or moral right. For very shame, the 
 British nation must redress this injustice. If we thought 
 the Greeks of Athens fit to rule over a Turkish majority, we 
 cannot profess that the Greeks of Cyprus are unfit to govern 
 themselves, nor can we evade our obligations by a show of 
 solicitude for the Cypriot Turks. If majorities are to have 
 sovereignty over minorities, the principle must be applied 
 all round ; and if we (as I hold, rightly, though belatedly) 
 have given our sanction to the application of this rule in 
 Anatolia to the detriment of the Greek minority there, we 
 cannot honestly penalise the Greek majority in Cyprus by 
 refusing to apply the same formula to their advantage. 
 Cyprus, moreover, is the one place where we can genuinely 
 protect a minority that is to come under foreign majority 
 government. We are masters of the situation there, and 
 in return for our evacuation we can exact what guarantees 
 we like, including, if necessary, the whole charter that was 
 laid by Professor Gilbert Murray before the Assembly of 
 the League of Nations in September 1922. An enlightened 
 policy cannot in this case be frustrated by the sovereign 
 susceptibilities of Latvia. 
 
 Finally, I must say something about personalities. Since 
 the publication of my first edition the Sultan-Caliph and 
 King Constantine have both gone West (the latter not for 
 the first time and possibly not for the last), Mr. Lloyd 
 George has gone to the country and has not been returned 
 to office, and Mr. Venizelos has gone to Lausanne. 
 
 In my criticism of Mr. Lloyd George’s Eastern policy, I 
 merely anticipated the verdict of an overwhelming majority 
 of the British electorate, and I should therefore not feel 
 called upon to say anything further, if it were not that one 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xix 
 
 or two admirers of the late Prime Minister have interpreted 
 what I have written as a covert attempt on my part to put 
 a spoke into the wheel of party politics at home. I cannot 
 pass this over, because it is such an admirable instance of 
 Western megalomania. The train of thought is as follows : 
 ‘ Kastern affairs are of no intrinsic interest in themselves : 
 therefore a Westerner who interests himself in them must 
 be doing so for an extraneous motive. Who is the most 
 prominent Western politician whom the writer attacks ? 
 Undoubtedly Mr. Lloyd George. Ergo, all this para- 
 phernalia about East and West is camouflage for the em- 
 placement of a new battery against the Coalition. It only 
 remains to decide whether this pamphlet called the ‘Western 
 Question ” is Unionist, Liberal, or Labour.’ All that I can 
 do is to assure any one whose mind works in this way that 
 he is putting the cart before the horse. I did not interest 
 myself in the ‘ Western Question’ in order to get at Mr. 
 Lloyd George, but I interested myself in Mr. Lloyd George 
 because he happened to pass across the stage of my 
 historical drama. The ‘Western Question’ made mis- 
 chief long before Mr. Lloyd George was heard of; and 
 the relations between different civilisations will remain the 
 most absorbing problem of human history long after English 
 party politics have become an object of learned research. 
 
 I have more to say about Mr. Venizelos, for in September 
 1922 he performed one of the finest and most difficult acts 
 of statesmanship in his career. I refer, of course, to his 
 refusal to represent the interests of the Greek Revolutionary 
 Government abroad unless they consented to surrender not 
 only the territory previously assigned to them in Anatolia 
 but also Eastern Thrace up to the line of the Maritsa. In 
 so doing, he deliberately forbore to embarrass the Allies 
 at a moment when any Greek had a right to feel bitter 
 
xx THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 against each and all of them, and resisted the temptation of 
 precipitating (as he almost certainly could have done) a 
 new Turco-British war, in which Greece might have had 
 a gambler’s chance of retrieving part of the disputed terri- 
 tories. At the moment when he took this far-sighted 
 decision, he was the object of almost scurrilous attacks in 
 a section of the British Press. It was natural, of course, that 
 the British public, which had suddenly been brought by 
 the late Government to the brink of war, should be alarmed 
 at Mr. Venizelos’s appearance in London. At that moment, 
 Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill were still in 
 office, and, several times since the Armistice, such impro- 
 vised consultations between Mr. Venizelos and the moving 
 spirits of the British Coalition had resulted in melodramatic 
 coups, through which the British Empire had become still 
 further entangled in Near and Middle Eastern politics. 
 The public nervousness, therefore, was perfectly justified 
 by the peril of the moment and by the memory of the past, 
 and it was in its way a tribute to Mr. Venizelos’s potency in 
 international affairs. The fault lay not in the feeling itself 
 but in the un-English expression given to it by certain 
 English newspapers. Mr. Venizelos and his nation were 
 ‘down,’ largely because they had been ‘let down’ by our 
 own Government, and, in these circumstances, while we 
 
 were of course entitled to oppose the policy which we. 
 
 imagined him to be pressing upon our Government in 
 opposition to what we considered to be our national interests, 
 we ought to have had the good taste to conduct the con- 
 troversy like gentlemen. When it turned out that Mr. 
 Venizelos was insisting that his country should adopt a 
 policy which was not only to their ultimate but to our im- 
 mediate interest, nothing less than a formal apology was due 
 to him, but, as far as I followed the Press, it was never made. 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XXi 
 
 Having relieved my mind on this point, however, I must 
 reaffirm what I have said in the first edition of this book 
 (and have left unaltered in the second) regarding Mr. Veni- 
 zelos’s initial responsibility, which he shares with Mr. Lloyd 
 George, for the Anatolian disaster. It is rapidly becoming 
 an established legend that the Greek adventure in Anatolia 
 would have ended successfully and the Smyrna Zone have 
 remained in the permanent possession of Greece, if only 
 Mr. Venizelos had not been turned out by King Constantine 
 in the autumn of 1920. This assumption, which is by 
 nature incapable of proof, leaves me as sceptical as ever. 
 I remain convinced that the crucial event in the tragedy was 
 the landing of the Greek troops at Smyrna on the 15th May 
 1919, for which Mr. Venizelos and not King Constantine was 
 responsible. That error set in motion the three formidable 
 forces of Turkish patriotism, Anglo-French rivalry, and 
 Anatolian military geography; and nothing, so far as I 
 can see, could have prevented these forces from producing 
 the resultant that they actually have produced. At the 
 best, Mr. Venizelos could have hastened, and thereby 
 mitigated the disastrousness of, the inevitable consumma- 
 tion by evacuating Anatolia without waiting for the final 
 catastrophe. The letter which he wrote from Aix-les-Bains 
 to General Dhanglis on the 3rd July 1921, when the 
 Greek Army in Anatolia was at the high tide of its 
 superficial success, shows (what no sensible person ever 
 doubted) that he had not lost his intellectual acumen ; and 
 if he had remained in office, he might have foreseen what 
 was coming at an earlier stage. The fact remains, however, 
 that failure was predictable from the beginning, and that, 
 down to his fall, Mr. Venizelos either did not predict it or 
 did not act upon his prognostications. On the contrary, 
 he was the promoter of the Smyrna policy, and I have not 
 
xxii THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 yet come across any denial of the motives which I con- 
 jecturally attributed to him on pp. 72-3. If these motives 
 were operative, they would, of course, have told still more 
 strongly against withdrawal from Anatolia than against 
 the original decision to go there. Indeed, considering that 
 Mr. Venizelos fell at a time when the Greek Army in Anatolia 
 was still more than holding its own (though the subsequent 
 turning of the tables was even then already predictable by 
 those who had eyes to see), it is hard to understand how he 
 could have retained office if he had attempted evacuation. 
 Anyway, he did not attempt it, and to my mind his respon- 
 sibility is undeniable. Nor do I think that his admirers 
 really do him a service by trying to prove him impeccable, 
 or by making out that the unfortunate ex-King Constantine 
 was other than a cypher, for good or ill. A statesman of 
 distinction who makes a capital mistake, admits it, and then 
 does his best to retrieve it, is a much more human figure 
 than that incongruous object, the statesman in a halo. 
 
 In a book entitled The Turk as he is,) but mostly con- 
 cerned with myself as I confess that I do not feel myself to 
 be, Major G. Melas, M.C., takes me severely to task for 
 saying a good word on behalf of the late King of Greece, 
 although the author describes himself on the cover as 
 ‘formerly secretary’ to that monarch. Major Melas 
 insinuates, though I think he nowhere openly declares, that 
 I have written what I have because I have been paid to do 
 so. I do not quite see how I am to prove my virtue, for 
 no one has ever put the temptation in my way! In plain 
 words, I have never yet been offered a bribe either by a Turk 
 or bya Greek. Until that happens, I shall cherish the belief 
 that I am not considered purchaseable, while Major Melas 
 may believe, if it pleases him, that I am merely not con- 
 
 * 3s, 6d,, no date of publication or name of publisher. 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XXxiii 
 
 sidered worth purchasing, so long as he will accept my 
 assurance that the delicate transaction has not hitherto 
 taken place ! 
 
 It may interest him to know that my English reviewers, 
 almost without exception, have convicted me of impar- 
 tiality. 
 
 ‘Both parties,’ one reviewer writes, ‘have so battened 
 upon the propaganda of their respective heroes that Professor 
 Toynbee’s dish will probably prove so unpalatable that they 
 will throw the book aside, saying, ‘‘ This man is hopelessly 
 biassed,”’ forgetful of the delighted avidity with which they 
 had read his previous chapter, wherein their every accusa- 
 tion against the Turks—or the Greeks—found ample con- 
 firmation.’ 
 
 ‘ Propagandists, whether Turkish or Greek,’ writes another 
 reviewer, ‘ will find in one half of his book cause for lavish 
 praise and in the other ground for bitter contradiction. 
 But when he comes to study the causes of this ghastly 
 problem of the Near East, Professor Toynbee has, for both 
 Turk and Greek, sympathy rather than blame. Both are 
 the victims, he would say, of our Western civilisation. 
 Therein lies the explanation of his rather puzzling title.’ 
 
 I could not have summarised my point of view better 
 than my reviewer has done it for me. 
 
 All the same, the criticisms which gave me the greatest 
 pleasure were two private letters from a Turkish and a 
 Greek friend of mine respectively. My Turkish corres- 
 pondent, writing from the Italian Consulate at Smyrna, in 
 which he had taken sanctuary, on the 4th September 1922, 
 a few days before the end of the Greek occupation, said :— 
 
 ‘Your book, it may seem strange to you, has more 
 nearly made me a Nationalist than ever, and at the same 
 time has done much to inculeate sympathy and esteem for 
 
xxiv THE WESTERN QUESTION a 
 
 the courageous and self-sacrificing side in the enemy [i.e. 
 Greek] effort.’ 
 
 My Greek friend corroborated my theory of the ‘spiritual 
 pauperisation ’ inflicted on Greece by the West (pp. 349-52), 
 and was generous enough to tell me that though he dis- 
 agreed violently with some of my book, he agreed so 
 strongly with my general conclusions and with my moral 
 of toleration and charity that his chief feeling was one of 
 gratitude. His central criticism is so much to the point 
 that I shall quote it :— 
 
 ‘Where I think you have done some avoidable injustice 
 to the Greeks,’ he wrote, ‘is in failing to exercise on their 
 behalf the sympathetic imagination with which you have 
 analysed so well the position and mentality*of the modern 
 Turk.’ 
 
 In defence, I am glad that I can point to the passage from 
 my Turkish friend’s letter which I have quoted above ; and 
 yet, in so far as my book has left that impression on my 
 Greek friend’s mind, it has fallen short of its purpose. It 
 is hardly a defect which I can remedy in a second edition, 
 for, in so far as it is present, it is probably due to something 
 amiss in my tone of feeling and angle of vision rather than 
 to errors in this or that statement of fact. My friend’s 
 criticism, however, will stimulate me to aim at impartiality 
 and, above all, at charity with greater alertness in anything 
 that I may write on the same or kindred subjects hereafter. 
 These two intellectual virtues are notoriously difficult to 
 sustain, and every believer in them is continually falling 
 short, not only of the ideals themselves, but of the degree 
 to which he himself is capable of approximating towards 
 them in his better moments. I well know that the effort 
 must never be relaxed, for it opens the sole avenue not only 
 to the understanding and interpretation of the ‘ Western 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XXV 
 
 Question ’ and other human questions, but to the solution 
 of them. ‘These problems, which appear so complicated on 
 the surface, are simple at the core. Treat the members of 
 other civilisations as human beings of like passions with 
 Western humanity, and they will respond in the same 
 terms. In more universal language, ‘Do unto others as 
 you would that they should do unto you.’ 
 
 ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE 
 
 Lonpon, 20th November 1922. 
 
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION 
 
 Tuts book is an attempt to place certain recent events in the 
 Near and Middle East in their historical setting, and to 
 illustrate from them several new features of more enduring 
 importance than the events themselves. It is not a dis- 
 cussion of what the peace-settlement in the East ought to 
 be, for the possibility of imposing a cut-and-dried scheme, 
 if it ever really existed, was destroyed by the landing of the 
 Greek troops at Smyrna in May 1919. At any rate, from 
 that moment the situation resolved itself into a conflict of 
 forces beyond control ; the Treaty of Sévres was still-born ; 
 and subsequent conferences and agreements, however im- 
 posing, have had and are likely to have no more than a 
 partial and temporary effect. On the other hand, there 
 have been real changes in the attitude of the Western public 
 towards their Governments’ Eastern policies, which have 
 produced corresponding changes in those policies themselves ; 
 and the Greeks and Turks have appeared in unfamiliar roles. 
 The Greeks have shown the same unfitness as the Turks for 
 governing a mixed population. The Turks, in their turn, have 
 become exponents of the political nationalism of the West. 
 The break-up of the Ottoman Empire has been arrested at 
 the borders of Anatolia, where Turkey has asserted her inde- 
 pendence as successfully as her former Near Eastern subjects 
 have asserted theirs in the Balkan Peninsula ; and in this 
 last stage in the redistribution of Near and Middle Eastern 
 territories, the atrocities which have accompanied it from 
 the beginning have been revealed in their true light, as 
 
 XXvVii 
 
XXViii THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 crimes incidental to an abnormal process, which all parties 
 have committed in turn, and not as the peculiar practice 
 of one denomination or nationality. Finally, the masterful 
 influence of our Western form of society upon people of other 
 civilisations can be discerned beneath the new phenomena 
 and the old, omnipresent and indefatigable in creation and 
 destruction, like some gigantic force of nature. 
 
 Personally, I am convinced that these subjects are worth 
 studying, apart from the momentary sensations and 
 quandaries of diplomacy and war which are given more 
 prominence in the Press, and this for students of human 
 affairs who have no personal or even national concern in the 
 Eastern Question. The contact of civilisations has always 
 been, and will always continue to be, a ruling factor in 
 human progress and failure. I am, of course, aware that 
 the illustrations which I have chosen involve burning 
 questions, and that my presentation of them will not 
 pass unchallenged. Indeed, the comparatively few people 
 interested in disproving or confirming my statements may 
 be my chief or only readers. ' I had therefore better mention 
 such qualifications as I possess for writing this book. 
 
 I have had certain opportunities for first-hand study of 
 Greek and Turkish affairs. Just before the Balkan Wars, I 
 spent nine months (November 1911 to August 1912) travel- 
 ling on foot through the old territories of Greece, as well as in 
 Krete and the Athos Peninsula, and though my main interest 
 was the historical geography of the country, I learnt a good 
 deal about the social and economic life of the modern 
 population. During the European War, I edited, under the 
 direction of Lord Bryce,! the Blue Book published by the 
 British Government on the ‘ Treatment of Armenians in the 
 
 + Whose death has removed one of the most experienced and distinguished 
 Western students of Near and Middle Eastern questions, though this was 
 only one among his manifold interests and activities, 
 
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION xxix 
 
 Ottoman Empire: 1915’ (Miscellaneous No. 31, 1916), and 
 incidentally learnt, I believe, nearly all that there is to be 
 learnt to the discredit of the Turkish nation and of their rule 
 over other peoples. Afterwards I worked, always on Turkish 
 affairs, in the Intelligence Bureau of the Department of 
 Information (May 1917 to May 1918); in the Political 
 Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (May to 
 December 1918); and in the Foreign Office section of the 
 British Delegation to the Peace Conference at Paris (Decem- 
 ber 1918 to April 1919). Since the beginning of the 1919-20 
 Session, I have had the honour to hold the Korais Chair of 
 Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and 
 History, in the University of London; and on the 20th 
 October 19201 the Senate of the University kindly granted 
 me leave of absence abroad for two terms, in order to enable 
 me to pursue the studies connected with my Chair by travel 
 in Greek lands. I arrived at Athens from Englandon the 15th 
 January 1921, and left Constantinople for England on the 
 16th September. During the intervening time, I saw all that 
 I could of the situation from both the Greek and the Turkish 
 point of view, in various parts of the two countries. The 
 most important of my journeys and other experiences were 
 shared by my wife, and I have profited more than I can say 
 by constant discussion with her of all that we saw and did 
 together, though I alone am responsible for the verification 
 and presentation of the results of our observations. 
 
 My itinerary was as follows : ? 
 
 (a) Jan, 15-26: Athens ; 
 
 (b) Jan. 27-March 15: Smyrna, and the following journeys 
 
 into the hinterland : 
 1. Feb. 1-8: Alashehir, Ushag, Kula, Salyhly, Sardis ; 
 
 1 Just a month before the change of government and consequent crisis in 
 Greece, which I (like most other observers at a distance) had not foreseen. 
 ? The route is plotted out on the map at the end of the volume. 
 
XXX THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 2. Feb. 11-18: Ephesus, Kirkinjé, Aidin, Tiré, Torbaly ; 
 3. Feb. 26—-March 10: Manysa, Soma, Kinik, Bergama, 
 Yukhara Bey Keui, Aivali, Dikeli ; 
 
 (c) March 17-Aug. 2: Constantinople, and the following 
 journeys into the hinterland : 
 
 1. March 27-April 5: Brusa, Pazarjyk, Kovalyja, 
 Nazyf Pasha, Yenishehir, K6prii Hissar ; 
 
 . April:7-13 : Brusa, Gemlik, Ermeni Sélés ; 
 
 . May 24-25: Yalova ; 
 
 . June 2-6: Gemlik, Omer Bey, Yalova ; 
 
 . June 13-18: Gemlik, Omer Bey, Armudlu ; 
 
 . June 22-27: Armudlu, Gemlik ; 
 
 . June 27-July 3: Ismid, Baghchejik, Karamursal, 
 Eregli, Deirmenderé ; 
 
 (d) Aug. 3-8: Smyrna ; 
 
 (e) Aug. 9-Sept. 1: Athens, and the following journey into 
 
 the hinterland : 
 
 Aug. 16-26: Tripolitsa, Sparta, Mistré, Tr¥pi, Kala- 
 mata, Vurkéno, Mavromméati, Meligalé, fsari, 
 Astéla, Kokolétri, Bassae, Pavlitsa, Kyparissia, 
 Samiko, Olympia, and back via the Pyrgos-Patras- 
 Korinth railway ; 
 
 (f) Sept. 1-9: Athens to Constantinople via Larisa and 
 Salonika, with an excursion to Flérina, Kozhani, and 
 Shatishta ; 
 
 (g) Sept. 9-16 : Constantinople. 
 
 AO Pw ww DS 
 
 My wife arrived at Constantinople, a few days before me, 
 in March and started home by sea from the Peiraeus on 
 the 15th August. Between those dates we were travelling 
 together. 
 
 This summary will indicate what facts I am in a position 
 to know, and it is for readers to judge whether I have 
 presented them impartially and drawn fair conclusions. 
 When a writer passes from statements of fact to judgments 
 of right and wrong, his propositions become doubly con- 
 troversial. But the observer of any conflict is bound to form 
 moral judgments in the process of informing himself about 
 
 ——., 
 
 SS 
 
 A RT esta semenemeeiiemnenges ages 
 
 nates ional,“ AG NET Ds ines —-— — 
 
 ntti EID A 
 
ee es 
 aE ee sere 
 
 eee 
 
 a i 
 
 = a 
 
 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION XXxi 
 
 events, and to abstract the one from the other, though it 
 may give the appearance of scientific objectivity, is really 
 less scientific than to put all his cards on the table. I have 
 therefore expressed freely, though carefully, my judgments 
 of right as well as of fact, and I submit that I am not con- 
 victed of partiality by the fact that, in discussing particular 
 chapters of a long story, I sum up against one party in favour 
 of the other. If that disqualifies me, then every verdict 
 must be accounted a miscarriage of justice. The fact that 
 I am neither a Greek nor a Turk perhaps creates little pre- 
 sumption of my being fair-minded, for Western partisans of 
 non-Western peoples are often more fanatical than their 
 favourites. I hope that it will appear from my method of 
 treatment that my own interest in Greece and Turkey 
 arises from curiosity (the most respectable of human 
 motives), and that I am as much interested in their past, 
 about which it is futile to break lances, as in their present 
 and future. 
 
 It may, I fear, be painful to Greeks and ‘ Philhellenes ’ 
 that information and reflections unfavourable to Greece 
 should have been published by the first occupant of the 
 Korafs Chair. Inaturally regret this, but from the academic 
 point of view it is less unfortunate than if my conclusions on 
 the Anatolian Question had been favourable to Greece and 
 unfavourable to Turkey. The actual circumstances, what- 
 ever personal unpleasantness they may entail for me and 
 my Greek friends and acquaintances, at least preclude the 
 suspicion that an endowment of learning in a British 
 University has been used for propaganda on behalf of the 
 country with which it is concerned. Such a contention, 
 if it could be urged, would be serious ; for academic study 
 should have no political purpose, although, when its sub- 
 ject is history, its judgments upon the nature and causal 
 
XXXil THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 connection of past events do occasionally and incidentally 
 have some effect upon the present and the future. 
 
 In this connection I ought to add that I made my journeys 
 in 1921 as special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian,1 
 and to mention the reasons. I did so first in order to pay 
 my expenses ; secondly, because the Guardian is a paper 
 which it is an honour to serve ; and thirdly, because without 
 this status it would hardly have been possible for me to learn 
 what I-wanted. My travels coincided with a historical crisis : 
 and, during such crises, travellers like myself who are not 
 persons of eminence have little chance of meeting the 
 important people and witnessing the important events, if 
 they travel as students or tourists; while journalists, 
 however unimportant personally, have greater opportunities 
 in such circumstances than under normal conditions. 
 
 ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE. 
 
 Lonpon, 22nd March 1922. 
 
 1 The sketches appended to Chapters IV.-VIJ. were originally published 
 in the Manchester Guardian, and are reprinted here by the kind permission 
 of the Editor. 
 
—— 
 
 f 
 . 
 
 NOTE ON SPELLING 
 
 I cannot pretend that my spelling of Greek and Turkish 
 proper names, of which this book is full, has been consistent, 
 though I have been careful always to spell the same name in 
 the same way—except in quotations, where I have purposely 
 left the names as they stand. I have used the following 
 symbols : 
 (i) In Turkish words— 
 ‘= ain (impossible to transliterate into the 
 Roman alphabet). 
 ’=hemzé (a hiatus in the middle of a word)? 
 gh=ghain (like the German guttural g). 
 
 q=qaf (hard £). 
 
 y (when a vowel)=hard yé or hard esseré (something like the 
 wu in English ‘until’ when rapidly 
 pronounced). 
 
 other unmodified 
 vowels 
 modified vowels=German modified vowels. 
 
 (ii) In Greek words— 
 gh=hard gamma (like ghain). 
 consonantal y=soft gamma. 
 : dh=dhelta (like the th in English ‘ the’). 
 th= (like the th in English ‘ thin’). 
 s=sigma (like s in English ‘ this,’ but never 
 
 like s in English ‘ his’). 
 
 kh=khi (like ch in Scotch ‘ loch’). 
 
 } =Italian vowels. 
 
 1 Except in the proelision of the Arabic definite article (e.g. in ‘ Abdu’l- 
 Hamid’), which I have indicated by using this sign in the ordinary English 
 way. 
 
 C 
 
XXXIV THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 (ii) In Greek words—continued. 
 x=ksi (like w in English ‘ awe,’ but never like 
 x in English ‘ examine ’). 
 ph=phi (English f). 
 vowels (as written 
 in this book) | =ttalian vowels. 
 
 I have often indicated the Greek stress accent, which is 
 as puzzling as the Russian. 
 
 However, I have not gone to extremes. In fact, I have 
 hardly used ‘,’, or gat all (the latter only, I think, in ‘Saljuq’ 
 and ‘ Ushagq,’ which have somehow impressed themselves on 
 my mind in those forms). On the other hand, I have always 
 used vowel y for Turkish hard 7, except in words familiarly 
 spelt otherwise—e.g. ‘ Aidin’ and ‘QOsmanli.’ To write 
 ‘“Uthmanly ’ would be misleading as well as affected. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION . ; ; : vii 
 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION ; ; ; . xxvii 
 NOTE ON SPELLING. : ; . : . Xxxili 
 
 I. THE SHADOW OF THE WEST : ‘ , : 1 
 II. WESTERN DIPLOMACY ‘ 7 : : , 37 
 III. GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE . 63 
 IV. THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA : ; ee; 
 
 Two Rvuinep CITIES . : ; ; ort eee 
 
 V. GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT . : . 158 
 
 A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MountTAINS . ; . 396 
 
 An AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT . : ’ a OK 
 
 GREEK PRISONS AT SMYRNA = : ; . 204 
 
 Tue Turkish Natronan Pact. ‘ : a ue 
 
 VI. THE MILITARY STALEMATE 2 ; ; — i 
 Tue Barrie or In Ont. ; - ; . 246 
 
 THE Oricin or A Lecunp : : . . 254 
 
 Vil. THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION . 3 : . 259 
 YALOVA ‘ ‘ F ; : - . 299 
 
 THE AREA OF THE ORGANISED ATROCITIES : = OEL 
 
 VIII. NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS . . ; . 820 
 TABLE OF DATES . : = ; 5 . 865 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER V_. ‘ 2 > ae 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII . ; .- oe 
 INDEX . ‘ ; ; > : : . 394 
 
 MAPS 
 
 THE THEATRE OF WAR IN WESTERN ANATOLIA, folding ~ 
 out at the end of Chapter VI... : ; ; eee): 
 
 THE DANGER LINE OF OMER BEY. : St 
 
 THE AUTHOR’S JOURNEYS IN 1921, folding ow at the end of 
 the volume : ; : ; j j . 408 
 
 XXX¥ 
 
I 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 
 
 Savages are distressed at the waning of the moon and 
 attempt to counteract it by magical remedies. They do 
 not realise that the shadow which creeps forward till it 
 blots out all but a fragment of the shining disc, is cast by 
 their world. In much the same way we civilised people of 
 the West glance with pity or contempt at our non-Western 
 contemporaries lying under the shadow of some stronger 
 power, which seems to paralyse their energies by depriving 
 them of light. Generally we are too deeply engrossed in 
 our own business to look closer, and we pass by on the other 
 side—conjecturing (if our curiosity is sufficiently aroused 
 to demand an explanation) that the shadow which oppresses 
 these sickly forms is the ghost of their own past. Yet if 
 we paused to examine that dim gigantic overshadowing 
 figure standing, apparently unconscious, with its back to its 
 victims,we should be startled to find that its features are ours. 
 
 The shadow upon the rest of humanity is cast by Western 
 civilisation, but it is difficult for either party to comprehend 
 the whole situation. The other human societies, or at any 
 rate the civilised and educated people among them, are 
 thoroughly aware of the penetrating and overpowering effect 
 of the West upon their public and private life, but from 
 this knowledge they draw a mistaken inference. In the 
 Near and Middle East, for example, most observers are 
 probably struck by the fact that their Greek and Turkish 
 acquaintances, who differ about almost everything else, 
 agree in the conviction that Western politics turn upon the 
 Eastern Question, and that the Englishman or Frenchman 
 
 A 
 
2 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 looks abroad on the world with eyes inflamed by a passionate 
 love or hatred, as the case may be, for the Greek or the 
 Turkish nation. At first one is inclined to attribute this 
 misconception purely to megalomania, and to shrug one’s 
 shoulders at it as being the kind of infirmity to which non- 
 Western peoples are heir. Later, one realises that, erroneous 
 though it is, it arises from the correct understanding of an 
 important fact regarding us which we ourselves are apt to 
 overlook. Just because we are aware of what passes in 
 our own minds, and know that interest in Eastern affairs 
 is almost entirely absent from them, it is difficult for us to 
 realise the profound influence on the East which we actually, 
 though unconsciously, exercise. This conjunction of great 
 effect on other people’s lives with little interest in or intention 
 with regard to them, though it is common enough in human 
 life, is also one of the principal causes of human misfortunes ; 
 and the relationship described in my allegory cannot per- 
 manently continue. Either the overshadowing figure must 
 turn its head, perceive the harm that unintentionally it 
 has been doing, and move out of the light ; or its victims, 
 after vain attempts to arouse its attention and request it 
 to change its posture, must stagger to their feet and stab 
 it in the back. 
 
 It is worth examining these two features in our relation- 
 ship to other civilisations which are so dangerous in com- 
 bination. Our indifference—to start with that—is partly 
 temporary, at any rate in its present degree of profundity. 
 Interest in Eastern (as in other) foreign affairs was suddenly 
 and artificially stimulated in all Western countries during 
 the European War. The destinies of England, France, 
 Germany, and even the United States were obviously 
 affected then by the policy of the Greek, Ottoman, and other 
 Eastern Governments, and hundreds of thousands of English 
 soldiers, and many thousand French, German, and Austrian 
 soldiers, serving in the East, were constantly in the thoughts 
 of their families at home. But the moment Turkey asked 
 
~ 
 
 “a a 
 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 3 
 
 for an armistice and the bulk of the European expeditionary 
 forces were drafted back and demobilised, this unusual 
 interest died away and was followed by an access of apathy, 
 also abnormal, which was partly due to war-weariness and 
 partly to the pressure of more urgent post-war problems 
 nearer home. Greece and Turkey have been pushed into 
 the background by Silesia, the Coal Strike, Reparations, 
 Ireland, the Pacific, Unemployment, and the rift in the 
 Entente. During the eight months of 19211 which I spent 
 in Greece and Turkey, Greek and Turkish affairs only 
 occupied the attention of Western statesmen or were given 
 ; prominence in Western newspapers during the three weeks * 
 when a conference of Allied ministers, expressly convened 
 to reconsider the Treaty of Sévres, was sitting in London. 
 But even on this special occasion the faint interest aroused 
 ii was immediately eclipsed by a crisis in the relations between 
 the three Entente Powers and Germany, 
 
 I generally found the Greeks and Turks incredulous when 
 
 this was pointed out to them. They insisted (of course 
 
 erroneously) that the immense effects which were being 
 produced all the time in the East by Western action, must 
 1 be the result of policy; it was inconceivable that they 
 | could be unintentional and unconscious; or at any rate 
 the interest of the Western public was bound in the near 
 future to be aroused by the striking consequences of its 
 unconscious activity. The most effective way to combat 
 this delusion was to remind them that the British public was 
 almost apathetic about the violent disturbances which were 
 then taking place in Ireland, a country next door to Great 
 Britain, vitally affecting our security and actually under 
 our government. Was it likely, then, that Great Britain 
 was or would be interested in Near and Middle Eastern 
 countries for which we had no direct responsibility and 
 whose fate was of secondary concern to the British Empire ? 
 
 1 15th January to 16th September. 
 2 21st February to 12th March, 
 
4 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 This extreme degree of indifference towards non-Western 
 affairs is no doubt unlikely to be permanent; but in the 
 lesser degree in which it has always existed, it will probably 
 continue, because it is a natural state of mind. Western 
 society is a unity—a closer and more permanent unity than 
 either the independent states that form and dissolve within 
 its boundaries or the Empires compounded of Western and 
 non-Western populations—and its own internal affairs are 
 bound to draw its attention away from the borderlands 
 or the regions beyond them. Our English politics and 
 economics are more closely concerned with the East than 
 are those of any other Western nation, and yet English 
 children at school are still taught French and German and 
 not Hindustani and Arabic—just because many more 
 individual English people have relations with neighbouring 
 Western nations than with our non-Western fellow-subjects 
 overseas, 
 
 This historic Western indifference is strikingly illustrated 
 by the policy of the Hapsburg Monarchy, a Western Power 
 which had vital interests in the Eastern borderlands of our 
 world and might have made its fortune, between 4.D.1699 and 
 1768, as heir to all the provinces of the Ottoman Empire on 
 this side of Constantinople. Yet though, during this favour- 
 able period, the Austrian Government had at its disposal 
 some of the best political talent in Europe, the Drang nach 
 Osten was perpetually arrested and reversed by the attraction 
 of the West. Even to the most sharp-sighted statesmen at 
 Vienna, a province in Germany or Italy looked as large and 
 as desirable as a kingdom in the Balkans. They expended 
 their strength in the three great Western wars of the eigh- 
 teenth century. Russia got ahead of them on the road to 
 Constantinople ; and then the spread of Western political 
 ideas among the local nationalities closed the thoroughfare 
 altogether. When Bismarck at last cut off the Austrian 
 Eagle’s Western head, and advised the bird to use the other, 
 it was toolate. The optical illusion which minimised Eastern 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST = 
 
 and magnified Western objectives in the eyes of eighteenth- 
 century Austrian statesmen, is possibly the principal cause 
 of the break-up of that ancient Western Monarchy in our 
 own generation, and it is certainly characteristic of the 
 permanent attitude of the Western public. 
 
 In dramatic contrast to this indifference is the actual 
 influence on Eastern life which the West has long exerted. 
 On the Near and Middle East, at any rate, where the superior 
 vitality and effectiveness of Western civilisation are rein- 
 forced by proximity, our influence has been increasing during 
 the last two and a half centuries till it is actually paramount 
 there, while we have remained hardly conscious of a process 
 which now impresses itself upon the local populations at 
 every turn. This combination of maximum actual effect 
 with minimum consciousness and interest has made the 
 Western factor in the Near and Middle East on the whole 
 an anarchic and destructive force, and at the same time 
 it appears to be almost the only positive force in the 
 field. Whenever one analyses a contemporary movement 
 —political, economic, religious, or intellectual—in these 
 societies, it nearly always turns out to be either a response 
 to or a reaction against some Western stimulus. In some 
 form, a Western stimulus is almost invariably there, and a 
 purely internal initiative is rarely discoverable, perhaps 
 even non-existent, the reason being that, before Western 
 penetration began, the indigenous civilisations of these 
 regions had partly or wholly broken down. A brief review 
 of these break-downs is necessary for an understanding of 
 the present situation, and in attempting it I can at the 
 same time define my terms. 
 
 The term ‘ Near Eastern ’ is used in this book to denote 
 the civilisation which grew up from among the ruins of 
 Ancient Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilisation in Anatolia 
 and at Constantinople, simultaneously with the growth of 
 our civilisation in the West. The two societies had a common 
 parent, were of the same age, and showed the same initial 
 
6 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 power of expansion, but here the parallel ends. Western 
 civilisation (whatever its ultimate limitations) has so far 
 continued to progress and expand, while Near Eastern 
 civilisation, after a more brilliant opening, broke down un- 
 expectedly in the eleventh century after Christ, and fell into 
 an incurable decline, until, about the seventeenth century, its 
 influence over men’s minds became extinct, except in Russia. 
 
 The cause of this break-down—to state it briefly and 
 roughly—was the premature development of the Near 
 Eastern state, which reached an efficiency at the very 
 beginning, in the eighth century, which the Western state 
 did not attain until the close of the fifteenth.’ This over- 
 growth of a particular social organ had two fatal effects. 
 First, it stunted or arrested the growth of other social 
 institutions and activities. ‘The Church became a depart- 
 ment of state in the various Near Eastern monarchies, not, 
 as in the West, an institution transcending states and binding 
 a civilisation together ; monastic orders, boroughs, marches, 
 bishoprics, and universities never struggled into autonomy, 
 and only the rudiments of new vernacular literatures 
 appeared. The state absorbed or subordinated all, and so 
 there was nothing to mediate between one state and another. 
 The ‘ East Roman’ (that is, the mediaeval Greek) and the 
 Bulgarian Empires, each claiming to be a complete embodi- 
 ment not only of the political but of the ecclesiastical and 
 spiritual life of Near Eastern civilisation, were incompatible. 
 There was no room for both in the Near Eastern world, 
 and the fatal consequence was the Hundred Years’ War 
 (A.D. 913-1019) between these two principal Near Eastern 
 Powers, which resulted in the temporary subjection of 
 mediaeval Bulgaria and the exhaustion of mediaeval Greece. 
 The victorious empire—militarised, distended, and over- 
 strained—became an easy prey to its neighbours, and Near 
 
 1 Except in the city-states of Northern and Central Italy, where during 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries miniature samples of the modern 
 Western ‘Great Power’ were grown experimentally, like seedlings in a 
 nursery -garden. 
 
eg ns | ee 
 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 7 
 
 Eastern civilisation, which it had pressed altogether into 
 its service, fell with it. 
 
 The inroads of the Central Asian nomads upon Eastern 
 and Central Anatolia in the eleventh century are discussed 
 in Chapter IV., but the first general conquest of Near Kastern 
 society by another came from the West. Near relations 
 are not always the best friends, and any one who reads 
 Liutprand of Cremona’s memoir of his embassy to the 
 court of Constantinople? (a.p. 968) or Anna Comnena’s 
 description of the First Crusade (a.D. 1096-7),? will be 
 impressed by the mutual antipathy of the Near East and 
 the West at their first encounters. 
 
 The Western conquest (begun by the Norman invasions, 
 and completed at the beginning of the thirteenth century 
 by the Fourth Crusade) naturally increased and embittered 
 this antipathy on the Near Eastern side, and hatred of the 
 ‘Latins’ materially assisted the later and more thorough 
 conquest of the Near Eastern world for Middle Eastern civili- 
 sation by the Osmanlis (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 
 after Christ). On the eve of the capture of Constantinople 
 by the Ottoman Power, ‘the first minister of the [Hast 
 Roman] Empire . . . was heard to declare that he had rather 
 behold, in Constantinople, the turban of Mahomet than the 
 Pope’s tiara or a cardinal’s hat ’ ; * and while the submerg- 
 ence of Near Eastern society was naturally accompanied by 
 a general heightening of consciousness among its members 
 of their difference from other civilised communities, the 
 memories of Western domination seem to have over- 
 shadowed the actualities of Middle Eastern for at least two 
 centuries. At anyrate,down to the middle of the seventeenth 
 century the Near East on the wholedisplayed greater hostility 
 towards Western than towards Middle Eastern influences. 
 
 The exception which proved the rule, while also pointing 
 
 1 New edition by Becker, J. (Hanover, 1915, Hahn), of Pertz’s edition in 
 the Monumenta Germ. Hist., vol. iii. 
 
 2 Annae Comnenac Alexias, ed. Reifferscheid, J. (Leipzig, 1884, Teubner, 
 2 vols.). * Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. \xviii. 
 
8 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 towards an approaching mental revolution, was the career 
 of Cyril Lukaris. This exceptional man was a Greek and 
 a priest of the Orthodox Church who went westward to study 
 in Venice and Padua, pushed on to Geneva, and (without 
 leaving his own Church) came under the spell of Calvinism. 
 His character and his Western education carried him to 
 the highest positions. In 1602 he was elected Patriarch of 
 Alexandria, in 1621 of Constantinople. He held the 
 Oecumenical Patriarchate for sixteen years ; sent numbers 
 of young Greeks to study in the Protestant Universities of 
 Western Europe; and published a Confession of Faith 
 (adapting Calvinistic ideas to Orthodox theological ter- 
 minology) not only in Greek but—significant innovation— 
 in simultaneous French, Latin, German, and English 
 editions. And then he fell. The Near Eastern hatred of 
 the West—even when represented by Western opponents 
 of the Roman Church—was stronger than Lukaris’s genius. 
 His enemies persuaded the Ottoman Government in 1637 to 
 have him executed as a dangerous innovator, and his doctrine 
 was finally condemned by an Orthodox synod in 1691.1 
 
 By that date, however, the mental reorientation of the Near 
 East towards the West was in full swing. The ‘ Westernisa- 
 tion ’ of the Near Eastern world is one of the most remark- 
 able phenomena in the intercourse between different 
 civilisations. It appears to have begun rather suddenly 
 in the same generation—about the third quarter of the 
 seventeenth century—among both the Russians and the 
 Greeks, and among the latter, where there was no ‘en- 
 lightened monarch ’ like Peter the Great to give it an im- 
 pulsion, its origins are more mysterious and more interesting. 
 No doubt it was encouraged by the contemporary tendency 
 in the West towards religious toleration, which was at last 
 making Western culture accessible without the necessity of 
 accepting some variety of Western religious dogma. At 
 any rate, a movement began among Near Easterners of that 
 
 1 The Roman Catholic missionaries in the Levant were his enemies as 
 well as the anti-Western majority of the Orthodox hierarchy. 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 9 
 
 generation which will have far more momentous results 
 than the commercial, diplomatic, and military rivalries of 
 Western Powers in the Levant, for which the name of 
 ‘Eastern Question ’ is commonly reserved. The Near Kast 
 saw its Western neighbours in a new light, no longer as the 
 barbarian Franks, but as ‘ Enlightened Europe ’ (a phrase 
 that constantly recurs in the writings of Korais), and it 
 adopted Western clothes and manners, Western commercial 
 and administrative methods, and above all Western ideas. 
 Western literature was translated, was imitated, and was able 
 to propagate new branches in the Near Eastern vernaculars, 
 which had failed in the Middle Ages to produce a literature 
 of their own. For the last two and a half centuries, the 
 Near East, having lost its distinctive civilisation, has flung 
 itself into the Western movement with hardly any reserves 
 or inhibitions. | 
 
 Middle Eastern civilisation has broken down in a different 
 way and with different consequences. In this book the 
 term ‘Middle Eastern’ is used to denote the civilisation 
 which has grown up from among the ruins of the ancient 
 civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Its parentage is 
 not the same as ours, and it is not our contemporary but 
 our junior by about six centuries. The interregnum, 
 accompanied by barbarian invasions, between the break- 
 down of Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilisation and the 
 beginnings of the modern West occurred approximately 
 between the years 4.D. 375 and 675, while the similar 
 interregnum, preceding the birth of the modern Middle East, 
 when the Abbasid Empire broke down and the Egyptian 
 and Mesopotamian world was overrun by Turkish and 
 Mongol nomads and Western Crusaders, did not begin till 
 the tenth century A.c. and was hardly over by the close of 
 the thirteenth. The new civilisation which was emerging 
 by the date a.p. 1300 had a not unpromising beginning. 
 There was practical genius in the political and military 
 organisation of the early Ottoman Empire; religious 
 fervour in the Shii revival in Persia ; architectural beauty 
 
10 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 in such buildings as the Great Mosque at Ephesus, the Green 
 Mosque at Brusa, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed at Con- 
 stantinople, or the Taj Mahal at Agra, which range from 
 the close of our thirteenth to the middle of our seventeenth 
 century. Yet the break-down in Middle Eastern civilisa- 
 tion began at an earlier stage than in Near Eastern. In 
 both the Ottoman and the Indian “ Empire, the decline of 
 vitality and creative power was perceptible by the close of 
 the sixteenth century, only about three hundred years from 
 birth ; and by a.D. 1774 the Mogul Power in India and the 
 Safawi Power in Persia had perished, while the Ottoman 
 Power seemed to be in its death agony. 
 
 Two causes of this Middle Eastern break-down suggest 
 themselves, one connected with the design of the new 
 building, the other with the site on which it was laid out. 
 Middle Eastern institutions, which were worked out most 
 logically in the Ottoman Empire and somewhat less syste- 
 matically in Northern India, did not lack originality. The 
 selection, education, and life-long discipline of soldiers and 
 officials were as audaciously conceived in the Empire of 
 Muhammad the Conqueror as in the imaginary Republic of 
 Plato,2 but they were equally contrary to nature. The new 
 institutions were a thorough-going adaptation to sedentary 
 conditions of the nomad economy which had enabled the 
 ancestors of the Moguls and Osmanlis to make a livelihood 
 on the steppes, and the relations between ruler, servants, 
 and subjects were modelled on those between shepherd, 
 watch-dog, and herd. The system could hardly have sur- 
 vived even if the populations on whom the founders of the 
 
 1 The Mogul dynasty, which did not really secure its hold over Northern 
 India till the beginning of Akbar’s reign (4.D. 1556), was only the last and 
 outwardly most magnificent phase of a Moslem state in Northern India which 
 had a continuous history, in spite of changes of dynasty and other vicissi- 
 tudes, from the conquests of Muhammad Ghori in the last decade of the 
 twelfth century after Christ onwards. 
 
 2 See Lybyer, A. H., Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of 
 Suleiman the Magnificent (Harvard, 1913, University Press), and compare 
 
 Lane-Poole, 8., Mediaeval India (London, 1903, Fisher Unwin), for the 
 slave system of Firoz Shah of Delhi, in the fourteenth century after Christ. 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 11 
 
 new order imposed it had been characterless and impres- 
 sionable, for the Osmanli watch-dogs rebelled against their 
 Sultan’s regulations long before the Near Eastern rayah 3 
 challenged the watch-dogs’ control. But the principal 
 experiments in this system happened to be made in areas 
 where other civilisations, or at least the ruins of other 
 civilisations, already covered the ground, and this was 
 certainly the second cause of failure. It is not difficult to 
 see why the new civilisation attempted to develop in 
 Northern India and in the Near East. The old centres of 
 Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilisation were exhausted. 
 Persia and Iraq had been trampled down by the first sweep 
 of the nomadic invasions in the interregnum, Syria and 
 Egypt broken by resistance on two fronts, to the Crusaders 
 and the Mongols. It also seems to be a law of history that 
 every death, interregnum, and rebirth of civilisation is 
 accompanied by a change of locality. Modern Western 
 civilisation made its first progress not in Greece and Southern 
 Italy, which had nurtured its parent, but on the almost 
 virgin soil of outlying provinces of the Roman Empire ; 
 and even Near Eastern civilisation started, away from the 
 centres of Ancient Greek culture, in inner Anatolia, and 
 expanded among the unsophisticated Slavs. But the sites 
 which fell to Middle Eastern civilisation were not untenanted, 
 though its own principal parent had not been the occupant. 
 To conquer and assimilate such venerable, self-conscious, and 
 exclusive societies as the Near Eastern and the Hindu was 
 a difficult enterprise for any young civilisation, and the 
 proximity of Western civilisation, rising towards its prime, 
 made the attempt dangerous. The early break-down of the 
 nomadic institutions was neither surprising nor necessarily 
 fatal in itself. The Teutonic institutions with which the 
 - West made its first experiments in construction were equally 
 unsuccessful, yet the failure of the Carolingian system did 
 not kill the new Western civilisation which had begun to 
 
 1 *Cattle.’ 
 
12 .THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 develop within that framework. It has lived to build itself 
 a whole series of political mansions. The parallel break- 
 down in the modern Middle East was less easy to repair 
 because it Jaid bare the old ruins on the site which had not 
 been worked into the new plan, and set free their original 
 tenants to reconstruct them on the quite different and more 
 attractive Western model. 
 
 This ‘ Westernisation ’ of the Near East has been discussed 
 above, but it is important to note that the break-down of 
 Middle Eastern civilisation, which helped to make it possible, 
 has only been partial. Civilisations, like individuals, spring 
 from two parents, and in all new civilisations whose parentage 
 we can trace, the heritage from the civilised mother has been 
 more important than that from the barbarian who violated 
 * her. In the West, the Near East, and the Middle East alike, 
 this heritage from the mother civilisation has been handed 
 down in the form of ‘ universal religions ’"—Christian churches 
 in the two former cases, Islam in the other. Just as 
 the Western Church survived the failure of the early Teu- 
 tonic kingdoms, so Islam has survived the collapse of the 
 Mogul and Osmanli Powers. Moreover, because modern 
 Middle Eastern civilisation is six centuries younger than 
 ours, Islam is still a greater force in its world than Chris- 
 tianity now is among us. As an expression of emotions and 
 ideas and as a bond of society, it is at least as powerful as 
 Christianity was in the West in the fourteenth century, and 
 even more indispensable—for in the Middle East no new 
 secular structure has yet been successfully erected, the 
 submerged Hindus and Near Easterners have lifted their 
 horns, and the West has trespassed through the ruined walls. 
 Islam, and nothing but Islam, now holds the Middle Eastern 
 world together. 
 
 These considerations explain the difference between the 
 two processes of ‘ Westernisation ’ in the Middle East and 
 the Near East which are observable in our generation. 
 The process in the Near East began about 250 years ago and 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 13 
 
 has gone forward fairly smoothly and easily, because the 
 positive previous obstacles had already been removed. 
 In the Middle East it did not begin till a century later. It 
 first manifested itself in the Ottoman Empire after the 
 disastrous Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjy, imposed by Russia 
 in 1774, and it has been constantly retarded and inter- 
 rupted by the real presence of Islam. In fact, though the 
 Ottoman Empire, by adopting Western methods, has 
 achieved what seemed impossible a century and a half ago 
 and has survived—even though with diminished territory 
 and sovereignty—auntil our day, it has never so far gone 
 much beyond the minimum degree of Westernisation 
 necessary to save it, at any given moment, from going 
 under. It has borrowed more technique than ideas, more 
 military technique than administrative, more administrative 
 than economic and educational. Thus, if Westernisation 
 were in itself the swmmum bonum for non-Western peoples, 
 the Middle Eastern world, just because it is not a tabula rasa, 
 would be a less promising field than the Near Eastern world 
 for the advancement of humanity. But any such notion, 
 though flattering and therefore plausible to Western minds, 
 is surely improbable. Middle Eastern civilisation, while 
 in many respects obviously less successful than ours, is also 
 likely to contain valuable different possibilities, and its 
 disappearance would be a loss, as the disappearance of a 
 distinctive Near Eastern civilisation in South-Eastern Europe 
 has proved to be already. The practical certainty, therefore, 
 that the ‘ Westernisation,’ like the break-down, of the 
 Middle East will only be partial, is a gain and not a calamity. 
 It would only be disastrous if the Islamic element in Middle 
 Eastern civilisation and the constructive element in con- 
 temporary Western life were incompatible, for then the 
 survival of Islam in the Middle East might certainly wreck 
 the development of Middle Eastern society and involve 
 our two worlds in an irreconcilable conflict. But this in- 
 compatibility, though often asserted, is disproved by the 
 
14 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 modus vivendi between Islam and the Western spirit which 
 the Middle Eastern peoples have been working out, in their 
 internal life as well as in their relations with Western 
 countries, during the last 150 years. Their problem is more 
 complicated than that of their Near Eastern neighbours, 
 it will take longer to solve, and they have begun a century 
 later. But it is certainly not insoluble, and if and when the 
 modus vivendi is completed, it may have more fruitful 
 results than are to be expected from the more thorough- 
 going assimilation of the Near East to the Western character. 
 
 Moreover, when the difference between the processes of 
 Westernisation in the Near and the Middle East has been 
 given full consideration, the fact remains that both societies 
 are moving along the same road in the same direction. It 
 would be out of place to digress further here in order to 
 demonstrate this proposition. It is a postulate of this book. 
 It will meet with opposition, partly through prejudice and 
 partly because it is easier to regard objects of thought as 
 constants than as variables. One slips into thinking of 
 Western, Near Eastern, and Middle Eastern civilisation as 
 each something with an unchanging identity, and from this 
 it is only a step to assume that because the Near East is 
 at this moment nearer than the Middle East to the West, 
 it is therefore somehow a priori within the Western pale, 
 and the Middle East permanently outside it. It is more 
 difficult to bear in mind that none of the three are stationary, 
 and that while the Near and Middle East are both approach- 
 ing the West, at different rates and intervals and from 
 different angles, the West is all the time moving on a course 
 ofitsown. Yet relativity is as fundamental a law in human 
 life as it now appears to be in the physical universe, and 
 when it is ignored, a true understanding of past history or 
 contemporary politics ceases to be possible. 
 
 When one turns from generalisations to instances, it 
 becomes clearer that the phenomena produced respectively 
 by the contact of the Middle East and the Near East with 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 15 
 
 the West have more resemblances than differences. As 
 we look into the recent problems and struggles of each of 
 these societies, we find the same necessity to borrow from 
 
 the West and the same destructive initial consequences. 
 
 On the one hand, the survival of Near and Middle Eastern 
 communities, after the break-down of their own forms of 
 life and in the face of Western expansion, has only been 
 made possible by the adoption of certain Western elements. 
 The present Greek National State could never have been 
 built up, as it has been since 1821, if during the preceding 
 century numbers of Greeks had not acquired Western 
 commercial methods and educational ideals. Again, the 
 Ottoman Empire could never have survived the apparently 
 desperate crisis of 1774-1841, during which its indigenous 
 institutions finally broke down and its existence was threat- 
 ened by Russia, the Greek Revolution, and Mehmed Ali, 
 if it had not taken over successfully a modicum of Western 
 military and administrative technique. Yet all the time 
 this infusion of Western life, which was essential to the 
 peoples that experienced it and was welcomed and brought 
 about by these peoples deliberately because they recognised 
 that it was the alternative to going under, has worked havoc 
 with their lives. It has been new wine poured suddenly 
 and clumsily into old bottles. 
 
 This is equally true of ideas, institutions, and intellectual 
 activities—for example, the Western political idea of 
 nationality. The Near and Middle Eastern peoples had to 
 reorganise themselves on national lines if they were to hold 
 their own at all in modern international politics, because 
 nationality is the contemporary basis of Western states and, 
 owing to the ascendency of the West in the world, the 
 relations of non-Western peoples to each other and to 
 Western Powers have to approximate to the forms which 
 the Western world takes for granted. Yet this principle 
 of nationality in politics is taken for granted by us simply 
 because it has grown naturally out of our special conditions, 
 
; 
 ; 
 it 
 
 SS 
 
 16 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 not because it is of universal application. The doctrine 
 really is that a sovereign independent territorial state ought 
 to be constituted, as far as possible, of all and none but the 
 speakers of a single vernacular. The existence of a French- 
 speaking population implies for us an ‘ all-French ’ sovereign 
 national state, an English-speaking population an English 
 one, and so on. This is common-sense in Western Europe, 
 where languages are on the whole distributed in homogeneous 
 territorial blocks, corresponding to convenient political 
 units. The Western national state has grown up among 
 us because it has brought with it the maximum political 
 efficiency and economy of effort possible for our world, and 
 since it has grown and has not been manufactured, it has 
 accommodated itself to other political realities and not 
 asserted itself @ outrance. The survival of Switzerland and 
 Belgium, whose unity is real but not linguistic, is evidence 
 of the political moderation and sanity of Western Europe. 
 But the value of this nationality principle depends on the 
 prevalence of solid blocks of ‘homophone’ population, a 
 condition which is unusual in the homelands of civilisations, 
 which are perpetually drawing into their focus fresh rein- 
 forcements of population from all quarters. No doubt this 
 is the reason why no known civilisation except ours has 
 made community of language the basis of political de- 
 marcation ; and in this the Near and Middle East both 
 conform to the general rule, while we are exceptions. 
 
 In the Near and Middle East (at any rate since their 
 contact with the West began) populations speaking different 
 languages have been intermixed geographically, and do not 
 represent local groups capable of independent political life 
 so much as different economic classes whose co-operation 
 is necessary to the well-being of any local state. The 
 introduction of the Western formula among these people 
 has therefore resulted in massacre. The formula has been 
 rigidly applied, because it has had no local history behind it, 
 and local institutions, which might have modified it, had 
 
 i. 
 
 = —e 
 
 are 
 
 5 Se 
 Se 
 
2 
 
 aoe 
 
 = 
 
 a 
 ai 
 
 et a 
 
 _— 
 
 Se 
 
 ae 
 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 17 
 
 already broken down. It has been applied more and 
 more savagely as it has exacted its toll of suffering and 
 exasperation. The Greek War of Independence, which 
 was perhaps the first movement in this region produced by 
 a conscious application of the Western national idea, 
 occasioned massacres of Turks throughout the Morea and 
 of Greeks at Aivali and in Khios. Even the nuclei of the 
 Near Eastern national states, though formed in areas where 
 some single nationality predominated, had to be carved out 
 by procrustean methods, and the evil has increased since 
 the attempt to reorganise the political map on Western 
 lines has been carried into districts where no single nation- 
 ality is (or was) numerically preponderant. In the north- 
 eastern provinces of Turkey, the massacre of Armenians 
 by Moslems has been endemic since 1895; in Macedonia 
 the mutual massacre of Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs, and Albanians 
 since about 1899; and after the Balkan Wars the plague 
 of racial warfare spread—with the streams of Moslem 
 refugees—from Macedonia to Thrace and Western Anatolia. 
 In the latter country, a Greek and a Turkish population 
 which had lived there side by side, on the whole peaceably, 
 for at least five centuries—even during the wars between 
 Greece and Turkey in 1821-9 ? and in 1897—have both been 
 seized by fits of homicidal national hatred. It broke out 
 among the local Turks in 1914 and 1916; among the local 
 Greeks at the landing of the Greek Army in May 1919 and, 
 
 since April 1921,all over the interior of the occupied territory, 
 
 in parts of which my wife and I had personal experience of 
 
 it during the May and June of that year.* Such massacres 
 
 are only the extreme form of a national struggle between 
 
 mutually indispensable neighbours, instigated by this fatal 
 
 1 The Serbs of course revolted earlier, but Serbian independence, though 
 
 the influence of Western ideas was no doubt at work from the beginning, 
 
 came about more by a gradual re-grouping of certain indigenous forces in 
 
 the Ottoman Empire. The movement was not so revolutionary, nor the 
 
 Western idea so dominant, as in the Greek case. 
 
 2 In Anatolia, in contrast to Rumili, the destruction of Greeks by Turks 
 at Aivali in 1821 was exceptional. % See Chapter VII. 
 
 B 
 
18 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Western idea, and carried on unremittingly by the other 
 deadly weapons of expropriation, eviction, hostile interfer- 
 ence with education and worship and the use of the mother- 
 tongue, and the refusal of justice in courts of law. The 
 recent history of Macedonia and Western Anatolia has been 
 a reductio ad absurdum of the principle of nationality, and 
 has made the Western public begin to see that there are 
 limits to the application of it in non-Western countries. 
 But the historical interest of these limiting cases lies in 
 the doubt which they cast back upon the fruitfulness of the 
 principle even in those areas where, by hook or by crook, 
 it has been made to work. The historian is led to speculate 
 whether the inoculation of the East with nationalism has 
 not from the beginning brought in diminishing returns of 
 happiness and prosperity. Given the previous break-down 
 of indigenous institutions and the irresistible ascendency of 
 the West, he must admit that it has been inevitable. But 
 when, after a century of waste and bloodshed, the resultant 
 Jugoslav, Rumanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Turkish, 
 Arab, Armenian, Georgian, and other Near and Middle 
 Eastern national states have reached (if they ever do reach) 
 some stable equilibrium, he will possibly judge the move- 
 ment of which they are a monument to have been not so 
 much a political advance as a necessary evil. 
 
 Next, let us consider the Westernisation of some in- 
 stitution, like the Ottoman Army. The most important 
 internal struggle in Turkey during the crisis of 1774-1841 was 
 between would-be reformers of the army on Western lines 
 and the interests vested in the lumber of the old, broken- 
 down Osmanlisystem. Sultan Mahmud’s principal achieve- 
 ment was that he got rid of the Janissaries during the Greek 
 War of Independence and built up enough of a new model 
 army to save Constantinople from the Russians in 1828-9. 
 The formation of regional army corps on the Prussian model 
 was carried out in 1843, and universal service introduced 
 for Moslems in 1880 and for Christian subjects of the Empire 
 
i) 
 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 19 
 
 after the Revolution of 1908. The progressive Westernisa- 
 tion of the army has undoubtedly saved Turkey from 
 extinction during the last century, and has made possible 
 an unprecedented assertion of the Central Government’s 
 authority over unruly tribes and outlying provinces. The 
 military schools for officers have also been a valuable 
 instrument of national education. Yet these essential 
 military reforms have almost been the death of the Turkish 
 nation, because they have been introduced artificially and 
 therefore in isolation from the contemporary advances in 
 hygiene, administrative method, and official integrity, 
 which, in the Western countries where universal service 
 has grown up, have counteracted the dangers otherwise 
 attaching to such a vast extension of state power over the 
 life of the individual. The Turks had to mobilise, train 
 and arm in Western fashion a large—too large—proportion 
 of their able-bodied male population in order to preserve 
 the Ottoman Empire’s existence, and under this stimulus 
 they mastered the means, but they never learnt to clothe 
 these conscripts adequately, pay them regularly, look after 
 their health, and demobilise them punctually after their 
 proper term of service. Western efficiency was no more 
 natural to nineteenth-century Turks in these spheres 
 than in the sphere of pure military technique, and the 
 necessity for it was less immediately obvious. Accord- 
 
 ingly, for several generations the Turkish peasantry have 
 
 been mobilised to die of neglect or mismanagement or to 
 return home with broken health, perhaps carrying con- 
 tagious diseases, to find their family dispersed or their 
 property ruined. The drafts of soldiers from Anatolia, 
 shipped off in Western-made uniforms and Western-built 
 steamers to fight in Albania or the Yemen with hardly any 
 of the arrangements for personal welfare which make such 
 campaigns endurable for Western troops, were also victims 
 of the fatal side of the contact between the Ottoman Empire 
 and the West. Their Government was not capable of 
 
20 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 victimising them in this way before it borrowed the neces- 
 sary minimum of Western technique. All that can be 
 said is that the reduction of the Ottoman Empire to the 
 territories inhabited by a Turkish majority (itself the result 
 of a Western agency, the principle of nationality) may at 
 last bring the Turkish peasant some relief. His antagonists 
 will have unwittingly liberated him, by liberating from his 
 Government those useless alien provinces which used to 
 drain his blood. If the blood of foreign soldiers is shed 
 hereafter among the Albanian or Arabian mountains, 
 it will be Serb, Greek, Italian, Indian, or English blood, 
 not Turkish. 
 
 A final example—this time from the intellectual field— 
 is offered by the history of the Modern Greek language and 
 literature. Here, too, sudden contact with the West has 
 sown confusion. It is to the credit of the Greeks that they 
 have been fascinated by the Western intellect as well as 
 by Western fashions, comforts, money-making, weapons, 
 constitutions, and other externals. From the beginning 
 they wanted to conceive and exchange Western thoughts 
 in their own language and bring a new tributary to the great 
 stream of Western literature. But what language? They 
 broke out of the Ottoman Empire not as a Western nation 
 with a long national history but as a commercial class and 
 a provincial peasantry in a Middle Eastern scheme of society. 
 The poverty of their previous social life was reflected, 
 naturally enough, in the poverty of their vernacular. It 
 was poor in syntax, in vocabulary, in power of expression. 
 In the course of centuries it might no doubt have enriched 
 itseH with the progress and experience of those who spoke 
 it, but there were no centuries to spare. The language 
 had to be Westernised like the nation. It had immediately 
 to be converted into a vehicle for Western ideas, and it was 
 an inevitable temptation to reconstruct it artificially out 
 of the materials of Ancient Greek. Here was a language— 
 the parent of the living vernacular, never obsolete as the 
 liturgical language of the Church, a link with the mediaeval 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 21 
 
 splendours of Near Eastern civilisation and with the greater 
 ancient splendours of Hellenic. The West admired Ancient 
 Greece as much as Modern Greece admired the West, and 
 the ancient language, having sufficed in its day for a civilisa- 
 tion which enlightened Westerners regarded as the equal of 
 their own, would surely supply now the indispensable 
 medium for a Modern Greek variety of Western culture. 
 Every motive for recourse to Ancient Greek existed—the 
 wish to establish a connection with past greatness, the wish 
 to impress the West and flatter themselves, and the urgent 
 need for a wider range of expression. Modern Greek men 
 of letters, moved by these important and legitimate con- 
 siderations, persuaded themselves that the ancient language 
 had never been replaced by another, and that in contamina- 
 ting Modern Greek with Ancient they were really purifying 
 their ancestral language from vulgarisms. The line that 
 they took was inevitable, but short cuts are even more 
 dangerous in literature than in politics, and the ancient 
 language had two fatal defects for their purpose: it was a 
 different language from Modern Greek and it was dead. 
 Their amalgam of dead and living idioms has been un- 
 satisfactory, even for official and technical prose, and poetry 
 rebels against it. Its limitations have become so apparent 
 that in the present generation a movement has set in for 
 purifying the purified language in its turn by going back to 
 the elements of the vernacular. But this popularising 
 movement has its own fanaticisms and pedantries, and 
 though it may be healthier in principle, it ignores the 
 problem which the amalgam was intended to solve. The 
 ‘popularists’ have not satisfactorily discovered how to 
 express Western thought in Modern Greek without calling 
 up reinforcements from the ancient language. The contro- 
 versy is bitter, and is hampering not only literature but 
 public education. Contact with the West is again the cause 
 of the mischief, and here, too, it is difficult to see any solution. 
 
 Such examples seem to support the thesis that the shadow 
 cast by the West, which is affecting these two contemporary 
 
22 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 civilisations profoundly in every department of life, has at 
 present a destructive rather than a constructive influence. 
 But the more one examines its effects the more one feels that 
 they have hardly yet begun to work themselves out, and 
 this is also indicated by the nearest historical parallel 
 within our knowledge. The ancient civilisations of Egypt 
 and Mesopotamia were in contact with Ancient Hellenic 
 or Graeco-Roman civilisation from the early seventh century 
 B.c., when the first Greek pirates and mercenaries landed in 
 Cilicia and Egypt, to the late seventh century after Christ, 
 when the last official documents in Greek were drafted 
 in the public offices of the Arab Empire. Out of these 
 thirteen centuries, the two Eastern civilisations may be 
 said to have been overshadowed by Hellenic, as Near and 
 Middle Eastern are overshadowed now by Western, during 
 the ten centuries from the conquests of Alexander (334-323 
 B.C.) to the conquests of the first two Caliphs of Islam 
 (A.D. 632-644) Compared with this millennium, the two 
 and a half centuries of modern Western influence over the 
 Near Eastern world, and the century and a half of its in- 
 fluence over the Middle Eastern world, can be seen in their 
 true proportions. They are only the opening phase in what 
 will be a far longer relationship, and if the ancient analogy 
 holds good, that relationship will change its character as 
 it continues. The contact between the Hellenic world and 
 the two ancient Eastern societies began with the superficial 
 conquests of commerce, war, and administration, and ended 
 with a fusion of religious experiences. Further, while those 
 first external conquests were made by the dominant, over- 
 shadowing Power, the religious fusion—the most thorough 
 and intimate kind of conquest which it is possible for one 
 society to make over another—was substantially a victory 
 for the worlds of Egypt and Mesopotamia. As the relation- 
 ship worked itself out, it deepened in character, changed 
 
 1 One might even say: Until the last translations were made from 
 classical Greek literature into Arabic, which was several centuries later, 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 23 
 
 from a one-sided influence into an interaction, and ended 
 in the spiritual ascendency of the externally conquered 
 party over the original conqueror. 
 
 Some similar ultimate reversal in the relations between 
 the modern West and our Eastern contemporaries is not 
 improbable, and we shall view the passing situation with 
 greater interest and in better perspective if we bear this 
 possibility in mind. At the same time, we must recognise 
 that it is still beyond our horizon. Our first act—the 
 Western conquest of the East—is still far from completion, 
 and there is little prospect in the near future of dramatic 
 or catastrophic reactions by the Eastérn civilisations upon 
 the West, particularly in the field of international politics 
 and war. It would be a mistake, for instance, to take too 
 seriously the bogeys lately dangled before us to draw us 
 into some ‘pro-Moslem’ or ‘anti-Moslem’ policy. The - 
 dangers of an entente between the Turkish Nationalist 
 Power in Anatolia and the Bolshevik Power in Russia have 
 been portrayed now as a reason for crushing the Nationalists, 
 now as a reason for conciliating them. By force or by 
 persuasion, we have been urged to deprive Russia of a 
 formidable ally, but neither school of alarmists ever suc- 
 ceeded in demonstrating that this Russo-Turkish combina- 
 tion was going to be a permanent reality. On the face of 
 it, it has been an entente not for action but for concerted 
 bluff andpropaganda. Even within these limits, it has 
 evidently been viewed by both parties with misgiving. 
 They have been forced into it because the Allied Powers 
 have insisted on treating them both as enemies, but both 
 have shown themselves anxious to come to terms with one 
 or all of the Allies (even at their partner’s expense), when- 
 ever they have seén an opportunity. The continuance of 
 the special intimacy between them, after the removal of its 
 transitory cause, is most improbable. At present Russians 
 and Turks are more alien from each other than either are 
 from the West, and a temporary common danger can hardly 
 
24 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 efface centuries of antipathy. A genuine rapprochement 
 between Russia and Turkey is only conceivable on common 
 ground produced by simultaneous Westernisation. Reaction 
 against the West seems bound to result incidentally in 
 mutual alienation on those deeper planes of consciousness 
 which are not touched by policies of state. 
 
 Another recent bogey is the Moplah rebellion in the 
 Madras Presidency of India, on account of which we were 
 asked to believe a general armed rebellion in India imminent 
 unless the British Government’s policy towards Turkey were 
 reversed. It is true that the Moplah leaders called their 
 organisation a ‘ Khilafat Kingdom,’ but any one who has 
 been following the Khilafat movement in India and has 
 looked up the Moplahs’ record, will not be misled by names. 
 The Moplahs are a wild mountain population who have 
 risen periodically against British rule ever since it has been 
 established over them, though for the greater part of the 
 time the British Government have been friendly to the 
 Government of the Ottoman Caliph and have frequently 
 given Turkey diplomatic and military support against her 
 Christian enemy Russia. Thus the name attached to the 
 latest Moplah rebellion is not the true explanation of its 
 origin, and indeed the choice of this name by Indian Moslems 
 who made a rebellion against the British Government 
 an occasion for massacring Hindus, can only have been 
 embarrassing to the educated Moslem leaders of the real 
 Khilafat movement, whose policy has been based on Moslem 
 and Hindu co-operation. The Khilafat movement among 
 the educated classes (the only classes capable of under- 
 standing its rather abstract chains of argument) is certainly 
 not a force to be underestimated. Underneath its academic 
 formulas, there is a real sentiment and a real grievance, as 
 is argued below. But the features of the Moplah rebellion 
 indicate that the Khilafat movement will be forced to take 
 a slow and peaceful rather than a violent headlong course. 
 The effectiveness of the movement lies in the co-operation 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 25 
 
 of the Hindus, and the Moplahs have demonstrated that 
 while co-operation may now have become possible between 
 Western-educated Hindus and Moslems when confined to 
 Western lines of political agitation, they cannot take up 
 the sword against the British without a danger of their 
 followers turning their swords against each other. 
 
 Indeed, all the symptoms at present visible of reflex 
 action by the Near and Middle Eastern worlds upon the West, 
 point to slower and vaguer, though perhaps ultimately 
 wider, movements than those generally prophesied in dis- 
 cussions of international politics. A real and a rather 
 disquieting process is indicated by the word ‘ Balkanisation.’ 
 It was coined by German socialists to describe what was 
 done to the western fringe of the Russian Empire by the 
 Peace of Brest-Litovsk, and it has since been applied to 
 certain general effects of the Versailles and supplementary 
 Treaties upon Europe. It describes conveniently the 
 growing influence in the Western world of Near Eastern 
 peoples who are still only imperfectly assimilated to Western 
 civilisation, and it can be traced in various spheres. It is 
 most obvious in politics. The sovereignty of the Western 
 Austro-Hungarian Monarchy has been superseded over 
 large territories by that of two Near Eastern states, Jugo- 
 slavia and Rumania, and Western populations—Germans 
 and. Magyars—have even been brought under the govern- 
 ment of Rumans and Serbs. This settlement is in accord 
 with our own Western principle of nationality. The greater 
 part of the redistributed districts are inhabited by the 
 peoples to whose national states they have now been 
 assigned, and the new subject Western populations are 
 minorities, some at least of whom were bound to be trans- 
 ferred with the non-Western majorities among which they 
 live. Still, when one compares the standards of the old 
 Austrian, or even the old Hungarian Government with 
 those of the new governments, or the relative civilisation 
 of the new subject minorities and the old subject majorities, 
 
26 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 one feels that the principle of nationality offers no more than 
 a partial solution for the problems of South-Eastern Europe. 
 Balkanisation is an unmistakable and an unsatisfactory, 
 though it is to be hoped only a temporary, result. 
 
 The process is even more disquieting in the economic 
 sphere, for the Western countries, just because they are 
 more civilised and more complicated in their economic 
 organisation, suffered more damage from the War in pro- 
 portion than the non-Western belligerents. The immense 
 expenditure of munitions on the Western front devastated 
 the industrial districts of Belgium and Northern France 
 far worse than Mackensen’s and Franchet d’Esperey’s brief 
 campaigns of movement damaged the fields and pastures 
 of Serbia. German industry was crippled by the blockade ; 
 Austrian (and to some extent Tchecho-Slovak) by the net- 
 work of new frontiers ; British by the collapse of our best 
 continental customers. On the other hand, Jugoslavia, 
 Rumania, and Greece have been strengthened economically 
 by the great enlargement of their territories, and at any 
 rate the two former by the enhanced value of Near Eastern 
 raw materials, especially food-stuffs, compared with Western 
 manufactures. This change has been as legitimate as the 
 simultaneous redistribution of national wealth among the 
 inhabitants of every country, but Westerners cannot regard 
 it with satisfaction. 
 
 It is also not fanciful to discern a psychological reaction 
 of the Near East upon the West. It has been pointed out 
 that Western nationalism, introduced into the Near East, 
 has promoted violence and hate. It now looks as if the 
 Near East were infecting conflicts of nationality in Western 
 Europe with the ferocity and fanaticism which it has im- 
 ported into its own. Before the War, the ancient conflicts 
 of interest between Ulstermen and Catholics in Ireland or 
 Germans and Poles in Silesia were waged with some restraint, 
 and bloodshed was uncommon. In 1921 both these and 
 other zones of national conflict in the West were a prey to 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 27 
 
 revolutionary bands, semi-official trashy opel. regular 
 combatants whose activities were disavowed while approved 
 by their governments, and all the other indecencies familiar 
 in the Armenian vilayets or Macedonia. This moral Balkan- 
 isation is also unmistakable, and it is more dangerous than 
 the political and economic manifestations of the tendency. 
 For good or evil, the barriers between the West and the 
 Near East are down, and the interchange of currents seems 
 certain to go on increasing until the waters find a common 
 level. It is to be hoped that the Western level will not 
 have to be permanently depressed in order to enable the 
 Near Eastern to rise to it. But at any rate, as has been 
 suggested above, the process will probably be spread over 
 a long period. There is one sphere, however, in which it 
 may produce important immediate effects, and that is in 
 the relations between the West and the Middle East. The 
 equally desirable adjustment between these two civilisations 
 is so difficult, and is in so delicate a stage, that it is affected 
 by imponderables. A hardly perceptible Near Eastern 
 pressure in the Western scale at this moment might make the 
 desirable balance between West and Middle East impossible. 
 This question is the special subject of this book, and is 
 the point of permanent historical importance in the Graeco- 
 Turkish conflict after the close of the European War, for 
 in this connection Greece and Turkey represent respectively 
 the Near Eastern and the Middle Eastern worlds. The 
 other Near Eastern nations—Rumans, Serbs, and Bulgars— 
 which have been brought by the results of the European 
 War into closer connection with Western civilisation, have 
 at the same time broken almost the last of their former 
 links with Turkey. The Treaty of Sévres, or rather the 
 occupation of Thrace by the Greek Army, which preceded 
 by some weeks the signing of the treaty, even removed 
 the common frontier between Turkey and Bulgaria. The 
 Moslem minorities in these three East European states are - 
 no danger to the ruling nationalities and are not conspicu- 
 
28 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 ously ill-treated. Thus no controversy remains between 
 Rumania or Jugoslavia or Bulgaria and the Middle Eastern 
 world, and their relations with the West have no bearing on 
 the relations between the West and the Middle East. 
 
 It is different with Greece. On the one hand, Greece is 
 in closer touch with the West than her Near Eastern neigh- 
 bours are. She is more permeated than they are with 
 Western education and more dependent economically than 
 any of them on trade with Western countries. In the 
 commercial and social capitals of Western Europe and the 
 United States—London, Paris, Vienna, Manchester, Liver- 
 pool, Marseilles, Trieste, New York, Chicago, San Francisco 
 —there are Greek colonies. Many families have lived in 
 the West for several consecutive generations, married into 
 Western families, naturalised as subjects of Western states, 
 sent their children to the best schools of their adopted 
 countries, and become Englishmen, Frenchmen, Austrians, 
 or Americans in everything except a traditional loyalty 
 towards their mother-country. Since there is a very wide- 
 spread sentiment for Greece in the West, which has had its 
 influence on international politics, this loyalty of the Greeks 
 abroad has seldom conflicted with their new allegiances. On 
 the contrary, a fortunate combination of the two has given 
 the wealthy and the cultivated Greeks abroad (both numerous 
 classes) opportunities of catching the ear of Western business 
 men, Western politicians, the Western Churches, Western 
 men of letters, and, last but not least, the Western Press. 
 
 It would have mattered less if the Greeks had only used 
 their exceptional influence in the West against their Near 
 Eastern neighbours like the Bulgarians, but unfortunately 
 they are not only more closely bound up than the other 
 Near Eastern nations with the West. Unlike them, they 
 are still in close relations, and in very hostile relations, with 
 the Turks, and the Osmanli Turkish nation, on its side, 
 enjoys a special position in the Middle Eastern world. 
 
 The Middle East finds it most natural at present to express 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 29 
 
 its regard for Turkey through a personal symbol. It feels 
 loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam, and 
 Western scholars have rather perversely exercised their 
 ingenuity in criticising the Sultan’s claim to the title. 
 Certainly the claim (which only dates from a.p. 1517) is 
 as doubtful as the Carolingians’ claim to be Roman 
 Emperors, and even if it were proved good in law, the 
 Osmanli Turks are as remote from the Ancient Middle 
 Eastern world as the Austrasian Franks were from Ancient 
 Greece and Rome. In fact, the title seems to have been 
 regarded as an antiquarian curiosity (something like the 
 sword and crown of Charlemagne at Vienna) by the Ottoman 
 Dynasty till it was exploited by Abdu’l-Hamid, and the 
 new conditions which made it worth his while to do this 
 were chiefly due to the progress of Westernisation. The 
 spread of Western posts, telegraphs, railways, and steamers 
 had made it possible to keep up communications between 
 Constantinople and the large outlying Moslem communities 
 in India, the East Indies, China, and Russia; and the 
 influence of Western nationalism, with its ingrained romantic 
 archaism, had set the fashion of reviving forgotten history, 
 even when it had little real bearing on the present. The 
 Khilafat movement is also part of that wave of sentiment 
 which moves Modern Greeks to think of themselves as the 
 special heirs of Pericles or Alexander, or to overload their 
 language with reminiscences of Thucydides and Homer. 
 Rationally considered, it is rather a maladroit symbol for 
 Islamic unity, since the succession to the Caliphate is the 
 subject of the chief controversies by which Moslems have 
 historically been divided. Technically, the Ottoman claim 
 is rejected by the Shi‘ii sect (which includes all Islam in 
 Persia and a large percentage of Moslems in Russia, Meso- 
 potamia, and India); by the Imam of San‘a in the Yemen ; 
 and by the Sherif of Morocco. Even among the more 
 numerous Sunni or orthodox, the Osmanli Khilafat is not uni- 
 versally accepted. <A puritanical aversion from the Western 
 
30 ‘THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 taint in modern Osmanili life alienates the Wahhe«bis and the 
 followers of the Idrisi in Arabia and the Senusi fraternity 
 in North Africa. Others are alienated by conflicting 
 national interests or family ambitions—for instance, the 
 Hashimite Sherifs of Mecca and their Hijazi and Syrian 
 supporters. The most extraordinary feature is that the 
 Sultan’s claim is extremely awkward for the Turkish 
 Nationalists, who do not want a theocracy but some kind 
 of limited representative government in the hands of the 
 Turkish official and officer class ; and Nationalism has un- 
 doubtedly won the allegiance of the Turkish people. But 
 all these criticisms of the symbol do not affect the deep and 
 general and not irrational feeling which it expresses suffici- 
 ently well for the time being. If and when it proves in- 
 adequate, it will doubtless be modified or discarded ; but 
 the feeling will continue, and this is the reality with which 
 we have to reckon. 
 
 The Middle Eastern world feels affection and esteem for 
 the Turks, and is concerned about their welfare, because the 
 Ottoman Empire combines several features which Middle 
 Eastern opinion values. Turkey is an independent Middle 
 Eastern state, much stronger than Persia and much more 
 civilised (in the Western as well as in the Middle Eastern 
 sense) than Afghanistan. In fact, she is the only Middle 
 Eastern state which, in a world dominated by the West and 
 more and more organised on Western lines, can still play 
 the part of a Great Power. It is not realised that Turkey 
 has not been a Great Power, or even a completely inde- 
 pendent Power, since a.p. 1774. The circumstance that she 
 still has Christian subjects and that she keeps a celebrated 
 Christian cathedral as her principal mosque and a famous 
 European city as her capital, lends her an appearance of 
 
 dominion which is gratifying to Middle Eastern populations — 
 
 under Western rule. Though Constantinople, Aya Soffa, 
 and the rayah are trophies from the Near Eastern and not 
 from the Western world, the Middle East, outside Turkey, 
 
 ee ee eee eer 
 
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 31 
 
 ‘ makes no clear distinction between Frank and Rum ; 
 
 and after all Turkey, dominated though she is by Western 
 Powers and forced in self-preservation to find a modus 
 vivendi with Western civilisation, is still independent in a 
 very important sense. She can accept some Western 
 elements and reject others ; choose her own way of adapting 
 what she borrows; and take her own time. In fact, she 
 can work out her modus vivendi for herself, and this is just 
 what is denied to Middle Eastern populations under British, 
 French, Dutch, or Italian administration. In dependencies 
 of Western empires the process is guided by the ruling 
 Power. The subject populations are more or less resigned 
 to this ; for the Indian Moslems, in particular, the loss of 
 initiative has important compensations ; and it is common 
 ground, except among a small number of extremists, that in 
 some form and by one or other party the modus vivendi 
 must be found. But there is a strong feeling that, at any 
 rate in one leading Middle Eastern country, the problem 
 ought to be worked out independently by the people them- 
 selves. This will not seem pedantic or far fetched to any 
 one acquainted with conditions in civilised non-Western 
 countries under Western government. It does not imply 
 that Western government has been a failure or ought to 
 be terminated abruptly in the countries over which it has 
 been established. It does mean that the shadow of the 
 West chills other civilisations when it cuts them off from 
 the sun altogether. Sunshine cannot be replaced by 
 excellent artificial light. In the eyes of other Moslems, an 
 independent Ottoman Empire is a precious window (it need 
 not be a large one) through which a few rays of natural 
 sunshine still reach the Middle Eastern world. Many 
 Western readers who are aware of the misdoings, and only 
 of the misdoings, of the Ottoman Turks and their Govern- 
 ment, will feel all this fantastic. Nevertheless, Moslem 
 sentiment about Turkey is not only genuine but reason- 
 able. There is the possibility here of a very serious mis- 
 
32 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 understanding between the Western and Middle Eastern 
 worlds. 
 
 This is the danger in the three-cornered relationship 
 between Western civilisation, Turkey, and Greece. Greece 
 interposes between the other two, and some of her national 
 ambitions cannot be realised without alienating them from 
 each other. Such ambitions have not necessarily been more 
 illegitimate or pursued by more undesirable means than the 
 ordinary policies of other sovereign national states. Only, in 
 this case, the same evils may have disproportionately grave 
 consequences. Greece, who has gained much by the special 
 place she holds in Western sentiment, may fairly be required 
 to forego undue advantages on account of the special position 
 of Turkey in the Middle East ; and clearly Western states- 
 manship cannot afford to leave Greece and Turkey in such 
 bad relations that each stands to gain by the other’s losses. 
 
 Greece has interposed in the literal sense. In 1921, 
 under the Allied occupation of Constantinople, an English- 
 man keeping an appointment with an officer at the General 
 Headquarters of the British ‘Army of the Black Sea,’ or 
 calling on an official at the Embassy, or applying for a visa 
 at the British section of the Inter-Allied Passport Control, 
 had to make his way through a cordon of Greek (or Armenian) 
 door-keepers, interpreters, and clerks before he could get 
 into touch with one of his own countrymen. Sometimes 
 one had difficulties, and then one wondered what happened 
 to Bulgars and Turks on similar errands, with the rival 
 nationality holding the gates, and no other avenue to their 
 English superiors. The employment of Near Easterners as 
 military interpreters seemed a particularly hazardous 
 policy. They were numerous, and wore the regular British 
 uniform, with nothing to distinguish them except a green- 
 and-white armlet.1 When off duty, it was only natural 
 
 1 The interpreters to the French and Italian forces at Constantinople 
 wore armlets but not uniforms. The British regulation was more generous 
 —the foreigner in British service was treated like an English soldier—but 
 the motive was inevitably misunderstood. 
 
 en ae ee 
 
‘ 
 t-te 
 
 a 
 
 Se aes 
 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 33 
 
 that some of them should take advantage of their khaki to 
 pay off old scores against the former ruling race at Cor- 
 stantinople ; and on duty, whenever they had to interpret 
 between an Englishman and a Bulgar or Turk, they were 
 under constant temptation to misuse their opportunities. 
 Even if they were scrupulously honest, a tone of voice, an 
 expression on their faces, or the mere knowledge of their 
 nationality in the mind of the other party, might do mischief. 
 I came across a very pertinent case when I accompanied 
 the Red Crescent Mission to the southern coasts of the 
 Marmara.! The British officers successively attached to 
 the Mission always brought with them the same Greek 
 interpreter. He was in a painful position. The better he 
 did his duty, the more he exposed the misdoings of—not 
 his fellow-subjects, for he was an Ottoman Greek who had 
 recently taken out British naturalisation papers—but his 
 own nation, in the persons of the Greek troops and the local 
 Greek population. His presence certainly did harm, and 
 yet the British officers could not dispense with an interpreter, 
 
 _ and presumably no qualified Englishman or Israelite could 
 
 be found. Certainly this Karamanly Greek knew his busi- 
 ness, and he was typical of his nation. The Greeks have 
 taken Western education seriously. If you visit a Greek 
 divisional or corps headquarters on active service, you may 
 find clerks and non-commissioned officers studying a French 
 or an English grammar in their intervals off duty. Efficient 
 Greek interpreters are abundant, Turkish or English 
 interpreters rare or unknown. The preponderance of Greek 
 and Armenian interpreters in the British Army of Occupation 
 at Constantinople was a result of the ordinary economic 
 laws of supply and demand. But it did create a real barrier 
 between the British Army and members of the other local 
 nationalities, and both Greeks and Turks regarded it as an 
 indication of British policy. They were wrong, but the 
 misconception has done considerable political damage. 
 
 4 See itinerary in Preface, 
 0 
 
34 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Greece had also interposed geographically by her acquisi- 
 tion of Eastern Thrace under the Treaty of Sévres. From 
 the Black Sea to the Marmara and the Aegean, an unbroken 
 belt of Greek territory separated Turkey in 1921 from 
 every other state in Europe. You could not telegraph 
 from Constantinople or Smyrna to London or Paris without 
 running the gauntlet of the Greek censorship, for the marine 
 cable passes through a transmitting-station on the Greek 
 island of Syra, and the overland wire from Constantinople 
 crosses Eastern Thrace. In the spring and summer of 1921, 
 at any rate, the Greek military censorship was stringently 
 exercised over both Press and business messages in transit. 
 In this the Greek Government were only exercising their 
 legal sovereign rights, but it is as much against the general 
 interest that Greece should be invested with the right to 
 control private communications between Turkey and the 
 West as it is that Turkey should control the passage of 
 merchant shipping through the waterway between the 
 Mediterranean and Russia. It is no answer to say that 
 this was an exceptional war-measure, for Greece and Turkey 
 might often be at war for years together, and in peace-time 
 the possibilities of surreptitious censorship might be even 
 more objectionable. Presumably more expensive and cir- 
 cuitous telegraphic routes could be organised (for instance, 
 through Varna or Constanza), but this would still leave 
 Greece astride the Oriental Railway between Constantinople 
 and Sofia—the only possible route for quick travelling 
 between Turkey and Western Europe. 
 
 But the most serious disturbance in the relations of West 
 and Middle East has been produced by the Greek occupation 
 of Western Anatolia. The mischief has been out of all 
 porportion to the extent of the territory. The area pro- 
 visionally assigned to Greece round Smyrna under the Treaty 
 of Sévres was small compared to the territories mandated 
 to Great Britain and France in Syria, Palestine, and Meso- 
 potamia, The whole area carved out of the= Ottoman 
 
| iy 
 
 THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 35 
 
 Empire since 1821 to make an independent Greece is even 
 smaller in comparison with the vast French and British 
 dominions over Middle Eastern peoples in India, the Nile 
 Basin, and North-West Africa. It is the misfortune as well 
 as the fault of Greece—and the unmitigated fault of Allied 
 statesmanship—that the occupation of Smyrna has had 
 specially untoward consequences, but the circumstances 
 could not fail to make trouble. The Greek troops were sent 
 to Smyrna, with a mandate from the Supreme Council and 
 under cover of the guns of Allied warships, more than six 
 months after the armistice with Turkey. The landing— 
 technically camouflaged as a movement of Allied troops 
 for the maintenance of order—was probably contrary to 
 the letter of the armistice, for no previous local disorder had 
 been proved, and it was certainly contrary to its spirit. 
 Within a few hours of the landing, the troops committed a 
 bad massacre in the city ; within a few days they advanced 
 into the interior ; and a new and devastating war of aggres- 
 sion against Turkey began in her only unravaged provinces. 
 In the sixteenth month of this war, the Powers gave Greece 
 a five-years’ administrative mandate in the Smyrna Zone 
 with the possibility of subsequent annexation. Turkey was 
 the leading state of the Middle Eastern world, Greece a Near 
 Eastern state of recent origin. She had been admitted 
 with generous facility into the Western concert of nations ; 
 but the mandate now given to her—to govern a mixed 
 population in which one element was of her own nationality 
 —would have been a difficult test, in parallel circumstances, 
 for the most experienced Western Power. It was wanton 
 rashness to make such an experiment at Turkey’s expense ; 
 and after the experiment had proved a failure, it showed 
 blind prejudice and partiality on the part of Western 
 Governments that they should continue to give Greece 
 material and moral support in her enterprise as an apostle 
 of their civilisation. 
 
 This policy would in any case have made bad feeling 
 
36 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 between the Western and the Middle Eastern worlds, for 
 we had reached a phase in our relationship in which Middle 
 Eastern peoples were—rightly or wrongly—ceasing to 
 tolerate the domination even of the leading Western Powers, 
 in countries which they have governed, on the whole bene- 
 ficially, for many years. This movement of revolt, which 
 might have been gradual, has been formidably accelerated 
 by the consequences of the European War, and our relations 
 have now entered on a phase which is admittedly critical. 
 In these circumstances, the statesmanship responsible after 
 the armistice for the Graeco-Turkish conflict is unpardon- 
 able. It introduced a cruel and unnecessary irritant into 
 a dangerous wound, at the risk of making it incurable. 
 It is not as if our misunderstanding with the Middle East 
 had been past mending. It was not, and it may still not 
 be, if the irritant can be removed without leaving malignant 
 after-effects. Conflicts between civilisations are terrible, 
 because civilisations are the most real and fundamental 
 forms of human society. But just because they are ultimate 
 forces, their differentia does not consist in externals like 
 colour or physique or birchplace or mother-tongue, but in 
 states of mind; and while the Ethiopian cannot change 
 his skin or the foreigner his accent, and it is difficult for the 
 subject of an efficient government even to forge a birth- 
 certificate, men’s minds can be turned, even at the eleventh 
 hour, from the paths of destruction. Civilisations are 
 differentiations of consciousness, and happily there are 
 possibilities of extensive mental adjustments between the 
 members of one civilisation and those of another. The 
 absorption of the Near Eastern into the Western outlook, 
 and the discovery of a modus vivendi between the outlooks 
 of West and Middle East, are not desperate, though they 
 are difficult problems. But at any moment they can be 
 made desperate by errors of judgment on the part of a few 
 men in power. 
 
 1 
 
 t 
 
 Se 
 
" 
 
 t 
 
 SS 
 
 II 
 WESTERN DIPLOMACY 
 
 On the 18th March 1912 I was walking through an out-of- 
 the-way district in the east of Krete. The landscape was 
 the bare limestone mountain-side characteristic of the 
 Aegean. Villages were rare, and some of them had been 
 sacked during the civil war of 1897 and not reoccupied. 
 Suddenly, as the path turned the corner round a hillside 
 in the limestone wilderness, a Western country-house came 
 into view. It was built in the Jacobean style ; the curves 
 and flourishes of its fagade were in excellent preservation ; 
 one’s own friends, or their great-grandparents, might have 
 walked out of the front door. But, after a few steps 
 towards it, the illusion of life faded. The door was half 
 walled-up with loose stones to convert the ground-floor into 
 a sheepfold, the windows stared blindly, the cornice had 
 no roof above it. It was the villa of some Venetian land- 
 owner or official, and must have been deserted since the 
 great War of Candia, two and a half centuries ago. 
 
 The empires founded by mediaeval Western states in 
 Near and Middle Eastern countries are a memento mori for 
 the modern Western Empires which are such an imposing 
 and characteristic feature in the landscape of the contem- 
 porary world. That Venetian colony in Krete lasted four 
 and a half centuries;a longer li colony 
 can yet boast of. Tn Galata, where French, English, and 
 American firms now have their offices, there was once a 
 Genoese settlement, extra-territorial and self-governing in 
 the manner of modern Shanghai. When this Western 
 community had diplomatic difficulties with the Imperial 
 
 1 a.v. 1644-69, 
 
 37 
 
38 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 East Roman Government, it used to shoot large stones 
 across the Golden. Horn into Constantinople from its muni- 
 cipal catapults. It lived two centuries (a.D. 1261-1453), and 
 planted daughter-colonies in the Crimea and on the Don, 
 which opened up an overland trade with Russia, India, and 
 China. Modern Russia has only been the principal Black 
 Sea Power for the last 148 years. Genoa held that position 
 for about fifty years longer. The Genoese Chartered Com- : 
 pany which governed the Aegean island of Khios had as 
 romantic a career as John Company in India. The Floren- 
 tine bankers who became Dukes of Athens anticipated the 
 exploits of Rajah Brooke and Cecil Rhodes ; and the trans- 
 formations of the Order of St. John in Palestine, Rhodes, 
 and Malta suggest strange possibilities of evolution for the 
 more recently founded Jesuit and Evangelical Missions. 
 About the year 1400, the Near East seemed on the verge of 
 becoming an annex to the constellation of miniature Western 
 Great Powers in Northern Italy, and then, within a century 
 or two, this exotic growth of commerce, war, administration, 
 and diplomacy was swept away. 
 
 When we look at our present ascendencies in the East 
 through this glass, they too appear unsubstantial, and it 
 becomes possible to imagine that Western manufactures, 
 garrisons, governors, protectorates, diplomatic understand- 
 ings and rivalries may be eliminated from the non-Western 
 civilised countries of the modern world before the mental 
 influence of the West upon other civilisations has reached 
 its maximum, and long before their counter-influence upon 
 the West has properly begun. However, the external and 
 material ascendency of the West is one of the realities of the 
 moment, and the most interesting chapter in a story is 
 often the last. In the Graeco-Turkish borderland of the 
 Near and the Middle East, the diplomatic aspect of this 
 ascendency is in the foreground. 
 
 During the battle of In Onii in March 1921,1 a Greek 
 
 1 See Chapter VI. 
 
: 
 i 
 
 WESTERN DIPLOMACY : 39 
 
 private soldier said to me ; ‘ This is really a battle between 
 England and France for the possession of Antolia.’ He 
 meant it, I think, in the literal sense, for a majority of the 
 Greek and Turkish combatants in this battle believed that 
 French and British officers were directing operations on 
 opposite sides.1 Their misapprehension showed the crude- 
 ness of their views about Western diplomatic methods. 
 Western governments which are supposed to be allies are 
 too experienced, and almost too respectable, to act openly 
 against each other. They know that scandal is never 
 worth while; and yet in essence this Greek soldier’s 
 remark was true. The distant Western Powers were the 
 protagonists in the war-after-the-war which has devastated 
 considerable tracts of the Near and Middle East, while the 
 local peoples, who were acting and suffering, were adits 
 If Mr. Thomas Hardy were to write a drama called ‘The 
 Patriots,’ he would no doubt present Professor Masaryk, 
 Mr. Venizelos, Mr. Stambolisky, General Pilsudsky,, the 
 Emir Feisal, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha as men walking in 
 a dream, like his Pitt and Napoleon ; and when the scene 
 dissolved into a vision of the real agent, we should see the 
 grey outlines of rooms and corridors in Downing Street and 
 on the Quai d’Orsay. Perhaps the chorus of spirits would 
 be composed of impotent Western observers like myself. 
 There is nothing new or paradoxical in this view of the 
 relations between Near and Middle Eastern states and 
 Western Powers. Change the metaphor from chess to 
 sport, and it is a commonplace. The correspondent of the 
 Times at Constantinople subscribed to it on the 5th October 
 1921, when he reported a rumour that certain circles in the 
 Quai d’Orsay were advising the Turkish Nationalist Govern- 
 ment at Angora to adopt an attitude of reserve towards any 
 suggestions of negotiation until Greece found herself in 
 greater difficulties. ‘The policy,’ he telegraphed, ‘ of back- 
 
 ? See ‘The Origin of a Legend,’ pp. 254 seqq. 
 * See his telegram in the Times of the 10th October 1921. 
 
40 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 ing the protagonists (sic) in the present Eastern War as if 
 they were race-horses, is a policy of which each of the 
 Entente Powers in turn has been guilty, and must be 
 abandoned if peace is ever to be restored in the Levant.’ 
 The metaphor was not of his invention. It was an 
 allusion to Lord Salisbury’s famous recantation of the 
 policy which he had pursued at the Berlin Conference of 
 1878: ‘We have backed the wrong horse!’ The phrase 
 sums up the spirit in which Western Powers have betted 
 and quarrelled in the Near and Middle Eastern arena for 
 the last 250 years, ever since they had the ships, men, and 
 money to fight there if they wanted to. It has been wrong- 
 headed and disastrous behaviour. The mere description 
 of it is an indictment, but it is an exposure of the little 
 wisdom in the government of human affairs rather than of 
 any special depravity in Western civilisation. 
 
 The exploitation of small states by greater is particularly 
 mischievous when the two groups of states belong to different 
 civilisations, but this difference is not the cause of it. It 
 occurs whenever such small states are hostile to one another 
 and weak and the larger states hostile to one another and 
 strong. A group of small, mutually hostile, and therefore 
 un-self-sufficient states creates automatically a sort of inter- 
 national vacuum, into which the powerful states around 
 are attracted. Their centripetal movement is one form of 
 ‘imperialism,’ and when several converging imperialisms 
 collide in the vacuum, there may be a general disaster. 
 What has been happening latterly in the Near and Middle 
 East had been going on for four centuries (from about 1470 
 to 1871) in the bosom of Western Europe. , Little rival 
 German and Italian states were backed by the big rivals— 
 Spain, France, England, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, Russia. 
 The dynamic consequences were perpetual diplomatic con- 
 flicts and wars, which recurred until the national unification 
 of Germany and Italy changed this particular vacuum into 
 a plenum and made a local equilibrium possible. It was after 
 
WESTERN .DIPLOMACY 4) 
 
 this that the thrust of forces, balanced at last further west, 
 directed itself eastwards into another vacuum and danger- 
 ously accentuated the stresses of the ‘ Eastern Question.’ 
 
 Such vacua are always a source of danger, and though 
 the Italian and German vacua in Western Europe were 
 removed before they had produced fatal consequences, the 
 sort of catastrophe which they might have brought, and the 
 Eastern vacuum still may bring about, is illustrated by the 
 history of Graeco-Roman civilisation in the third and second 
 centuries B.c. The ambitions, fears, and rivalries of the 
 small states round the Mediterranean—Messana, Syracuse, 
 and Saguntum ; Aetolia, Pergamon, and Rhodes—involved 
 their powerful neighbours in wars which did not come to 
 an end till one Great Power, Rome, had eaten up four others 
 —Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt. The sequel was 
 universal impoverishment and revolution, and the victorious 
 Power also came to an unpleasant end, like a snake in the 
 Zoological Gardens some years ago which, in a tug-of-war 
 with another snake over the same pigeon, swallowed its 
 rival as well as the bird, and died by inches as the foreign 
 body stiffened in its throat. 
 
 Only the Great Powers themselves can save each other 
 from such fatalities, as well as from the constant friction and 
 waste of energy into which the presence of vacua more 
 commonly leads them. The first safeguard against the 
 danger is moderation on their part, but the small states 
 cannot be acquitted of responsibility. So long as they are 
 willing to sell their services to some Great Power in order to 
 procure that Power’s backing against their own small rivals, 
 they deserve to be treated as pawns and no sentiment need 
 be wasted upon them. A remedy for their situation is in 
 their peoples’ hands, They can change the vacuum into 
 a plenum by co-operation. When the Italian and German 
 peoples made up their minds to combine into national 
 states,’ the traditional diplomacy of the Powers was unable 
 
 1 Between 1848 and 1871. 
 
42 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 to stop them, and from that time onwards Italy and Germany 
 ceased to be arenas of international conflict. Instead, they 
 took their places as Great Powers in the new arena of the 
 Near and Middle East, and began to use the small states 
 here as they had been used themselves. This arena is un- 
 happily still open, but the Eastern peoples can close it by 
 refusing, in their turn, to be pitted against one another. 
 As it is, they are willing victims, and the Powers are in some 
 degree victims as well as villains. In such situations, 
 international politics move in a vicious circle, and the good- 
 will of all the parties is needed in order to break it. 
 
 Having stated the case for the defence of the Powers’ 
 diplomacy in the East, I can now proceed with the indict- 
 ment. In the terms suggested above, the first phase after 
 the European War may be described somewhat as follows: 
 France was backing Poland vigorously, and Hungary 
 tentatively, against Germany and Russia; and she was 
 backing Turkey tentatively against Russia and vigorously 
 against Greece because Greece had been backed by Great 
 Britain, Great Britain was backing Greece against Turkey, 
 because an aggrandised Greece dependent on British support 
 would save Great Britain the trouble of herself imposing 
 her Eastern peace-terms. Italy was backing Turkey against 
 Greece as payment on account for prospective economic con- 
 cessions in Anatolia ; and Russia was backing Turkey against 
 Greece to deter her from purchasing the backing of any of 
 the Western Powers who were Russia’s enemies. Russia 
 also backed the Armenian Republic of Erivan to a limited 
 extent against both Turkey and Azerbaijan, as a barrier 
 between possible Turkish ‘Pan-Turanian’ ambitions and 
 the oil-fields of Baku; and she backed both Erivan and 
 Azerbaijan against Georgia in order to complete the restora- 
 tion of her authority over her previous possessions in Trans- 
 caucasia. In this criss-cross of exploitations Russia’s part 
 was perhaps the least blameworthy, because she had the 
 best claim to be acting in self-defence. 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 43 
 
 As for the pawns, the three Transcaucasian states threw 
 away their brief independence by refusing to settle their 
 boundary disputes and work together. Hungary would 
 sell herself to anybody who would help her to recover her 
 frontiers of 1914, and Poland would almost do the same 
 for the frontiers of 1772. Greece had sacrificed her exchange 
 and her young men’s lives for a gambler’s chance of realising 
 her utmost national ambitions. Turkey, who was genuinely 
 fighting for her life, deserved the same cautious sympathy 
 as Russia. 
 
 Only four small states in the area had begun to shake 
 themselves free from the vicious circle of clientage and 
 exploitation. These were Tchecho-Slovakia, Jugoslavia, 
 Rumania, and Bulgaria. The ‘ Little Entente’ between the 
 first three ought not to be condemned because its primary 
 motive has been mutual insurance against the largely justi- 
 fiable restlessness of Hungary under the Treaty of Trianon. 
 Short of an appeasement of the feuds between the small 
 states, it is a gain that they should pursue these feuds among 
 themselves without drawing in the Great Powers as rival 
 backers; and, besides, arrangements originally made for 
 one purpose may often be found serviceable for others. 
 Dr. Bene’ probably had economic co-operation in his mind 
 from the beginning. This economic motive might attract 
 Austria into the group, and might even bring about the 
 ultimate adhesion of Hungary. One thing is certain: the 
 treatment of minorities everywhere—including unneces- 
 sarily and unjustly subjected minorities—will improve in 
 proportion to the growth of mutual confidence between the 
 state of which they are subjects and the other state of which 
 they would prefer to be citizens. 
 
 Bulgaria, defeated and denied her national unity but not 
 embittered, was showing even more remarkable wisdom. 
 Mr. Stambolisky’s policy has apparently been to let terri- 
 torial claims lie, to bring about a reconciliation in feeling as 
 well as in form with Jugoslavia and Rumania, and to build 
 
44 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 up a ‘Green International’ of the peasant-proprietors of 
 South-Eastern and Central Europe, who find themselves in 
 a precarious position between the urban capitalism of the 
 Western Powers and the urban communism of Petrograd 
 and Moscow. His movement is complementary to 
 Dr. Bene’’s, and the two seem bound to converge. The 
 Poles, Tchechs, Slovenes, and Croats, who have common 
 economic interests and no national quarrel with the Bulgars, 
 are the natural intermediaries between Bulgaria and the 
 Rumans and Serbs. 
 
 These are promising materials for the establishment of 
 a plenum in the Near East, and there are Near Eastern 
 statesmen who realise its desirability. For example, 
 Mr. Take Jonescu, the leading advocate of the Little Entente 
 in Rumania, was careful to declare (in a statement published 
 in the Times of the 11th October 1921, after a visit to 
 London): ‘I am not following any ‘French ”’ policy 
 against Britain or any “ British” policy against France.’ 
 It would have been difficult for Greek and Turkish statesmen 
 at that date to make any similar declaration, though if they 
 are wise, they will take the first opportunity to enable one 
 another to dispense with French, British, or any other back- 
 ing. Until they succeed, they will both be broken more and 
 more cruelly upon the wheel of a greater rivalry than theirs. 
 
 In modern times, since the effacement of the Miniature 
 Powers of Northern Italy, there have been three main 
 Western rivalries in the Near and Middle East : between 
 Great Britain and France, between Great Britain and Russia, 
 and between Great Britain, France, and Russia together and 
 Germany. The first is the most important of the three. 
 It is the oldest ; it lived on underground after the Entente 
 of 1904 and even during the European War ; and since the 
 armistice it has again overtopped the other two. 
 
 This Anglo-French rivalry in the Near and Middle East 
 can be traced back to the sixteenth century. It was a 
 commercial rivalry so long as the vacuum which attracted 
 
 | 
 | 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 45 
 
 it was only economic and not political. In the eighteenth 
 century, after the break-down of the Mogul Empire, it 
 blossomed out in India into a military struggle for direct 
 dominion, which terminated in the complete defeat of 
 France. This was its classic period, but Napoleon’s efforts 
 } to recover a footing in India by a new route transferred the 
 
 ; centre of stress to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire and 
 developed an intermediate form of competition, conditioned 
 
 by the semi-recovery of Turkey from her eighteenth-century 
 
 decline, and the semi-self-sufficiency of the Near Eastern 
 
 nations which have been disentangling themselves from her. 
 
 j Since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, France and Great _. 
 Britain have never fought in the Levant with naval and 
 military weapons (though they have several times been on 
 the verge of open war), but their struggle has been real and 
 
 sometimes bitter for all that, and though it has not here 
 gone the length of empire-building, it has not been con- 
 fined to trade. Its characteristic fields have been diplomacy 
 and culture, its entrenchments embassies, consulates, re- 
 ligious missions, and schools. It has flared up on the Upper 
 Nile, in Egypt, on the Isthmus of Suez, in Palestine, in the 
 Lebanon, at Mosul, at the Dardanelles, at Salonika, in 
 
 Constantinople. The crises of 1839-41 and 1882 over Egypt 
 
 and of 1898 over the Egyptian Sudan are landmarks on a 
 
 road that has never been smooth, for conflicts between 
 
 Sultan Mahmud and Mehmed Ali, Maronites and Druses, 
 Greeks and Turks, Syrians and Hijazis, Arabs and Jews, have 
 perpetually kept alive the combative instinct in French 
 and English missionaries, schoolmasters, consuls, diplo- 
 matists, civil servants, ministers of state, and journalists. 
 } One cannot understand—or make allowances for—the post- | 
 , war relations of the French and British Governments over | 
 the ‘ Eastern Question ’ unless one realises this tradition of 
 
 rivalry and its accumulated inheritance of suspicion and 
 
 resentment. It is a bad mental background for the 
 individuals who have to represent the two countries. The 
 
 = 
 ’ 
 
46 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 French are perhaps more affected by it than we, because 
 on the whole they have had the worst of the struggle in the 
 Levant as well as in India, and failure cuts deeper memories 
 than success. 
 
 The other two rivalries less immediately concern my 
 subject. The Anglo-Russian rivalry has been diplomatic 
 and military, with the main stresses in Afghanistan, in 
 Persia, and at the Black Sea Straits. It was prominent 
 from about 1815 until 1917, suffered a sudden eclipse with the 
 collapse of the Russian Power, and is at present a secondary 
 though far from a negligible factor in the Middle Eastern 
 situation. It will reassert itself as Russia recovers, unless 
 the vacuum continues to be occupied by the Anglo-French 
 rivalry, or the formation of a local plenum happily eliminates 
 this arena of rivalry altogether. 
 
 The Entente between France, Great Britain, and Russia 
 against Germany has been the shortest and strangest 
 grouping of all. It was only in existence from the Anglo- 
 Russian Agreement of 1907 to the Bolshevik revolution in 
 Russia at the close of 1917. It never had the solidity of 
 the older Franco-Russian combination against Germany in 
 Europe, and it is unlikely to recur. It lacked the com- 
 paratively strong cement of fear, except in so far as it was 
 a corollary to the rapprochement of the same three parties 
 over European politics. Its direct motive was covetousness, 
 and it rested locally on nothing more substantial than the 
 precarious honour among thieves who find their business 
 threatened by a vigorous and talented competitor. Some of 
 the thieves, at any rate, never got out of the habit of picking 
 their temporary partners’ pockets. 
 
 The venerable Anglo-French rivalry in the Near and 
 Middle East was not brought to an end by the Entente of 
 1904, whatever results that agreement may have had in 
 the North-American Fisheries or in Tropical Africa. This 
 
 1 Egypt and Morocco came within the purview of the understanding, but 
 not Turkey or Greece. 
 
| WESTERN DIPLOMACY 47 
 
 rivalry was more or less dormant during the few years before 
 the War, when the partition of Asiatic Turkey and the 
 alteration of the status of the Straits did not appear im- 
 minent. Each Power’s attention at that time was mainly 
 taken up by the common rivalry with Germany, and both 
 Powers—to their credit—tried to come to agreements with 
 Germany over their respective Eastern interests before the 
 War began. But Turkey’s intervention in the War removed 
 all restraint on Western appetites. Germany dreamed of 
 swallowing Turkey gradually but whole, the Allied Powers 
 of dividing her piecemeal. But how was she to be carved 
 up? Their abandonment of any thought of compromise 
 -with Germany in the East made it extremely difficult for 
 them to compromise with one another. Their conflicting 
 ambitions, dragging on the leash, pulled them asunder, in 
 spite of their acute common danger ; and by the middle of 
 1915 the tension had become so serious that the problem 
 had to be faced and some immediate definite agreement 
 attempted. The deciding factors were the military break- 
 down of Russia in the course of 1915 and the overtures 
 made to the British Government in the summer of that year © 
 by the Sherif (now King) Husein of Mecca, on behalf of a 
 secret Arab Nationalist Committee at Damascus. 
 
 To prevent the Russian Government from making a 
 separate peace, the French and British Governments 
 acquiesced in the acquisition by Russia of Constantinople 
 and adjoining territories commanding the Black Sea Straits. 
 An agreement was signed, in~which these territories were 
 defined. They included the Gallipoli. Peninsula and a strip 
 along the European coast of the Marmara joining it to the 
 Peninsula of Constantinople—the whole roughly correspond- 
 ing to the European section of the ‘ Zone of the Straits ’ as 
 laid down in Article 179 of the Treaty of Sévres and indicated 
 on the map annexed to it. On the Asiatic side, most of the 
 Ismid Peninsula was included, but not the Bigha Peninsula 
 nor the Asiatic parts of the Sévres Zone between Bigha and 
 
 lal 
 
 SSS 
 
48 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Ismid. France and Great Britain did not bind themselves 
 to carry on the war till these terms were enforced on Turkey 
 and her allies, but. merely consented to them in advance, 
 in the event of their proving enforceable when peace was 
 concluded. In 1917, however, any claim to annexations was 
 twice 1 formally and publicly renounced by Russia, and no 
 Russian Government is likely to revive this particular claim, 
 unless either Turkey or the Western Powers establish some 
 régime in the Straits which does not secure a permanent com- 
 mercial right-of-way for the riverain Powers of the Black Sea. 
 
 King Husein’s overtures in the summer of 1915 led to 
 long negotiations between him, as spokesman of the Arab 
 
 National Movement in the Ottoman Empire, and the British 
 
 Government acting for the Allies, and subsequently to the 
 revolt of the Hijaz against Turkey on the 9th June 1916. 
 But they also forced Great Britain, France, and Russia to 
 agree upon a definition of their own respective claims in 
 
 -Turkey-in-Asia. The resulting secret agreement between 
 
 the three Powers about the disposal of Asiatic Turkey, un- 
 officially and also unjustly known as the ‘Sykes-Picot ’ 
 Agreement,” was signed in May 1916, and its terms were 
 
 afterwards published by the Bolsheviks when the Petrograd 
 
 archives fell into their hands. 
 
 The parts of this agreement relating to the Arab provinces 
 do not directly concern the Graeco-Turkish conflict. It is 
 sufficient to say that while the letter of these parts could be 
 so interpreted as not to contradict the commitments to King 
 
 + On the 10th April and 19th May, both occasions being before the 
 accession of the Bolsheviks to power. 
 
 * The final text of the agreement was drafted by Sir Mark Sykes and M. 
 Georges Picot on behalf of the British and French Governments respectively, 
 but these two gentlemen only settled details and phraseology. The funda- 
 mental points in the agreement had already been worked out in conferences 
 of leading statesmen and officials on both sides, before it was handed over 
 to them for completion. The unofficial name, used for brevity, gives a 
 wrong impression of the part they played, and now that the agreement is 
 discredited and Sir Mark Sykes unable to defend himself, owing to his 
 lamentable death from influenza during the Peace Conference at Paris, it is 
 important that no injustice should be done to his memory. ‘The responsi- 
 bility on the British side for this agreement lies with the British Government. 
 
” 
 
 WESTERN DIPLOMACY 49 
 
 Husein into which we were entering simultaneously, the 
 two sets of arrangements were incompatible in spirit. King 
 Husein supposed that he was securing from the Allies a 
 general undertaking, with certain reservations, to promote 
 and uphold the independence of the Arabs. Meanwhile, 
 the Allies were really arranging among themselves that 
 Great Britain and France between them should exercise 
 varying degrees of political authority over all Arab terri- 
 tories in Asia except the Hijaz itself. It is true that the 
 more attenuated degrees of this ascendency were styled 
 ‘Arab independence,’ but that technical use of the word 
 ‘independence ’—a novelty even in diplomacy—would no 
 doubt have been misunderstood by the Arabs, and so the 
 text of the Three Power Agreement of 1916 was prudently 
 not communicated to the Hijaz Government. When King 
 Husein subsequently got hold of the Bolsheviks’ version, 
 there was a diplomatic storm ; and when, after the armistice, 
 the inevitable collision occurred between the Allies’ arrange- 
 ments with the Arabs and their arrangements among them- 
 selves, King Husein practically broke off diplomatic 
 relations. No plenipotentiary of the Hijaz Government 
 signed the Treaty of Sévres. 
 
 In the non-Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, the 
 Allied Governments were not embarrassed at the time by 
 any commitments to the people of the country. The Turks 
 were at war with them; offers previously made to Greece 
 at Turkey’s expense had been declined and withdrawn ; 
 the Armenians had got themselves massacred by the Turks 
 for helping the Allies without getting the Allies committed 
 in return to doing anything for them. In these territories, 
 therefore, the partition was defined in more downright 
 terms. There were to be no ‘independent’ spheres of 
 influence here, and each Power recognised the other’s right 
 to dispose in whatever way it chose of the zone assigned to 
 it. In this way France was given the absolute disposal of 
 a vast zone including Cilicia, East-Central Anatolia, and 
 
 D 
 
50 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Western Kurdistan, the boundaries being identical with 
 those of the ‘area in which the special interests of France 
 are recognised ’ in the Tripartite Treaty of the 10th August 
 1920, as defined in Article 5 and set out on the published map. 
 Russia received a somewhat smaller territory 1 bounded by 
 the French Zone, the town of Trebizond, and the pre-war 
 Russo-Turkish frontier. It is worth noting that this area, 
 which Russia, if she chose, was to annex outright, was 
 practically identical with the area which President Wilson, 
 arbitrating in pursuance of Article 89 of the Treaty of Sévres, 
 has since awarded to an independent Armenia. Russia’s 
 intentions in regard to it may be judged, not only from the 
 general record of the Tsardom towards subject nationalities, 
 but from the fact that during the period in 1916 and 1917 
 when this territory was temporarily under Russian military 
 occupation, General Yudenich began to plant Cossack 
 colonies on lands belonging to local Ottoman Armenians 
 who had previously been deported and massacred by the 
 Turks on account of their supposed sympathy with the 
 Allies. The colonies were meant to be permanent, and 
 natives of Transcaucasia (i.e. practically all Russian 
 Armenians) were declared ineligible! The intention was 
 clear, and the terms of the agreement debarred our Govern- 
 ment from protesting against it. Yet at the very time 
 when the agreement was being made, I was being employed 
 by His Majesty’s Government to compile all available 
 documents on the recent treatment of the Armenians by the 
 Turkish Government in a ‘ Blue Book,’ ? which was duly 
 published and distributed as war-propaganda! The French 
 Government made use of the Armenians in a different way. 
 They promised to erect an autonomous Armenian state, 
 under their aegis, in the Cilician part of their Anatolian Zone, 
 
 1 Russia’s principal Eastern gains under the secret agreements were 
 (1) Constantinople and the Straits, and (2) the right, apparently conceded 
 by Great Britain, to do as she pleased with the ‘Russian Zone’ in Persia 
 established by the bipartite agreement of 1907. 
 
 2 Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916). 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 51 
 
 and the promise brought them several thousand Armenian 
 volunteers, most of whom were enrolled in the Légion 
 d’Orsent and served for the rest of the War. That is perhaps 
 the only asset which France has ever realised from this 
 zone, which looked so substantial an acquisition in the 
 emphatic terminology and highly coloured sketch maps of 
 the agreement. What the Armenians have got out of the 
 French Government’s promise can only be realised ade- 
 quately by a study of events in Cilicia since the armistice ! 
 
 One other point in the 1916 agreement has to be noted. 
 The British Government—which had annexed Cyprus to the 
 British Empire after declaring war on Turkey, had offered it 
 to Greece in 1915, and subsequently had withdrawn the offer 
 —now undertook not to alienate the island without the con- 
 sent of France. As four-fifths of the Cypriots are Greeks 
 and the other fifth Turks, this pledge has a bearing on 
 the relations of these two nationalities. 
 
 The agreement of 1916 was not communicated to the 
 Italian Government any more than to King Husein, but 
 Western Governments are efficient, and the Italian Secret 
 Service discovered its existence.1 Under the Treaty of 
 London, in virtue of which Italy had come into the War, the 
 three other Powers had promised Italy—among other things 
 —an ‘equitable’ zone in the region of Adalia (in South- 
 Western Anatolia) in the event of their making territorial 
 acquisitions in Turkey themselves. Accordingly a new, 
 long, and ludicrous series of negotiations began. The word 
 ‘equitable ’ in itself was an inexhaustible mine of dialectic. 
 How was it to be translated into square kilometres? And 
 had it not a moral implication? An assessment of moral 
 damages suffered by being kept in the dark must have swelled 
 the Italian Government’s territorial claim, and the immense 
 extent of the Turkish territories eventually assigned to Italy 
 in the secret agreement made by the British, French, 
 and Italian Prime Ministers in April 1917 at St. Jean de 
 
 1 T had this information recently from an excellent Italian source. 
 
52 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Maurienne, indicates that two of these gentlemen had a bad 
 conscience. This Italian Zone consisted of a substantial 
 section which Italy might dispose of as she chose, and a 
 much more modest section north of it in which she was to 
 have the monopoly of giving advice and assistance to an 
 ‘independent ’ native Government. The annexable zone 
 included both Smyrna and Konia, and the total area (the 
 two parts would hardly in practice have been distinguish- 
 able) can be most easily described by reference to the ‘ area 
 in which the special interests of Italy are recognised ’ in the 
 Tripartite Treaty of the 10th August 1920. It differed 
 from the latter area in excluding its north-western corner, 
 while including practically the whole of the ‘territory of 
 Smyrna ’ afterwards provisionally assigned to Greece under 
 the Treaty of Sévres. A portentous commitment—but there 
 was a way out, for the instrument contained a legal flaw. 
 Here, however, I shall follow the example of Herodotus, 
 when he touches upon mysteries, and ‘though I know, 
 prefer to hold my tongue.’ This particular mystery is 
 indeed common knowledge among those interested—not 
 least among Italians. At the-same time, I cannot discover 
 that it has been made public in the technical sense, either 
 by the Allied Governments or by their enemies, and cer- 
 tainly my own knowledge of it was originally obtained 
 through official channels. An even more pertinent reason 
 for passing it over is the undesirability of reviving old griev- 
 ances at a time when co-operation and goodwill between the 
 Western Powers in the East are of particular importance... . 
 
 So the validity of the St. Jean de Maurienne agreement 
 remained debatable, but the controversy has become aca- 
 demic. One need only turn to the public ‘Tripartite 
 Agreement between the British Empire, France, and Italy 
 respecting Anatolia, signed at Sévres, 10th August 1920,’ 
 
 1 Treaty Series No. 12 (1920), not to be confused with the T'reaty signed 
 at Sévres on the same date by all the Allies (except Jugoslavia and the Hijaz ) 
 and Turkey. 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 53 
 
 Here the French and Italian Zones (with the modifications 
 | in the Italian Zone above mentioned) reappear, but their 
 f bold colours and solid outlines have faded into something 
 
 rather blank and thin. They have become merely ‘areas 
 
 in which the special interests of France and Italy are 
 respectively recognised’ by them and by Great Britain. 
 The treaty only binds the three Powers; Turkey is not a 
 party to it; the ‘special interests ’ are defined in Article 1 
 as a ‘preferential claim...to supply assistance ...in the 
 event of the Turkish Government or the Government of 
 Kurdistan being desirous of obtaining assistance in the 
 i local administration or police.’ The only unconditional 
 advantage now attaching to the zones is that ‘the Contract- 
 | ing Parties undertake not to apply, nor to make or support 
 applications on behalf of their nationals, for industrial or 
 commercial concessions in an area in which the special 
 ) interests of one of the said Powers are recognised, except in 
 | cases where such Power declines or is unable to take ad- 
 vantage of its special position.’! Moreover, an uncondi- 
 tional obligation to ‘accept therewith the responsibility for 
 j supervising the execution of the Treaty of Peace with 
 Turkey with regard to the protection of minorities’ is un- 
 dertaken 2 by each Power in the area within which its special 
 interests are recognised. 
 ) The advantages respectively appropriated by the three 
 
 Powers in this treaty are so remarkably small compared 
 | with those envisaged in the agreements of 1916 and 1917, 
 
 that one seeks a reason. Did it lie in the necessity in this 
 | case for publicity, and if so, did the public document 
 simply mean to the initiated what its secret predecessors 
 b said outright ? This explanation is supported by the pre- 
 
 cedent of the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 concerning 
 
 Persia—a public bipartite agreement between two Powers, 
 who mutually proclaimed zones of respective ‘ disinterested - 
 
 ness’ in Persia in each other’s favour. Persia was not a 
 
 1 Article 2, * Article 9, 
 
 \ 
 { 
 i 
 
54 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 party, and the analogy of form with the present Tripartite 
 Treaty concerning Turkey is very close. On the other hand, 
 the Anglo-Russian Agreement in practice rapidly approached 
 results analogous to those avowedly contemplated in Turkey 
 according to the two secret agreements.1 Did the authors 
 of the Tripartite Treaty of 1920 calculate that in Turkey, too, 
 the same transformation could be effected without too much 
 scandal in the course of time? This explanation is plausible 
 but cannot easily be reconciled with the subsequent policy 
 at any rate of the French Government. On the 20th October 
 1921, M. Franklin-Bouillon, acting for his Government, 
 made an agreement with Yusuf Kemal Bey, acting on behalf 
 of the Turkish Nationalist Government of Angora, and in 
 this agreement the French Zone was tacitly abandoned. 
 The claim to special interests was passed over without a 
 word ; the rights of minorities were confirmed not by France 
 nor even jointly by both contracting parties, but by the 
 Great National Assembly of Turkey ; and the sole economic 
 concession secured to a French group was the exploitation 
 of the Bozanty-Nisibin section of the Baghdad Railway.* 
 When they ratified this agreement with Angora, the French 
 Government can hardly have contemplated putting aggres- 
 sive interpretations on the Tripartite Agreement there- 
 after. 
 
 Before searching further for the cause of these far-reaching 
 abatements of claims, it will be well to compare with the 
 original claims of the Powers the assets actually held by 
 them in Turkey in the autumn of 1921. 
 
 The Russian claim to Constantinople and the Straits had 
 
 1 The transformation of the other party’s zone of disinterestedness into 
 one’s own zone of interest (in the most unfettered sense) would undoubtedly 
 have been completed in Persia at the end of the War, if the process had not 
 been cut short by the Russian Revolution. The Russian Government in- 
 tended this transformation from the outset. The British did not, but had 
 to follow the Russian lead. 
 
 2 In his personal letter of the 20th October 1921 to M, Franklin-Bouillon, 
 Yusuf Kemel Bey also offered the concession of one group of mines (with 
 50 per cent. Turkish participation) and promised benevolent consideration 
 of future French applications, 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 55 
 
 disappeared. The Constantinople and Ismid Peninsulas 
 remained under Ottoman administration, but three Allied 
 High Commissioners were in control and there was a mixed 
 British, French, and Italian garrison. There were also 
 Allied troops on Gallipoli and at Chanak Kalé, and the 
 Straits were commanded by the Allied navies. 
 
 The Powers had recognised the nominal independence of 
 all the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire in Asia, even 
 of those which they had left at one another’s absolute 
 disposal under the secret agreement of 1916; and the 
 ‘control,’ contemplated in the 1916 agreement, over ‘ inde- 
 pendent ’ Arab territories had been conferred by a mandate 
 from the League of Nations. In ‘independent ’ Palestine, 
 and the half-dozen ‘independent ’ states which France, as 
 mandatory, had set up in Syria, the British and French 
 Governments respectively were wielding all the powers of 
 sovereignty. In Syria the French mandate had actually 
 been established by military operations. The Arab National 
 Government formed at Damascus after the Turkish evacua- 
 tion had been overthrown by force in July 1920 and a war 
 indemnity had been imposed. 
 
 In Mesopotamia, which was conquered by the British 
 Army from the Turks during the War, British troops had 
 remained in occupation, and many small risings of the Arab 
 population, and one big rising in the summer of 1920, had 
 been put down. But the mandatory Power had since set 
 up a single Arab government for the whole country and was 
 rapidly reducing its garrisons. It looked as if the Mesopo- 
 tamian Arabs would become genuinely independent before 
 long, and if this happened, the independence of Syria was 
 likely to follow. The Syrians being more ripe for self- 
 government than the Mesopotamians, the liquidation of 
 British control in Mesopotamia seemed bound to hasten that 
 of French control in Syria, Thus, even in the Arab area, 
 the claims staked out in the secret agreements were far from 
 having been realised, and a still further diminution of the 
 
56 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 authority exercised there by the British and French Govern- 
 ments was probable in the near future. 
 
 But the difference between claim and actuality was far 
 more striking in Anatolia. Here three immense zones, 
 swallowing up two-thirds of the whole country and placed 
 at the absolute disposal of Italy, France, and Russia respec- 
 tively, had simply disappeared from the map. The Soviet 
 Russian Government had not only renounced the Russian 
 claim but had even ceded to Turkey (under a treaty signed 
 at Moscow with the plenipotentiaries of Angora 4) territories 
 possessed by Russia in 1914. France had renounced her 
 claim, in the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement of the 20th 
 October 1921; and she had incidentally made a vicarious 
 sacrifice on behalf of Italy, for Italy could no more avoid 
 following the French lead in regard to Anatolian Zones than 
 
 France the British in regard to mandates over Arabs. The 
 ‘paper structure of Western dominion had collapsed, and 
 _ the site was occupied by a national Turkish Government. 
 This Government had laid solid foundations; it disposed 
 of a formidable army ; and its independence was a reality, 
 not a fiction or an experiment like that of the new Arab 
 Governments at Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad. 
 
 But the picture has still to be completed, for in the autumn 
 of 1921 one Power held not only everything accorded to her 
 by treaty but a great deal more, and that was Greece. 
 Under the treaty signed by the Allies and Turkey at Sévres 
 on the 10th August 1920, Greece acquired provisionally a 
 zone round Smyrna which had been assigned to Italy by 
 the agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, and the whole of 
 Kastern Thrace except the Constantinople Peninsula— 
 including the strip along the Marmara and the Dardanelles 
 assigned to Russia in 1915, as well as the interior. All this 
 
 1 The terms of this Treaty of Moscow between Angora and Russia had 
 been anticipated in the Treaty of Alexandropol, imposed by Angora on the 
 Armenian Republic of Erivan after Kiazym Kara Bekir Pasha’s campaign 
 in the autumn of 1920. They were afterwards confirmed in a third treaty 
 signed at Kars by representatives of Angora and the three Transcaucasian 
 Soviet Republics, For dates see the table at the end of the book. 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 57 
 
 was now in her effective possession, and not only this but 
 almost the whole north-west of Anatolia up to the rivers 
 Maeander and Sakkaria,1 with the two strategic positions 
 of Afium Kara Hissar and Eski Shehir. 
 
 This was an extraordinary reversal. In the secret agree- | 
 
 ments made during the War, Greece had had no share. She 
 had been a small Near Eastern state and an unpopular 
 neutral, And now, in the fourth year after the armistice, 
 she alone could point to substantial acquisitions, while the 
 three self-styled ‘ Principal Allied Powers,’ who had borne 
 the brunt of the fighting and the intriguing in Asiatic Turkey, 
 had got next to nothing in hand, and nothing lucrative at 
 all. This was the fact, but what was its moral? Taking 
 
 the situation at its face value, a Greek might have been © 
 
 tempted to suppose that his nation had more virility and 
 ‘survival-value ’ than the English, French, and Italians. 
 Here was ‘little Greece’ making good her treaty rights 
 when greater Powers were waiving theirs, and standing up 
 to the Turkish Nationalists of whom the West had fought 
 
 shy. The Turks, and their Indian admirers, might have - 
 
 drawn similar conclusions. They, for their part, had got 
 rid of the French and Italian Zones ; they had even secured 
 the retrocession by France of a long strip of frontier territory, 
 containing the permanent way of the Baghdad Railway, 
 which the Treaty of Sévres had included in the French 
 mandated territory of Syria; they had recovered from 
 Russia territories which she had taken from them in 1878 ; 
 and they looked forward confidently to forcing the Greek 
 army out of Anatolia and the Allied garrisons out of Con- 
 
 stantinople. This was an unmistakable turn of the tide. 
 
 Which looked decadent ? The West or Turkey ? 
 
 Many Turks and Greeks have seen things in this light 
 during the last few years. Their consequent exaltation of 
 spirits has been one of the obstacles to a settlement. But 
 
 1 Except for the Peninsulas of Haidar Pasha and Bigha, which, like the 
 Jonstantinople Peninsula, were controlled by the Three Powers, 
 
58 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 , in so far as they have thought and felt like this, they have 
 
 ignored the most important fact in the situation. What- 
 
 ever the Western Powers had sacrificed in the Near and 
 Middle East, they were none of them any longer at war 
 there, while Greece and Turkey, in the fourth year after the 
 armistice, were fighting with all their might. 
 
 Here we have the key to the diplomatic situation. The 
 renunciations made by the Western Powers in the Near and 
 Middle East were neither uncompensated nor involuntary, 
 while the price of her gains was proving ruinous to Greece, 
 The striking inconsistency between the Powers’ claims before 
 the armistice and their later policy is certainly damaging 
 to the reputation of the few dozen British, French, and 
 Italian officials and politicians who made the secret agree- 
 ments. The long tradition of professional rivalry had 
 obsessed them. They were stupefied by the stale, poisonous 
 atmosphere of 1839, 1882, and 1898, which still hung about 
 their consulates, embassies, and foreign offices; and the 
 clandestine and unedifying activities on which they were 
 employing their energies during the most critical moments 
 of the War had little relation to the present or the future. 
 They were completely out of touch with the public opinion 
 of their respective countries. They not only miscalculated 
 the relative values which their public would set upon peace 
 and Oriental annexations after the War. They even mis- 
 judged their own ability to coerce or cajole their publics into 
 carrying out their policy. 
 
 But the folly of the Western diplomatists has been the 
 measure of the Western public’s common-sense. During the 
 War, the Eastern ‘ side-shows,’ though frequently criticised, 
 were rightly regarded as a technical military problem. 
 They were a part of the general conduct of the War, and 
 a comparatively small proportion of our man-power and 
 material resources was involved in them, The public let 
 them be, and the diplomatists made their secret agreements 
 on the supposition that the men and money available in the 
 
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 59 
 
 East for military purposes during the War would remain at 
 their service for political purposes after it. But from the 
 moment of the armistice, public opinion began to assert 
 itself. The main operations on the Western front had been 
 terminated by complete victory ; why should subsidiary 
 fronts be kept in being? The soldiers who had been 
 defending the heart of France, Italy, and England were being 
 demobilised ; why should their comrades be kept under 
 arms to hold down unwilling populations in outlandish 
 Eastern countries, where neither they nor their families had 
 any interests at stake ? And why should the taxpayers, on 
 whom the national struggle for existence had imposed crush- 
 ing burdens, accept further burdens for the sake of their 
 diplomatists’ professional struggle for power ? The soldiers 
 and the taxpayers revolted against the further expenditure 
 of lives and money to which the diplomatists had secretly 
 committed them. British troops in Transcaucasia and 
 Mesopotamia, and French troops in Cilicia, clamoured to be 
 demobilised ; French sailors in the Black Sea refused to 
 operate against the Bolsheviks; Italian reinforcements 
 refused to embark for Albania, not to speak of the Central 
 Desert of Anatolia, which Italian diplomatists had worked 
 so hard to acquire for their countrymen; and there had 
 been a growing opposition in the Press and the Parliaments. 
 Confessions about the strength of the respective military 
 forces in the East, their casualties, their cost of maintenance, 
 and about the budgets of the civil administration in the 
 occupied territories, had been wrung out of unwilling Govern- 
 ments and subjected to unanswerable criticisms. 
 
 This internal struggle had been going on simultaneously 
 and with similar fortunes in all three countries. Official 
 resistance had been very stubborn, and at first the unspent 
 momentum of the War and the distraction of the public 
 mind enabled the officials to carry on. They were not 
 prevented from embarking on costly aggressive operations 
 in Russia, though they were forced to break them off ; and 
 
60 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 as recently as the summer of 1920 the French Government 
 found ways and means of conquering Syria and the British 
 of reconquering Mesopotamia. But it was always a losing 
 , battle, and the last offensive ended in rout. M. Franklin- 
 ' Bouillon’s agreement with Yusuf Kemal Bey and our own 
 _Government’s treaty with the Emir Feisal were unmistak- 
 able admissions of defeat. Substantially, the Western 
 ‘nations have demonstrated their comparative wisdom and 
 strength of character at their representatives’ expense. 
 They have re-established an effective, though belated, 
 limited, and rather negative ‘ democratic control ’ over their 
 public servants, and they have realised more quickly than 
 the ‘experts’ that the days of Oriental dependencies are 
 numbered. Under post-war conditions—especially political 
 conditions—these pieces of property are going to bring in 
 diminishing returns, and their owners, the Western nations, 
 have therefore begun to force their official overseers to 
 liquidate them.! But this victory and defeat are incidents 
 in an internal struggle, and it would be as absurd to treat 
 
 them as a defeat of Great Britain by the Arabs or a victory © 
 
 of the Turks over France, as it would be to represent the 
 rejection by the American Senate and people of President 
 Wilson’s projects in the Old World (which included a man- 
 date over the northern half of Turkey) as a defeat of 
 American by European imperialism. Had she chosen, 
 America could have taken up her mandate as far as the 
 European Powers were concerned; and in the same way 
 Great Britain, France, and Italy were physically capable at 
 the time of the armistice of executing the secret agreements. 
 They had the ships, men, and money to overcome any 
 resistance which could then have been put up by the local 
 populations. The deciding factor was not any stronger 
 
 ; : 
 
 \ * On the other hand, public opinion may insist on the retention of Tropical 
 | African dependencies, which will probably remain profitable, and may even 
 \have them exploited by methods at which professional administrators will 
 ibe revolted. The Western public is only more businesslike, not more high- 
 ' minded, than its servants, . 
 
 i 
 J 
 
= 
 ae 
 
 WESTERN DIPLOMACY 61 
 
 ‘ will to live ’ on the part of the Greeks, Turks, and Arabs, 
 but the deliberate preference of the British, French, and 
 Italian peoples to conserve their remaining resources 
 instead of squandering them abroad. 
 
 It is necessary to insist on this in order to explain the 
 sequel, for the illusions of the local nationalities have been 
 utilised by the Western diplomatists in order to save some- 
 thing from the wreck of their schemes. The harder they 
 have found it to coax supplies out of their own Parlia- 
 ments, the more they have turned their attention to other 
 ways and means ; and they have found these nations much 
 more ‘suggestible ’ than the comparatively well-educated, 
 sophisticated, and politically experienced public of Western 
 Europe—particularly in regard to Eastern affairs, which 
 involve their national freedom, unity, and honour, while 
 only very speculative material interests are at stake for 
 Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Italians. Greeks and Turks 
 can be swayed and stampeded by visions of ‘The City,’ 
 ‘Tonia,’ ‘The Abode of Felicity,’ or the Holy Sepulchres of 
 Edirné. The herd-instinct can be relied on, as it cannot be 
 in the West, to override the interest and judgment of the 
 individual ; and a kind of ‘ Juggernaut ’ national personality 
 can be conjured into existence and induced, by offerings 
 attractive to its divinity, to drive over its worshippers’ 
 bodies. On the international chess-board such pieces make 
 excellent pawns, and the Western diplomatists—wrapped 
 up in their tradition and instinctively using every available 
 means to carry on their professional activities—have not 
 neglected them. ‘This is really a battle between England 
 and France.’ The Greek and Turkish pawns carried on the 
 game of the French and English players. This pawn- 
 playing, however, has not been so odiously cold and dis- 
 ingenuous as an analysis makes it appear. The trap in 
 which the victims have been caught in order to be exploited 
 was not cunningly hidden. They rushed into it with their 
 eyes open because they could not resist the bait. This 
 
62 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 second phase of Western diplomacy is rather less discredit- 
 able to its authors than the secret haggling during the War. 
 There has been less conspiracy about it and more sport, and 
 —most disarming defence—it has been just as stupid. 
 The statesmen miscalculated again. Their fellow-country- 
 men had the means to carry out their policy but not the will ; 
 their pawns had the will without the means. They were 
 too weak to perform the rdle marked out for them, however 
 great the bribe. They could not struggle on to the eighth 
 square and turn into queens. On the contrary, they have 
 displayed an exasperating faculty of making queens out of 
 the opposing pawns. Greek and Turkish armies, fighting 
 French and English battles, have aroused, and always will 
 arouse, more resistance than they can overcome. 
 
III 
 GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 
 
 Tue last chapter was an attempt to analyse the post-war 
 problem on the Near and Middle Eastern chess-board. If 
 the analysis was correct, it ought to throw light on the 
 particular réles of Turkey and Greece. A game played with 
 living pieces may be a cruel spectacle, and, half through her 
 own fault, Greece has been the principal victim. The fault 
 is only half hers, for at first she struggled hard not to be 
 drawn into the rivalries between the Powers, and the 
 struggle cost her her internal unity. But instead of common- 
 sense and moderation prevailing, as since the armistice they 
 have begun to prevail in the West, they were overborne by 
 the pressure of the Entente Powers and the imperious 
 personality of Mr. Venizelos; and Greece, more than ever 
 divided at home, was pushed into that foreign policy of 
 reckless aggrandisement towards which the blind herd- 
 instinct under the surface of her politics was all the time 
 impelling her. At last, fatally at war within herself and at 
 the same time fatally united for war against a neighbouring 
 nation, she was brought to a point from which she could 
 neither reach internal or external peace, nor retreat without 
 loss or even disaster. The world has sympathised with the 
 personal tragedy of Mr. Venizelos. There is a greater 
 pathos in the national tragedy of his country. 
 
 Mr. Venizelos is tragic not on account of his fall, but 
 because of the change of part which was the cause of it. 
 He came to Greece in 1910 in order to banish personal 
 partisanships from her politics. It has been his fate—the 
 
 fatal conjunction of his country’s circumstances and his 
 63 
 
64 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 own character—to reimport into the old feuds a ferocity to 
 which they have seldom been degraded since the worst 
 moments of demoralisation during the War of Independence.! 
 He made his mark as a great peace minister, and like Pitt 
 he left his poor country involved in a desperate war. In 
 the first war through which he guided her destinies, he 
 showed striking moderation in the hour of victory. After 
 the second war, he grasped at such excessive territorial 
 prizes that he failed to secure the greater prize of peace. 
 Being a statesman of great force and great charm of char- 
 acter, he has been able to give ample effect to his policy, and 
 when it has been mistaken, his country has therefore suffered 
 its consequences to the full. 
 
 There has been a parallel change in the part latterly 
 played in international politics by Greece. At the beginning, 
 Greece distinguished herself from her neighbours by holding 
 aloof from the European War. Serbia had no choice; 
 Turkey and Bulgaria were committed by a few men in 
 power ; Rumania’s intervention seems mainly to have been 
 decided by party leaders and by Russian coercion, and 
 though made at leisure, to have been not exactly a national 
 decision. In Greece alone of the Near and Middle Eastern 
 belligerents, there was a real canvassing of opinion com- 
 parable to the internal struggle which preceded the 
 intervention of a Western nation like Italy, or to the post- 
 armistice struggle in the principal Western Allied countries, 
 alluded to above. 
 
 The controversy was brought on by a private offer from 
 the Allied Governments to Mr. Venizelos, at that time 
 premier and at the height of his prestige, of territorial 
 acquisitions for Greece on condition that she intervened on 
 their side. The territories offered were very large-——a much 
 bigger zone in Western Anatolia than that provisionally 
 assigned to Greece under the Treaty of Sévres, and Cyprus 
 
 1 ¢.9. The civil wars of November 1823 to June 1824 and of November 
 and December 1824. 
 
 Se 
 
ip: 
 
 ee 
 
 GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 65 
 
 in addition—and the scheme, as worked out by Mr. Veni- 
 zelos, would have diminished the risks of departing from 
 neutrality, for he proposed to purchase the co-operation of 
 Bulgaria (also still neutral) by ceding to her Eastern Mace- 
 donia. Yet it was after all a policy of adventure, and 
 nothing but the fact that it suited our interests has made 
 us think ill of King Constantine for rejecting it. The hard 
 things said about him may be true, but his opposition to 
 Mr. Venizelos on this question does not prove them. 
 Neutrality, during the whole period during which we 
 respected the King’s legitimate claim to insist upon it, was 
 more prudent for Greece, and more dignified, than the 
 purchase of territory by intervention ; and it makes for 
 the general betterment of international relations if small 
 states always and everywhere keep as clear as possible of 
 the rivalries between Great Powers. Indeed, King Con- 
 stantine was not alone in his views. Possibly a majority 
 among the politically educated people in Greece agreed with 
 him, and such sentiment for Germany as really counted in 
 the controversy (its importance has been exaggerated) was 
 natural and proper. Greece had not borrowed Western 
 civilisation only from the three Western Powers that 
 happened to be on one side in the European War. In her 
 eager apprenticeship she had sought instruction from all 
 members of Western society. By the decision of the 
 British, French, and Russian Governments of the day,’ 
 her first Western instructors had been Bavarians. Their 
 tutelage was not a success, but a number of them married 
 Greeks and founded families in the country, and the link 
 thus created with Germany as well as with the other Western 
 nations was perpetuated by the intellectual gifts which Greece 
 has since received from her. German archaeologists like 
 Schliemann and Dérpfeld have taught the Modern Greeks 
 how to rediscover the history of their predecessors, and 
 Greek students have gone to German universities as well as 
 1 Convention of London, 7th May 1832. 
 E 
 
66 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 to Paris and Oxford. Our murderous civil war in the West 
 naturally produced a mental and sentimental schism in 
 Greece, which contributed to the political cleavage in the 
 country. 
 
 Thus Greece rapidly became divided against herself, and 
 the conflict took more and more violent forms. There was 
 a bad tradition of violence and personal vendetta in the 
 politics of Greece, which was not surprising considering the 
 suddenness and recentness of her political Westernisation. 
 The miracle was that the Fathers of the Revolution—that 
 incongruous assemblage of peasants and merchants, brigands 
 touched by romanticism, and philosophic Ottoman high 
 officials—had been able to found anything resembling a 
 Western parliamentary state. Considering the initial 
 difficulties, the political development of Modern Greece has 
 been rapid ; but she could not be expected to skip stages 
 in the process, and it is not surprising that by 1914 she had 
 not left behind her the spoils system of nineteenth-century 
 America and the personal treatment of politics that prevailed 
 in England before the Reform Bill. Since 1910 she had 
 been making efforts to shake herself free from these 
 anachronisms. The profound disturbance of her internal 
 life by the War has fastened them upon her once more. In 
 a milder form we have been suffering from the same symp- 
 toms of political deterioration in Great Britain. 
 
 The schism widened quickly. Mr. Venizelos fell. The 
 Allies’ offers were declined and withdrawn. Mr. Venizelos 
 returned to power. The Dardanelles expedition failed, the 
 Allies landed an expeditionary force on Greek territory at 
 Salonika, and a few days later Bulgaria entered the War. 
 Mr. Venizelos fell again, and the hostility of the two factions 
 in Greece towards one another mounted up, as they were 
 driven nearer to committing their country to one side or 
 the other in the battle of Great Powers. The Greek Army 
 under the King’s control menaced the rear of the Entente 
 Army at Salonika, whose intrusion had brought the War on 
 
 | 
 
 cg 
 
———— 
 
 I 
 
 GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 67 
 
 to Greek territory. An army corps handed over Fort Rupel 
 in Eastern Macedonia to the Bulgarians, and surrendered. 
 The Allies retaliated by subjecting Greece to the naval block- 
 ade, which produced more speedy and acute distress there 
 than in Germany. On the 25th September 1916, Mr. Veni- 
 zelos left Athens for Krete, went on to Salonika, set up a 
 provisional Government over the Greek territories controlled 
 by the naval and military forces of the Entente Powers, and 
 organised a contingent of Greek volunteers to fight for them 
 on the Salonika front. On the Ist December 1916, there 
 was an armed conflict in Athens, in which Allied soldiers and 
 Venizelist civilians were killed by Royalist soldiers and 
 reservists. On the 11th June 1917, King Constantine was 
 forced by a French commissioner, M. Jonnart, to abdicate, 
 and a few days later Mr. Venizelos was brought back to 
 Athens by Allied troops. After this coup d état, his 
 Government—thus established in the capital and placed in 
 control of all Greek territory not occupied by the Central 
 Powers—formally entered the European War as a member 
 of the Entente Alliance. As such, it subsequently presented 
 its claims at the Peace Conference held by the victorious 
 states at Paris. 
 
 Every event referred to in the last paragraph raises 
 controversial issues. Did the elections and by-elections 
 of 1915 prove or not that Mr. Venizelos was supported by 
 a majority of the Greek nation? If he was, had the King 
 a right to dismiss and exclude him from office? Did her 
 treaty with Serbia legally and morally bind Greece to fight 
 when Bulgaria intervened ? Had the Allies received a 
 genuine invitation from Mr. Venizelos’s Government to land 
 at Salonika ? Which side was morally the aggressor in the 
 fight at Athens on the Ist December 1916? Was the will 
 of the Greek nation or the military power of the Entente the 
 real cause of Mr. Venizelos’s triumph over King Constantine 
 between his flight from and return to Athens? These 
 controversies lie behind the horizon of this book; many of 
 
68 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 them had only an ephemeral interest ; others are incapable 
 of settlement. In particular, it is almost impossible to 
 adjudicate upon the relative strength and merits of the 
 two Greek factions. Each contains a few fine and many 
 inferior individuals and a contingent of bad characters. 
 Neither has a solid hold upon the nation, which has fluctuated 
 between them under the pressure of foreign armies, the 
 fancied interests of the moment, or irrational emotion ; 
 and at each turn of the wheel there has been provocation 
 and retaliation. Royalists terrorised Venizelists in 1915 
 and 1916 ; Venizelists proscribed and imprisoned Royalists 
 from the coup d’état of the 11th June 1917, down to the 
 elections of November 1920; and after the return of the 
 King, Venizelist placemen were systematically retired, 
 transferred, or otherwise removed to make way for the men 
 whom they had themselves displaced three and a half years 
 before. Each time yet another turn of the wheel has been 
 hoped for and worked for by the temporarily discomfited 
 party, but reversals of party fortunes, when they involve 
 such consequences as these, are nothing but a misfortune 
 for a nation, and Greece cannot begin to rebuild her shattered 
 political life so long as it remains dominated by personal 
 rancours. The point of historical interest is not to pass 
 judgments on these mischievous parties and their unprofit- 
 able vicissitudes, but to trace how a war between the 
 Western Powers has played havoc with the internal develop- 
 ment of a Near Eastern country, and then to observe how 
 this internal disharmony has reacted prejudicially upon 
 that country’s foreign policy under a succession of party 
 governments. 
 
 At the Paris Conference Mr. Venizelos, on behalf of Greece, 
 put forward startling demands. He asked for the whole 
 of Western and Eastern Thrace up to the Black Sea and the 
 Chatalja lines, and for the entire vilayet or province of 
 Aidin,! in Western Anatolia, with the exception of the one 
 
 1 Of which Smyrna is now the provincial capital. 
 
 omen, 
 
 | 
 
— 
 
 GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 69 
 
 sanjak or department of Denizli, but with the addition of 
 @ corridor to the south coast of the Marmara. ‘The first 
 claim meant interposing a continuous belt of Greek territory 
 between Turkey and other European states and between 
 Bulgaria and the Aegean. The second meant taking from 
 Turkey the richest province and principal port of Anatolia, 
 bringing a large Turkish population under Greek rule, and 
 leaving the two nations, with these new seeds of discord 
 sown between them, to face one another along an immense 
 land frontier. 
 
 These claims, imprudent in themselves, came strangely 
 from Mr. Venizelos, who had stood for a totally different 
 policy after the Balkan Wars. In 1913 he handed Western | 
 Thrace over to Bulgaria, though the coast-line had been 
 occupied during hostilities by the Greek Navy, and he 
 doubted the wisdom of annexing Eastern Macedonia (the 
 lower Struma valley) and the port of Kavala. He realised 
 that Greece must live on good terms with Bulgaria, and that 
 unless Bulgaria had unhampered access to the Aegean, an 
 adjustment of interests would be impossible. In 1915 he 
 was still developing this policy in his proposal to cede 
 Eastern Macedonia to Bulgaria in exchange for Anatolian 
 compensations to Greece. But in 1919 he deliberately took 
 the contrary line ; maintained that Bulgaria, by a second 
 
 f aggression, had shown herself incapable of responding to a 
 policy of confidence ; and submitted that it was no use 
 attempting to conciliate her in the new settlement. As a 
 measure of justice, she should have an economic right-of- 
 way to some port or ports on the Aegean, but sovereignty 
 over the seaboard, even in Western Thrace, ought to be 
 taken from her and given to Greece. 
 
 He made a similar change of front in regard to Turkey. 
 In 1913 he had shrewdly eliminated all land frontiers 
 between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. In Europe he 
 separated the two countries by the assignment of Western 
 Thrace to Bulgaria, and in Asia he took pains to show that 
 
 pe 
 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
70 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the acquisition of the islands of Khios and Mitylini by 
 Greece would not necessarily menace Turkish sovereignty 
 on the neighbouring mainland of Anatolia. The Ottoman 
 Government had insisted so strongly on this danger that 
 although these islands were inhabited by an overwhelming 
 Greek majority and had been conquered by Greece in the 
 first Balkan War, the question was referred for adjudication 
 to a Conference of Ambassadors of the Powers. This Con- 
 ference awarded the islands to Greece, and there is no doubt 
 that they were largely influenced in doing so by a belief 
 in the good faith and moderation of Mr. Venizelos. Their 
 confidence seemed justified when, some months later, he 
 signed a convention with the Porte for the inter-migration 
 of Turkish minorities in Macedonia and Greek minorities 
 along the western littoral of Anatolia.t It was a loyal 
 attempt to assure the Turks that, in pressing her claim to 
 the islands, Greece had nothing in view but a local applica- 
 tion in her favour of the principle of nationality—that she 
 had no intention of taking advantage of their strategic 
 position commanding Smyrna, and of the proximity of a 
 powerful Greek minority on the mainland, in order to use 
 them in the future as a ‘jumping-off ground’ for an im- 
 perialistic policy in Anatolia. And then, at Paris in 1919, 
 he justified the Turks’ worst suspicions and incidentally 
 endorsed their arguments for the reunion of the islands with 
 Turkey. He not only claimed the mainland province 
 opposite the islands, but actually counted in the population 
 of the islands in supporting his mainland claim by statistics 
 of the Greek percentage in the population, on the very 
 ground (put forward by the Turks in 1913) that mainland 
 and islands formed an indivisible geographical unity ! 
 
 In fact, at Paris the only vestige of Mr. Venizelos’s old 
 statesmanship was his handling of the Straits and Constanti- 
 nople. He ostentatiously refrained from claiming either 
 the city or the territories immediately commanding the 
 
 1 See Chapter IV., p. 141, below. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 71 
 
 Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, on the express assumption 
 that they would be placed under some international régime. 
 He saw that Greece would be involved in dangerous conflicts 
 of interest, especially with Russia and the other Black Sea 
 riverains, if she acquired the sovereignty over these strategic 
 positions, and that on the other hand the Greek element in 
 Constantinople would become the dominant local nationality 
 if Ottoman sovereignty came to an end and Greece stretched 
 up to Chatalja. But why, if he realised this, did he ignore 
 the still greater dangers in which he was involving Greece by 
 his policy towards Bulgaria in Thrace and towards Turkey 
 in Anatolia ? Ifthe governing consideration in the Thracian 
 case was the alleged implacability and incorrigible aggres- 
 siveness of Bulgaria, and if friendship with her had been 
 proved impossible by experience, then he ought to have 
 aimed first at securing for Greece the best possible strategic 
 frontier. Instead of that, he proposed a settlement which 
 would produce the longest possible land frontier between 
 the two countries, and would put all the strategical advan- 
 tages on Bulgaria’s side. In regard to Turkey, again, the 
 desirability of avoiding a common frontier and of inter- 
 changing the minorities had surely been re-demonstrated 
 rather than disproved since 1913. The Turks had shown 
 themselves bellicose and merciless to minorities. A 
 straggling land frontier in Anatolia as well as in Thrace 
 would be a permanent military anxiety, and though the 
 local Greek minorities stood to gain if Greece acquired the 
 province of Aidin (for they could be protected without 
 ' having to emigrate), the much larger minorities scattered 
 through the interior and remaining under the Turkish 
 Government’s power would be exposed to greater danger, 
 as in the event they have been exposed—with deplorable 
 consequences. 
 
 What had happened to Mr. Venizelos? Before the formal 
 presentation of his claims to the Council of Ten, he expressed 
 
 1 See Chapter VII. 
 
72 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 unlimited optimism about the practicability of carrying 
 them out. He refused to admit that in opening the Ana- 
 tolian question he was implicitly reopening the question of 
 the islands ; maintained that the Greek Army could hold 
 his projected Anatolian frontier on a peace-footing ; and 
 suggested that so long as they were given economic outlets 
 to the sea, Bulgaria and Turkey would be reconciled to the 
 losses of territory and population which he hoped to inflict 
 upon them. Had he simply been infected by the hysterical 
 atmosphere of the Peace Conference? Had the sudden 
 passage from the verge of defeat to apparently absolute 
 victory blinded him to the fact that the momentarily 
 prostrate enemy nations would some time become Powers 
 again? Had his head been turned by his Western col- 
 leagues’ recognition of his personal qualities? All these 
 things happened to other prominent members of the Confer- 
 ence, but it is difficult to believe that a statesman with such 
 a long experience, such a record of liberalism and moderation, 
 and so much intellectual originality and strength of will, 
 can have based an elaborate programme upon passing 
 impulses and emotions. These may have weakened his 
 judgment, they can hardly have overthrown it. The less 
 improbable explanation is that his optimism was largely 
 feigned, that he was taking the risks with his eyes open, and 
 that his policy was decided partly by some force majeure and 
 partly by the expectation that the dangers, while real, 
 could be discounted by some effective means of insurance. 
 The force majeure is not far to seek. It lay in the necessities 
 of Greek internal politics. Mr. Venizelos must have known 
 —what his Western colleagues never realised—that his 
 position at home was precarious. He had only been brought 
 back into power by foreign bayonets ; he had had to intern 
 or exile many hundreds of his leading opponents in order 
 to maintain himself; and it was doubtful whether the 
 country was behind him. He had not to deal with the 
 comparatively sober and united nation which had followed 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 73 
 
 him from 1910 to 1914, but with a nation exasperated by 
 suffering and faction and then demoralised by unexpected 
 success. If he had not exploited this tremendous oppor- 
 tunity to the utmost—if, besides Constantinople, he had 
 renounced other great traditional (and non-party) national 
 claims—the Royalists might have cried ‘ Traitor,’ and who 
 knows if Greece might not have echoed them? If, on the 
 other hand, he succeeded, by his undoubted personal magnet- 
 ism and prestige, in obtaining for his country even more in 
 Thrace and Anatolia than the ordinary patriotic public 
 expected, he might prolong his tenure of office for an 
 indefinite period and devote all his abilities to warding off 
 the dangers which the necessities of the moment bade him 
 incur. The post-armistice period was an ‘acid test’ for 
 all Entente politicians then in power. Reason and honesty 
 were more important than they ever had been in politics, 
 but it needed high moral courage to act up to them. Was 
 there the same failure of nerve in Mr. Venizelos as in 
 Mr. Lloyd George ? 
 
 Possibly the idea of finding insurance for his risks took 
 shape in Mr. Venizelos’s mind during his intercourse with 
 Mr. Lloyd George at Paris. Undoubtedly Mr. Lloyd George 
 was more responsible than any other representative of the 
 ‘Principal Allied Powers’ for the substantial triumph, 
 at the Conference, of Mr. Venizelos’s claims. From that 
 time onwards, the personal attitude of Mr. Lloyd George 
 became one of the most important factors in the Graeco- 
 Turkish conflict. But the British Prime Minister’s views 
 are not always to be found in the official documents which 
 will eventually pass into the Public Record Office, and there 
 is no reason to expect that he will ever write an illuminating 
 autobiography. The play of his mind in regard to Turkey 
 and Greece will therefore probably always remain a matter 
 of conjecture, and as we cannot leave it out of account, we 
 must make the best guesses that we can. 
 
 Why did Mr. Lloyd George back Greece at the Conference, 
 
74 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 and go on backing her, with unusual constancy, when to 
 all appearance he was losing on her? One must allow 
 something for sentiment—uninformed religious sentiment 
 on behalf of Christians in conflict with non-Christians, and 
 romantic sentiment towards the successors of the Ancient 
 Greeks. He is reported to have read something late in life 
 about the Hellenic or ‘ Ancient Greek’ civilisation, and to 
 have been influenced by the identity of name. The words 
 ‘Christian ’ and ‘ Greek’ possess a magical power of sugges- 
 tion—the political bearings of which are discussed in 
 Chapter VIII. It is no insult to suppose that the Prime 
 Minister’s sentiment rested on common fallacies, if we 
 assume that it was sincere as far as it went. But it would 
 be wrong to treat it as other than secondary to practical 
 calculations, and there is reason to believe that he calculated 
 as follows: The British Government cannot keep troops 
 mobilised in the East to enforce eventual terms of peace 
 upon Turkey ; Greece can provide the troops and enforce 
 the terms with British diplomatic and naval backing, and 
 she will gladly do so if these terms include her own claims. 
 If Greece makes these claims good through British backing, 
 she will have to follow Great Britain’s lead. She is a mari- 
 time Power, a labyrinth of peninsulas and islands, and the 
 territories that she covets in Anatolia are overseas. In 
 short, if Turkey can be dominated by the land-power of 
 Greece, Greece can be dominated by the sea-power of Great 
 Britain, and so the British Government can still carry out 
 their war-aims in the Near and Middle East without spending 
 British money and lives. 
 
 Subsidiary motives may have entered in. From what is 
 known of Mr. Lloyd George’s character, it may be guessed 
 that the immediate practical problem of finding some 
 military substitute for British divisions which had to be 
 withdrawn from the Caucasus, the Straits, and Syria, was 
 more present to his mind than any general principle of 
 policy for the future. In his mind, the general appears to 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 75 
 
 flower out of the particular by some esoteric process. 
 Incidentally, his policy on this occasion smothered the 
 awkward question of Cyprus. Eighty per cent. of the 
 population of Cyprus are Greeks who want to be united with 
 the Greek Kingdom ; the British Government had no case 
 for incorporating the island in the Empire ;1 yet since the 
 armistice they had shown no inclination to give it up. But 
 if Greece were acquiring vast territories elsewhere with Great 
 Britain’s assistance, the Greek Government at least would be 
 debarred from taking up the Cypriots’ cause and creating 
 an open international scandal. There were many possible 
 motives on Mr. Lloyd George’s side for coming to an 
 understanding with Mr. Venizelos. 
 
 Did the Welsh and the Kretan statesmen deceive them- 
 selves or one another? Something was wrong with their 
 calculations, for the bargain turned out badly for both. 
 Probably each deceived himself, and that by overestimating 
 the other’s power, in contingent circumstances, to perform 
 more than his bond. Whatever the mutual understanding 
 was (and it may never have been precisely formulated), 
 one need not suppose that either actually promised more 
 than he could perform or expected that their joint contri- 
 butions would be insufficient to bring about their combined 
 aims. On the other hand, one cannot believe that either 
 was blind to the risks jointly incurred. Unexpectedly 
 effective opposition from the Turks, the Russians, or one or 
 other of the Allies might render the contemplated Greek 
 military effort and the contemplated British diplomatic and 
 naval effort unequal to their task, and here some self- 
 deception may have come in. Each party may have been 
 reckoning, for insurance, upon greater efforts being forth- 
 
 1 Under the Cyprus Convention, secretly negotiated between the British 
 and the Ottoman Government on the 4th June 1878 (between the Treaties 
 of San Stefano and Berlin), Turkey consented to the occupation and admini- 
 stration of Cyprus by Great Britain so long as Russia retained Kars, Ardahan 
 and Batum, Great Britain undertaking in return to resist furthur Russian 
 encroachments on Asiatic Turkey by force of arms. Cyprus was annexed 
 to the British Empire by an Order in Council on the 5th November 1914. 
 
76 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 coming, in case of need, from the other when once com- 
 mitted to action. If Mr. Venizelos were playing for Thrace 
 and Smyrna, would he hesitate to borrow a few more 
 millions, send a few more divisions, sacrifice a few ~more 
 lives in order to win the game ? And if Mr. Lloyd George 
 were playing for ascendency in the Straits and indeed 
 throughout the Levant, would he not in the last resort re- 
 inforce the Greek Army with his own to gain so great a prize ? 
 So Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Venizelos may have calculated 
 respectively in their private thoughts, for it is evident that 
 neither realised the limits of the other’s power over his 
 fellow-countrymen. The British Premier ignored Greek 
 party-politics ; the Greek Premier ignored the limiting veto 
 possessed and since exercised by British public opinion over 
 the commitments of His Majesty’s Government in the East. 
 
 This is, and only can be, conjecture, but at any rate it 
 offers a reasonable explanation of what actually occurred ; 
 for if these two statesmen’s minds did work in the way 
 suggested, one can see how circumstances conspired to give 
 their policy its opportunity. Sir Arthur Balfour, with a 
 less naive appreciation of Ancient Greece than Mr. Lloyd 
 George, may have been tickled by the conceit of Modern 
 Greek ‘ harmosts ’ administering ‘Ionia.’ President Wilson 
 was ignorant and flouted his able expert advisers. M.Clemen- 
 ceau, always symbolic, adopted the characteristic Western 
 attitude towards the ‘Eastern Question.’ He thought it 
 tedious and unimportant, and was ready to humour his 
 colleagues when Mosul and Smyrna were on the agenda in 
 order to be all the more obstinate over the Saar, the Rhine, 
 and Reparations—somewhat in the spirit in which insurance 
 companies pay small claims and fight big ones. On this 
 tack he was prepared to go to the utmost lengths which the 
 small but energetic Colonial Party in France permitted, 
 Mr. Venizelos adroitly smoothed M. Clemenceau’s path by 
 sending two Greek divisions to fight the Bolsheviks in 
 Southern Russia during the early winter months of 1919, 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 77 
 
 a job against which the French Navy mutinied. It was an 
 earnest of what he could get his countrymen to do, on the mere 
 expectation of favours to come, in a cause which appealed 
 to French bondholders. Even if the French Government 
 had foreseen all the consequences, they could hardly have 
 raised opposition when, a month or two later, the very 
 Greek troops which had served French policy at Odessa 
 were shipped off to serve Greek and British policy at Smyrna. 
 
 The fatal decision was precipitated by the public disagree- 
 ment between Italy and the other Powers over the Adriatic. 
 On the 24th April 1919, the Italian Delegation withdrew 
 from Paris. They were back again by the 5th May. But 
 lovers’ quarrels between statesmen in Western capitals may 
 produce more serious breaches of amity between their 
 representatives in the Near and Middle East, who have 
 been trained in jealousy for generations. On the 29th 
 March, the Italian claim in Anatolia had been staked out 
 by a naval and military occupation of Adalia, and during 
 the interregnum at Paris the Italian forces began to occupy 
 one point after another on the coast from Adalia north- 
 westwards in the direction of Smyrna. The diplomatists 
 came back, but the occupations went on, and the local 
 representatives of the other Powers took alarm. Smyrna 
 was at Italy’s disposal according to the agreement of St. Jean 
 de Maurienne, and the instalment of an Italian garrison there 
 would more than compensate for flaws in the legal validity 
 of a scrap of paper. The only certain way to keep the 
 Italians out was to forestall them. Could this be done 
 under the armistice, signed on the 30th October 1918, with 
 Turkey ? According to Article 7 of this instrument, ‘ The 
 Allies have the right to occupy any strategic points in the 
 event of any strategic situation arising that threatens the 
 security of the Allies.’ That was good enough, but what 
 troops to send? The telegrams passed to and fro between 
 Constantinople and Paris, Mr. Venizelos saw his opportunity, 
 and the ‘ Big Three’ took their decision. The Porte was 
 
78 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 informed that Allied troops were to be landed at Smyrna for 
 the maintenance of order. An Allied naval squadron left 
 the Bosphorus for Smyrna, with Admiral Calthorpe, the 
 British High Commissioner, in command. The local Allied 
 control-officers were instructed to disarm and remove the 
 Turkish troops remaining in the city, in accordance with 
 Articles 5 and 20 of the armistice. In the act of compliance, 
 the Turkish authorities were troubled by a rumour. The 
 troops that were to be landed next day were Greek! They 
 made urgent inquiries from the control-officers, and were 
 simply informed that the troops would be ‘ Allied,’ as 
 announced already. The answer, technically correct, was 
 of course a deplorable prevarication. The Greek troops 
 went on shore, under the guns of the Allied warships, the 
 following morning. 
 
 Various consequences of this landing occupy most of the 
 remaining chapters in this book. The diplomatic con- 
 sequences may conveniently be narrated here in anticipation. 
 Within the first few weeks, so much bloodshed and destruc- 
 tion occurred that the Allied and Associated Governments 
 sent a commission of senior officers, under the presidency 
 of Admiral Bristol, United States High Commissioner at 
 Constantinople, to put a stop to the fighting and establish 
 the responsibility for the atrocities already committed. 
 But the mischief could not be undone so easily. The 
 Commissioners arranged an armistice line ; they could not 
 demobilise the forces already opposing one another in this 
 new war. They reported on the crimes committed, but 
 their report has never been published by their Governments.1 
 Possibly they were tactless. It may have been difficult to 
 indict Greeks and Turks who had killed, burnt, robbed, and 
 violated in the vilayet of Aidin without reflecting upon 
 statesmen who had made decisions at Paris. There is no 
 doubt that the ‘ Big Three ’ were morally as well as techni- 
 cally responsible for the consequences of this particular 
 
 1 Unofficial versions of their findings are current. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 79 
 
 decision, for they cannot plead that they were badly in- 
 formed. The suggestion of a Greek landing at Smyrna had 
 been aired in official circles for some weeks before it was 
 carried into effect, and had evoked emphatic comments and 
 forecasts from the local representatives of the several 
 Powers who were controlling the execution of the armistice 
 on the spot. These representatives cannot be blamed for 
 having reported, as they were in duty bound to do, the danger 
 of an Italian coup de main upon Smyrna. They could not 
 know the diplomatic situation at Paris, or foresee that a 
 Greek occupation would be the safeguard selected by their 
 Governments. The ‘ Big Three’ were responsible, and if 
 any of them demur to this, they can be challenged to 
 publish, or to invite their successors in office to publish, the 
 official information on which they acted, as well as the 
 Bristol Report. Their unwillingness to publish the report 
 is not incomprehensible, and besides, Mr. Venizelos threw 
 all his personal influence into the scale. He objected to the 
 publication of evidence which had been taken by the Com- 
 mission without the presence of a Greek assessor, and in 
 which the names of the witnesses were withheld.1 There 
 was, of course, a good reason for this, which reflected on the 
 local Greek authorities and not on the Western Commis- 
 
 1 On the 22nd March 1920, the following answer to a question by Earl 
 Winterton was given in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister :— 
 
 ‘His Majesty’s Government . .. consider it inadvisable to allow the 
 Report of the Commission in question to be published owing to the con- 
 ditions under which the inquiry was conducted. As the Commission was 
 investigating charges against the Greek Army, the Supreme Council decided 
 that a Greek officer should be allowed to follow the proceedings, but not to 
 vote or take part in the preparation of the Report. The Commission, how- 
 ever, when it began its inquiries, decided not to allow any Greek representa- 
 tive to be present, on the ground that Turkish witnesses might be afraid of 
 giving evidence. M. Venizelosimmediately protested against this proceeding 
 on the ground that it was contrary to the rules of justice in every civilised 
 country that charges should be investigated and witnesses heard without 
 the accused person being allowed to know the charges and the evidence 
 against him. The Supreme Council were of opinion that M. Venizelos’ 
 protest was justified, but before it could alter the procedure the inquiry was 
 completed. Inasmuch as it has not been possible to communicate to the 
 Greek Government the evidence against them upon which the Commission’s 
 Report has been based, owing to pledges given to witnesses, the British 
 Government think it inadvisable and unfair to publish the Report itself.’ 
 
80 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 sioners. ‘The individuals giving damaging evidence against 
 the Greeks were living under a Greek military occupation 
 and could not safely be exposed to reprisals. There were 
 the same legal flaws in the Bryce Reports on Alleged German 
 Atrocities in Belgium and on The Treatment of Armenians in 
 the Ottoman Empire. Did the Allied Governments hesitate 
 to publish these documents on that account ? 
 
 And so, on the 10th August 1920, when the atrocities 
 committed by the Greeks at their landing were fifteen 
 months old and the war which they had started had spread 
 far into the interior, a treaty of peace with Turkey was 
 signed at Sévres—by plenipotentiaries unrepresentative of all 
 the implicated nations—under which a zone on the mainland 
 of Anatolia round Smyrna was provisionally assigned to 
 Greece (Articles 65-83). It was a very much smaller territory 
 than that which Mr. Venizelos had originally claimed, but 
 even if his claims had been granted in full, the consequences 
 for Great Britain and France, for Turkey and Greece, for 
 Mr. Venizelos himself and eventually perhaps even for Mr. 
 Lloyd George, could hardly have been more unfortunate. 
 
 Poetic justice got to work quickly. Mr. Venizelos fell 
 only three months after the treaty was signed, and the 
 return of King Constantine led to an open rift between 
 France and Great Britain. 
 
 The position of Mr. Venizelos in Greece has been so little 
 understood in Great Britain and France that his fall has 
 been regarded as inexplicable. No doubt he partly suffered 
 for being ahead of his fellow-countrymen. The police 
 regulations against furious driving and cruelty to animals 
 which he introduced at Athens were as unpopular as the 
 similar innovations of the inter-Allied police at Constanti- 
 nople. The lawyers worked against him at the, elections 
 because he insisted on their liability to military service. 
 The families of the influential politicians, officials, and 
 officers whom he had interned or exiled were naturally his 
 enemies ; and during his prolonged absence at the Peace 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 81 
 
 Conference in the West, his henchmen exercised something 
 like a reign of terror at home. Mr. Gy¥paris, who was the 
 Kretan chieftain’s mighty man of valour, is stated to have 
 silenced Royalist deputies in the Chamber at the point of 
 his revolver, and the murder of Mr. Ion Dhraghtmis by 
 Kretan ‘Special Constabulary’ as he was driving into 
 Athens from the country was only a particularly shocking 
 instance of a régime of violence—unhappily more durable 
 than party fortunes—from which prominent Venizelists had 
 also suffered previously to June 1917 and have suffered 
 again since the change of government in 1920. But these 
 causes of unpopularity were either petty or were confined, 
 in their direct operation, to a comparatively small section 
 of the population. They do not account for the sweeping 
 success of the anti-Venizelist parties in the elections of 
 November 1920. However influential their partisans may 
 have been individually, they were not numerous and they 
 were out of power. Simple superiority of electioneering 
 organisation could not account for the solid anti-Venizelist 
 vote in remote rural districts. There must have been some 
 general and impersonal grievance against Mr. Venizelos of 
 old standing. It cannot have been-war-weariness, for-after 
 Mr. Venizelos’s fall, Mr, Gotinaris’s 1 Government were able 
 to carry on the war under more discouraging conditions on 
 a larger scale, calling one class after another to the colours. 
 War-weariness did not begin to dominate the. internal 
 political situation till the late summer.of.1921. In fact, 
 Mr. Venizelos’s fall was not the direct_consequence.of.his 
 policy at the Peace Conference. Rather,.that.policy--was 
 an unsuccessful attempt.to..placate-a-feeling against him 
 to which his subsequent fall was-due. 
 
 This feeling is not yet generally realised in England, but 
 it must have been evident to any Englishman who has 
 travelled since in Greece. The Greek nation cannot forgive 
 
 1] have spelt this well-known name in the usual way, instead of 
 
 ‘ Ghiinaris.’ 
 F 
 
82 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Mr. Venizelos for having resorted to foreign support against 
 his political opponents. They do not so much resent the 
 steps taken by Great Britain and France to force Greece 
 out of her neutrality. They recognise that our vital 
 interests were at stake, and that at the Peace Conference we 
 did our best to make amends for previous injuries perhaps 
 pardonably inflicted. But they cherish their right as an 
 independent nation to have remained neutral during the 
 European War if they chose. Their right to this was just 
 as precious (though more difficult to exercise, owing to their 
 weakness and their geographical proximity to the theatre 
 of war) as the right of the United States. But whereas 
 America did make up her mind freely and intervened when 
 she thought good, Greece had her hands forced by Mr. 
 Venizelos. The King’s policy may have been wrong, but 
 Mr. Venizelos had no business to associate himself with 
 foreign Powers in coercing him. The Commander of the 
 Allied Army at Salonika, in the situation in which he found 
 himself, may have been justified by military necessity in ex- 
 acting guarantees from the Greek Army ; but Mr. Venizelos 
 ought never to have let himself be reinstalled in the 
 government offices at Athens by an Allied expeditionary 
 force. The fact that his pro-Entente policy put Greece on 
 the winning side does not diminish the objection to the 
 precedent that he has established for the treatment of Greek 
 sovereignty by Great Powers ; and violations of right are 
 not made less humiliating by patronising payments in 
 compensation. The territorial acquisitions of Greece 
 under the Treaty of Sévres are regarded by the Greek 
 nation as their due, by virtue of the principle of nationality, 
 and though they may be mistaken about the application 
 of this principle, it is surely the proper basis on which such 
 claims should be considered. Greece could not, with any 
 self-respect, accept Thrace and Smyrna as rent for the 
 Allies’ trenches round Salonika or as compensation for the 
 damage caused by the passage of the European War, any 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 83 
 
 more than Belgium could accept the offers which accom- 
 panied the German ultimatum. Still less could she accept 
 them as a personal tribute to Mr. Venizelos for. his eminent 
 services to the Allied cause and his distinction of character. 
 This view, however, was ventilated in the French and 
 British Press, if not among responsible officials and states- 
 men, whenever the Greek claims were discussed, and 
 especially at the time when the Treaty of Sévres was signed 
 and published. This exasperated Greek public opinion, and 
 when a few months later the accident of King Alexander’s 
 death gave it the opportunity, it is not surprising that it 
 expressed itself as it did. Mr. Venizelos failed in Greece for 
 the same fundamental reason as Generals Kolchak and 
 Denikin and Wrangel in Russia, and foreign intervention did 
 the same service to King Constantine and Mr. Godnaris as. 
 to Trotsky and Lenin. 
 
 The return of King Constantine brought to light a diverg-. 
 ence between French and British policy in the Near and | 
 Middle East, which had been growing during the long and. | 
 laborious incubation of the treaty which was supposed to: 
 embody their common policy. It arose directly out of the 
 joint decision of Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau to 
 disembark Greek troops at Smyrna in May 1919, and it is 
 a striking instance of sinister reflex action produced by | 
 Western interference in the East upon the internal relations 
 of the Western world. 3 
 
 Whose fault was the divergence ? It is not so easy to say. 
 By the end of 1921, France had obviously reversed her 
 policy, while Great Britain had changed hers little and that 
 unwillingly. But passivity is no proof of virtue. The original 
 joint policy—which was the British Prime Minister’s policy 
 —may have been wrong from the start ; or circumstances 
 may have altered ; or at any rate the reasonable interpreta- 
 tion of the situation may have been modified by experience. 
 It may or may not be possible to justify the change in. 
 French policy, but at least it is not difficult to explain it. 
 
: 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
 84 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 In the first place, France had obtained no relief for herself 
 in the East by the employment of Greece as a pawn. On 
 the contrary, she had had additional burdens thrown upon 
 her soldiers and taxpayers. The disembarkation of the 
 
 | Greek troops at Smyrna did not merely produce a guerilla 
 | warfare in the hinterland. It created the Turkish National 
 | Movement, which rapidly secured control of the whole 
 ‘interior of Anatolia with its military resources.1_ The new 
 | Nationalist organisation set out to recover for Turkey, if 
 necessary by force of arms, all territories inhabited by 
 non-Arab Moslem Ottoman majorities, and the French were 
 in Occupation of such territories on the northern borders 
 of Syria. Nationalist forces attacked the weak French 
 garrisons here in January 1920, and France found herself 
 involved in a costly campaign in difficult country. She 
 tried many expedients. There were repeated changes of 
 command; at one moment the Cilician Armenians were 
 given arms and encouraged to hold the front; at other 
 times they were held in leash, the Turks in the occupied 
 territory conciliated, and temporary truces arranged with 
 the enemy. In attempting to escape from an unwanted 
 
 military burden, France heedlessly embroiled the local 
 
 ' nationalities with one another, and made it almost as difficult 
 
 | for them to live together after her evacuation as it has been 
 | made in the territories temporarily occupied by Greece in 
 | Western Anatolia. But these precarious provisional arrange- 
 
 ments did not solve the problem, and all the time the 
 
 | yesentment at the drain of French lives and money was 
 
 mounting up at home. It became clear that the drain 
 could only be stopped by coming to terms with the Angora 
 
 | Government over the future frontier between Turkey and 
 
 | Syria, and this was the main object of the agreement signed 
 \by M. Franklin-Bouillon and Yusuf Kemal Bey on the 
 20th October 1921,? nearly two years from the beginning 
 
 1 See Chapters V. and VI. 
 2 Published, with an English translation, by the British Government as a 
 White Paper (Turkey No. 2(1921)=Cmd. 1556). 
 
 SEE hatte 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 85 
 
 of the Cilician campaign. In this agreement France con- 
 ceded practically all the ‘Turkish demands.! She not only 
 undertook to evacuate Cilicia, which was left under Turkish 
 sovereignty by the Treaty of Sévres. She also retroceded 
 a large strip of territory (mainly inhabited by non-Arab 
 Moslems) along the northern fringe of Syria. It is note- 
 worthy that this territory contains all the strategic positions 
 essential for the defence of Syria towards the north—for 
 instance, the Amanus tunnel, the railway bridge over the 
 Euphrates, and practically the whole track of the Baghdad 
 Railway east of the tunnel, except the loop —_ it runs 
 down to Aleppo. The French ‘ will to power ’ in the East 
 had become so weak that the French public preferred to 
 hold Syria by the goodwill of the Turks, in order to avoid 
 
 military commitments on the frontier altogether, rather 
 
 than to hold it by their own military strength along the line 
 where it could be held thus with the minimum of effort. 
 “The Greek landing at Smyrna created no corresponding 
 problem for Great Britain, for though Mesopotamia and 
 Turkey had been left with a short common frontier, east of 
 the Tigris, by the dispositions of the Treaty of Sévres, the 
 contact was only nominal. The line ran through tribal 
 hill-country—a no-man’s-land in which neither Ottoman, 
 British, nor Arab authority was effective—and the Turkish 
 Nationalists had too much trouble with the Kurds to attack 
 the Mesopotamian plains on the other side of their fast- 
 nesses. It is one of the ironies of Franco-British rivalry 
 that French jealousy was the cause of this British immunity, 
 for till within two months of the first Nationalist offensive, 
 the British Army had been responsible for the defence of 
 Northern Syria. The Anglo-Franco-Arab forces which 
 overthrew the Turks in Palestine, in the autumn of 1918, and 
 forced Turkey to sue for an armistice, had consisted mainly 
 
 1 The only important concession made by the Turks was that Alexandretta . 
 should be left to Syria, with provision for the linguistic and cultural | 
 autonomy of the Turkish element there, 
 
86 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 of British and Indian troops and had been under General 
 Lord Allenby’s supreme command. When Syria and 
 Cilicia were occupied, this arrangement was continued ; 
 Lord Allenby remained in supreme command over the zones 
 respectively garrisoned by the several Allies, and British 
 and Indian garrisons actually held the dangerous outpost at 
 Marash, among the hills. But as the Peace Conference pro- 
 crastinated over the settlement of Turkey, French opinion 
 became more and more uneasy about this interim régime. 
 A condominium in Egypt had once resulted in a solely 
 British ascendency.! Was history to repeat itself in Syria ? 
 Already Mr. Lloyd George had persuaded M. Clemenceau 
 into parting with Mosul, which had been assigned to 
 the French sphere under the secret agreement of 1916. 
 The British Government was no less committed to its Arab 
 allies than to France, and Prince Feisal’s army was in 
 occupation, under Lord Allenby, of all Eastern Syria. 
 Pressure was put upon the French Government by French 
 opinion to bring the interim arrangement to an end, and the 
 British Government wished nothing better. They had no 
 intention of making a breach with France by themselves 
 seeking a mandate over Syria ; they could no longer defend 
 in Parliament their expenditure upon a prolonged occupa- 
 tion from which the country was to derive no benefit ; and 
 they were anxious to get rid of their responsibility for 
 keeping the peace before the French and the Arabs came 
 to blows. Agreement was therefore easy, and in November 
 1919 the British garrison at Marash was replaced by French 
 troops, the British forces retired from all places north of the 
 northern boundary of Palestine, and Lord Allenby’s com- 
 mand over the French and Arab forces came to an end. 
 Thus the French had incurred their new military commit- 
 
 1 The merits of the old controversy over Egypt are beside the point. The 
 effacement of France may have been her own fault, Great Britain may have 
 been blameless. The relevant point is that what had happened thirty-seven 
 years before in Egypt was resented, and that this resentment coloured the 
 French view of the situation in Syria. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 87 
 
 ments in Cilicia deliberately, and their unfounded suspicions 
 of British policy in Syria were to blame, as well as the real 
 errors of British policy in regard to Greece and Turkey. 
 But this truth, besides being unpalatable, offered no practical 
 solution, for the British Government could not have sent 
 their troops back to Cilicia even if the French Government 
 could have brought themselves to ask for them. The line 
 of least.resistance for France was to come to terms with the 
 Turks and to put all the blame on the British, and in effect 
 this is what the French Government did. 
 Indeed, one of the direct motives for the reversal of French 
 policy in the Near and Middle East was hostility towards 
 Great Britain, through fear that she might gain a permanent 
 predominance in the old competition between the. two ; 
 Powers. Since the beginning of the War, she had secured 
 a formidable lead. She had become patroness of the Arab 
 National Movement ; she had displayed a military power 
 which overshadowed the Eastern effort of France; the 
 knock-out blow to the Turks had been delivered by a British 
 commander ; and now Mr. Lloyd George’s policy of partner- 
 ship between British sea-power and Greek power on land 
 promised a British ascendency not only in the Black Sea 
 Straits but over Greece and what was left of Turkey. There 
 is no evidence, of course, that any such British ascendency 
 —to the exclusion of Italy, France, and America—was in 
 Mr. Lloyd George’s mind. It is much more likely that he 
 was simply trying to co-ordinate the available means for 
 controlling the situation, without clearly distinguishing for 
 whose benefit the control would be exercised. This par- 
 ticular disadvantage of his policy from the French point of 
 view could have been avoided if, from the moment M. 
 Clemenceau had accepted it, the French Government had 
 worked for it as energetically as the British did. But they 
 did not do so, partly because they had not originated the 
 idea, and partly because the whole intention was to saddle 
 Greece with the military effort and to limit the Allies’ 
 
88 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 liabilities to naval and diplomatic contributions. The 
 French Government could no more embark on fresh military 
 operations in the Aegean area than the British, but at the 
 same time they could hardly make an equal naval and 
 diplomatic contribution. British prestige and British naval 
 power were both far greater than French in the East after 
 the armistice. In practice, the Allied contribution to the 
 policy was bound to come principally, as the idea had come 
 originally, from the British side; and therefore, if the 
 policy were successful, the Greeks would look on the British © 
 as their benefactors and the Turks would look on them as 
 their masters. Automatically, the réle of France would 
 dwindle and French influence tend to be effaced. 
 
 This influence—in the fields of diplomacy, finance, and 
 culture—is the commodity traditionally at stake in Western 
 rivalries in the Near and Middle East, and in this as in other 
 spheres contemporary France clings anxiously to the assets 
 to which she regards herself as entitled. During the twenty 
 years before the armistice, her cultural property in the 
 Ottoman Empire had been trespassed upon by Germany ; 
 indeed, she had been violently evicted from it by Germany 
 after the outbreak of war. She had a cultural Alsace- 
 Lorraine to recover in the East as well as a political Alsace- 
 Lorraine in Europe, and in both cases she wanted an 
 ‘integral’ restitution. She regarded both assets as her 
 property, and the acquisition of them by others as robbery, 
 and on the whole it is less odious to be robbed by one’s 
 enemies than by one’s allies. That is perhaps the fairest 
 statement of the French point of view. One might put the 
 same thing in another way by saying that France was eager 
 to step into Germany’s shoes and appropriate her monopoly 
 of influence over Turkey by carrying on the German policy” 
 of diplomatic cajolery, intellectual bedazzlement, financial 
 control, and studied disinterestedness in the Ottoman 
 Government’s treatment of subject populations. But this 
 less charitable formulation is also really less correct, for the 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 89 
 
 German policy was nothing but the policy invented for 
 France nearly four centuries'ago by Francis 1. and habitu- 
 ally practised by her till Wilhelm II. filched it from her. 
 Whether the desire of France to revive it on her own account 
 was creditable to her may be questioned ; but, rooted as 
 it was in a sense of property, and in an old national tradition, 
 the impulse was not so easy to restrain as if it had been a 
 new ambition. 
 
 These were the French motives. They were reinforced 
 by the collapse of the last ‘ White ’ movement in Southern 
 Russia in the autumn of 1920, for if the Bolsheviks could 
 not be destroyed by civil war they might still be kept at 
 bay by the hostility of neighbouring nations. French 
 publicists began to think of Turkey as an Eastern Poland. 
 In fact, a French policy took shape for using Turkey against 
 Russia in much the same way as Mr. Lloyd George was 
 already using Greece against Turkey. 
 
 As for the recall of King Constantine to Greece by 
 plebiscite, which occurred a short time after the flight of 
 General Wrangel’s army from the Crimea to Constantinople, 
 it was not a motive but a pretext for the reversal of French 
 policy, and France would not have reverted to the * Lloyd 
 George policy’ to which she had been committed by M. 
 Clemenceau, even if the King and all his supporters had 
 been turned out and Mr. Venizelos set up again, before 
 M. Franklin Bouillon had begun to negotiate his agree- 
 ment. The change of government in Greece was a welcome 
 screen for the somewhat risquée metamorphosis in which 
 French policy was already engaged. The screen was not 
 wholly transparent. The French public did genuinely dis- 
 like seeing a brother-in-law of the ex-Kaiser reascend a 
 European throne ; and they did mind the death of the French 
 marines killed by Royalist Greek troops at Athens on the 
 lst December 1916. But one can either stimulate or check 
 such feelings. When the Franklin-Bouillon agreement was 
 made public, it was not swept away by public indignation 
 
90 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 with the Turkish Nationalists for the treacherous killing of 
 Frenchmen (in this case, prisoners of war) during the recent 
 campaign. Nor was France unduly perturbed by the 
 armed raids of the ex-King Charles of Hungary, though 
 they were far more dangerous to the Versailles settlement 
 than King Constantine’s constitutional restoration. The 
 French had been looking out for a grievance against Greece, 
 and they had found it. They could not be expected to 
 
 & relinquish it readily. 
 \x7 [Grea Britain, on the other hand, would not readily 
 
 relinquish the policy initiated by her Prime Minister. He, 
 too, wielded a screen (the diplomatist’s substitute for a 
 buckler). In his case it was the protection of the Christian 
 minorities hitherto subject to Turkey, and here also there 
 was a traditional public sentiment to give the diplomatic 
 form some substance. It is true that the Greek campaign 
 in Anatolia was having the opposite effect to that generally 
 assumed in Great Britain. The minorities in the occupied 
 territories were being compromised and the more numerous 
 minorities in the vast unconquered interior exposed to 
 reprisals.1_ But public feeling is no more rational in England 
 than in France. It is inclined to take satisfaction in the 
 liberation of one Christian from Moslem rule, even if this 
 involves the subjection and oppression of ten Moslems on 
 the spot and the massacre of two Christians at a distance. 
 It takes it for granted that the liberation of Christians is 
 always and everywhere an application of the principle of 
 nationality, just because it was so on the whole in the 
 territories taken away from Turkey between 1814 and 1913. 
 It does not face the fact that in Anatolia, where the Chris- 
 tians are in a minority, the two things conflict and can only 
 be promoted at the expense of one another. Nor is its 
 faith shaken by atrocities, for a majority of people in England 
 believe that atrocities are committed only by Turks, and 
 that daily, while the rest mostly believe more or less the same 
 
 * See Chapters VII, and VIII. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 91 
 
 thing about Greeks or Bulgars. Every report of fresh 
 atrocities committed by members of one or other Eastern 
 nationality therefore simply strengthens the existing anti- 
 Turk or anti-Greek or anti-Bulgarian persuasion, as the case 
 may be. As people read of them, they have the double 
 luxury of being confirmed in their views (for they seldom 
 read the other side) and of giving way to moral indignation. 
 They write to the Press or petition the Government to take 
 active measures against the offending nation. They rarely 
 reflect that previous measures of the kind for which they 
 appeal may have provoked the very atrocities which have 
 just aroused their feelings. Because they are indulging 
 their feelings, and not using their reason as they would use 
 it in circumstances where they were more directly respon- 
 sible for what was to be done, they thirst for vengeance and 
 forget to look for remedies. Thus they c overlook the obvious 
 and fundamental fact that ‘atrocities are committed in 
 similar exceptional circumstances by people of every nation 
 and_civilisation,.. and that whatever may be the duties of 
 Governments, the mission of philanthropists i is not to punish 
 crime but to remove its cause." 
 
 “ This was the sentimental link between British public 
 opinion and Mr. Lloyd George’s policy towards Turkey and 
 Greece, but it was no more the motive for the British 
 Government’s constancy than hostility to King Constantine 
 was for the French Government’s volte-face. In either case 
 sentiment screened supposed interest, and British policy 
 was slow to change because co-operation with Greece against 
 Turkey did, on a short view, seem better calculated to serve 
 the interests of Great Britain than those of France. The 
 Greek campaign in Anatolia did temporarily lighten for the 
 Allies the task of controlling the Black Sea Straits, and Great 
 Britain cared more about the maintenance of this control 
 than France—not, as the French supposed, because she 
 aimed at a monopoly of political and naval ascendency there, 
 
 1 See Chapter VII, 
 
92 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 but because the British carrying trade with the Black Sea 
 riverains through this waterway had been more important 
 than the French before the War. The British nation hoped 
 to renew this trade at the earliest opportunity. The French, 
 intending to make no peace with the Bolsheviks until they 
 honoured the debts of the Tsar, were comparatively in- 
 different as to whethér the commercial route were open or 
 closed. Indeed, they might prefer to see it closed, if that 
 would bring additional pressure to bear upon Russia, Thus 
 there was a positive British interest to be served by employ- 
 ing Greece as a pawn, and in the summer of 1920, when the 
 Asiatic shores of the Straits were actually threatened by the 
 Turkish Nationalist forces, Mr. Venizelos did play his part 
 according to the understanding. Without any expenditure 
 of British money or lives, the littoral of the Straits was 
 cleared by the Greek Army’s advance and the Nationalists 
 driven away into the interior! This was a substantial 
 service, and the British Government, who had accepted it 
 in order to extricate themselves from an awkward position, 
 were committed by it more deeply than before to the Anglo- 
 Greek entente in virtue of which it had been rendered. 
 The Greek Army was so immediately convenient that British 
 statesmen ignored the fact that its presence in Anatolia had 
 really created the hostile movement which it showed such 
 obliging readiness to combat, and the still more serious fact 
 that this movement was potentially stronger than the force 
 which had called it into being. They only slowly realised 
 that the Greek military position in Anatolia must ultimately 
 prove untenable, and that when the inevitable evacuation 
 occurred, the Straits would not only be left uncovered. but 
 might be exposed to attacks from a military Power driven 
 into hostility towards Great Britain on account of her sup- 
 port of Greece—a Power which did not exist at the time of 
 the original Greek landing at Smyrna. Meanwhile, it had 
 become difficult to change and doubtful whether any change 
 
 * See Chapter VI. * See Chapters V, and VI, 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 93 
 
 at this stage could heal the rift between a Greece backed by 
 
 Great Britain and-a~Turkey backed. byFrance: This rift 
 
 had disastrous effects upon the local situation, because it 
 
 made the French and. British. Governments impotent, on 
 
 the few occasions when they attempted it in a half-hearted 
 
 way, to arrest the mischief for which they were jointly 
 responsible. | 
 
 On the 2lst February 1921 the three Western Allied 
 
 Governments and the Japanese Government held a confer- 
 
 ence in London at which the Graeco-Turkish problem was 
 
 the first item on the agenda, and the Governments of Athens, 
 
 Constantinople, and Angora} were invited to send delega- 
 
 tions. After listening to statements of the Greek and 
 
 Turkish case, the Allied statesmen laid before each party 
 
 the following proposal :— 
 
 . ‘Viewing the difference of opinion that has arisen con- 
 cerning the populations of Eastern Thrace and Smyrna in 
 the areas assigned to Greece by the Treaty of Sévres, the 
 Powers are willing to refer the question of the populations 
 of those two areas to an International Commission to be 
 appointed by themselves, with instructions to examine into 
 the figures both before and since the War, and to proceed 
 with its investigations on the spot without delay, on the 
 clear understanding, which shall be accepted by both parties— 
 namely, by Turkey and by Greece— 
 
 ‘(a) That they will accept the results of such arbitration ; 
 
 “(b) That the remaining clauses of the Treaty of Sévres 
 shall remain unaltered, and shall be loyally accepted both by 
 Turkey and Greece.’ ? 
 
 Had the Supreme Council instituted such an investigation 
 two years earlier, before sending the Greek troops to Smyrna, 
 the facts which would have come to light might have 
 impressed them sufficiently to enable them to resist the 
 temptations of opportunism. But they had left undone 
 
 1 The Angora delegates were nominally received as members of the Con- } 
 stantinople Delegation, in order to save the dignity of the Allied statesmen 
 whose treaty of peace they were defying. The Constantinople delegates |) 
 solved the problem by entrusting the presentation of their case to Bekir N 
 Samy Bey, the’ chief representative of Angora. 
 
 2 Quoted from the official communiqué published in the 7imes of the 26th 
 February 1921. 
 
94 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 those things which they ought to have done and done those 
 things which they ought not to have done, and there was 
 no health in their diplomacy. The Turkish delegation, 
 through its spokesman Bekir Samy Bey, did indeed accept 
 the proposal, with certain stipulations as to the conditions 
 of investigation and reservations in regard to the remainder 
 of the Sévres Treaty; but the Greek representative, 
 Mr. Kaloyerépoulos, replied that he had ‘instructions from 
 the Greek National Assembly to base himself on the Treaty 
 of Sévres.’ ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ No doubt the 
 Greek Foreign Minister divined that the identical formula 
 presented by the Allied Governments concealed a divergence 
 of view. Did Mr. Lloyd George really desire a recount of 
 the population in the disputed districts, based this time not 
 on the collation of interested estimates but on a geniune 
 inquiry ?+ The acceptance of the proposal by the Turks 
 showed that, at least in their belief, such an inquiry might 
 prove damaging to the ‘ Lloyd George policy.’ In rejecting 
 it, therefore, the Greeks might not incur the displeasure of 
 at least one of the parties that had put it forward, and with 
 a calculated temerity they refused to abandon by negotia- 
 tion what they still hoped to hold by force. 
 
 After this first rebuff, an alternative proposal of a very 
 different character was submitted by the Allied Governments 
 on the 12th March. The document ? consisted of a series 
 of proposed modifications of the Treaty of Sévres. Con- 
 cessions were offered to Turkey in regard to her admission 
 to the League of Nations, her contingent expulsion from 
 Constantinople,* the chairmanship of the Straits Commission, 
 the scheme for judicial reform, the strength of the Turkish 
 Army, the area of the zone of the Straits, the military status 
 of Constantinople, the size of the Turkish Navy, foreign 
 
 1 For the statistics on which the Supreme Council justified the disposi- 
 tions of the Treaty of Sévres in regard to the Smyrna Zone, see Chapter IV., 
 
 p. 133. 
 * Published in extenso in the Times of the 14th March 1921. 
 3 See Treaty of Sévres, Article 36. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 95 
 
 financial and economic control, and the admission of 
 residents in Turkey to the privileges reserved for nationals 
 of the Allied Powers. There were also territorial concessions. 
 In regard to Kurdistan, the Allies ‘would be prepared to 
 consider a modification of the Treaty! in a sense in con- 
 formity with the existing facts of the situation.’ In regard 
 to Armenia, the stipulations of the Treaty? ‘might be 
 adapted on condition of Turkey recognising the rights of 
 Turkish Armenians to a national home on the eastern 
 frontiers of Turkey-in-Asia.’ But the crucial territorial 
 proposals came at the end :— 
 
 ‘In regard to Smyrna, the Allies would be ready to propose 
 
 an equitable compromise with a view to ending the present 
 unhappy state of hostilities and ensuring the return of 
 peace. 
 
 ‘The region called the Vilayet of Smyrna would remain 
 under Turkish sovereignty, a Greek force would remain in 
 Smyrna town, but in the rest of the sanjak * order would be 
 maintained by a gendarmerie with Allied officers and re- 
 cruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution of the 
 population as reported by an Inter-Allied Commission. The 
 same proportional arrangement, equally according to the 
 report of the Commission, would apply to the administration. 
 
 ‘A Christian governor would be appointed by the League 
 of Nations and assisted by an elective assembly and an elec- 
 tive council. The governor would be responsible for pay- 
 ments to the Turkish Government of annual sums expanding 
 with the prosperity of the province. 
 
 ‘This arrangement would in five years be open to review 
 on the demand of either party by the League of Nations.’ 
 
 The terms of this second proposal proved that Mr. Kalo- 
 yerépoulos had shown good judgment in rejecting the first. 
 The investigation originally proposed in Thrace had been 
 dropped altogether, and in the district round Smyrna the 
 proportion between the two national elements in the popula- 
 tion, though it was still to be investigated, was only to tell 
 in Turkey’s favour within limits previously defined. Turkey 
 
 1 Articles 62-64. 2 Articles 88-93. 
 
 8 The zone provisionally assigned to Greece by the Treaty of Sévres in- 
 cluded the town of Aivali and the sanjak of Manysa as well as the sanjak 
 of Smyrna. 
 
: 
 ! 
 | 
 
 96 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 was indeed assured on paper of the permanent maintenance 
 of her sovereignty, but what was that assurance worth ? 
 Autonomy under a Christian governor, paying tribute and 
 flying the Ottoman flag, called up in Turkish minds the 
 precedents of Moldavia and Wallachia, Serbia and Bulgaria 
 and Eastern Rumelia, Samos and Krete and the Lebanon. 
 Tn all these cases, such arrangements had been pressed upon 
 Turkey by the Western Powers with the solemn guarantee 
 that they would go no further, and invariably they had 
 resulted in the complete separation from the Ottoman 
 Empire of the provinces so differentiated. In the new 
 proposal in regard to Smyrna, they were to be reinforced 
 by the presence of a foreign garrison. No doubt all this 
 was interpreted by both the Turkish and the Greek delega- 
 tions as a method of executing the Sévres clauses in a more 
 roundabout way ; and if it were a choice between the two, 
 the Turks would probably have preferred the less long- 
 drawn-out operation. According to their experience, the 
 lesion involved in autonomy was equally certain to sever 
 the province from Turkey in the long run, and the revival 
 of this traditional diplomatic device was an indication— 
 all the more insulting if unintentional—that the Powers 
 meant to keep the ‘Sick Man’ prostrate by applying the 
 old-fashioned treatment. This proposal was therefore as 
 unacceptable to the Turks as the former had been to the 
 Greeks ; and as it promised to promote the ‘ Lloyd George 
 policy ’ by securing for the Greeks the substance of what 
 they wanted, it seemed unlikely that it represented the 
 real wishes of France and Italy, even though it had been 
 put forward (like its predecessors) in the name of all three 
 Powers. The Greeks, on their side, were not enthusiastic 
 over it. It was, after all, a whittling down of their claims ; 
 without the consent of the Turks, it was valueless in practice ; 
 and a military offensive (to which they were looking forward 
 with mistaken self-confidence 1) seemed to them a more 
 
 1 See Chapter VI. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 97 
 
 promising solution. Would it put them in the wrong ? 
 They ascertained that in ‘forestalling an enemy attack ’ 
 they ran little risk of incurring their’ backer’s displeasure.’ 
 So the Conference broke up; the delegates went their 
 ways to lay the second proposal before their principals ; 
 but the latter never had to draft their refusals, for within 
 less than a fortnight the Greek Army launched its ill-fated 
 Spring offensive. Because of the rift in the counsels of the 
 Allied Governments, Greek and Turkish soldiers killed each 
 other to no purpose at the battle of In Oni. 
 
 On the 21st June 1921, four months after their first 
 failure and on the eve of a much larger Greek offensive, for 
 which preparations had been going forward ever since the 
 In Onii reverse, the Allied Governments attempted media- 
 tion again. After a consultation between Allied statesmen, 
 the British Government telegraphed to the Greek Govern- 
 ment in the name of the three Western Allied Powers, 
 deprecating further military operations : 
 
 ‘They were prepared to attempt the task of conciliation 
 if the Hellenic Government were disposed to place its interests 
 in their hands. Should the Greek Government decide that 
 it was not prepared to accept outside intervention or advice, 
 the Allied Powers could not persevere in an action that 
 would obviously be fruitless. In such a case the responsi- 
 bility for the consequences of [a] renewed struggle would 
 rest upon the Greeks themselves. On the other hand, 
 should the Hellenic Government decide in its own interests 
 to accept the intervention of the Powers, the latter were 
 prepared to state the terms upon which their assistance 
 would be proffered, and, in the event of these being accepted, 
 to approach the Turkish Government with a view to the 
 immediate suspension of hostilities and to negotiations for 
 the conclusion of peace.’ # 
 
 The Allied representatives duly ‘ proceeded to discuss the 
 terms in question, and arrived at a general agreement as 
 
 1 Bekir Samy Bey also did business with the backers of Angora ; but the 
 agreements which he negotiated privately with the French and Italian 
 Governments were repudiated by the Great National Assembly on his return. } 
 
 2 Quoted from a statement made on the 23rd June 1921, in the House of 
 Commons, by Mr. Chamberlain in answer to a question by Major-General 
 Seely. 
 
 G 
 
98 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 to the lines on which they would proceed,’ but this belated 
 second démarche on their part in the cause of peace was 
 terminated by a prompt though courteous refusal from the 
 Greek Government. The Powers were informed that ‘the 
 conduct and decisions of the Greek Government can be 
 dictated by military considerations only. . . . Any adjourn- 
 ment of the operations would compromise the situation to 
 the disadvantage of Greece and the encouragement of 
 enemy resistance.’! For three months Greece had been 
 mobilising her reservists and depreciating her currency in 
 order to make her maximum military effort. On the eve 
 of delivering the long-prepared blow, the Greek Govern- 
 ment could hardly be expected to submit the destinies of 
 their country to a court in which they had good reason to 
 believe that two out of the three judges were prejudiced 
 against her; and in their reply they pertinently remarked 
 that ‘this situation . . . is caused by the application of the 
 penalties contained in the treaty with regard to the Near 
 East.’1 Neither they nor the Turks nor the Allies them- 
 selves were yet able to break the vicious circle into which 
 the ‘ Lloyd George policy ’ had drawn them. Because the 
 Allied Governments were no more unanimous and impartial 
 in June 1921 than they had been in February, Greek and 
 Turkish soldiers again killed each other fruitlessly—and 
 this time in much larger numbers—at Kiutahia and Eski 
 Shehir and on the Sakkaria in July, August, and September. 
 
 These attempts at peace-making really came to nothing 
 because the Powers each still expected in their hearts to 
 gain more by playing their pawns against each other than 
 by stopping the game, while the pawns each believed and 
 openly declared that, with such powerful players behind 
 them, they had a sporting chance of checkmating their 
 adversaries. Nothing struck me more forcibly during the 
 eight months that I was in touch with the Greek Army and 
 
 1 Quoted from the semi-official précis of the Greek Government’s Note, 
 issued at Athens on the 25th June and published in the Times on the 27th 
 June 1921, 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 99 
 
 public, than the universal belief that Great Britain, or 
 rather the Prime Minister wielding the resources of Great 
 Britain, would see them through. It was the one point on 
 which all Greeks—Ottoman subjects and Hellenic, literates 
 and illiterates, Royalists and Venizelists, civilians and 
 soldiers, privates and generals—were in enthusiastic agree- 
 ment. ‘With Great Britain supporting us_we are not 
 afraid of anything. 7—*But are you sure we are supporting | | 
 you? Most English people aren’t interested in Greece or | ( 
 the Kastern Question.’—‘ Well, Lloyd George is supporting | 
 us, and he will throw the resources of Great Britain into the | 
 scale if we can’t do the job by ourselves.’—‘ But Mr. Lloyd } 
 George isn’t an autocrat. He can only help you if public | 
 opinion lets Parliament vote him the men and money.’— 
 ‘Oh! You will vote them. You know your own interests. 
 You know how useful a Greater Greece can be to a naval ( 
 Power like yours.’-—‘ Yes, but it isn’t worth our while to \ 
 quarrel with our Allies, and you forget that we have recently 
 made a joint declaration of neutrality !’—‘ Oh, we know | 
 all about British policy. We have watched you for years. 
 We have seen you throw dust in people’s eyes before. You | 
 will be with us all right when the moment comes. We. 
 aren’t afraid. Here is to the health of a noble son of the | 
 great country which is the benefactress of Greece!’ It | 
 was always the same conversation. I lost count of the 
 number of times that I repeated my part; and the Turks 
 on their side, as soon as I began to gain their confidence, 
 used to express equal assurance in the support of Italy and 
 France. 
 
 I feel certain from my own experience that the ‘ will to 
 war ’ in both nations was sustained by nothing so much as 
 by this belief that they had stronger Powers behind them, 
 and that their ardour would have been damped and their 
 claims moderated to the point of compromise, if once they 
 had both been convinced that there would be no more 
 Western backing for either party. In order to convince 
 
 om 
 
100 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 them, some very emphatic demonstration of Anglo-French 
 solidarity was necessary, for optimism in politics is their 
 one common national characteristic, and they both enor- 
 mously exaggerated the amount of support which they had 
 been receiving or were likely to receive from one or other 
 of the Allied Powers. Neither the Greeks nor the Turks 
 realised the narrowness of the means allowed to the French 
 and British Governments by their public for carrying out 
 policies in the East, and hence they did not perceive that 
 these backers of theirs valued their services only in so far 
 as they relieved them from making efforts themselves. 
 They did not suspect how quickly pawns in distress become 
 an embarrassment, or how little the players care if they 
 disappear from the board. These Near and Middle Eastern 
 nations are still inexperienced, and their backers have never 
 undeceived them. Occasionally, indeed, they may actually 
 have deluded them and led them on. In the autumn of 
 1921, for example, both belligerents were more inclined than 
 they had previously been (and, above all, simultaneously 
 inclined) towards peace. The Greek Army had made its 
 supreme effort and had failed to deliver the knock-out blow ; 
 the Turkish Army had been shaken and had only just escaped 
 destruction. The Greek ‘ will to war’ was weakening and 
 the Turkish had not yet begun to recover strength. Most 
 encouraging symptom of all, the British Government were 
 at last facing the facts and preparing a proposal for com- 
 bined Allied mediation on the basis of an evacuation of 
 Anatolia by Greece. But the favourable moment passed, 
 and there is some evidence that the failure to seize the 
 opportunity for negotiations was due to advice deliberately 
 given by Paristo Angora. Icameacross such evidence myself, 
 and a report to the same effect was made independently 
 by the correspondent of the Times at Constantinople : 
 
 ‘TI learn on good authority,’ he telegraphed on the 5th 
 October,? ‘ that the Porte has been informed by its delegate 
 
 1 See Chapter VI, * Times, 10th October 1921, 
 
 —Se 
 
 SS eee 
 
ae 
 
 GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 101 
 
 Nabi Bey, who recently has held several conversations with 
 prominent French officials and politicians, that French politi- 
 cal circles are not likely to consider favourably a Greek | 
 request for Allied mediation, should such be made in the i 
 near future. They believe it would be a false step for the 
 Nationalists to demand or accept European intervention at | 
 the present juncture, and that [the] weariness of the Greek } 
 ‘ Army will finally compel Greece to accept European media- | 
 tion on terms far more favourable to the Turks than it will 
 now accept.’ } 
 
 — 
 
 The Jimes correspondent’s information and my own is 
 supported by the fact (which was not then public knowledge) 
 that M. Franklin-Bouillon and Yusuf Kemal Bey were at 
 | that time actually engaged in negotiating a separate agree- 
 ment between the French and the Nationalist Governments. 
 
 But if our information was correct, Angora was very badly 
 
 advised by its new Western friends. It was already evident | 
 that the campaign in Anatolia would be terminated either 
 by mediation or by exhaustion,! and that though the 
 method of exhaustion would undoubtedly break the Greek 
 
 ‘ will to war ’ first, the process might complete the devasta- 
 
 | tion of the richest part of the Turkish national home. No 
 
 government can afford to prolong a war which is being 
 fought in its own ‘country. Yusuf Kemal Bey would have 
 doné Well t6 visit the devastated regions in France and ask 
 himself whether the French victory in the fifth year of the 
 : European War was better for France than if she had made 
 peace by negotiation two years earlier. 
 
 Indeed, both belligerents, if they had recognised their 
 true interests, would have made up their minds to enter 
 into direct negotiations with one another rather than allow 
 the Western Powers to exploit them any longer; and the 
 Western Powers, on their side, would have taken common 
 action to bring a settlement about. Our interest in stopping 
 the Graeco-Turkish War was not so immediate as that of the 
 combatants. Our countries were not being ravaged by it | 
 nor our currency sensibly depreciated nor our young men | 
 
 1 See Chapter VI. 
 
102 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 killed. Yet the continuance of this remote conflict was 
 seriously affecting our own relations. So long as the Greeks 
 and Turks (confirmed in their bellicose mood by our real 
 or fancied encouragement) continued to fight each other, 
 they each had the strongest incentive to make mischief 
 between Great Britain and France, in order to make sure 
 of retaining our respective backing. I think I never met 
 a Greek who did not speak ill to me purposely of the French 
 and Italians, and when the Turks forgot for a moment that 
 I was English and spoke as they were in the habit of speaking 
 to members of the other two Allied nations, they used the 
 same language of my fellow-countrymen. During the battle 
 of In Onii,1 I was continually told by Greek soldiers of every 
 rank that French and Italian officers had been seen directing 
 the fire of the Turkish artillery ; and I afterwards saw a 
 series of articles by Madame Gaulis, a French correspondent 
 who was present at the same battle on the Turkish side, in 
 which she reported stories told her by the Turks of un- 
 neutral and indeed atrocious behaviour by the British officers 
 attached as observers to the Greek Army. Both stories, as 
 I was in a position to know, were untrue, but both were 
 genuinely believed and eagerly passed on by Greeks and 
 Turks to Englishmen and Frenchmen respectively in order 
 to make mischief between us. 
 
 When I accompanied the Ottoman Red Crescent Society’s 
 expeditions to evacuate the survivors of atrocities com- 
 mitted by the Greeks along the south-eastern coasts of the 
 Marmara,” the Greek authorities more than once com- 
 promised British honour in an exceedingly unpleasant way 
 by hoisting Red Ensigns side by side with the Greek flag 
 over the scenes of their misdoings. The French and Italian 
 flags were conspicuously absent, and the effect, was not lost 
 upon the Allied officers attached to the expedition, the Red 
 Crescent representatives, and the terrorised Turkish popula- 
 tion. At the headquarters of the Greek Tenth Division at 
 
 1 See ‘ The Origin of a Legend,’ p. 254. * See Chapter VII. 
 
 | 
 ' 
 | 
 / 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 103 
 
 Gemlik, I witnessed an amusing piece of unconscious counter- 
 propaganda. Our three Allied officers had gone inside to 
 discuss procedure with the Greek Chief-of-Staff, leaving their 
 three orderlies in the courtyard ; and these Western soldiers, 
 who had been working for several weeks together and were 
 the best of friends, stood in a group of khaki, blue and grey 
 —smoking, communicating by broken words and gestures, 
 and laughing with evident good humour. The spectacle of 
 this fraternisation between nations who ought to have been 
 at loggerheads on their account was altogether too much 
 for the Greek soldiers on duty. Could a man in English 
 uniform really be on speaking terms with the common 
 enemies of Greece and Great Britain? They could not 
 keep their countenances. Some scowled from the upper 
 windows; another—hit in the face by this -appalling 
 spectacle as he came suddenly round a corner—stopped 
 dead with his jaw dropping, while the innocent causes of 
 this consternation went on with their conversation in com- 
 plete ignorance of the effect which they were producing. 
 Yet at Gemlik, too, there were unpleasant features. In 
 the summer of 1920 the Nationalists had originally been 
 driven out and the town occupied by the British Navy 
 co-operating with the Greek forces,1 and the building now 
 used as Divisional Headquarters by the Greek General 
 Commanding in the zone of the Greek atrocities,? had 
 formerly served as ours. Notices painted up in English 
 were still visible on the walls; and in the neighbouring 
 Turkish village of Omer Bey, which was daily expecting 
 to share the fate of the villages north of it, we were told that 
 the British naval authorities, before they left, had arranged 
 the surrender of arms. If the inhabitants had only known 
 that a few weeks later the British were going to hand them 
 over to the Greeks, they would have fought, they said, there 
 and then rather than find themselves later, defenceless, at 
 the mercy of their national enemy. ‘There was plenty of 
 
 1 See Chapter VI. * See Chapter VII. 
 
104 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 material for mischief-making, and it was not neglected by 
 
 | either party. 
 . Such perpetual propaganda on the part of all the members 
 | of the local nationalities with whom they have to do, un- 
 | doubtedly does make mischief between local representatives 
 of the Powers. They may be on their guard against it ; 
 they may make loyal efforts to feel and display mutual 
 goodwill, but the constant suggestion accords with the 
 tradition of Anglo-French rivalry which they have inherited 
 from many generations of predecessors, and with the palpable 
 divergence in the policy of their Governments which appears 
 in the instructions which they are perpetually receiving 
 from home. So the old Eastern feud between France and 
 Great Britain is revived in situ, and is communicated to 
 ‘ official circles ’ and to public opinion in Paris and London, 
 where it is echoed in the Press, magnified by unsatisfactory 
 conferences between the Prime Ministers, and re-com- 
 municated, in a more acute form, to the already infected 
 embassies, consulates, schools, and missions where it started. 
 The Agreement between France and the Turkish Nation- 
 alist Government, signed at Angora on the 20th October 
 1921, was a danger-signal. Its contents, with which a fair- 
 minded British critic might have little fault to find, were 
 not what mattered. It was all to the good that the campaign 
 in Cilicia should come to an end; that France should 
 abandon her economic zone in Anatolia; and that the 
 principle of nationality should be applied more fairly than 
 it had been under the Treaty of Sévres in the borderland 
 between Turkey and Syria, by the restoration of a strip of 
 territory to the former.1_ The strategic danger to Mesopo- 
 tamia involved in the arrangements made by the French 
 and the Nationalist Government about the Baghdad Railway 
 is rather theoretical; and as for the Christian minorities 
 in the abortive French zone, which France undertook to 
 
 1 There are certain Arab and Armenian minorities in the retroceded strip, 
 but the great majority of the population is Turkish and Kurd. 
 
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 105 
 
 protect by the Tripartite Treaty of the 10th August 1920, 
 it is evident that no situation could have put them in greater 
 danger that the previous state of warfare, and that an 
 understanding between Paris and Angora at least offered 
 the possibility: of securing them better conditions. In fact, 
 an unprejudiced reader of the correspondence ! between the 
 French and British Governments; which arose out of the 
 Franklin-Bouillon Agreement, will probably concede that 
 the Quai d’Orsay had the best of the argument on nearly 
 every concrete question. But on the main issue the British 
 Government were obviously in the right. A separate peace 
 (and this was in reality a separate peace) between France 
 and the Nationalists obstructed a general peace in the East 
 and put a dangerous strain upon the Entente. 
 
 The damage done to the prospects of a general Near 
 and Middle Eastern settlement was clear. Even if the 
 French Government did not explicitly advise Angora -to 
 be unaccommodating, the concluison of the separate 
 agreement was bound to have an equivalent effect upon 
 the Nationalists’ minds. Belligerency is a hysterical con- F 
 dition at the best, and-when a belligerent finds its hands | 
 suddenly strengthened, it is hard for it to keep its head. \\ 
 - The strain imposed upon the-Entente by this open rift . 
 between the two Governments in their Oriental policies at 
 last aroused some alarm in the minds of the French and 
 British public. There is no need here to point out the 
 general issues at stake. The moment that the possibility 
 of a breach in the Entente was faced, they became appallingly | 
 apparent. This book is only concerned with the particular | 
 catastrophe which such a breach would bring about in the 
 relations between the Western and the non-Western worlds. 
 The crisis upon which these relations have now entered has . | 
 been discussed in Chapter I., and in this crisis Great Britain 
 and France are joint trustees for Western civilisation. 
 Between them they control, directly or indirectly, the greater 
 
 1 White Paper (Turkey No. 1 (1922)=Cmd. 1570). 
 
106 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 part of the Middle Eastern world. Germany has forcibly 
 been excluded from the advantages and responsibilities of 
 representing our civilisation in the East. The Italian 
 dominions in North Africa are an enclave, the Dutch 
 dominions in the East Indies an outlying province. France 
 and Great Britain, though they are far from embodying the 
 total strength and wisdom of the West, have taken upon 
 themselves the tremendous task of guiding West and East 
 out of the paths of destruction. If they do their best and 
 do it together, they may just succeed. If they fall out, 
 failure is certain; and if they fail, they will not be 
 forgiven. 
 
IV 
 THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 
 
 ON the 15th May 1919, a destructive force was let loose in 
 Western Anatolia, as sudden and apparently incomprehen- 
 sible in its action as the eruption of a voleano. One 
 morning, six months after the close of the European War, 
 civilians and disarmed soldiers were massacred in the streets 
 of Smyrna; whole quarters and villages were plundered ; 
 then the rich valleys in the hinterland were devastated by 
 further arson and bloodshed, and a military front came into 
 existence, which cut off the ports of Smyrna and Constanti- 
 nople from the interior and ruined their trade. As the war 
 continued, capital investments like houses, bridges, and 
 tunnels (with which the country was already too poorly 
 provided) were steadily destroyed, cattle lifted, crops 
 commandeered, human beings conscripted, deported or 
 otherwise driven away, if they escaped being murdered. 
 In fact, a wholesale ruin of the country and extermination 
 of its inhabitants began, over an area which extended with 
 alarming speed. Within eight months the destruction that 
 had started on the Smyrna quays was at work in Cilicia, at 
 the other end of Anatolia. Within eighteen months, it had 
 overwhelmed the Armenian Republic of Erivan, beyond the 
 north-eastern boundaries of Turkey-in-Asia. 
 
 Of course, volcanic action is not the isolated, supernatural 
 phenomenon which it appears to be. The force discharged 
 with such terrible consequences at a particular point has 
 been accumulated there slowly by stresses and strains con- 
 verging from all quarters; and if we look sufficiently far 
 behind the date and beyond the place of the eruption to 
 
 107 
 
108 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 take into account all the factors, we find ourselves con- 
 fronted by nothing outside the ordinary course of nature. 
 So it is with the war-after-the-war in Anatolia. We cannot 
 understand it if we begin our investigation with the landing of 
 the Greek troops in May 1919, for that was only a symptom of 
 the deeper disturbances discussed in the foregoing chapters. 
 The break-down of Near and of Middle Eastern civilisation, 
 the introduction of the Western idea of political nationality, 
 the traditional rivalries of the Powers and the attraction of 
 Greece and Turkey into the vicious circle, remote though 
 they may have seemed, are the necessary prologue to the 
 Anatolian drama. This prologue is not complete without 
 some description of the doomed region and its people, as 
 they were before the smoke and the flames and the burning 
 streams of lava overwhelmed them. 
 
 The earliest relevant point in the historical background 
 is that Anatolia was once assimilated by Ancient Hellenic 
 civilisation. The propagation there of the Ancient Greek 
 language and of the city-state went on through the whole 
 course of Graeco-Roman history. In the twelfth century 
 B.C. the first Greek colonies were planted on the western 
 littoral. The sixth century after Christ saw the final 
 extinction of the pre-Greek languages in the interior. This 
 process belongs to a closed chapter. None of the civilisa- 
 tions now in contact in Anatolia were yet in existence. It 
 has to be mentioned here partly because of the romantic 
 appropriation of the Ancient Hellenic past by the Modern 
 Greeks, and partly for its bearing on the next point. 
 
 This second point is that Anatolia did not cease to be 
 Greek during the interregnum (about A.D. 375-675) between 
 the submergence of the Ancient Hellenic and the emergence 
 of the Modern Western and Near Eastern civilisations. 
 Before its break-down the Ancient civilisation had retired 
 from its broad eastern domains into a citadel, Constanti- 
 nople, flanked by two glacis, the Balkan and Anatolian 
 Peninsulas ; and finding itself too weak to hold both out- 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 109 
 
 works, the beleaguered society chose to concentrate its 
 defensive efforts on the Anatolian frontier. The Balkan 
 Peninsula was abandoned to be overrun by nomads and 
 Slavs. For several centuries Salonika was continuously 
 blockaded by the barbarians. Even the Peloponnese, the 
 heart of the Ancient Greek world, was largely occupied by 
 Slavonic settlers, who were only afterwards assimilated by 
 the Modern Greeks through being converted to the new 
 Near Eastern civilisation. In Anatolia, on the other hand, 
 the barbarians never gained a foothold, and there was 
 therefore a gradual transition from the old civilisation to 
 the young one. Ancient Greek ceased to be a living 
 language and was replaced by Modern Greek in the mouths 
 of the people. But Ancient Greek remained the language 
 of literature (like Latin in the West) and the affiliations of 
 the vulgar tongue were not obscured or forgotten. In 
 Anatolia the Modern Greek constituent of Near Eastern 
 civilisation was evolved out of the Ancient Greek constituent 
 of the preceding Graeco-Roman culture. 
 
 Anatolia, in fact—and this is the third point—was the 
 cradle of the Near Eastern civilisation which was growing 
 up from the eighth to the eleventh century after Christ. 
 In the ‘ East Roman Empire ’ (the leading state in the early 
 Near Eastern world) the dynasties, the nobility, and the 
 territorial army were recruited from Anatolia, and the 
 Anatolian provinces (which officially included the regions 
 now called ‘ Western and Eastern Thrace’) ranked above 
 the European. Constantinople the capital was the ‘ bridge- 
 head’ of the Empire in Europe (to quote the phrase of a 
 distinguished Byzantine scholar). Like Ottoman Con- 
 stantinople, it took and did not give. The Imperial enclaves 
 in European Greece only forwarded their surplus revenues 
 to the Treasury after defraying their own expenses. The 
 Anatolian revenues, on the other hand, were paid directly 
 to, and the Anatolian troops and officials remunerated 
 directly from, the centre. Anatolia was at once the cradle 
 
110 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 of Near Eastern civilisation, the birthplace of the Modern 
 Greek people, and the backbone of the mediaeval Greek 
 state. From this source a new culture radiated among 
 the Bulgars, Jugoslavs and Rumans, the Ukrainians and 
 Russians, and the peoples of the Caucasus. 
 
 The fourth relevant point in the history of Anatolia is 
 its relation to that premature break-down of Near Eastern 
 civilisation which has been discussed in Chapter I. East- 
 Central Anatolia was the first part of the East Roman 
 Empire to be touched by decay. The strain of the Hundred 
 Years’ War (A.D. 913-1019) between the Greek and Bulgarian 
 states weakened the East Roman Government’s control 
 over these distant but vital provinces. The local officials 
 and commanders turned into a feudal nobility, which en- 
 croached on the lands and liberties of the peasantry. From 
 the first years of the Bulgarian War there were agrarian 
 troubles here, with which the Government failed to deal 
 effectively. In fact, the Government itself began to fall 
 under the landlords’ control. During the breathing-spaces 
 in the Bulgarian War, the military efforts of the Empire 
 were wantonly kept at a stretch to conquer fresh territories 
 for feudalism on the eastern border.1 After exercising this 
 fatal influence on state policy, feudal anarchy finally pre- 
 vailed over state authority in the Near East about the time 
 when Western Governments—the Normans in England and 
 Sicily and the Capetians in France—were organising Western 
 feudalism into a system serviceable to the state’s activities. 
 Thus, a superficial and temporary extension of the East 
 Roman Power in the Balkan Peninsula and the fringes of 
 the Middle East was accompanied by a serious internal 
 break-down of Near Eastern society in East-Central Anatolia, 
 which was tested almost immediately by the inroads of the 
 
 1 The Arab Marches of Malatia were conquered between 920 and 942 ; 
 Cilicia and Northern Syria between 962 and 976 (this by feudal usurpers on 
 the Imperial throne) ; and Basil 11., the slayer of Bulgarians and Anatolian 
 feudatories, himself carried on the feudal policy by starting the annexation 
 of Armenian principalities (A.p, 999-1046). 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 111 
 
 Saljug Turks from Central Asia (1064-75). After raiding 
 not only the new provinces but the whole of Anatolia up 
 to Smyrna and Isnik, the Saljuqs remained in permanent 
 occupation of the East and Centre, and Turcified it. 
 
 This process of Turcification in East-Central Anatolia is 
 one of the puzzles of history. Four centuries earlier the 
 Constantinople Government, then apparently far weaker 
 and undoubtedly less civilised than it was in the eleventh 
 century, had succeeded in repelling the invasions of a 
 formidable civilised Power—the Arab Empire in its prime. 
 But now the sedentary, civilised population of East-Central 
 Anatolia was assimilated by a barbarous nomadic people, 
 driven out of its native environment on the steppes by some 
 periodic variation of climate. The Saljugqs had not even 
 numbers on their side. The Greek population which they 
 found in the country must have been comparatively dense, 
 while the contemporary records, as well as our general 
 knowledge of nomadic social conditions, indicate that the 
 invaders’ numbers were small. The usual importance of 
 numbers in deciding the issue when two peoples mix is 
 illustrated in the almost simultaneous conquest of England 
 by the Normans. Here everything but numbers was on 
 the invaders’ side. They were superior in culture, politics, 
 and military technique, and they kept up a close connection 
 with their kinsmen on the Continent. But their numerical 
 inferiority outweighed all these advantages, and eventually 
 they were assimilated by the backward population which 
 they had conquered. How, then, did the Greeks fail to 
 assimilate the Saljuqs though they had numbers as well as 
 civilisation in their favour ? 
 
 The radical change in language and nationality which 
 occurred in East-Central Anatolia after the eleventh century 
 of our era, really has no parallel in Western history. Since 
 the close of the Dark Age, the changes in the distribution of 
 nationalities in Western Europe have been singularly small. 
 The linguistic frontiers between French and Flemish or 
 
112 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 French and High German have hardly varied, and even on 
 our eastern borders, the encroachments of Germans on Poles, 
 or of Poles on Ukrainians, have been sporadic. They have 
 produced enclaves and minorities, not homogeneous trans- 
 formations of population. The Germanisation of the greater 
 part of Silesia has been something exceptional. The open- 
 ness of the country towards the North German plain, the 
 decimation of the Polish population by a Mongol raid in 
 the thirteenth century, the presence of coal and iron and 
 the consequent influx of German industrial workers during 
 the past century, and the political union of Silesia from an 
 early date with non-Polish countries, were a strong combina- 
 tion of special causes. Yet in spite of all this, the Polish 
 nationality has retained sufficient footing in Silesia to 
 produce one of the most difficult problems of national 
 demarcation in the settlement after the European War. 
 The case of Bohemia is more characteristic. Here, two 
 streams of German colonisation almost encircled an origin- 
 ally less civilised Slav population ; the first German univer- 
 sity east of the Rhine was founded at Prag ; the Kingdom 
 was nearly always connected politically with German 
 territories and was at last subjected continuously to Austria. 
 Yet the German colonists have never pushed far out from 
 the mountain-rim of Bohemia into the central plain,! and 
 in the end the Tchechs, assisted by the physiography of their 
 country and by the fortunes of war, have established a 
 political ascendency over the German immigrants. In 
 Ireland, again, the rapid spread of the English language, 
 since the introduction of national primary education between 
 1833 and 1845 and the great emigrations to America, has 
 been only a linguistic phenomenon. It has been accom- 
 panied by no change of religion, and the separate national 
 consciousness has been heightened, not diminished. 
 
 1 That is, the agricultural colonists—for in districts where the rural 
 population remained Tchech, there was a Germanising tendency, of varying 
 strength and duration, in the towns. 
 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
 rae ee a a ee ee ape SE 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 113 
 
 The change in East-Central Anatolia was of quite another 
 order. Here, a military occupation in weak force by 
 nomads was followed by the almost total extinction of Near 
 Eastern civilisation, Orthodox Christianity and the Greek 
 language, and this was not accomplished by massacre. 
 There is no contemporary evidence that the Saljugs killed 
 off the inhabitants they found and repeopled the country 
 with their own stock, and the physical type of the modern 
 population forbids any such hypothesis. The Central 
 Asian ‘ Mongoloid ’ type is found in Anatolia, but it is rare, 
 and the great mass of the Turkish-speaking peasantry are 
 ‘ Alpines,’ with a marked tendency towards the ‘ Armenoid ’ 
 type which is already portrayed in representations of Hittites 
 on Egyptian bas-reliefs of the fourteenth and thirteenth 
 centuries B.C. The mediaeval Greek population was not 
 exterminated by the Saljugs but converted. As they had 
 once turned from Hittites and Phrygians into Greeks, so 
 they turned again from Greeks into Turks, under the 
 influence of a few nomad intruders. This is the fact to be 
 explained, and as analogies seem to show that the Saljug 
 conquest in itself was an insufficient cause, we must seek an 
 explanation in the local developments that preceded it. 
 
 We must infer that, by the time of the conquest, the feudal 
 anarchy in East-Central Anatolia had alienated the peasantry 
 from their lords, and that education and the mental life 
 which maintains the distinctive character of a civilisation 
 were confined to a handful of lay and ecclesiastical land- 
 owners. Near Eastern civilisation here, in spite of an 
 imposing exterior, must have become a hollow crust which 
 broke under the nomads’ horse-hoofs. The submerged 
 peasantry profited by the break-down, and loved their old 
 masters so little that in shaking off their yoke they did not 
 hesitate also to discard their culture, in which the peasant 
 had had only a nominal share. In fact, in the eleventh 
 century 4.c. the Anatolian peasantry, in contrast to the 
 ruling class, may have been a more or less uncultivated 
 
 ) H 
 
114 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 : people like the nomadic invaders and ready, like them, to 
 adopt any way of life which offered them a better future. 
 The Orthodox Church was bound up with the old oppression. 
 Islam was untried and was attractively equalitarian in its 
 professions. Saljuq nomads and Anatolian peasantry were 
 amalgamated by their common conversion,! and the nomad 
 element was absorbed. In fact, the Saljugqs were not the 
 cause but simply the instrument by which the peasantry 
 | of East-Central Anatolia were transferred from one civilisa- 
 | tion to another. 
 
 This early Turcification of East-Central Anatolia was a 
 separate event from that of the West and North-West, which 
 | did not begin till two hundred years later. Here there was 
 | more urban life and perhaps more rural liberty ; the first 
 | | Saljuq raiders were driven out again within twenty years, 
 and Greek nationality and civilisation had a new lease of 
 life. The causes of Turcification in this region, where it 
 only began in the latter part of the thirteenth century, are 
 also easier to analyse. In one respect history repeated 
 itself, for another exhausting struggle in Kurope—this time 
 to against the Western conquerors who came on the Fourth 
 ) Crusade—loosened the hold of the East Roman Empire 
 upon its remaining Asiatic territories. North-Western 
 Anatolia was occupied by fresh parties of Turks while the 
 Greeks were recovering Constantinople and the Morea ; and 
 the vanguard of these Turks (including the party led by 
 Ertoghrul the father of Osman) were again Central Asian 
 nomads, flying now not only from a drought 2 but from the 
 
 1 The traditional date for the conversion of Saljuq, the eponym of the 
 Saljuq Turks, is a.p. 956 (Sir T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam, 2nd 
 ed., of London, 1913, Constable). But though many nomadic peoples (e.g. the 
 modern Kirghiz Kazaks) have been nominal Moslems, Islamic institutions 
 do not generally get hold of nomadic peoples unless or until they settle 
 down. Probably most of the eleventh-century invaders of Anatolia were 
 still Shamanists in practice, and the second swarm driven westwards in the 
 thirteenth century were certainly so. There is some evidence that even 
 Ertoghrul, the father of Osman, was a pagan (H. A. Gibbons, Foundation | 
 of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford, 1916, Clarendon Press). 
 
 2 The historical evidence afforded by recorded dates of the eruptions of 
 nomads from the steppes into China, Russia, the Near and Middle Kast, and 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 115 
 
 Mongols. In most other ways, however, the situation was 
 different from that of the eleventh century. The new 
 nomad immigrants in the North-West had behind them, in 
 the Saljugqs of East-Central Anatolia, a population of their 
 own language from which valuable reinforcements could be 
 drawn, and these settled Turcified Anatolians, like the other 
 sedentary Islamic peoples, were beginning to build up a new 
 Middle Eastern civilisation. The main features of it have 
 been discussed in Chapter I. From approximately a.D. 
 1300 onwards, it became a more attractive form of life than 
 the prematurely overstrained and now moribund civilisation 
 of the Near East. It offered not only a refuge for the 
 oppressed but a more promising career for the able and the 
 ambitious, and the young Osmanli Power (as well as the 
 neighbouring Turkish principalities which it subsequently 
 conquered) was largely built up by renegade Greek nobles 
 and officials. The classical instance of this is the family 
 of Evrenés, the fortunes of which were made by the last 
 Greek governor of Brusa. He surrendered the city to the 
 Osmanlis after a long defence, when at last he despaired of 
 help from the East Roman Government, and then turned 
 Turk—carrying over with him, it seems, many of the notables 
 and other inhabitants.1 Two generations later, a de- 
 scendant of his conquered Macedonia for the Ottoman 
 Empire and led the first Osmanli expedition into the Morea. 
 For these services the family was invested with a fief at 
 Yenije Vardar, which was still in their hands at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century. This assimilation by young 
 Middle Eastern communities of the best energies that 
 remained in the Near Eastern world was no doubt assisted 
 by the Near Easterners’ hatred of their mediaeval Western 
 
 India, indicates a 600-year cycle of alternating dry and moist periods. The 
 two Turkish invasions of Anatolia both fall within the dry period, A.D. 950- 
 1250. It is not an accident that that period almost coincides with the inter- 
 regnum (circa A.D. 975-1275) between the Ancient and the Modern civili- 
 sations of the Middle East. (For these climatic cycles see also Chapter 
 VIIL) 
 
 1 See H. A. Gibbons, Foundation of the Ottoman Empire, p. 48. 
 
116 THE WESTERN’ QUESTION 
 
 conquerors.' The Ottoman conquests in South-Eastern . 
 Europe down to the close of the fifteenth century (a con- 
 tinuation of the movement that substituted the Turkish 
 for the Greek nationality in Western Anatolia) were largely 
 made at the expense of French and Italian rulers. But while 
 in Europe the Osmanlis were the sole agents of Middle 
 Eastern expansion, Western Anatolia was mostly Turcified 
 by other new Turkish Powers, like the principalities of 
 Sarukhan and Aidin in the valleys of the Hermus and the 
 Maeander. Thus, in two distinct stages, all Anatolia was 
 appropriated by Turkish-speaking Moslem communities 
 belonging to the new Middle Eastern world. 
 
 The next point of importance in the history of Anatolia 
 is the unification of the separate Turkish states, of which 
 there were forty or more in existence at the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century. The Osmanli state, grown strong 
 by acquisitions in Europe, turned round upon its Turkish 
 neighbours eastward, and, in spite of the diversion made in 
 their favour by Timur Lenk, they were all conquered and 
 annexed before the end of the fifteenth century. Thus 
 Anatolia again became a political unit after being partitioned 
 and fought over for 400 years, only the predominant 
 nationality was no longer Greek but Turkish. By the date 
 A.D. 1500, Turcification had perhaps proceeded about as 
 far as Hellenisation had when Ancient Anatolia was united 
 under the Roman Empire, and it looked as if, in the modern 
 case, political unification would again carry the linguistic 
 and cultural process to completion. Certainly, during the 
 succeeding centuries of Ottoman dominion, the Greek 
 impress was more and more effaced and a Turkish impress 
 substituted upon the plastic features of the Anatolian people, 
 but in the end the parallel has not worked out. Of course 
 the process was impeded by an obstacle which did not exist 
 in the earlier age, when Greeks were made out of Phrygians 
 and Lydians. A Modern Greek who turned Turk had not 
 
 1 See Chapter I. 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 117 
 
 only to change his language and ways of life, but to get over 
 the difference between two mutually exclusive religions, and 
 this barrier would check assimilation except when mass- 
 conversions were brought about by some special inducement 
 or pressure. Yet the Turkish language did in time become 
 the vernacular of most of the unconverted Christian minori- 
 ties that remained in Anatolia ; and in Syria, under more or 
 less parallel conditions, the barrier between the two rival 
 universal religions has largely been broken down. 
 
 In Syria, where a Christian Syriac-speaking population 
 was conquered in the seventh century after Christ by 
 Moslem Arabs, the majority of the population was ulti- 
 mately converted to Islam (as, in the later case, the majority 
 of the Anatolians were), and the Christian remnant took to 
 an Arabic (as in Anatolia it mostly took to a Turkish) 
 vernacular. But in Syria there also survived or grew up a 
 certain community of feeling between these Arabic-speaking 
 Christians on the one side and the converted majority, with 
 its infusion of genuine Arab immigrants, on the other. The 
 early Arabic literature and culture were to some extent 
 adaptations of Graeco-Roman originals, for which the 
 Christian Syrians were the intermediaries. Arabic literature 
 was thus not an exclusively Islamic affair, and there were 
 Christians even among its distinguished men of letters. 
 This created a common inheritance in which all speakers of 
 Arabic, whether Christians or Moslems, could take pride, 
 and in recent years, since Syria began to be affected by the 
 Western idea of political nationality, some sections of the 
 Christian minority have thrown in their lot with their 
 Moslem fellow-countrymen. It may be a mistake to build 
 too much upon the possibilities of co-operation between 
 them, but undoubtedly the tendency is there.* 
 
 Nationalism has reacted quite differently upon the 
 
 1 Since the armistice, a parallel tendency has shown itself among the 
 Christian Copts in Egypt to make common cause with the Moslem National- 
 ists against the British ascendency. 
 
118 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Turkish-speaking Christians in Anatolia, as has been « 
 demonstrated by their action during the European War. 
 On the Palestine front, where Orthodox ! Christian Arabic- 
 speaking Syrians were serving side by side with Moslem 
 Syrians under Prince Feisal in order to liberate their common 
 country from the foreign rule of the Turks, there were also 
 Turkish-speaking Gregorian Christians from Anatolia who 
 had enlisted in the French Légion d’Orient to fight on the 
 anti-Turkish side, though they came from the same country 
 as the Turks and used their language. Both these con- 
 tingents of Christian soldiers were equally right or wrong 
 in doing what they did. Both were technically rebels 
 against their lawful sovereign. Both were probably justified 
 by their previous treatment at the hands of the Ottoman 
 Government, and certainly by the current Western doctrine 
 of nationality. The interesting difference is that the Syrian 
 Christians felt themselves to be of the same nationality as 
 the Moslems with whom they shared their language and their 
 country, while the Anatolian Christians regarded the 
 Anatolian Moslems as foreign oppressors and found their 
 national ideal in union with their Armenian-speaking co- 
 religionists in Transcaucasia. One obvious reason for this 
 difference is that the Turkish-speaking Moslem majority in 
 Anatolia, being the ruling nation in the Ottoman Empire, 
 were able to oppress the local Christian minority, while in 
 Syria the Moslem majority and the Christian minority were 
 both under Turkish domination. But there is another 
 reason of at least as great importance, namely, that, whereas 
 there is no national community outside Syria and Egypt to 
 which the Syrian Orthodox and the Copts respectively could 
 feel that they belonged, the Turkish-speaking Gregorians of 
 Anatolia have the Transcaucasian Armenians to look to and 
 the Turkish-speaking Orthodox the European Greeks. 
 
 1 The attitude of the Catholic Christian Arabic-speaking Syrians is more 
 obscure, but there is reason to doubt the official French view that they feel 
 themselves a separate nation from other Syrians and want an entirely inde- 
 pendent state of their own, 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 119 
 
 Before discussing the phenomena of nationalism produced 
 in Anatolia by these special conditions, it is worth noting 
 exactly how far the process of amalgamation between the 
 different races, languages, and religions there has gone. 
 There is a great variety of physical type in Anatolia. The 
 basic ‘ Alpine ’ stock is crossed with ‘ Mediterranean ’ on the 
 coast and with ‘Mongoloid’ and ‘Nordic’ (the latter in 
 surprisingly large proportions) in the interior. But it is 
 impossible to identify the source and date of introduction 
 of these various strains, for they now crop up indiscrimin- 
 ately among members of all religions. ‘Mediterranean ’ 
 and ‘ Nordic’ Moslems, ‘ Alpine’ Orthodox and ‘ Mediter- 
 ranean’ Gregorians can be noted almost everywhere by 
 the passing traveller. 
 
 There has been at least as much intermixture and inter- 
 change in language.1 Among the Orthodox Christian 
 minority in the extreme north-east (‘Pontus’), colloquial 
 Greek has survived continuously since the time before the 
 Saljuq invasion. In some groups of Orthodox villages 
 between the Kyzyl Yrmak and the Cilician Highlands 
 (‘ Cappadocia ’), the spoken language is at present in tran- 
 sition from Greek to Turkish. The Gregorian Christian 
 Highlanders, as well as the Orthodox element in the central 
 vilayet of Konia (the former Turkish principality of Kara- 
 man), have almost entirely taken to Turkish in place of their 
 respective Armenian and Greek mother-tongues.2 Eighty 
 or ninety years ago, when the American Evangelical Missions 
 started work in the interior, one of their first steps was to 
 publish Turkish translations of the Bible in Greek and 
 Armenian characters, to serve the needs of the local Christian 
 communities. This combination of a borrowed vernacular 
 and an inherited script has become characteristic of the 
 Anatolian Christian minorities. At the village of Gélde, 
 
 1 See R. M. Dawkins, Modern Greek in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1916, 
 University Press). 
 
 2 Greek is still spoken in one or two Karamanly villages like Sillé. 
 
120 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 north of Kula, in the interior of the Aidin vilayet, I have seen . 
 such Turkish-Greek inscriptions on the tombstones in the 
 churchyard, and mustered up all the Turkish I knew to talk 
 to the ‘ bekji’ (Turkish for ‘ guard ’) who was attending me 
 —an Orthodox Christian with ‘Nordic’ hair and eyes and 
 nothing but Turkish on his tongue. Even at Kirkinje, 
 an Orthodox village in the hills above Ephesus, a few miles 
 from the coast and a few hours by train from Smyrna, the 
 boys are only just learning Greek at school and the men 
 have still to talk Turkish at home to their wives, who show 
 no signs of becoming bilingual. At Adalia, on the south 
 coast, I have heard that at one time in the latter part of the 
 nineteenth century the Christians were speaking Turkish 
 and the Moslems Greek—the Christians being the Turcified 
 indigenous population and the Moslems refugees from Krete, 
 where Greek is the universal language of both denominations. 
 
 From these influences of language and neighbourhood 
 certain social results have followed. The Turkish-speaking 
 Karamanly Christians who settle in Constantinople as small 
 shopkeepers (often in Moslem quarters) certainly feel them- 
 selves different from the Greek-speaking Christian natives 
 of Rumelia and the Kingdom of Greece. They are pleased 
 if you talk to them in Turkish, and proud of their home and 
 name. They do not appear to become assimilated to their 
 Greek-speaking co-religionists, unless or until they make their 
 fortunes and so mix socially with the leaders of the ‘ Millet- 
 i-Rum ’? in the capital. There are also positive personal 
 links created by mutual economic services, which have 
 often given rise to hereditary friendships between Moslem 
 and Christian families. But unhappily many of these links 
 have been broken by the events of the last few years, and 
 such good feeling has always been personal rather than 
 
 1 The autonomous organisation of the non-Bulgarian Orthodox Christians 
 of Turkey for ecclesiastical and educational affairs and questions of ‘ personal 
 statute’ (e.g. registration, marriage, inheritance), under the presidency of . 
 the Oecumenical Patriarch (who, as the recognised head of this organisation, 
 is an official of the Ottoman Government). 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 12] 
 
 corporate. If anything like a common national conscious- 
 ness had grown up in Anatolia before the War, the Turkish- 
 speaking Gregorian Christians of Cilicia would not have 
 served in the French Légion d’Orient nor the Orthodox Chris- 
 tians of the Aegean and Marmara littoral have given assist- 
 ance to the British Navy. Nationality is a question of 
 sentiment, not of language or race, and in sentiment these 
 Christian minorities have undoubtedly been anti-Turk. 
 Without facing the inherent geographical, economic, and 
 administrative difficulties, they have aspired to break their 
 political connection with Turkey and to become citizens 
 respectively of a Greek and an Armenian national state, and 
 they have staked their lives and property on the slenderest 
 expectations of realising this ambition. It has been a 
 remarkable triumph of emotion over interest among people 
 who set a high value upon material prosperity, and of the 
 Western idea of political nationality in the most unsuitable 
 environment. This deserves investigation, and, leaving the 
 Armenian case aside, we have now to review the rise of Greek 
 nationalism in Anatolia as a feature in the process of 
 Westernisation. 
 
 The key to the present situation is the revulsion of feeling 
 among the Near Eastern peoples towards the West which 
 occurred in the latter part of the seventeenth century and 
 has been discussed in Chapter I. ; but it was about a century 
 before this movement perceptibly affected the relations 
 between Christians and Moslems in Anatolia. Then, in the 
 last quarter of the eighteenth century, a Modern Greek revival 
 began there, under Western influences, which bears resem- 
 blance in many points to the ancient process of Hellenisation. 
 
 The Modern movement started, like the Ancient, with 
 colonisation, the best example of which is the settlement of 
 Aivali.1 Here an obscure little Christian village rose to 
 
 1 See G. Sakkaris, [storia ton Kydhonidn (Athens, 1920, Vitsikundkis). 
 ‘ Aivali’ is the vernacular Greek name, being an adaptation of the Turkish 
 ‘ Aivalyk,’ but the purists have translated this into ‘Kydhoniés’ (which 
 means ‘Quince Orchard’ in Greek, as ‘ Aivalyk’ does in Turkish). 
 
122 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 eminence in the space of a few years, apparently through . 
 the accident that a priest born and bred there subsequently 
 gained favour in ‘ official circles ’ at Constantinople. About 
 the year 1773 (in reward for services about which many 
 legends have grown up) he obtained a firman from the Sultan 
 granting his native place the privilege that no Moslem should 
 thenceforth reside within the communal boundaries, and 
 conferring considerable rights of self-government. This 
 was the first opportunity given to the Modern Greeks for 
 territorial self-government,! and the extent to which the 
 Western notion of political nationality was already in the 
 air is indicated by the eagerness with which they took 
 advantage of it. Though the territory was tiny and not 
 particularly fertile, there was an influx of Greek colonists 
 from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially from 
 the Aegean Islands and the Morea, which has left its record 
 in the predominance of the ‘ Mediterranean’ type among 
 the present population. The rocky soil was turned to 
 account for the intensive cultivation of olives, and economic 
 links with the West were formed by the exportation of oil 
 and soap. At the outbreak of the Greek Revolution (1821), 
 there were about 30,000 Greeks in Aivali and its dependent 
 villages ; 40 oil-mills ; 30 soap-works ; 2 hospitals ; and an 
 academy.” This colony has survived the two catastrophes 
 of 1821 and 1917. 
 
 There has also been colonisation inland, especially along 
 the trade-routes radiating from Smyrna. The Greeks have 
 incidentally benefited by the extension of the commercial 
 hinterland of Smyrna, which has been going on ever 
 since the sixteenth century, when the modern communities 
 of Western merchants started business in the city. Western 
 enterprise has enabled an increasing population to make a 
 
 1 They already enjoyed a somewhat precarious ‘cultural autonomy’ all 
 over the Ottoman Empire, under the institutions of the ‘ Millet-i-Rum’ (see 
 above). 
 
 * George Finlay, History of Greece, vol. vii. pp. 179-80 (Oxford, 1877, 
 Clarendon Press), 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 123 
 
 livelihood in Smyrna, and the newcomers have largely been 
 Greeks, starting generally as clerks or shopkeepers and 
 rising in many cases to be merchants on the Western scale. 
 Since the building of the French and British railways in the 
 hinterland after the Crimean War, the immigration of Greeks 
 has been especially noticeable.1. They have settled along 
 the lines as railwaymen, as agents of Smyrna firms, as local 
 traders and shopkeepers, and have shown a tendency to 
 invest their profits in land. Estates that have passed into 
 the hands of Greek landlords have naturally attracted Greek 
 labourers, particularly for specialised forms of production, 
 like olive or currant-farming, in which the peasantry of 
 European Greece and the islands is skilled. 
 
 At Kula, about half the Christian element in the mixed 
 population of the town are Turcified descendants of the 
 original mediaeval Greek inhabitants, but the other half are 
 recent immigrants from Samos and other islands, At Aidin, 
 before the catastrophe of 1919, there was a recently-built 
 Greek quarter inhabited by about 12,000 shopkeepers, 
 merchants, workmen, manufacturers, professional men, and 
 landowners, and there were similar settlements on a less 
 ambitious scale at smaller inland centres like Salyhly. At 
 Bergama, every Greek as well as every Turkish householder 
 possesses land, on which he lives and works at certain seasons, 
 even if this is not his staple economic occupation. At Kinik 
 and other places in the Kaikos valley east of Bergama, there 
 are now several purely agricultural Greek villages. 
 
 This colonisation has been accompanied by a revival of 
 the Greek language among the Turcified native Christians. 
 A Greek officer who had just visited the town of Nazylly up 
 the valley of the Maeander, told me in the winter of 1921 
 that one of the Christian notables there, after showing great 
 
 1 This has been partly due also to the incipient Westernisation of the 
 Ottoman Empire, for railways could not be built till the Central Govern- 
 ‘ment had re-established security in the provinces by reasserting its author- 
 ity, and the instruments of this have been Western-trained Turkish soldiers 
 and gendarmerie, 
 
124 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 distress at not being able to communicate with him in the 
 national tongue, finally put his hand on his heart and said 
 to the interpreter in Turkish: ‘Tell him that though my 
 tongue is Turkish my heart is Greek.’ Many of this notable’s 
 more studious co-religionists have already taught their 
 tongues the language of their hearts, and in this they have 
 been helped by the immigrants, who have not only brought 
 their language with them but have founded schools. As 
 soon as their olive plantations began to bear fruit, the 
 Aivaliots were no longer content with primary education. 
 Their celebrated Academy was started, with the Ottoman 
 Government’s permission, in the years 1800-3; and the 
 Evangeliki Skholf at Smyrna—founded in 1708, refounded 
 in 1733, reorganised and recognised by the Ottoman Govern- 
 ment in 1810, and again in 1828—has a longer history. The 
 prominence of the schools and the number of the teachers 
 are the most striking feature of Kirkinje, and zeal for 
 education has gone hand in hand with economic prosperity. 
 Since the beginning of the present century the revival of the 
 Greek language, through schools largely staffed and sup- 
 ported from the Kingdom, has started among the distant 
 Christian minorities in Karaman and Cappadocia. 
 
 The mainspring of the Greek revival in Anatolia is that 
 instinct for corporate life on a small scale which was the soul 
 of the earlier revival in Rumili and the Morea. The com- 
 munal patriotism which one finds among the Anatolian 
 Greeks to-day constantly reminds one of travellers’ de- 
 scriptions of Ydhra, Pétses, Ghalaxidhi, Ambeldkia, and 
 other European centres of Greek life a century ago. The 
 mukhtar (head-man), the priest, the schoolmaster, the 
 doctor, take a mutual interest in their respective duties and 
 know how to work together. Voluntary subscriptions are 
 forthcoming not only from merchants and landowners but 
 from shopkeepers and labourers for the building and upkeep 
 of church, school, and hospital, and for the salaries of clergy 
 and teachers. At Bergama, where the Greek community 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 125 
 
 were driven out in 1914 and spent six years in exile, they 
 have burdened themselves, since repatriation, with an 
 onerous loan in order to restart their secondary school, and 
 have assigned the hospital building to it, because the former 
 school building has been too much damaged for immediate 
 repair. They have a genius for clubs. The ‘ Ladies’ 
 Union’ and ‘Girls’ Union’ at Bergama have each made 
 themselves responsible for particular pieces of reconstruc- 
 tion, and the re-opening of the Community Club was one of 
 the first things done. In all these Greek communities the 
 Boy Scout movement has been taken up and turned to 
 account. In Anatolia the Greeks show an admirable faculty 
 for making themselves at home in the wilderness and striking 
 local roots. A shanty becomes a café, a railway-platform 
 an esplanade. No matter how unpromising the present, 
 they have a radiant belief in the future of the place in which 
 they have invested their energies. At Aidin I met a Greek 
 doctor—a French subject belonging to a family of doctors 
 educated in France from father to son—who had been on 
 the point of retiring to France on his earnings when the 
 catastrophe came. The Greek quarter was gutted, his house 
 burnt to the ground, his safe broken open, his savings lost, 
 and now he was starting out to rebuild his fortunes. His 
 unshaken belief in the future of Aidin still gave his life the 
 necessary savour of hope. 
 
 The political expression of this economic and cultural 
 revival is a sense of unity with the Greeks of the Kingdom 
 and a desire to turn the feeling into accomplished fact. In 
 1921 this political nationalism seemed to me strongest at 
 Aivali, and there is less obstacle here than elsewhere to its 
 ‘realisation. The population is homogeneous and has hardly 
 any intercourse with the Turkish hinterland- beyond its 
 olive-groves, while it is in constant communication by sea 
 with Mitylini, Greece, Western Europe, and even America. 
 The economic links with Greece are so strong that here alone, 
 in the whole occupied area, the Greek currency had com- 
 
126 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 pletely driven the Turkish out of circulation. In fact, in 
 
 nationality and economic life Aivali is as much isolated from 
 the rest of the Anatolian mainland as if it were an island, 
 and it would not be impracticable to attach it to Greece as 
 an enclave, somewhat as Zara has been separated from 
 Dalmatia and attached to Italy. 
 
 At Smyrna, too, Greek national feeling is naturally strong. 
 The Greek element in the city is far the largest aggregate of 
 Greek population in Anatolia, and has the most frequent 
 and direct communication with Athens. Many Smyrna 
 Greeks are Hellenic subjects, either by immigration or by 
 naturalisation. At the same time, the prosperity of the 
 Greeks, like that of the entire business community, at Smyrna 
 depends on maintaining and increasing the economic inter- 
 course with the hinterland, and in this respect there could 
 be no greater contrast than between Smyrna and Aivali. 
 Smyrna is not a self-contained community, and you cannot 
 stay there without being conscious every moment that the 
 roots of its prosperity strike deep and far afield in the soil 
 of Anatolia. You are also conscious that the Smyrniots 
 are being torn in two between their national inclinations and 
 their economic interests. They are in the same dilemma 
 as the Germans of Danzig and the Italians of Fiume and 
 Trieste—three Western commercial cities for which it has 
 been particularly hard to devise a satisfactory settlement. 
 
 But the most difficult problem created by political 
 nationalism is among the small scattered Greek communities 
 in the interior. Here this Western novelty has been break- 
 ing the linguistic and economic ties between a minority and 
 the majority on whose goodwill their livelihood if not their 
 life depends, and has been giving them new ties of language 
 and sentiment with Greece—a distant country hostile to 
 the Ottoman Empire. They can only get political union 
 with Greece in one of two ways: either emigration, which 
 means exile if not ruin, or the annexation by Greece of the 
 vast territories over which they are spread, and of the Moslem 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 127 
 
 majorities among whom they live. The second solution is 
 impossible (as is demonstrated by the history of the last 
 three years), and attempts to realise it only drive the Turks 
 into imposing the alternative in the drastic form of eviction 
 or deportation. But if it were conceivable that Greece 
 should annex all parts of Anatolia where Greek-feeling Ortho- 
 dox Christians at the moment constituted over 25 per cent. 
 (say) of the population, and if the rights and feelings of the 
 subjected Turkish 75 per cent. were left out of account, even 
 then the settlement would not be permanent. These Greek 
 minorities may be regarded politically as rearguards of a 
 retreating nation or as outposts of an advancing one, but 
 they also have a positive economic reason for being in their 
 present situation. A certain minority of Christian traders 
 and artisans is at present the necessary complement to a 
 certain majority of Anatolian Moslem peasants, and if this 
 minority emigrated to Greece, or the Moslem majority in 
 Anatolia gave place to a solid Greek population, their 
 occupation would be gone, and they would have to find some 
 other peasant-country, like Egypt or Russia, where they 
 could earn their living as a scattered minority once more. 
 Whatever national aspirations he may have, the Near 
 Eastern petty trader is just as much bound to settle among 
 backward cultivators as fishermen are to follow their shoals 
 or the Labrador Indians their caribou. 
 
 For the Greek minorities in the interior, nationalism has 
 been a will-o’-the-wisp enticing them to destruction. Yet 
 they, as well as the Smyrniots and Aivaliots, have been 
 attracted by it, partly because the latent sense of insecurity, 
 inherent in minorities, makes them susceptible to move- 
 ments promising cohesion and backing, and blind to their 
 inevitable dangers; partly, too, because of the romantic 
 vein introduced into all modern nationalism through the 
 special circumstances of its origin in the West. Owing to 
 the virtual stability of our linguistic boundaries since the 
 Dark Age (alluded to above), the romantic appeal to the 
 
128 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 past is a possible emotional basis in Western Europe for the 
 demarcation of modern national states. Where Frenchmen 
 or Italians held tournaments or built cathedrals in the 
 ' Middle Ages, there are mostly still French and Italian 
 populations anxious to be citizens of modern France and 
 Italy. But in most parts of Anatolia where in the Middle 
 Ages there were Orthodox Greeks belonging to the Near 
 Eastern world, there are now Middle Eastern Moslem Turks. 
 The continuity has been interrupted ; the past offers not 
 foundations but treacherous ruins; and the Greeks make 
 matters worse by digging down below the mediaeval stratum 
 to memories of Ancient Hellenism. For this folly we 
 Westerners are largely to blame, for while we prudently 
 refrain from importing the exploits of Ancient Romans, 
 Gauls, or Goths into our contemporary national politics, and 
 content ourselves with King Alfreds and Hohenstaufens and 
 Joans of Arc, we have taught the unfortunate Greek peasant 
 and merchant to say, parrot-wise, ‘I am a descendant of 
 Pericles,’ like foolish parents who bring up their children to 
 be more affected than themselves. In Anatolia this extra- 
 vagance is unfortunately encouraged by perpetual suggestion. 
 The country abounds in imposing remains of mediaeval and 
 classical antiquity, and the very stones cry out to any one 
 who is foolish enough to lend an ear. At Kula, certain 
 fragments of sculpture dating respectively from about the 
 sixth century B.c. and the second century after Christ, were 
 pointed out to me as a serious argument for including the 
 town in Greece in 1921. The offensive against Angora was 
 going to ‘cut the Gordian Knot’; the first day’s advance 
 inaugurated ‘a new Catabasis of Alexander’; the official 
 communiqué ran: ‘We have occupied Dorylaion (Eski 
 Shehir),’ the modern name being added in brackets for the 
 benefit of readers who had not made a profound study of 
 the classical geographers. Political romanticism is essenti- 
 ally unhistorical, being an attempt to telescope past and 
 present into one another, and it has an unlimited capacity 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 129 
 
 for ignoring what is inconvenient. At Gdlde, the Chris- 
 tians were hyperconscious of the twelfth-century Byzantine 
 church and of the Greek characters carved on the nineteenth- 
 century tombstones, but took no account of the equally 
 significant fact that the Greek script now recorded Turkish 
 words. No doubt the Moslems of Golde, when they go to 
 school in imitation of their Greek neighbours, will claim 
 the church as a monument of Saljuq art and argue that 
 Turkish was the original language of the country, spoken by 
 Lydians and Phrygians and Hittites before their temporary 
 Hellenisation ! 
 
 Turkish nationalism, indeed, is already in the field, and 
 Anatolia has lately become its stronghold. But the Ottoman 
 Turks have been about a century later than their Near 
 Eastern neighbours in adopting this Western notion, and 
 the Turks of Anatolia have taken to it last of all. In this 
 as in other spheres of Westernisation, the Turks have only 
 borrowed under pressure of necessity, and they felt the need 
 for our political ideas considerably later than for our military 
 and administrative methods. As the ruling race in the 
 Ottoman Empire, they identified themselves with the state, 
 like the German Austrians in the Hapsburg Monarchy, and, 
 like them, they developed no separate national consciousness 
 until the triumph of the subject nationalities forced them 
 to put on the same armour in self-defence. The parallel 
 holds in detail. In Austria, the German National Movement 
 started among the German Styrians and Bohemians, who 
 found themselves at grips with militantly nationalist Slav 
 populations; and in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish 
 National Movement started among the Turkish minority 
 threatened by Greek, Bulgarian, and Serb nationalism in 
 Rumili. The Young Turk Movement first declared itself in 
 the interior of Macedonia. Salonika was the home of the 
 Committee of Union and Progress. It was not until the 
 victories of the Balkan States in the war of 1912-13 had 
 given a painful demonstration of what national enthusiasm 
 
 I 
 
 a 
 
130 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 and organisation can achieve, that the idea seems to have 
 made any general impression on the Turkish people, and it 
 was only then that the seeds of it were sown in Anatolia. 
 Up to that time the Anatolian Turks, like the Germans 
 of Upper and Lower Austria, had been remote from the 
 pressure of foreign ambitions, which had converged on 
 Salonika and Constantinople. In their own country they 
 were in an overwhelming majority, and the non-Turkish 
 minorities (principally Circassians, Armenians, and Greeks) 
 were learning to speak Turkish and giving little trouble. 
 Their security was broken by the Greek conquest and 
 annexation of the islands of Mitylini, Khios, and Samos 
 lying a few miles off their coast, and their feelings were 
 aroused by the arrival of thousands of destitute Moslem 
 refugees from the lost provinces in Rumili. Hitherto they 
 had drawn a distinction between their Orthodox Christian 
 neighbours of the ‘ Millet-i-Rum’ (i.e. Romyi, or * East 
 Romans ’) and the foreign Greeks in the hostile kingdom of 
 ‘Yunanistan.’ But now the enemy was at their gates and 
 the Rum were showing sympathy with him. Greek nation- 
 alism in Anatolia was felt by the Turks not only as a menace 
 but as a betrayal, and the Christian minority was bound to 
 suffer, just as the Italian minorities in Trentino, Trieste, 
 Istria, Dalmatia, and other territories retained by the Haps- 
 burg Monarchy after the wars of 1859 and 1866 were 
 adversely affected by the liberation of their kinsmen in Lom- 
 bardy and Venetia. In a Western monarchy like Austria, 
 repression seldom went beyond the falsification of census 
 returns and hostile discrimination in matters of government 
 service or of state education. In the Near and Middle East, 
 similar situations at present lead to spoliation and massacre. 
 Thus, before the Greek troops landed at Smyrna on the 
 15th May 1919, a Turkish as well as a Greek National Move- 
 ment was already in existence in Anatolia, occasions for 
 conflict had arisen, and conflicts had occurred. Apologists 
 for the landing (or rather for the several statesmen who 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 131 
 
 brought it about) will make the most of this fact, because 
 it offers them their most plausible line of defence. They 
 will argue that the landing cannot fairly be represented as 
 the cause of the calamities that followed it, because these 
 were the inevitable produce of a previous situation and were 
 bound to occur, whatever policy had prevailed at the Peace 
 Conference in Paris. It may be doubted whether the 
 defendants will appreciate this plea of impotence, for in 
 statesmen it is a confession of bankruptcy. But as they 
 may be driven to it, it requires examination. My personal 
 belief is that, bad though the conditions of the previous ten 
 years had been, the situation created in Anatolia by the 
 armistice offered the Allied Governments, who then became 
 responsible, a genuine opportunity for putting an end to the 
 conflict and pouring oil into the wounds which it had made. 
 I am convinced that after the armistice the unfortunate 
 population of Anatolia might have been given a new start, 
 and need not have been plunged, as it has been, into an 
 internal war of extermination, which even those who consider 
 it unavoidable will admit to be something far worse than 
 the evils which the conflict between Greek and Turkish 
 nationalism had produced in this country before. But just 
 because I hold this view, I am bound to make all allowance 
 for the other and to examine how far the breach had gone 
 before the armistice was concluded. 
 
 One need not look back beyond 1908, for in Anatolia 
 nowadays both Greeks and Turks testify to the comparative 
 prosperity which they enjoyed before the Ottoman Revolu- 
 tion. ‘ Under Sultan Abdu’l-Hamid,’ they have often said 
 to me in almost identical words, * we had little to complain 
 of. We lived at peace with one another.’ There is always 
 something mythical about a ‘Golden Age ’~—memory, like 
 glass, gets an iridescence by decay—but this myth contains 
 something true. From the end of the Greek War of Inde- 
 pendence down to the fall of Abdu’l-Hamid, there was no 
 blood-feud between the Anatolian Greeks and Turks, and 
 
132 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the Graeco-Turkish war of 1897 in Thessaly had singularly 
 little repercussion on the other side of the Aegean. The 
 trouble began after that. What was the status quo, that 
 is, the relative strength of the two nationalities before they 
 entered upon their struggle ¢ 
 
 The Anatolian Greeks had three great advantages : their 
 highly-developed corporate life with its faculty for team- 
 work, their zeal for education, and the stimulus of having to 
 rely on their own efforts without state-aid. The last point 
 is the fundamental one. It was the same stimulus that the 
 Tchechs enjoyed as compared with the Germans in Austria, 
 or English Nonconformists and Catholics as compared 
 with members of the Established Church. It came out most 
 strongly in the success of their schools. A Greek school in 
 Anatolia being supported entirely by local endowments and 
 subscriptions, and administered by a committee represent- 
 ing the benefactors and beneficiaries, everybody is interested 
 in its welfare and it is the chief object of communal pride. 
 The Turkish schools, on the other hand, have mostly been 
 paid for and administered by the State, and the school- 
 masters have less direct connection with the religious and 
 administrative authorities, perhaps still less with the local 
 Turkish population. In contrast to the life of a Greek 
 community, one is struck by the isolation of the Turkish 
 civil official, gendarmerie inspector, mufti, and schoolmaster 
 from one another. They are linked up through the Govern- 
 ment offices at the provincial capital or at Constantinople, 
 and Departments in Stamboul appear to be as inimical to 
 each other’s interests and activities as they are in Whitehall. 
 Indeed, the evils of bureaucracy in Turkey are incomparably 
 greater than in England, and far outweigh the advantage 
 which the Anatolian Turks ought to have derived from the 
 fact that the sums assigned to education out of the public 
 revenue (to which the Anatolian Christians contributed 
 their share) were in practice expended almost exclusively 
 for their benefit. The Christians contributed compulsorily 
 
 v 
 
Ul 
 
 THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 133 
 
 to Moslem education as well as paying voluntarily for their 
 own, and they could afford to do so, largely because the 
 superior education which they provided for themselves 
 made them much wealthier than the Moslems per head of 
 the population. It was an outlay which brought in an 
 immediate and a lucrative return. 
 
 In fact, the Greeks were stronger in everything except 
 numbers, in which, of course, the Turks had an overwhelming 
 superiority. Before discussing this, it must be mentioned 
 that no census had or has been taken in Anatolia or any 
 other part of Turkey, and that all possible figures for the 
 relative strength of denominations and nationalities rest on 
 rough estimates, mostly made by the interested parties. 
 The decision at the Peace Conference to send Greek troops 
 to Smyrna did not arise from considerations of nationality, 
 as I have attempted to show. On the other hand, after the 
 fait accompli of the landing, the demarcation of the zone 
 round Smyrna provisionally assigned to Greece under the 
 Treaty of Sévres was based on a comparison and synthesis 
 of the data then available in print. This was all that could 
 be done by the officials to whom the authors of the policy 
 resorted, after the event, for justification of the fatal step 
 which they had taken. But the most painstaking collation 
 of these untrustworthy statistics could not approximate to 
 the truth.t I can only say that in February and March 
 1921, when the evicted and deported Greeks had been re- 
 patriated and numbers of Turks evicted in their turn,? my 
 personal impression was that even in the Sévres Zone 
 the Turks were in an unmistakable majority. I spent six 
 weeks travelling over the zone under Greek auspices and 
 took particular pains to visit the Greek communities, and 
 
 1 The Allied Governments tacitly admitted this at the Conference of 
 London in February 1921. Having recognised that the mischief which they 
 ‘had made must be undone if possible, their first step was to propose a re- 
 count of the population in the Smyrna Zone and Thrace (see Chapter III.). 
 
 2 T am certain that this number far exceeds that of the evicted or de- 
 ported Greeks who have failed to return, through death or disinclination, 
 since the armistice. 
 
134 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 I state my impression, with the reservation that no certainty 
 is possible until an impartial investigation is made on the 
 spot—a step proposed by the Powers, accepted by Turkey, 
 and rejected by Greece at the Conference of London.? 
 
 The Greeks naturally feel that numbers ought not to be 
 decisive ; that (at present at any rate) they could make far 
 more out of the country than the Turks have done, and that 
 under Greek control there would be a rapid increase in the 
 Greek population. The Turks feel about Greek immigrants 
 as the Mesopotamian Arabs do about Indian, or the Califor- 
 nians, British Columbians, Australians, and New Zealanders, 
 about Chinese and Japanese. They admit that the country 
 in which they at present constitute the majority of the 
 population is under-populated and under-developed, and 
 that if such immigrants were allowed free entry and a free 
 hand, they might bring the agricultural and mineral resources 
 of the land to their maximum of productivity at an earlier 
 date than the nationality in possession are likely to do for 
 themselves. But they do not consider this a sufficient ground 
 for their being supplanted and forfeiting to new-comers the 
 right of exploitation. Is not the latent wealth of the 
 country their own? May they not do what they like with 
 it 2? What grievance has the rest of the world if they let it 
 lie until they or their children are ready to make use of it ? 
 This is, of course, the Parable of the Talents translated into 
 terms of nationalism, and so far no peaceful solution has 
 been worked out. The argument of the modern American 
 and Australian might have been used against the original 
 English-speaking colonists of the New World and Australasia 
 by the Red Indians and Blackfellows, if they could have 
 
 1 See above, Chapter III., p. 93. At the Conference of London in Febru- 
 ary and March 1921, the Greek and Turkish delegations submitted quite 
 irreconcilable figures. On the Turkish side, Dr. Nihad Reshad Bey claimed 
 that the Turks amounted to 75 per cent. (or roughly 1,250,000 out of 
 1,500,000) in the vilayet of Aidin, and the non-Greeks to 57 per cent. in 
 Smyrna city. On the Greek side, Mr. Ghunarakis, taking the Sé res Zone 
 as his area, put the pre-war population at 548,000 Greeks and 390,000 
 Turks, and the post-war population at 460,000 Greeks and 450,000 Turks. 
 (See Times, 25th February 1921.) 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 135 
 
 supported it by effective resistance. Unlike them, the 
 Turkish majority in Anatolia has proved itself able to fight 
 successfully for its point of view, and the utilitarian argu- 
 ment of the Greeks has been turned against its authors by 
 their ruinous failure to assert it by force of arms. 
 
 The Hamidian status quo was disturbed at once by the 
 introduction of parliamentary institutions, which opened a 
 field for all the potential conflicts of nationality in Anatolia, 
 as in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks 
 complain that the Greeks did not use the new liberty of the 
 Press and of elections to secure their legitimate share in the 
 management of the Ottoman Empire, but took advantage 
 of it to promote their own secession from Turkey and 
 union with the Kingdom of Greece—in fact, that they 
 accepted the position of Ottoman citizens in order to behave 
 as traitors. The Greeks on their part complain that, while 
 extending their nominal rights, the Young Turks had designs 
 against the few substantial privileges which the Christian 
 minorities had previously enjoyed. They assert that the 
 Committee of Union and Progress, and especially its local 
 branches in the provinces, preached the doctrine of ‘ Ottoman- 
 isation ’; demanded allegiance to the Ottoman Empire to 
 the exclusion of traditional loyalties ; foreshadowed the 
 abolition of the ‘millet’ system; stirred up fanatical 
 national and religious feeling among the Turkish masses ; 
 and created such tension that it became unsafe for the Chris- 
 tians in the inland towns of Anatolia to travel on business or 
 to visit their country estates. 
 
 Probably both complaints were well-founded. The 
 Turkish revolutionaries had a simple-minded belief that a 
 parliamentary constitution would at once remove long- 
 standing inequalities of status and create an ‘ Ottoman ’ 
 political consciousness among the enfranchised elements. 
 
 ' They forgot that injustices rankle even after they are brought 
 
 to an end, and they did not reckon with the momentum 
 which Greek nationalism had already acquired in Anatolia 
 
136 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 through a century or more of existence. The Greeks could 
 not be expected to renounce a cherished tradition and 
 valuable prescriptive rights for the sake of a hazardous 
 political experiment, over which they themselves would have 
 little control. That would have been a rare sacrifice of 
 interest and sentiment, and their refusal to make it, though 
 it may have been narrow-minded, was not a sign of special 
 bad faith. Exactly the same line was taken by the other 
 non-Turkish nationalities in the Empire which had inde- 
 pendent national states outside to look to, like the Bulgars 
 and the Serbs. Even the Moslem Albanian and Kurdish 
 tribesmen rebelled, to maintain the privilege of lawlessness 
 which Abdu’l-Hamid had allowed them. The only non- 
 Turks who made a genuine attempt to work the Constitution 
 of 1908 were civilised populations, like the Armenians and 
 the sedentary Arabs, which had no preferable allegiance as 
 an alternative. 
 
 On the other hand the Greeks, exasperated by the glaring 
 contrast between the Young Turks’ professions of liberalism 
 and their chauvinistic practice, made insufficient allowance 
 for the difficulties of their position and the confusion in 
 their minds. The Young Turks, during their exile in Paris, 
 took current Western political thought as they found it. 
 They were not troubled by the underlying antinomy between 
 nationalism and democracy, its two leading ideas. They 
 did not see that in a non-Western country with a mixed 
 population, the two principles were dangerously incompat- 
 ible. They set about applying both with unintentional 
 inconsistency, and by the time that they were driven by 
 events to choose between them, they had become so em- 
 bittered by the attitude of the Powers and of the minorities 
 that they sacrificed the more generous to the more militant 
 doctrine. 
 
 Thus a serious rift had opened by the autumn of 1912, 
 but on both sides it was the inevitable disillusionment of 
 inexperience, and the misunderstanding might have been 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 137 
 
 diminished by time. A much worse situation was created 
 by the outbreak of the Balkan War. 
 
 It is quite impossible for Greeks and Turks to look at the 
 First Balkan War from the same angle of vision. For the 
 Greeks it was a war of liberation against a tyranny, incom- 
 pletely successful in so far as a single Greek was left under 
 Turkish sovereignty at the conclusion of peace. Any 
 Turks ruling over Greeks were felt to be oppressors, even if 
 they were in a local majority, for here the romantic element 
 came in. If the Turks had secured a majority, that, in 
 the eyes of the Greeks, was only one robbery the more. 
 Wherever they were and whatever their numbers, they 
 were intruders, and pretensions based on the present could 
 be put out of count by a monument, an inscription, a legend, 
 ora name. In any war with Turkey, Greece could not feel 
 herself the aggressor. In invading Ottoman territory she 
 was simply recovering what she regarded as her own. A 
 war of liberation always seems to those who make it to be 
 morally a war of defence, even when they take the offensive. 
 
 The Turks, on their side, felt themselves victims of a wanton 
 attack by neighbouring states at a moment of weakness. 
 They were weak, they believed, because they were volun- 
 tarily experimenting in those Western institutions which 
 the Great Powers and the Near Eastern nations had always 
 been trying to force upon them. The invaders were kinsmen 
 of the very elements in the Ottoman Empire which had 
 most to gain by the reforms. Yet Western public opinion 
 was giving the invaders its benediction and the kindred 
 minorities in the Empire were praying for their victory. In 
 these circumstances the Turks were almost bound to forget 
 that their weakness arose not so much from the constitu- 
 tional régime itself as from their long delay in attempting 
 the necessary adjustment of their political life to Western 
 conditions. They did not reflect that the reforms had not 
 so far been working very successfully, and that if they were 
 a failure, the status of the minorities might become more 
 
138 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 unfavourable than it had been before. With the enemy 
 assaulting the Chatalja lines and the guns making them- 
 selves heard in Constantinople, they could not see the other 
 side of the case, and everything that foreigners had said 
 about Turkey now seemed sheer hypocrisy. Not the im- 
 provement but the spoliation of Turkey must after all have 
 been the ulterior object of the traditional denunciations. 
 
 As for the distinction between technical and moral 
 aggression which seemed so obvious to the Balkan peoples 
 and their Western sympathisers, it could not survive the 
 spectacle of streams of Turkish refugees fleeing before 
 the face of the Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian armies. As 
 the Turkish forces fell back, the Christian population rose 
 against the Moslem minority in the invaded provinces. 
 Villages were looted and burnt wholesale ; there was also 
 murder and violation ; and the reign of terror by no means 
 ceased when the victorious states took over control.1 The 
 hundreds of thousands of refugees who arrived at Constanti- 
 nople, and kept on arriving after the conclusion of peace, 
 were destitute and terror-stricken. The following are the 
 figures of those who actually passed through the hands of 
 the Ministry of Refugees (a melancholy Department of State), 
 without allowing for the unknown numbers that were dealt 
 with by private charity or perished before they could be 
 assisted at all :-— 
 
 1912-13 1914-15 1916-17 1918-19 1919-20 Total 
 A. 177,352 120,566 18,912 22,244 74,848 413,922 
 B. 68,947 53,718 1,252 6,736 12,536 143,189 
 A=Moslem refugees from all territories lost by Turkey in the Balkan 
 Wars (1912-13). 
 B=Moslem refugees from territories acquired by Greece from Turkey in 
 the Balkan Wars (1912-13). : 
 
 In 1921, I myself came across refugees encamped in mosque 
 
 courtyards at Constantinople who had been in that condition 
 
 ever since 1912, but the great majority were resettled, by 
 
 1 See Report of the International Commission to inquire into the causes ond 
 conduct of the Balkan War, ch. ii. 1 (pp. 71-7). (Washington, D.C., 1914, 
 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.) 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 139 
 
 the exertions of the Ministry of Refugees and the Ottoman 
 Red Crescent Society, in Anatolia. Their numbers were so 
 great that they appreciably affected the population. At 
 Yalova, for example, when I was helping to evacuate the 
 Turkish survivors of Greek atrocities and was making lists 
 of names of the men of military age whom the Greek authori- 
 ties were detaining, I found that about one in three came 
 from the Yannina district in Epirus. At Gemlik and other 
 places it was the same—and now the racial war, passing 
 from Europe into Asia, had overtaken them, and they were 
 being uprooted again.? There had been settlements of 
 Moslem refugees in Anatolia before—Kretans, Bosniaks, 
 Dobrujalys, Circassians—but they had never come with 
 such a rush, and the Circassians, though perhaps more 
 numerous in the aggregate, had been distributed over the 
 entire Empire. Moreover, except in the case of the Kretans, 
 the people who had evicted them had not been of the same 
 nationality as the local Anatolian Christian minorities, and 
 the Kretan settlers had been so turbulent that they had not 
 gained the sympathy of their new Turkish neighbours and 
 co-religionists. For all these reasons, the arrival of the 
 Rumelian refugees from the end of 1912 onwards produced 
 an unexampled tension of feeling in Anatolia and a desire 
 for revenge ; and so the Balkan War had two harvests of 
 victims: first, the Rumili Turks on the one side, and then 
 the Anatolian Greeks on the other. In writing of these 
 events, Greeks and Philhellenes have sought to differentiate 
 between the two cases. One pamphlet that lies before me 
 describes the uprooted populations as ‘ émigrées d’une part, 
 expulsées de l’autre.’* No such distinction is warrantable. 
 
 1 See ‘ Yalova,’ at the end of Chapter VII., p. 299 below. 
 2 At Constantinople I came across one family of Turkish refugees from 
 Thrace who had been uprooted no less than six times since the beginning of 
 
 “the First Balkan War. ‘Three or four successive evictions were not an un- 
 
 common experience. 
 
 ’ [/Hellénisme de l’Asie Mineure et la Jeune Turquie: Protestation et 
 appel... par un témoin oculaire. ...’. (Anonymous, without place or date 
 of publication. ) 
 
140 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 The fundamental truth was that a number of Near Eastern 
 Christians and Middle Eastern Moslems were bearing the 
 brunt of one particular clash in a vast interaction between 
 civilisations. But if differences in their degree of suffering 
 are to be noted and compared, then surely one must judge 
 that the Rumili Turks, who were driven out first and amid 
 the terrors of invasion and battle, were the more unfortunate. 
 
 The Turkish reprisals against the West Anatolian Greeks 
 became general in the spring of 1914.1 Entire Greek com- 
 munities were driven from their homes by terrorism, their 
 houses and land and often their movable property were 
 seized, and individuals were killed in the process. Not only 
 communities on the coast opposite the three liberated 
 islands of Mitylini, Khios, and Samos, but settlements at 
 some distance inland were affected. What happened at 
 Bergama, for instance, was described to me at first hand in 
 1921 by repatriated exiles. One morning in the spring of 
 1914, the Bergama Greeks were informed by the local Otto- 
 man authorities that they could not guarantee their safety 
 if they remained that night in the town. Abandoning 
 everything but what they could carry in their hands, they 
 got down before nightfall to the skala of Dikeli, crossed over 
 to Mitylini as soon as transport could be found for them, 
 and remained there six years. The procedure bore evidence 
 of being systematic. The terror attacked one district after 
 another, and was carried on by ‘ chetté ’ bands, enrolled from 
 the Rumili refugees as well as from the local population and 
 nominally attached as reinforcements to the regular Otto- 
 man gendarmerie. The definition of ‘chettés’ and the 
 history of their employment may be left to Chapter VII. 
 It is sufficient here to state that the same method was used 
 previously in Macedonia and subsequently—against both 
 Armenians and Turks—in this and other parts of Anatolia, 
 
 * It must be remembered that the provocation was continuing. In 1914 
 and 1915, 53,718 fresh Turkish refugees from the Ottoman territories just 
 annexed by Greece passed through the hands of the Ministry of Refugees. 
 (See table above. ) 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 141 
 
 and that various Near and Middle Eastern Governments 
 have successively soiled their hands with it under parallel 
 conditions. 
 
 In 1914 the process was happily checked before it had 
 been applied to larger Greek centres like Vurla, Aivali, or 
 Smyrna itself. First some restraint was put upon it by the 
 negotiation of an agreement between the Greek and Ottoman 
 Governments, and then it was more effectively interrupted 
 by the European War, since, during the period when Greece 
 was still neutral while Turkey had become a belligerent, the 
 latter had a strong motive for refraining from action which 
 might bring Greece in on the other side. The previous 
 agreement was the work of Mr. Venizelos, and though he 
 has been criticised on account of it by some of his fellow- 
 countrymen, it will probably rank among the minor triumphs 
 of his statesmanship. In an exchange of notes,1 a regular 
 interchange of the minorities left on the wrong side of the 
 new frontiers was provided for, and a mixed commission set 
 up to see that the intermigration was conducted in a humane 
 and orderly manner. The emigrants were to be given time 
 and means to remove their portable property and to dispose 
 of their real estate at a fair valuation—the valuations to be 
 passed through a clearing house and each party, on their 
 arrival in their new homes, to be compensated out of the 
 property left behind by the others. The mixed commission 
 contained neutral members as well as Greeks and Turks. 
 This is the most constructive scheme that has yet been tried 
 in the Near and Middle East for the solution of the minority 
 problem ; and if it is objected that in this case it did little 
 to diminish the suffering and economic loss, the answer is 
 that it was not given a fair trial. If it had been already 
 embodied in the Treaty of Bukarest (10th August 1913) and 
 had not been suspended by the intervention of Turkey in 
 ‘the European War (end of October 1914), it might not only 
 
 1 Greek Government’s note of 24th June and Ottoman Government’s 
 answer of 8th July 1914, 
 
142 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 have saved the minorities but have brought about a good 
 understanding between the two countries. As it is, it is a 
 
 precedent to which the utmost attention ought to be given. 
 
 From the outbreak of the European War until the spring 
 of 1916, the West Anatolian Greeks (for the diplomatic 
 reasons above mentioned) suffered relatively little. Cer- 
 tainly their position was unenviable enough, for, with the 
 sudden cessation of Western control, the Turks behaved like 
 children out of school. Local Christian merchants, as well 
 as those of Entente nationality established in the country, 
 were subjected to crushing requisitions, and Christian 
 Ottoman subjects (who had been liable to military service 
 since the Constitution of 1908) were mobilised wholesale. 
 They were mostly drafted into labour battalions which, like 
 the gangs of British prisoners from Kut, were made to work 
 under shocking conditions and had an appalling mortality 
 from exposure and starvation. This was to a great extent 
 due to that piecemeal assimilation by the Ottoman Govern- 
 ment of Western military methods (discussed in Chapter I.), 
 which often bore just as hardly upon its Moslem soldiers. 
 At Manysa, for example, Greek inhabitants have described 
 to me how, during the European War, the Turkish garrison 
 was literally starving, though this was a substantial town in 
 a peaceful agricultural district with railway communications. 
 On the other hand, there is no doubt that the sufferings of 
 the Greek (as well as the Armenian) labour battalions were 
 partly deliberately brought about by the malignity of 
 Turkish officers in charge, for which the Ministry of War, 
 and ultimately the Ottoman Government, must be held 
 responsible. 
 
 But unhappily this was not the worst, for in the spring of 
 1916 the Ottoman military authorities started deportations, 
 first partial and then wholesale, of the Greek population along 
 the Aegean and Marmara littoral. This may partly have 
 been a political counter-demonstration to the establishment 
 of Mr. Venizelos’s revolutionary pro-Entente Government at 
 
 - ——— 
 
— 
 
 THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 143 
 
 Salonika, but the hostile occupation of the three neighbouring 
 Greek islands by the naval forces of the Entente Powers 
 themselves was probably the main cause. These deporta- 
 tions (in contrast to the previous deportations of the Armen- 
 ians) bear marks of having been a genuine measure of military 
 precaution. While in 1914 there were sporadic outrages in 
 the interior too, the deportations of 1916-18 appear to have 
 been practically confined to places within range of hostile 
 navaloperations.!_ They were carried out with great brutality. 
 At Aivali, for instance, which had survived in 1914, all inhabi- 
 tants between the ages of twelve and eighty (that is, in effect, 
 the entire population) were turned out of their homes on the 
 27th March 1917, and some were transported great distances 
 —the former French vice-consul, M. Sapaunjoghlu, a gentle- 
 man of advanced age, as far as Kaisaria. But his case was 
 apparently exceptional. The majority of the Aivaliots seem 
 to have been transported only as far as Balykesry, and to 
 have remained there till the end of the War ; and though they 
 suffered great hardships and were shamelessly fleeced by the 
 Turkish peasants from whom they were forced to hire trans- 
 port, they were not massacred on the road, or driven on and. 
 on till they dropped, or marooned in deadly swamps and 
 deserts, like the still more unfortunate Armenians. The ex- 
 tent of their loss and suffering largely depended upon the 
 behaviour of their Moslem neighbours. At Armudlu, a mixed 
 Greek and Turkish village on the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula,? 
 the Greek inhabitants told me in 1921 that, when during the 
 
 European War they were deported to Brusa, the local Turks 
 
 looked after their property for them till their return. But 
 from what I saw myself in 1921,° I fear that such cases were 
 exceptional. At Kinik, Bergama, Aivali, and Dikeli, I can 
 state from personal observation that the Greek communal 
 
 1 ¢,9. There was no deportation, as far as I can make out, at Manysa or 
 Aidin. 
 
 2 See Chapter VII. for what has happened there since. 
 
 8 | visited Kinik, Bergama, Aivali, and Dikeli, but not Phokiés, where some 
 of the worst excesses are said to have been committed during this period. 
 
144 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 buildings—churches, schools, hospitals, baths—were wan- 
 tonly desecrated and defaced and mercilessly ransacked, even 
 beams and window-frames being removed; and that the 
 private houses were thoroughly plundered and then occupied 
 by Moslems. The destruction seemed to have been most 
 savage at Aivali—probably because it was a self-contained 
 Greek community and there was no local Moslem population 
 which might have had some personal link, however little, 
 with the deportees. Aivali was made over, after the 27th 
 March 1917, to Rumili Moslem refugees embittered by years 
 of misfortune, and the damage that they did was propor- 
 tionately great. In 1921 the Turkish numerals painted on 
 the doors of the Greek houses assigned to these intruders 
 were still visible, and it looks as if here, at any rate, the 
 change of population was intended to be permanent. 
 
 The only possible 1 defence of all this is that the deporta- 
 tion of potentially hostile persons from war-areas, even 
 without definite suspicion, was practised by Western Govern- 
 ments also—for instance, by our own Government on the 
 East Coast. In Western Anatolia the Greeks were not only 
 suspect as ardent Venizelists (that is, sympathisers with the 
 party in Greece that wanted to intervene on what was the 
 enemy side from-the Turkish point of view), but they did 
 actually do intelligence work for the Allied navies, as was 
 admitted to me freely at Aivali. The fact that, instead of 
 being a handful of ‘enemy aliens,’ they were Ottoman 
 subjects and amounted to a large percentage of the popula- 
 tion, is one of the anomalies of the present state of affairs in 
 the East, from which both they and the Turks have suffered ; 
 and the roughness with which they were treated (as com- 
 
 2 One defence of the Turks in this matter, which is accepted rather too 
 readily by British, French, and American non-official residents in Turkey, is 
 that these Anatolian deportations, too, were the work of a Western Power 
 —Germany. The plan is attributed to General Liman von Sanders, and 
 though it is not usually assumed that he foresaw the consequences, it is 
 argued that he who wills the end wills the means. I have so far discovered 
 no evidence for this allegation, which seems to rest on nothing more than 
 the unconvincing presumption that the Turks could not have devised and 
 executed such measures on their own account. 
 
 er 
 
f ee 
 
 em 
 
 THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 145 
 
 pared with persons deported or interned by the Western 
 belligerents) did not fall below current Near and Middle 
 Eastern standards. But any defence is wholly irrelevant. 
 The various incentives and provocations that have been 
 mentioned explain, but do not excuse, the Turks’ treatment 
 of the West Anatolian Greeks between 1914 and the armis- 
 tice, just as the history of Macedonia since the Treaty of 
 Berlin merely explains without excusing the Balkan Allies’ 
 treatment of the Rumili Turks in 1912 and thereafter. The 
 important fact is that by the time of the armistice, when 
 the victorious Western Powers became masters of the 
 situation in the East as no group of Western Powers had 
 ever been before, upwards of half a million Rumili Turks on 
 the one part and as many Anatolian Greeks on the other had 
 been cruelly affected by six years of almost continuous 
 warfare. At that date, could the Powers have saved the 
 situation ? Could they have put an end in Anatolia to the 
 national conflict between Greeks and Turks? Having now 
 described, without, I think, minimising, the proportions to 
 which the evil had then grown, I reiterate my belief that 
 they could. 
 
 Between the 30th October 1918 (the date of the armistice 
 with Turkey) and the 15th May 1919 (the date of the Greek 
 landing at Smyrna), the Allies had the future of Anatolia in 
 their hands. The country was ringed round by their naval 
 and military forces occupying the Arab Provinces, the 
 Straits, and Transcaucasia, and was under the surveillance 
 of control-officers superintending the execution of the 
 armistice terms. Even in comparatively remote places, 
 this control was working effectively until the news of the 
 Greek landing arrived. The Turkish civil and military 
 authorities were obeying the orders conveyed to them, 
 
 _troops were being disbanded, arms and munitions called in. 
 
 The railways were intact (for there had been no military 
 operations in Anatolia) and were running. The dislocation 
 produced by the blockade was being repaired. The country 
 
 K 
 
146 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 as a whole was not in disorder, and though there may have 
 been disturbances at this time in the far north-east, there 
 certainly was no breach of the peace in the neighbourhood of 
 Smyrna, which afterwards became the theatre of the new 
 war. 
 
 In these circumstances, there were three alternative ways 
 of dealing with the Graeco-Turkish nationality-problem, 
 between which the Supreme Council had to choose. One 
 possible policy was thorough-going segregation. The re- 
 spective nationalities had been so far uprooted since 1912, 
 and national feeling so fiercely roused, that it might have 
 seemed wisest not to reverse what had been done by violence, 
 but only to mitigate the suffering and injustice by a belated 
 application of the principles of the 1914 Agreement. Another 
 alternative was to restore the statws quo. The Anatolian 
 Greeks evicted or deported since 1914 might have been 
 repatriated, and the Turkish refugees who had supplanted 
 them either resettled elsewhere in Anatolia (which was under- 
 populated and under-developed) or given the choice of 
 returning to Rumelia, where fair treatment could have been 
 secured for them from the Greek Government by the 
 Principal Allied Powers. Either of these policies could have 
 been adopted without fresh changes of frontier. The third 
 alternative was to carve out a sort of territorial reservation 
 for the Anatolian Greeks in Anatolia—a policy which com- 
 bined the disadvantages of the two others. It involved both 
 a complicated redrawing of frontiers and also a reshuffling 
 of populations (not less undesirable for being only local). 
 It was in contradiction with the geographical structure of 
 Anatolia, and with the economic relations between the Greeks 
 and Turks in the country. Worst of all, it was a one-sided 
 arrangement, giving advantages in Western Anatolia to the 
 victorious nationality which no one proposed to give in 
 Macedonia (where the circumstances were parallel but the 
 positions reversed) to the defeated nationality. 
 
 However, this was the policy which the Supreme Council 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 147 
 
 elected to pursue. Its consequences are sufficiently de- 
 scribed in other parts of this book. One ultimate conse- 
 quence will probably be that the first alternative—that of 
 radical segregation—will have to be applied under conditions 
 far less favourable than those prevailing from November 
 1918 to April 1919. But we have still to ask whether at 
 that time the second alternative—the restoration of the 
 national status quo—was really feasible ? The Allied Armies 
 in the East were in course of demobilisation. The ring of 
 garrisons round Anatolia was in any case going to be attenu- 
 ated till it almost faded away. Would the authority of the 
 Allied control-officers in Anatolia have survived its dis- 
 appearance ? Would not Greece and Turkey in any case 
 have taken the situation into their own hands, as they have 
 actually done, and with just as disastrous results? Of 
 course, either answer to these questions is hypothetical, but 
 the negative is much the more probable. Greece could 
 never have invaded Anatolia without the consent of the 
 Allies, even if they had withdrawn all their troops from the 
 East, owing to their permanent command of the sea; and 
 Turkey would never have expelled the Allied control-officers 
 if there had been no Greek invasion. On the contrary, she 
 would have felt their presence a security against the eventu- 
 ality of that Greek occupation of Smyrna which, rightly or 
 wrongly, the Turks regard as a mortal blow to their national 
 life. It is thus exceedingly unlikely that the political 
 situation established in Anatolia after the armistice would 
 have been violently disturbed, and meanwhile the economic 
 factor would have been operating powerfully to bring the 
 two conflicting nationalities in the country together. During 
 those six months after the armistice, the economic prospects 
 of Anatolia were more brilliant than they ever were or 
 probably will be. In the industrial countries of Western 
 Europe, there was then an unprecedented demand for wheat, 
 wool, leather, cattle, and other food-stuffs and raw materials 
 which Anatolia produces ; the internal transport system of 
 
148 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the peninsula (though scanty) was intact; and in the 
 temporary dearth of shipping, its proximity to the European 
 markets gave it an enormous advantage; but above all 
 Anatolia would have benefited by the economic disorganisa - 
 tion and isolation of Russia, the country which normally 
 placed the same products on the same market in greater 
 volume. The opportunity was remarkable, and the French 
 and British merchants of Smyrna and Constantinople, 
 heavily though they had been hit by the War, started out 
 confidently to take advantage of it. The prosperity to 
 which they looked forward would have been shared by the 
 Turkish agriculturist and the Greek middleman. The 
 destruction of the previous six years (which, after all, was 
 not comparable to the devastation of Serbia or Poland or 
 Northern France) would rapidly have been made good ; 
 the repatriated exiles would have found their feet ; common 
 economic interest would have linked the various classes 
 (which in Anatolia are equivalent to the nationalities) 
 together ; and the balance would have been held by that 
 new and long-needed factor : a neutral control. Even after 
 what had happened, I found personal links between Anatol- 
 ian Greeks and Turks still holding at Manysa and Armudlu 
 in 1921. If the Greek troops had never landed, assuredly 
 the breach could have been healed and the status quo re- 
 stored. But the policy actually chosen by the Supreme 
 Council not only kept the wound open; it inflamed it 
 almost beyond hope of cure. 
 
 TWO RUINED CITIES 
 [Written at Smyrna on the 21st February 1921.) 
 
 I approached Ancient Ephesus from the slopes of a lime- 
 stone hill spangled with crimson anemones, gashed with the 
 quarries from which the stones of the city were hewn, and 
 crowned with the remnants of towers and curtain walls. I 
 had chosen my direction so as to descend upon the theatre 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 149 
 
 from above, and the view, suddenly disclosed, of the vast 
 cavity, with the seats still in place and the stage buildings 
 standing, was as impressive as I had expected it to be. Be- 
 yond it, the great central thoroughfare of the city, a streak of 
 marble pavement showing up against the green of the plain, 
 led down to the ancient harbour, now a reed-bed, yellow and 
 brown. Parallel to the thoroughfare on our left stood the 
 mountain of Koressos, with Lysimachus’s fortifications on 
 the sky-line. Beyond, on a separate and lower hill of lime- 
 stone, stood the ‘Prison of St. Paul,’ a tower in a salient of the 
 city’s defences. Beyond that again lay the sea, deep blue 
 against the horizon, and to our right stretched the plain of 
 alluvium which has choked the harbour and driven the sea 
 away. The river Cayster, which built the plain and co- 
 operated with the folly of man to the city’s undoing, wound 
 like a snake in spiteful loops and curves through the feverish 
 levels which it has laid down. 
 
 The Austrian archaeologists who were excavating Ephesus 
 before the War have only laid bare the main outlines, but the 
 view from the top of the theatre—and still more the view 
 from the summit of Koressos, which I climbed next day— 
 gives one an impression of how great the city was. The vast 
 circuit and finely cut masonry of Lysimachus’s walls, the 
 immense circumference of the harbour, an artificial basin dug 
 in defiance of the Cayster’s malice, record the ambitions of 
 its founder. In this same spirit the Germans built the port 
 of Haidar Pasha and the Baghdad Railway, and the prize 
 they strove for was the same—the conquest of a commercial 
 hinterland extending into the heart of Asia. 
 
 Lysimachus was one of Alexander’s generals and heirs, and 
 he laid out Ephesus at a moment when all Asia, from the 
 Aegean to the Pamirs, had been opened to Greek enterprise 
 by Alexander’s conquests. From Ephesus, the caravan- 
 routes led up the three rivers into the interior, as the railways 
 lead up them from Smyrna now. But Ephesus was greater 
 than Smyrna has ever been. In the time of the geographer 
 
150 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Strabo (about the beginning of the Christian era) the economic 
 hinterland of Ephesus had spread into the provinces of Sivas 
 and Kaisaria, diverting their exports from the ports of the 
 Black Sea, and it was a more prosperous as well as a wider 
 hinterland over which Ephesus ruled. As I stood in the 
 orchestra of the theatre and thought of the crowd shouting 
 ‘ Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,’ and the city clerk stand- 
 ing perhaps where I stood and trying to calm them down, my 
 eye caught an inscription on the base of a vanished statue : 
 ‘To the Emperor and God Caesar Augustus Vespasianus, in 
 the proconsulship of Lucius Mestrius Florus, the townspeople 
 of Simav, for the temple of the Emperors at Ephesus. . . .’ 
 The townspeople of Simav! I had seen their modern repre- 
 sentatives the other day, coming with their strings of camels 
 to market at Kula, inside the Greek lines—veritable types of 
 primitive man, with wild faces and outlandish costumes. The 
 modern Simavlys do not erect monuments in Smyrna. Civic 
 organisation, art, and all that the marble base and its inserip- 
 tion imply, must be things utterly beyond their horizon. 
 The contrast is a measure of the difference between Anatolia 
 now andthen. Modern Anatolia could not support so great 
 a city as Ephesus, and when the crimes and blunders which 
 ruined Ancient Civilisation had reduced Anatolia from its for- 
 mer to its present condition, the city deserted Lysimachus’s 
 ambitious site and retreated to the little hill at the back of 
 the plain where the original settlement had been. Here, out 
 of touch with the sea (a dangerous rather than a lucrative 
 neighbour in times of anarchy and decline), stood the Byzan- 
 tine Church of St. John and the citadel walls, and below the 
 citadel there still stands the shell of the fourteenth-century 
 Saljuq mosque, the latest and in some ways the most beauti- 
 ful monument of all. Except where a few masses of brick- 
 work rise above the soil or where the excavators have laid 
 marble pavements and foundations bare, Lysimachus’s city — 
 
 1 Strahonis Geographica, ed. by Meineke, A. (3 vols., Leipzig, Teubner, 
 Classical Texts Series), Vol. 11. p. 758=Casaubon, p. 540. 
 
THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA 151 
 
 has disappeared. Its extent is only indicated by the fine- 
 ground fragments of bricks and masonry that strew the fields. 
 Could Smyrna, the modern Ephesus, be blotted out as com- 
 pletely, if statesmen in London and Paris and Rome co- 
 operated with the alluvium of the River Hermus to destroy 
 it ? I speculated on this as I walked along the ridge of 
 Koressos and heard the Lewis guns popping a few miles away 
 over the hills, where the economic hinterland of Smyrna is 
 at present cut short by the boundary between the Greek and 
 the Italian Zone. Next day I went on to Aidin, and saw 
 how the process could be begun. 
 
 The Greek quarter of Aidin had been a miniature European 
 city. It had its finely placed church, its well-equipped 
 hospital, its school, its theatre, its cinema, its electric light, 
 its flour mills, its factories for crushing olives and making 
 soap. There were doctors and lawyers, merchants and 
 manufacturers, a municipality and a club. This life and 
 prosperity were a recent growth. It was one of those Greek 
 colonies which had sprung up along the railways built from 
 Smyrna into the interior. It had survived the Committee 
 of Union and Progress and the European War. Destruction 
 overtook it nine months after the armistice, in July 1919, 
 when the Greek forces, after landing in Asia Minor, made a 
 premature advance up the Maeander Valley, occupied Aidin, 
 and were temporarily driven out. When they reoccupied 
 the town a few days later, this was what they found. It does 
 not matter for the moment who began the destruction. I 
 have heard the most conflicting accounts and do not propose 
 to deliver a verdict,! especially as one has been delivered 
 already, I believe, by an inter-Allied commission which 
 examined and reported not long after the events took place. 
 Anyhow, whether in reprisal for previous provocation or not, 
 the Greek quarter was reduced to ruins and the Greek 
 community partly massacred and partly carried away into | 
 captivity beyond the Maeander. 
 
 1 For further discussion of these events at Aidin, see Chapter VII., pp. 273-4. 
 
152 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 The work was deliberately done. The buildings were not 
 destroyed in the heat of battle but burnt one by one, 
 and there is a sudden sharp boundary between the gutted 
 Greek houses and the intact Turkish centre of the town. 
 Here were twisted bedsteads, there safes with holes knocked 
 in their sides, here a shred of clothing or a boot. Iwas shown 
 gardens where people were killed wholesale, and a gulley 
 where individuals, entered on a written list, were taken out 
 and slaughtered one by one. I visited these ruins in the late 
 afternoon of a fine day. Below us stretched the plain of the 
 Maeander, covered with olives and fig trees, one of the most 
 beautiful views that I have ever seen. Above us the setting 
 sun was turning the spurs of the mountains to purple and 
 crimson, and my boots were grinding a rubble of brick and 
 masonry which reminded me suddenly of the fields on the 
 site of Lysimachus’s city. 
 
V 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT ! 
 
 WueEn I visited Anatolia in 1921, war and politics and life 
 and happiness there were dependent upon the rivalries of 
 Western diplomacy, yet Western civilisation had less footing 
 in the country than at any time since the Crimean War. 
 At Smyrna and the places occupied by the Greek Army in 
 the hinterland, the Allied Powers had voluntarily abdicated 
 their control in favour of the incoming Greek authorities. : 
 Elsewhere, the control-officers had lost command of the 
 situation as the Turkish National Movement gained it. 
 When once the Greeks had landed, the possible consequences 
 of breaking the armistice with the Allies did not weigh with 
 the Turks against the certain consequences of failing to 
 resist the invaders by force of arms. Rifles, breech-blocks, 
 and munitions were no longer handed in; reservists were 
 called up instead of being disbanded; and the Turkish 
 regular army, which by May 1919 had been reduced by the 
 control to less than 20,000 effectives, began to grow formid- 
 able again. For the controlling Powers it was an undignified 
 position, and it was only made worse by the measures of 
 coercion which they eventually took. In March 1920, there 
 was a demonstrative naval and military occupation of 
 Constantinople 2; prominent Turkish Nationalists in the 
 capital were arrested and deported to Malta; and next 
 month the Ottoman Parliament, which had recently re- 
 assembled after a general election with an overwhelmingly 
 
 For the official apologia of the Greek Administration, see additional 
 note to this chapter at the end of the book, p. 387. 
 2 Under the armistice, the Straits had already come under Allied oceupa- 
 tion, but the city of Constantinople had been nominally exempt from it. 
 
 153 
 
154 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Nationalist majority, broke up. The result was an open 
 breach between the Nationalist Power in the interior and the 
 Allies. Outlying detachments of British and Italian troops 
 had hastily to be withdrawn to the coast (the French in 
 Cilicia were already involved in military operations) ; some 
 control-officers, and an intelligence officer at Amasia, 
 were allowed to leave; others, like Colonel Rawlinson at 
 Erzerum, were imprisoned as hostages for the Malta de- 
 portees. The military consequences are described in the 
 following chapter. The political result was that the 
 Nationalist executive at Angora formally renounced its 
 allegiance to the Porte and proclaimed itself the legitimate 
 depository of Ottoman sovereignty. It had already made 
 itself the de facto government of all Anatolia outside the 
 Greek lines, but with this declaration and the withdrawal 
 of the armistice-control, the elimination of Western authority 
 from Anatolia was completed. That was the price paid by 
 Western statesmanship for a precarious and unprofitable 
 military domination over Constantinople. The English and 
 French merchants there got little satisfaction out of the 
 circumscribed omnipotence of their countries’ Generals and 
 High Commissioners, for their own business was boycotted 
 by the productive interior. The railways once laid out by 
 Western capital to serve Western trade were requisitioned 
 by Greek and Turkish commanders, wrecked by raiding- 
 parties, cut in half by the front. Even the American educa- 
 tional institutions, which had secured a privileged position 
 by their scrupulous non-interference in politics, found it 
 difficult to carry on. In the spring of 1921, the American 
 staff of Anatolia College, Marsovan, were banished from the 
 Nationalist territory because some of their Greek colleagues 
 were suspected of complicity in the revolutionary ‘ Pontus ’ 
 movement against the authority of Angora. From the 
 moment of the Greek landing in May 1919, Western civilisa- 
 tion fell into the same adversity in Anatolia as in Russia 
 after the Bolshevik Revolution. Not only its military and 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 155 
 
 political control, but its trade, its capital investments, its 
 cultural undertakings were inexorably rooted up. The war 
 of extermination between the local nationalities, let loose 
 by its own diplomacy, was an atmosphere in which it could 
 not live. It was being frozen out and abandoning the field 
 to the native flora of Greek and Turkish rule, which, given 
 a few years of untrammelled growth and struggle for exist- 
 ence with one another, might leave as little trace of the West 
 in Anatolia as there is to be found in Afghanistan. 
 
 These two experiments in administration by Near and 
 Middle Easterners, unfettered by customary restraints, are 
 the subject of this chapter. It is difficult to separate them 
 from the accompanying military operations and consequent 
 war of extermination. The Angora Government was set 
 up in order to mobilise the country’s resources for a military 
 effort, and the Greek High Commissioner at Smyrna assumed 
 a war-dictatorship pending the inauguration of the con- 
 stitution provided for the Smyrna Zone under the abortive 
 Treaty of Sévres1—a constitution which was still-born, 
 because it could not come into operation until the treaty 
 had been ratified. At the same time, there were some 
 remarkable personalities among those engaged in the civil 
 government on both sides of the front ; and their respective 
 merits as administrators may be judged by their comparative 
 success or failure in stemming the fatal current that swept 
 both parties towards excesses against each other. 
 
 On both sides there are indications that the leading men 
 were well-intentioned, but in government, as in war, the 
 Greeks were fighting a losing and the Turks a winning battle. 
 Though he arrived too late to prevent the original Smyrna 
 massacre,? the Greek High Commissioner started well. He 
 immediately reduced the troops and the civilian Greek 
 population to order and asserted his civil authority effec- 
 tively in the occupied area. On the Turkish side, on the 
 other hand, the civil authority of the Nationalist Government 
 
 1 Article 65-83, particularly Article 72. 2 See Chapter VII. 
 
156 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 was weak to begin with, and remained so until the Turkish 
 regular army was re-formed, for during the interval the 
 maintenance of the front had to be left to chettés, who in 
 many cases were professional brigands and went on making 
 their customary livelihood in the areas which they were 
 ‘defending.’ Their depredations, being economic, took 
 little account of nationality, and there are authentic cases 
 of Turkish villages which, in this first phase of the struggle, 
 actually called in the Greeks in order to be rescued from 
 their national ‘ protectors.’! The Angora Government did 
 not yet dare to interfere, for the object of its existence was 
 to carry on the war, and it had nothing so far but this screen 
 of chettés to oppose to the enemy. But there was an un- 
 mistakable change in the situation during the eight months 
 that I spent in the area. By the winter of 1920-1, the Turkish 
 regular army was again in being ;? the chettés were no 
 longer indispensable ; and the Angora Government promptly 
 invited them either to join the ranks or to lay down their 
 arms. Most of them did one or the other. One or two, like 
 the Circassian brothers Edhem of Salyhly and Eshref of 
 Sokia, preferred to desert to the Greeks. In either event 
 their power came to an end, and they were replaced by 
 regular Ottoman mutesarrifs and kaimakams of the ordinary 
 type and standard. There were exceptions, like the chetté 
 leader Osman Agha of Kiresiin, who retained his all but 
 nominal independence and got out of hand in ‘ Pontus’ 
 during the crisis of the final Greek offensive. But over far 
 the greater part of the country a civil administration was 
 established which Western observers uniformly reported to 
 be not less efficient, and more honest, than the average 
 Ottoman provincial administration before the European 
 War. As Angora extended its rule, it was able to improve 
 its standard. To begin with, it had often to raise revenue 
 in its home territories by methods only distinguishable from 
 
 * I came across several instances in the Kozak—a mountainous district, 
 just north of Bergama, where the population is exclusively Turkish. 
 ? See Chapter VI. * See Chapter VII. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 157 
 
 those of the chettés by being called requisitions, and this 
 had resulted in several serious revolts among the Turkish 
 population. But in 1921, as the regular sources of revenue 
 came into its hands, it became able to pay its way.1 Its 
 finances were assisted by the fact that there were no im- 
 ports except free donations of arms, and by the end of 1921 
 it claimed to be balancing a war-budget without raising 
 loans or printing fresh paper. 
 
 On the Greek side the opposite tendency was observable. 
 From taking Circassian chettés into their service it was only 
 a step for the Greek military authorities to raise Christian 
 chetté bands. By April 1921 these were in full operation,? 
 and the High Commissioner at Smyrna could not or would 
 not put them down. Even in the city of Smyrna, I found a 
 distinct change for the worse between my departure in March 
 and my return in August. In the winter, the Greek gen- 
 darmerie had been accused of occasional crimes against 
 Moslems in the interior. In August, Moslems were being 
 murdered by Greek soldiers in the city and its suburbs.® 
 
 1 T was told this by a Karamanly Christian surgeon serving in the National- 
 ist Army, who had been taken prisoner by the Greeks in the battle of In Onii, 
 and whom I visited on the 12th April 1921 in the Brusa military hospital. 
 
 2 See Chapter VII. 
 
 3 T subjoin three instances, from a source in which I have complete con- 
 fidence but which for obvious reasons I cannot yet specify : 
 
 (i) 29th May 1921, at lki Cheshmé, Smyrna City: Musa bin Ahmed Haijji 
 Huseinaki was killed on the way from a café to his house, and the corpse 
 plundered. The murderers must have been Greek soldiers, for a Greek 
 sergeant’s epaulette (evidently torn off in a struggle) was found clutched in 
 the corpse’s hand ; 
 
 (ii) 4th August 1921, at Kiatyb oghlu, Smyrna City: Mehmed Agha was 
 murdered by a Greek soldier, who entered his stable (on the ground-floor of 
 the house) and shot him with his revolver as he came to the door in answer 
 to the soldier’s knocking ; 
 
 (iii) 4th (?) August 1921, at Cordelid (suburb of Smyrna): Emin, brother of 
 Hasan Efendi, Directeur et locataire du Club des Turcs, refused to serve 
 Greek soldiers with alcoholic liquor and in revenge was bayonetted in the 
 neck that evening in the street. 
 
 T also have in my possession records (which I can publish if necessary) of 
 the murder of eight Turks in all at (a) Burnabad, (6) a country house near 
 Kilisman, (c) Kémiirderé, (d) Kyrkagach, and (e) Ushaq during April, May, 
 and June 1921. Of these, five were killed by Greek gendarmes, two by Greek 
 soldiers, and one by persons unknown. Besides these, I have records of 
 numerous cases of beating, violation and forcible detention of women, and 
 other crimes of violence stopping short of murder, which were committed by 
 
 treek gendarmes and soldiers, generally in conjunction with robbery. 
 
158 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Before, my Turkish acquaintances had visited me freely in 
 my hotel. This time they hesitated to be seen with me in 
 the street, and for fear of compromising them I did not call 
 on them in their houses.1_ The Western business community, 
 too, though they had complained of the paralysis of trade, 
 had borne witness at the earlier date to the unprecedented 
 security of life and property which the Greek police had 
 established in the city and its suburbs, and had admitted 
 that the falling-off of normal trade with the interior was 
 partly balanced by contracts for the Greek Army. By the 
 summer, the Greek Quarter-Master-General’s office was in 
 serious financial straits and its creditors were gloomy.? Even 
 apart from the atrocities which began in April (not only in 
 the few places where there were Western witnesses, but all 
 over the occupied territories), Greek rule in Western Anatolia 
 was then distinctly on the downward path. 
 
 It isno wonder that the Greeks failed, for, in sending them 
 to Smyrna, the Supreme Council had set them the most diffi- 
 cult administrative task conceivable—that of governing a 
 country with a mixed population in which one of the elements 
 was of the same nationality as themselves. The parallel 
 situation in Ireland was too much for the British nation, 
 which has more experience than most in the arts of govern- 
 ment, and the problem of ruling Turks and non-Turks in the 
 Ottoman Empire had completely beaten the Osmanlis. On 
 the other hand, the great strength of Greece, and of the other 
 independent states founded by Near Eastern peoples for- 
 merly subject to Turkey, was the comparative homogeneity 
 of population in the earliest liberated territories, which made 
 the introduction of democratic national institutions on the 
 
 1 One Turkish gentleman of my acquaintance, who was a ‘ foreign-pro- 
 tected person,’ used to hide every Sunday when the Consulate of the 
 protecting Power was closed, because another person protected by the same 
 Power had been kidnapped by Greek gendarmes one Sunday in broad daylight, 
 and the Consulate had failed to obtain satisfaction from the Greek authorities. 
 
 * See speech by Lord St. Davids, delivered at the half-yearly shareholders’ 
 meeting of the Ottoman (Aidin) Railway Company on the 31st March, and 
 reported in the Times of the 1st. April 1922. 
 
 ~_ eee 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 159 
 
 Western model a not impossible undertaking. In accepting 
 their mandate for the Smyrna Zone, the Greeks saddled 
 themselves not with the White Man’s but with the Osmanli’s 
 ‘burden.’ The establishment of the Turkish Nationalist 
 Government in the rest of the country, which was an inevit- 
 able consequence, aggravated the problem, and the equally 
 inevitable state of war between the two governments made 
 it impossible to solve. 
 
 In comparing their respective achievements, it is only fair 
 to point out that on the whole the Nationalists had the easier 
 task. Though they too had to deal with a mixed population, 
 the Turkish element in the country where they inaugurated 
 their régime was in an overwhelming majority, and the non- 
 Turks were not only hopelessly outnumbered but were 
 accustomed (however painfully) to Ottoman sovereignty. 
 
 In these territories the administration had been Ottoman for 
 a minimum of four and in places for six centuries ;! it was 
 not interrupted during the European War ; 2 and the Nation- 
 alists had merely to connect up the existing machinery with 
 Angora instead of Constantinople and to overhaul it where it 
 was out of gear. It was an old-fashioned instrument, but at 
 any rate it worked. The Greek High Commissioner, on his 
 side, took over an area in which the non-Greek element was | 
 almost certainly in a considerable majority, and where every 
 usage and institution was against him. He stood for a 
 revolutionary reversal of national relationships, which only | 
 time and tranquillity could possibly have made acceptable to 
 the party which was the loser by the change, and both these 
 essential conditions were denied to him. Finally, while the 
 Nationalists disposed of a broad hinterland only remotely 
 affected by the War, the whole of the Greek Zone was sensitive 
 | to the disturbing influences of the front, and there was no 
 physical barrier between the Turkish element in its popula- | 
 
 eee 
 
 1 The original nucleus of the Ottoman Empire, between Eski Shehir and 
 Brusa, was in the Nationalists’ hands till July 1921, but passed under Greek 
 occupation as a result of the summer campaign of that year (see Chapter VI.). 
 
 2 Except for the temporary Russian occupation of the extreme north-east. 
 
160 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 tion and the main body of the Turkish nation on the other 
 side of the military lines. 
 
 The geographical difficulties of the Greeks’ position round 
 Smyrna are discussed from the military point of view in the 
 next chapter. The administrative aspect can be illustrated 
 from the partially parallel conditions created in Macedonia 
 by the award of the Berlin Conference in 1878 and perpetu- 
 ated until the Balkan War. The parallel is only partial, 
 because the conditions of Turkish rule in Macedonia during 
 that period were more favourable in two respects than those 
 of Greek rule in Anatolia. In the first place, while the Greek 
 High Commissioner at Smyrna had uninterrupted war on his 
 frontiers, Turkey and the Balkan States adjoining her Mace- 
 donian provinces were at any rate nominally at peace from 
 1878 to 1912, except for the brief and successful campaign 
 against Greece alone in 1897. In the second place, these 
 Balkan neighbours of Turkey and their respective kinsmen 
 in Macedonia were more hostile to one another than to her, 
 It took them thirty-four years to agree upon even a tempor- 
 ary military co-operation, and during the interval Turkey 
 was able to ‘ divide and rule ’—a policy for which Nationalist 
 Anatolia, with its solid Turkish majority united under a 
 single national government, gave the Greek High Commis- 
 sioner little opportunity... In Macedonia, the Ottoman 
 Government was also the customary sovereign of the 
 country. Yet peace, custom, and the division among her 
 enemies did not enable Turkey to administer successfully 
 these outlying provinces inhabited by an alien majority and 
 only marked off by artificial frontiers from a ring of hostile 
 territory. The last phase of Ottoman rule in Macedonia was 
 a byword, and the prospects of Greek.rule in the Smyrna 
 Zone were even more gloomy from the beginning. 
 
 Along the southern border of the Greek occupied territory, 
 for instance, the conditions were least unfavourable when I 
 
 1 For the Greek attempt to play off the Anatolian Circassians against the 
 Turks, see p. 156 above, and Chapter VII. below, 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 161 
 
 visited it in February 1921, since there were no regular 
 military operations in progress on this part of the front. 
 It was too remote from the principal theatre of war, and 
 detachments of Italian troops were holding the ring. Yet 
 the Italians could not or would not prevent Turkish raiders 
 from crossing the border, as Greek, Bulgar, and Serb ‘ komi- 
 tajys ’ used to cross from the Balkan States into Macedonia, 
 and there was a zone at least twenty miles deep in which 
 the Greek authorities could not establish security. I had to 
 have an escort of two gendarmes to explore the walls of 
 Ancient Ephesus, only a mile or two from the railway-station 
 of Ayasoluk ; ten soldiers and five gendarmes to cross the 
 mountains from Aidin to Tiré;1 and six troopers (on the 
 alert at every village we passed) to ride over the Cayster 
 plain from Tiré to the railway-junction of Torbaly. I was 
 told by Greeks of daily encounters, with casualties, between 
 Greek gendarmes and Turkish chettés, and by Turks of 
 Turkish villages ‘shot up’ by the gendarmes for having 
 given the chettés compulsory hospitality. It was the old 
 story of Macedonia, word for word. Of course, there were 
 exceptional districts. In the Bergama district, which was 
 far from the border and where the High Commissioner was 
 represented by an admirable lieutenant,” I rode for two days 
 through wooded mountains under the escort of a single 
 gendarme, and at Yukara Bey Keui I found a detachment of 
 half-a-dozen men in charge of ten scattered Turkish villages. 
 The commander of this isolated detachment had just brought 
 his wife out from Greece to join him, and the day I arrived 
 being some festival of the Orthodox Church, they were being 
 entertained by a party of Turkish musicians, with whom they 
 were on the most friendly terms. No doubt such idylls could 
 have been witnessed in Macedonia between 1878 and 1912, 
 
 1 See ‘A Journey through the Mountains,’ p. 196 below. 
 
 2 Mr. Ioannis Alexakis, ‘nomarkhis’ of Bergama, an Ottoman subject 
 from Kush Adasy (=Scala Nuova), where he had been a landowner and 
 British vice-consul, like his father before him. His profession, before 
 entering the High Commissioner’s service, had been the law. 
 
 L 
 
162 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 but in both cases they were no more than gleams of light in 
 the gathering darkness of internecine war.1_ My considered 
 judgment is that it was as impossible for the Greeks to estab- 
 lish a good administration in Anatolia as it was for the Turks 
 in Macedonia after 1878, and that if circumstances had 
 allowed them to prolong their dominion there by force, it 
 would soon have had the worst possible reaction upon their 
 standards of government at home. 
 
 Before attempting to illustrate this view from my own 
 observations, I must state that my final opinion of the Greek 
 administration has proved considerably less favourable than 
 my first impressions in the winter of 1921, partly because 
 the Greek civil government seriously deteriorated afterwards 
 in consequence of the military crisis in the spring and the 
 outbreak of atrocities, but also partly because it took me 
 time to realise the seamy side of what I had seen on my first 
 survey. Of necessity, I had travelled under official auspices 
 and was shown things from the official standpoint.2 I 
 should also add that I have not had first-hand experience of 
 the Turkish Nationalist administration. At the time when 
 I was at Constantinople, Turkish resentment against ‘the 
 British Government’s policy was so intense that it was 
 impossible for a British subject to get a visa for travelling 
 in Nationalist territory, and most of my information about 
 conditions in the interior is derived from American relief- 
 workers, missionaries, business-men, and journalists who 
 were travelling freely between Constantinople and Angora by 
 several routes from different Black Sea ports, and who thus 
 saw between them a considerable part of the country. This 
 information, though good, is of course second-hand, and 
 I do not wish to lay stress on four days which my wife and 
 I passed, by chance, in an area under Nationalist authority,® 
 
 1 See Chapter VII. 
 
 * This comes out in the two narratives written at Smyrna on the 2lst 
 February 1921, and printed at the end of this chapter. 
 
 * At Ismid and neighbouring places along the south coast of the Gulf, 
 between the 27th June and the 3rd July 1921 (see Chapter VII.). 
 
t 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 163 
 
 as the time was short and the conditions, though test- 
 ing, were exceptional. Whether personal experience would 
 have given me a more or a less favourable opinion of the 
 Nationalist administration than I have actually formed, I 
 cannot say, and I must offer my impressions, such as they 
 are, with this reservation. But I can speak with more 
 authority of the Nationalist programme and point of view, 
 of which some account is given at the end of the chapter. 
 
 In 1921, the dominating personality on the Greek side in 
 Anatolia was the High Commissioner, Mr. Sterghiddhis. 
 He began his career as a successful barrister in Krete, and 
 bears the marks of his country and profession. He is 
 highly-strung—resourceful and courageous but capricious 
 and hot-tempered—and his method of administration was 
 to strike unexpectedly and hard, as if he were pleading a 
 weak case or fighting a desperate duel. This fencing style 
 of government, with its lunges, feints, and dexterous avoid- 
 ance of hostile thrusts, is un-Western and particularly un- 
 English, but then Mr. Sterghiddhis did not command the 
 means of an Indian lieutenant-governor. To begin with, he 
 was perpetually in financial straits, for he had to pay his 
 own way without assistance from the Greek Government ; 
 the local revenues had dwindled with the commercial 
 isolation of Smyrna from the hinterland ; and the Capitula- 
 tions (which remained provisionally in force) made it difficult 
 to tap new sources. He had no judicial system and no civil 
 service. He had to hold his own against the military, who 
 became less amenable as the military situation grew more 
 grave. He was not sure of backing from Athens, for he was 
 a nominee of Mr. Venizelos, and the Royalist Ministers only 
 asked him to remain because it was impossible to find a 
 successor. He had to improvise everything, pending the 
 inauguration of the Sévres régime, and to act as if he believed 
 in the prospects of Greek rule in Anatolia, when every 
 month it was becoming more evident that the Supreme 
 Council’s irresponsible decision would have to be reversed. 
 
164 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 On the other hand, if the Treaty at Sévres had eventually 
 come into force, he would have found himself in a still more 
 delicate position, for under Article 83 he might have been 
 confronted after five years with a plebiscite on the definitive 
 attribution to Greece of the Smyrna Zone. If the demand 
 for a plebiscite had been presented, as prescribed, by a 
 majority in the local parliament, and if the popular vote had 
 then gone in favour of Greece, he would infallibly have been 
 accused of having misused his powers during the previous 
 five years in order to bring about the decision ; while if the 
 vote had gone the other way, his fellow-countrymen would 
 have made him the scapegoat for their national disappoint- 
 ment. Such difficulties might paralyse a professional 
 Western administrator, but Mr. Sterghiédhis, who had been 
 urged for a long time without effect to enter public life by 
 his friend and fellow-islander Mr. Venizelos, had only been 
 attracted towards it by abnormal conditions. Finally, 
 after failing to excite his ambition, Mr. Venizelos had 
 appealed successfully to his love for tour de force, and had 
 persuaded him to undertake the Governor-Generalship of 
 Epirus after the fall of King Constantine, when the province 
 was in a chaotic condition owing to its temporary occupation 
 by the Italians. Sterghiddhis went to Yannina, gathered 
 some able young men about him, and got his hand in so 
 successfully that Mr. Venizelos appealed to him a second 
 time, in May 1919, to save the situation for Greece in Ana- 
 tolia, after the disgraceful episodes which had accompanied 
 the landing of her troops! That was how Sterghiddhis 
 came to Smyrna. He could hardly have had a worse start 
 or performed a more brilliant acrobatic feat than to keep 
 afloat as he did in such a sea of troubles. 
 
 An anecdote from his apprenticeship in Epirus is worth 
 recording. He had disposed of all but the one most re- 
 doubtable of the provincial brigands, when this gentleman 
 invited him by letter to a téte-d-téfe conference—in the 
 
 1 See Chapter VII, 
 
 a inert 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 165 
 
 mountains. The Governor-General accepted the proposal 
 by return, with the stipulation that neither party should 
 bring armed followers within a stated distance of the rendez- 
 vous. Arriving alone at the appointed hour, he found the 
 chieftain waiting for him in the open, but also observed rifle- 
 barrels trained on him from behind every rock. Sterghié- 
 dhis was not the man to miss his opportunity. Without 
 hesitation, he took the verbal offensive and overwhelmed 
 the trickster with such a torrent of invective that, between 
 shame and astonishment, he lost his head and was immedi- 
 ately rushed by the Governor-General into satisfactory terms 
 of capitulation, which he afterwards observed. 
 
 These qualities are invaluable in a dictator, especially 
 when circumstances compel him occasionally to assume the 
 brigand’s role himself. People with a case against his 
 administration at Smyrna certainly did not find Sterghiddhis 
 easy to tackle. He was not loved either by Western consuls 
 or by unofficial petitioners of any nationality, whom he had 
 an unlimited capacity for ignoring, unless he chose to em- 
 barrass them by doing them more than justice, in order 
 to choke off future applications. This was his favourite 
 sleight-of-hand in holding the balance between the different 
 elements in the local population. He gained some un- 
 popularity among the Smyrna Greeks, but more credit 
 among Western visitors and even among residents who 
 ought to have known better, by occasional spectacular acts 
 of partiality towards Turks, when Turks and Greeks were 
 in conflict. He could not or would not prevent or redress 
 the far more frequent injustices, great or small, which were 
 done to Turks by the Greek military or gendarmerie or. 
 subordinate members of his own civil administration, or 
 still more frequently by the Greek population with local 
 official connivance ; and he was quite clever enough to 
 know that if general oppression of this kind went on, melo- 
 dramatic personal interventions did not appreciably alleviate 
 the hardships of the Turkish population and only embittered 
 
166 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 their feelings by masking the real situation. Probably, 
 however, these gestures were the most effective that he could 
 make in the circumstances. 
 
 Every administrator is dependent on his instruments, and 
 most contemporary administration in the Near and Middle 
 East breaks down in its rank and file. Mr. Sterghiddhis had 
 some worthy seconds, like my friend Professor Constantine 
 Karatheodhorfs 1 of Gottingen, who in 1921 was organising 
 a university for him and advising him on all manner of 
 educational and social questions, or like the brilliant young 
 agriculturist Mr. Frangdépulos, of whom some account is 
 given elsewhere.? But what were they among so many ? 
 When he left Epirus, he insisted on bringing his nursery of 
 young officials with him * (a course which must have left his 
 successor in difficulties), but in the larger zone of Smyrna 
 they were not nearly numerous enough to go round. In the 
 last resort, the character of Greek rule in Anatolia depended 
 not on the High Commissioner but on the ordinary captain 
 or sergeant or even private of gendarmes, and these men 
 were not fitted to rule over an alien population. Drafted 
 out from Greece, they knew no Turkish and took no trouble 
 to learn it, because they were uncertain how long they would 
 be serving overseas. I came across Greek gendarmes who 
 
 1 Professor Karatheodhoris belongs to the well-known Greek ‘ Phanariot’ 
 family of the name, which has supplied the Ottoman Government with many 
 distinguished public servants. The late Prince of Samos was a relative of 
 his. His uncle was a government engineer in Mitylini under Abdu’l-Hamid, 
 who devised an ingenious system of commuting taxes for labour locally em- 
 ployed on public works, so as to ensure to the taxpayer that his expenditure 
 would be reproductive. By this method he enlisted the sympathies of the 
 communes and got labour for equipping the island with excellent roads. 
 Professor Karatheodhoris’s father was Ottoman Minister at Brussels, and he 
 himself was educated at the University of Liége. After a varied experience 
 in Egypt and elsewhere, he was appointed to a Chair of Mathematics in the 
 University of Géttingen, which he occupied with distinction for twenty 
 years. He was interested in everything—archaeology, hygiene, economics, 
 languages—and constantly reminded me of what I had read about Ludwig 
 Ross and the other German savants who came out to Greece in the thirties of 
 last century in the train of King Otto. In fact, Professor Karatheodhoris was a 
 Westerner abroad—constructive, broad-minded, humane, and out of water. 
 
 2 See ‘An Agricultural Experiment,’ p. 201 below. 
 
 * | was favourably impressed by the two whom I happened to meet: Mr, 
 G. P. Vasilikés at Aidin and Mr. I. A. Naburis at Soma. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 167 
 
 had been stationed for as long as nine months on end in 
 purely Turkish rural districts without picking up more than 
 a word or two of the language ; and in one case, when I was 
 being escorted, my companion knew so little that I had to 
 do the talking when we wanted to ask the way. There was 
 something more in this than laziness, for Greeks are good 
 linguists and industrious in acquiring knowledge which may 
 help them to get on. Their disinclination to learn Turkish 
 was fortified by national hostility and disdain. Under-dog 
 must speak top-dog’s language, and if he could not, so much 
 the worse for him. He ought not to have made Greeks 
 speak Turkish in the days of his own ascendency. So the 
 unfortunate Turkish peasant with some vital petition to 
 make, or under arrest on some serious charge, might have to 
 hire the services of a Greek translator, who as likely as not 
 would do his business badly ; and when the Turk appeared 
 in court he might be cross-examined by a hectoring inter- 
 preter on this Greek version of his case, of which he did not 
 understand a word, until the presiding officer, bored by the 
 dialogue, impatiently cut it short—having convinced himself 
 once again that the Turks were a brutish and malignant 
 people. Sterghiadhis might cherish the honourable ambition 
 of being the Greek Cromer or Liautey, but national animosity 
 stultified his efforts as inexorably as if he had been a well- 
 meaning Ottoman Vali of Salonika in 1912 or a liberal- 
 minded English Viceroy of Ireland in 1921. 
 
 Undoubtedly his administrative operations reveal a 
 deficit when one strikes the balance. On the credit side, 
 the chief item was the repatriation of more than 120,000 
 Greek refugees and deportees, which was admirably done. 
 In helping them, care was taken not to pauperise them or 
 to weaken the tradition of local self-government (the great 
 blunder made in building up the Greek Kingdom during the 
 past century, after the War of Independence). As far as 
 possible they were given loans rather than grants, and the 
 total expenditure was well below the original estimate. 
 
168 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Bergama and Aivali got on to their feet after the harvest of 
 1920; Kinik was struggling up by the winter of 1921; only 
 the people of Dikeli had been disheartened by a plague of 
 field-mice, which had cost them the fruits of a whole year’s 
 work. Relief was also given to the Turkish population. I 
 saw destitute Moslem women receiving rations of food from 
 the High Commissioner’s representative at Aidin,* and 
 subsidies were paid to the Turkish orphanage (Daru’l-Yetim) 
 at Smyrna. Besides this, certain positive measures were 
 taken for economic and social development. In rural 
 districts, cheap light ploughs were put on sale at cost price 
 by the administration ; an experimental farm for mechanical 
 agriculture was established at Torbaly ;* and Professor 
 Karatheodhoris began to organise his new university, of 
 which the departments of hygiene (to combat malaria and 
 syphilis, the two scourges of Anatolia) and oriental languages 
 were to be launched in the autumn of 1921. If this scheme 
 was prematurely ambitious, nothing could have been more 
 practical than the overhauling of the municipal administra- 
 tion of Smyrna City, which was entrusted by the High 
 Commissioner to a Greek refugee from Varna, Mr. Klionas. 
 
 Each of these items, however, is cancelled, or more than 
 cancelled, by something in the debit column. The repatria- 
 
 ’ tion of Greeks, for example, was marred by the expropriation 
 
 of their Turkish neighbours. Titles had of course been con- 
 fused by the criminal violence of the Turks themselves 
 between 1914 and the armistice, and it was natural that the 
 Greek population should be tempted to retaliate when they 
 returned as the dominant nationality. But the minor 
 functionaries of Mr. Sterghiddhis’s administration ought not 
 to have been so incompetent or casual or partial as to grant 
 false claims, and the High Commissioner himself ought to 
 have seen to it that they did not doso. These inroads upon 
 
 1 On the other side it must be remembered that the devastation of Aidin 
 was wholly due to the war let loose by the Greek landing (see Chapter VI., 
 p. 226, and Chapter VII., pp. 273-4). 
 
 2 See ‘An Agricultural Experiment,’ p. 201 below. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 169 
 
 Turkish property continued after the repatriation of the 
 Greeks had been completed. At Narly Deré and Balcha 
 Ova, for instance, I was informed that certain Greek 
 inhabitants had persuaded the Greek authorities in the 
 summer of 1921, immediately before harvest, to give them 
 possession of land owned and sown that year by Turks, on 
 the ground that it was originally theirs. At Phokiés, not 
 only expropriation but murder and violence were suffered, 
 at the hands of the repatriated Greeks, by the Turkish 
 element. In a place so near the centre of government, such 
 excesses ought not to have occurred. The result was that 
 from May 1919 onwards, even before systematic atrocities 
 began, there was a vast emigration of Turks from the 
 occupied territories. By the spring of 1921, the Ottoman 
 Ministry of Refugees at Constantinople estimated the 
 numbers at something between 200,000 and 325,000, and 
 there is no danger of exaggeration in at least equating them 
 with those of the repatriated Greeks.1 No scientific agri- 
 culture or distribution of ploughs could make up for the 
 diminution of productivity caused by such a drain on the 
 population. The services of many Turkish peasants who 
 remained were requisitioned for weeks and months at a time 
 for military transport. They had to bring their mules and 
 ox-carts with them, and many of these were destroyed, to 
 the further impoverishment of the country. After the 
 spring of 1921, if not earlier, military service was also imposed 
 on the local Ottoman Greeks. According to the report of 
 an inter-Allied commission of inquiry, dated the Ist June 
 1921, ‘ The Greek Army have instituted conscription of those 
 Ottoman subjects who are Christian refugees, who have to 
 leave their families in great distress.’2 In August I myself 
 saw in prison at Smyrna a Greek Ottoman subject who had 
 
 1 There are no exact statistics, because these refugees nearly all drifted 
 eastwards into territories still held by the Nationalists, and did not pass 
 through Constantinople or any other single distributing centre where count 
 could be kept of their numbers. 
 
 2 Parliamentary Paper, Turkey No. 1(1921)=Cmd. 1478 (see Chapter VIL. ). 
 
 te a ae oth pe EES 
 
 ae 
 
170 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 differed with the Greek military authorities as to whether 
 he was of military age. 
 
 The debit account also included military destruction, 
 which may be none the less ruinous for being the result of 
 ‘legitimate warfare ’ (as distinguished from the ‘ atrocities ’ 
 dealt with in Chapter VII.). Though there was no con- 
 centration of artillery, the Anatolian War did widespread 
 damage owing to the constant shifting of the front. Even 
 at the remote mountain village of Yukara Bey Keui, north 
 of Bergama, I found nearly half the houses destroyed 
 through having been shelled and set on fire at the time of 
 the original Greek occupation, and hardly a village had 
 escaped damage in really bad areas like the Maeander 
 Valley. Still more deadly was the paralysis of trade—the 
 stagnant port, the severed railways, the holding up of 
 food-stuffs in the interior by the military authorities. In 
 February 1921, at Kula, one of the seats of the carpet in- 
 dustry, they were still executing orders for the Smyrna firms, 
 but the wool which they were using came from the Angora 
 district, on the other side of the front. They had certain 
 stocks in hand, but what would become of their output when 
 these were exhausted ? Smyrna, again, is the headquarters 
 of the largest liquorice firm in the world, because the best 
 grade of root is collected in the Maeander Valley. This 
 firm used to forward it from their up-country collecting- 
 stations by the British Aidin Railway ; but the chances of 
 war placed the line in the hands of the Greeks and the 
 principal root-bearing districts in those of the Turks, and 
 severed the communications between them. Under such 
 conditions, how could business be carried on ? But I have 
 sufficiently enlarged upon these economic losses already. 
 I only refer to them again in order to insist that they must 
 be reckoned into any estimate of the economic profit or 
 loss which the Greek administration was bringing to the 
 country. 
 
 See ‘Greek Prisons at Smyrna,’ p. 204 below. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 171 
 
 It might, of course, be pleaded that the points examined 
 so far throw more light on Mr. Sterghiddhis’s predicament 
 than on his personality. The anti-Turkish instincts of his 
 subordinates and the economic ravages of the War were 
 factors with which he had to contend but for which he was 
 not responsible. There was, however, one ‘acid test’ of 
 his statesmanship, and that was his personal policy towards 
 the Turkish educated class and their institutions. To 
 secure the goodwill of this class is the most difficult task for 
 a foreign administrator in any subject country ; yet without 
 their co-operation good government is ultimately impossible 
 (as British experience in India and Egypt shows), and to 
 alienate them gratuitously is an unpardonable error. The 
 heaviest indictment against Mr. Sterghiddhis is on this 
 head. In some things, like the special attention paid to 
 Kretan and Circassian in contrast to Turkish Moslem 
 notables of the province, he was perhaps merely injudi- 
 cious.1 But he inflicted a wanton wound in attacking the 
 Sultaniyyah Secondary School and the Turkish Hospital 
 in Smyrna City—-institutions for which enlightened and 
 patriotic Turks cared intensely, as precious instruments of 
 national development. 
 
 Mr. Sterghiddhis, having appropriated the Sultaniyyah 
 School building and converted it into law courts, attempted 
 
 1 During the Greek occupation some of the Kretan Moslem settlers, who 
 had originally left their native island to escape from the Christians and are 
 usually reputed to be more anti-Greek than the Turks, showed a surprising 
 readiness to co-operate with the Greek authorities. Ali Bey, a Kretan 
 landowner of Odemish, was the High Commissioner’s liaison officer, or would- 
 be liaison officer, with his Turkish administrés, and Husni Bey, who had 
 been Ottoman Mutesarrif of Manysa at the time of the Greek occupation, 
 remained there as the High Commissioner’s representative, being now 
 surrounded entirely by Greek functionaries and gendarmes. This com- 
 placency on the Kretan Moslems’ part towards their old Christian enemies 
 seems due partly to community of language, partly to their bad relations, 
 since their settlement in Anatolia, with their new Turkish neighbours. As 
 regards the Circassian chetté-leaders Eshref and Edhem Beys, the empresse- 
 ment with which they were received in the winter of 1921, when they 
 _ deserted from the Nationalists (see above), may have been due to the Greek 
 military authorities rather than to Mr. Sterghiadhis. At any rate, the 
 results were unfortunate, for, rightly or wrongly, educated Turks inferred 
 that the Greek administration was trying to drive in a wedge between them 
 and these non-Turkish Moslem minorities. 
 
172 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 to defend his action 1 by reference to the Treaty of Sévres. 
 When Articles 68 and 240 are read together, the local Greek 
 administration appears to be entitled, if and when the treaty 
 is ratified, to ‘acquire without payment all property and 
 possessions . . . registered in the name of the Turkish Empire 
 or of the Civil List’ and situated in the Smyrna Zone. 
 Mr. Sterghiddhis claimed that the Sultaniyyah fell within 
 this category, because the Imperial Treasury at Constanti- 
 nople used to make it an annual grant of L.T. 40,000—a 
 proof, in his estimation, that it was an Imperial and not a 
 communal institution. The Turks replied to this, first, that 
 the treaty had not come into force because it had never been 
 ratified. They pointed out that on this account they had 
 not yet enjoyed such benefits as the treaty secured to them 
 —for example, the local parliament (Article 72)—and that 
 it was therefore unjust to subject them by anticipation to 
 provisions detrimental to their interests. But they laid 
 more stress on the fact that, though there had been an 
 annual government grant, the site of the Sultaniyyah was 
 wakf land (that is, a religious endowment) and that the 
 building had been erected twenty or thirty years before 
 by public subscription. They therefore maintained—with 
 evident justice—that Articles 68 and 240 were inapplicable. 
 
 The Greeks retorted that anyhow the Ottoman Govern- 
 ment had ceased to pay the grant, that the Greek adminis- 
 tration was quite unable to pay it, and that there were no 
 educational grants on this scale in the Kingdom of Greece 
 —the Sultaniyyah School having had nearly a hundred per 
 cent. of free places. To this the leaders of the Turkish 
 community answered that Mr. Sterghiddhis had never 
 given them a chance to raise funds themselves or to 
 negotiate about the grant with the Ministry of Education 
 at Constantinople. 
 
 1 My presentation of the Greek case in this Sultaniyyah controversy is 
 based on notes furnished to me by an official in the Greek High Commis- 
 — office. I have also discussed the subject with Mr. Sterghiadhis 
 
 imself, 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 173 
 
 The Greeks’ next line of defence was that the Sultaniyyah 
 was intended as a ladder to the Galata Serai Lycée or to the 
 University at Constantinople, and that since the Smyrna 
 district had been separated provisionally from Turkey, they 
 saw no reason for maintaining special educational links with 
 that country. If the Turks of the Smyrna Zone wanted 
 higher education, they could go to the new Greek University 
 at Smyrna or to Athens. The Turkish comment on this 
 was that if the Sévres Treaty involved the severance of such 
 vital and well-established links as this, that merely showed 
 once more how artificial and unjust it was. 
 
 The Greek authorities also pleaded that they were setting 
 up a local Moslem Educational Commission, to exercise the 
 powers enjoyed by the various Christian and Jewish Millets 
 in the Ottoman Empire. I obtained confirmation of this 
 from the Turkish side in August 1921, but with important 
 qualifications. In the first place, it was not a new departure, 
 for before the Greek occupation all provincial educational 
 endowments had been allocated to provincial uses and were 
 already administered by a commission of local notables (the 
 Ministry of Education at Constantinople confining itself to 
 supervision). In the second place, I was informed that the 
 Greek High Commissioner had only offered to place funds 
 allocated to primary education under Moslem administration. 
 
 This limitation, if it was a fact, struck me at once as 
 significant, because it fitted in with an impression which I 
 had formed, during my first visit in the preceding winter, 
 regarding Greek policy. While the Greek rank and file were 
 instinctively anti-Turk—an instinct which, unless kept in 
 order, was bound to break out into excesses like those 
 committed at the landing in May 1919 and again since April 
 1921 1—the higher civil authorities and certain enlightened 
 Venizelist generals * had evidently wanted to conciliate and 
 
 1 See Chapter VII. 
 2 The four whom I met in February at Alashehir, Ushaq, and Salyhly were 
 replaced in their commands a few weeks afterwards by Royalists, 
 
174 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 gain the confidence of the Turkish peasantry—with the 
 idea, I think, of detaching them from the Turkish govern- 
 ing class, whom they frankly regarded as irreconcilable 
 to Greek rule. The war of extermination which began 
 in April 1921 of course wrecked any chances that such 
 a policy might have had, even if the first Smyrna massacre 
 could have been got over; but the precedents in Egypt 
 and India were in any case against its success, and I fancy 
 _that the Greek exponents of it were misled by having 
 studied the first chapter of British administration in 
 Oriental countries and ignored the second. It would be 
 in accordance with this policy to encourage primary and 
 at the same time to sabotage higher Turkish education, 
 and the High Commissioner’s proposal for reorganisation, 
 if correctly reported to me, had very much this air. As 
 far as primary education went, it was not ungenerous. 
 The new Turkish Educational Commission was to ad- 
 minister, apparently, not only all provincial endowments 
 for primary education but also the proceeds of the special 
 virght (tax) previously. collected for educational purposes 
 by the Ottoman Government—the Greek High Com- 
 missioner reserving the right to decide whether further 
 funds were necessary. On the other hand, all the local 
 endowments—both primary and secondary—hitherto ad- 
 ministered by the Commission of Notables under the 
 Ottoman Ministry of Education, had been taken over by 
 the Greek authorities since the beginning of the occupa- 
 tion, and during the six months preceding August 1921 
 the income of neither branch had been paid over. Mean- 
 while, as has been explained, the Sultaniyyah endowment 
 (both the site and the building) had been confiscated. 
 Even, therefore, if the reconstituted Turkish Educational 
 Commission recovered control over primary education 
 funds, the Turkish community had been robbed of its 
 principal endowment for secondary education, and had no 
 assurance with regard to others. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 175 
 
 The High Commissioner’s last line of defence in the 
 Sultaniyyah controversy was to protest his readiness to pay 
 the rent for a suitable alternative building, if the School 
 could find one ; but it was notorious that in Smyrna, as in 
 most large cities after the European War, there was a dearth 
 of housing accommodation—always excepting the two large 
 unfinished buildings in which the new Greek University was 
 being installed. Considering that one of these buildings 
 had been started by Rahmy Bey, the previous governor of 
 the province, with the intention of making it into a new 
 Turkish University,! the fair course would surely have 
 been to house the new law courts there or else to 
 assign the building to the Sultaniyyah in exchange for 
 its own. The Sultaniyyah was a going concern, fulfilling 
 an ascertained need. Pupils were annually passing 
 through it from the lower schools of the province to 
 Constantinople. The new Greek University was a castle 
 in the air, without local foundations—a doubtful experi- 
 ment even if made at the cost of nothing else. These 
 facts dispose of Mr. Sterghiddhis’s otherwise not un- 
 reasonable plea that a judicial system was an adminis- 
 trative necessity, and law courts a public utility from 
 which Turks as well as Greeks would benefit, so that he 
 was merely transferring the Sultaniyyah building from one 
 department of the public service to another. If the Sultan- 
 iyyah was not government property, and if Rahmy Bey’s 
 buildings were available, this contention falls to the ground. 
 
 The notes supplied to me by the Greek High Commission 
 end, however, with a home thrust : ‘ At Constantinople the 
 French, British, and Italians have occupied schools and 
 wakf buildings’ for their own military and administrative 
 purposes. In truth, at Constantinople I found the French 
 actually installed in one wing of the Galata Serai Lycée. 
 
 -*Tant pis,’ said the Turks: ‘The Western Powers have set 
 
 a bad example.’ 
 
 1 The other, I believe, was to have been a maternity hospital. 
 
176 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 A similar fate had overtaken the Turkish Hospital at 
 Smyrna. This institution had an annual revenue from 
 endowments of L.T. 7000 gold, was administered by a 
 governing body of private individuals belonging to the 
 province, and used to maintain in permanence 400 beds. 
 The Greek High Commission took over the hospital and its 
 revenue, cut down the number of beds first to eighty and 
 then to forty, pocketing the whole amount of the savings on 
 the revenue thus effected, and by August 1921 had entirely 
 appropriated this hospital—a private endowment intended 
 for the civilian public of the province—to the accommoda- 
 tion of wounded Greek soldiers. Accordingly, the Smyrna 
 branch of the Ottoman Red Crescent Society (a private 
 organisation dependent on local voluntary contributions) 
 had opened a dispensary at Iki Cheshmelik, staffed by one 
 
 physician, one surgeon, one midwife, and one dispenser, and - 
 
 attended by an average of 2500 out-patients a month. Of 
 course this could not supply the place of the Hospital, but, 
 in a time of poverty and under a foreign occupation, it 
 testified to the initiative and public spirit of the Turkish 
 community. 
 
 I have deliberately gone into detail in discussing the 
 Greek High Commissioner’s treatment of these Turkish 
 institutions. It may not have been an exceptional piece 
 of injustice. I should not be surprised to learn that equal 
 or worse treatment had been meted out to dozens of German, 
 Magyar, and Bulgar institutions in the vast territories 
 newly acquired by Poland, Tchecho-Slovakia, Rumania, and 
 Jugoslavia ; and the same story may have to be told about 
 Greek, Armenian, and American institutions in the territory 
 held by the Turkish Nationalists.. But it is generally 
 recognised, in spite of the passions aroused by war, that 
 these other defeated nationalities are fundamentally civilised 
 and progressive, and it is regarded as a misfortune that 
 members of them should have been brought under foreign 
 rule by the accidents of geography or belligerency. On the 
 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
 — 
 
ee ee 
 — — ae 
 
 a OE Na ee 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 177 
 
 other hand, the subjection of Turks to foreign rule, particu- 
 larly in this controversial case of Smyrna, has frequently 
 been defended on the ground that they are uncivilised and 
 irreclaimable. This is not the case, but it is true that, for 
 reasons touched upon in previous chapters, it is difficult for 
 them to work out their modus vivendi with the West, and 
 that they are backward in matters of private enterprise and 
 organisation. Many of their own leaders are acutely aware 
 of this, and have been struggling against odds to remedy it. 
 The Sultaniyyah School, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the 
 Turkish Hospital at Smyrna were monuments of this 
 endeavour, and it was heart-rending for those who had done 
 such work to see it deliberately undone. While Greek 
 propagandists in Europe and America, and their Western 
 sympathisers, were representing Greek aspirations in Ana- 
 tolia as the cause of civilisation, the Turkish population 
 under Greek rule was actually being cut off by it from access 
 to Western culture. The provisions of the Treaty of Sévres 
 in regard to Smyrna would stand condemned on this result 
 alone, even if they had not also resulted in war and atrocities. 
 ‘The smoking flax he will not quench.’ That text ought to 
 inspire all Western dealings with non-Western peoples in 
 our generation. Under the opposite treatment, how can 
 the Turks or their fellow-Moslems in other countries be 
 expected to persevere in the arduous enterprise of adjust- 
 ment upon which the most enlightened among them have 
 entered 2 This seemingly trivial injustice cuts through all 
 the cant, prejudice, and misconception in which the “ Western 
 Question ’ is habitually muffled, and goes straight to its 
 heart. 
 
 Yet whatever colour Mr. Sterghiadhis’s character may 
 assume under the ‘ acid test ’ of his treatment of the Sultan- 
 iyyah School, the magic title ‘ Harmost of Tonia ’ may be 
 trusted to correct the visual impression.1. On the other 
 
 1 Except in the eyes of that small minority of the Western public that is 
 
 familiar with the history of Ancient Sparta. 
 M 
 
178 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 hand, very few of my readers will credit the following 
 description, drawn from life, of a ‘ People’s Commissary of 
 the Great National Assembly of Angora.’ The individual 
 of whom I am thinking was wearing (at least when I met him) 
 a top-hat and morning coat which would not have betrayed 
 him either inside—or for that matter outside—a London 
 club, though he was less at home in England than in France. 
 The attraction which had drawn him to London on previous 
 occasions had been the reading-room of the British Museum. 
 His study was comparative jurisprudence, about which he 
 had interesting things to say and spoke with animation. 
 In peace-time he was a university professor, but like other 
 stormy petrels of that remarkable tribe,! who love to venture 
 out upon the sea of politics in revolutionary weather, he 
 had temporarily abandoned his vocation for affairs of state. 
 In fact, he was playing the part of a Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs, and that with conspicuous ability. In a brief career 
 he had already driven two very hard bargains—one with 
 Mr. Chicherin at Moscow and another with M. Franklin- 
 Bouillon at Angora. At the time when I met him, he was 
 just going to try his hand on Lord Curzon, if not on Mr. 
 Lloyd George. His name was Yusuf Kemal. 
 
 I infinitely regret that the policy of His Majesty’s Govern- 
 ment prevented me, as a British subject, from visiting 
 Yusuf Kemal Bey’s colleagues in the course of my travels 
 in 1921, but as I was unable to make their acquaintance, I 
 shall not attempt an appreciation of them at second hand. 
 In regard to Mustafa Kemal Pasha I have therefore only 
 to say that he is not a Jew; not a member of that group 
 of politicians who controlled the Committee of Union and 
 Progress, and through it the Ottoman Empire, for half-a- 
 dozen years between the coup d’état of January 1913 and 
 the armistice of October 1918; and not under suspicion of 
 making money or other personal gain out of his present 
 
 1 Aristion of Athens, Steffens of Breslau, Masaryk of Prag, and Wilson 
 of Princeton may serve as examples. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 179 
 
 position. He comes, I understand, from a Rumili Moslem 
 family ; he is a professional soldier; and at a time when 
 smart officers in Turkey had as brilliant prospects in politics 
 as smart lawyers in Greece, he distinguished himself, like 
 Mr. Sterghiddhis, by sticking to his profession. At the 
 Dardanelles he is reported once to have saved a critical 
 situation by taking the command out of his German superior 
 officer’s hands. At any rate, he made sufficient mark to 
 incur the jealousy of Enver, who used his powers as Minister 
 of War to keep Mustafa Kemal in the background from that 
 time onwards till his own downfall. The effect was the 
 opposite to what Enver had intended, for when the triumvir 
 fled the country, Mustafa Kemal emerged as a popular 
 figure—a soldier with a fine record who had been persecuted 
 by the men responsible for the national disaster. Just 
 because he was known to be a personal opponent of Enver, 
 the tame government kept by the Allied Powers at Con- 
 stantinople let him loose in Anatolia (with the approval of 
 the Allied military authorities) as an inspector-general of 
 the Ottoman forces in the early summer of 1919, a few weeks 
 after the landing of the Greek troops at Smyrna. Once 
 there, he taught his countrymen a new answer to an old 
 riddle.1 High Ottoman officials, at the instance of outraged 
 Allied High Commissioners, recalled, degraded, and con- 
 demned the audacious rebel, but tono purpose. He proved 
 by a personal demonstration that a Turk can be his own 
 master in Anatolia without having to wait for a better world, 
 and under his inspiration the National Movement sprang 
 to life. 
 
 Other striking personalities gathered round him at Angora. 
 Besides Yusuf Kemal Bey there was Dr. Adnan Bey, 
 universally praised for his effective interest in the social 
 
 1 The riddle is: ‘Where is a Turk his own master?’ The traditional 
 answer is: ‘In Hell.’ The inventor must have been some Chief Dragoman 
 of a foreign embassy at Constantinople who had spent his life in applying 
 the Capitulations in the capital of that ‘sovereign independent state’ the 
 old Ottoman Empire. 
 
 nh 
 ' 
 
180 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 welfare of the Anatolian peasantry, on which the future of 
 the Turkish nation depends. A remarkable figure was 
 Adnan Bey’s wife, Halidé Hanum, the most celebrated pupil 
 of the American College for Girls at Constantinople,! who 
 is one of the pioneers of the modern movement in Turkey 
 for the emancipation of women, as well as a novelist, a 
 political journalist, and an apostle of ‘ Pan-Turanianism.’ 
 But any selection of names must be arbitrary, for it is no 
 exaggeration to say that, in some place and in some capacity, 
 every Osmanli of character and energy became a worker for 
 the national cause, and no individual names stand out like 
 those of King Constantine, Mr. Venizelos, or Mr. Sterghiddhis 
 on the Greek side. 
 
 Though Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s name is far better known 
 than Mr. Sterghiddhis’s, the Turkish administration in 
 Anatolia did not derive its character from the dictator at 
 Angora to the same extent as the Greek administration did 
 from his counterpart at Smyrna. Nothing could be more 
 dangerously misleading than the nickname ‘ Kemalists,’ 
 which both the Government and the Press in Great Britain 
 were pleased to employ. It suggests that a military adven- 
 turer with a few confederates had somehow—by terrorism, 
 cajolery, or magic—got hold of the interior of Anatolia and 
 started a bogus ‘movement,’ which every self-respecting 
 Turk would have repudiated if the legitimate Government 
 at Constantinople could have given the loyalists effective 
 support. It implies an artificial, stagey, and scandalous 
 pretension, of which respectable Governments could not take 
 cognizance without loss of dignity, and which would certainly 
 collapse sooner or later under the weight of the ‘ Principal 
 Allied Powers’’ displeasure. This is, of course, the well- 
 known ostrich-attitude which consecrated authority regu- 
 larly adopts towards those who defy it. No doubt our 
 ancestors once used to refer to the Americans as ‘ Washing- 
 tonists’; our Austrian contemporaries saw nothing but 
 
 + Now at Arnautkeui, on the Bosphorus, formerly at Scutari. 
 
oe a 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 181 
 
 impertinent ‘Masarykists’ in the Tchechs; and we our- 
 selves have recently been experimenting in this form of 
 political ‘suggestion ’ upon twelve million ‘ Zaghlulists ’ in 
 Egypt. Ofcourse, there are such things as spurious national 
 movements, but every genuine national movement can also 
 be explained away. All corporate action is started by 
 individuals and carried on mainly by an active minority, 
 while the mass follows behind. But readers of the Jungle 
 Book will remember that it was the stolid herd of buffaloes, 
 and not Mowgli on the leader’s back, that trampled the life 
 out of Shere Khan. Opponents of political movements 
 claiming to be national should take to heart Gamaliel’s 
 advice to the Sanhedrin: ‘ Refrain from these men and let 
 them alone, for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will 
 come to naught ; but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow 
 it—lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.’ But 
 it is hard for imperial peoples to avoid the paths of destruc- 
 tion. Their prophets prophesy falsely, and their people love 
 to have it so. 
 
 Though I have not met Mustafa Kemal Pasha in the flesh, 
 I can certify that he is not a ‘Kemalist.’ He is a Turkish 
 Nationalist, and in 1921 I only met or heard of half-a-dozen 
 Turks who were anything else. One was a merchant in a 
 provincial town near Smyrna, who delivered in my presence 
 the double-edged remark that he disliked the Nationalists 
 as much as the Greeks. Another was Damad Ferid Pasha— 
 the unfortunate son-in-law of the Sultan who twice let him- 
 self be lured into taking office at Constantinople during the 
 period after the armistice, and burnt his fingers in trying 
 to pull the Allies’ (or rather, the British and Greek Prime 
 Ministers’) chestnuts out of the fire. A third (by hearsay 
 only) was the Sultan. To these one must add the well- 
 intentioned Prince Sabahu’d-Din and his friends (the would- 
 be leaders of an ‘ Entente Libérale’ Party), an uncertain 
 number of Moslem ecclesiastics in the capital, and the 
 encyclopaedic scholar Riza Tewfik Bey ‘The Philosopher,’ 
 
, 
 ) 
 } 
 | 
 
 182 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 It is amusing to note that the British Government's 
 relations with the Sultan during the Allied occupation of 
 Constantinople were attacked by the Turkish Nationalists 
 and by the Indian Moslems with equal bitterness, but with 
 diametrically opposite presumptions as to their character. 
 Apparently the Indians considered that the Sultan was a 
 prisoner under duress, and that the British Government 
 were restraining him from exercising his lawful authority as 
 Caliph of Islam. Undoubtedly the Turkish Nationalists 
 regarded him as an opponent of constitutional government 
 and almost as a traitor to his country, who was lending 
 himself to British designs against their movement in the 
 hope of recovering the autocratic power formerly enjoyed 
 by Abdu’l-Hamid. In the Indians’ eyes he was a tragic 
 captive, in his own countrymen’s a sordid tool. I do not 
 think that this statement misrepresents the Nationalists’ 
 attitude, though they were naturally not so indiscreet as to 
 publish it from the house tops. It was a symptom of the 
 important and indisputable fact that the Angora movement 
 was national and not religious in character. Its originators 
 may not have been democrats (they certainly were not 
 communists), and probably they contemplated a form of 
 government in which an oligarchy of officials, officers, and 
 other persons of Western education would be paramount over 
 the hojas (ecclesiastics) and the peasantry. But however 
 narrow the actual, if not the nominal, franchise might be, 
 they were determined that the class enjoying it, and not the 
 Dynasty, should be master in the country. 
 
 As Caliph, the Ottoman Sultan may be sacred to Indian 
 Moslems, and his will (as far as it affects them) may be law, 
 but in his own dominions he has always’ been subject, in the 
 last resort, to the will of his servants. The Ottoman 
 Dynasty has lasted because it has created a permanent 
 professional public service ; and this service (the efficiency 
 of which has always affected the fortunes of the Empire at 
 least as much as the character of the reigning sovereign) has 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 183 
 
 constantly limited the Sultan’s power. Even Suleiman the 
 Magnificent had to humour the Janissaries by putting his 
 name on their rolls as a private and ostentatiously drawing 
 rations and pay. Later Sultans have lost their lives not 
 only through palace intrigue but over controversial political 
 questions like that of army reform (which was eventually 
 carried through by Sultan Mahmud 11). Abdu ’|-Hamid was 
 not the first Ottoman autocrat whom his subjects deposed. 
 Only Westerners ignorant of Ottoman history will make the 
 
 ‘mistake of treating the resistance of the Nationalists to the 
 
 Sultan’s authority as a bad joke and sneering at them as 
 if they were truants from an infant school. This was really 
 one of many chapters in the development of a genuine con- 
 stitutional issue, and the precedents gave fair warning that 
 foreign backers of the Sultan would once more lose their 
 money. As for the formula that Great Britain was in duty 
 bound to support the ‘legitimate ’ Government of the Sultan 
 at Constantinople, it was neither ‘ correct > nor sagacious. 
 The schism in Turkish internal politics was the consequence 
 of our occupation of Constantinople, and by favouring, on 
 transparent diplomatic pretexts, the claimant to legitimacy 
 who happened to be under our thumb, we were only strength- 
 ening his rivals. The history of France in 1792-5 and of 
 Russia in 1917-20, and the triumph of King Constantine over 
 Mr. Venizelos, ought to have taught diplomatists once for all 
 that nothing is more surely fatal to either side in a domestic 
 struggle than foreign support. If the Greek landing at 
 Smyrna created the Turkish National Movement, the British 
 support of the Sultan at Constantinople made its fortune. 
 Damad Ferid Pasha, the only convinced opponent of the 
 Nationalists whom local British policy succeeded in raising 
 to the Grand Vizierate, exploited the Sultan’s prestige in 
 every possible way. In the winter of 1919-20, when the 
 National Movement was still dependent upon chetté forces, 
 he encouraged a Circassian chetté named Anzavur to start 
 an anti-Nationalist movement in the Sanjak of Bigha (on 
 
184 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles) and lavished titles and 
 decorations upon him for a few local successes.!_ There was 
 even talk of organising a ‘loyal’ Turkish Army under 
 British officers to reconquer the interior! But in April 
 1920, when the campaigning season came on, Anzavur’s 
 operations broke down, and a Greek offensive was needed to 
 prevent the Nationalist Army from presenting itself at 
 Chanak Kalé and Haidar Pasha. The Circassians—broken 
 reed though they had proved—were afterwards taken up 
 by the Greeks,? but Damad Ferid had another weapon 
 which non-Moslems could not use—the appeal to religion. 
 There is some plausibility in the view that an Ottoman 
 Caliphate and an Ottoman Constitution are incompatible 
 ideals, and the hojas (ecclesiastics) as a class might be 
 expected to support the Caliph in his claims to autocracy, on 
 the ground that Nationalism threatened their influence as 
 much as his. Undoubtedly a national consciousness and 
 an organised religion are both exacting masters, and in con- 
 temporary Turkey it must be as difficult for hojas to steer 
 their course as it is for Catholic bishops in Ireland. Can the 
 professional representative of Islam afford to let the Western- 
 trained officer and official and schoolmaster and physician 
 capture the peasant’s mind? On the other hand, can he 
 venture to denounce a movement which has been so much 
 more efficacious than all the ulema of Islam in defending 
 Moslem territory against the infidel 2? Damad Ferid Pasha 
 put these questions to the test by obtaining a fetwa from 
 the Sheikhu’l-Islam, in which the conduct of the N: ationalists 
 was condemned as contrary to religion. But in Turkey, 
 too, there are such things as anachronisms, and the Grand 
 
 * See Chapter VI. for the military aspect of Anzavur’s activities. 
 
 2 See Chapter VII. 
 
 * The Sheikhu’l-Islam is the principal jurisconsult for Islamic law in the 
 Ottoman Empire and the legal adviser of the Government. He is a member 
 of the Ministry and falls with it, but as he is a legal officer as well as a 
 politician, his opinions do not always accord with ministerial policy. A 
 fetwa is a ‘legal opinion,’ whether given in response to a private or to an 
 official question. 
 
| 
 | 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 185 
 
 Vizier’s antiquated petard had the same effect as the 
 artillery which Pius 1x. used to bring into play against the 
 leaders of the Italian Risorgimento. No one was injured by 
 its explosion except the Grand Vizier himself. It made 
 him so odious and ridiculous in the eyes of his fellow-country- 
 men that he became an embarrassment to his patrons the 
 Allied High Commissioners. When he offered his resigna- 
 
 tion, they did not press him to withdraw it, and thenceforth 
 
 they found it advisable to tolerate at the Porte grand viziers 
 of a more and more Nationalist complexion. Public 
 opinion, when genuine, has a mysterious power. Constanti- 
 nople was under effective military occupation, and the 
 Turkish element does not amount to much more than fifty 
 per cent. of the population, the remainder being more or 
 less decidedly hostile to Turkish Nationalism. Yet, even 
 here, Turkish feeling counted sufficiently to induce the 
 Occupying Powers to defer to it. Tewfik Pasha, ‘Izzet 
 Pasha, and the other statesmen who took office in the capital 
 during and after 1921, were in sympathy—even notoriously 
 in sympathy—with Nationalist aims, but the High Com- 
 missioners shrank from the difficulties of trying to govern 
 the occupied territory without them. 
 
 As for the ‘Entente Libérale,’ their claims to represent 
 the Turkish nation were discredited by the very test which 
 vindicated those of the Nationalist leaders. No inference, 
 perhaps, could have been drawn from the fact that they 
 were in exile during the European War, for while it lasted, 
 entire nations were held down by force, and other exiles, 
 like Professor Masaryk or Dr. Trumbié¢, afterwards returned 
 to govern by popular consent. But all the King’s horses 
 and all the King’s men could not set up Prince Sabahu’d-Din 
 at Constantinople. Nor could the adhesion of Dr. Riza 
 Tewfik Bey patch up the prestige of this decrepit political 
 party. The ‘ Philosopher ’ had played a picturesque part in 
 
 * Turkish Ambassador in London before the European War, not to be 
 confused with the scholar Riza Tewfik Bey. 
 
186 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the 1908 Revolution, and had subsequently withdrawn from 
 politics in disgust, like most of the best original members of 
 the Committee of Union and Progress. But while many of 
 the others offered their services to the new National Move- 
 ment after the fall of Enver, Talaat, and Jemal, Riza Tewfik 
 Bey turned his face in the opposite direction. In 1921 I 
 found him honoured by his countrymen of all parties as a 
 poet and a scholar, and I never once heard his independence 
 of mind or disinterestedness of motive called in question. 
 But I am certain that in his political views he was as excep- 
 tional as in his intellectual achievements. The only other 
 name on my list of anti-Nationalist Turks known to me 
 personally is that of a distinguished official whom I must 
 here leave anonymous. As for those villagers who in the 
 first phase of the Anatolian war took sides with the Greek 
 troops against the Nationalist chettés, I have already ex- 
 plained that the conditions which had influenced them at 
 the time were modified a few months afterwards. If I had 
 had an opportunity of eliciting their views at the time of 
 my visit in 1921, I should have found, I fancy, that they 
 had changed their minds. 
 
 The rapid and spontaneous spread of the National Move- 
 ment over the greater part of Anatolia may be illustrated 
 by the following account of how the news of the Greek 
 landing at Smyrna was received in the far interior. It was 
 given to me in 1921 by an Englishman who in May 1919 
 had been Allied control-officer in the town of X. Up to the 
 end of May, he had been conducting the local process of 
 disarmament without difficulty, though he had no troops 
 with him and indeed no assistants but a couple of orderlies 
 and clerks. In pursuance of the armistice, the Allied High 
 Command at Constantinople was sending him orders for 
 the progressive handing over of breech-blocks, rifles, ammuni- 
 tion, and other military stores. He was transmitting the 
 orders to the Ottoman civil and military authorities, and 
 they were obeying them to his satisfaction. Then one day 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 187 
 
 there was a commotion in the market-place, and he was 
 informed that an agitating rumour was the cause of it. 
 Greek troops had landed at Smyrna and begun to massacre 
 the Moslem population. He denied the rumour by pro- 
 clamation, and the disturbance died down. Three days 
 later there was another and more serious commotion. This 
 time the local Greek and Armenian bishops had received 
 confirmation of the news from their Patriarchates at Con- 
 stantinople. The officer denied it again, declaring that the 
 story was impossible because the armistice terms were well 
 known and Greece could not act in defiance of the Allies. 
 Next day he received an urgent message from the Turkish 
 commandant, and, calling at his office, found him in a state 
 of collapse, with an official telegram from the Ottoman War 
 Office at Constantinople on his desk. The telegram recon- 
 firmed the news, and added that the Greeks had landed 
 under the auspices of the Allies. Then the British officer 
 wired urgently to his own chiefs to learn the truth, and eight 
 days later received for the first time from them the informa- 
 tion which had already reached him through every other 
 channel. But his orders were already ceasing to be obeyed. 
 The Turkish authorities were re-arming and drilling their 
 men, and when he was eventually recalled to Constantinople, 
 he was lucky to escape detention. 
 
 The doctrines to which the Turkish nation thus rallied 
 under the influence of the Greek invasion were first preached 
 openly by Mustafa Kemal Pasha while he was travelling as 
 inspector-general up and down Anatolia. They were formu- 
 lated into a programme by two congresses of notables held 
 during the summer of 1919 at Erzerum and Sivas. The new 
 party won a sweeping success in the parliamentary elections 
 held during the following autumn and early winter ;1 and 
 
 1 The Nationalists were accused of having secured their majority by 
 intimidation, but even if this charge were proved, the effect of intimidation 
 on their part must at least have been counterbalanced by the fact that the 
 capital was in the hands (though not yet under the formal occupation) of 
 the victorious Allies, who were known to disapprove of them, 
 
 a ee 
 
 SS a 
 
188 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 a solid phalanx of Nationalist deputies took their seats 
 under the noses of the Allied High Commissioners at 
 Constantinople, while the military leaders were reorganising 
 the Turkish Army well out of the reach of British battle- 
 ships or Greek divisions. In the Turkish capital, on the 
 28th January 1920, these deputies set their names to the 
 celebrated ‘ National Pact ’—a briefer and more interesting 
 document than the Treaty of Sévres. 
 
 The text of this Solemn League and Covenant is printed 
 at the end of the chapter. Its historical importance does 
 not lie so much in the specific resolutions, which were framed 
 to meet a temporary situation, as in the spirit which in- 
 formed them. A Persian army once chained itself together 
 in order to conquer or die upon the field, and in the eighteenth 
 century Western seamen used to nail their colours to the 
 mast. The similar device of binding oneself to a creed by 
 oath appears to have been a Scottish invention, and un- 
 doubtedly the authors of the Turkish Covenant had Western 
 precedents in mind. Their demands can all be brought 
 under a single formula: ‘ Most-favoured-Western-nation 
 treatment for the Turkish people.’ If the right of self- 
 determination has been established for Western nations, the 
 Turkish nation will insist upon sharing it. If it has been 
 exercised by plebiscite in disputed areas like Silesia or 
 Masuria or Klagenfurt, then there must be plebiscites in the 
 Kars-Ardahan-Batum district and in Western Thrace. If 
 administrative and military servitudes have been attached 
 to international waterways passing through national terri- 
 tories, as has in fact been done with the Scheldt, the Danube, 
 and certain German rivers, then Turkey will accept a similar 
 statute for the Black Sea Straits. But like every Western 
 Power, she must remain complete mistress of her capital, 
 and the interests of foreign commerce must accommodate 
 themselves to the necessities of national defence. Again, 
 if certain rights have been secured to minorities, by treaties 
 arising out of the European War, in defeated Western 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 189 
 
 countries like Germany, Austria and Hungary, or in newly 
 created or aggrandised countries of a Western or Western- 
 ised complexion like Poland, Tchecho-Slovakia, Jugo- 
 slavia, Rumania, and Greece, the Turkish people have no 
 objection to granting the same. In fact, they would gladly 
 be quit, in exchange, of the more extensive cultural autonomy 
 which hitherto they have allowed on their own initiative to 
 Christians and Jews. Only, before they go further, they 
 would like to make sure that Moslem minorities in South- 
 Eastern Europe are benefiting by the minority treaties 
 already signed. Finally, as regards the Capitulations, they 
 might feel differently if Powers like England and France 
 tolerated similar restrictions upon their sovereignty, but, 
 from what they know about our domestic institutions, they 
 assume that we agree with their own view that ‘entire 
 independence and complete liberty of action are a sine qua 
 non of national existence, if a country’s national and 
 economic independence is to be assured and it is to be 
 endowed with an up-to-date well-ordered administration.’ 
 They do not forget that they have been defeated or expect 
 not to suffer for it, for Germany and Austria, their former 
 Western Allies, have not been treated leniently. Accord- 
 ingly, they resign themselves to losing the provinces in- 
 habited by Arab majorities within the area subject to Allied 
 military occupation under the terms of the armistice signed 
 on the 30th October 1918—but on the understanding that 
 this occupation will be temporary, and that the destiny of 
 the Arabs will be decided on the Western principle of self- 
 determination, the application of which they have already 
 claimed for themselves. The document begins and ends on 
 a note of challenge. We await your terms, gentlemen of 
 the West, but meanwhile we are taking our precautions, in 
 case your terms should turn out to be in contradiction to 
 your principles. By your principles we stand. After all, 
 you invented them ! 
 
 This is the spirit which breathes through the laconic 
 
190 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 articles of the Turkish National Pact, and gives them a 
 permanent interest. The Pact was something more than 
 a statement of war-aims or a party programme. It was the 
 first adequate expression of a sentiment which had been 
 growing up in the minds of Western-educated Turks for 
 three or four generations, which in a half-conscious way had 
 inspired the reforms of Midhat Pasha and the Revolution of 
 1908, and which may dominate Turkey and influence the 
 rest of the Middle East for many generations to come. It 
 was as emphatic an adoption of the Western national idea 
 as any manifesto of the Greek War of Independence, and 
 it was at the same time an appeal to Western public opinion. 
 You revile us, it pleaded in effect, for having failed to estab- 
 lish a modus vivendi with you, but such adjustments have to 
 be reciprocal. As one among your own prophets has said : 
 * Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you.’ 
 
 The Allied occupation of Constantinople, the break-up of 
 the Ottoman Parliament, and the formal establishment of a 
 National Government at Angora—events which followed 
 one another during the spring of 1920—have been mentioned 
 at the beginning of the chapter. The Great National 
 Assembly was the body in whose name the new government 
 at Angora was carried on. Fugitive deputies from the 
 dispersed Parliament were given seats in it, as well as newly 
 elected representatives from the Anatolian constituencies, 
 but, like other war-time chambers, it did not exercise the 
 sovereign power, and the ministers of state constituted 
 a body of executive magistrates with the fashionable title 
 of commissioner, which in Soviet Russia, British Egypt, 
 Palestine, and Mesopotamia, French Syria, and Greek 
 Smyrna was borne at the time by the de facto rulers. 
 
 Before the war of extermination spread from the Greek 
 occupied territories to ‘ Pontus’ in June 1921,? the Angora 
 
 1 The difference in connotation between the sinister word ‘Kommissar’ 
 and the untarnished respectability of ‘Haut Commissaire’ and ‘ High Com- 
 missioner,’ is a philological curiosity of the post-war period. 
 
 ® See Chapter VII. J 
 
6 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 191 
 
 Government had, as far as my information goes, a fairly 
 good record. In the north-eastern provinces of the territory 
 under its rule, the Constantinople Ministry of Refugees 
 claimed, by the early summer of 1921, to have repatriated 
 461,062 out of 868,962 Moslem refugees who had been up- 
 rooted by the Russian invasion of 1916-18, as well as 335,000 
 Greeks and Armenians—statements which I reproduce with 
 the reservation that I have had no opportunity to verify 
 them. On the other hand, an unknown number of Armenian 
 women and children appropriated by Moslem households 
 during the terrible atrocities of 1915 remained in captivity, 
 and I have not heard of steps having been taken by the 
 Angora Government to release them, as it behoved them to 
 do if they were to dissociate themselves effectively in Western 
 eyes from the régime of Talaat and Enver. There were also 
 something like 300,000 Armenian refugees from the same 
 atrocities in the territory of the Erivan Republic, who had 
 been living there for five years in extreme destitution and with 
 an appalling death-rate, but who were not enabled to return 
 to their homes in Ottoman territory, even after the formal 
 conclusion of peace between Angora and Erivan at the close 
 of 1920. These were bad marks against the Nationalist 
 Government, even allowing for the fact that they were 
 omissions to repair the ill-doing of their predecessors and 
 not positive misdeeds of their own. As regards atrocities, 
 those incidental to the Cilician campaign fall outside the 
 scope of this book,! while those committed against Greek 
 minorities are discussed in Chapter VII. But, as under the 
 neighbouring Greek administration, there were things that, 
 without being technically ‘atrocious,’ were deplorable. 
 During the winter of 1920-1 a number of unfortunate Greek 
 railwaymen, belonging to the section of the Aidin Railway 
 that was in the Nationalists’ hands, were interned with their 
 families under cruel conditions on an island in Lake Egirdir ; 
 
 1 But see in this connection ‘The Area of the Organised Atrocities,’ at the 
 end of Chapter VII. below. 
 
aie 
 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
 192 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 and the accounts of the proceedings of the military tribunals 
 in ‘Pontus’ which reached the Zimes correspondent at 
 Constantinople, justify, if correct, his severe comments upon 
 them.! Short of atrocities, the standard of treatment meted 
 out to minorities seems, unfortunately, to have been set by 
 the subordinate authorities on the Turkish as well as on the 
 Greek side of the Anatolian front. 
 
 Perhaps the most curious episode of Nationalist adminis- 
 tration in Anatolia was that of the ‘ Christian Turks.’ From 
 the summer of 1921 onwards, there were persistent reports, 
 always emanating from Turkish Nationalist publicity 
 agencies, of a new movement, headed by an Orthodox priest 
 named Eftim (Efthymios) from Keskin in South-Central 
 Anatolia, for founding a Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate 
 independent of the Oecumenical Patriarchate at Constanti- 
 nople. The Oecumenical Patriarchate appears to have 
 considered the movement sufficiently substantial to require 
 denunciation, and the Angora Government afterwards stated 
 that, in view of this, they had refrained from giving encour- 
 agement to Papa Eftim and had not acted on his proposals 
 until his movement had declared itself again, and this time 
 unmistakably, after the Greek retreat from the Sakkaria.? 
 In fact, they claimed that it was a spontaneous manifestation 
 of Turkish national feeling among the Orthodox Christian 
 minority, and stoutly denied that it owed anything to official 
 pressure or inspiration. 
 
 This would, of course, have been a sensible and advantage- 
 ous line for the Anatolian Orthodox minority to take. As 
 has been explained already in Chapter IV., it is evident to 
 any outside observer that their very existence depends on 
 a good understanding with their Moslem neighbours, with 
 whom they do possess the important link of a common 
 vernacular language. But this hardly affects the credibility 
 of the story, for in the Near and Middle East common-sense 
 
 1 See the Zimes of the 18th and 22nd October 1921. 
 * See Chapter VI. 
 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
~~ 
 
 QO 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 193 
 
 rarely governs action, and rulers are shameless in forging 
 testimonials from their victims. For example, the Turkish 
 villages round Aidin had suffered particularly from outrages 
 by the Greek troops in the summer of 1919; many of them 
 had been ‘shot up’ and burnt ; but when: I visited Aidin 
 in February 1921, the Greek authorities showed me an 
 ‘ original ’ document—duly written in Turkish and sealed 
 by dozens of Turkish mukhtars (village headmen) from this 
 very district—petitioning for the perpetuation of Greek 
 rule! ‘ Beit known unto your worships,’ ran the preamble,' 
 ‘that your humble petitioners are not of the curséd tribe of 
 the Osmanlis. The ancient and noble blood of the Saljuqs 
 flows in their veins, and, like your worships, they have 
 groaned under the tyranny of the Ottoman conqueror for 
 centuries. Now that they have been liberated by Hellenic 
 chivalry, the categorical imperatives of humanity and 
 civilisation forbid their being abandoned to their tyrants 
 again !’ 
 
 The seals were the seals of the mukhtars, but the voice 
 was the voice of an examinee in universal history, and there 
 is the same suspicious erudition about the thesis attributed 
 to Papa Eftim. According to this theory, the present 
 Turkish-speaking Christian minorities in Anatolia are 
 descended from Turkish immigrants earlier than the Saljuqs, 
 or perhaps from Saljugs converted to Christianity before 
 the majority of the tribe was converted to Islam. They 
 have always read the Bible and performed the Orthodox 
 ritual in the Turkish language. Nothing connects them 
 with the Greeks except their use of the Greek alphabet and 
 their acknowledgment, hitherto, of the ecclesiastical supre- 
 macy of the Oecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople— 
 both mere historical survivals from the cultural influence of 
 the East Roman Empire. 
 
 This myth has no foundation. The Greek origin of these 
 Turkish-speaking Christians in Anatolia is betrayed by the 
 * Tam quoting from memory only. 
 
 N 
 
194 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 identity of the name ‘ Rum,’ by which they are known in 
 Turkish, with that of ‘Romyi’ (Romaioi, or East Romans), 
 which the Greek-speaking Christians of Constantinople and 
 Athens still apply to themselves in their everyday vernacular. 
 The transitional stage—half-way from Greek to Turkish— 
 through which the language of the Cappadocian ‘ Rum’ is 
 passing at present, illustrates the process by which others, 
 like the Karamanly, have become entirely Turkish-speaking.? 
 As for their ritual, there is a record of their having performed 
 it in Turkish in certain districts ;? but, like their Greek- 
 speaking co-religionists, they have generally employed 
 Ancient Greek for this, and the Turkish Bible in Greek 
 characters was a Protestant gift from the American mission- 
 aries, at which Orthodox prelates at first looked askance. 
 All this has been narrated in Chapter IV., but the historical 
 truth would not matter, if Papa Eftim really had the will 
 to believe, or to make his flock believe, the legend. In 
 politics, what Plato calls ‘ Noble Lies ’ are often beneficial, 
 and this one could be grafted on to the Tree of Knowledge so 
 as almost to counterfeit nature. Ecclesiastical autonomies 
 and the translation of the Bible and liturgy into vernaculars 
 are in the best tradition of Orthodox Christendom. The 
 Orthodox Church, to its credit, never made Ancient Greek 
 a sacred language or erected the Oecumenical Patriarchate 
 into a Papacy, and it does not depend on external uniformity 
 for the maintenance of a common communion and creed. 
 
 There are, however, real ‘Christian Turks,’ of Turkish descent, in the Bal- 
 kan Peninsula. The East Roman Emperors, like the Arab Caliphs, employed 
 Turkish mercenaries from the Steppes in the ninth century after Christ, 
 and these adopted the religion of their masters. A colony of them was 
 settled by the Emperor Theophilus (4.D. 829-42) in the neighbourhood of 
 Salonika, and these ‘ Vardariots’ may be the ancestors of the little Turkish- 
 speaking Orthodox communities that still exist to the east of Serres. Some 
 of the Anatolian Orthodox also may be descended from such colonists, but 
 there is no evidence forit. There are, besides, the Gagauz Orthodox Christians 
 in Dobruja and Eastern Thrace—descendants, these, of Ghuzz nomads who 
 invaded the Balkan Peninsula by the route north of the Caspian and Black 
 Seas at the same time as the Saljuqs invaded the Anatolian Peninsula 
 through Persia. But the Gagauz—like the Karait Turkish Jews and unlike 
 the Anatolian Rum—not only speak Turkish but preserve their Turkish 
 tribal name. > See Addendum on p. 405. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 195 
 
 There were four independently governed churches in the 
 Orthodox communion from the beginning. There are now 
 at least a dozen, an increase due almost entirely to peaceful 
 secessions from the Patriarchate of Constantinople under 
 the influence of the Western idea of nationality. In this 
 fashion the local Orthodox Church became autonomous in 
 Russia, and more recently in the Kingdom of Greece (1850-2), 
 in Serbia (1879), and in Rumania (1885), and an autonomous 
 Albanian Orthodox Church has recently been started by 
 Bishop Fan Noli. Hitherto, the Oecumenical Patriarchate 
 has never offered strenuous resistance to this tendency except 
 in the case of Bulgaria, who had to struggle for her ecclesi- 
 astical independence in the ninth and tenth centuries, and 
 again in 1870. But the almost complete triumph of political 
 nationalism in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire between 
 1912 and 1920 portends the final extinction of an ecclesias- 
 tical institution which, however accommodating, is in the 
 last resort incompatible with the national principle. The 
 Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian inhabitants of the new 
 provinces permanently acquired by Greece from the Ottoman 
 Empire in Rumelia after 1912, are bound to be transferred, 
 sooner or later, from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the 
 Patriarchate at Constantinople to that of the Holy Synod at 
 Athens, for the traditional relations of Church and State in 
 the Near Eastern world require that the boundaries of ecclesi- 
 astical and political jurisdiction shall coincide. When this 
 inevitable event occurs (and the party feud between Royal- 
 ists and Venizelists has no doubt hastened its advent), the 
 Oecumenical Patriarch will be left with no flock except the 
 Greek-speaking Orthodox population of Constantinople and 
 its immediate neighbourhood and the minorities in Anatolia. 
 It is therefore to be expected that the Patriarchate will fight 
 even harder to retain the Anatolians than the Bulgarians ; 
 and thus, whether Papa Eftim is the leader of a genuine 
 movement (as Bishop Fan Noli certainly is) or an accomplice 
 in an ingenious fake, his gesture has created a new situation. 
 
196 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 The issue rests with the Anatolian Orthodox minorities 
 themselves, for considering their well-proved faculty for 
 holding out against persecution, it is certain that the Patri- 
 archate cannot coerce them into preserving nor the Angora 
 Government into abandoning their old ecclesiastical affilia- 
 tions against their own wishes. At this stage it is impossible 
 to say whether common-sense and ties of neighbourhood or 
 sentimentality and contrariness will prevail withthem. But 
 pressure from either of the interested parties will only drive 
 them into the arms of the other. Both the Patriarchate and 
 the Angora Government will therefore be wise to maintain 
 
 a passive and ‘expectant’ attitude, for each has great. 
 
 interests at stake—the Patriarchate, possibly, its existence, 
 and the Nationalists the crowning of their endeavours, for a 
 Turkish nation cannot live and flourish in Anatolia until the 
 Christian minorities as well as the Moslem majority in the 
 country have given it their voluntary allegiance. 
 
 A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS 
 [Narrative written at Smyrna on the 21st February 1921.] 
 
 We started from the konak at Aidin after lunch—myself, 
 the sergeant, nine soldiers, and two horses. That morning I 
 had climbed the acropolis of Tralleis—a steep, isolated hill 
 on the plateau behind Aidin, where the ancient city stood—in 
 order to get some notion of the road we should follow, but it 
 had shown me little. The ravines, ploughed deep into the 
 flanks of the hills by the abundant streams, wound away out 
 of sight, and the nearest spurs hid the summits of the 
 mountains. Southwards, in the opposite direction, the 
 marvellous plain of the Maeander was in view, with the 
 winding river, the bridge where the Greek and Italian out- 
 posts face each other, and beyond that the mountains of 
 China and Mughla. However, that was not my direction. 
 The village beyond the bridge, on the Italian side of the 
 river, is the headquarters of a young man called Yuruk Ali, 
 
— 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 197 
 
 and the Italian Government does not guarantee your nose 
 and ears if you trespass there.! 
 
 We followed the track up the stream that comes down 
 from the mountains between the Turkish and Greek quarters 
 of Aidin. For the first hour we passed ruined and abandoned 
 water-mills, then a ruined Turkish village on the further side 
 of the ravine. Then we began to climb a zig-zag path 
 through ever thicker brushwood, and emerged after two 
 hours on a spur of the mountains cleared of trees and 
 occupied by the Turkish village where we were to pass the 
 night. 
 
 Dagh Emir is a good village, as Turkish villages go. There 
 is a Greek gendarmerie post there, and the headmen of the 
 neighbouring villages came to call on us in the section com- 
 mander’s house. Afterwards we adjourned to the house of 
 the headman of Dagh Emir, where the other men of the 
 village were assembled. The section commander and the 
 headman were on good terms. I could see that there was a 
 familiarity between them which could not have been assumed 
 for my edification. But how times have changed! The 
 headman had done his first term of military service (thirty- 
 six months) in Krete, when it was an Ottoman province. 
 The section commander was a Kretan, and his father (he 
 himself was young) must have been one of the rayahs whom 
 the headman had to hold down. Now the Kretan was 
 master and the Turk the subject race, and if one race had 
 to rule the other (which is a bad arrangement either way 
 round), it seemed more natural that it should be so.2. The 
 Kretan was a smart soldier—well shaven and clothed, 
 intelligent and educated. The Turk was a primitive being. 
 I do not know into what distant exile his subsequent terms 
 of service may have carried him. Perhaps to the Adriatic 
 or the Red Sea. But you would never have guessed that 
 
 1 When I wrote this, I was looking at the Italians and all their works 
 through Greek spectacles. 
 
 2 In the light of subsequent experience, I withdraw this judgment and 
 emphasise the words in brackets. 
 
198 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 he had been out of his native village, and those who had been 
 fortunate enough to avoid military service had, in fact, never 
 travelled more than a day’s journey beyond their homes. 
 Next day we took a guide from Dagh Emir, and when we 
 halted to eat I offered him a sardine. He told me then that 
 it was the first fish he had eaten in his life (he was getting on 
 for sixty), yet from Dagh Emir you look right down the plain 
 to the Maeander mouth and see the glint of the sea. I asked 
 him how far he had been. To Aidin and Tiré (the two 
 market towns on either side of the mountains), and once in 
 his life to Smyrna (a short day’s journey from either town 
 by train). This is the life of the Turkish peasant in the 
 mountains, even in so comparatively civilised a district of 
 Anatolia as the Smyrna Zone. 
 In the headman’s house every man put his tobacco in the 
 middle for common use (a gracious custom), and chestnuts 
 and water were handed round. What should we talk about ? 
 In a Greek village we should have talked politics, especially 
 when a conference had been convened for our special benefit 
 in London.1 But my sergeant—the scoutmaster of Aidin 
 and interpreter for Turkish and English in the Colonel’s 
 office—knew better. He began to tell a story from the 
 -Qur’an: ‘Once uponatime....’ ‘ Yes ?’ murmured the 
 Turks with a childlike expectancy, and listened open- 
 mouthed. Seeing that the tale had a moral, I thought of 
 Tolstoy’s short stories, and as my Turkish does not run to 
 narrative, I got the sergeant to translate. I began with the 
 two pilgrims to Jerusalem. They were easily transformed 
 into Hajjis going to the Haramein. ‘The English gentleman 
 says that once upon a time there were two Hajjis....’ The 
 mouths opened wider still. They had not expected to learn 
 about Hajjis from a Frank, and the story went down well. 
 I followed on with the peasant who bought land from the 
 Bashkirs, and the company laughed when the sun went down 
 
 1 T now realise that these Turkish villagers could not possibly have talked 
 politics in our company, and I draw no inference as to their real outlook 
 from our conversation that evening. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 199 
 
 and he fell dead half-way up the hill. But the sergeant knew 
 best after all. ‘ Once upon a time,’ he began again, ‘a man 
 was sitting under an oak tree and looking at a melon patch. 
 He said : “‘ God was mistaken in making the small fruit grow 
 on the big tree and the big fruit on the small.” Just then 
 an acorn fell and hit him on the nose. “Thank God it was 
 not a melon,” he said. ‘God knows best after all.” ’ This 
 was the success of the evening, and I realised that if you talk 
 to Turkish peasants you must be simple indeed. 
 
 The party broke up in good humour, and the sergeant and 
 I stayed to sleep on the headman’s floor. But the sergeant 
 was taking no risks, and a sentry with fixed bayonet stood 
 on guard all night at the headman’s door. 
 
 Next morning we started early, for we had many hours— 
 we could never discover quite how many—to go. At first 
 it was six, it had risen to eight by midday, and it was ten 
 before we actually arrived at Tiré. Towards the end of 
 our journey we discovered that our old guide from Dagh 
 Emir did not really know the road. He had determined to 
 come with us for protection on the way, and had assumed a 
 knowledge of the road in order to secure our company. The 
 road wound downwards and upwards for hours through a 
 tangle of valleys and hills—a narrow mule-track with 
 thickets all round and the soil rooted up everywhere by the 
 wild boars. There are innumerable boars in this country 
 just now. To Moslems they are unclean, and, before the 
 Greek occupation, the Christians could not hunt them because 
 they were disarmed. It is a magnificent country—not unlike 
 Greece, but ampler and more generously endewed. The 
 mountains are made of softer stuff which disintegrates more 
 readily than the Greek limestone, and the soil is clothed 
 with trees and permeated with water. In every ravine 
 water was flowing, though this has been an exceptionally 
 dry year. Instead of goats (the scourge of Greece) there 
 were cattle, small but fat and good yielders of milk. ‘The 
 tents of the Yuruks (Turkish nomads) were pitched here and 
 
200 THE WESTERN QUESTION | 
 
 there, and a little Yuruk girl with glossy brown hair made 
 us a gift of salt when we stopped by the Sary Su stream for 
 our midday meal. All over the mountains there were wild t 
 fig trees and olives, to within less than an hour’s distance 
 from the summit of the pass (though the altitude of the 
 summit is nearly 3600 feet above sea-level), and the higher 
 we climbed the more villages we saw and the more cultiva- 
 tion. The whole of this hill-country is fertile. Security, 
 not soil or water, is wanting to make it productive. 
 Late in the afternoon our path led us through a village, 
 and the men came out, hand on heart, to bid us welcome. 
 Only one man, fat and swarthy, remained sitting on his 
 sheepskin. We sat down beside him. ‘I am feeling very 
 ill,” he muttered. ‘Where?’ ‘All over, head, arms, and 
 legs, and I have had no appetite for six months.’ It was a 
 strange medical history for so stout and well-liking a man, 
 and my sergeant remarked to me in English that he was a 
 bad fellow. We continued our journey, and sure enough 
 after half an hour our guide’s tongue was loosed. ‘That was 
 a bad man,’ he said, ‘a chetté (brigand). Once at Dagh | 
 Emir, when we were all in the mosque, he came and took 
 everything from our houses.’ ‘Why haven’t you killed 
 him?’ Tasked. ‘ He has still years to live,’ was the answer. 
 I took it to mean that he has associates who would avenge 
 his death. Our sergeant offered to arrest the fat man, if our 
 guide would give evidence against him. But no, he preferred 
 to let well alone. 
 And so we marched along, always climbing higher and 
 never seeing the summit, though now the sun was sinking 
 fast. But at last the trees came to anend. We passed the 
 springs from which the streams started, and suddenly we 
 were on the edge of a precipice, looking straight down upon 
 a plain as low and level as the plain of the Maeander from 
 which we had been mounting steadily for a day and a half. 
 It was the famous plain of the Cayster. Before us Tiré, 
 our destination, was spread out like a city in an aeroplane 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 201 
 
 photograph. Beyond, the sunset was tinging the snow on 
 the mountains of Salyhly and Alashehir, which I had seen a 
 week before from the further side. It was a wonderful 
 moment, and God was kind. We were lighted by the moon 
 down the rocky zig-zag track into the town, an hour and a 
 half’s journey more, and the weather did not break till we 
 were safely in bed. Next morning, when I looked out of 
 my window at Tiré, it was pouring with rain. The clouds 
 were clinging to the sides of the mountains, and above them 
 I could see the snow lying on the heights which we had 
 crossed the evening before. 
 
 AN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT 
 [Narrative written at Smyrna on the 21st February 1921.] 
 
 We arrived at Tepé Keui in the dusk. We had made the 
 twenty-five miles from Tiré in not much more than four 
 hours. The old chaussée, grass-grown and left unmetalled 
 for years, was excellent for trotting. The road matched the 
 country—derelict too. I think we passed through two 
 (small) villages and one deserted tekké (dervish monastery). 
 Yet the soil, I imagine, is one of the richest in the world. 
 Far away, on the slopes of the mountains on either side of 
 the Caystrian plain, we could see here and there some larger 
 settlements, and I suppose there is cultivation in their 
 neighbourhood. But.in the middle of the plain, where our 
 road took us, there is nothing. It is an empty land. The 
 cause of this was indicated by the way in which we travelled : 
 an advance guard of two soldiers riding 100 yards ahead ; 
 the captain from Tiré, my sergeant, and myself in the 
 middle, and three soldiers bringing up the rear. We took 
 special precautions when we passed through the villages, and 
 the sergeant got worried if any horse lagged behind. We 
 were still within the area infested by the chettés (brigands) 
 who slip over from the Italian Zone. The captain pointed 
 out to me a hill to the south. ‘There was a scrap behind 
 there yesterday. One killed on each side.’ 
 
202 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 At Tepé Keui my friends left me at the gate of the experi- 
 mental farm and rode on to Torbaly—the junction of the 
 Cayster and Maeander valley railways, with a considerable 
 Greek population. I was greeted by the director of the farm 
 and enjoyed his hospitality for the night and the following 
 day. 
 
 I had already heard the director’s history. His father 
 had been a shipowner in one of the Ionian Islands off the 
 west coast of Greece, and had made money, like other people 
 in that business. The son had been brought up in Europe 
 (he told me that he had been in every European country 
 except Norway) and had pursued a long course of study in 
 scientific agriculture in Switzerland, and afterwards in Paris. 
 Later, the family business had been transferred to Odessa, 
 and my host, while young (he is a young man still), found 
 himself very rich. He had a car of his own, and did what 
 pleased him. Then came the War and Bolshevism. The 
 father and brother were killed, the property disappeared, 
 and he was left without a penny in the world. He bethought 
 him of his studies in agriculture, and of the new method 
 of performing agricultural operations by motor-tractors—a 
 by-product of the ‘tank,’ which had just been invented. 
 So he went into an engine works for eight months as an 
 ordinary hand, acquired a thorough knowledge of the 
 engines by which these tractors are driven, and was then 
 employed by the Greek Government to cultivate a large 
 estate in Thessaly for supplying the army with food. An 
 old fellow-student from Paris joined him there, and they 
 came on together a month or two ago to Tepé Keui, where 
 they are now in the service of Mr. Sterghiadhis, the Greek 
 High Commissioner for the Smyrna Zone. 
 
 Tepé Keui is Government property. The estate originally 
 belonged to Abdu’l-Hamid. After the Revolution of 1908 
 it was transferred from the Crown to the State, and allowed 
 to go to rack and ruin. My friend found the house dilapi- 
 dated, the cattle-sheds choked with dung, the currant bushes 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 203 
 
 suffocated with undergrowth and unpruned, the fig trees left 
 to degenerate. He brought with him two old tractors which 
 some Americans had scrapped as useless, but which he has 
 managed to repair. He has with him twelve soldiers, seven 
 pupils (all local Greek peasants), and a mechanic. He 
 reckons that, with tractors, one man can perform all the 
 agricultural operations for ten hectares in the year. At 
 present he is only beginning, but the possibilities of ex- 
 pansion are almost infinite. We climbed to the roof of a 
 building (the grand-stand of the Sultan’s racecourse, now 
 being transformed into a combined lecture-room and 
 engine-shed) and surveyed his kingdom. The estate 
 stretched away as far as the eye could see. 
 
 The villages on the horizon were in it, and the mountains 
 beyond. The plain between us and the villages could grow 
 currants and figs and olives, cereals and cotton. On the 
 mountains there were innumerable wild. figs and olives 
 already, and he was offering possession of them to any 
 peasant who would graft them and make them bear fruit. 
 
 In the director’s'mind (and in the mind of Mr. Sterghiddhis 
 who appointed him) the real importance of Tepé Keui is 
 educational. By this example, the peasantry—Turks and 
 Greeks alike—are to learn to exploit the agricultural riches 
 of the Smyrna Zone. But the experiment at Tepé Keui is 
 of more than local significance. For all Anatolia it may 
 mark the turn of the tide. For nine centuries now, the 
 nomadism introduced by the Turkish conquerors from 
 Central Asia has been divorcing Anatolia from agriculture, 
 and now, perhaps, the plough (reinforced by the motor- 
 tractor) is going at last to recover the ground it has lost.’ 
 But the importance of this new mechanical farming may be 
 greater still. We talked of the unnatural concentration of 
 population, during the last century, in the great cities of 
 Europe and America; of the countryside’s revenge upon 
 
 1 Wor a criticism of Mr. Frangépulos’s view of nomadism and its influence 
 in the Ottoman Empire, see Chapter VIII., pp. 338-43 below. 
 
204 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the city during the War ; of the tension between town and 
 country which has arisen all over the world, from Russia to 
 the Middle West of America ; and of the downfall of certain 
 cities, like Vienna and, possibly, Smyrna. In my friend’s 
 opinion, we are on the eve of a centrifugal movement of 
 population, a demobilisation, as it were, of the overgrown 
 towns. But in returning to the fields humanity will not 
 forget what it has learnt in the factories. The great inven- 
 tion of the last century—scientific machinery—will be 
 retained and developed, and the earth will be cultivated 
 as it has never been before. 
 
 This is what we talked about in Abdu’l-Hamid’s villa, and 
 I felt how strange a country Anatolia is. It combines the 
 romance of the new and the old. Next day, as my train 
 stopped at the stations on the railway to Smyrna, I studied 
 the headdress of the Turkish peasants on the platforms. It 
 is the same kerchief or mitra, wound round the head and 
 sometimes under the chin as well, that you see Asiatics 
 wearing in the paintings on Ancient Greek vases. Darius 
 
 wears just such a mitra in the famous battle-mosaic of — 
 
 Pompeii. These peasants are the Ancient Lydians and 
 Phrygians, with nothing but their language changed. Yet 
 the dominant impression is not the memory of Classical 
 Antiquity. Old as its history is, you feel that the country 
 has never been used by its inhabitants. The forests, the 
 waters, the plains, still wait for the hand that will gather in 
 their riches.1_ The romance is less of the past than of a new 
 world in the making. 
 
 GREEK PRISONS AT SMYRNA 
 [Written at Athens on the 14th August 1921.] 
 
 When I was at Smyrna the other day, I visited two 
 prisons, one being the Central Prison near the konak 
 (Government buildings) and the other an extemporised 
 house of bondage in the Rue Maltaise. The former was 
 
 ’ For the bearings of this, see p. 134 above. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 205 
 
 decent as far as I penetrated—and that was only to the 
 ‘no-man’s-land ’ between two parallel lines of bars, across 
 which the prisoners were allowed to talk to their friends 
 from outside. The second prison was not decent. It 
 flanked both sides of one of those cul-de-sac passages which 
 branch off at right angles from the narrow streets of Smyrna, 
 and the principal cell on the ground floor had been a private 
 warehouse under the Turkish régime. The bars which once 
 protected the produce of the interior now penned in human 
 beings. When I walked up to the bars and talked through 
 them, there were about forty men inside, and I was told that 
 at times the number rose to a hundred. Their misdemean- 
 ours varied from being suspected of a wish to join the 
 Nationalist Army (if Turks) or not to join the Greek Army 
 (if Greek Ottoman subjects), to being taken up drunk and 
 disorderly in the streets, but they were all subjected to the 
 same filthy and insanitary conditions. When I inquired 
 about sanitary arrangements, the Greek warders burst out 
 laughing and enlightened me by pointing to a corner of the 
 room—undrained and on the same level as the rest of the 
 floor, on which the prisoners slept without bedding. Several 
 of these unhappy people told me that they were ill, and 
 certainly most of them had the appearance of being so. 
 They told me further that the prison was never visited by 
 a doctor, and that they were not provided with sufficient 
 water to drink. I must do this much justice to the Greek 
 warders, that they let me look and talk as much as I pleased, 
 but then I do not think it occurred to them that there was 
 anything to be ashamed of in the condition of the people and 
 the building under their charge. 
 
 In the other and more decent prison, I visited two pro- 
 minent Turkish inhabitants of Smyrna whose imprisonment 
 since about two months previously had created some stir. 
 With one of them (like myself, a professor and journalist) I 
 managed to exchange a few words in the presence of the 
 prison authorities. To the second—a provision merchant— 
 
| 
 | 
 | 
 | 
 
 206 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 I only succeeded in shouting across ‘ no-man’s-land ’ through 
 the bars, but I afterwards made inquiries about his case 
 from several sources, and give my results, with the necessary 
 reservation that I had no time to verify them and that they 
 represent only the prisoner’s side of the case. 
 
 There seems no doubt that, rather less than two months 
 ago, this gentleman had suddenly been thrown into 
 prison (where he still remains without trial) on the ground 
 that he had been selling sugar in Smyrna at a price several 
 piastres per ‘oka ’ below that of his fellow-merchants, who 
 are of course mostly Greeks. He imported his sugar from 
 Constantinople, not on his own account, but as commission- 
 agent for an Armenian merchant in business there. Sugar 
 so imported does not pay duty on arrival at Smyrna, because 
 Smyrna is still juridically Ottoman territory, and the 
 sugar is supposed to have paid the Ottoman customs-duty 
 when. it originally enters Ottoman territory at Constanti- 
 nople. His accusers declared that the duty on this sugar 
 had not in reality been paid at Constantinople; that, by 
 making a false declaration to this effect, he had evaded 
 paying duty altogether; and that this was how he had 
 managed to undersell his competitors. The prisoner, on his 
 side, maintained that duty had been paid at Constantinople ; 
 explained the lower price on the ground that the sugar sold 
 consisted of old stocks originally bought below the current 
 wholesale price ; and pleaded that in any case he was not 
 responsible, since he had not sold the sugar on his own 
 account but merely as agent for a principal in Constanti- 
 nople. He had memorialised the Greek High Commissioner, 
 and in support of his contention had submitted, six weeks 
 before my visit, twenty-four business letters, addressed to 
 him by the merchant at Constantinople for whom he had 
 been acting. But the Greek authorities had postponed the 
 case pending inquiries in Constantinople, and these may 
 take months, while the merchant remains in prison and 
 his business goes to pieces. It appears that he has 
 
 ‘ 
 
emg 
 
 nl 
 
 — 
 
 ———- 
 
 ci 
 
 GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 207 
 
 offered to find sureties up to L.T. 12,500, or to deposit that 
 sum himself as bail in a bank, but the Greek authorities 
 refuse to release him on bail unless the money is paid 
 over to themselves. This is natural, but it is also 
 natural that the merchant should refuse, in the belief that 
 if once he paid the sum over to the authorities he would 
 never recover it. So in prison he remains. Turkish circles 
 in Smyrna believe that he is the victim of a plot by the 
 Greek merchants to ruin his business. This may or may not 
 be true, but certainly it is not incredible. 
 
 This is all that I was able to see of the Greek prisons in 
 Smyrna during a short visit. Of course the question is 
 one of comparison. How do these Greek prisons compare 
 with those of the civilised countries with which Greece 
 claims to rank, and with those of the Ottoman Empire over 
 which she claims so great a superiority ? The comparatively 
 decent prison was originally built and equipped by the 
 previous Ottoman authorities. The obscene prison is a 
 new creation of the Greek régime. Perhaps the Greek 
 authorities will claim indulgence for the conditions which 
 I observed in the Maltesica prison on the ground that it is 
 an emergency arrangement. But, then, how is it that 
 the Greek administration in Smyrna needs more prison- 
 accommodation than its predecessor ? 
 
 THE TURKISH NATIONAL PACT 
 (L’EMPIRE OTTOMAN EST MORT! VIVE LA TURQUIE!) 
 
 I 
 FRENCH TEXT, OBTAINED FROM A TURKISH SOURCE 
 
 ‘ CHAMBRE DES Dé&putis OTTOMANE. 
 
 ‘Les Députés du Parlement Ottoman ayant approuvé et 
 signé le Pacte National, dont nous donnons ci-dessous la copie, 
 déclarent les principes qui y sont énoncés comme renfermant 
 en eux le maximum de sacrifices possibles auxquels la Nation 
 Ottomane pourra consentir, en vue de s’assurer une paix juste 
 et durable. 
 
208 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 ARTICLE I, 
 
 ‘Le sort de territoires de Empire Ottoman exclusivement 
 peuplés par des majorités Arabes, et se trouvant, lors de la con- 
 clusion de l’armistice du 30 octobre [1918], sous l’occupation 
 des armées ennemies, doit étre réglé selon la volonté librement 
 exprimée par les populations locales. 
 
 ‘Les parties de l’Empire situées en dega et au dela de la 
 ligne d’armistice et habitées par une majorité musulmano- 
 ottomane dont les éléments constitutifs, unis par des liens 
 religieux et culturels et mus par un méme idéal, sont animés 
 d’un respect réciproque pour leurs droits ethniques et leurs 
 conditions sociales, forment un tout qui ne souffre, sous quelque 
 prétexte que ce soit, aucune dissociation ni de fait ni de droit. 
 
 ARTICLE II. 
 
 ‘ Quant au sort des trois Sandjaks de Kars, Erdehan et Batoum, 
 dont la population avait dés sa libération affirmé, par un vote 
 solennel, sa volonté de faire retour 4 la mére patrie, les membres 
 signataires du présent Pacte admettent qu’au besoin il soit 
 procédé & second plébiscite librement effectué. * 
 
 ArticLE IIT. 
 
 ‘Le statut juridique de la Thrace Occidentale, dont le régle- 
 
 ment avait été subordonné & la paix turque, doit se baser sur la 
 volonté de sa population librement exprimée. 
 
 ARTICLE IV. 
 
 ‘La sécurité de Constantinople, capitale de Empire et siége 
 du Khalifat et du Gouvernement Ottoman, ainsi que celle de 
 la mer de Marmara, doivent étre 4 labri de toute atteinte. 
 
 ‘Ce principe une fois posé et admis, les soussignés sont préts a 
 souscrire & toute-décision qui sera prise d’un commun accord 
 par le Gouvernement Impérial, d’une part, et les Puissances 
 intéressées, de l’autre, en vue d’assurer ouverture des Détroits 
 au commerce mondial et aux communications internationales. 
 
 ARTICLE Y. 
 
 ‘Les droits des minorités seront confirmés par nous sur la 
 méme base que ceux établis au profit des minorités dans d’autres 
 pays par les conventions ad hoc conclues entre les Puissances de 
 l’Entente, leurs adversaires et certains de leurs associés. 
 
 ‘ D’autre part, nous avons la ferme conviction que les minorités 
 musulmanes des pays avoisinants jouiront des mémes garanties 
 en ce qui concerne leurs droits. 
 
GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT 209 
 ARTICLE VI. 
 
 ‘En vue d’assurer notre développement national et économique 
 et dans le but de doter le pays d’une administration réguliére 
 plus moderne, les signataires du présent Pacte considérent la 
 jouissance d’une indépendance entiére et d’une liberté compléte 
 d’action comme condition sine gud non de l’existence nationale. 
 
 ‘En conséquence, nous nous opposons a toute restriction 
 juridique ou financiére de nature a entraver notre développe- 
 ment national. 
 
 ‘Les conditions de réglement des obligations qui nous seront 
 imposées ne doivent pas étre en contradiction avec ces principes. 
 
 ‘ Constantinople, le 28 janvier 1920.’ 
 
 II 
 CLOSE TRANSLATION FROM THE TURKISH, MADE INDEPEN- 
 DENTLY OF THE FRENCH VERSION, OF THE TEXT OF 
 THE NATIONAL PACT, AS PRINTED IN THE PROCEED- 
 INGS OF THE TURKISH CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES OF 
 THE l77H FEBRUARY 1920. 
 
 ‘The Members of the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies recog- 
 nise and affirm that the independence of the State and the 
 
 ‘future of the Nation can be assured by complete respect for the 
 
 following principles, which represent the maximum of sacrifice 
 which can be undertaken in order to achieve a just and lasting 
 peace, and that the continued existence of a stable Ottoman 
 Sultanate and society is impossible outside of the said prin- 
 ciples : 
 
 First Article-——‘ Inasmuch as it is necessary that the destinies 
 of the portions of the Turkish Empire which are populated 
 exclusively by an Arab majority, and which on the conclusion 
 of the armistice of the 30th*October 1918 were in the occupa- 
 tion of enemy forces, should be determined in accordance with 
 the votes which shall be freely given by the inhabitants, the 
 whole of those parts whether within or outside the said armistice 
 line which are inhabited by an Ottoman Moslem majority, 
 united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued with sentiments 
 of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and wholly 
 respectful of each other’s racial and social rights and surround- 
 ing conditions, form a whole which-does not admit of division 
 for any reason in truth or in ordinance. 
 
 Second Article—‘ We accept that, in the case of the three 
 Sandjaks which united themselves by a general vote to the 
 mother country when they first were free, recourse should again 
 be had, if necessary, to a free popular vote. 
 
 Oo 
 
210 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Third Article—‘ The determination of the juridical status of 
 Western Thrace also, which has been made dependent on the 
 Turkish peace, must be effected in accordance with the votes 
 which shall be given by the inhabitants in complete freedom. 
 
 Fourth Article-——‘ The security of the city of Constantinople, 
 which is the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the 
 Sultanate, and the headquarters of the Ottoman Government, 
 and of the Sea of Marmora must be protected from every 
 danger. Provided this principle is maintained, whatever 
 decision may be arrived at jointly by us and all other Govern- 
 ments concerned, regarding the opening of the Bosphorus to 
 the commerce and traffic of the world, is valid. 
 
 Fifth Article-—‘ The rights of minorities as defined in the 
 treaties concluded between the Entente Powers and their 
 enemies and certain of their associates shall be confirmed and 
 assured by us—in reliance on the belief that the Moslem minor- 
 ities in neighbouring countries also will have the benefit of the 
 same rights. 
 
 Sixth Article —‘ It is a fundamental condition of our life and 
 continued existence that we, like every country, should enjoy 
 complete independence and liberty in the matter of assuring 
 the means of our development, in order that our national and 
 economic development should be rendered possible and that it 
 should be possible to conduct. affairs in the form of a more 
 up-to-date regular administration. 
 
 ‘For this reason we are opposed to restrictions inimical to 
 our development in political, judicial, financial, and other 
 matters. 
 
 ‘The conditions of settlement of our proved debts shall like- 
 wise not be contrary to these principles. 
 
 ‘ January 28th, 1920.’ 
 
 | 
 | 
 
VI 
 THE MILITARY STALEMATE 
 
 TuE failure of the Greek campaign in Anatolia was an event 
 of more than local and temporary importance. It marked 
 a distinct turn in a tide which had been flowing for over 200 
 years. The Western public has grown so used to the break- 
 up of the Ottoman Empire that it takes the process for 
 granted and assumes that it will go on till there is no Turkish 
 state left on the map, while some publicists have gone so 
 far as to prophesy the extinction of the Turkish nation. 
 But if this process be examined, it will be found to have 
 passed through two different phases, and to have entered on 
 a third in which it is tending towards equilibrium. During 
 the first phase (1682-1814) Turkey lost territory almost 
 exclusively to Austria and Russia, the nearest Western or 
 Westernised Great Powers. From 1814 to 1913, on the other 
 hand, her losses to other Powers were inconsiderable,! and 
 her progressive break-up took the form of successful internal 
 secessions—by subject nationalities in her Near Eastern and 
 by ambitious viceroys in her Middle Eastern provinces. In 
 the third phase, which began with her intervention on the 
 losing side in the European War, it looked at first as if she 
 might suffer total shipwreck. The appetites of the Powers 
 were unleashed as they had never been before ; Greek and 
 
 1 To Russia, only (i) the fortresses of Akhaltsikh and Akhalkalaki and 
 the three districts of Kars-Ardahan-Batum in Transcaucasia, and (ii) the 
 islands of the Danube Delta; to Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina ; to 
 Italy, Tripoli and the Dodecanese; to Great Britain, Cyprus (neither 
 Cyprus nor the Dodecanese being formally annexed till after the outbreak 
 of the European War). France took Algiers and Tunis, and Great Britain 
 Egypt, not from the Ottoman Empire directly, but from ex-Ottoman 
 governors or their heirs who had previously established their independence 
 de facto. 
 
 211 
 
212 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Arab nationalism joined in the hunt; and Turkey at the 
 armistice seemed to be at the mercy of overwhelming hostile 
 forces. In reality, perhaps, her salvation was at hand. 
 The loss of the Arab provinces in addition to Rumelia made 
 it possible for her at last to concentrate her strength in her 
 home-lands. The Western leaven of nationalism, which 
 had weakened her for a century while it was working only 
 among her Near Eastern subjects, was now at work in her 
 own people, and was beginning to call out their latent 
 energies. The Western peoples, more sober than their 
 statesmen, were imposing vetos on their partition schemes. 
 Turkey suddenly found herself faced by no serious opponent 
 except Greece, and that in a military arena where all the 
 advantages were on Turkey’s side. By September 1921, in 
 the twenty-ninth month of the Anatolian campaign, it had 
 become evident that there would be no military decision, 
 and that the war would be ended either by the mediation of 
 the diplomatic protagonists, that is, of the Entente Powers, 
 or by the national exhaustion of one of the belligerents. It 
 was further evident that, if it were to be settled by exhaus- 
 tion, Greece would break down first. The diplomatic 
 developments which caused the Anatolian question to be 
 decided by single-combat between Turkey and Greece, have 
 been discussed in previous chapters. This chapter is con- 
 cerned with the military factors contributing to the final 
 result, 
 
 The most important of these factors was the geography 
 of the theatre of war. Neither belligerent had sufficient 
 military resources to dominate the zone of operations, 
 corner his adversary, and deliver the ‘knock-out blow.’ 
 Even in the summer of 1921, when each had mobilised his 
 maximum man-power and begged or borrowed all the 
 munitions and equipment that he could get from abroad, 
 Anatolia still.looked like a chessboard on which there were 
 too few pieces to finish the game. There they must stay 
 till the players got up and left them, or superior beings swept 
 
 ¢ 
 
% 
 
 THE MILITARY STALEMATE 213 
 
 them into a box and folded up the board. There could be 
 no checkmate. 
 
 After the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the European 
 War, its pre-war territories were invaded on three sides 
 (leaving out of account the abortive Russian invasion of the 
 north-eastern provinces) by foreign powers more or less 
 resolved on permanent occupation. Mesopotamia was 
 invaded by the British ; Palestine and Syria by the British, 
 the Hijazis, and the French in combination ; and finally 
 Western Anatolia by the Greeks. The second of these 
 operations was perhaps the most difficult of the three. It 
 had to be based on Egypt, with the Suez Canal and the 
 desert across the invaders’ communications, and in its second 
 act—that is, the conquest of the Syrian interior by the French 
 from the Hijazis 1—the aggressors had to operate from the 
 sea and cross two parallel ranges of mountains, only traversed 
 by a rack-and-pinion railway, in order to get from Beirut to 
 Damascus. But if once you have successfully invaded 
 Syria and Palestine, they are comparatively easy to hold, 
 for the sea on one side and the Arabian desert on the other 
 provide practicable military frontiers enclosing a territory 
 of manageable size. In contrast to this, Mesopotamia and 
 Western Anatolia are not so difficult: to occupy. From 
 Basra a navigable river,* and from Smyrna a railway-system 
 radiating up open valleys, offer access to the interior. The 
 problem is not so much to conquer these areas as to hold 
 them when you have done so, for neither of them has any 
 natural boundaries. The incautious invader of Mesopotamia 
 must push on and on to the Taurus passes and the Persian 
 plateau, if not to the Caspian and the Caucasus, before he 
 finds frontiers which he can hold securely. He cannot be 
 indifferent to the re-occupation of Transcaucasia by 
 Russian garrisons or to Bolshevik raids in North-Western 
 Persia, and the restoration of Ottoman sovereignty over a 
 
 1 In July 1920. 
 2 Duplicated by military railways during the British invasion. 
 5 The frontiers which drained away the strength of Ancient Assyria. 
 
214 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 section of railway between the Taurus tunnel and Nisibin 
 disturbs his peace of mind. Indeed, he is sensitive to 
 military movements hundreds of miles away from the 
 original territory which he set out to hold, and the invader 
 of Western Anatolia is in much the same position. He, too, 
 can find no comfortable frontier till he strikes the Taurus 
 from the other side 1 or reaches the north-eastern escarpment 
 of the Anatolian plateau. Pan-Turanianism is a bogey to 
 him, an entente between Angora and Moscow almost a cause 
 for despair. Had the Tsardom remained in existence, the 
 Greek occupation of Western Anatolia and the British 
 occupation of Mesopotamia would have been less unmanage- 
 able problems. The forces opposing each of them would 
 have had a powerful enemy in their rear, and might have 
 been overawed or pinioned. This was the presupposition of 
 the Secret Agreement of 1916. The frontiers between the 
 projected British, French, and Russian Zones in the Middle 
 East would have been as artificial as those which formerly 
 divided the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian holdings in 
 Poland. But the three invaders might have strengthened 
 the foundations of their rule by buttressing each other. On 
 the other hand, with Russia on their side, Turkish and Arab 
 and Persian nationalists, Pan-Islamists, Pan-Turanians, and 
 all other Middle Eastern opponents of Western domination 
 obtained a boundless manceuvring ground and a secure line 
 of retreat. They could venture on resistance, and the longer 
 they kept it up, the more the invaders would be embarrassed 
 by the configuration of the country. 
 
 Western Anatolia has, it is true, a patch of desert in its 
 hinterland, but this possible frontier lies at an average 
 distance of more than 250 miles from the west coast (instead 
 of the 100 miles which separate desert from coast in Syria). 
 Moreover, there are gaps at each end of this desert, leading 
 on, round its northern and its southern border, into the vast 
 interior of Central and Eastern Anatolia. The value of the 
 
 * The frontier between the East Roman Empire and the Arab Empire. 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 215 
 
 Anatolian desert as a frontier for a conqueror of the western 
 part of the country must therefore not be over-estimated. 
 
 Starting from the west coast at Smyrna or the neighbour- 
 hood and following the two main river valleys (the Hermus 
 and Maeander, each provided with a railway) inland and 
 eastwards, the invader first traverses a hundred miles or so 
 of open river valley, with a landscape like that of Greece, 
 except for the softened outlines and the greatly enlarged 
 scale. Then he encounters a plateau with a steep escarp- 
 ment, and, when he has climbed it, he has still 150 miles to 
 go across a bleak, rolling surface not unlike the Lincolnshire 
 wolds—especially in winter, when the great open fields are 
 either miry or frost-bound or covered deep in snow (as I 
 found them at Ushaq in February 1921). Scrubby oaks and 
 irregular outcrops of rock, rising here and there into moun- 
 tains, hardly break the monotony or diminish the openness 
 of the country. Roads and railways are rare, and the soil 
 unfavourable for transport apart from them. They are 
 also devious ; for while it is only 250 miles as the crow flies 
 from Smyrna to the western edge of the desert, it is 2623 
 miles by railway to Afium Kara Hissar, which is hardly more 
 than half-way towards the desert from the escarpment of 
 the plateau. In the end, when the desert is reached by the 
 centre of an advancing army, the gaps on either side leave 
 that army’s flanks as much exposed as ever. 
 
 The problem of closing these gaps against counter-attacks 
 is made more difficult by the fact that the plateau—which 
 covers almost the whole peninsula except the 100-mile wide 
 strip of lowland along the western coast—has a rim of 
 mountains. Successive tiers of parallel ranges, running 
 roughly east and west, separate the interior from both the 
 Mediterranean and the Black Sea coasts ; and these ranges 
 push out westwards, outflanking the lowlands and the routes 
 up the river valleys, till their last spurs plunge into the Aegean 
 Sea. On the north flank there is the miniature range of the 
 Karamursal (or Yalova-Gemlik) promontory, the mighty 
 
216 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Mysian Olympus towering above Brusa, and the vast 
 mountain labyrinths of Simav and the Troad. On the south 
 there is a similar labyrinth round Mughla. I looked out at 
 the snow-covered mountains of Simav through a periscope, 
 from the northern sector of the Greek lines round Ushagq, on 
 the 3rd February 1921. On the 15th of the same month, I 
 climbed the ancient acropolis of Tralleis to gaze across the 
 Maeander at the mountains of Mughla. In the following 
 summer, I also acquainted myself with the Karamursal 
 district, as will appear in Chapter VII., and I can certify 
 that all three fastnesses looked formidable to an amateur. 
 From the Simav and Mughla fastnesses, the Anatolians of 
 Xenophon’s time used to harass the communications of the 
 Persian Empire, while the still more venerable brigands of 
 Karamursal gave trouble to the Argonauts. The same 
 crags and forests served their Turcified descendants as bases 
 for very effective operations against Greek military com- 
 munications. They commanded the railways from Smyrna 
 to Panderma, Kara Hissar, and Saraikeui, and the roads 
 from Brusa towards Eski Shehir. 
 
 These outlying groups of mountains also give a strategical 
 as well as a tactical advantage to the defence. They stand 
 in the way of any concerted advance from the Marmara 
 coast or the Gulf of Adalia in support of an invasion from 
 Smyrna. The routes leading inland from these other 
 possible maritime bases only communicate with the valley 
 routes from Smyrna round the eastern ends of the Simav 
 and Mughla mountains—that is, at points 200 miles inland, 
 as the crow flies, from the west coast. Till they have been 
 carried this distance into the interior, operations conducted 
 by the same invader from these three bases must proceed 
 in dangerous isolation from one another. 
 
 These various geographical factors in combination tend, 
 whenever Anatolia is invaded from the west, to produce a 
 military front along one of two lines. The first line (de- 
 scribed from the point of view of the defence) runs from 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 217 
 
 north to south somewhere near the western escarpment of 
 the plateau, with the right flank buttressed on the Simav 
 and the left on the Mughla mountains. As long as this line 
 is held by the defence, the invader is confined to the western 
 lowlands, denied the possibility of concerted operations from 
 Adalia or the Marmara, and harassed (if he has a competent 
 opponent) by guerilla warfare against his communications. 
 The second line, about 150 miles further east, also runs north 
 and south, from the main northern to the main southern 
 mountain-rim of the plateau, with the desert making a 
 break in the centre and the wings respectively covering the 
 two gaps between the desert and the mountains. This 
 second line is perhaps technically less advantageous to the 
 defence. It cuts its front in two, while it allows the invader 
 to feed a united front from three maritime bases. On the 
 other hand, it vastly increases the area which the invader 
 has to occupy, lengthens his communications, leaves 
 mountains hospitable to guerillas in his rear, brings him 
 up on to the inclement plateau, and yet does not present 
 him with a physically strong frontier which he can hold 
 without effort. The defence, on its side, can still (though 
 with difficulty and delay) co-ordinate its northern and 
 southern sectors by communications east of the desert, and 
 can carry on guerilla operations even more effectively than 
 before. In fact, the second or more easterly line may give 
 the invader a certain military ascendency, but not the means 
 of terminating the campaign, while it seriously increases the 
 drain on his national resources. At the same time, the 
 difference in strategic value between those two lines is 
 sufficient to make the area between them—a strip about 150 
 miles wide along the western edge of the plateau—the 
 western key, in the military sense, to the mastery of Ana- 
 tolia. For this reason it has often been a focus of war and 
 government. The cradle of the Ottoman Empire was the 
 district between Sdyiid and Eski Shehir, where the route 
 from the Marmara mounts the north-western escarpment. 
 
218 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 The citadel and sepulchres of the Phrygian kings, and 
 Amorion, the principal fortress of the East Roman Empire 
 in Anatolia, were both situated between the desert and the 
 mountains of Simav. Conforming to the same permanent 
 geographical conditions, the recent Graeco-Turkish campaign 
 turned principally upon the control of a section of railway 
 running north and south, over this part of the plateau, from 
 Eski Shehir to Afium Kara Hissar. 
 
 This railway forms the junction between the five following 
 important lines of communication : 
 
 (i) The railway from the west coast (Smyrna to Afium 
 Kara Hissar) ; 
 
 (ii) The route, mostly by road, from Adalia (Adalia to 
 Afium Kara Hissar, using a few kilometres of rail- 
 way north of Buldur) ; 
 
 (iii) The route into Central and Eastern Anatolia through 
 the southern gap (the track of the Anatolian and 
 Baghdad Railways from Kara Hissar to Konia, 
 Eregli, the Taurus and Amanus Tunnels, and 
 Nisibin) ; 
 
 (iv) The route from the Marmara (either from Haidar 
 Pasha by railway, or from Mudania mostly by road, 
 to Eski Shehir) ; 
 
 (v) The route into Central and Eastern Anatolia through 
 the northern gap (from Eski Shehir to Angora and 
 then eastwards, through Sivas and Erzerum, into 
 Russia). 
 
 This convergence of routes gives the Eski Shehir-Kara 
 Hissar railway undoubted strategical importance, but only 
 for an invader disposing of forces and resources’ commen- 
 surate with the size of the country. It is little use securing 
 the key if you cannot take possession of the citadel, and this 
 citadel is so vast that the garrison, even if it abandons the 
 gate, has almost boundless room to retreat and manoeuvre 
 before it finds its back against the wall. Eski Shehir and 
 Kara Hissar, distant though they seem when you arrive at 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 219 
 
 them from the coast, are only on the outer fringe of Anatolia. 
 Two tables of distances sufficiently illustrate this fact. 
 
 Take a map and a pair of dividers and fix one limb at 
 Kum Kalé, almost the most westerly point on the Anatolian 
 mainland, lying on the fortieth parallel of latitude at the 
 entrance to the Dardanelles. Then move the other limb 
 eastwards, diverging a little to measure the respective 
 distances from the Dardanelles to Séyiid (where the Marmara 
 routes unite and mount on to the plateau, N.N.W. of Eski 
 Shehir); to Angora (the Nationalists’ capital); to Sivas 
 (their reserve capital); and finally to Erzerum (their last 
 fortress before they retire into the vast hinterland of Russia). 
 The following distances will be registered : 
 
 (i) Dardanelles to Sdyiid, 200 miles. 
 
 (ii) ss ,, Angora, 350 __,, 
 (iii) = » sivas, 570, 
 (iv) ¥ ,, Erzerum, 800 _,, 
 
 This is as the crow flies. By railway, the following distances 
 
 have to be traversed from Smyrna : 
 
 (i) Smyrna to Kara Hissar, 420 kilometres =262$ miles, 
 
 (ii) - », Konia, 693 #3 =423-.-,, 
 
 (iii) a ,», Eregli, 883 or =552. —,, 
 
 (iv) Smyrna via Eregli to Kaisaria,! about 1120 kilometres 
 =about 700 miles. 
 
 (v) Smyrna to Eski Shehir, 582 kilometres=364 miles. 
 
 (vi) i ,, Angora, 845 “2 =§28 _,, 
 
 ‘* Won’t you walk into my parlour ?”’ said the spider to 
 the fly.’ 
 
 The moral of these figures is reinforced by historical pre- 
 cedents. Western Anatolia has sometimes been conquered, 
 or partially conquered, successfully overland. The Phryg- 
 ians and Mysians achieved this about the twelfth century, 
 and the Galatians in the third century B.c., from the north- 
 west, coming across the Straits out of the Balkan Peninsula. 
 It has also been conquered from the north-east by Powers 
 
 1 The section from Eregli to Kaisaria being by road. 
 
220 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 already in possession of the east and the centre of the 
 country—in the sixth century B.c., for instance, by the 
 Persians and in the thirteenth century after Christ by the 
 Turks. All these conquests except the Persian, however, 
 were tribal migrations, not annexations by a foreign state 
 situated beyond the boundaries of the country. There are 
 even fewer instances of conquest from the west coast by a 
 foreign state situated overseas. 
 
 The Ancient Greek colonies of the twelfth century B.c. 
 (on which Modern Greece largely founds her claim to ‘ Ionia ’) 
 are not a case in point, for they too were planted by emigrants 
 who retained no political connection with the country from 
 which they came. They were not colonial possessions of any 
 Greek state or states on the other side of the Aegean, and 
 in the seventh and sixth centuries B.c. they were annexed 
 without difficulty by the Kingdom of Lydia, the first con- 
 siderable land-power that arose in the interior of Western 
 Anatolia after their foundation. Soon after the middle of 
 the sixth century, they were taken over, with Lydia, by the 
 Persian Empire. About 499 B.c. they revolted and received 
 some naval and military assistance from the independent 
 Greeks overseas. But though Athens was not three days’ 
 sail away, while the capital of Persia was three months’ 
 journey overland, the insurgents were reconquered. 
 
 In 479 B.c., however, they slipped out of Persia’s hands 
 again, in a moment of demoralisation due to the disastrous 
 failure of Xerxes’ invasion of European Greece, and an 
 interesting controversy immediately arose between the two 
 leading states in the victorious Greek alliance. 
 
 ‘The Allies held a conference to discuss the evacuation of 
 the civil population of Ionia, and debated where to settle 
 them in the parts of Greece at their disposal, supposing that 
 they abandoned Ionia to the Orientals. It seemed to them 
 out of the question that they should remain under arms for 
 ever protecting the Ionians, and without their protection 
 they had no hope of the Ionians successfully measuring 
 themselves against the Persians. 'The Peloponnesian Govern- 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 221 
 
 ments accordingly proposed to evict the inhabitants of ports 
 belonging to nations in Greece which had sided with the 
 Persians, and to hand the districts over to the Ionians to 
 settle in. The Athenians, however, would not hear of any 
 evacuation of Ionia or accept proposals from the Pelopon- 
 nesians in regard to a population of Athenian origin. They 
 raised such violent opposition that the Peloponnesians gave 
 way. 
 
 The result was that a war which had already lasted, off 
 and on, for twenty-one years (499-479 B.c.) was prolonged to 
 fifty-one (499-449 B.c.) and terminated by a mutually un- 
 satisfactory peace. The terms of it are obscure, because the 
 Athenians referred to them as little as possible and the 
 Persians never wrote their own history. Apparently, the 
 Ionian cities on the mainland remained members of the 
 Athenian Confederacy but were ‘demilitarised ’—their 
 fortifications being dismantled * and their territories de- 
 clared neutral ground. No doubt they paid double tribute 
 to the sea and the land power which had made peace at 
 their expense. Afterwards, the fratricidal conflict into which 
 Greece fell in 431 B.c. gave Persia an opportunity of re- 
 asserting her claim to sovereignty ; and then, when Athens 
 had at length succumbed to Sparta, the Ionians appealed 
 to King Agesilaos to carry on the Anatolian policy of 
 Pericles. Agesilaos landed troops at Ephesus and delivered 
 a series of offensives against the Persians (399-5 B.c.), over 
 much the same ground and with much the same results as 
 the operations conducted from the adjacent base of Smyrna in 
 1919-21. Victories were gained and territory was occupied, 
 but with no effect upon the enemy’s will to continue the war. 
 Finally, the campaign was broken off by a diversion in the 
 Balkans. Sparta was attacked by her neighbours, and 
 Agesilaos evacuated Anatolia on an urgent summons from 
 his Government. For eight or nine years, the countries 
 
 1 In the conventional mythology, the original Ionians were settlers from 
 Attica. 
 
 2 Herodotus, ix. 106. Compare the anecdote in v. 50. 
 
 3 See Thucydides, iii. 33. 2; viii. 14.3; 16.3; 31. 3; 62.2; 107.1; also 
 Xenophon, Hellenica, i. 2. 15; 5. 11, 
 
222 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 round the Aegean relapsed into general warfare. Then, in 
 386 B.c. peace was negotiated in European Greece by 
 Persian mediation, and the broker’s fee was a formal re- 
 cognition, by all states ‘consenting to the peace,’ of Persia’s 
 sovereignty over the Anatolian mainland.! 
 
 Then there are the conquests of Alexander—jubilantly 
 trumpeted by the Greek Press of all parties in 1921, when- 
 ever their troops advanced. The ‘Gordian Knot’ was to 
 be cut once again by General Papulas! They forgot that 
 Alexander had not after all outwitted the oracle. Whoever 
 untied the knot was to rule Asia. Alexander cut it, and 
 destroyed the Persian Empire (which had tied the Middle 
 East together for two centuries) without founding another. 
 His enduring achievements were negative. By overthrow- 
 ing the Oriental world-state he threw open the Middle East 
 to Hellenic civilisation, but he did not permanently annex 
 to his ancestral kingdom of Macedonia either Western 
 Anatolia or any other of the vast territories which he overran. 
 After his death, Western Anatolia was fought over for more 
 than a century by rival Powers—a Greek kingdom at 
 Antioch, pushing up north-westward along the modern 
 route of the Baghdad Railway; a Greek kingdom in the 
 Balkans, first in Thrace and then in Macedonia, which never 
 secured any hold; a Greek kingdom in Egypt, operating 
 coastwise from overseas ; local Powers like Pergamon (a 
 revived Lydia) and the city-states of Cyzicus and Rhodes ; 
 and the immigrant Galatian tribesmen. In the midst of 
 this political anarchy, Hellenic civilisation only made pro- 
 gress in Anatolia because there was no counter-influence 
 like Islam in the field against it (the civilisations of Mesopo- 
 tamia and Egypt being remote and by that time enfeebled). 
 Moreover, even this cultural progress was comparatively 
 slight until it was assisted by the Roman conquest and poli- 
 tical unification of the country. 
 
 What happened after the annexation of Western Anatolia 
 
 * As well as the islands of Klazomenai and Cyprus, 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 223 
 
 by Rome illustrates the immense difficulty of any permanent 
 conquest of that country from overseas. The moment was 
 extraordinarily propitious. By 133 B.c., the west of the 
 peninsula had been united for fifty-six years under a local 
 Government (the Kingdom of Pergamon) protected and 
 aggrandised by Rome, and the remainder was divided among 
 a dozen petty states, all likewise clients of Rome, jealous of 
 one another, and united by no community of language, 
 religion, or national feeling. Rome was the only surviving 
 Great Power in the Mediterranean world. She annexed 
 light-heartedly, sent her officials to take possession, and was 
 involved in an interminable succession of wars. Roman 
 imperialism had by that time made its reputation, and 
 peoples overshadowed by it fought desperately to beat it 
 off. The late king’s bastard raised chettés, declared his 
 conversion to Bolshevism (styling his outlawed followers 
 ‘ Citizens of the City of the Sun ’), and gave Rome trouble 
 for three years (131-129 B.c.). Later, Mithridates of Pontus, 
 one of the client princes of the centre and east, took up the 
 struggle with well-drilled troops, well-filled coffers, and an 
 effectively administered territory ; drove the Romans into 
 the sea and followed them into the Balkans; started a 
 second round after barely losing the first ; and threatened 
 to let loose on the West an avalanche of invasion from the 
 steppes of Russia. Mithridates evoked something like an 
 Anatolian national feeling, and as he had no quarrel with 
 contemporary Western culture, the Hellenised minorities 
 sometimes took his side. Before the Roman Government 
 had finished with him, they were as sick of the names 
 Mithridates and Pontus as the British Government latterly 
 became of Mustafa Kemal and Angora. They had to spend 
 stupendous sums, send gigantic reinforcements, and put 
 Pompey, their best general, in command with unprecedented 
 military and political powers. Pompey did finish Mithri- 
 dates, but his remedy was almost worse for Rome than the 
 disease. Before he slipped away to the Crimea, the enfant 
 
} 
 i 
 
 224 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 terrible of Ancient Anatolia had led the Romans a dance to 
 the Caucasus and the Euphrates, and they were never able to 
 shuffle back. At the other end of Anatolia they encountered 
 a new Oriental Great Power (the strongest since the fall of 
 Darius) with a military technique that baffled them and 
 the formidable backing of a popular anti-Hellenic reaction. 
 The best that Pompey could do was to trace a frontier for 
 Rome from the Caucasus to the Arabian desert, and for 
 seven centuries (64 B.C.—A.D. 628) Rome shouldered the 
 burden of Atlas. The frontier-wars grew more frequent, 
 more violent, and more long-drawn-out ; they turned into 
 wars of religion ; and after the last and longest, in which 
 each combatant received and inflicted mortal wounds, the 
 Arab tribesmen rushed in under the sudden intoxication of 
 Islam, and at one blow felled Rome and Hellenism. If only 
 the Modern Greeks would study Ancient history without 
 sentiment, it might be an antidote instead of a stimulant to 
 their disastrous romanticism. 
 
 After taking in this background, one can look back in 
 better perspective over the course of the last Anatolian 
 campaign. The problem for the Greeks was not simply to 
 occupy manu militari a certain zone in Western Anatolia, 
 but to maintain effective political sovereignty there after 
 reducing their garrison to a peace-footing. They had not 
 only to drive the enemy out of the territories which they 
 wished to hold. They had either to find defensible positions 
 of such strength that they could be indifferent to chronic 
 border-warfare, or else to break the enemy’s will and power 
 to continue the war so absolutely that he would be compelled 
 to accept satisfactory terms of peace and to observe them 
 for an indefinite period, however weak in themselves or 
 weakly-held the Greek frontier defences in Anatolia might 
 be. The first alternative solution was a ‘ scientific ’ frontier, 
 like the mountain-frontier of British India or the desert- 
 frontier secured by the French in Syria and Algeria. The 
 second was a ‘knock-out blow,’ like that delivered by the 
 
 a 
 
 cite nane PTET is 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 225 ‘ 
 
 Allied Armies on the Western Front in the summer and 
 
 autumn of 1918. One can discern the interplay of these two 
 
 ideas in the minds of the Greek Staff as one traces the course 
 
 of their operations. Almost every time that they advanced, 
 
 some ideal ‘scientific’ frontier was their objective. Yet 
 
 every time that they reached a new line, it disappointed their 
 expectations, and they veered round—always too late—to 
 
 the alternative strategy of annihilation. 
 The Turks, on their side, had, first of all, to reconstitute 
 their army and keep it in being, sacrificing territory to avoid 
 | hazarding a decision. Ultimately, they had either to drive 
 the Greeks into the sea or force them to evacuate Anatolia 
 through national exhaustion. The first method had recently 
 ) been applied with success in several similar situations. 
 ) During the European War the Turks themselves had forced 
 an Anglo-French Army out of the Gallipoli Peninsula ; the 
 | Germans had forced the Belgians out of Antwerp; and, on 
 a much larger scale, the Bolsheviks had forced the troops 
 and Governments of Denikin and Wrangel out of Southern 
 Russia, Odessa, and the Crimea—though the ‘ Whites,’ like 
 the Greeks in Anatolia, had been backed by Allied diplomacy, 
 warships, and munitions. On the other hand, in a parallel 
 situation, the Central Powers had failed to dislodge the Allies 
 from Salonika. The precedents for a military decision in 
 favour of the Turks were thus doubtful, while the economic 
 ) and psychological conditions prevailing after the European 
 War were favourable to the method of exhaustion. During 
 the summer of 1920 the Arabs of Mesopotamia induced the 
 British Government, by such tactics, considerably to relax 
 their hold upon that country, and the common factors in 
 Mesopotamian and Anatolian military geography have 
 already been noticed. On the whole, the Turkish Staff were 
 consistent in refusing battle when the Greeks attacked in 
 superior strength, and the moral of the Turkish nation stood 
 the repetition of this depressing strategy. The judgment 
 of the military leaders was more often at fault during the 
 P 
 
226 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Greek retreats. They assumed too readily that the Greek 
 troops would be demoralised by the strategic failures of their 
 commanders, counter-attacked rashly and unskilfully, and 
 wasted to no purpose strength which they could ill afford to 
 lose. In nearly every Greek offensive, after initial Greek 
 successes, the Turkish defence was successful in the decisive 
 phase, and then the Greeks were heartened again by being 
 enabled to punish Turkish attempts to hinder their 
 retreat. 
 
 It is worth glancing at the several stages in this curious 
 struggle. The first lasted from the landing of the Greek 
 troops at Smyrna in May 1919 to the May of 1920. The 
 Supreme Council had sanctioned a Greek occupation without 
 defining the area! And the Greeks, after disembarking 
 under cover of Allied warships, naturally pushed inland, as 
 fast as they could go, up the railways leading to Aidin and 
 Manysa. They met with no serious resistance, for under the 
 Allied armistice-control the Turkish regular army had by 
 that time been reduced to less than 20,000 effectives. The 
 temporary recapture of Aidin town was the work of Turkish 
 chettés, and only happened because the Greek Staff (making 
 hay while the sun shone) had pushed forward too quickly 
 and the local Greek commander had lost his nerve. This 
 reverse, though it incidentally ruined the richest country and 
 the most promising provincial city in Western Anatolia and 
 
 * It must be noted that the south-west corner of Anatolia was artificially 
 excluded from the field of operations by the presence of detachments of 
 Italian troops at Scala Nuova, Sokia, and on the south bank of the Mae- 
 ander opposite Aidin, as well as at Adalia. The only operations here were 
 raids by Turkish chettés into the Greek occupied territory from behind the 
 screen of Italian troops, which prevented the Greeks from retaliating by 
 punitive expeditions. But in any case this district would not have been the 
 scene of major operations in this particular war, because the centre of the 
 Nationalist power—both military and political—was located in the northern 
 gap leading round the desert from Western to Central and Eastern 
 Anatolia, so that it would have been difficult for the Turks and useless for 
 the Greeks to make great military efforts in the opposite corner of the 
 peninsula. On the other hand, the route from Adalia to Angora west of 
 the desert was valuable to the Turks as an inlet for supplies, and it was 
 therefore important for the Greeks to cut it; but they could do this 
 at Afium Kara Hissar more effectively than at any point south of the 
 Maeander. 
 
 —= 
 
 | 
 
 ! 
 4 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 227 
 
 caused appalling suffering and misery,! had almost no 
 military importance. Aidin was reoccupied after a day or 
 two, and when the Allies, awaking too late to their responsi- 
 bility, sent a commission of inquiry and fixed a local 
 armistice-line, the towns and districts of Aidin, Odemish, 
 Manysa and Bergama, as well as Smyrna, were left in the 
 Greeks’ hands. The Greek Staff had thus secured elbow- 
 room for holding Smyrna and its maritime approaches, but 
 they had not advanced beyond the lowlands or encountered 
 regular troops. There they sat for a year and waited for 
 the Treaty of Sévres, while in the interior the Nationalists’ 
 military organisation went forward. 
 
 The second stage began in June 1920 and lasted until the 
 following December. The Greeks advanced again, but this 
 time, instead of merely omitting to restrain them, the 
 Supreme Council, or at least the British Government, en- 
 couraged them to go on. A succession of events in the 
 spring had created an awkward situation for the arbiters of 
 the world. In January the Nationalists had put out their 
 claws and raided a dump of Ottoman war-material which 
 had been deposited, in pursuance of the armistice, in the 
 Gallipoli Peninsula. The formal occupation of Constanti- 
 nople and the deportation of militant Nationalists in March 
 had not overawed the Turks but exasperated them. In 
 April, while the details of the Treaty of Sévres were being 
 settled finally at San Remo, the Allied detachments and 
 control-officers in Anatolia were being withdrawn to escape 
 internment, and Damad Ferid Pasha’s Circassian irregulars 
 were retreating towards the Straits. When the official 
 summary of the Treaty was being published in May, the 
 Allied Governments were privately facing the disagreeable 
 alternatives of a humiliating evacuation of Constantinople 
 
 1 See Chapter VII., pp. 273-4. 
 
 ®* An armed party landed from the Asiatic shore, disposed (by what 
 methods?) of the French guards, loaded large quantities of material on 
 lighters, tugged them across the Dardanelles, unshipped them, and trans- 
 ported them into the interior at leisure! 
 
228 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 or the despatch of reinforcements for which they dared not 
 ask their respective nations. The Nationalist forces were 
 already working round the flank of a British battalion 
 stationed at Ismid. They attacked it about the 15th of 
 June, and when the news reached England, Mr. Venizelos, 
 who had arrived in anticipation of it, offered to pull the 
 chestnuts out of the fire. There was a conference at Bou- 
 logne, and French military experts—correctly calculating the 
 Nationalists’ potential strength—uttered warnings against 
 acceptance. But the British Government could not risk 
 a disgrace at Ismid which would have eclipsed Kutu’l- 
 Amara. Turkey was a beaten enemy and appearances must 
 be kept up. The French Government, too, had political 
 temptations. A Greek offensive might give them relief from 
 the unpopular war in Cilicia and an opportunity to conquer 
 Eastern Syria from the Emir Feisal. The statesmen 
 hovered. between the arguments of their colleague and those 
 of their expert advisers. In the end, a Greek offensive was 
 authorised, but geographical limits were laid down. The 
 Greek forces were to interpose themselves between the 
 Nationalists and the Straits, and in reward they were to 
 occupy Eastern Thrace (in anticipation of the Treaty of 
 Sévres) and additional territory east of Smyrna which even 
 the Treaty did not assign to Greece ; but they were not to 
 advance to Kara Hissar or Eski Shehir. 
 
 The Greek operations, thus sanctioned, were promptly 
 started on the 22nd June and were rapidly and brilliantly 
 executed. There were four simultaneous movements.1 One 
 force advanced northwards from Manysa along the Panderma 
 Railway, which threads its way, between the mountain- 
 tangles of the Troad and Simav, to the south coast of the 
 Marmara. Hast of Panderma there are lowlands again, and 
 Brusa was occupied by the Greek cavalry ranging ahead of 
 the other arms. A second force advanced simultaneously 
 
 ' Omitting the occupation of Thrace (an admirable piece of work from 
 the military point of view), which had no direct bearing on the problem of 
 Anatolia. 
 
 | 
 } 
 . 
 | 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 229 
 
 east wards from the Hermus and Cayster valleys to Alashehir, 
 at the foot of the escarpment, and then, in August, up to 
 Ushagq on the plateau. A third force, further south, moved 
 from Aidin in a parallel direction up the north bank of the 
 Maeander, to a point from which there were easy communica- 
 tions with Ushaq and Alashehir. A fourth force, consisting 
 of a single division, was sent by sea express to Ismid, and 
 relieved the pressure on the British battalion, while Mudania 
 and Gemlik were also occupied from the sea by Graeco- 
 British naval and military units. 
 
 The strategy of these operations was good, the marching 
 and moral of the Greek troops excellent, the Turkish resist- 
 ance negligible. The Nationalist forces either retreated 
 without offering battle (as at Brusa) or were driven headlong 
 (as in the neighbourhood of Alashehir). Within less than 
 a fortnight everything was over except the subsidiary 
 advance to Ushaq, and the British and Greek Premiers were 
 laughing at the French generals who did not even know (or 
 perhaps had slyly pretended not to know) their own busi- 
 ness. In the circumstances it was natural for the statesmen 
 to assume that the soldiers had been disingenuous, but the 
 truth was that the soldiers—rightly including politics in 
 their military calculations—had been the better politicians. 
 Probably they had foreseen all along that the Greeks could 
 successfully cover the Straits and so save the Supreme 
 Council from the immediate political necessity of taking 
 cognizance of Turkish Nationalism; but they had also 
 foreseen that the Greeks could not break up the Nationalist 
 military organisation, and that they would subsequently be 
 weakened, from the military point of view, as a result of 
 their advance. There would be no compensation for this 
 military disadvantage unless the Turkish National Move- 
 ment were crippled politically by a military retreat, and of 
 
 1 No doubt the staff of the British Army of the Black Sea contributed to 
 the plans. The British Navy, too, took part whenever possible, while the 
 French and Italians, though they had assented to the offensive, rather 
 ostentatiously abstained from participation. 
 
7 SS ene ae a ee ee 
 
 230 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 this, as it turned out, there was nosymptom. The Turkish 
 leaders were not discouraged, because their new army was 
 not yet ready and they had never expected their chetté 
 screen to be a match for Greek regular troops. They had 
 intended all along to barter territory for time (their man- 
 ceuvring ground was so immense that, militarily, they could 
 well afford it), and they had no fear of a political débacle. 
 Backward nations are not neurotic, and the Russian strategy 
 of 1812 could be followed with impunity by the Turkey of 
 1920. What were Brusa and Ushaq? The Eski Shehir- 
 Kara Hissar Railway, the key to Western Anatolia, remained 
 in the Nationalists’ hands, and their busy reorganisation of 
 the army had suffered no interruption.’ 
 
 The Greeks, on the other hand, experienced some dis- 
 illusionment as their exhilaration subsided and the winter 
 came on. They had exchanged a continuous front in the 
 lowlands near their base for three fronts isolated from each 
 other and each ill-connected with Smyrna. The division 
 encamped at Ismid for the benefit of the Allies had only sea- 
 communications. The railway from Smyrna to Panderma 
 was exposed to attack by guerillas, while between Panderma 
 and Brusa there was no railway at all. In the third place, 
 their southern front had been pushed up on to the plateau. 
 Within six months of its occupation, Ushaq had acquired 
 an unpleasant reputation in the Greek Army, and when I 
 saw it under winter conditions in the February of 1921, I 
 sympathised with their repugnance. The defences had been 
 organised with reasonable thoroughness, and the enemy 
 screen of chettés had retired out of contact. But Ushaq 
 was at the tip of a salient enclosing like a sheath the last 
 twenty-five miles of the railway from Smyrna, and the 
 bridges and tunnels by which the line wound its way up 
 
 1 The Greek occupation of Ushaq, Brusa, and Ismid not only did not dis- 
 courage the Turks, it did not even deter another Moslem population from 
 following their example. The Arab rising in Mesopotamia began at this 
 very moment and lasted till the autumn, just as the most serious of the 
 risings in Egypt had occurred a few months after Lord Allenby’s great 
 viotory over the Turks in Palestine. 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 231 
 
 the escarpment of the plateau were uncomfortably vulner- 
 able. The two divisions stationed at the further end of 
 this potential trap had much to put up with and little to do, 
 They despised the enemy whom they had driven before 
 them so easily the preceding summer, and did not realise 
 that they were soon to be confronted with better trained and 
 equipped formations. This was demoralising, and it was 
 made worse by the change of government in Greece and the 
 consequent change of personnel in the army of Anatolia. 
 The commander-in-chief was replaced first, and a few weeks 
 before the campaigning season of 1921 began, the majority 
 of the previous Venizelist corps and divisional commanders 
 were superseded by officers who did not know the troops, the 
 country, or even in many cases the latest developments in 
 the art of war.2 If there was to be another ‘ walk-over,’ 
 Royalist generals were to reap the laurels. Meanwhile the 
 Turkish High Command worked hard behind the scenes, and 
 did nothing at the front to disturb their opponents’ illusions. 
 
 The third phase lasted from January to April 1921, 
 Before the winter was over, the Royalists were feeling so 
 acutely the drawbacks of the position in which they had been 
 landed by the Venizelists’ ‘limited’ offensive, that their 
 hearts were set upon Kara Hissar and Eski Shehir. So long 
 as he held these places and the railway connecting them, the 
 enemy possessed the interior lines, while the Greek front was 
 discontinuous and not conveniently accessible. Drive him 
 out and the tables would be turned. His right and left wings, 
 pushed back respectively on Angora and Konia, would be 
 separated by the desert, while the Greek front would be 
 reunited and served by a continuous chain of railway from 
 Smyrma to Ismid. What had prevented the victorious 
 Greek Army from taking Eski Shehir and Kara Hissar the 
 
 1 13th (Khalkis) and 2nd (Athens), both composed of men from the 
 Aegean, accustomed to milder winters. 
 2 Some had been interned in Silesia by the Germans, many more by the 
 
 Venizelists in the Archipelago, and all these had seen no active service since 
 the Balkan Wars. 
 
232 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 previous summer ? Obviously, the limitation suggested to 
 the Supreme Council by the malice of the French General 
 Staff and weakly accepted by Mr. Venizelos. But the King 
 had always stood for independence towards the foreigner, 
 He would not hamper Greek generalship by submitting to 
 servitudes imposed by the Powers, and the refusal of the 
 Allies to recognise his Government had at least this advan- 
 tage that it absolved them from any obligations that the 
 preceding Government might have contracted. Confidently, 
 Greece took a free hand to finish the war,! leaving out of 
 account the potentialities of her adversary. 
 
 In January 1921, the Greek Northern Army made a 
 reconnaissance in force from Brusa, struck the Anatolian 
 Railway where it penetrates the north-west escarpment of 
 the plateau through the Karakeui Defile, and got within 
 sight of the upland plain of Eski Shehir. They met ‘with 
 little resistance and retired unpursued, deciding to repeat the 
 excursion when the weather was milder and their delegates 
 had tried their luck at the forthcoming conference in London.? 
 Evidently the chettés were as contemptible as the year 
 before—but this was the fatal error in their calculation. 
 This time the new Turkish Army had been almost but not 
 quite ready. It had been timed to be ready by the spring, 
 and the January raid had taken it by surprise. But it 
 
 1 It is impossible to say whether the Greek forces under arms in the summer 
 of 1920 were really strong enough to advance much further than they did, 
 if the Allies had sanctioned it. But it is certain that this would have made 
 very little difference to the course of the campaign. Before the Greeks 
 could have reached the Eski Shehir-Kara Hissar line, the Nationalists 
 could have evacuated their training camps and arsenals eastwards, and the 
 remaining stages of the campaign would merely have been fought a hundred 
 miles or so deeper in the interior. As has been explained, this western key 
 to Anatolia is still only on the fringe. The ‘limitation’ laid down in June 
 1920 at Boulogne, like the armistice-line traced in the summer of 1919, is 
 chiefly interesting for the light it throws on the Supreme Council’s muddle- 
 headedness. Were the Greeks allies and the Turks recalcitrant defeated 
 enemies, or were they both naughty boys? The Supreme Council could 
 never make up their minds. Logically, either they themselves had done 
 wrong in sending the Greeks to Smyrna, or else the Nationalists deserved 
 no mercy. They would not admit the former alternative, but had not the 
 nerve to act ruthlessly up to the latter. 
 
 * See Chapter III. above. 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 233 
 
 profited by the warning, and during February and March, 
 while the conference was dragging on ineffectively in London 
 and the Greek forces at Brusa were marking time, the Turks 
 were fortifying the approaches to Eski Shehir as feverishly 
 as they had fortified the Dardanelles in 1915 after the first 
 naval bombardment. 
 
 The conference came to nothing, and on the 23rd March 
 1921, the Greek Northern and Southern Armies took the 
 offensive simultaneously from Brusa and Ushaq. After 
 encountering stiff resistance, the Southern Army occupied 
 Kara Hissar, but the three northern divisions beat in vain 
 against the heights which they had taken in their stride two 
 months before. The approaches were now swept by a well- 
 served artillery ; the slopes were scientifically entrenched ; 
 and the trenches were manned by troops who held their 
 ground. After several days’ murderous fighting, the Greek 
 7th Division on the right carried the Turkish positions 
 opposite them with the bayonet and looked down once again 
 upon the plain of Eski Shehir.1 But the Turks had rein- 
 forcements and the Greeks had none ; the Greek centre and 
 left were pushed back over the escarpment ; the right had 
 to follow, and the failure of the Northern Army necessitated 
 a strategic retreat of the Southern from Kara Hissar. By 
 the 4th April the Greeks were back in their old lines. They 
 had lost heavily with no result. They could only congratu- 
 late themselves that they had escaped destruction. On the 
 2nd and 3rd April, as I walked back the forty-odd miles to 
 Brusa with the 7th Division—an interminable procession of 
 troops, mules, ox-carts and lorries crawling along a foundered 
 road—we could not make out why no enemy attacked us 
 from the mountains commanding our southern flank. It 
 turned out that all Turkish units still fit for action had 
 been sent south to cut the railway between Kara Hissar and 
 
 Ushaq. They nearly succeeded, and the Southern Army’s 
 
 _ 1 This ridge above the village of Kovalyja was held by the Greek 7th 
 Division from the 29th March to the night of the lst to 2nd April. I visited 
 it on the lst April. See ‘The Battle of In Onii,’ p. 249.) 
 
234 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 retreat was only kept open by the gallantry of a single 
 regiment in reserve at Tulu Punar. 
 
 The Greek failure, as I can testify, was not due to the rank 
 and file, who fought with the same determination as their 
 opponents and retreated in good order, but to the staff. 
 Although they had command of the air, and the eventual 
 battlefield was within easy reach of their aerodrome at 
 Brusa, they had apparently obtained no intelligence of the 
 new Turkish entrenchments and formations. Expecting to 
 meet nothing but chettés and to disperse them as easily as 
 before, they did not regroup their forces, but simply sent 
 forward on each front the divisions that had been in winter 
 quarters there. The three northern divisions were thus 
 thrown without reserves against fortified positions at forty to 
 fifty miles’ distance from their base at Brusa and with no com- 
 munications but roads never intended for motor transport. 
 The Turks had railways at their disposal and made bold use 
 of their interior lines in order to concentrate on the defence 
 of Eski Shehir—deliberately risking the temporary loss of 
 Kara Hissar, on the sound calculation that the Greeks could 
 never retain it if they were repulsed on the principal battle- 
 field. These causes alone would account for the result, but 
 the Greeks could not get over their surprise at the trans- 
 formation of the chettés into soldiers, and scented the 
 ‘hidden hand.’ The Turkish artillery must have been 
 served by Russian or German gunners to make such good 
 shooting, Italian sappers must have traced the trenches, 
 French officers have kept the infantry steady. I convinced 
 myself to my own satisfaction that this was a hallucination,! 
 and in reality there was no puzzle to solve. There had been 
 many trained soldiers in the old Ottoman Army, and they 
 had had rather more opportunity than the Greeks of learning 
 from the European War. The Greeks’ unchallenged ascend- 
 ency during the preceding two years had been due to the 
 fact that, before their landing, the Allied control had broken 
 
 * See ‘The Origin of a Legend,’ pp. 254 seqq. 
 
ae 
 
 THE MILITARY STALEMATE 235 
 
 up the Turkish military machine. By the spring of 1921 the 
 Nationalist organisers had assembled it again, and at the 
 battle of In Onti 1 Greek and Turkish regular forces had met 
 for the first time in the Anatolian War. The repulse of the 
 Greeks under the first test of these conditions was the 
 turning-point in the campaign.? 
 
 There was a certain inevitability about the stages that 
 followed, but neither party had yet put out their full 
 strength, the season was young, and before autumn there was 
 time for a more extensive slaughter. The Greek Government 
 began to gamble. They mobilised class after class * and 
 multiplied their artillery and munitions. The drachma 
 dropped, the people grew restive, but who would shrink from 
 a few months’ strain with a prospect of victory ?- Deliver 
 the ‘knock-out blow,’ and the drachma and King Constantine 
 would recover their credit. This fourth phase lasted from 
 the 5th April 1921 to the 21st July. Ninety-five days were 
 consumed in suspense and preparations, twelve in the 
 supreme effort to obtain a victorious decision. 
 
 In the Greek offensive launched on the 10th July 1921 
 there was no failure of strategy. The most able of the 
 Royalist officers, General Dismanis, a scientific soldier 
 who had distinguished himself in the Balkan War, had 
 been entrusted, as Chief of the General Staff, with the 
 working out of the plans.‘ This time the first objective 
 
 1 So named after the principal village on the battlefield. 
 
 * The Greeks were naturally tempted to dispute this, and to attribute the 
 Nationalist Army’s achievements almost entirely to French, Italian, or 
 Russian assistance—just as the Turks explained the Greek successes in 1920 
 as being the result of British support. It is true that both parties did 
 receive foreign munitions and diplomatic encouragement, and the Greeks— 
 down to the return of King Constantine—actual naval and military support 
 from Great Britain. But each party over-estimated the foreign contribution 
 to the fighting power of the other. 
 
 2 Including the troops already under arms, eleven classes from Old Greece 
 and twenty-one from the provinces acquired after the Balkan War appear 
 to have been mobilised by the beginning of the July offensive, besides con- 
 siderable numbers of Ottoman Greeks impressed by compulsory levy in the 
 occupied territories. 
 
 “ T understand that at least the outline of the plans actually adopted was 
 
 suggested by a young Venizelist staff-officer of the 3rd Corps, who had not 
 been deprived of his post like his chief, General Nidher. It might not be 
 
236 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 was Kiutahia, a town a few miles west of the Eski Shehir- 
 Kara Hissar Railway and about equidistant from the two 
 termini. The principal concentration was on the southern 
 front, which was directly connected with the Smyrna base 
 by railway. The strongest column moved due north from 
 Tulu Punar—the position in advance of Ushaq which the 
 Greeks had successfully held in the April retreat and had 
 never abandoned. A second column was sent north-east 
 to make a wide encircling movement through Kara Hissar. 
 A third—from Brusa—was timed to meet the Tulu Punar 
 column outside Kiutahia by a daring march through the 
 mountains. On this occasion the Greeks reached their 
 objectives. The converging columns met; Kiutahia fell ; 
 the positions covering Eski Shehir were turned from the 
 south, and the encircling column threatened the garrison’s 
 railway communications with Angora. Eski Shehir was 
 evacuated and occupied by the columns which had taken 
 Kiutahia, and only then the remaining Greek forces at Brusa 
 sallied out for the third time to the In Oni battlefield, 
 walked through the abandoned Turkish defences, and 
 arrived in turn at Eski Shehir. On the 21st July the Turkish 
 Army attempted to recover Eski Shehir from the Greek 
 forces wearied by eleven days’ fighting and marching, but 
 reunited. This counter-attack failed, the Turks broke con- 
 tact, and the operations came to an end, leaving the western 
 key of Anatolia in the Greeks’ possession. 
 
 Had they got a decision? Their strategy had been as 
 good as the summer before, and though the reservists were 
 not equal to the seasoned troops that had fought in the 
 European War, their marching and fighting powers still 
 impressed foreign military attachés. They had taken the 
 long-coveted positions of Kara Hissar and Eski Shehir, only 
 —as in 1920—the Turkish Army had again eluded them. 
 During the first two months of preparations and counter- 
 
 discreet to mention this officer’s name, but if the story is true, it does him 
 and General Dismanis equal credit. It is interesting to note that he had 
 partly been trained by British officers on the Salonika front. 
 
Se ne 
 
 THE MILITARY STALEMATE 237 
 
 preparations, the Turkish Staff had been keeping careful 
 watch upon the relative increase in strength of the opposing 
 forces,! and about a month before the Greek offensive they 
 again decided not to risk standing on their positions but to 
 barter territory for time. The decision was singularly clear- 
 sighted. Laboriously constructed and successfully defended 
 fortifications were scrapped, the arsenals, munition works, 
 and training-camps at Eski Shehir dismantled, sentiment 
 thrown to the winds, and, the moment the Greeks moved, 
 the bulk of the Turkish Army withdrew. The defenders of 
 Kiutahia were a devoted rearguard.2, The forces which 
 counter-attacked at Eski Shehir were virtually intact, and 
 they did not this time weaken themselves by persistence. 
 They slipped away eastwards again into the interior and dug 
 themselves in on the east bank of the Sakkaria and its 
 tributary the Gédk Su, covering the western and southern 
 approaches to Angora. The decision on which the Greeks 
 had gambled had been successfully postponed. 
 
 The fifth phase * lasted from the 22nd July to the 23rd 
 September 1921. Jaded by an unprofitable victory, and 
 with no further military prospect of terminating the war, the 
 Greeks pushed forward through the northern gap towards the 
 boundless hinterland of Central and Eastern Anatolia. It 
 was a crazy enterprise, for every rational objective had dis- 
 appeared. The annihilation of the enemy? Three times 
 already that stroke had missed its aim. The occupation of 
 his temporary capital ? As if the loss of Angora would break 
 
 a Turkish moral which had survived the loss of Constanti- 
 
 1 A few days before the Greek July offensive, I learned from a first-rate 
 Allied military source that the Turkish regular army had by then risen to 
 200,000 men from the 19,000 which had been its strength in May 1919. 
 
 2 Apparently one strong and one weak Turkish division were left at Kiu- 
 tahia, with orders to retreat after fighting a delaying action for twenty- 
 four hours. The weak division carried out its instructions. The commander 
 of the strong division was heroically insubordinate. He fought on and, after 
 inflicting heavy losses, was killed with the majority of his men. 
 
 $ A very clear and convincing account of it was written by the Times 
 correspondent at Constantinople. See the Times of the 14th and 24th 
 October 1921. There is also an official account from the Greek side by 
 Stratigfh]és, X., of which an English translation (place and date of publica- 
 tion not indicated) has been printed, with excellent maps. 
 
— Ts 
 
 : 238 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 nople, or would prevent the Great National Assembly from 
 
 | resuming its activities at Sivas or Kaisaria. Everything 
 
 was against the invaders. The three bare weeks which they 
 
 gave themselves for recuperation were time enough for the 
 
 Turks to prepare their new positions, and the incidents of 
 
 the battle of In Onii were repeated on a larger scale. Start- 
 
 ing on the 14th August,! the Greeks halted and marched and 
 
 halted again for ten days before they found themselves 
 
 face to face with their opponents. The heat and drought 
 
 and malignant malaria of summer were more cruel than the 
 
 frosts of early spring. They exhausted themselves by a 
 
 detour through the desert which was to turn the Turkish 
 
 left flank, and then apparently changed their tactics to a 
 
 frontal attack. They delivered the attack on the 24th 
 
 August and kept it up till the 4th September. Once more, 
 
 as at In Onii, some divisions fought their way through the 
 
 last line of the Turkish defences and only had to halt because 
 
 their neighbours had failed to make equal progress. The 
 
 attack was within an ace of success at the moment when it 
 
 became evident that it had failed. Then, on the 8th, 9th, and 
 
 10th September, Turkish counter-attacks showed the neces- 
 
 sity fora retreat. Next day it began, and again, as in April, 
 
 H the Turks failed to prevent it. By the 13th September the 
 
 Greek Army had withdrawn west and north of the loop of 
 
 the Sakkaria without further disaster, and were trailing back, 
 
 devastating the country as they went, to Eski Shehir. The 
 
 . site where Western archaeologists had located Alexander’s 
 
 Gordion lay on their road. Would a Greek army ever pene- 
 
 trate that distance into Anatolia again ? / 
 From that moment it became evident that the Anatolian 
 
 campaign would not be terminated by a military decision. 
 
 The Greeks had shot their bolt without either striking a | 
 
 scientific frontier or transfixing their enemy, but the Turks 
 
 had also missed their chance. In attempting to march on 
 
 Angora the Greeks had delivered themselves into their 
 
 1 T take my dates from the Greek official account, 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 239 
 
 hands, and they had let them escape. If they had been 
 unable to destroy them on the battlefield east of the Sakkaria, 
 when the Greeks’ attack had failed and Turkish cavalry 
 were raiding their communications, they could have little 
 hope of driving them by force out of Eski Shehir and Kara 
 Hissar, still less of driving them into the Aegean. From the 
 military point of view, stalemate had been reached and 
 further offensive operations by either party were foredoomed 
 to failure. The remaining alternatives were mediation by 
 the Western Powers or a passive contest of national endur- 
 ance. The rdle of the Powers has been discussed in Chapter 
 IIl., but while Western diplomacy was making further 
 revelations of its bankruptcy in Eastern affairs, Greece and 
 Turkey were drifting towards collapse. 
 
 Which would break down first 2? There was a stubborn 
 spirit in both the fighting forces. The Greek divisions in 
 Anatolia before the mobilisation of 1921 were mostly troops 
 who had fought on the Salonika front in the European War 
 and had had a varied experience in Bulgaria or Southern 
 Russia before they came to Anatolia. They were accus- 
 tomed to much hotter artillery fire, their moral had been 
 fortified by participation in the Great War on the victorious 
 side, and they were proud of having had French and English 
 troops as comrades in arms. They were wonderfully good 
 marchers ; capable of sustained attacks against prepared 
 positions ; not easily demoralised by casualties ; stoical and 
 cool-headed in retreat. Of course, by the time of the 
 retreat from the Sakkaria, the remnants of these divisions 
 had been swamped by the reservists, but they too had seen 
 Service in the Balkan Wars and had the expectation of 
 victory. The only really bad troops were the Thracian and 
 Anatolian levies. At the battle of In Onii, the 10th (Asia 
 Minor) Division had been the first to give ground. 
 
 The Turkish troops on their side consisted of three 
 categories—regulars, volunteers, and local chettés. I had a 
 glimpse of all three from the 29th June to the 2nd July 1921 
 
240 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 at Ismid, and was impressed by their discipline. The chettés 
 were undoubtedly under the Army’s control. The volun- 
 teers, who came like the regulars from distant parts, were 
 properly organised units. The regulars themselves, in spite 
 of their miscellaneous uniforms, were unmistakably fine 
 soldiers. I saw them in circumstances of extreme provoca- 
 tion,! but they stood the test. There had been no retaliation 
 
 \ | upon the churches for the state in which the Greeks had left 
 ' the mosques; no wrecking of the deserted Greek and 
 
 |. Armenian shops, though the sign of the cross still remained. 
 
 chalked on their shutters to distinguish them from the 
 Turkish shops, which the Greeks, before they left, had 
 | systematically looted ; no violence against the few native 
 Christians who had remained, in revenge for the previous 
 ' massacre of Turkish civilians. The sale and consumption 
 of alcoholic liquors had been effectively prohibited by the 
 military governor. At night the town was quiet, the troops 
 sober and orderly, and a Westerner could walk the streets 
 in the dark with no adventures except courteous challenges 
 from sentries and the offer of a lantern to light him on his 
 way. Ismid was an outlying theatre of operations, and the 
 best Turkish divisions were at that time concentrated behind 
 Eski Shehir in anticipation of the Greek offensive, so that the 
 troops that I happened to see were not likely to have been 
 exceptionally favourable examples of the Nationalist Army. 
 
 Their temper differed from that of the Greeks. They had 
 fewer illusions. ‘They were not the spoilt children of fortune 
 or of Western sentimentality nor intoxicated by historical 
 romance. While, like the Greeks, they had been at war for 
 years, they had generally been beaten, so that they had no 
 mental capital of self-confidence or exhilaration to draw on. 
 They were simply going on fighting so long as an invader 
 remained on their soil. I was particularly struck by the 
 quiet determination of the officers taken prisoner by the 
 Greeks at the battle of In Oni, whom I visited a few days 
 
 1 See Chapter VIL. 
 
Rey 
 
 THE MILITARY STALEMATE 241 
 
 after in their place of detention at Brusa. They were all 
 reservists, and not one of them, I think, had spent less than 
 four out of the last ten years on active service. They were 
 mostly small landowners—yeomen or squires—and came 
 from such parts as Konia and Kaisaria, in the centre and 
 | east of Anatolia, well beyond the range of pcssible. Greek 
 invasion. They had thus no personal or parochial interests 
 at stake, and to have been taken prisoner recently is a 
 depressing position. But these men did not display a trace 
 of irresolution. After frankly admitting their weariness of 
 war, they added in a matter-of-fact way that this war would 
 be carried on by the Turkish nation until the Greeks had © 
 evacuated all Anatolia. In fact, the difference in temper 
 between the Greek and Turkish armies was not unlike that 
 between the Germans and the French in the European War. 
 The Turkish soldier had the immense moral advantage of 
 resisting an invader, and fighting in his own country gave 
 him material advantages as well. He was accustomed to 
 the climate, and had the sympathy of the majority of the 
 ) population. 
 With the individual Greek soldier, chivalry towards the 
 Anatolian Greek minorities was perhaps the strongest motive 
 for enduring hardship and disappointment and exile from 
 home. The minorities had suffered during the ten years 
 before the Greek Army came ; they had welcomed the Army 
 as their deliverers and shown them hospitality and kindness. 
 | European Greek soldiers had married Anatolian wives. The 
 minorities had been compromised by the Greek occupation, 
 and their protectors had no confidence that, if they left the 
 country, their kinsmen and co-religionists would be shielded 
 effectively by Western intervention from Turkish reprisals. 
 During their brief ascendency, the minorities had in many \ | 
 cases more than paid off old scores against the Turks, and | | 
 ' were unwilling to risk another settlement of accounts with | j 
 | them. At the end of June 1921, when for purely strategic | 
 | reasons the Greek forces voluntarily evacuated the enclave 
 Q 
 
242 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 round Ismid and the Yalova Peninsula, almost the entire 
 native Christian population accompanied them, and, in view 
 of their record, it can only be said that they were wise.! 
 Still, migration means ruin and suffering, whether the parties 
 have brought it on themselves or not. The spectacle was 
 unpleasant for the retiring troops, the disposal of the 
 refugees embarrassing to the Greek Government. In 
 Cilicia, during the winter of 1921, the departure of the French 
 garrisons produced a civilian emigration on a larger scale. 
 The appalling prospect of more than half-a-million Greeks 
 fleeing destitute from all over Western Anatolia under 
 similar conditions, steeled the Greek Army to face an un- 
 comfortable present and a blank future. Yet the Moreot 
 or Macedonian conscript was fighting overseas, and Anatolia 
 was for him a foreign country. He could not be expected 
 to hold out to the same extremity as if the front had been 
 on the Vistritza or the Sperkhiés instead of the Sakkaria 
 and the Maeander, or as the Turkish soldier would hold out 
 to defend his national home-lands. 
 
 At this stage, however, the issue depended even more upon 
 the temper of the civilians. I had no opportunity of observ- 
 ing this in the Nationalist territory, but I was struck by the 
 confident spirit that prevailed in Constantinople and Smyrna. 
 The Turkish inhabitants of the capital and of the principal 
 port of Turkey were living under foreign military occupation, 
 but they never seemed to doubt that sooner or later the 
 Nationalist troops would march in; and though, during 
 1921, those troops were constantly retiring further into the 
 interior, their confidence was perceptibly increasing. 'They 
 seemed to feel instinctively that Turkey could hold out 
 longer than Greece. ‘Nous les aurons’ they were saying 
 after In Onii, ‘ Nous les avons ’ after the Sakkaria. 
 
 During the battle of the Sakkaria I was observing the 
 ‘home front’ in Greece. There was little to be learnt in 
 Athens, for in August (as in the preceding January) party 
 
 1 See Chapter VII. 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 243 
 
 politics were engrossing people’s attention. The ‘general 
 
 post ’ of placemen—from cabinet ministers down to elemen- 
 
 tary schoolmasters—was still going on. Whose place had 
 
 been, or was going to be, given to whom? Everybody in 
 
 the capital was making or losing his career, and personal 
 
 interest was bound to thrust into the background the national 
 
 question of the war, in spite of the steady arrival of wounded 
 
 and the progressive conversion of public buildings into 
 
 military hospitals. I spent my time in the country. For 
 
 ten days I walked about in the Morea, sleeping in the 
 
 villagers’ houses, talking with them over the evening meal, 
 
 and continuing the conversation on the mountain-tracks 
 
 next morning ; and afterwards I made a more rapid excur- 
 
 sion into Western Macedonia. The Morea was the heart of 
 
 ‘Old Greece ’ and had been solidly Royalist. The Greeks 
 
 of Macedonia had only been united to the Kingdom after the 
 
 Balkan War, and, like most of their newly liberated kinsmen, 
 
 had been supporters of Mr. Venizelos. The Moreots are pro- 
 
 vincials, the Macedonians—linked up with the West by rail- 
 
 way more than a generation ago—are comparatively in touch 
 
 with the world. By visiting both and comparing impressions, 
 
 I got some notion of the general state of feeling in the country. 
 
 They were in a puzzled state of mind, accepting with 
 
 strange credulity their newspapers’ assurances of an im- 
 
 mediate victorious conclusion of the war, yet full of uneasi- 
 
 ness at the growing economic pressure. In three days 
 
 Angora was to fall; in three months King Constantine was 
 
 to march into Constantinople ; the Turkish resistance was 
 
 broken ; in this hundredth year after the beginning of the 
 
 War of Independence they were to see the realisation of the 
 
 ‘Great Idea.’ Crudely coloured broadsheets of their King 
 riding over the corpse of the Turkish dragon through the 
 i Golden Gate, with his namesake the last East Roman 
 Emperor riding at his side, were passed from hand to hand, 
 . and the children were repeating doggerel prophecies, but 
 there was no atmosphere of elation. The people seemed 
 
244 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 like a long-distance runner who thinks that he is winning the 
 race but wonders if he has dangerously overstrained himself. 
 Even in conversation with a stranger, they spoke less of the 
 supposed victory than of its cost—of the young men absent 
 for years at the war and of the remorseless rise in prices. 
 The depreciation of the drachma seemed to have had a 
 greater effect than separation from sons and husbands and 
 shortage of hands in the fields. The fall had not been great 
 compared to that of other European currencies or of the 
 Turkish pound. The drachma still stood higher than the 
 Italian lira. But the political importance of the exchange 
 is largely psychological, and a rapid fall of moderate extent 
 may demoralise a country more than one three times as 
 great spread over six times the period. The financial 
 position of Greece had been exceptionally favourable during 
 the European War. The internal struggle of parties had 
 prolonged her neutrality, and she had earned handsome 
 profits from her merchant-marine. The armistice left her 
 with the drachma above par and with the expectation of 
 prosperity. It was a depressing experience to be reduced 
 unexpectedly to the level of her neighbours and to drift on 
 at war while they were all returning to more normal condi- 
 tions.! Moreover, an equal depreciation in her case involved 
 greater actual hardships, -for while Jugoslavia, Bulgaria, 
 Rumania, and still more Turkey, were mainly agricultural 
 and proportionately self-supporting, the national livelihood 
 of Greece was dependent on her foreign trade. She exported 
 
 1 Fluctuations of the Drachma. 
 Number of Drachmas to 
 
 Date. the Pound Sterling on the 
 London Exchange. 
 
 28th June 1914 (Pre-War) . ; ‘ : ‘ . ; 25.14 
 
 9th May 1919 (Eve of Greek landing at Smyrna) . , ‘ 24.35-24.65 
 
 1lth November 1920 (Eve of Greek General Election) . . 37.00-37.50 
 23rd December 1920 (Just after return of King Constantine 
 
 to Athens) . ~ : 3 : - ‘ 3 p 48.50-48.80 
 
 18th March 1921 (Just before Greek Spring Offensive) . P 51.75-52.25 
 
 8th July 1921 (Just before Greek Summer Offensive) . - 66. 25-66. 75 
 
 23rd September 1921 (End of Greek Summer Offensive) : 77.00-78.00 
 30th March 1922 (Just after Near Eastern Conference at 
 
 Paris) ‘ k P ‘ P , ; - 104,50-106. 50 
 
 PO 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 245 
 
 currants, tobacco, olive oil, oranges, emery and other 
 specialised agricultural products and rare minerals; she 
 imported in exchange a large part of her clothing and food. 
 Depreciation therefore raised the cost of living for almost 
 every family inthe country. It hit the peasant and shepherd 
 as well as the merchant, ship-owner, and financier. On the 
 other hand, the heavier fall in the Turkish pound was felt 
 less severely by the population of the Nationalist territory. 
 They were living on their own production, with almost no 
 imports except munitions of war presented to them gratis, 
 or on long credit, by their backers. There was terrible 
 hardship among Turkish officials and pensioners and 
 refugees at Constantinople—a great over-crowded city, 
 competing for its supplies in the world-market, and deprived 
 of the revenues and commerce of Anatolia. Indeed, the 
 Angora Government would have found the defence and 
 maintenance of Constantinople during their war with Greece 
 as great a burden as Petrograd was for the Moscow Govern- 
 ment while they were fighting the ‘ Whites’ and the Poles. 
 But the Allies had relieved them of this responsibility, while 
 the Greeks themselves had relieved them of Smyrna—a port 
 as indispensable to Turkey in peace and as superfluous in 
 a& campaign against an enemy commanding the sea as 
 Odessa is to Russia. The Nationalists had no economic 
 impedimenta and a minimum of military expense. Greece 
 was hampered by a costly overseas war and a delicate 
 national economy. As one takes the measure of this differ- 
 ence and its bearing on the contest of endurance into which 
 the war had lapsed, one perceives that it was another product 
 of the omnipresent factor of Westernisation. By Western- 
 ising earlier and more radically, Greece had gained many 
 advantages in her long struggle with Turkey—she had 
 gained education, skill, wealth, organisation, and foreign 
 sympathy. But to purchase all this she had had to attach 
 herself to the economic system of the Western world, and 
 that system—though its fruits may be desirable in peace 
 
 ———— 
 
246 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 and though its energies can be diverted, by a tour de force, to 
 strike titanic blows in a war of decision—is ill-adapted to 
 stand the strain of a war of exhaustion. The Turkish 
 strategy had achieved its object. It had prolonged the 
 Anatolian conflict into a stage in which Greece’s Western 
 accomplishments were a handicap and Turkey’s relative 
 imperviousness to Westernisation (the cause of so many 
 of her past misfortunes) was working in her favour. 
 
 THE BATTLE OF IN ONU 
 [Narrative written at Brusa on the 5th April 1921.] 
 
 I arrived at Greek headquarters here the day the Southern 
 Army took Afium Kara Hissar, and before the Turkish 
 defensive on the Eski Shehir front had proved itself more 
 than a match for the three Greek divisions attacking there. 
 During the next two days I became conscious of a growing 
 tension at headquarters and of a dearth of news. The 
 situation on the northern front was settling down from a 
 war of movement into a war of position like that on the old 
 western front in France, without either side possessing the 
 resources in men and munitions of which the combatants 
 in the European War disposed. Something must snap soon 
 on one side or other, and I decided to get as far forward as 
 I could before the crisis occurred. Though the Greek 
 military authorities must have suspected by then that the 
 break would come on their side, they gave me every facility, 
 and I hope that what I witnessed and shall describe will 
 repay their frankness and hospitality. 
 
 I went up to corps headquarters in an empty motor 
 ambulance returning early in the morning after bringing 
 down wounded to Brusa the day before. It was a long day’s 
 journey, for there were two steep gradients to climb, and the 
 Greek motor transport—a legacy of equipment from the 
 Great War—is the worse for years of campaigning on the 
 roads of Macedonia and Anatolia—roads metalled for ox- 
 carts and not for heavy motor transport designed for use in 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 247 
 
 France. As we climbed painfully up the heights of Nazyf 
 Pasha, that separate the plain of Ainegél from the plateau 
 of Pazarjyk (a journey that I repeated on foot in the reverse 
 direction several days later), I began to realise on how narrow 
 a margin the Greeks had gambled for a military decision in 
 Anatolia, and how adverse were the circumstances under 
 which they were playing for victory over Kemal. 
 
 That evening we reached Pazarjyk, the headquarters of 
 the corps that was conducting the offensive, and next 
 morning another lorry, loaded this time with artillery 
 ammunition, carried me on towards the 7th Division, which 
 was holding the Greek right wing. Dumps of material and 
 parks of arabas (ox-carts) announced our approach to the 
 scene of operations. Then suddenly the road plunged down 
 from the plateau in curves between low hills, past some 
 carcases of animals, and we found ourselves running parallel 
 with a river and a railway track along a deep defile. 
 
 The place was infested with the atmosphere of war, which 
 makes inanimate hills and valleys seem malevolent and adds 
 something sinister to the most ordinary landscape. But 
 this place was haunted by history as well. That railway, 
 with its magnificent embankment and culverts and bridges 
 intact, and even its telegraph wires uncut, but with neither 
 rolling-stock nor staff, was the Anatolian Railway—the 
 first section of the Baghdad line. In its derelict condition 
 it seemed symbolic of a great nation’s frustrated ambitions. 
 The giant had fallen, and smaller people were fighting for 
 this fragment of the heritage which the German had marked 
 out as hisown. But that smoke rising above the hill to our 
 left front as we dipped into the ravine was symbolic too. It 
 marked the site of Sdyiid, the first Anatolian village possessed 
 by the ancestor of the Ottoman Dynasty, and now the 
 Osmanlis were fighting for their national existence on the 
 very spot where that existence had begun. Ertoghrul, the 
 father of Osman, coming through the defile from the south, 
 had founded an empire which in two centuries spread north- 
 
248 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 westward to the Danube. To-day, along that line of hills 
 through which the defile made its way, the Greeks were 
 fighting for a lodgment to the south-east which might 
 eventually give them the empire of all Anatolia. 
 
 As we approached the southern end of the defile, the guns 
 began to be heard. That afternoon it was too late to visit 
 the front line, and I sat there discerning nothing but the 
 extreme tension in the air, There was an extraordinary 
 silence, only emphasised by the occasional faint sound of 
 artillery from the other sectors. A column of smoke began 
 to rise sluggishly from behind the hill to our left rear (I after- 
 wards discovered that it was the burning of Boz Oyuk, the 
 attractive little town through which I had ridden up a few 
 hours before). As it grew dusk, this smoke caught the 
 reflection of the unseen fire below, and stretchers came down 
 slowly from over the hill to our left front, where the artillery 
 observers were standing on the sky-line. Then as the light 
 vanished it grew suddenly very cold. I was invited into a 
 tent and went to sleep. Evidently the battle to-day had 
 been on the other sectors, and its issue there would decide 
 our division’s action. 
 
 Dawn was like the evening. A stretcher moving down 
 very slowly, intense cold, and a clinging, bewildering mist. 
 But I had a whole day before me, and I asked the chief of 
 staff if I might visit Kovalitsa,! the Turkish position which 
 the 7th Division had taken at great cost the day before I 
 came. He pointed to the sky-line of the mountain straight 
 in front of us, two or three kilometres away. ‘There it is,’ 
 he said ; ‘go when and where you like,’ so I started away. 
 I will confess that I did not enjoy going off alone through 
 the mist up that empty valley to the sky-line with the Turks 
 beyond it, though I was more afraid of sudden death from 
 some Greek patrol, which might fire at a man not in Greek 
 uniform without waiting to inquire whether his papers were 
 in order. But no one took any notice of me. I caught up 
 
 1 The Greek transcription of Kovalyja. 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 249 
 
 a sapper on his way to join the divisional detachment of 
 engineers, who were reorganising the captured Turkish 
 positions on the hill, and we climbed up the slopes together 
 through the mangey oak-scrub. He had been in America, 
 and we talked alternately in English and Greek. On the 
 top I fell in with the divisional commander of engineers, and 
 we walked round the position together. 
 
 As the sun rose and the mist cleared away it became 
 evident how magnificent the position was. The Turkish 
 trenches facing north commanded the southern exits of the 
 defile through which I had come the day before. From the 
 crown of the hill a rift in the mist suddenly revealed a corridor 
 of plain stretching away towards Eski Shehir, with nothing 
 between us and it except a low ridge, a mile or so off, on 
 which a few Turks were still visible through the periscope. 
 To our right rear the great snow-capped Mysian Olympus, 
 that towers above the city of Brusa, appeared unexpectedly 
 through a gap in the nearer hills (that gap often recurred 
 unpleasantly to my mind when we were retreating next day). 
 The summit which I had ascended was one of the three or 
 four that constitute the Kovalitsa ridge, and the position 
 must have been a terrible one to attack. All along the 
 northern rim of the crest there was a tilted outcrop of lime- 
 stone scrag, turning the slope for a few yards into a precipice, 
 and here, where the nullahs met the scrag, lay most of the 
 Greek dead (the Turkish dead, killed by shell-fire, lay in their 
 trenches). 
 
 I wondered how any one could think the military posses- 
 sion of those summits worth the price, and then I looked 
 down the plain of Eski Shehir and thought of the historical 
 consequences which the capture of those summits might in- 
 volve. I had not realised yet that, even from the military 
 point of view, they had been captured in vain. 
 
 I know that retreats have been described too often already. 
 The general features of all retreats are probably the same. 
 But perhaps any one who has taken part in one has a right 
 
250 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 to describe it again. As far as I was concerned, this parti- 
 cular retreat began when, after having seen all I wanted of 
 Kovalitsa, I made my way back downhill towards divisional 
 headquarters, but I did not know this till four o’clock next 
 morning. I thought that I was merely going down to find 
 some lunch, and that I should have time to visit Kovalitsa 
 again before the division descended from Kovalitsa into the 
 plain and advanced to Eski Shehir. 
 
 As a matter of fact, I was already disturbed on my own 
 account (though no doubt not nearly so acutely as the 
 divisional staff) by the exposure of our left flank. During 
 my outward journey to Kovalitsa there had been a burst of 
 rifle fire which sounded disconcertingly near to divisional 
 headquarters. The cannonading, which broke out furiously 
 when I was on the top of Kovalitsa and then rather suddenly 
 stopped, seemed to come not only from our left, but from 
 very much to our left rear. When I got down to head- 
 quarters I found only officers and telephones. Tents and 
 baggage had gone. Where should I find my riicksack ? At 
 Karakeui, a little way back. Inquiries for Karakeui led me 
 right back to the northern end of the defile, where the road 
 zigzagged down from the Pazarjyk plateau, and where, the 
 day before, I had first encountered the atmosphere of war, 
 I found my baggage and determined to stick to it, which let 
 me in for an exasperating series of marches and counter- 
 marches with the baggage train of the divisional staff up and 
 down the defile. JI should think the site of our camp for the 
 night was settled and unsettled half-a-dozen times. Late 
 afternoon passed into evening, and the little town of Boz 
 Oyuk went up in brighter and brighter flames, illuminating 
 not only the smoke but the surrounding hills. Finally, 
 towards 10 p.m., we got the order to pitch the tents where 
 they had been the night before. A rumour came that there 
 had been a great battle on the 10th Division’s sector in the 
 centre ; that the 10th had repulsed all attacks, and had 
 counter-attacked in turn ; and that a Greek aeroplane had 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 251 
 
 seen the Turkish forces retreating in confusion. Asa matter 
 of fact, that morning the 10th Division, holding the Greek 
 centre, had been pushed so far back that our own retreat 
 through the defile had been menaced for several hours, and 
 the airmen had reported that fresh Turkish divisions were 
 coming into line. At the moment when the staff’s baggage 
 was moving up to its old position, a general retreat had 
 already been decreed. 
 
 I was dozing (one could not sleep consecutively for the 
 cold) against the outside of a tent, when some one came round 
 and began to pull up the pegs. As I got up I found the mules 
 already being loaded. The battery under the hill limbered 
 up and fell into line in front of us. The cavalry mounted 
 and followed. We moved out, but back and down the valley, 
 passed through the streets of Boz Oyuk, where the fire was 
 now at its height, and turned once again into the road lead- 
 ing northward up the defile. It was a weird march, between 
 4 A.M. and dawn, in choking dust transfused with moonlight 
 and reeking with the odour of animals and men. I did not 
 in the least realise our danger, and I am sure that 90 per 
 cent. of the column were as unaware of it as I. 
 
 Then we passed out of the defile, left the road where it 
 wound away up to our left, and unloaded the mules in a field 
 by the railway. We were told that this was to be our 
 position for the day, and I was thinking of wandering back 
 to corps headquarters to get news of the other divisions, 
 when an urgent order came for us to load and start again. 
 There was.a visible impatience among the men, who were 
 already very tired. Where were we togo? To Pazarjyk or 
 beyond? The orderly only knew that we were to go back- 
 wardand start at once. By aside track we regained the main 
 road, and then the truth burst upon us. The field artillery 
 were well ahead. The heavy guns, drawn by motor lorries, 
 were lumbering up another road that made a junction with 
 ours. Eventheinfantry wereemergingfromthedefile. It was 
 a general retreat, and heaven knew how far we were to go. 
 
252 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Being a mule train and belonging to the divisional staff, 
 we made our way through the fields at a faster pace than the 
 column, and were able to survey it from one end to the other 
 before the close of the day. I must record my admiration 
 of the discipline and good temper which the retreating 
 division maintained from beginning to end, and I was an 
 eye-witness of the 7th Division’s retreat from the moment it 
 left the valley below Kovalitsa till the time when, on the 
 second afternoon, one section after another of the intermin- 
 able column passed through the wire entanglements and 
 trenches which they had held twelve days earlier, before the 
 offensive began, and settled down in their old quarters to 
 hold their old line. 
 
 The men were angry—angry at spending so much blood 
 and labour in vain, but even more humiliated at a defeat 
 which broke a long record of victory of which they had been 
 intensely proud. A great deal is written about the southern 
 temperament and its tendency to give way under adversity, 
 but the temperament of a crowd (whatever may be the case 
 with individuals) is not innate and unchangeable, but is the 
 product of habit and training. This crowd, whose bearing 
 in adversity I was privileged to witness, was a body of men 
 toughened and knit together by four years’ experience of 
 modern warfare. They had learnt much from their contact 
 with the other Allied armies on the Salonika front, and this 
 training was not to be undone by one reverse, however bitter 
 or however serious it might be. Certainly the quality of 
 this veteran division came out in adversity more than when 
 they were still confident of success. Heavy guns, field guns, 
 mountain artillery, lorries, ox-carts, and mules—all were 
 safely brought away, and such ammunition as could not be 
 transported was blown up. . 
 
 The single road along which we were moving was badly 
 broken up by the constant passage of heavy traffic, and ox- 
 carts and motor transport seemed equally apt to break down. 
 But the break-downs were repaired, the stream of wheeled 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 253 
 
 traffic was kept constantly moving in single file, the mules 
 were passed along in parallel columns across the fields, and 
 officers were detailed to direct the movement at bridges and 
 fords. As we emerged from the defile, the cavalry were sent 
 back through it to keep the Turkish cavalry in play, the 
 mountain artillery was sorted out and kept at the rear of the 
 column, and the heavy artillery was hurried on towards the 
 van. 
 
 There was no panic and little confusion, and yet our 
 situation was not a comfortable one. The positions we had 
 just left were at right angles to the old positions, covering 
 Brusa, to which we were retreating. The road we were 
 following roughly described the arc of a circle, seventy kilo- 
 metres long, with the concave side towards the enemy. 
 Would the enemy cavalry move along the chord of the arc 
 and cut into our flank before our journey was done? But 
 no enemy appeared. We camped that afternoon at 2 P.M. 
 on the Nazyf Pasha heights, between the plateau of Pazarjyk 
 and the plain of Ainegol. We did not leave them till 3 a.m. 
 next morning, and it was not till we had safely passed through 
 barred and bolted Aineg6l town, and were nearing the further 
 heights, where we were to stand, that any Turkish cavalry 
 made contact with our rearguard. 
 
 I marched through Aineg6l with the divisional commander 
 of engineers and bivouacked with his detachment for half an 
 hour just beyond. The mules were ranged in line and un- 
 loaded, and, the day being Sunday, a church parade was held 
 for the men. That was the end of my walking. My friend 
 put me into a passing motor lorry which dropped me at the 
 crown of the hill, just above the wire and trenches of the 
 period before the offensive, which the division was to re- 
 occupy again. From the bank above the road I commanded 
 a marvellous view of kindly Olympus, the plain and town of 
 Ainegol, and the Nazyf Pasha heights on the horizon, eight 
 hours’ march away. I sat there watching the immense 
 procession and looking out for the mule which was carrying 
 
254 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 my knapsack—I could identify him because he was also 
 carrying two deal folding tables belonging to the divisional 
 staff. 
 
 As I watched, one of two oxen yoked to a cart just below 
 me lay down deliberately in the road, and the whole file of 
 carts, guns, and lorries halted behind him for miles. It was 
 a dramatic act on the part of the ox, for there, far away on 
 the road zigzagging down into the plain from Nazyf Pasha, 
 I could see the dust raised by the Turkish cavalry as they 
 came down at last in pursuit. In some circumstances an 
 ox may decide the fate of an army, but the driver of this ox 
 was more than a match forhim. After kicking and prodding 
 the animal with no result whatever, he stooped down, picked 
 up its tail, and, to my amazement, started carefully parting 
 the hairs. Then, assuming a ferocious expression, he dug his 
 teeth into the tail flesh. Perhaps this was an ultima ratio for 
 dealing with oxen which had been handed down in the man’s 
 family for generations. Anyhow it worked. The ox got 
 up with alacrity and walked on, the whole column followed, 
 and I myself was caught up in a motor-car, whirled away to 
 see the progress of the 3rd Division, and finally deposited 
 in a hotel at Brusa at two o’clock next morning, after a 
 twenty-three hours’ day. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF A LEGEND 
 [Written at Constantinople on the 15th April 1921.] 
 
 There is a widespread belief among the Greeks and Turks 
 that Allied officers have been taking an active part in the 
 recent operations on one side and the other. It has even 
 been explained to me that this is really a war between 
 England and France for influence in Anatolia. The legend 
 is founded on the fact—which the local nationalities know 
 as well as we do—that the views of the Allied Governments 
 on the Anatolian problem diverge. But only the megalo- 
 mania which besets the minds of all nationalities, without 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 255 
 
 exception, out here could suppose that this divergence over 
 what is a very minor issue in world politics could break the 
 Entente. The Entente is not going to be broken because 
 the incorrigible ‘ Eastern Question ’ is a question still, and 
 I have been able to ascertain at first hand (what I should 
 have assumed @ priori) that there have been neither British 
 officers fighting on the Greek side nor French and Italian on 
 the Turkish. 
 
 When I got back to Constantinople from the Brusa front 
 the other day, I was assured by my Turkish friends, who had 
 stayed in Constantinople all the time, that British officers 
 had been directing the Greek offensive. There is, of course, 
 not a shadow of truth in this. The truth is that officers 
 belonging to all three Allied Powers were attached to the 
 Greek Army to watch the operations. When the front was 
 at Avghyn and Kovalitsa, I travelled from Brusa to the corps 
 headquarters at Pazarjyk in the same lorry as an Italian 
 officer and his orderlies. When I arrived at Kovalitsa, I 
 found British officers examining the captured Turkish 
 positions ; and when I got back to my hotel at Brusa, 1 
 found a larger number of French officers there than the 
 British and Italian attachés put together. No doubt the 
 Turkish legend about the British arose because the British 
 attachés posted themselves in the Greek front lines and were 
 visible from the Turkish positions. 
 
 The most ingenious periscope could not have revealed to 
 the Kemalists the Italian officer at Pazarjyk or the French 
 mission at Brusa. Why these latter gentlemen did not visit 
 the front itself it is impossible for me to say. The Greeks 
 will tell me that the reason was political—that France and 
 Italy do not wish to lose favour with Kemal by being ob- 
 served in Greece’s company. I should be more inclined to 
 attribute the lesser activity of the French and Italian 
 attachés to their lack of motor-cars and horses, with which 
 the British attachés were supplied, and also possibly to a 
 difference of age, physique, and temperament. But I was 
 
256 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 considerably amused when I found a French garrison in the 
 Brusa hotel, because I had just been hearing from Greek 
 soldiers of all ranks that French officers were directing 
 operations on the other side. 
 
 I watched this second legend spreading through the Greek 
 Army and growing in dimensions hour by hour. First a 
 French uniform had been observed in the Turkish trenches. 
 Then an officer in French uniform had been bayoneted by 
 an evzone in one of the Greek attacks, without having time 
 to utter more than the single word ‘ Pardon.’ And later, a 
 long way behind the front, I met the evzone who had both 
 killed the one and captured the other! The French had 
 also inflicted casualties on the British. One of the English 
 attachés, who had been shot by a Kemalist one day, was shot 
 all over again by a French colonel the day after, and was 
 welcomed by the waiters as one risen from the dead when he 
 turned up at the hotel that evening for dinner. 
 
 A day or two later I went with this same British officer to 
 visit the Greek and Turkish wounded who had been brought 
 down to the Greek military hospital at Brusa, and we dis- 
 covered the origin of the story. It had all arisen out of a 
 new fashion in headgear (which in the East has a political 
 significance that it does not possess in the West). An 
 apparently unwounded officer, wearing a grey, Italian- 
 looking uniform, with three stars on either flap of the collar, 
 explained to us, in almost perfect English, that he was a 
 Greek doctor from a village near Konia, who had been 
 educated in the American College at Beirut, conscripted for 
 the Turkish Army during the Great War, captured by the 
 British Army on the Palestine front, released after the 
 armistice from his internment in Egypt, and then, after 
 returning home, had been conscripted a second time by the 
 Kemalists. As we talked, he lifted some clothes lying beside 
 his bed to look for a matchbox, and there, underneath, was 
 his military cap. It was a round, flat-topped thing of grey 
 cloth, stretched on a stiff frame, rather like the képi of the 
 
THE MILITARY STALEMATE 257 
 
 old Austrian Army, except that it had two flaps buttoned 
 together over the top and had no peak (for to wear a peak to 
 your cap is contrary to the Muhammadan religion, because 
 it would prevent you from touching the ground with your 
 forehead when you prayed). The English major put on a 
 solemn face. ‘So you are the officer,’ he said. ‘ What 
 officer 2?’ asked the poor Greek doctor a little nervously. 
 ‘The French officer who killed me,’ replied the major, ‘and 
 that is the hat you did it in.’ 
 
 Thus the cut of a cap is capable of starting a legend in the 
 Near East which, if not treated with the proper scepticism, 
 might ultimately have an adverse effect upon the relations 
 of two Great Powers in Western Europe. Upon such 
 evidence, it would be possible to start any legend you pleased. 
 You meet Greek staff-officers wearing lion-and-unicorn 
 buttons, and Kemalist prisoners turn up in U.S. Army 
 greatcoats. When I visited the Turkish trenches captured 
 by the Greek right wing on the heights of Kovalitsa, the only 
 Turkish ammunition-boxes I saw there bore English inscrip- 
 tions. I happened to know the history of this ammunition. 
 It had been shipped to Batum and transported to Kars for 
 the use of the Armenian Army several months ago, and had 
 arrived at its destination the day before the Armenian 
 garrison in Kars capitulated to the Kemalist forces on that 
 front. In anticipation of the Greek offensive, the Kemalists 
 had then carried it right across Anatolia and shot it off from 
 these positions covering Eski Shehir. 
 
 Such are the material foundations of legends, but of course 
 the cause, as distinct from the basis, of a legend is psycho- 
 logical. Why was the Greek Army, from divisional com- 
 manders down to privates, so ready to believe, on such in- 
 adequate evidence, that the army opposed to them was under 
 French command? Neither I nor the British attachés nor 
 any of our Greek informants had ever seen with our own eyes 
 the French prisoner or the French corpse. Normally, grown 
 men, even in the Near East, do not give credence to such 
 
 R 
 
258 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 grave charges as this on the strength of mere rumour. I 
 think that in this case the Greek Army’s ‘ will to believe ’ 
 arose out of a very human desire to find some honourable 
 reason for their failure to reach their objective. As a matter 
 of fact, the record of the Greek combatant forces in this 
 battle was honourable enough. They fought like lions— 
 attacking strongly-fortified positions for six days running 
 without reserves. In these circumstances it was an almost 
 irresistible temptation to believe, on the slenderest evidence, 
 that the enemy who had baffled them was not a horde of 
 chettés (brigands), but a great military Power. 
 
 So the story of the French officers spread from mouth to 
 mouth, and it was curious to see its effect upon the Greek 
 Army’s moral. At first it made them angry and combative. 
 ‘We should have got through the first day but for the French, 
 and we shall get through now in spite of them.’ But later, 
 as victory failed to come, I could see how the rumour bred 
 discouragement. ‘ We are not up against the Kemalists but 
 against the French,’ or ‘How can we fight the French ? ’ 
 were phrases repeated to me during the last days of the 
 battle by many Greek soldiers. Ifthe Greek High Command 
 are not sensible enough to explode this legend quickly, its 
 ultimate effect on the Greek Army’s moral may be extremely 
 bad. But that is their affair. It is our business to see that 
 Near Eastern legends without truth behind them do not 
 trouble the good relations of England and France. 
 
ce ——— _ —  — —— rm: ——— — — ee — ~—s soee.. Bod. _—¥ ws SS) ee eet 8 
 
ily 
 
 RHODES 
 
 P fe) 
 Kilometres 
 
 P fe) 50 100 125 1650 
 Miles ae MS OL! 
 
 REFERENCE 
 
 ae! 
 
 #5 Mountain ©: \) Desert ~~~~— Rivers 
 peek eommee Pi /WAYs 
 c= Plateaw\ » Lowland —t—t= Lorry Roads 
 
 = 
 
 THE THEATRE OF WAR IN WESTERN ANATOLIA 
 
Vil 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 
 
 Tue policy of the Supreme Council towards Turkey and 
 Greece is sufficiently condemned by the misgovernment, 
 economic dislocation, war and military destruction which 
 were its direct consequences. But Western statesmanship 
 was also responsible in a measure for the atrocities which 
 these engendered. Atrocities were, and were known by 
 experience to be, the inevitable fruits, if these other evils 
 were allowed to seed themselves and grow, and the experience 
 was duly repeated in Anatolia. Armed men sprang out of 
 the ground and slaughtered one another, but, as in the 
 Ancient Greek legend, the heroes who had sown the dragon’s 
 teeth kept at a tactful distance from the shambles and 
 expressed the horror requisite among sensitive Westerners 
 when Orientals shed one another’s blood. 
 
 This chapter is not an inventory of the outrages committed 
 on the Greek and the Turkish side of the front during the 
 Anatolian War. There have been official publications on 
 the subject (or rather, on isolated halves of the subject) by 
 the Sublime Porte and the Oecumenical Patriarchate, and two 
 important reports by authoritative neutral investigators.1 
 My wife and I are also witnesses for the Greek atrocities in 
 the Yalova, Gemlik, and Ismid areas, with which the reports 
 of these latter investigators are largely concerned. We not 
 
 * 1, Cmd. 1478=Turkey No. 1 (1921): Reports on Atrocities in the districts 
 of Yalova and Guemlik and in the Ismid Peninsula (London, 1921, H.M. 
 Stationery Office). [This White Paper contains two separate reports: (a) 
 on the Yalova-Gemlik district by the senior members, and (b) on the Ismid 
 district by the junior members of an Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry sent 
 to make investigations on the spot by the three High Commissioners at 
 Constantinople. ] 
 
 2. Gehri, Maurice, délégué du Comité liternational de la Croix Rouge: 
 Mission denquéte en Anatolie (12-22 Mai 1921); Extrait de la Revue Inter- 
 nationale de la Croix Rouge, 3™° Année, No. 31, 15 juillet 1921 (Geneva, 
 1921). 
 
 259 
 
260 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 only obtained abundant material evidence in the shape of 
 burnt and plundered houses, recent corpses, and terror- 
 stricken survivors. We witnessed robbery by Greek 
 civilians and arson by Greek soldiers in uniform in the act 
 of perpetration. We also obtained convincing evidence 
 that atrocities similar to those which had come under our 
 observation in the neighbourhood of the Marmara during 
 May and June 1921, had been started since the same date 
 in wide areas all over the remainder of the Greek occupied 
 territories. My dossier of evidence is in order, and I should 
 publish it if I felt at any time that it would be useful to do 
 so. But it has no proper place in this book, and it has been 
 my misfortune to handle such documents so many times that 
 I have no wish to repeat a very distasteful task. The genesis 
 and nature of atrocities, as illustrated by occurrences since 
 May 1919 in Anatolia, are the subject of this chapter. 
 
 How are atrocities to be defined? The demarcation 
 between atrocities and acts of ‘legitimate warfare’ has 
 varied in different generations of different societies. If our 
 Western civilisation makes any further progress, all warfare 
 may eventually be classed as an atrocity in our moral code, 
 as on the other hand part of what we now so class was 
 regarded as legitimate by our Western ancestors, and is still 
 so regarded in their heart of hearts by modern Near and 
 Middle Eastern peoples. At present, however, there is a 
 moral distinction in Western minds, drawn at a definite 
 though constantly shifting line, which we have not yet 
 transcended by abandoning the notion of ‘legitimate war- 
 fare ’ altogether, and which younger contemporary societies 
 have so far accepted that they do lip service to it and are 
 ashamed to be detected when they transgress it. It seems 
 important to keep this distinction clear’ while our neigh- 
 bours remain inwardly unconverted and we ourselves are 
 
 1 There was a division of Western opinion on this point during the 
 European War. Some people felt that the implications of ‘legitimate war- 
 
 fare’ were so abominable that the idea was bound to do more harm than the 
 complementary idea of ‘atrocity’ could do good by setting limits to it. These 
 
| 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 261 
 
 perpetually relapsing, though this is only desirable so long 
 as the definition of ‘ atrocities ’ is all the time being extended 
 so as to encroach upon and finally evict from our minds 
 the hideous concept of a ‘legitimate ’ infliction of physical 
 injury on living creatures. 
 
 As we stand at present, ‘ legitimate warfare ’ may perhaps 
 be defined as the infliction of every kind and degree of 
 physical injury on enemy combatants not yet hors de combat, 
 so long as it is inflicted with a view to success in military 
 operations ; ‘atrocities,’ as the infliction of any kind or 
 degree of injury on anybody when it is not directed to this 
 end. Whether the victims are combatants in action or hors 
 de combat, non-combatants in a theatre of military operations, 
 non-combatants behind the front, or soldiers and civilians 
 in time of peace, to injure them without a military object is 
 ‘atrocious ’ or illegitimate. 
 
 When and how do atrocities in this sense occur ? Nearly 
 always when there is something abnormal about the general 
 condition of society, and especially in the two abnormal 
 states of war and revolution. Such states are not invariably 
 accompanied by atrocities. Indeed, if they were, the 
 distinction between atrocities and ‘legitimate warfare,’ 
 being empirical, would hardly have arisen. But in these 
 states atrocities are at any rate far more common than 
 under conditions of internal and external peace. In peace 
 they are rare—even in uncivilised or immature societies— 
 except among populations morally divided by colour, 
 nationality, religion, class, political tenets or any other 
 potential cause of dissension, and then they may occur in 
 otherwise humane and progressive communities. The 
 mutual outrages of Moslems and Hindus in India, the 
 massacres of Armenians by Turks in the Ottoman Empire, 
 and the pogroms of Jews in Poland and Russia have their 
 parallel in the lynching of negroes in certain states of the 
 
 ‘extreme pacifists’ therefore agreed with the ‘extreme militarists’ (though 
 for contrary reasons) in objecting to the distinction, but the party which up- 
 held it was in a great majority in all the Western belligerent countries. 
 
262 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 American Union and in the murder of Catholics by Pro- 
 testants and Protestants by Catholics in Belfast. Under 
 abnormal conditions, however, history proves conclusively 
 that atrocities may also be committed in civilised societies 
 of average homogeneity. The September Massacres, the 
 Terror, and the war of extermination in la Vendée were 
 possible in modern France during the Great Revolution ; 
 the excesses of the Commune at Paris in 1871 and its blood- 
 thirsty repression were consequences of the Franco-Prussian 
 War; the European War of 1914 occasioned both the 
 German atrocities in Belgium and Northern France and the 
 similar atrocities by ‘Black and Tans,’ Ulster Auxiliaries, 
 and Sinn Feiners which occurred in Ireland after the 
 armistice. Then there is a tale of political assassinations. 
 That of the Arch-Duke Franz-Ferdinand may have partly 
 provoked the War, but the War itself provoked the assas- 
 sination of Jaurés, Stiirgkh, Tisza, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa 
 Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner.* 
 
 Atrocities, in fact, seem to be outbreaks of bestiality 
 normally ‘suppressed’ in human beings but almost auto- 
 matically stimulated under certain conditions, and that so 
 powerfully, if the conditions are sufficiently acute or pro- 
 tracted, that the most highly civilised people are carried 
 away. During the early summer of 1921, I was for some 
 weeks in intimate contact with Greek soldiers and civilians 
 then engaged in atrocities upon Turkish peasants, and with 
 the survivors of their victims whom the Ottoman Red 
 Crescent was attempting to rescue. My strongest impression 
 during this horrible experience was of something inhuman 
 both in the bloodthirstiness of the hunters and in the terror 
 of the hunted. At the moment of embarkation, especially, 
 when we were on the point of getting these defenceless men, 
 women, and children, with a remnant of their worldly 
 possessions, out of their tormentors’ clutches, the tension 
 
 1 Confining the list to Western countries and omitting half-Westernised 
 Russia. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 263 
 
 used to mount and mount till it seemed as if the Greek 
 soldiers and chettés must spring upon their prey. But for 
 the presence of the three Allied officers attached to the Red 
 Crescent Mission, I think they would have done so. They 
 were furious at being cheated of their kill, and resisted the 
 evacuation not only of men capable of military service but 
 of old men, women, and children whose residence in the 
 occupied territory was if anything a military disadvantage 
 to the Greek Army. The Turkish survivors, on their side, 
 were paralysed with terror, and could not realise that they 
 had been rescued from their pursuers. Our interview on 
 the evening of the 24th May 1921 with the acting hoja of 
 Akkeui is described in the separate narrative of our experi- 
 ences at Yalova.! A less painful incident two days later 
 made a still more vivid impression. It was the early morning 
 of the 26th May on board the Red Crescent 8.8. Gul-i-Nthal, 
 at anchor in Constantinople harbour, waiting to pass the 
 inter-Allied control. We had left Yalova the evening before, 
 made our passage during the night, and the refugees with 
 whom our decks were crowded were at last in safety, after 
 months passed under the shadow of death. But they could 
 not shake off the nightmare. Wishing to check the informa- 
 tion that I had been collecting about the Greek chetté 
 leaders, I went up to a fairly stalwart-looking refugee and 
 asked him to repeat their names for me. At my question, 
 the man burst into tears. ‘ Howcan you ask me their names 
 when we have had to leave some of our people behind at 
 their mercy ? If I tell you, they will hear, they will hear, 
 and will take revenge on our relations!’ Even in Stamboul 
 harbour, the hunted animal was still under the fascination of 
 the beasts of prey. Though we had left them on the other 
 side of the Marmara, the breath of their pursuing still 
 haunted his imagination. It was like some metamorphosis 
 in classical mythology. In both hunter and hunted, the 
 ‘ subconscious ’ pre-human animal had come to life. 
 1 See ‘ Yalova,’ p. 303. 
 
264 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 The terror of the hunted is illustrated by the following 
 passage, dated the 15th May 1921, in the report of the Inter- f 
 Allied Commission : —- 
 
 ‘At 4.30 the Commission landed at Kutchuk Kumlar 
 [=Kuchuk Kumla], a village about 24 kilom. from the point 
 of debarkation [i.e. the skala]. The houses on the beach 
 were entirely destroyed, and one was in flames. Horses 
 had been sent by the Greek general, who the day before had 
 been informed of our intention to visit the village. 
 
 ‘The Commission made for Kutchuk Kumlar. Several 
 hundreds of terror-stricken inhabitants, mostly women, were 
 waiting for the Commission to land. 
 
 ‘It was difficult to obtain exact information, so great was 
 the panic among the population, but it was gathered that a | 
 detachment of Greek soldiers and brigands had gone through | 
 the village a few days before and had returned that very 
 morning, passing the Kumlar landing-place. The Com- 
 mission returned on board, followed by the entire population, 
 which placed itself under the protection of the Allies and 
 refused to leave the beach, imploring us to take them to 
 quiet and safety. That end of the jetty which was nearest 
 to the “ Bryony” was most densely covered with people. 
 A letter was then written to General Leonardopoulos, asking 
 him to take immediate steps for the protection of the village 
 of Kumlar. 
 
 ‘It was only possible to hand him this letter at 6 A.M. 
 next day. The “ Bryony” remained at anchor beyond the 
 landing-place, throwing her searchlights over the beach and 
 the adjoining hills all night long, in order to reassure the 
 refugees. 
 
 ‘ May 16.—At 9 a.m. the Commission landed, in order to 
 collect all possible information from the refugees on the 
 beach. One wounded and two dead men were brought along 
 by the natives. 
 
 ‘The refugees stated that the day before a group of them, 
 about twenty strong, tried to get to Guemlek in order to 
 procure bread. They left the village, and, on arriving at 
 the landing-place, met a detachment of Greek soldiers and 
 brigands, commanded by a Greek officer. The women were 
 sent back to the village, and the men were forced to follow 
 the bandits. On the way some of the men were given the 
 order to return, and others were killed, the muktar being 
 among the latter. 
 
 ‘ At 10 o’clock the Commission reached the village, which 
 
 1 Omd. 1478 (1921). eS 
 
| 
 F 
 | 
 } 
 \ 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 265 
 
 was completely destroyed. A corporal and ten men sent by 
 General Leonardopoulos (before the arrival of the letter sent 
 that morning, which he could not have received) were on 
 guard. The corporal was questioned by the Commission. 
 
 ‘On returning to the landing-place, a Greek staff officer, 
 sent by the general commanding the Greek division, was 
 waiting for the Commission. At the request of the latter he 
 assured the refugees that they would be properly protected, 
 a promise which had no effect on the population.’ 
 
 The metamorphosis of the hunters into wild beasts comes 
 out in a reminiscence of the Turkish atrocities against 
 Armenians in Cilicia during 1909, recounted by an American 
 eye-witness to Mr. W. J. Childs : 1— 
 
 ‘Grim silence and intentness on the part of the slayers, 
 and the despairing silence of their victims, had been one of 
 the most impressive characteristics of the scenes. And next, 
 he said, had been the innate mercilessness and cruelty re- 
 vealed in the character of those who killed ; not in the way 
 of torturing—of that he saw nothing—but in the insatiable 
 desire to kill, and satisfaction in the deed. . . . The besiegers 
 [of a house in which Armenians had taken refuge] were a 
 crowd rather than a mob, a party of old men, young men, 
 and youths, told off as it were to this duty. Old men were 
 their spokesmen, and the rest kept silence. But silent or 
 speaking, they sat or stood patiently in the street before the 
 door with foam on their lips, like waiting wolves.’ 
 
 This is an ugly possibility in all of us; but happily, even 
 when the stimuli are present, atrocities are seldom committed 
 Spontaneously by large bodies of human beings. Such 
 outbreaks do occur. There was a bad case, described below, 
 on the occasion of the original Greek landing at Smyrna. 
 But more commonly the rabies seizes a few individuals, and 
 is communicated by them to the mass, while in other cases 
 the blood-lust of the pack is excited by cold-blooded hunts- 
 men who desire the death of the quarry without being carried 
 away themselves by the excitement of the chase. There 
 seems to be much evidence for this in the history of the 
 French Revolution, but the most signal modern instance 
 was the attempt to exterminate the Armenians in 1915. In 
 
 this case, hundreds of thousands of people were done to 
 1 Across Asia Minor on Foot (London and Edinburgh, 1917, Blackwood). 
 
266 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 death and thousands turned into robbers and murderers by 
 the administrative action of a few dozen criminals in control 
 of the Ottoman Empire.1 The atrocities which began 
 throughout the Greek occupied territories in April 1921, 
 were also organised from above, as I shall try to show. So 
 far as it goes, this fact is a hopeful symptom for the eventual 
 stamping out of the disease. But criminals by suggestion 
 are guilty besides those who instigate the crime, and even 
 if the extent of the moral disaster in such organised atrocities 
 is less, that of the bloodshed and agony produced by them 
 is generally far greater than when people simply run amuck, 
 When once the stimuli are there, no amount of civilisation 
 is a certain antidote against their operation. The only 
 infallible remedy is prevention. Such stumbling-blocks 
 ought never to be laid in the way of human beings, and for 
 statesmen who lay them, however little they may have 
 foreseen or intended the consequences of their action, ‘it 
 were better that a mill-stone were hanged about their necks 
 and that they were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ 
 
 These general considerations have a practical bearing on 
 my subject, for they indicate that Orientals have no greater 
 predisposition to atrocities than other people. Indeed, 
 when the circumstances outlined in Chapters I. and IV. are 
 taken into account, it will appear that the greater frequency 
 of atrocities in the East has simply been proportional to the 
 more intense operation of the stimuli there than in the con- 
 temporary West. If the history of Oriental atrocities is ever 
 scientifically investigated, it will be found, I believe, that 
 they have been worse during the last dozen years than during 
 the rest of the last century, and worse again during that 
 century than between the years 1461 and 1821. If this 
 proved correct, there would be a strong presumption that 
 they were not endemic, and that the revolutionary process 
 of Westernisation was one of their causes. The two curves 
 of atrocities and Westernisation would practically coincide, 
 
 1 On this point see Blue Book Miscellaneous No, 31 (1916), pp. 651-3. 
 
 —————__. ~~ 
 
a 
 
 —— ee 5 ‘ 
 
 ~ ee are 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 267 
 
 and the true diagnosis of the atrocities might be that they 
 were a prolonged epidemic, to which the Near and Middle 
 Eastern societies were subject from the time when they lost 
 their indigenous civilisations until they became acclimatised 
 to the intrusive influences of the West. 
 
 This view is borne out by the recentness (and precarious- 
 ness) of our boasted Western superiority. Educated 
 Osmanlis are aware that the Spanish-speaking Jews who are 
 so prominent in the principal cities of the Levant, are de- 
 scended from the Jews of Spain, who were expelled by the 
 Spanish and given asylum by the Ottoman Government at 
 the close of the fifteenth century. Following up this clue, 
 they have studied the martyrdom of the ‘ Moriscos,’ the 
 Moslem population of the Moorish states in the Peninsula 
 reconquered by the Christians. They have read in Western 
 histories how this civilised and industrious Middle Eastern 
 people was forcibly converted, driven by oppression into 
 desperate revolts, and then massacred, despoiled, and evicted 
 by its Western conquerors, at the very time when in the Near 
 East the Osmanlis were allowing conquered non-Moslems to 
 retain their cultural autonomy and were organising Ortho- 
 dox, Armenian, and Jewish millets as official departments of 
 a Moslem state. I have heard Turks express ironical regret 
 that they did not Westernise in the fifteenth century after 
 Christ. If they had followed our example then, they would 
 have had no minorities to bother them to-day ! 
 
 It is undoubtedly true that down to the latter part of the 
 seventeenth century the Middle East had the more tolerant 
 tradition towards alien subjects, and this tradition was of 
 Kastern derivation. It was based on Islamic law, which 
 had been codified from the Qur’an and the Traditions during 
 the first two centuries of the Arab Caliphate and largely 
 embodied the practice of that empire. The status of the 
 
 conquered communities is clear.1 Conversion or a super- 
 
 1 See Margoliouth, D.S., Harly Development of Mohammedanism (London, 
 1913, Williams and Norgate); and Arnold, Sir T. W., The Preaching of 
 Islam (2nd edition, London, 1913, Constable). 
 
268 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 tax, not conversion or the sword (as is often believed in the 
 West), was the alternative offered them ; and as the super- 
 tax was the backbone of the Imperial budget, the Treasury 
 (staffed for the first two generations by Christian clerks) did 
 not encourage the multiplication of true believers. This 
 arrangement was not altogether inequitable, since, in return 
 for the special revenue which it exacted from communities 
 that capitulated on these terms, the Islamic Government 
 guaranteed them protection, and the relationship between 
 Moslems and ‘ clients ’ was regarded as a bilateral covenant. 
 So long as the Government remained effective, the non- 
 Moslems had little inducement to change their condition, 
 and mass-conversions of Monophysites, Nestorians, and 
 Zoroastrians to the ruling religion seem to have been un- 
 common until the ninth and tenth centuries after Christ, 
 when the Empire was breaking up. There is little evidence 
 that they were the result of official pressure. The more pro- 
 bable cause was that instinctive desire for a new social bond 
 capable of surviving the impending break-down of civilisation, 
 which—in the parallel circumstances of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries after Christ—had produced mass-conversions to 
 Christianity in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire. 
 
 This ancient Islamic tradition was inherited by the Osman- 
 lis, was co-ordinated (in the millet system) with the new 
 nomadic institutions of their empire, and has never entirely 
 disappeared. During the last two centuries Ottoman subject 
 communities have been massacred for pursuing Western- 
 made political ambitions, but they have never, like dis- 
 senting subjects of Western Governments, been compelled to 
 emigrate or else conform. One need not go back to the 
 methods by which Saxons and Prussians (or the survivors of 
 them) were brought by Charlemagne and the Knights of the 
 Sword respectively into our Western fold. They do not 
 compare favourably with the statesmanship of the Arabs, 
 but they are an old story. On the other hand, one can 
 fairly compare with the Ottoman Government’s record the 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 269 
 
 conduct of Western Governments since the Reformation. 
 The principle of ‘Cuius regio, eius religio,’ on which the 
 new map of religions was drawn by the mutual consent of 
 the rulers in Western Europe, was repudiated east of the 
 Turkish frontier, and in the seventeenth century Hun- 
 garian Protestants still preferred Ottoman to Hapsburg 
 sovereignty. In France, the Edict of Nantes was revoked 
 as recently as 1685, and in 1731-2 the Prince-Bishop of 
 Salzburg expelled 30,000 Protestant subjects from his 
 dominions. The diplomatic intervention of the King of 
 Prussia barely secured them the privilege of selling instead 
 of forfeiting their property. I can picture the sale, having 
 seen one conducted in similar circumstances at Armudlu, on 
 the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, on the 24th and 25th June 
 1921.1 Our Western ancestors were more provident than 
 those of our Turkish contemporaries. In most Western 
 states, they took the necessary steps, before the end of the 
 seventeenth century, to secure homogeneity of population 
 where it did not exist already.2 But in provinces like 
 Ireland and Bohemia, where they scamped their work, 
 their descendants have reacted to the same stimulus as 
 the Turks and the Greeks in Anatolia. 
 
 In judging Greek and Turkish atrocities, Westerners have 
 no right to be self-righteous. They can only commit one 
 greater error of judgment, and that is to suppose that the 
 Turks are more unrighteous than the Greeks. Much mischief 
 has been done in the Near and Middle East by this common 
 Western opinion. The argument generally advanced is 
 that Turks have committed a very much greater number of 
 
 1 The Turkish inhabitants were being evacuated by the Red Crescent. 
 The Greek military authorities would not let them take away their cattle, 
 but ‘bought’ the animals as a concession. The owners were cheated in 
 three separate ways. 
 
 2 The massacre of Glencoe, personally ordered by that model constitutional 
 monarch William 111., early in the fourth year of the ‘Glorious Revolution,’ 
 bears an uncanny resemblance in motive and circumstance to the crimes of 
 Young Turk rulers against Armenians in the era of the Ottoman ‘ Hurriet.’ 
 
 But it needed the more systematic measures taken after 1745 to ensure that 
 
 there should be no ‘ Gaelic Question’ in twentieth-century Great Britain. 
 
 2 
 a 
 wi 
 
270 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 atrocities upon Greeks than Greeks upon Turks since the 
 two peoples first came across each other. The fact is true 
 but the deduction is fallacious, because a second factor has 
 to be taken into consideration, and that is the opportunities 
 enjoyed by the two parties for respective ill-treatment. 
 From 1461 to 1821, very few Greeks in the world were not 
 in the power of the Turks, while the Greeks never had con- 
 siderable numbers of Turks in their power till 1912. To 
 obtain properly comparable figures (if one really can give 
 quantitative expression to moral values), one ought to divide 
 the total number of atrocities inflicted by each people upon 
 the other by the number of its opportunities to inflict them, 
 and then correct the result (if the evidence suffices) by the 
 strength of the stimulus in each particular case. I shall not 
 attempt this calculation, but I recommend it to any one who 
 believes that there is much to choose between the Greek and 
 the Turkish record. 
 
 In Anatolia there were both spontaneous and organised 
 atrocities on either side after the Greek landing on the 15th 
 May 1919. The worst spontaneous outbreak occurred on 
 that very day. The report of the Allied Commission of 
 Inquiry has never been published,! but I have obtained two 
 independent accounts by eye-witnesses. One is a Western 
 resident of long standing and distinguished position at 
 Smyrna, who spent that morning in a house looking on to 
 the sea-front. The other—an officer in the Royal Naval 
 Reserve—was on board a British warship moored stern-on 
 to the quay. The Greek expeditionary force was convoyed 
 by a squadron of Allied warships with a British admiral in 
 command, and, the evening before, the plan of disembarka- 
 tion had been worked out at a conference of Greek and Allied 
 officers on board the British flagship. The Turkish troops 
 in the city had previously been disarmed by the local Allied 
 control-officers, but they had not all been evacuated. A 
 
 1 See Chapter III., p. 79. 
 2 See also ‘The Greek Version of Events on the 15th May 1919 and follow- 
 
 ing days at Smyrna,’ pp. 378 seqq. below, 
 
——— 
 
 Me re heen y: 
 
 | 
 | 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 271 
 
 party, including a large proportion of officers, still remained 
 in the barracks behind the konak (Government Offices), and 
 to avoid the possibility of incidents, it was agreed that the 
 Greeks should land unobtrusively at the two extremities of 
 the city, march round the suburbs, and enter simultaneously 
 from the land side. The meeting broke up, and next 
 morning the Greeks landed at the middle of the quay! The 
 Orthodox Metropolitan Bishop appeared in state to greet 
 them ; there were religious ceremonies and a national dance ; 
 and then the troops marched in column southwards, along 
 the quay (the most conspicuous thoroughfare in Smyrna) 
 towards the konak, with a mixed crowd of local civilians— 
 Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Turks—looking on. As they 
 approached, the atmosphere grew electric, and when the 
 head of the column came within a few hundred yards of the 
 building, somebody fired a shot. I have met no witness of 
 this fatal occurrence, and reserve judgment as to the side 
 from which the shot came (each party of course attributing 
 it with equal vehemence to the other). My witnesses, who 
 were both at points further north, only heard the sudden 
 fusillade that followed. It is certain that the Greek troops 
 
 fired promiscuously into the crowd, killing and wounding ~ 
 Christian as well as Moslem civilians. One or two Christians 
 were found lying among the wounded Moslem civilians when 
 people came to attend to them and take them to hospital, and 
 it was evident that they had been hit by the same volleys. 
 The barrack-buildings were kept under so hot a fire that the 
 Turkish officers inside had difficulty in displaying a white 
 flag in token of surrender. When at length the signal was 
 accepted and the Greek troops rushed in, these officers were 
 formed into column and marched northwards along the quay. 
 They had to hold their hands above their heads and shout 
 either ‘Zito o Venezélos’ or ‘ Zito i Ell4s’ 1—they could 
 choose which they preferred, so long as they shouted 
 sufficiently loud to satisfy their captors. Some who 
 
 1 * Long live Venizelos’ or ‘ Long live Greece,’ 
 § 
 
272 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 stumbled or fell out of the ranks were immediately bayoneted 
 by the Greek escort and their bodies pitched into the sea.* 
 Later, as they waited on the quay for further disposal, local 
 Greek civilians were seen to snatch the rifles out of the 
 soldiers’ hands and massacre this or that prisoner. The 
 soldiers, unacquainted with Smyrna customs, attacked any 
 civilian wearing a fez, and a number of Smyrniot Greeks, 
 Armenians, and Jews—who till that day had worn the 
 common Ottoman headgear—fell victims to this error or 
 barely escaped. The killing went on for two days, and for 
 ; many days after not a fez was to be seen in the streets. ‘The 
 looting lasted a fortnight, and probably more of this was done 
 by Ottoman Greek civilians than by the soldiers. Not only 
 in Smyrna but in villages within a radius of half-a-dozen 
 miles from the city, local Greeks—suddenly possessed of 
 arms—raided their Turkish neighbours’ houses, stripped 
 them of their furniture, and lifted their cattle. This was 
 allowed to go on by the occupying authorities until Mr. 
 » Sterghiadhis arrived on the scene. 
 
 It is difficult to estimate the number of the killed. When 
 the slaughter was over, my first witness visited the morgue 
 and counted there forty unreclaimed bodies in addition to 
 parts of bodies and limbs. Before his visit, the majority had 
 been recognised and removed for burial by their relations. 
 For days afterwards, fresh corpses were washed up by the 
 sea, those killed on the sea-front having been thrown into 
 the water. At least 200 Turks in all appear to have been 
 murdered. On the other hand, I have failed to obtain 
 evidence that the Greek troops suffered casualties. My two 
 Western witnesses had neither seen nor heard of any, and I 
 
 have inquired in Greek quarters without result.2 This is a 
 
 1 British naval officers and seamen on board warships moored to the quay 
 had to witness these atrocities at a few yards’ distance. They clamoured 
 for shore leave, in order to intervene, but leave was refused. The admiral 
 had instructions from higher quarters to leave the Greeks a free hand when 
 once their disembarkation had taken place. It is not, of course, suggested 
 that the authors of these instructions foresaw how*the Greeks would use 
 their licence. Yet it required little foresight to do so! 
 
 2 But on this point see further, p. 381. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 273 
 
 point of great importance, though of course it does not prove 
 that the original shot was not fired by the Turks, for bullets 
 do not always hit their target. 
 
 A second spontaneous outbreak, this time on the Turkish 
 side, occurred a few weeks later at Aidin. Hearing of what 
 had happened at Smyrna, the able-bodied Turks of the town 
 and district broke open the arsenal where surrendered war 
 material had been stored by the Allied control, armed them- 
 selves, and took to the mountains before the Greek forces 
 arrived. The temporary recapture of the town by these 
 Turkish chettés has been mentioned in Chapter VI. During 
 the few days that they held it, they wiped out the Greek 
 quarter. Women and children were hunted like rats from 
 house to house, and civilians caught alive were slaughtered 
 in batches—shot or knifed or hurled over a cliff. The 
 houses and public buildings were plundered, the machinery 
 in the factories wrecked, safes blown or burst open, and the 
 whole quarter finally burnt to the ground. Many of the 
 women who escaped with their lives were violated, and others 
 were kidnapped and never again heard of by their families. 
 
 When I visited Aidin eighteen months afterwards,' I found 
 that a large part of the Turkish quarter ® had also been 
 burnt. All the Mosques that I saw were ruined and aban- 
 doned, and there were practically no Turks left in the town. 
 Were these all reprisals, or had some of this destruction been 
 done by the Greeks during their first occupation ? I received 
 two contradictory answers. The members of a Western 
 family whose honesty is above suspicion and who had been 
 living in a house a mile or two outside the town while all 
 these events were happening, informed me that to their 
 knowledge the Greeks had done nothing during their first 
 occupation to exasperate the Turkish population. The 
 other story was that the Greek commander, finding the 
 arsenal cleaned out, had published a proclamation demanding 
 
 1 See ‘Two Ruined Cities,’ p. 148 above. 
 2 On the western side of the konak. 
 
 8 
 
274 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the surrender of a stated quantity of arms by the Turkish 
 inhabitants within a stated number of hours, and threaten- 
 ing, if he did not obtain them, to fire a portion of the 
 Turkish quarter. The requisite number of arms was not 
 forthcoming (they had been carried out of reach) and the 
 quarter designated was burnt down. 
 
 Whether the Turks had this provocation or not, it does 
 not diminish the guilt of what they did themselves, nor do 
 their atrocities justify the reprisals which the Greek troops 
 took, during their retirement and return, in the surrounding 
 Turkish villages as well as in the town. I afterwards met 
 a Turkish landowner from one village whose whole family 
 had been butchered and the bodies thrown into a well. At 
 the time of my visit, ruins flanked the railway for miles as 
 one came into Aidin by the Smyrna train. It had needed 
 no organisation to desolate the richest parts of the Maeander 
 Valley. The beast had come to life spontaneously in Turk 
 and Greek, and acted after his kind. 
 
 There were further spontaneous outrages on both sides at 
 each revival of military operations—for example, during the 
 Greek offensive in the summer of 1920, on which the following 
 observations were made by the Inter-Allied Commission of 
 Inquiry :— 
 
 ‘ Attacks-on Christians, which had become less numerous 
 since the armistice, increased in numbers and ferocity—more 
 particularly with regard to the Greeks—in March 1920, and 
 even more so in June and July 1920, when preparations were 
 being made for Greek offensives.* 
 
 ‘The principal excesses of which the Greeks are accused 
 took place after July 1920, when the Greek military forces 
 occupied the territory.” 
 
 ‘These excesses are attributed either to regular troops or 
 to bands. 
 
 ‘When they arrived in the territory (in July and August), 
 the regular troops attacked various Moslem villages, princi- 
 
 1 Omd. 1478 (1921), p. 11, referring to the district north of Ismid. 
 
 2 In the Ismid district. The report was written before the events 
 which accompanied the Greek evacuation of Ismid at the end of June and 
 beginning of July, 1921. 
 
pally those in the region east of Beicos. Inhabitants were . 
 killed, cattle carried off, and houses and even whole villages ; 
 burnt. To this should be added individual offences on the ; 
 part of soldiers belonging to Greek detachments, such as 
 extortion of money, theft, violence, and murder. In the 
 occupied regions the Greek military authorities first made 
 numerous arrests and caused people to be summarily exe- 
 cuted (more particularly at Beicos-Chibukli). 
 
 ‘A good many searches made for hidden weapons gave 
 | rise to individual offences, violence and theft. These indi- 
 vidual offences, caused by insufficient discipline, were. not 
 | usually stopped. 
 
 ‘ Acts of violence and barbarism, as well as massacre on 
 a large scale, were undoubtedly committed in 1920 by 
 Kemalist bands, or by soldiers of the regular army, against 
 the Christian population of the region not occupied by the 
 Greek army, east of Yalova, north of the Lake of Nicaea, 
 and in the region of Nicaea,’ ? 
 
 ) THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 275 
 \ 
 
 But these spontaneous atrocities were only the first phase. 
 They were succeeded by organised atrocities on either side 
 | as soon as the military operations became critical. The 
 t | Greek organised atrocities began half-way through April 
 1921, immediately after the Greek Army’s reverse at In Oni. 
 | Having for the first time encountered the new Turkish 
 A | regular troops and realised the formidable character of their 
 antagonists, they vented their anger and alarm upon the 
 civil population behind the front, just as the German Army 
 } committed their worst atrocities in Belgium and Northern 
 France in areas to the rear of battlefields where they had met 
 | with unexpected opposition. The Turkish atrocities against 
 Christian civilians in ‘ Pontus’ began early in the following 
 June, when the Turkish General Staff were anticipating the 
 big Greek offensive against Eski Shehir and Angora. 
 
 On both sides, these atrocities were afterwards represented 
 ag necessary and justifiable military measures against attacks 
 by guerilla bands. The Turks declared that the revolution- 
 
 ary organisation of the ‘ Pontic ’ Greeks was in touch with 
 the Greek General Staff; that the latter had supplied them 
 
 _ 1 Omd. 1478 (1921), p. 10. > Cmd. 1478 (1921), p. 3. 
 
276 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 with arms and even with officers ; and that, as soon as the 
 offensive started, they were to make a diversion in the 
 Turkish Army’s rear. The Greeks, for their part, declared 
 that the Turkish villages which they had destroyed had 
 harboured Turkish bands, which had penetrated the Greek 
 lines and had been raiding their railway communications. 
 Probably there was truth in both statements, for guerilla 
 bands are always likely to be at work in such conditions as 
 those created in Anatolia after the 15th May 1919. This 
 used to be the excuse of the Turkish troops in Macedonia 
 before the Balkan War for the ‘shooting up’ and pillaging 
 and burning of villages, and it is quite possible that (as the 
 Turks allege) there was similar provocation for the atrocities 
 against the Armenians in 1915. Only, as the last instance 
 illustrates, such provocation generally bears no proportion 
 whatever to the reprisals taken for it ; and while the guerillas 
 who have given it generally escape, many times their number 
 of innocent and unarmed people suffer abominations. In 
 fact, the provocations alleged generally turn out to be no 
 more than welcome pretexts for the indulgence of covetous- 
 ness and bestiality, and certainly this is the impression made 
 by the evidence about the organised atrocities in the Ana- 
 tolian War on either side, I have no information that they 
 were committed in the course of fighting. The victims 
 had almost always been disarmed beforehand—sometimes 
 months beforehand; the crimes were committed in cold 
 blood and the plundering was leisurely and systematic. 
 During the first raid of Greek chettés upon Armudlu on the 
 19th April 1921 (see below), kaiks sailed round the coast 
 from the chettés’ home-villages to carry away the loot, and 
 the spoil from Hoja Deréyi-Bala was transported by trains 
 of mules. I personally questioned ! a number of survivors 
 from the group of Turkish villages round Fistikli about the 
 temper of the Greek chettés during their operations. They 
 all agreed that they were not in a state of fury or excitement. 
 
 1 On board the Red Crescent 8.8. Gul-i-Nihal on the 18th June 1921. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 277 
 
 They plundered first and killed afterwards, and they sang 
 at their work, even when they got to the killing. It was 
 the exhilaration of a cat who has caught a mouse to play with. 
 
 A significant feature was the murder of rich men and sub- 
 sequent seizure of their property. Sometimes the whole 
 family was killed and the house burnt, to cover the tracks 
 of the criminals. I have in my possession accounts of many 
 such murders committed by Greek soldiers or chettés or by 
 both together in the course of raids on villages in different 
 parts of the Greek occupied territory. The rich often fell 
 victims to their great possessions when the poor escaped 
 with their lives. On the other side, I note an example from 
 the raid of Osman Agha Kiresiinlii and his chettés upon 
 Marsovan in the last week of July 1921. In an account 
 derived from neutral eye-witnesses,! it is stated that a 
 certain Sadyk Bey, Commissioner at Marsovan for the 
 Angora Government, took the opportunity of the raid to 
 murder two rich Armenians to whom he owed L.T. 6000. 
 
 In these organised atrocities, the economic motive was 
 certainly uppermost in the minds of those who carried them 
 out—though when they had tasted blood, the rabies some- 
 times carried them away and they burnt or otherwise ruined 
 valuable property. The political motive was also important. 
 For the local members of the nationality in power, it was a 
 pleasure to get rid of their alien neighbours, while the more 
 exalted persons who armed and instigated them (playing 
 on their covetousness for the purpose), were no doubt 
 anxious to eliminate awkward minorities—and still more 
 awkward majorities—-in territories which they hoped to 
 keep for their own national state. Military considerations 
 may have entered in, but in the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, 
 where I made my closest personal investigations, the evi- 
 dence was against this. I do not think that bands of 
 Turkish chettés had been at work here before the organised 
 
 1 Reported by the J'imes correspondent at Constantinople, and published 
 
 in the Times of the 26th October 1921, 
 
278 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 atrocities were committed by the Greeks against the Turkish 
 civilian population. I do not judge merely from the fact 
 that this district was behind the front—guerillas might have 
 crossed the lines—but from the circumstance that during 
 May and June isolated Christian villages were still occupied 
 by their inhabitants, and that the military pickets and the 
 squads of Greek kurujus (irregular guards) posted in the 
 Turkish villages were so small that their lives would not 
 have been safe if Turkish as well as Greek bands had been 
 in the neighbourhood. In this area, at any rate, I believe 
 that the Greek troops and chettés had the field to themselves, 
 and this was also the opinion of M. Gehri, the representative 
 of the Geneva International Red Cross :— 
 
 ‘ At the time of our investigation, the Peninsula, of Samanli- 
 Dagh [=the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula] was behind the Greek 
 front, and it has never been a theatre of hostilities since 
 the beginning of the Greek occupation. Until March last, 
 the region was quiet. The crimes which have come to our 
 knowledge fall within the last two months (end of March 
 to the 15th May). They are subsequent to the retreat of 
 the Greek army after the defeat of Eski Shehir [=In Onii]. 
 Possibly they are a consequence of it.’ + 
 
 Since the chettés were the principal instruments (though 
 not the principal authors) of the organised atrocities on both 
 sides, it is necessary to explain more precisely what they 
 were. There had always been ‘economic’ brigands in 
 Anatolia—a straightforward profession, in which people of 
 all local denominations and nationalities had engaged. 
 They were the enemies of constituted authority, which had 
 done its ineffective best to put them down. But these new 
 ‘ political ’ chettés, though they were partly recruited from 
 the professionals, and though their personal incentive was 
 still loot, were in quite other relations with the civil and 
 military authorities of their respective nations. So far from 
 
 discouraging them, the authorities armed them, organised ~ 
 
 them, and gave them a free hand to accomplish results); 
 
  Gehri, op. cit., pp. 3-4. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 279 
 
 which they desired to see accomplished but preferred not 
 to obtain openly for themselves. 
 
 The ‘ political’ chettés were in fact a form of ‘ camou- 
 flage,’ and, as might be expected, they were a recent institu- 
 tion. There was no camouflage about the klephts and 
 bashy-bozuks who committed the atrocities of the Greek 
 War of Independence. They were acclaimed as soldiers and 
 patriots by their fellow-countrymen. But Westernisation 
 imposed metaphorical as well as tailor-made black coats, 
 and Oriental Governments admitted to the Concert of 
 Europe had to observe its decencies. Practices still kept 
 alive in Near and Middle Eastern countries by abnormal 
 conditions had somehow to be reconciled with accepted 
 Western standards. A solution was worked out in Mace- 
 donia by the independent Near Eastern nations of the 
 Balkan Peninsula, under the stimulus of the situation 
 created after 1878 by the Treaty of Berlin. It was simple 
 —indeed so simple that Western observers were never de- 
 ceived ; but perhaps it ministered to some nascent uneasi- 
 ness about atrocities among the people themselves, for they 
 persevered in it until it became the recognised convention. 
 The Governments merely ceased to acknowledge the agents 
 by whom their policies were carried out. The bands sent 
 across the frontiers were ostensibly organised by revolution- 
 ary committees, equipped by patriotic subscriptions, and 
 recruited by self-sacrificing volunteers, and army officers 
 exchanged their uniform for brigand fancy dress when they 
 acted as leaders. Everybody knew that these brigands had 
 the backing of the states whose supposed interests their 
 activities were intended to advance, but the convention 
 enabled the Governments of these states to remain * at peace : 
 with one another and with the Ottoman Empire, and to 
 maintain diplomatic missions on the Western model in one 
 another’s capitals. This certainly postponed the more 
 wide-spread miseries of open war, but it was more demoralis- 
 ing. The relation between Governments and ‘ komitajys ’ 
 
280 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 (the nick-name of Western derivation—‘ committee-men ’— 
 by which these new-fangled gentry were appropriately 
 called) was not only equivocal. It was in the nature of 
 
 things indeterminate, and in the process of disclaiming 
 
 responsibility the principals sometimes actually lost control. 
 It was curiously like the relation between the Powers and 
 their pawns discussed in Chapters IT. and ITI. 
 
 In this novelty, as in others, the Turks did not fail to 
 imitate their former subjects. ‘Chetté’ soon became the 
 synonym for * komitajy ’ in Anatolia. Turkish ‘ political ’ 
 chettés made their début in 1914 on the Western littoral, 
 and in 1915, after being reinforced by convicts released for 
 the purpose from the public prisons, they carried out the 
 designs of the Union and Progress Government against the 
 Armenians in every province of Anatolia except the vilayet 
 of Aidin. The Armenian civil population was ‘deported ’ 
 from the villages and towns and marched off for ‘intern- 
 ment’ under the escort of uniformed gendarmes ; but at 
 the first point on their road out of range of Western ob- 
 servers, the chettés appeared and executed the massacre. 
 The uniformed gendarmes arrived without their prisoners at 
 their destination. What had happened? The chettés had 
 waylaid them. It was unfortunate. The Ottoman Govern- 
 ment, faithful to its tradition of clemency, had intended 
 only to deport the seditious Armenians instead of taking 
 severer measures ; but the chettés, though outlaws, were 
 Osmanlis. Their patriotic indignation had been too strong 
 for them, and their armament too strong for the gendarmes, 
 so that the Government could not be blamed for the mishap 
 to the Armenians. The make-belief was as inept as it was 
 disgusting, yet it was felt to be worth while. These were 
 the precedents for the organised atrocities of 1921. 
 
 In war-time, chettés are not difficult to raise. The Inter- 
 Allied Commission of Inquiry drew attention to the field for 
 recruitment afforded by embittered refugees :— 
 
 1 See Chapter IV. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 281 
 
 ‘Where either side is in the ascendancy, the survivors of 
 the other in many cases become fugitive; the men often 
 become brigands. . . . 
 
 ‘The members of the Commission [in the Ismid area] are 
 under the impression that those Moslems who have become 
 brigands will return to their homes and to peaceful pursuits 
 when assured of settled conditions under Moslem administra- 
 
 tion, and that Greek brigands, if offered an amnesty, will 
 take the opportunity of trusting the Allies in a scheme for 
 colonisation in a Greek zone. These men appear usually 
 to have become brigands only when driven from their homes 
 or after desertion from Turkish military service.’ + 
 
 The Greek recruiting authorities paid special attention to 
 the Anatolian Circassians. At the time of the final sub- = 
 jugation of the Caucasus by Russia, something like half a 
 Q million survivors of this Caucasian Moslem nation were given 
 asylum in the Ottoman Empire. Their leaders soon made 
 | their mark in Turkish public life, but the commonalty never 
 i got on with the Turkish peasants. Their different language, 
 | customs and costume and higher standard of living were 
 1 barriers, and they were as turbulent as the Kretans. There 
 i were many of these uncomfortable Circassian exiles in 
 i Western Anatolia. Damad Ferid Pasha’s attempt to raise 
 . a Circassian army against the Nationalists, and the desertion 
 of Eshref and Edhem, the Circassian chetté leaders, from the 
 
 | Nationalists to the Greeks, have been mentioned already.? 
 I These two deserters are reported to have laid suggestions 
 i before the Greek High Command for the enlistment of their 
 ( | kinsmen on a larger scale. In irresponsible Greek quarters, 
 \\ there was talk of imitating the Russian Cossack system and 
 
 | of planting a cordon of privileged Circassian military 
 | colonists round the frontiers of the Anatolian territory which 
 \ Greece hoped to retain in permanence. The Ottoman a 
 Government had done this with the Circassians in a hap- 
 | hazard way along the desert border of Syria, but the un- | 
 suitability of the climate for Northern settlers had told 
 
 ' against the experiment. Whether the Greek authorities 
 
 4 Cmd, 1478 (1921), p. 10. ® See Chapter V. 
 
282 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 really thought of repeating it on their own account it is 
 impossible to say, but in the course of 1921 they certainly 
 raised considerable numbers of Circassian auxiliaries, on 
 whom the Commission of Inquiry passed the following 
 judgment :— 
 ‘These Circassians furnish excellent semi-regular com- 
 batants, but also form bands whose poorly controlled activity 
 admits of excesses and thus helps to perpetuate the régime 
 
 of continual reprisals which is gradually ravaging and 
 depopulating the country.’ ! 
 
 At the end of June 1921, a few weeks after that report was 
 written, some of these Circassian mercenaries assisted the 
 Greek chettés and regular troops at Ismid in the massacre 
 of Turkish civilians, on the eve of the Greek evacuation of 
 the town. But so far as I could discover, they played a 
 subordinate part, and there is no warrant for making them 
 the scape-goats for either this or any other Greek atrocity. 
 The majority of the political chettés raised by the Greek 
 authorities in Anatolia, in and after April 1921, were neither 
 professional brigands nor non-Turkish Moslems, but local 
 Christians formerly engaged in peaceful occupations. The 
 survivors from Turkish villages round Fistikli which had 
 been attacked and burnt by Greek chettés in April 1921 (see 
 below), told me that previously there had not been chettés in 
 their district, that the relations between the Greek and 
 Turkish inhabitants had been neighbourly, and that the 
 leaders of the new Greek chetté bands had been shepherds 
 and charcoal burners. At Yalova, several of them had been 
 shopkeepers or petty merchants. At Gemlik, one of them 
 owned a little factory! They were, in fact, ordinary Greek 
 civilians who, under the brutalising influence of the war and 
 
 1 Cmd. 1478 (1921), p. 11. 
 
 2 They gave me the following names of chetté band leaders from Greek 
 villages :—From Engheré, Londi Kaptan; from Katyrly, Styliands; from 
 Arnautkeui, Yokatos Yoryi (‘Loaded George’), Hajji Topuz (?) oghlu 
 (‘Palmer Club’s son’) Panayoti, and Kumarjy oghlu (‘Gambler’s son’) 
 Potti (?)—not all so very respectable after all, if their family professions 
 were accurately recorded in their surnames, 
 
; 
 } 
 ' 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 283 
 
 the encouragement of the Greek army of occupation, had 
 girt on bandoliers, assumed an appropriate head-dress,* and 
 begun breaking the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Command- 
 ments as well as the Tenth. This was, of course, the most 
 deplorable feature in the system. Had the executants of 
 the organised atrocities been only professional criminals or 
 alien settlers like the Circassians, they could subsequently 
 have been killed or driven out without compromising the 
 innocent majority of the nationality whose authorities had 
 employed them. But these civilians turned assassins com- 
 promised the whole nation to which they belonged. Their 
 activities started a war of extermination between the two 
 elements in a mixed population, and when once this had 
 begun, it was difficult to see how the two could be enabled 
 to live together as neighbours again. The enrolment of 
 these chettés opened a vista of reprisals and counter-reprisals 
 which all the diplomacy of the West could hardly arrest 
 before it worked itself out to its horrible conclusion. 
 
 The irony of the situation was that this diabolical method 
 of camouflage was totally ineffective. On both sides, con- 
 clusive evidence was obtained by Western observers that 
 chettés and constituted authorities were acting in co-opera- 
 tion. On this point, the Inter-Allied Commission in the 
 Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, in their report of the 23rd May 
 1921, summed up as follows :— 
 
 ‘The Commission endeavoured to arrive at the causes 
 which, in less than two months, brought about the destruc- 
 tion or evacuation of nearly all the Moslem villages of that 
 part of the kazas of Yalova and Guemlek which is occupied 
 by the Greeks. 
 
 ‘Tf events which took place at the time of the movements 
 of the Greek army towards the end of March can explain 
 
 1 A gort of turban consisting of a strip of cloth, or of a bashlyk with 
 long lappets wound round the head and loosely tied. This is the national 
 head-dress of the Laz—a Georgian-speaking Moslem tribe on the Black Sea 
 coast between “Batum and Trebizond, renowned as sailors and assassins. 
 The Greek chetté leaders wore it self-consciously, but the Western peaked 
 cloth cap—their ordinary head-gear—suited them better. The head-dress 
 is, of course, the distinctive element of costume in Turkey. 
 
284 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 why the villages near to the Greek line (Dijan Keui, Reshadié, 
 Soyuljak, Bazar Keui (Turkish), and Chengeller (Armenian)) 
 were destroyed or abandoned by reason of attack or as 
 reprisals, the case is not parallel on the northern shore of 
 the Gulf of Mudania. These latter villages were burned on 
 the 15th May, when military operations were but few, and 
 without the Greek Commander having reported the par- 
 ticular acts of provocation, although the Commission had 
 been at Guemlek since the 12th May. 
 
 ‘A sufficient cause is doubtless presented by the age-long 
 hatred existing between the various races, increased, in so 
 far as the Greek soldiers and the Greek population of 
 Guemlek are concerned, by the presence of 2000 Armenian 
 refugees who suffered greatly at the hands of the Turks 
 during the war, and by that of 3600 Greek refugees, many 
 of whom witnessed the atrocities committed by the Kemalists 
 at Fulajik, Elmalik, and Nicea [sic]. But although this hatred 
 can explain the severity of the treatment suffered by Moslem 
 villages, it does not appear to have been the determining 
 factor of their destruction on so general and rapid a scale. 
 
 ‘A distinct and regular method appears to have been 
 followed in the destruction of villages, group by group, for 
 the last two months, which destruction has even reached 
 the neighbourhood of the Greek headquarters. 
 
 ‘The members of the Commission consider that, in the- 
 part of the kazas of Yalova and Guemlek occupied by the 
 Greek army, there is a systematic plan of destruction of 
 Turkish villages and extinction of the Moslem population. 
 This plan is being carried out by Greek and Armenian bands, 
 which appear to operate under Greek instructions and some- 
 times even with the assistance of detachments of regular 
 troops. 
 
 ‘This destruction of villages and the disappearance of the 
 Moslem population consequent thereon doubtless has as its 
 object to guard the flanks and rear of the Greek army against 
 any possible attack by the population in the event of an 
 early offensive, and perhaps even to create in this region a 
 political situation favourable to the Greek Government. 
 
 ‘In any event, the Commission is of opinion that the 
 atrocities reported against Christians on the one hand, and 
 Moslems on the other, are unworthy of a civilised govern- 
 ment, and that in the region occupied by the Greek army, 
 the Greek authorities, who are alone in authority there, are 
 responsible, and, in the region under the Kemalist régime, 
 the Turkish authorities.’ 
 
 M, Gehri, the representative of the Geneva International 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 285 
 
 Red Cross who accompanied the Inter-Allied Commission 
 and subsequently the Ottoman Red Crescent on several of 
 their expeditions, expressed the same opinion :— 
 
 ‘The Mission came to the conclusion that for the last 
 two months elements of the Greek army of occupation have 
 been employed in the extermination of the Moslem popula- 
 tion of the [Yalova-Gemlik] peninsula. The facts established 
 —burnings of villages, massacres, terror of the inhabitants, 
 coincidences of place and date—leave no room for doubt in 
 regard to this. The atrocities which we have seen, or of 
 which we have seen the material evidence, were the work of 
 irregular bands of armed civilians (tchett) and of organised 
 units of the regular army. No cases have come to our know- 
 ledge in which these misdeeds have been prevented or 
 punished by the military command. Instead of being dis- 
 armed and broken up, the bands have been assisted in their 
 activities and have collaborated hand in hand with organised 
 units of regulars.’ } 
 
 On pp. 10 and 11 of the White Paper,’ similar conclusions 
 are recorded by the section of the Inter-Allied Commission 
 which visited the Ismid district and reported—before the 
 final scenes of the Greek evacuation—on the Ist June 1921. 
 
 These general judgments can be supported by examples. 
 My own observations at Yalova are recorded below,® and 
 can be corroborated by reference to M. Gehri’s report.* The 
 co-operation between Greek chettés and military at Kapakly 
 and Kumla was observed by both M. Gehri and the Inter- 
 Allied Commission. I quote M. Gehri’s account, because it 
 is less accessible in the original to English readers than the 
 White Paper :— 
 
 ‘ Monday the 16th May 1921—The Bryony [the British 
 warship conveying the Yalova-Gemlik Commission of In- 
 quiry] proceeded to Kapakli, which had been burning since 
 3.0 o’clock the previous day. Here and there among the 
 smoking ruins, a few inhabitants. The rest had fled into the 
 mountains. Eight corpses, four being those of women. 
 
 Three of them seemed to have been dead about a fortnight. 
 The 5 others had been killed the day before. In the case 
 
 1 Gehri, op. cit., p. 3. * Omd. 1478 (1921). 
 3 See ‘ Yalova,’ p. 299. el sae 
 
286 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 of one woman, the blood was still flowing. Another woman 
 had been killed on a mattress. The whole posture of the 
 “corpses showed that they had been killed where we found 
 gthem, in their houses. Some had been mutilated. 
 «3 The survivors declared that the assassins had been Greek 
 soldiers. The staff officer [attached by the Greek command 
 at Gemlik to the Commission] contested their statements, 
 and, noticing a little girl, demanded that the question should 
 _be put to her, because “in the mouths of children the truth 
 is found.’ The child declared quietly and categorically that 
 the criminals had been Greek soldiers. . . . 
 
 ‘Tuesday the 17th May.—The Commission received, on 
 
 board the Bryony, the depositions of Lieutenant John Costas 
 
 ,and Adjutant Papoultopoulos, of the 28th Infantry Regi- 
 ment, who had been in command of the detachment sent to 
 make a reconnaissance in the south of the Peninsula, on the 
 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th May. Their itinerary and time- 
 table coincided at almost every point with the information 
 supplied by the people of Koumla and of the burnt villages. 
 Lieutenant Costas admitted the possibility of his soldiers 
 having been the incendiaries. He had not considered it his 
 duty to keep himself informed of what was happening. At 
 Koumla landing-place, he had had 4 armed Turks arrested 
 and shot. 
 
 ‘While the Bryony went to Fistikli and Armoudli, I left 
 with the Greek lieutenant and adjutant and our Italian 
 interpreter to identify the corpses of the four Turks who 
 had been shot. In the course of an hour’s ride we found 7, 
 only one of which was identified by the lieutenant as his 
 handiwork. Asked why he had shot them when he had 
 only had orders to arrest them, he replied: “ Because I 
 chose.” The Greeks returned to Ghemlik and we to Koumla 
 landing-place. On the way back we found 2 more corpses. 
 
 ‘That evening, about 5.0 P.M., we were visited at the 
 landing-place by the brigand leader Yorgo of Ghemlik. He 
 was armed to the teeth and accompanied by a boy and a 
 soldier, also armed. They were followed by a detachment of 
 soldiers, who took cover under the trees at some distance 
 from the village. Yorgo boasted of having accompanied 
 Costas’s reconnaissance detachment in all its movements and 
 of having set the villages on fire. When they left, the trio 
 stole 3 horses from the people at the landing-place, to go up 
 to Koutchouk Koumla... . 
 
 ‘Thursday the 19th May 1921.—By General Leonardo- 
 poulos’s orders, a divisional liaison officer brought the brigand 
 chief Yorgo on board [the Bryony]. Yorgo declared that he 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 287 
 
 had been drunk when he boasted the day before ; that while 
 he had certainly accompanied Costas’s detachment in its 
 various movements, he had only done so in the capacity of 
 guide ; that it was not he who had set fire to the villages, but 
 Greek brigands from Yalova; and that the officer and he 
 had seen them doing it.’ + 
 
 The survivors from the villages round Fistikli told me that 
 in their district the work had mainly been done by chetté 
 bands of Greek civilians from the two villages of Katyrly and 
 Arnautkeui. They had been organised and armed by the 
 Greek authorities—partly with weapons taken from the 
 local Turks when these had been disarmed, and partly with 
 arms brought from Gemlik and distributed to the local 
 Greek population by two Greek officers accompanied by a 
 hundred soldiers. Greek troops had participated in the 
 destruction of the three villages of Sultanié, Khairié, and 
 Selimié. 
 
 On the 29th June 1921, my wife and I personally witnessed 
 Greek troops in uniform committing arson without provoca- 
 tion along the south coast of the Gulf of Ismid. We were 
 travelling up the Gulf towards Ismid in the Red Crescent 
 S.S. Gul-i-Nthal, with a representative of the Allied High 
 Commissioners on board, whose presence enabled us to pass 
 the cordon of Greek warships. The Greek forces, which had 
 evacuated the town of Ismid on the morning of the previous 
 day, were retreating along the shore in the opposite direction 
 —from east to west—towards Yalova and Gemlik. Our 
 first intimation of their approach was the sudden appearance 
 of two columns of smoke rising from the shore ahead of us. 
 A little later, and a village ? burst into flames just as we 
 came opposite to it, and at the same moment we saw that 
 a column of Greek troops in uniform, coming from the east, 
 had just arrived there. We were coasting only a few hundred 
 yards from the shore, and could see the soldiers setting fire 
 to the houses distinctly with the naked eye. Even the boats 
 
 1 Gehri, op. cit., pp. 
 2 Afterwards avait a as s Ulashly Iskelesi. 
 
\ 
 F 
 
 288 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 moored to the jetties were burning, down to the water-line. 
 Later, as we looked astern, we saw new and larger columns 
 of smoke rise from the little towns of Eregli and Karamursal, 
 which had been intact a few hours before, when we had 
 passed them. The head of the column had reached them 
 and continued its operations. From our anchorage off 
 Ismid that evening, we could see the fiery glow above Kara- 
 mursal flickering far into the night. On the Ist and 2nd 
 July we landed at Karamursal, Eregli and the skala? of 
 Deirmenderé, and walked up to inspect Deirmenderé itself. 
 Everywhere the destruction had been malicious and sys- 
 tematic. Among the ruins of Karamursal we found two 
 live human beings. One was an old Turkish woman named 
 Khadija, who had been violated and beaten with rifle butts. 
 The other was an exhausted Greek private named Andréas 
 Masséras, belonging to the 10th Company, 16th Regiment, 
 1lth Division. I afterwards got an account from him of 
 what had occurred. During the retreat of the 29th June, 
 he told me, his regiment had been the rearguard—except 
 for a detachment of Circassians only twenty or thirty men 
 strong. The villages were all burning by the time that they 
 reached them—a confirmation of our own observations at 
 Ulashly Iskelesi, where we had seen the houses being set on 
 fire by regular troops at the head of the column. At 
 Eregli, Masséras had fallen out with sunstroke ; the tail of 
 the column passed him; he dragged himself on as far as 
 Karamursal; collapsed there ; and lay in the open till we 
 picked himup. This again confirmed what we had seen for 
 ourselves, that there had been no fighting during the retreat, 
 and that the Turkish towns and villages had been burnt in 
 cold blood, without provocation. 
 
 The collaboration of Greek troops with chettés was not 
 confined to the Yalova-Gemlik-Ismid areas. I possess 
 detailed accounts of raids, accompanied by massacre, in 
 which Greek troops participated at Bashlamysh, near 
 
 1 Landing-place, with subsidiary village. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 289 
 
 Akhissar, on the 24th June 1921, and (further south) at 
 
 Tiyenli, near Manysa, on the 25th May of the same year, 
 | . besides less circumstantial records and statistics from many 
 other parts of the occupied territories. 
 
 In ‘ Pontus,’ on the Turkish side, during the organised q 
 atrocities which began in June 1921, the relations between ] 
 the Nationalist authorities and their chettés appear to have 
 been similar. Accounts from survivors of the atrocities | 
 ; against the Greek minority in Bafra town and district, which 
 mY were carried out between the 3rd June and the 18th, state 
 iva that the Nationalist Governor, Jemil Bey, openly organised 
 | | the proceedings and that Turkish regulars and gendarmes 
 took as much hand in the plundering, raping, killing and burn- 
 ing as the chettés recruited from the local Moslem civilians. 
 
 On the other hand, American eye-witnesses 1 of Osman 
 Agha Kiresiinlii’s raid upon the town of Marsovan in the 
 last week of July, reported that the raid was made on the 
 chetté leader’s initiative ; that the Nationalist Governor of 
 the town had shut himself up in his house while it was in 
 progress ; and that some of the Christians whose lives were 
 threatened were saved by some of the upper-class Turkish 
 inhabitants. In this instance, the chettés were not local men 
 but came from a distant and much wilder district, and the 
 disapproval of the governor and the local notables was not 
 surprising. At the same time, the Nationalist Commissioner 
 Sadyk Bey apparently did participate (as mentioned above) 
 in the crimes committed by the raiders, and local gendarmes 
 and peasants went on looting after the chettés had gone. 
 The Angora Government are said to have instituted an 
 inquiry and to have punished several officers and officials 
 found guilty of misconduct in connection with this raid, but 
 no disciplinary action seems to have been taken against 
 Osman Agha. Possibly they could not have deprived him of 
 his office of Mayor (Beledié-Reis) of Kiresiin, where his power 
 
 1 An account based on information from them was communicated to 
 the Times by its Constantinople correspondent and published on the 26th 
 October 1921. 
 
 Tr 
 
290 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 was no doubt greater than theirs. But at least they might 
 have struck him off their army-list, in which he had figured, 
 and continued to figure, asa colonel. Probably the ‘ Pontus’ 
 revolutionary movement really was a danger to the Nation- 
 alists between June and September 1921, when they needed 
 every regular soldier that they could muster on their 
 western front in order to prevent the Greek Army from 
 reaching Angora. Osman Agha’s methods of repression 
 were effective, and they could not afford to quarrel with him 
 if he overshot the mark. Such an explanation, if correct, 
 would not be a justification of their leniency towards him, 
 but only another illustration of the evils which were to be 
 expected from the prolongation of the Anatolian War. 
 
 The tactics employed in these organised atrocities on both 
 sides need not be illustrated so fully, for there were few 
 innovations. The indirect method known as deportation 
 was practised on a large scale. On the Greek side, I have 
 information of deportations from the districts of Manysa, 
 Nif, Kasaba, Salyhly, Akhissar, Alashehir, Kula, Ushagq, 
 Torbaly, Bayndyr, Tiré, Odemish, Aidin, and Nazylly—in 
 fact, from all over the interior of the occupied territory. 
 The following is an instance from the town of Alashehir 
 itself. Riffat Bey, the Turkish kaimakam or governor 
 under the Greek occupation, laid a report on outrages com- 
 mitted by Greek troops before the Greek commandant five 
 times over, and the fifth time received a promise of attention. 
 Hearing no more of it, however, he submitted a second 
 report, which received no acknowledgment. Thereupon 
 Riffat Bey sent copies of both reports with a covering 
 letter 1 to a Western Consul-General at Smyrna. The Greek 
 authorities discovered what he had done, put him under 
 arrest, and deported him—with the Hakim, Mufti, and 
 twenty-five other Turkish notables of the town—as a 
 ‘prisoner of war.’ During their march, the party had to 
 
 1 Kaimakam’s official letter No. 84 of 9th May 1921 in local archives of Ala- 
 shehir Sanjak. My source of information was not the consulate in question. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 291 
 
 pass the night in the open in all weathers. They were known 
 to have arrived at Smyrna and to have been shipped away, 
 and that was the last news of them. I possess precise 
 accounts of similar deportations from fourteen particular 
 towns and villages, the largest recorded number from any 
 one place being fifty, and the average about thirty. The 
 dates range from the 13th April 1921 to the beginning of 
 July, when my informant had ceased to collect information— 
 not because deportations had ceased to occur, but because 
 he was exposing himself, in recording these and other 
 outrages, to imminent personal danger. The deportees were 
 sometimes murdered by their escort on the way—for ex- 
 ample, a certain Sultanhissarly oghlu Omer Efendi, deported 
 on the 20th April 1921 from Késhk, near Aidin, whose 
 corpse was afterwards found lying in the road, while the 
 fate of his fourteen fellow-deportees was unknown. In the 
 Aidin district, the deportees’ houses were sometimes looted 
 and their womenfolk violated, after their removal, by Greek 
 officers and non-commissioned officers. At Tiré, a certain 
 Isbartaly Hajji Suleiman and another Turkish notable were 
 deported for having given shelter to two refugees from a 
 group of eighteen villages 1} in the neighbourhood, which had 
 been looted and burnt on the 28th June. 
 
 In these deportations, the Greek authorities adhered to 
 their policy of striking at the Turkish upper class. No 
 doubt they hoped to establish their ascendency more rapidly 
 over the peasantry if their national leaders were bodily 
 removed. The Turkish deportations, on the other hand, 
 like those of the Armenians in 1915, seem to have been made 
 wholesale, without distinction of class. They were partly 
 provoked by the operations of the Greek Navy along the 
 Black Sea littoral, A landing was feared in connection with 
 the main Greek offensive and with the ‘ Pontus ’ revolution- 
 ary organisation in the Turkish rear. On the 27th July 
 1921, the Greek and Armenian Section of the British High 
 
 1 T obtained the names of twelve of these villages. 
 
292 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Commission at Constantinople informed me that they had 
 been receiving very bad reports ; that the deportations were 
 attended by great suffering and in some cases by massacre ; 
 and that they were occurring in Southern Anatolia as well 
 as in the ‘ Pontus’ area. 
 
 Unfortunately, deportations were far from being the 
 worst of the organised atrocities. They were surpassed by 
 the destruction of villages and ‘shooting up’ of towns. 
 This ‘ direct action’ usually began in the outlying parts of 
 a district. The small coverts were drawn first, and, like 
 skilful ‘ beaters,’ the chettés herded the survivors into the 
 central village or town, where they could be disposed of 
 conveniently. This tactic was followed by the Greeks in 
 the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, and by the Turks in the region 
 of Bafra. The first stage was generally effected quickly, 
 the second at leisure. Having taken the edge off their 
 appetite for loot and blood, the chettés played cat-and- 
 mouse with their remaining victims. They subjected them 
 to a merciless blockade, killing any who ventured out to work 
 in the fields. On occasional dark nights they raided and 
 withdrew and raided again, each time doing a little pillaging 
 and murder. At length they pounced ; there was the final 
 massacre ; the village went up in flames; and a month’s 
 not unprofitable sport ended in the elimination of the rival 
 nationality from that particular area. Before giving 
 examples, I must state my conviction that, as a general rule, 
 both the Greek and the Turkish authorities were able to stop 
 this sport at any moment if they chose to do so. The 
 village of Omer Bey, on the hillside above Gemlik, was 
 effectively protected by the presence of two Greek guards in 
 uniform, though the chettés had wiped out all the villages 
 a mile or two further north. Similarly, after the with- 
 drawal of the Greek garrison and the Christian civilians, the 
 Nationalist military authorities were able to preserve the 
 Armenian village of Baghchejik, opposite Ismid across the 
 head of the Gulf. The local Turkish chettés who occupied 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 293 
 
 it had been instructed that arson was not to occur, and 
 the instruction was obeyed.1 These instances of discipline 
 were admirable, but they increase the responsibility of the 
 authorities in the far more numerous cases in which they 
 refrained from exercising their power. 
 
 The drawing of the outlying coverts may be illustrated 
 from the treatment of the six little Turkish villages round 
 Fistikli, about which I obtained details from survivors. 
 Here there were no wholesale massacres. From Selimié, for 
 instance, all 300 inhabitants escaped to Kapakly, Narly, and 
 Karaja Ali, and did not perish till these latter places were 
 overwhelmed on the 15th May (see above). At Ihsanié, 
 only 5 were killed and 2 wounded out of 100; at Sultanié, 
 1 killed and 1 wounded out of 56; at Mejidié, 2 missing out 
 of 250. Only at Khairié half the population were known to 
 have been killed in this first phase, but that was premature. 
 A wurder or two was generally sufficient to terrorise the 
 villagers into abandoning their homes and fleeing either to 
 the forests and mountains (where many perished of exposure 
 and starvation) or to the larger centres. (My own informants 
 had been rescued by the Red Crescent after two months’ 
 precarious shelter at Armudlu.) The 6 villages? round 
 Fistikli were evacuated in rapid succession during the week 
 ending the 18th April 1921, and then ransacked and burnt 
 by the chettés at their ease. 
 
 In the cat-and-mouse play, which was the next stage, there 
 were variations. Samanly, for example, was one of the only 
 two survivors among the seventeen Turkish villages in the 
 district of Yalova. It harboured the persons and property 
 of refugees from the neighbouring villages which had been 
 destroyed. Yet Samanly itself, though closely blockaded, 
 
 1 Half-a-dozen houses were set on fire by local Turkish civilian pillagers 
 during the night of the 29th June 1921, while the chetté detachment 
 stationed in the village was absent on a reconnaissance. The fire was ex- 
 tinguished by the chettés when they returned. 
 
 * From Lutfié, the sixth, only two families (=fifteen persons) had reached 
 Armudlu. The fate of the rest was unknown, but they may have found 
 refuge elsewhere. 
 
294 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 got off with a single raid accompanied by only one murder. 
 Between the 15th April 1921—the date of that event—and 
 the 5th June, when the Red Crescent evacuated the popula- 
 tion, the final catastrophe appears to have been averted by 
 an understanding between the head Greek kuruju, a cheerful 
 ruffian called Ormanjy Yoryi (‘ Forester George ’), and the 
 leaders of the Greek chettés. The Greek authorities pre- 
 ferred to allude to Yoryi as a ‘ garde champétre,’ but he 
 could hardly have done his job if he had been anything so 
 respectable. When we attempted to evacuate the villagers’ 
 cattle, it appeared that more than half the animals (as well 
 as an astonishing number of paper liras) had passed into his 
 ownership during the previous six weeks as ‘ gifts in return 
 for protection.’ No doubt a percentage of this was passed 
 on to the chettés to purchase delay, and they must have 
 felt themselves cheated when we evacuated the village under 
 their noses.1 But the villagers had profited—though for a 
 substantial ‘ consideration ’—by the Forester’s diplomacy. 
 At Armudlu—a large, mixed village near the tip of the 
 Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, to which I made two three-day 
 visits in June 1921 with a Red Crescent expedition—the 
 Greek and Turkish communities had previously been on 
 good terms. During the European War, when the Greeks 
 had been deported to Brusa, the Turks had looked after 
 their property for them; and under the Greek military 
 occupation the local priest—Papa Photi of Imraly—did his 
 best for the Turks, who talked of him as their saviour. It is 
 true that his flock eventually petitioned the Patriarchate 
 to remove him for this reason, but down to the evacuation, 
 they treated their Turkish neighbours with less than the usual 
 inhumanity. The chettés who harried Armudlu came from 
 Katyrly, Arnautkeui, Koiru, Gemlik and Yalova. Taukju 
 oghlu (‘ Poulterer’s son’) Khristo of Katyrly, Stylianés of 
 Arnautkeui, and Dhimitri of Koiru werethe namesthatI noted. 
 
 1 On the last day they were hiding behind the nearest wood, but did not 
 pounce, owing to the presence of Allied officers with the Red Crescent 
 Mission. 
 
or anes — << ali 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 295 
 
 Khristo had some bowels of compassion. During the 
 battle of In Onii (when the chetté bands were being formed) 
 he visited Armudlu on the pretext of buying olives and 
 warned a Turkish acquaintance, Hilmi Reis, to flee, because 
 they intended to burn down the village. About a month 
 later, Khristo visited Armudlu again, and the following day 
 one hundred chettés—the same who afterwards burnt 
 Kapakly, Narly, and Karaja Ali in the sight of the Inter- 
 Allied Commission—duly arrived.1_ They took money from 
 all the Turkish inhabitants, and the local Greek kuruju, 
 Mumju oghlu (‘ Chandler’s son’) Kocho, who acted as their 
 go-between, informed the notables that they would have to 
 find L.T. 3000. But this time the chettés were not in earnest. 
 Though the money was not forthcoming, they went away 
 after killing only two people. 
 
 A week later they came again—arriving from Gemlik with 
 a party of soldiers under an officer. The chettés themselves 
 were dressed up in Greek uniforms, but were recognised by 
 their faces. The Turks barricaded themselves in their houses. 
 The raiders took twelve head of cattle and again retired. 
 
 The Turkish community then complained to the head- 
 quarters of the Greek Tenth Division at Gemlik, and a 
 permanent picket of thirty soldiers was posted in Armudlu 
 under a second-lieutenant, but this safeguard increased their 
 afflictions. The chettés came more than ever, and the 
 officer made personal raids on the Turkish households at 
 night, extorting money, valuables, and women. In time, 
 the girls learnt to escape by the back-door as he arrived, but 
 he used to beat the head of the household when he did not 
 get what he wanted. A woman named Eminé, seventy 
 years old, who refused to put him on the tracks of her grand- 
 daughter, was so cruelly beaten by this hero and his men that 
 she could not move for several days. When the Inter-Allied 
 Commission visited Armudlu on the 17th May, she tried to 
 show them her wounds, but before she could get into touch 
 
 1 Khristo did not accompany them. 
 
296 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 with them she was driven back into her house by Greek 
 soldiers with fixed bayonets. From first to last many women 
 were violated, for the officer took a different one each night. 
 
 After the visit of the Commission, this officer was replaced, 
 and the situation improved. But the maintenance of the 
 Greek picket (including their consumption of raki) was 
 charged entirely to the Turkish section of the community ; 
 the chettés hovered in the offing; and when the Red 
 Crescent offered them the opportunity, the Turkish in- 
 habitants of Armudlu were glad enough to leave their homes 
 and become refugees. . 
 
 They had not fared so badly as the Turks of Fistikli, who 
 had had to receive three parties of ‘ guests ’ in succession— 
 a band of chettés from Katyrly, another from Arnautkeui, 
 and a detachment of fifty-five Greek regulars under an 
 officer. In June 1921, when I obtained my information, the 
 village was being governed by the officer and the two chetté 
 leaders in joint committee. The villagers had to supply 
 their followers with a ration of bread, and on the first evening 
 women had been violated and money and other property 
 stolen. Still, up to date my informants had heard of no 
 murders at Fistikli, the place had not been burnt down, and 
 most of the inhabitants were still there, though the mukhtar 
 had got away to Constantinople. Fistikli had so far escaped 
 the final catastrophe. 
 
 These places that I have just described were exceptions. 
 They were the few places in that particular area where 
 Turkish inhabitants survived to be evacuated. Elsewhere, 
 sooner or later, the cat pounced and the extermination was 
 completed. I never witnessed the last act except on my 
 voyage to Ismid. It was seldom performed when Western 
 observers were in the neighbourhood, though at Kapakly, 
 Narly, Karaja Ali and Kumla the Inter-Allied Commission 
 was (literally) in at the death. From survivors of the 
 destruction of Gedelik (a village between Gemlik and 
 Pazarkeui) and of Upper and Lower Hoja-deré (twin villages 
 
 —_— 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 297 
 
 above Engheré, on the north coast of the Yalova-Gemlik 
 Peninsula) I obtained detailed accounts, which can be pub- 
 lished hereafter if necessary, while the account previously 
 cited of Osman Agha’s exploits at Marsovan may serve as 
 an illustration on the other side. But I shall not reproduce 
 these horrors here. The West has become sufficiently 
 familiar with their counterparts since 1914 for me to leave 
 them to my readers’ imagination. 
 
 I must, however, say something about the events which 
 preceded the voluntary withdrawal of the Greek Army from 
 the town of Ismid, at the end of June 1921. During the 
 year that the Greek occupation of Ismid had lasted (July 
 1920 to June 1921), the war of extermination had gone to 
 such lengths, and the local Greek civilians had compromised 
 themselves so deeply by participation, that the entire 
 native Christian population took its departure with the 
 troops. Naturally they felt savage. Their brief ascendency 
 had cost them their homes; they had had to leave their 
 immovable property behind; and though they had had 
 time for preparations and the Greek authorities had provided 
 shipping, their prospects were forlorn. They vented their 
 rage on their Turkish civilian neighbours, while they still 
 had them in their power. The villages east of Ismid were 
 evacuated first, and the Turkish peasants with their ox-carts 
 were commandeered to transport the departing Christians’ 
 possessions. When we landed at Ismid about thirty-five 
 hours after the completion of the evacuation, the streets 
 leading to the jetties were heaped with the wrecks of these 
 carts and the water littered with the offal of the oxen, which 
 had been slaughtered on the quay in order that the flesh and 
 the hides might more conveniently be shipped away. 
 Corpses of Turkish carters—murdered in return for their 
 services—were floating among the offal, and one or two 
 corpses of Turkish women. In the town itself, the Turkish 
 shops had been systematically looted—the Christian shops 
 being protected against the destroying angel by the sign of 
 
298 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the cross, chalked up on their shutters over the owner’s name. 
 One Turkish and Jewish quarter in the centre of the town 
 had been set on fire, and the fire had only been extinguished 
 after the Greeks’ departure by the exertions of the French 
 Assumptionists (who have a College at Ismid, and covered 
 themselves with honour on this occasion). Cattle had been 
 penned into the burning quarter by the incendiaries in a 
 frenzy of cruelty and had been burnt alive, and the smoking 
 ruins were haunted by tortured, half-burnt cats. The 
 mosques had not only been robbed of their carpets and other 
 furniture, but had been deliberately defiled. In the court- 
 yard and even in the interior of the principal mosque, the 
 Pertev Mehmed Jamy’sy, pigs had been slaughtered and left 
 lying. A general massacre had been prevented by the 
 French liaison officer stationed at Ismid, who started 
 patrolling the streets in company with the commander of a 
 French destroyer as soon as the killing began. But at 1 P.M. 
 on Friday the 24th June, three and a half days before the 
 Greek evacuation, the male inhabitants of the two Turkish 
 quarters of Baghcheshmé and Tepekhané, in the highest 
 part of the town, away from the sea, had been dragged out 
 to the cemetery and shot in batches. On Wednesday the 
 29th I was present when two of the graves were opened, and 
 ascertained for myself that the corpses were those of Moslems 
 and that their arms had been pinioned behind their backs. 
 There were thought to be about sixty corpses in that group 
 of graves, and there were several others. In all, over 300 
 people were missing—a death-roll probably exceeding that 
 at Smyrna on the 15th and 16th May 1919. 
 
 These details are as horrible as those which I have with- 
 held, but I have recorded them with a purpose. The rabies 
 that broke out among the Greeks at the moment of quitting 
 Ismid was a warning of what might happen on a much larger 
 scale if the statesmen whose policy was responsible for this 
 war of extermination in Anatolia should altogether fail to 
 
 1 They sheltered several thousand Turkish civilians on their premises 
 until the Greeks left, and when I visited them they were giving asylum to 
 the one or two Christian families that had not got away. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 299 
 
 retrieve the mischief which they had made. If the Greek 
 military occupation were terminated by agreement, and the 
 consequent change of régime—whatever it might be—were 
 effected under neutral auspices, the catastrophe might be 
 averted. But if hostilities were still going on at the time 
 when the Greeks, with their taghmatarkhs and their sindagh- 
 matarkhs, their khorofilaki and their armostis, one and all, 
 bag and baggage, cleared out from the province they had 
 desolated and profaned, then the horror which I have 
 deliberately described was almost bound to be repeated 
 through the length and breadth of the occupied territory, 
 from Brusa to Aidin and from Eski Shehir to Smyrna. 
 
 YALOVA 
 
 [Narrative written at Constantinople on lst June 1921.) 
 
 Our steamer anchored opposite Yalova, a few hundred 
 yards from the shore, about 2 P.M. on the 24th May, and at 
 first sight there seemed nothing wrong with the place. The 
 row of neat houses along the sea-front was undamaged. The 
 crops were green on the low hills behind the town, and the 
 woods were green on the little mountains in the background. 
 The landscape was almost ludicrously English. Our first 
 boat put off with the three Allied officers attached to the 
 expedition and the representative of the Geneva Inter- 
 national Red Cross, who had acted on the commission of 
 investigation the week before. We saw them walk up the 
 jetty, receive the salute of a Greek guard of honour, and pass 
 round the corner of the konak (Government Offices). As 
 soon as the boat came back, my wife and I followed. We 
 had a general permission from the Greek High Command 
 to visit the Brusa front. We showed our papers to the 
 sentry and found ourselves waiting in the Kaimakam’s 
 (Turkish governor’s) office on the ground floor, while the 
 official members of the party were talking with the Greek 
 commandant, Captain Dhimitrios Papagrigoriu, upstairs. 
 The konak faced away from the sea on to an open space. 
 There were cafés on the other side, with Greeks, Armenians, 
 
300 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 and a few Turks sitting in front of them and looking on, 
 while groups of Greek soldiers stood about idly in the open. 
 
 As we waited, the first event was a rumour from a Greek 
 source. Three women had been killed that morning, on 
 their way down from a village, by Turkish chettés (brigands 
 engaged on ‘ political’ work)! In a few minutes, a strange 
 procession arrived and halted in front of our window—an 
 araba (native carriage) bearing the dead bodies of three 
 women in Greek dress, neatly laid out and covered with 
 flowers. The procession was conducted by a Greek priest, 
 who took part in all the subsequent scenes. He spoke 
 Turkish fluently, and we were informed that he had arrived 
 in Yalova two days before the Inter-Allied Commission of 
 Inquiry and had made inflammatory speeches.!_ Certainly 
 his conduct was inflammatory as we saw it. 
 
 Whether intentionally or not, he marshalled the corpses 
 into the square at the moment when the Red Crescent 
 officials (who landed after us) were coming on shore. If the 
 feelings of the Greek crowd had been aroused, as they well 
 might have been at the sight of three of their women newly 
 killed, the Red Crescent officials would have been put in some 
 danger. But the crowd remained strangely calm. Not 
 anger or horror or pity but curiosity seemed to be the 
 dominant emotion. Our presence near the ground-floor 
 window of the konak was not at first perceived. The priest 
 gave a swift upward glance at the first-floor balcony, to make 
 sure that the Allied officers were still closeted with the Greek 
 commandant, and then rapidly directed his assistants to 
 arrange the sheets on which the bodies were laid, so as to 
 show the blood-stains to the best advantage. Several times 
 over this ghastly drapery was rearranged to improve the 
 effect. It was like some obscene milliner dressing her shop 
 window. The upward glances became more frequent, the 
 expectancy of the crowd more intense. Then the officers 
 came out and the spectacle was duly presented to them. 
 
 1 He was said to be an emissary from the Oecumenical Patriarchate. He 
 told me himself that he was the director of an orphanage at Constantinople. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 301 
 
 Were the women really Turks or Greeks? To judge by 
 the attitude of the crowd, they were not their compatriots. 
 And who had killed them ? I do not see how any Turk could 
 have killed anybody in this district at this moment. The 
 local Turkish civilians are disarmed and terrified, and though 
 Yalova is close to the front, none of the Greeks stated to me 
 that Turkish chetté bands were operating behind the Greek 
 lines. They ascribed the atrocities vaguely to chettés, but 
 the only chettés we saw were Greeks. These Greek chettés, 
 as well as the Greek soldiers, are going about the country in 
 small parties, and the Greek and Armenian villages are still 
 intact, while fourteen and a half Turkish villages out of six- 
 teen | have been destroyed. I cannot prove that what we ~ 
 witnessed was a fraud staged for our benefit, but it seems to 
 me probable that the dead women were Turks and that 
 Greek chettés had killed them. 
 
 But the afternoon was getting on, and we had much work 
 before us. The Red Crescent had been given to understand, 
 before the steamer started, that the Greek High Commission 
 at Constantinople had consented to the evacuation from the 
 Yalova district of all surviving Turkish inhabitants and 
 refugees who wished to leave.. (Since my return to Con- 
 stantinople, I have called at the Greek High Commission and 
 ascertained that this was the case.) We were prepared to 
 bring away at least 1000 people, and we now asked the Greek 
 Captain for an escort in order to visit the villages and bring 
 the people down. Atonce he interposed an objection. Only 
 refugees from villages burnt or otherwise destroyed might be 
 evacuated, not inhabitants of surviving places—namely, the 
 two villages of Samanly and Akkeui, which we proposed to 
 visit, and Yalova town. An unseemly argument began, in 
 the presence of a crowd of soldiers and civilians. It was 
 adjourned to the Captain’s room, but he alleged categorical 
 orders to this effect from his superior officer General Leonar- 
 dhépulos, commanding the 10th Division. The utmost that 
 we could prevail on him to do was to telegraph to the General 
 
 1 Actually, fifteen and a half out of seventeen. 
 
302 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 at his headquarters at Gemlik, stating our belief that the 
 Greek High Commission had authorised the removal of all 
 Turkish civilians wishing to leave, and asking for orders in 
 thissense. In the meantime we set off to make an inspection 
 of the two Turkish villages—Samanly and Akkeui—which 
 still survive out of the original sixteen of six weeks ago. 
 
 Our start for the villages of Samanly and Akkeui was not 
 easy, for our request for an escort drew a string of objections 
 from Captain Papagrigoriu. It was half a day’s journey ; 
 we should not get back till after midnight; the road ran 
 through a wooded ravine infested by brigands; he could 
 not guarantee our security. We looked at our watches and 
 our maps. It was about five o’clock. We reckoned that 
 we should be back by ten (as we were), and that there was 
 a moon. At last the Captain gave way. He called the 
 sergeant of a patrol and gave him private instructions in 
 his office, and we marched off with the sergeant and about 
 ten men. 
 
 At Samanly, the first village, we found the male inhabitants 
 lined up to receive us, and several ruffianly-looking fellows, 
 armed to the teeth but not in uniform, standing guard over 
 them. These, we were told, were Greek ‘ rural guards.’ It 
 soon became apparent why they were present. We put the 
 question to the assembly: ‘Do you want to stay or go?’ 
 and it was received in silence. At last one man answered : 
 ‘I want to go,’ but the rest still held their tongues. Then 
 the official members of the party went off to the mukhtar’s 
 (headman’s) house to talk to him privately (he told them that 
 the village had recently been pillaged, and that they could 
 not work in their fields without danger to their lives), while I 
 went round the assembled villagers and took down the names 
 of each and the number of his family (I got a record of 132 
 living inhabitants and 35 living refugees from places already 
 destroyed, and I am going back to call the roll and see if they 
 are still alive). Then I made the soldiers and ‘ rural guards ’ 
 stand back, and asked again, very quietly: ‘Do you want 
 tostay orgo?’ Then one andall they answered: ‘We want 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 303 
 
 to go! Take us with you; take us! We are afraid.’ 
 | Their terror was unmistakable, their wish was not open to 
 / doubt. They loved the homes they would be leaving, but 
 they would abandon everything if they could save their 
 wives’ and children’s lives and their own. 
 
 At Akkeui, a bigger and evidently once prosperous village, 
 the terror was even more intense. The mukhtar being down 
 at Yalova, we went to see the hoja (Moslem ecclesiastic) in 
 his house. He was a refugee from a destroyed village who 
 had taken the place of the hoja of Akkeui, previously killed 
 
 | by the chettés, and was looking after the mosque. (Though 
 a refugee, and therefore able to leave under General Leonar- 
 dhépulos’s orders, he stuck to his post and refused to come 
 with us.) ‘Do you want to stay or go?’ ‘I cannot speak 
 for the others, but I think they want to go.’ ‘ Why do you 
 want to go?’ Silence. ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘ Yes, we are 
 afraid.’ ‘ Are you afraid of chettés?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘ Of Greek 
 chettés?’ ‘Yes.’ Ashe said this, the hoja drew nearer and 
 spoke in a whisper, almost sinking on to the floor. ‘ Are you 
 also afraid of the Greek soldiers?’ A very long pause, and 
 at last a faint ‘No.’ ‘ Have bad things been happening in 
 Akkeui?’ ‘Yes. A week ago, or perhaps as much as nine 
 days (later we learnt from an independent source that it 
 was at any rate less than a fortnight) the Rum-chetteleri 
 (Greek chettés) came into the village and killed sixty people 
 [out of about 400]. Some are buried in the open square 
 through which you have just come, others on a little hill 
 between the two mahallas [quarters] of the village.’ It was 
 terrible to leave that poor hoja and his fellow-villagers with 
 the night coming on, the ‘rural guards’ standing by with 
 their rifles and bandoliers and evil countenances, and the 
 Greek chettés (some of whom had ridden out of Yalova ahead 
 of us) lurking somewhere in the neighbourhood. But the 
 official members of the party had to get back to learn what 
 orders had been telegraphed by General Leonardhépulos, 
 and after consultation we decided that it would be unsafe, 
 as well as ineffective, for the rest of us to stay there alone, 
 
304 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 We had begun to realise how seriously the Greek troops and 
 chettés were out of hand. 
 
 Next morning the British and Italian officers visited the 
 two villages again, taking with them members of the Red 
 Crescent Mission. This time they made a list of surviving 
 inhabitants, and of refugees from other places, at Akkeui, as 
 I had done at Samanly the night before, and here also we 
 shall return to call the roll. This time, too, two boys (about 
 thirteen or fourteen years old) found courage to show them 
 the traces of the Greek chetté raid which had occurred about 
 nine days before. They led them to another quarter of the 
 village behind some trees. The houses were gutted, the 
 window and door frames removed (a common phenomenon 
 in the present devastation of Anatolia), the furniture broken 
 open and thrown into the street, and in the backyards there 
 were newly-made graves. Out of the round figure of sixty 
 people killed on that occasion, which had been given us by 
 the hoja, our party obtained forty-nine individual names. 
 
 The courage of the two boys who exposed these damning 
 traces was wonderful. The whole population was overcome 
 by strain and terror, and while these boys were acting as 
 guides they were being dogged by the ‘rural guards.’ 
 Whether or not they came within the scope of General 
 Leonardhépulos’s telegram, they had, if possible, to be got 
 away, and the party brought them down to the shore. We 
 got one of them on board, and he is now in safety. The 
 British military policeman who accompanied us was keeping 
 his eye on the other till his turn came to get on board, but 
 he was called away for a moment on other business, and 
 when he looked round again the boy had gone. We could 
 find no trace of him, and, though we have his name, we have 
 little hope, when we return, of finding him alive.1 Indeed, 
 what proportion shall we find of these terrorised villagers 
 who, because they were inhabitants of still undestroyed 
 villages, were prevented by General Leonardhdépulos’s ex- 
 press orders from embarking on the Red Crescent steamer ? 
 
 1 Happily we did. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 305 
 
 We are working with all our might to save them. | If we fail, 
 we shall know, from our records, who have been killed, and 
 shall be morally certain as to who have killed them. 
 
 On the morning of the 25th May, those of our party who 
 did not make the second journey to Samanly and Akkeui 
 attempted in various ways to bring Captain Papagrigoriu to 
 reason. Having with me a letter of recommendation from 
 General Papulas, the Greek Commander-in-Chief in Asia . 
 Minor, and having received much kindness from him, I 
 drafted a telegram to him explaining the situation and re- 
 questing permission for the surviving inhabitants of Yalova, 
 Samanly, and Akkeui to embark, as well as the refugees. I 
 then sought out the Captain in the café, asked the favour of 
 an interview with him in his office, and handed him simul- 
 taneously my credentials and my telegram. Would he be so 
 kind as to send the telegram off? ‘The Commander-in- 
 Chief says that you are a Philhellene! In this telegram you 
 are destroying Greece!’ ‘I think it is to the interest of 
 Greece that the Commander-in-Chief should be informed of 
 what is happening here.’ ‘I will not send it.’ ‘Very well, 
 Kyrie Lokhayé (“ Mon Capitaine’). I am not an enemy of 
 Greece or acting out of malice, and I did not want to go out 
 of my way to make this telegram public, but now I shall 
 have to send it publicly through the Eastern Telegraph 
 Company at Constantinople.’ (I have since done so and 
 received an affirmative answer.) 
 
 Meanwhile, Captain Papagrigoriu had been behaving 
 worse than I had realised. He had already gone back on 
 the terms presented in General Leonardhdépulos’s telegram 
 the night before, and had announced that even the refugees 
 from the burnt or destroyed villages were not all to be 
 evacuated. People from certain villages which he mentioned 
 by name were to be kept back—first of all on the ground 
 that these were still intact, but when we brought evidence 
 that they were burnt, he shifted his ground or gave no reason 
 at all. He was particularly stubborn over two villages— 
 
 U 
 
—~ — Km——K 
 
 306 THE WESTERN QUESTION ts 
 
 Ghajyk and Yortan. It was clear that he had some special 
 reason for this. A second condition was that refugees . 
 resident more than two months in a still existing village or f 
 in Yalova were to count as old inhabitants of their new place ' 
 of residence and were to stay behind—that is, if a family had 
 been homeless and destitute for more than two months, it 
 was to be kept in this condition! These points were dis- 
 cussed between the Captain and those official members of 
 our party who had not gone up to Akkeui and Samanly to 
 bring down the refugees whom we had found there the night 
 before. The Captain was obdurate, and the representative 
 of the International Red Cross made him a formal protest i 
 in the name of his Society. The Captain replied that he was 
 merely carrying out his orders, and that, if he had had the | 
 means, he would have looked after the refugees and have pro- 
 vided a hospitalforthem! The allegation of superior orders, | 
 which Captain Papagrigoriu repeatedly made, is of serious | | 
 importance. If true, it implicates General Leonardhépulos, 
 the commander of the 10th Division, and my impression is | 
 that the two telegrams received by the Captain from the | 
 General during our stay at Yalova (the second I shall mention t 
 later) did stiffen him in his resolve to let the smallest possible 
 number of his victims escape from his grip. Moreover, I | 
 have absolutely trustworthy first-hand accounts (though 
 here I have not yet been a witness myself) of the same 
 atrocities being committed simultaneously in other parts of 
 the peninsula—towards Gemlik and the western extremity— | 
 where Captain Papagrigoriu is not, but General Leonar- 
 dhépulos is, in control. Before this article is printed, I hope | 
 to have met the General himself.1 Meanwhile, I will finish 
 the story of what I have already witnessed. 
 
 Before these interviews with the Captain were over, the 
 refugees had begun to gather on the beach. It was incred- 
 ible how quickly they flocked in. (Akkeui was nearly two 
 
 * General Leonardhépulos was almost immediately transferred to another 
 post. 
 
 eee oe 
 
OO 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 307 
 
 hours’ distance on foot from the Yalova jetty.) They 
 brought just themselves and their families, and whatever 
 they could carry off at a moment’s notice. A few had a cow 
 or a calf or some poultry, or boxes loaded on ox-carts. Most 
 had only the bundles of bedding which they could carry on 
 their backs. Most pitiful of all were the women with 
 children, whose men were dead and who had no one to help 
 them. As we reckoned it out afterwards, there were some- 
 thing like 500 persons huddled together there like terrified 
 animals, in sight of the steamer, and looking to us to get them 
 into safety. The British and Italian lieutenants returned 
 with the last arrivals. The Christian civilians (Greek and 
 Armenian) and the Greek soldiers gathered round, half-- 
 mocking and half-menacing. The sinister priest sidled up.. 
 Captain Papagrigoriu presented himself, and the leaders of 
 the Greek chetté bands now openly paraded in his company ! 
 I secured the names of five: (1) Kosti of Constantinople ; 
 (2) Kosti of Elmalyk ; (3) Thomas of Elmalyk ; (4) Khristos ; 
 and (5) Mihal, both the latter being from the village of 
 Hajji Mehmedin Chiftligi (Hajji Mehmed’s farm). I have 
 already mentioned? that one of them stood at Captain 
 Papagrigoriu’s elbow during the subsequent proceedings, 
 acting as his ‘interpreter’ and advising him as to which 
 individual refugees should be passed or kept back. 
 
 The actual embarkation lasted seven hours. It began at 
 midday on the 25th May and continued till about seven in 
 the evening, when Captain Papagrigoriu, after the receipt of 
 a second telegram from General Leonardhépulos, absolutely 
 refused to let us take any more persons on board. By that 
 time we had succeeded in embarking about 320 out of a total 
 of something like 500 collected on the beach, and of between 
 1300 and 1500 (adding inhabitants of surviving places and 
 refugees from destroyed places together) whom we had really 
 been authorised to evacuate by the instructions previously 
 conveyed by the Greek High Commissioner at Constanti- 
 
 1 In a previous telegram not reprinted here. 
 
308 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 nople (as he has since stated personally to me) to the Greek 
 military authorities. During those seven hours we had to 
 wrestle for their lives, not only family by family but person by 
 person. Captain Papagrigoriu not only kept back the very 
 few men of military age, as was reasonable ; he struggled 
 to retain in his power every individual, however feeble or 
 defenceless or old. He separated (I have instances vividly in 
 my mind) wives from husbands and mothers from children. 
 
 The proceedings began with a fresh argument as to whether 
 certain categories of refugees should now be excepted or not 
 from the number of those to be liberated. This ended in the 
 despatch of a second telegram to General Leonardhépulos, 
 and eventually in the receipt of a second reply from him. 
 As I have said, this reply appeared to stiffen Captain Papa- 
 grigoriu in his resistance. Fortunately it arrived very late 
 in the afternoon. 
 
 Meanwhile, we started to claim individual cases, and an 
 indescribable confusion arose. The Captain stormed and 
 gesticulated ; we argued and expostulated; the soldiers 
 standing at the entrance to the jetty kept on turning back 
 persons whom the Captain had already passed for evacuation ; 
 the soldiers and the Captain shouted at each other; both 
 soldiers and Christian civilians crowded in upon the refugees 
 and whispered in their ears (we learnt afterwards that they 
 had been telling them that we intended to throw those who 
 embarked into the sea, half-way between Yalova and Con- 
 stantinople !) ; the priest glided in and out; the Christian 
 women looked on and gloated (we took a photograph of them 
 laughing at the scene); the refugees sat numb and patient 
 till their turn came to pass muster, and then the women 
 trembled and sobbed. 
 
 I can only mention one or two of the incidents that crowd 
 into my memory. At one moment, I heard a woman call 
 and saw her pointing to her husband, who was being led away 
 by a chetté leader from the shore into the town. I ran after 
 them, led the man back by the hand, and returned with 
 
 — 
 
j—SSS2EEOOELEL I 
 
 ere 
 
 THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 309 
 
 another member of our party to bring the chetté before the 
 Allied officers for an explanation. We had a scuffle with 
 him. A Greek officer rushed up from the café and beckoned 
 to the Greek and Armenian crowd ; they threw themselves 
 between us, and our chetté ran like a hare down the street. 
 I do not know with which of the five gentlemen I have named 
 Thad the honour to make acquaintance, but the leaders are 
 recognizable by the sort of cloth turban they wear. They 
 have borrowed it from the Lazes, a Moslem tribe who do 
 brigandage in Anatolia for their living. The object of this 
 (a mean trick) is to be mistaken for Moslems, so that their 
 atrocities may be put down to the other side. 
 
 At another moment, some one came on shore from the 
 steamer with a message that they had seen through their 
 field-glasses a woman struggling to show herself at the 
 window of a house facing the sea, and soldiers forcing her 
 back. We rushed along to the house indicated ; several 
 soldiers ran away, and others looked on sullenly while the 
 woman emerged timidly from the door and was conducted 
 by us to the jetty. The house from which she came was 
 next door to Captain Papagrigoriu’s. 
 
 When the second telegram from General Leonardhépulos 
 arrived, the Captain refused to allow the embarkation to 
 continue, and we insisted on taking the names of those 
 refugees (nearly all from Ghajyk and Yortan) who still 
 remained onshore. The Captain and his subordinate officers 
 offered more opposition to this than to any other request we 
 madetothem. They suggested every pretext for frustrating 
 us. The Captain offered to guarantee the safety of these 
 unfortunate people on his word of honour! Finally he con- 
 sented that the list should be taken down by the English 
 military policeman attached to the Allied officers, who had 
 come out less than two months ago and knew neither Greek 
 nor Turkish. We agreed, and, calling up the heads of 
 families one by one, I spelled out to the policeman the name 
 of each, the village he came from, and the number of in- 
 
310 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 dividuals in his household, while a Greek lieutenant screamed 
 to me to go away. We accounted for 134 persons out of 
 something less than 200, and then the Greek officers brought 
 up soldiers and literally drove the rest away, declaring 
 (which was untrue) that they were not refugees from de- 
 stroyed villages, but inhabitants of Yalova town. 
 
 The final scene was the most pitiable, perhaps, of all. We 
 had got off all the people whom we had rescued to the 
 steamer, on lighters, and were now gathered on the quay, 
 with a crowd of Greek soldiers between us and the people 
 abandoned on the shore, when we saw two old men standing 
 in a paralysed attitude on the jetty. Their wives had been 
 kept back, and they would not leave without them. Rally- 
 ing for a last encounter with the Captain, we went on shore 
 again and hunted out and rescued these poor women. Yet 
 other families were separated, by pure malignity, perhaps 
 for ever. Next morning, when our steamer was lying at 
 anchor between Scutari and Seraglio Point, we found a very 
 old woman on board with several small children in her care. 
 Their mother—her daughter—had been with them on the 
 beach, but the Greeks had prevented her from embarking, 
 and we had learnt of it too late. 
 
 The following is a list of the villages burnt or otherwise 
 destroyed in the Yalova district. I myself heard Captain 
 Papagrigoriu state that a number of these places had been 
 burnt, and I have completed the list from other sources. I 
 have not yet been able to visit the sites of these places, but 
 the presence of refugees from them, and their testimony, 
 convince me that they have in fact been destroyed. Nearly 
 all this destruction appears to have taken place during the 
 last six weeks, and Captain Papagrigoriu only mentioned 
 one place—Ghajyk—as having been destroyed as a conse- 
 quence of military operations. I infer that the remainder 
 (like one of the quarters of Akkeui, within nine days of our 
 visit) have been wiped out by Greek or Armenian chetté 
 bands, 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 311 
 
 List oF VILLAGES DESTROYED IN THE YALOVA DISTRICT 
 DURING APRIL AND May 1921 
 
 Name of Village. ‘Wares: eee Seca 
 1. Reshadié . : . 400 All. 
 2. Ghajyk . ; . 100 Half. 
 3. Derekeui . P . 40 to 60 All. 
 4, Sultanié . ; . 10 (variant 40) All. 
 5. Karakilissé : ee All... 
 6. Yortan . ; . 40 to 60 All. 
 7. Kirazly . : . 60 All. 
 8. Syghyrjyk ‘ . 80 All. 
 9, Pashakeui 5 . 80 to 90 All. 
 
 10. Kiirdkeui . ; ae All. 
 
 11. Uvez Punar : . 50 to 60 All. 
 
 12. Goékché Deré . 80 to 40 All. 
 
 13. Orta Burun ; . 40 All. 
 
 14. Gillik . : . 50 to 60 All. 
 
 15. Chalyjakeui ; 40 to 50 All. 
 
 Also the farm called Shukri Efendi Chiftligi. 
 
 Norr.—The district covered by the above villages, together with 
 Akkeui and Samanly, is less than a quarter of the total 
 area of the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, the boundaries of 
 which, on the land side, roughly coincide with the road 
 from Gemlik to Yalova via Pazarkeui. 
 
 THE AREA OF THE ORGANISED ATROCITIES 
 
 Itis important to establish whether the organised atrocities 
 described in Chapter VII. were confined to comparatively 
 small areas or were of general occurrence in the Anatolian 
 territories respectively controlled by the Governments of 
 Athens and Angora. 
 
 The region called ‘ Pontus’ in North-Eastern Anatolia, 
 where, after the armistice, the Greek minority started a 
 revolutionary movement for an independent republic, and 
 where organised atrocities were begun by the Turks in June 
 1921; more or less coincides with the Ottoman vilayet of 
 Trebizond together with the adjoining Sanjaks of Samsun 
 and Amasia. This is a small fraction of the total Nationalist 
 territory, but unhappily the Turkish atrocities against 
 minorities were not confined to these districts. By the 27th 
 
b 
 
 | 
 
 | 
 
 312 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 July 1921, the British High Commission at Constantinople 
 had received reports of the deportation of Christians further 
 south. (See pp. 291-2 above.) These deportations were 
 probably connected with the Nationalists’ military opera- 
 tions against the French in Cilicia, and, if they were, the 
 victims would mostly have been Armenians. 
 
 In this connection, the disasters brought upon the remnant 
 of the Ottoman Armenians by the Anatolian War deserve 
 attention. It is true that there would in any case have 
 been trouble in Cilicia, owing to the irresponsible policy of 
 the French authorities, who tried at first to lessen the burden 
 on their regular army by partly garrisoning Cilicia with the 
 Armenian volunteers of the Légion d’Orient. They even 
 permitted the Armenians to raise and arm irregular bands. 
 If the Armenians took this opportunity to revenge them- 
 selves upon the local Turkish population for what they had 
 suffered (principally from other Turks)! in 1915, they can 
 hardly be blamed.? The French, who exposed them to the 
 temptation and afterwards allowed them to suffer for having 
 yielded to it, have more to answer for. In fact, this French 
 attempt to play off the Armenians against the Turks in 
 Cilicia was of a piece with the British statesmanship that 
 sent the Greeks to Smyrna, At the same time, it is almost 
 certain that if the Greeks had never landed at Smyrna, the 
 Cilician campaign and the consequent atrocities at Hajin 
 and elsewhere on the Turkish side would not have occurred. 
 It was the Greek landing that created the Nationalist Move- 
 ment and goaded the Turks into a renewal of hostilities 
 
 | | against the Allies on all fronts. Thus the Armenians who 
 
 * During the deportation of the Armenians in 1915, the Turkish civil 
 population displayed more human feeling in Cilicia (as far as the evidence 
 goes) than in any other province. (See Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 652.) 
 
 * During the Cilician campaign, the Nationalist forces massacred Armenian 
 non-combatants at Hajin and elsewhere, while the Armenians paid off past 
 and present scores against the Turks in Adana and other places temporarily 
 under French occupation. After the French evacuation and the exodus of 
 the majority of the Christian civil population from Cilicia, I learnt this 
 latter fact independently from two competent and trustworthy Western 
 sources, who cited good evidence for it. This shows the exodus in a new 
 light, when taken in conjunction with the circumstances of the Greek 
 evacuation of Ismid. 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 313 
 
 were massacred at Hajin, as well as the Greeks of ‘ Pontus E 
 and the Turks of the Greek occupied territories, were in some 
 degree victims of Mr. Venizelos’s and Mr. Lloyd George’s 
 original miscalculations at Paris. This is still clearer in the 
 case of those Armenian civilians who were robbed, violated, 
 murdered, or evicted during and after the Turkish invasion 
 of the Republic of Erivan in the autumn of 1920. Kiazym 
 Kara Bekir Pasha’s operations had a military object directly 
 connected with the Greek War. The Nationalists were 
 obtaining munitions from the Russians, as the Greeks were 
 at that time from the Allies, but the Black Sea route was 
 precarious and it was desirable to open communications 
 overland. The Erivan Republic was a barrier. Kara Bekir 
 broke it down. Thus the Turkish atrocities against the 
 Armenians in the Caucasus and Cilicia after May 1919 had 
 the same genesis as the war of extermination in other parts 
 of Anatolia, though they do not fall within the scope of this 
 book. 
 
 The extent of the Greek organised atrocities has been 
 disputed. After their occurrence in the Yalova-Gemlik 
 Peninsula had been proved conclusively by the publication 
 of the Inter-Allied Commission’s Report, there was an 
 attempt in some quarters to make out that the crimes thus 
 exposed, which could no longer be denied and which it was 
 impossible to excuse, were at least exceptional. I took 
 pains to investigate this question, and arrived at the oppo- 
 site conclusion, although my first piece of evidence appeared 
 to point the other way. 
 
 The large Turkish village of Omer Bey stands conspicu- 
 ously on the hills overlooking Gemlik from the south-east, 
 above the south side of the valley that runs up from the head 
 of Gemlik Gulf to the Lake of Isnik. During our first visit 
 to Gemlik with the Red Crescent, a Greek picket was posted 
 across the mule-path leading up to Omer Bey from Gemlik 
 town, but, being bored by the interminable obstructiveness 
 of the Greek military authorities, who kept our mission 
 waiting for instructions from Smyrna which never came, 
 
314 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 my wife and I amused ourselves on the 4th June 1921 by 
 taking a walk which brought us to Omer Bey from an un- 
 picketed direction. It was a good opportunity to discuss 
 the situation freely with the mukhtar and other notables, 
 and we learnt from them the curious fact that conditions 
 
 fos Sescutari UTR, 
 
 QHaidar Pasha 
 
 * ALLigg Adapaza F | 
 
 si Princes © 
 
 60 slan b | 
 SEA OF tT 
 
 eH 
 He 
 
 res) 
 
 em Southern limit of Greek organized atrocities in 
 » Marmara area down to 30th June 1921, & new 
 Greek front after that date. 
 LZ Areas occupied by Greek Army before local 
 withdrawal at end of June 1921. 
 Areas evacuated by Greek Army at end of June 1921, 
 2 Areas devastated before & during withdrawal, 
 
 THE DANGER LINE OF OMER BEY 
 
 { were completely different north and south of the village. \ 
 Southwards, they could go out in small parties and work all t 
 day in the fields with comparative impunity, and so could the | 
 inhabitants of other Turkish villages lying in that direction. j 
 To venture out northwards, on the other hand, meant almost 
 certain death. Even on the high-road in the valley bottom, 
 a few hundred yards below and visible from where we stood, 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 315 
 
 some of their people had been murdered by Christian chettés, 
 and across the valley not a Turkish village survived. There 
 
 was a definite ‘danger line,’ running north of Omer Bey 
 
 from the Gulf to the Lake. 
 
 At the moment, I was puzzled by this information. It 
 was a fresh indication of what was evident already—that 
 the atrocities which had been occurring north of this line, in 
 the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, for the previous seven weeks, 
 were being executed on some plan—but an explanation only 
 presented itself at the end of the month, when the Greek 
 forces retreating from Ismid successively evacuated Yalova 
 town and the entire Yalova Peninsula, and came to a halt 
 along the very line which the people of Omer Bey had 
 pointed out to me. The coincidence threw light on the 
 connection between the atrocities and the military opera- 
 tions. The Greek troops had gone to Ismid the year before 
 to please the Allies, but their obligation to remain there had 
 been cancelled by the Allies’ declaration of neutrality ; the 
 reverse at In Onii had demonstrated the danger of an un- 
 necessary dispersal of forces ; and a withdrawal from Ismid 
 was a rational preliminary to the projected summer offensive. 
 These considerations must have suggested themselves in 
 April, as soon as King Constantine had overhauled his 
 General Staff,1 and, after elaborate preparations,* the retreat 
 was ably carried out between the 25th and 30th June 1921. 
 Ten days later, the offensive duly followed, but while on the 
 principal front the Greek Army pushed forward to Eski 
 Shehir and the bend of the Sakkaria, they did not attempt 
 to reoccupy any territory on the Marmara. The line to 
 which they had previously retreated in this quarter (that is, 
 the ‘ danger line’ of Omer Bey) was in fact the most 
 advantageous that they could hold as a military front, and 
 they stuck to it. But it was also the line at which the 
 atrocities committed in the evacuated districts, during the 
 
 1 See Chapter VI., p. 235, above. 
 
 2 Which included the evacuation of the Christian civilians from the Ismid 
 area and the temporary occupation of Karamursal, in order to secure a line 
 of retreat by land, 
 
a= 
 
 316 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 two and a half months before this local retreat, had found 
 their limit. If the atrocities north of this line had been less 
 systematic, or if the new front had only temporarily coincided 
 with it, the coincidence would have been little to build on, 
 and, even as it is, it does not amount to a proof. But it does 
 suggest very strongly that the Greek military authorities, 
 when they decided to simplify and shorten their Marmara 
 front after the battle of In Onii, determined at the same time 
 to devastate the country that they intended to abandon, 
 and accomplished the devastation (by the methods described | 
 in Chapter VII.) before they executed the retreat. At any 
 rate, on this hypothesis the organised atrocities which . 
 started on the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula in the middle of 
 
 April, the events which accompanied the evacuation of . 
 Ismid towards the end of June, and the incendiarism com- 
 mitted on the 29th June along the coast from Deirmenderé 
 
 to Karamursal,! fall into place as parts of a consistent 
 programme. The object of the atrocities, on this showing, 
 
 was to exterminate the Turkish inhabitants of districts which 
 
 it was no longer convenient for the Greek Army to hold. 
 
 They were a ‘ political’ corollary to a military move. On 
 
 the other hand, the Turkish villages south of the projected 
 
 new front were preserved provisionally as potential sources 
 
 of food-supplies, transport-animals, and labour for the Greek 
 
 Army. They were still in the Army’s power, and could be 
 destroyed later, if and when a further military retirement 
 became necessary. This would explain why the line marked 
 
 out in April, and eventually taken up at the end of June, for | 
 the new local front, had impressed itself during the inter- 
 
 vening period upon the consciousness of the people of Omer 
 
 Bey as the line to the north of which the Turkish population 
 
 was being exterminated, while it was being spared to the 
 
 south of it. 
 
 —— TT 
 
 1 The Greeks could not devastate this strip of coast at the same time as 
 the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula, for they only held it for about five days, im- 
 mediately before the retreat along it took place. Previously it had been in 
 the hands of a force of Turkish chettés, who intervened between the Greek : 
 forces at Yalova and those at Ismid, The Greek communications with 
 Ismid had been by sea, 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 317 
 
 Personally, I find this explanation convincing, and if it 
 hits the mark, it more than justifies the pronouncements 
 made by the Inter-Allied Commission and by M. Gehri 
 regarding the responsibility of the Greek authorities. Such 
 a decision, affecting as it did the areas of two Divisional 
 Commands,! must have emanated at least from the Corps 
 Command at Brusa, if not from the Army Command at 
 Smyrna. On the other hand, though this would, if proved, 
 confirm the worst suspicions against the Greek authorities 
 as regards their conduct in the districts north of the line, it 
 might by itself create a presumption that, in the far more 
 extensive occupied territories south of the line, similar 
 atrocities had not been organised. The ‘ danger line,’ after 
 all, had been a ‘safety line’ for Omer Bey and for the 
 Turkish villages immediately south of it. Unless there were 
 evidence to the contrary, the same immunity might be 
 supposed to prevail elsewhere. 
 
 During my travels in the hinterland of Smyrna the previous 
 winter, I had been informed of isolated atrocities, from which 
 my informants had already inferred a plan on the part of the 
 Greek authorities for the extermination of the Turkish 
 population. At the time, I had dismissed this inference as 
 wild and unproven, but after what I had seen in May and 
 June 1921 it naturally recurred to my mind, and at the 
 beginning of August I revisited Smyrna to make investiga- 
 tions. On this visit I not only found conditions in Smyrna 
 City changed greatly for the worse, but I obtained accounts 
 of organised atrocities all over the interior, beginning at the 
 same date as the organised atrocities on the Marmara and 
 affording multitudes of little ‘undesigned coincidences,’ 
 besides the broad general resemblance, with the events that 
 had come under my personal observation and that have been 
 described in Chapter VII. 
 
 Though in these cases I was unable to check the informa- 
 tion personally, as I had done on the Marmara, I believe it 
 to be true, apart from the fact that it came to me from a 
 
 1 Tenth Divisional Headquarters at Gemlik and Eleventh at Ismid. 
 
318 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 trustworthy source, for the three following reasons : (i) The 
 situation of the Turks in Smyrna City having become what 
 could be called without exaggeration a ‘ reign of terror,’ it 
 was to be inferred that their treatment in the country- 
 districts had grown worse in proportion—that is, had 
 become absolutely very much worse, since it is a well-known 
 fact that, in the Near and Middle East, conditions are never 
 so bad in large semi-Westernised towns as in rural districts. 
 (ii) There was the coincidence of date. (iii) There were the 
 *‘ undesigned coincidences ’ of detail. 
 
 This is not the place for a full presentment of my Smyrna 
 information, but the following summary will give a sufficient 
 idea of it :— 
 
 I 
 
 ORGANISED ATROCITIES, SOUTH OF THE OMER Bry ‘ DANGER 
 LINE,’ IN TERRITORIES ALREADY UNDER GREEK OCCUPA- 
 TION BEFORE THE OFFENSIVE OF THE 10TH JULY 1921. 
 
 (i) Akhissar District— 
 12 villages (names specified) affected, that is : 
 4 villages destroyed, with pillage and massacre ; 
 4 villages pillaged, with massacre ; 
 4 villages from which massacres alone were re- 
 ported ; 
 (ii) Soghanderé District— 
 25 to 30 villages (names not specified) pillaged, 
 inhabitants massacred ; 
 (iii) Gordez and Karajyk (east of Akhissar)— 
 14th June 1921: both places pillaged and burnt, 
 inhabitants massacred ; 
 (iv) Between Akhissar and Manysa— 
 82 villages (names not specified) more or less com- 
 pletely pillaged ; 
 (v) Tiré-Bayndyr-Odemish Districts— 
 60 villages pillaged and some of them burnt, 18 of 
 the latter being in the Tiré District ; these were 
 
 * Which for obvious reasons I am not at liberty to name at present. 
 
 ar- 
 
THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION 319 
 
 attacked on the 28th June 1921 (12 names speci- 
 fied) ; the survivors fled to the mountains ; 
 (vi) Aidin District— 
 
 14 villages (names specified) pillaged, women 
 violated, men massacred; of these, 10 were 
 attacked simultaneously on the 2nd May 1921 
 and the survivors fled to the mountains, 
 
 II 
 
 ORGANISED ATROCITIES, SOUTH OF THE OER Bry ‘ DANGER 
 LINE, COMMITTED SUBSEQUENTLY TO THE GREEK 
 OFFENSIVE OF THE 10TH JULY 1921. 
 
 (i) Aidin District— 
 50 more villages destroyed by the beginning of 
 October 1921 ; 
 (ii) Kyzylja (a village about 15 miles south-east of Smyrna 
 City)— 
 145 out of 150 houses burnt in September 1921 ; 
 
 (iti) Field of Operations during the Kiutahia-Eski Shehir 
 
 | and the Sakkaria Offensives— 
 
 | Details unknown to me, but the Greek Army is 
 
 reported to have carried out systematic devasta- 
 tions, particularly on the retreat from the bend 
 of the Sakkaria to Eski Shehir, in addition to 
 
 \ the incidental destruction caused by ‘ legitimate 
 
 warfare.’ 
 
 (iv) Since the beginning of 1922— 
 
 See speech delivered by Lord St. Davids, at the 
 half-yearly meeting of the Ottoman (Aidin) 
 Railway Company, on the 3lst March and re- 
 ported in the Times of the Ist April 1922; 
 further (regarding occurrences on the 14th Feb- 
 ruary 1922 at Karatepé, near Késhk, in the 
 Aidin district), a letter, dated the 9th March, 
 from a Turkish correspondent of mine at 
 Smyrna, which was published in the Times of 
 the 6th April 1922. 
 
Vill 
 NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 
 
 In the last six chapters, a number of recent events relating 
 to Turkey and Greece have been discussed in order to illus- 
 trate the problem of ‘ Westernisation’ introduced in 
 Chapter I. After this detailed and in parts painful survey, 
 it is time to seek conclusions of wider interest and greater 
 permanence than the events themselves. If my presenta- 
 tion has been right, certain general facts have emerged. 
 
 The public of the Western Powers on the winning side in 
 the European War have refused to perform military service 
 or to pay taxes on anything like the scale necessary for the 
 execution of the programmes—mapped out during the War 
 by their respective Governments in a series of secret agree- 
 ments—for the resettlement of the Near and Middle East. 
 
 The Governments, crippled by this unforeseen curtailment 
 of their power, have tried to save part of their programmes 
 by employing as pawns the local Governments and nation- 
 alities, which are more directly interested and therefore less 
 unwilling to make sacrifices in the Near and Middle East 
 than the Western public.. This move has been a blunder. 
 In the upshot, the Western Governments have retained less 
 control over the Eastern situation than if they had simply 
 accepted their constituents’ verdict and abandoned their 
 programmes after the armistice. 
 
 Greece—the principal Near Eastern pawn—has proved as 
 
 _ incapable as Turkey (or for that matter any Western country) 
 _ of governing well a mixed population containing an alien 
 
 | majority and a minority of her own nationality. 
 mt 
 
 The Turks have now become infected with the Western 
 
 320 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 321 
 
 idea of political nationality as thoroughly as the Greeks. 
 This idea is partly a destructive force, especially when 
 transplanted into the foreign environment of the Near and 
 Middle East. On the other hand, simply because it is a 
 Western idea, its acceptance by a non-Western people offers 
 the basis for a modus vivendi between their particular non- 
 Western form of society and Western civilisation. It is an 
 implicit abandonment of the claim, hitherto tacitly cherished 
 if not openly advanced by Middle Easterners as well as 
 by Westerners, to impose their own institutions not only 
 upon uncivilised populations but upon other civilised 
 societies. 
 
 The Turks have proved themselves impregnable in the 4 
 interior of Anatolia. Having successfully resisted the maxi- | 
 mum military effort of Greece, they are a fortior: capable of 
 resisting the less earnest will of Western Governments and 
 nations to impose military, financial, and economic controls 
 (of the kind specified in the Treaty of Sévres), to maintain 
 the Capitulations or the rights of bondholders, to enjoy old 
 or acquire new commercial concessions, or to protect native 
 minorities. While the Treaty of Sévres reduced Ottoman 
 sovereignty to a minimum on paper, Turkey, within her 
 national limits, has become more independent de facto than 
 she has ever been since she signed the Treaty of Kuchuk 
 Kainarjy with Russia in 1774. 
 
 The latest attempt of Greece to take further territories by ' 
 force from Turkey has had no constructive results to set 
 against its flagrant destructive effects, and can have no such 
 
 ‘results, because there are no longer any even approximately 
 
 homogeneous Greek populations under Turkish rule to be 
 liberated. The only positive consequence has been and must 
 be the extermination of minorities on either side, and even of 
 local majorities, where these have been brought temporarily 
 under the military occupation of the enemy state. 
 
 These facts are all phenomena of the fundamental process 
 of ‘ Westernisation,’ and illustrate one or other of its two 
 
 x 
 
322 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 \ leading features; the indifference of Western minds towards 
 | non-Western societies andthe omnipresence of the Western 
 | factor in non-Western affairs. But they are more interesting 
 and permanent phenomena than the ups and downs of 
 | diplomacy and war. The most important new element in 
 | them is common to them all, and can be summed up ina 
 
 single formula: the likenesses between the positions of the 
 
 Greeks and the Turks have now become greater than the 
 ‘differences, in regard to what has long been the governing 
 factor in the lives of both peoples—namely, their respective 
 relations to Western civilisation. 
 
 If this formula is true, as I believe it to be, the moral for 
 Greece and Turkey is evident. With a common major 
 problem to solve, they have an identical interest in com- 
 posing their ancient quarrel—not in order to wage joint war- 
 fare against the West (a motive for co-operation which has 
 influenced Moslem and Hindu extremists in India), but in 
 order to leave one another a free hand to work out their 
 particular modus vivendi in their own way. The shadow of 
 the West has been causing increasing discomfort to both 
 peoples, and the Janus-character of recent Rofyalism in 
 Greece and Nationalism in Turkey betrays their perplexity. 
 Turkish Nationalism is at once the acceptance of a Western 
 idea and a revolt against Western domination. In the same 
 way, the Modern Greeks have twice taken kings from 
 Western dynasties in order to secure for Greece a place in 
 the family of Western states. ‘Nay, but we will have a 
 king over us, that we also may be like all the nations.’ And 
 yet King Constantine, the son and successor of the second 
 of them, has become popular with his subjects as a symbol 
 of their national resistance to Western encroachments upon 
 the independence of their country. 
 
 Both feel the pressure of a problem greater than their local 
 animosities, but a good understanding is not easy for them 
 to attain. When the formula of political nationality is 
 applied to mixed populations where nationality is hard to 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 323 
 
 disentangle from profession or class, an irreducible residuum 
 of minorities is bound to be left on the wrong side of the 
 definitive frontier lines, and this residuum is a fruitful cause 
 of estrangement. Each nation fears that its own hostages 
 in the other’s territory may be ill-treated, and that the other’s 
 hostages in its own territory may undermine its sovereignty, 
 and such expectations have a fatal tendency to realise them- 
 selves. Some solution for this problem of minorities has to 
 be found before relations between Turkey and Greece can 
 be expected to change for the better. 
 
 Any solution, to be successful, must satisfy the amour 
 propre and set at rest the anxieties of either country. The 
 former point ought to be met by reciprocity in the treatment 
 of minorities, on lines recognised as compatible with national 
 sovereignty by Western states. Neither party can feel 
 humiliated by being asked to endow minorities with rights 
 which the other party is being asked to grant at the same 
 time, and which Western states have granted already. From 
 this point of view, the minority treaties recently signed by 
 Germany, Austria, Tchecho-Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, 
 as well as by Jugoslavia and Rumania and by Greece her- 
 self, offer a good diplomatic starting point. But the crux 
 of the minority problem is not to establish rights on paper, 
 but to make sure that they are operative—in other words, 
 to establish guarantees. 
 
 One practical giiarantee is created by the fact that, 
 wherever the lines of demarcation between the national 
 states of the Near and Middle East may finally be drawn, , 
 the respective hostages in the hands of each state will be ' 
 comparable in number. At the time when there were 
 some millions of Greeks, Armenians, and Bulgars under Otto- 
 man government and few or no Turks under the rule of an 
 independent Greek, Armenian, or Bulgarian state, the Turks 
 had no reciprocal advantage to gain by giving guarantees to 
 their non-Turkish subjects. But when the Near and Middle 
 East arrives (if it ever does arrive) at a new political equi- 
 
324 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 librium on the-basis of nationality, there will probably have 
 been about as many Turks brought under Greek, Bulgarian, 
 and Armenian sovereignty as non-Turks left under Turkish. 
 None of the states concerned will be able to safeguard their 
 minorities abroad except through the goodwill of the ruling 
 majority, and they can only secure that goodwill by con- 
 ceding on their side what they ask for on the other. 
 
 A second guarantee (not to be under-estimated because it 
 is impalpable) is moral pressure. The callousness of the 
 Near and Middle Eastern nations-during the past century 
 towards their hostages in one another’s hands is a reproach 
 under which they will suffer until they show a different 
 spirit. Again and again, the independent sections of these 
 nations, in pursuing territorial ambitions, have deliberately 
 exposed to the gravest dangers minorities which could not 
 benefit even if those ambitions were realised to the full. 
 Indeed, the tragedies of minorities have sometimes been 
 hailed by their more fortunate kinsmen with barely concealed 
 satisfaction as political windfalls, because they have black- 
 ened the reputation of the rival nationality. Such an 
 attitude towards minorities is inhuman, and nations claiming 
 admittance into the concert of Western states must make it 
 clear by their actions that they are genuinely concerned for 
 their minorities abroad and are even prepared, in the 
 interests of these minorities, to make sacrifices of sove- 
 reignty at home, so long as identical sacrifices are made by 
 the other parties. Western public opinion, if it is exerted 
 in this sense upon all Near and Middle Eastern peoples with 
 equal energy and sincerity, might be far more efficacious 
 than its traditional partisanship has allowed it to be in the 
 past. 
 
 The most essential guarantee, however, is the elimination 
 of fear. No nation will treat minorities well if it believes 
 that they menace its vital interests, and the history of the 
 Near and Middle East during the past century has given all 
 parties good reason to regard minorities in that light. The 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 325 
 
 subject minority of one decade has not infrequently become 
 the dominant minority in the next, and sometimes (by such 
 methods as have been described in Chapter VII.) the local 
 majority in the following generation. Minority rights, and 
 the guarantees of those rights, have often been the leverage 
 by which these changes have been brought about, and the 
 majorities that have suffered by them have not unnaturally 
 been filled with bitterness and suspicion. It may be stated 
 as a general law that the protection of minorities is in- 
 compatible with instability of frontiers. The abnormal 
 instability which was so conspicuous a feature of Near and 
 Middle Eastern history during the last century certainly 
 benefited the comparatively homogeneous populations that 
 succeeded in changing their allegiance. Greeks in the 
 Morea and the Islands, for example, when liberated from the 
 Ottoman Empire, were enabled (after a gradual recovery 
 from the shock of the operation) to advance towards happier 
 conditions of life, without destroying the happiness of a 
 corresponding number of Turks. But the scattered kindred 
 minorities paid the price by incurring the resentment of the 
 
 ' respective majorities among whom they lived, and the 
 
 persecutions grew fiercer as the process began to affect the 
 territories inhabited by the minorities themselves, to which 
 the dominant majorities felt that they had a just title on 
 the very principle of nationality invoked by the minorities 
 against them. This was an inevitable corollary of the re- 
 mapping of the East into national states, and could only be 
 stopped either by the stoppage of the process itself or by its 
 completion. Now that the latter is in sight, the stabilisation 
 of frontiers has become not only desirable but practicable. 
 Statesmanship should take every measure calculated to 
 create in the minds of the several Near and Middle Eastern 
 nations the expectation that the frontiers now drawn will be 
 permanent, and that the instability of the past century has 
 come toanend. It is for diplomatists to find the convincing 
 formula. The local states might guarantee one another’s 
 
326 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 frontiers by treaty, and get the instrument countersigned by 
 the Western Powers. The expectation of stability, however 
 created, would no doubt be unpalatable to Chauvinists 
 safely ensconced in the national capitals, but there could be 
 no stronger guarantee for the minorities than the persuasion 
 of all parties that the frontiers standing between them and 
 ‘liberation,’ and between the local majorities and subjection, 
 would never be shifted in the minorities’ favour. 
 
 If these psychological guarantees could be brought into 
 existence, the atmosphere would have been created for a 
 reciprocal acceptance of some administrative machinery. 
 The alternatives are legion, but there would be much to be 
 said for the negotiation of a treaty between (for instance) 
 Turkey, Greece, and the Armenian Republic of Erivan, 
 establishing not only identical rights for the respective 
 Armenian, Greek, and Turkish minorities in each country, 
 but an identical system of inspection. A single commission, 
 appointed by the League of Nations in consultation with the 
 states concerned, and charged to inspect the relations 
 between majorities and minorities in all their territories, 
 would be an appropriate organ. Reciprocity and sympathy 
 with their kin would be the main inducements for the im- 
 plicit sacrifice of sovereignty by the participating states, but 
 they might also acquire a direct interest in such an inspec- 
 torate’s activities, if its terms of reference were wisely 
 framed. Persecuted minorities are not necessarily blame- 
 less because they suffer. As has been pointed out in the 
 last chapter, the accusations of sedition brought against 
 them by their persecutors are often partly true, though they 
 are generally stultified by the disproportionate savagery of 
 the repression. An obligation of loyalty on the minorities’ 
 side is the equitable quid pro quo for a genuine conferment of 
 rights on the part of the ruling majorities ; and it should be 
 the duty of an impartial inspectorate to examine whether 
 the minorities, as well as the Government under which they 
 lived, were fulfilling their engagements. If it performed 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 327 
 
 this part of its functions as effectively as the other, the 
 minorities would be checked in their ruinous temptation to 
 disloyalty, and if they yielded to it, the threatened Govern- 
 ment would have impartial testimony to the fact that its 
 measures of defence, however excessive or wrong in character, 
 had at least not been taken without cause. 
 
 Such avenues offer the Near and Middle Eastern peoples 
 the best prospect of eventually coming together, but recipro- 
 city is the password. The possibility of these better 
 relationships depends on mutual respect if not esteem, and 
 here once more the Western factor comes in. Greeks and 
 Turks will not learn to treat each other as equals so long as 
 the Western public, by vulgar insults and hardly less vulgar 
 applause, encourages them to strut like fighting-cocks and 
 stimulates all their feelings of hatred and scorn. Western 
 sentiment about the Greeks and Turks is for the most part 
 ill-informed, violently expressed and dangerously influential. 
 It is an irresponsible revolutionary force—a signal instance 
 of that fatal conjunction of unconsciousness and power which 
 characterises the modern Western attitude towards the rest 
 of mankind. 
 
 Among the Western public, the names ‘Greek’ and 
 ‘Turk’ are chiefly familiar as pegs on which people hang 
 false antitheses—always to the Turks’ disadvantage, except 
 among a small minority who are generally driven by ex- 
 asperation into the opposite extreme. I have heard 
 believing Western Christians, in comparing the Turks with 
 the Near Eastern Christian peoples, stigmatise the former as 
 ‘incapable of progress.’ These same Christian Westerners 
 would be horrified at the doctrine that negroes, or women,’ 
 have no souls. Yet this is only a theological form of the 
 proposition which they make, with regard to the Turks, 
 
 1 But I have heard this doctrine as regards women attributed by them—I 
 believe with no foundation whatever—to Islam. The doctrine about negroes 
 was, of course, propounded by Protestant divines in the Southern States of 
 the American Union before the Civil War. The Turks, like other Moslems, 
 are free from prejudice about colour. 
 
328 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 without hesitation. It is not the first case in which theo- 
 logical prejudice has led-estimable people to count fellow 
 human-beings among ‘the beasts that perish.’ Western 
 statesmen are little better, for though they have recently 
 become more chary of religious allusions, the other current 
 defamations of the Turks could hardly have been more 
 pithily formulated than they were by the Allied Governments 
 in a note dated the 11th January 1917 and addressed to 
 President Wilson, in which they enumerated, among their 
 war-aims, ‘the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman 
 Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western 
 civilisation.’ This diplomatic document and the sectarian 
 prejudice alluded to above cover between them the principal 
 fallacies by which the confused relations of the Greeks and 
 Turks with the West and with one another have been worse 
 confounded. These are the three false antitheses of Christi- 
 anity and Islam, Europe and Asia, civilisation and barbarism. 
 They are so deeply rooted in Western minds and so unfortunate 
 in their effect upon the minds of Near and Middle Easterners 
 that, at the risk of pedantry, I shall attempt to confute them. 
 
 The first is false because ‘ Christian ’ is not equivalent to 
 ‘Western’ nor ‘Islam’ to a negation of Western ideals. 
 The name of Christianity, though borne in common by the 
 religions which most modern Westerners and Near Easterners 
 and a small minority of Middle Easterners profess, is not the 
 mark of any contemporary community of religious ideas and 
 institutions,! but merely a record that three now distinct 
 civilisations have a single parent in common. The early 
 Christian Church was the last phase of Ancient Hellenic or 
 Graeco-Roman society, which died after it had had inter- 
 course with other societies and had given birth to several 
 children, and these children have spent a considerable part 
 _ of their lives in disagreeing with one another. The Middle 
 Eastern Christianity of the Nestorian and Monophysite 
 
 1 Except, of course, among converts to (or Uniates with) Roman Catholicism 
 and Protestantism from the Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian Churches, 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 329 
 
 Churches (religions begotten of Hellenism by the spirit of 
 Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt) parted company with the 
 Catholic Church as early as the fifth century after Christ. 
 These movements of dissent were the first attempts of the 
 reawakening Middle East to undo the preceding process of 
 Hellenisation. They were, in fact, the forerunners of Islam, 
 which accomplished the spiritual liberation to which they 
 aspired. Again, the Near Eastern Christianity of the 
 Orthodox Church parted company with the Western branch 
 of the Catholic Church in the eighth century, when the 
 divorce took place between modern Western and Near 
 Eastern civilisation. From the respective dates of these 
 schisms, the several Christian churches, though they have 
 kept their family name, have had no religious experiences in 
 common. The other churches have no part or lot in the 
 great men and movements of our Western Christendom from 
 Gregory the Great onwards, nor we in theirs. Our ‘ common 
 Christianity ’ is not a living fact, but a historical curiosity. 
 Islam, on the other hand, is not a totally alien and con- 
 tradictory ideal of life, as Westerners vulgarly believe. Its 
 relation to Western Christianity differs in degree rather than 
 in kind from that of Monophysitism. In their theological 
 disguise, both were monotheistic reactions against trinitar- 
 ianism (of different form and intensity), and in their essence 
 revolts of the Middle East against Hellenism. At the same 
 time, both had in their veins the blood of the parent whom 
 they repudiated. The influence of Ancient Greek originals 
 upon early Islamic literature, of Roman upon Islamic law, 
 and of Hellenistic upon Islamic ideas and institutions is more 
 
 - and more engaging the attention of modern Orientalists. 
 
 But is Islam incompatible with progress? I am writing 
 these lines in the year of the Hijra 1340, which, reckoning by 
 solar years, is the thirteen hundred and fifty-fourth since the 
 birth of the founder.1 As we cannot look into the future, 
 
 1 Muhammad was probably born in the year a.p. 571. His Hijra or 
 migration from Mecca to Medina, from which the Islamic era is reckoned 
 ocourred in A.D, 622. The year of the Islamic calendar is a lunar one. 
 
330 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 let us take a parallel from the past and imagine a detached 
 and philosophic observer speculating about the future of our 
 Western civilisation towards the middle of the fourteenth 
 century after Christ. We will not suppose him a Moslem 
 (who might be suspected of anti-Christian prejudice) but a 
 Far Easterner—for example, some Chinese statesman who 
 has been convinced by his Confucian education of the equal 
 absurdity of all theistic religions. He has travelled, perhaps, 
 on an embassy from the last sovereign of the Mongol Dynasty 
 round various courts of Western Europe. What are his 
 conclusions in the memoir for the Imperial Academy of 
 Sciences which he has composed after his return? ‘These 
 Westerners,’ one fancies him writing, ‘are still children. 
 They are not altogether unpromising. They have some 
 charming arts and crafts and a noble architecture; they 
 have started interesting experiments in municipal govern- 
 ment ; their vernacular poetry has recently made strides, 
 and like ourselves they possess the priceless treasure of an 
 ancient classical literature, though through ignorance and 
 indifference they have lost the better half of it. Their 
 characteristic qualities are a rude vitality and an aptitude 
 for war. It is a pity that this nascent civilisation, in spite 
 of the good elements which it contains, is precluded from all 
 possibility of progress by its deplorable religion and even 
 more deplorable ecclesiastical institutions. The dogmas are 
 childish, the priesthood power-loving, the spirit fanatical. 
 I see no prospect of this incubus being shaken off. Chris- 
 tianity has wound itself like a python round the limbs of 
 young Western society. A few more generations, and it 
 will have crushed and devoured its victim.’ 
 
 This hypothetical appreciation could have suggested 
 itself, I believe, to quite a competent outside observer of 
 that particular moment in the long course of Western 
 history, and yet, with the Renaissance beginning and the 
 Reformation in sight, it would have been fantastically wrong. 
 Can we be any surer of our ground in forecasting the effect 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 331 
 
 of Islam upon the future of Middle Eastern civilisation ? 
 The general proposition that Islam is incompatible with 
 progress is sufficiently disproved by the past. The religion 
 has surely gone through as many phases and affected as 
 many sides of life as the various branches of Christianity 
 had done by the fourteenth century of their existence, and 
 the society that has taken shape inside the Islamic chrysalis 
 has evinced a capacity for breaking out into an inde- 
 pendent life of its own. The original nomadic institutions 
 of the Ottoman Empire and its modern experiments in 
 Westernisation have doubtless been influenced, and the 
 latter perhaps retarded, by Islam, but they have not been 
 inhibited. , 
 
 The unconscious grievance of the West against Islam is | | 
 
 not that Islam is incompatible with progress of any kind, for 
 we are practically indifferent to progress or stagnation on/ | 
 
 Islamic lines. We really resent the fact that Islam offers an' 
 alternative system of life to our own. Rightly or wrongly, 
 we consider this alternative-inferior, and we feel that if only 
 it were not held before them, the peoples that at present 
 cling to it might have caught us up at one stride and entered 
 into full possession of the best that we have to offer them. 
 The fact that the other branches of Christianity (for reasons 
 suggested in Chapter I.) have ceased to exercise a rival 
 attraction upon their adherents is what secretly commends 
 them to us, rather than their identity of name with our 
 religion ; and, on account of this rather negative virtue, the 
 Kastern Churches are sometimes tenderly regarded by 
 Westerners who have no love for Western Christianity, but 
 who retain a human pride in the prestige and the attractive- 
 ness of Western civilisation. But do Westerners who have 
 this secret quarrel with Islam feel unmixed satisfaction at 
 the results of the unreserved abandonment of their own 
 traditions and pursuit of Western ideals by Near Easterners ? 
 Or, to bring the argument home, do they reproach our com- 
 paratively backward Western aneestors of the fourteenth 
 
332 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 century because they did not try to exchange their painfully 
 developing individuality for some temporarily more advanced 
 form of life, like that of fourteenth-century Far Eastern 
 society ? Do they regard this as a gran rifiuto, and regret it 
 from our point of view as a loss of valuable possibilities ? 
 Those are the logical corollaries of their attitude towards 
 Islam. But perhaps they are able to realise in our own case 
 that distinctive traditions of civilisation cannot be sur- 
 rendered or borrowed by a society precipitately without a 
 general shock to its system, which is likely to tell more 
 heavily in the long run than any immediate gains which this 
 or that organ might make by the change. 
 
 The second antithesis, between ‘ Europe’ and ‘ Asia,’ is 
 false, to begin with, because the Greeks are not specially at 
 home in the one continent nor the Turks in the other, and 
 also for the more fundamental reason that the so-called 
 continents themselves are fictions, with no relation to the 
 real geographical entities. If one took the conventional 
 boundaries seriously, one might indeed have to class the 
 Modern Greeks as Asiatics and the Osmanli Turks as 
 Europeans. It has been mentioned in Chapter I. that the 
 cradle of the Modern Greek people, of the East Roman 
 Empire, and of Near Eastern civilisation was Central and 
 Eastern Anatolia. The first piece of free Greek soil in 
 modern times was Aivali;! and Korais, the first Modern 
 Greek man of letters to be treated as an equal by Western 
 intellectuals, came from Smyrna. On the other hand, the 
 Ottoman state found its destiny on the continent of Europe. 
 It was the conquest of Thrace and Macedonia that differen- 
 tiated it from the other Turkish principalities of Anatolia, 
 and the strength derived from these European possessions 
 that enabled it eventually to conquer its Asiatic neighbours. 
 The centre of gravity remained in Rumili down to the Berlin 
 Treaty of 1878 ; its transference to Anatolia was only faced 
 by the Turkish nation after the Balkan War, and was not 
 
 1 See Chapter IV., pp. 121-2. 
 
R 
 
 TH Unc eh eee 
 
 NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 333 
 
 avowed till Mustafa Kemal Pasha summoned the Great 
 National Assembly to Angora in 1920. 
 
 But ‘ Europe’ and ‘ Asia ’ are conventions which are only 
 possible on a small-scale two-colour map. The scientific 
 physical geographer knows of no barrier between the two 
 continents. In the tundra-zone or the forest-zone or the 
 steppe-zone, where is the division ? Or at what point does 
 one pass out of Europe into Asia along the Trans-Siberian 
 or the Trans-Turkestan Railway ? What are the political 
 frontiers between Russia or Turkey ‘in Europe’ and 
 Russia or Turkey ‘in Asia’? The boundary -between the 
 continents, which bisects their city, does not disturb the 
 inhabitants of Constantinople, many of whom sleep in 
 Asiatic houses and earn their daily bread in European offices, 
 with a penny-steamer to take them to and fro. Again, when 
 one comes to the Aegean, one finds no boundary there. The 
 European mountain ranges which dip under the sea at Athos 
 and Sunium raise their crests above the waves in chains of 
 islands, and reach over into Asia from the peninsulas of 
 Cheshmé and Mykali and Knidos. The physiographical unity 
 of the Aegean basin, without distinction of continents, is the 
 strongest point in the claim advanced by Greece to Smyrna, 
 and what is true of the Aegean holds on a larger scale for the 
 entire Mediterranean. The traditional partition of Eurasia 
 into two continents is unreal, and the Ancient Greek 
 scientists who first introduced it as a parochial division in 
 their miniature world, never succumbed to the illusion that 
 there was some mysterious difference of soil or climate pre- 
 disposing ‘ Asiatics’ to vice and ‘ Europeans’ to virtue. 
 After giving full weight to the environmental factor, they 
 concluded that the human differences which were so striking 
 in their own day, were functions not of continents but of 
 cultures, and they attributed most importance to the 
 political dissimilarities between Hellenic and Ancient Middle 
 Eastern society. ‘ Both the Hellenic and the non-Hellenic 
 inhabitants of Asia,’ as one of them observed, ‘ who happen 
 
334 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 not to be under autocratic government but to be indepen- 
 dent, and who therefore exert themselves for their own 
 benefit, are the most warlike people in the world.’ 4 
 
 The real entities of human geography, which are cultural 
 and which in this book have been called civilisations, have 
 been defined in Chapter I., and the vulgar conception of 
 ‘Europe’ is, of course, a confusion between the fictitious 
 continent and the reality of Western civilisation. ‘Western’ 
 is what people mean when they talk of ‘ European’ in this 
 connection. Yet Western civilisation grew up in Western 
 Europe only ? and succeeded in crossing the Atlantic and 
 seeding itself in the New World before it made any headway, 
 east of Riga and Cattaro, in those ‘ European’ countries 
 where other cultures had already encumbered or exhausted 
 the ground. If the Allied statesmen were right, and being 
 ‘radically alien to Western civilisation ’ is a valid reason for 
 ‘the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire,’ many 
 other non-Western European states, beginning with Greece 
 herself, will have to pack their bags and remove their 
 baggage. But ‘ Europe for Westerners only ’ is a monstrous 
 and a most impolitic claim, for, if titles go by continents, 
 what standing have we Westerners, who have colonised the 
 four quarters of the world, to our holdings in America, 
 Africa, and Australasia? This is not a line of argument 
 which Australians would like to present to the Japanese, or 
 South Africans to the Bantus. 
 
 The third false antithesis, between civilisation and 
 barbarism, is generally more picturesquely expressed. The 
 Greeks ‘ have Hellen the son of Deucalion to their father,’ 
 while the ‘ Unspeakable Turk ’ is a ‘ nomad from the steppes ’ 
 and shares the odium of the Scythian, the Mongol, and the 
 Hun. This is the greatest nonsense of all. If itis a question 
 of physical transmission, our Modern Greek contemporaries 
 have about as little Hellenic blood in their veins as our 
 
 * Corpus Hippocrateum: De Aeribus, Aquis et Locis, ch. xvi. (edited by 
 Kuelewein, H., Leipzig, 1894, Teubner). 
 
 * The name ‘Evropi’ is ordinarily usedjby the Modern Greeks in this 
 sense, as @ term excluding their own country. 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 335 
 
 Osmanli contemporaries have of nomadic. If it is one of 
 spiritual heritage, I hope I have sufficiently demonstrated 
 that the Hellenic civilisation of the Ancient Greeks and the 
 Near Eastern civilisation of the Modern Greeks are totally 
 distinct from one another; that we Westerners have as 
 good a claim as any Near Easterners to be the true Hellenes’ 
 spiritual descendants ; and that there is even a perceptible 
 Hellenistic strain in the Osmanlis’ Middle Eastern culture. 
 The common statement that Ancient Greek literature was 
 handed down to us by the Modern Greek refugees from the 
 final wreck of the East Roman Empire in the fifteenth 
 century, is inexact. The Modern Greeks did copy, preserve, 
 and eventually sell to Western connoisseurs the manuscripts 
 of the Ancient authors. They also kept alive a knowledge 
 of the grammar and vocabulary of the Ancient language. 
 But the part played by Modern Greeks in the revival of 
 Classical Greek studies in Western Europe and America has 
 been remarkably small. From the end of the fifteenth 
 century onwards, the whole reconstruction and reinterpre- 
 tation of the Greek Classics has been done by Western 
 scholars. The Modern Greeks provided the texts and the 
 linguistic key, but the most important qualifications of the 
 Western Grecians were their previous familiarity with the 
 Roman adaptations of Ancient Greek literature and their 
 membership in a living society which rivalled the greatness 
 of Hellas in her prime. Korais, the great Modern Greek 
 scholar who made the fruits of Western Classical scholarship 
 accessible for the first time to any considerable number of 
 his fellow-countrymen by editing the Classics with intro- 
 ductions and notes in the Modern Greek language, went as 
 a young man to the French University of Montpellier to 
 study medicine ; was diverted from technology to scholar- 
 ship under the influence of his Western professors ; and spent 
 the remaining forty-six years of a long life in Paris, where 
 he found a more congenial atmosphere for Ancient Greek 
 studies than on the classic soil of his native Smyrna. 
 
336 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 It is worth noting that the differentiation of Near Eastern 
 from Ancient Hellenic culture came about by a deliberate 
 breach with the past, and not by a tearful parting. The 
 Academy of Athens, founded by Plato, was not broken up by 
 the Turks. It was closed, in the ninth century of its exist- 
 ence and just forty years before the first Turks visited 
 Constantinople,! by Justinian, the Near Eastern sovereign 
 who built Aya Sofia and who figures as a worthy in the legend 
 of Modern Greek nationalism. Seven philosophers who 
 refused to embrace the Christian religion took refuge in the 
 dominions of Justinian’s Middle Eastern rival Khosru,? and 
 the Persian Government stipulated for the repatriation and 
 toleration of these last representatives of Hellenic culture in 
 a treaty of peace with the East Roman Power. The cult 
 of the Olympian gods survived three centuries longer in the 
 Mani, the most inaccessible promontory of the Morea, which 
 was cut off from the East Roman Empire by the Slavonic 
 migrations at the close of the sixth century. But in the 
 latter part of the ninth century, when the Moreot Slavs 
 had been reduced to subjection, this scandalous survival of 
 Ancient Hellenic usages attracted the attention of the 
 Constantinople Government. The Olympian cults of the 
 Maniots were suppressed and the last taint of Hellenism 
 was purged out of the Near Eastern world.4 The repudiation 
 of the Hellenic tradition had already been symbolised by a 
 change in the use of names. ‘Hellene’ had come to mean 
 a heathen outsider, in contrast to the Christian subject of the 
 East Roman Empire. The latter was the orthodox pattern 
 of the primitive Modern Greek, and Romyéds, or ‘ East 
 Roman,’ as has been mentioned in Chapter IV., became the 
 
 1 The Academy was closed in a.D. 529; the first ambassadors from the 
 Khan of the earliest Turkish Empire in Central Asia arrived at Constanti- 
 nople in a.D. 569. 
 
 2 It must be admitted that the Hellenic philosophers did not find them- 
 selves at home at the Middle Eastern court. 
 
 3 Tn a.v. 533. 
 
 4 See Konstandinos Porphyroyénnitos (=‘Constantine Porphyrogeni- 
 tus’): On the Administration of the [Hast Roman] Empire, ch. 1. (ed. by 
 Bekker, I., Bonn, 1840, Weber). 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 337 
 
 national name in the vernacular. The Modern Greek 
 merchants and peasantry of the Ottoman Empire only learnt 
 to call themselves Hellenes from the children of the French 
 Revolution in the West, who delighted to speak of Switzerland 
 as the Helvetian Republic and to have their portraits painted 
 in the costume of Roman Senators. This classical affectation 
 was a Western fashion which the Modern Greeks borrowed 
 with other promiscuous properties of our puppet-show, just 
 as the classical scholarship of Korais was a part of his 
 enlightened advocacy of Western culture among his fellow- 
 countrymen. 
 
 This profound student was so impressed by the alienness 
 of the Near Eastern spirit both from the Modern West, to 
 which he had given his spiritual allegiance, and from 
 Ancient Hellenism, to which he turned for the same inspira- 
 tion as his Western models, that in his writings he frequently 
 attacked the greatest of all Near Eastern institutions, the 
 East Roman Empire. 
 
 ‘If the Graeco-Roman Emperors had given to the educa- 
 tion of the race a small part of that attention which they 
 gave to the multiplication of churches and monasteries, 
 they would not have betrayed the race to other rulers more 
 benighted than themselves. For all the evils which we 
 have suffered from the maniac Moslems, we are indebted to 
 those fleshly and material-minded Christian Emperors.’ 4 
 
 Korais’s verdict is borne out by the following passage from 
 the memoirs ? of his contemporary Thedédhoros Kolokotrénis, 
 one of the most celebrated Moreot captains in the War of 
 Independence :— 
 
 ‘In my young days,? when I might have learnt some- 
 thing, schools and academies did not exist. There were 
 hardly a few schools in which they learnt to read and write. 
 
 The old-fashioned hoja-bashys, who were the local notables, 
 hardly knew how to write their own names. The majority 
 
 1 Korais: Apdnthisma Hpistolén, pp. 46-7; cp. pp. 4and 133 (Athens, 1839). 
 
 2 Kolokotrénis, Th.: Dhityisis symbdndon tis LEilinikis Phylis (1770- 
 1836), 2nd ed. (Athens, 1889, Estia). 
 3 He was born in 1770, 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 of arch-priests knew nothing but their ritual, and that only 
 by picking it up ; not one of them had been properly taught. 
 The Psalter, Chant Book, Book of Offices, and other pro- 
 phetical works were the books I read. It was not till I 
 went to Zante ! that I came across the history of Greece in 
 plain Greek. The books I read often were the History of 
 Greece, the History of Aristoménis and Gorgé, and the 
 History of Iskender Beg. It was the French Revolution and 
 Napoleon, to my mind, that opened the eyes of the world.’ 
 
 The klepht was as well aware as the scholar of the quarter 
 from which light and warmth were beginning to radiate 
 through the Near and Middle Eastern dusk. Neither of 
 them tried to pretend that the sun that was showing its face 
 in their western heavens was a refracted image of Ancient 
 Hellenic Hyperion, who had descended for ever into the 
 shadowy underworld. That myth is one of the extravagances 
 of Western Philhellenism. 
 
 Equally extravagant is the frequent reference of anything 
 that is or is thought to be objectionable in Osmanli psycho- 
 logy and institutions to the influence of nomadism.” ‘ Grass 
 
 1 An island then under British occupation, which had been under almost 
 uninterrupted Western government for the preceding six centuries. Upper- 
 class Zantiots used to complete their education in Italian universities. 
 
 * So subtle a writer as Sir Charles Eliot seems to slip into this rut in his 
 brilliant book on Turkey in Hurope (revised edition, London, 1907). In 
 describing the proclivity shown even by cultivated and well-to-do Turks for 
 living from hand to mouth, taking things as they find them, and omitting 
 to furnish their houses or to keep them in repair, he suggests that it may be 
 due to some kind of inherited nomadic instinct. I feel great diffidence in 
 criticising an observer of such ability and penetration, but a comparison 
 between accounts of Modern Turkey and of the Southern States of the 
 American Union before the Civil War suggests to my mind what is perhaps 
 a less far-fetched explanation. If one reads standard descriptions of the 
 South, like Olmsted’s, one cannot fail to be struck by the apparent resem- 
 blance, in this very respect, between old Southern and contemporary Turkish 
 life and manners. Can one discover a common cause? I believe that one 
 can. In both societies there was the conjunction of a racial ascendency 
 with an abnormal mobility of population. In the South it was a white 
 ascendency over negroes, in Turkey a Middle Eastern ascendency over Near 
 Easterners. In America the movement of population was due to the 
 economic attraction of the untenanted West, in the Ottoman Empire to the 
 eviction of the outlying Turkish minorities by their former Near Eastern 
 subjects. But this conjunction of circumstances, however brought about, 
 might well have the same rather demoralising and unsettling effect upon the 
 ruling element in either society, and a very natural form of it would be the 
 encouragement of the proclivity described above, for which we have the 
 testimony in either case of independent observers. On this interpretation, 
 the proclivity itself might be recent and temporary, 
 
| ; 
 | 
 
 NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 339 
 
 does not grow where the Turkish horse-hoof has trod! ’ 
 Whichever conquered nationality invented this much- 
 quoted proverb had evidently no acquaintance with the 
 economics of life on the steppes. Had the metaphor any 
 relation to reality, those primaeval Turks who first took to 
 stock-breeding would not have survived their first twelve 
 months in business, for the nomad moves in an annual orbit, 
 and drives his herds each season over the ground on which 
 he has pastured them at the same season the year before. 
 His perpetual motion is not a symptom of waywardness and 
 perversity. It is as scientific as the agriculturist’s rotation 
 of crops or performance of different operations in different 
 fields at different times of year. Both are perpetually 
 shifting the scene of their activities in order not to exhaust 
 a particular parcel of ground. There is only a quantitative 
 difference in the range of their oscillation, conditioned by 
 the difference between their media of productivity. The 
 nomad, ranging widely in order to convert grasses into 
 human food through chemical transformations in the bodies 
 of tame animals, regards the agriculturist as a stick-in-the- 
 mud. The agriculturist, raising edible seeds and roots in 
 sufficient quantities out of a much smaller area of land, 
 regards the nomad as a vagabond. 
 
 There would be nothing more in this than the common- 
 place mutual contempt of different trades, if the frontiers 
 between nomad’s land and peasant’s land were stable. On 
 his own ground, each of them is following that mode of life 
 which the experience of generations has shown to be 
 economically the most productive. He is in equilibrium 
 with his environment and therefore more or less harmless 
 and amiable. In fact, the nomad who visits the peasant or 
 the peasant who visits the nomad at home is generally 
 agreeably surprised at the courtesy of his reception. ‘Those 
 splendid horse-dairy-farmers the Abioi, who live on a milk 
 diet and are the justest of mankind,’ is the earliest reference 
 to the Central Asian nomads that I know of in the literature 
 
340 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 of a sedentary society,! and if nomads were literary-minded, 
 I daresay they would compliment us occasionally in equally 
 gracious phraseology. The traditional bitterness between 
 peasant and nomad arises from a physical cause for which 
 neither is to blame. Their respective environments and the 
 frontiers between them are subject to periodic change. 
 Recent meteorological research indicates that there is a 
 rhythmic alternation, possibly of world-wide incidence, 
 between periods of relative desiccation and humidity,? 
 which causes alternate intrusions of peasants and nomads 
 into one another’s spheres. When desiccation reaches a 
 degree at which the steppe can no longer provide pasture for 
 the quantity of cattle with which the nomads have stocked 
 it, the herdsmen swerve from their beaten track of annual 
 migration and invade the surrounding cultivated countries 
 in search of food for their animals and themselves. On the 
 other hand, when the climatic pendulum swings back and 
 the next phase of humidity attains a point at which the 
 steppe becomes capable of bearing cultivated roots and 
 cereals, the peasant makes his counter-offensive upon the 
 pastures of the nomad. Their respective methods of 
 aggression are very dissimilar. The nomad’s outbreak is 
 as sudden as a cavalry charge, and shatters sedentary 
 societies like the bursting of some high explosive. The 
 peasant’s is an infantry advance. At each step he digs 
 himself in with mattock or steam-plough, and secures his 
 communications by building roads or railways. The most 
 striking recorded examples of nomad explosion are the in- 
 trusions of the Turks and Mongols, which occurred in what 
 was probably the last dry period but one.2 An imposing 
 
 1 Iliad, Book x111., lines 5-6. Of. Herodotus, Book trv., chaps. xxiii. 
 and xxvi., and almost every traveller who has visited the nomads at home. 
 
 * See Dr. Ellsworth Huntington’s works passim, but especially The Pulse 
 of Asia (Boston and New York, 1907, Houghton Mifflin Co.), and The 
 Climatic Factor as illustrated in Arid America (Washington, D.C., 1914, 
 Carnegie Institution). 
 
 * Research has not yet proceeded far enough on the meteorological side to 
 infer the length of period with any certainty from the scientific data. But 
 the historical records of movements of population produced by this now 
 
 — 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 341 
 
 instance of peasant encroachment is the subsequent eastward 
 expansion of Russia. Both types of movement are abnormal, 
 and each is extremely unpleasant for the party at whose 
 expense it is made. But they are alike in being due to a 
 single uncontrollable physical cause, and it is as erroneous 
 to attribute its workings to human wickedness in the one 
 case as in the other. Yet while the intrusive nomad has 
 been stigmatised as an ogre, the intrusive peasant has either 
 escaped observation or has been commended as an apostle 
 of civilisation. The reasons for this partiality are clear. 
 One is that the nomad’s tactics are more dramatic than the 
 peasant’s and make a correspondingly greater impression 
 on the imagination. The other is that history is written for 
 and by the sedentary populations, which are much the most 
 numerous and sophisticated portion of mankind, while the 
 nomad usually suffers and pines away and disappears with- 
 out telling his tale. Yet, if he did put it on record, he might 
 paint us as monsters. 
 
 The relentless pressure of the cultivator is probably more 
 painful in the long run, if one happens to be the victim of it, 
 than the nomad’s savage onslaught. The Mongol raids were 
 over in two or three generations ; but the Russian colonisa- 
 tion, which has been the reprisal for them, has been going on 
 for more than four hundred years—first behind the Cossack 
 lines, which encircled and narrowed down the pasture-lands 
 from the north, and then along the Trans-Caspian Railway, 
 which stretched its tentacles round their southern border. 
 From the nomad’s point of view, a peasant Power like Russia 
 resembles those rolling and crushing machines with which 
 Western industrialism shapes hot steel according to its 
 pleasure. In its grip, the nomad is either crushed out of 
 existence or racked into the sedentary mould, and the 
 
 well-established physical cause, point to a total period-length of 600 years 
 between the respective ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ maxima. We are probably at 
 present in the early stages of a ‘wet’ phase, the last ‘dry’ phase having 
 extended from about 1575 to 1875, the preceding ‘wet’ phase from 1275 to 
 1575, and the previous ‘dry’ phase—of which the Turkish and Mongol ex- 
 plosions were a consequence—from 4.D, 975 to 1275, 
 
 — 
 
 CTI 
 
 ‘ - = a 
 
342 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 process of penetration is not always peaceful. The path 
 was cleared for the Trans-Caspian Railway by the slaughter 
 of Tirkmens at Gék Tepé.1 But the nomad’s death-cry is 
 seldom heard. During the European War, while people in 
 England were raking up the Ottoman Turks’ nomadic 
 ancestry in order to account for their murder of 600,000 
 Armenians, 500,000 Turkish-speaking Central Asian nomads 
 of the Kirghiz Kazak Confederacy were being exterminated 
 —also under superior orders—by that ‘ justest of mankind’ - 
 the Russian muzhik, Men, women, and children were shot 
 down, or were put to death in a more horrible way by being 
 robbed of their animals and equipment and then being driven 
 forth in winter time to perish in mountain or desert. A 
 lucky few escaped across the Chinese frontier.2, These 
 atrocities were courageously exposed and denounced by 
 Mr. Kerensky in the Duma before the first Russian Revolu- 
 tion, but who listened or cared ? Not the Tsar’s Govern- 
 ment, nor the great public in the West. 
 
 So much, in vindication of the genus Hun. - But even on 
 the assumption that they are a generation of vipers, is 
 nomadic ancestry as irretrievable as original sin? If it is, 
 then where are we to stop? We may give up the nomad- 
 descended Near Eastern Bulgars, and even the Westernised 
 Magyars, as lost souls. (After all, they were both on the 
 wrong side in the War!) But what about all the other 
 nations of the Western world—including incidentally the 
 French, the Belgians, the Italians, and ourselves—who speak 
 languages of the Indo-European family ?* Does not our 
 speech bewray us and convict us of the ineffaceable 
 nomadic taint ? Where did these languages come from ? 
 
 1 In 1881. 
 
 2 For details see Czaplicka, M.A.: The Turks of Central Asia in History 
 and at the Present Day (Oxford, 1918, Clarendon Press), p. 17. The respec- 
 tive estimates of the total numbers of murdered Kazaks and Armenians are 
 both conjectural. 
 
 * The only population in Western Europe, besides the Magyars, who 
 speak non-Indo-Kuropean languages are the Finns and Lapps (incidentally 
 both ‘Turanian’), and the Basques—honourable exceptions, but hardly 
 numerous enough to save our reputation ! 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 343 
 
 Our Western philologists trace them back to the same steppes 
 from which the Turanian languages issued later. At any 
 rate, the migrants who propagated one branch of Indo- 
 European speech in Persia and India must have crossed the 
 steppe to get there, and could hardly have lived except by 
 practising the nomad economy on their way.’ Yet their 
 dubious origin is never cast up against the speakers of the 
 modern Iranian and Prakrit vernaculars, even by those 
 Westerners who are least inclined to believe that natives of 
 India will ever be capable of governing themselves. Not 
 only the morphology of the Sanskrit language, but the 
 mythology and institutions of those proximate descendants 
 of nomads who first gave that language its literary form, have 
 been extravagantly admired by Westerners too fastidious to 
 overlook the nomadic ancestry of the Osmanli Turks. 
 
 Such inconsistencies make havoc of the prejudice that 
 nomads generically are abominable, and few words need be 
 wasted in exposing the fallacy in the case of the Osmanlis. 
 Tt has been mentioned in Chapter IV. that, for good or evil, 
 they have actually inherited an infinitesimal quantity of 
 nomadic blood; and in Chapter I. some allusion has been 
 made to their experiment in governing sedentary subjects by 
 an adaptation of nomadic institutions. If they are to be 
 condemned because that experiment broke down, or because 
 they have bungled in borrowing Western institutions as a 
 substitute, they cannot fairly be accused at the same time of 
 never having got out of their unfortunate nomadic habits. 
 An unprejudiced study of Ottoman history does point to 
 the conclusion that, down to the latter part of the seven- 
 teenth century, their secular institutions (apart from the 
 immense field covered by the system of Islam) were to a large 
 extent conditioned by their nomadic antecedents. But it 
 
 1 This conjecture is supported by the fact that the Iranian and Sanskrit 
 names for the staple agricultural instruments are not derived from the same 
 roots as those common to so many Indo-European languages on our side of 
 the Central Asian steppe. It looks as if the ‘proto-Aryas’ lost the use of 
 these implements during their migration and rediscovered or borrowed them 
 independently. 
 
344 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 indicates equally strongly that, at any rate since the time of 
 Sultan Mahmud tr. (1808-1839), the traces of nomadic 
 influence upon their social life and politics have disappeared. 
 
 The best commentary on all this false history and false 
 sentiment which prejudice the thoughts of the Western 
 public about the Greeks and the Turks (on the rare occasions 
 when it thinks about them at all) is the judgment of those 
 Westerners who speak from personal experience. They are 
 few in number, but they are mostly educated men, and the 
 different vocations which have drawn them to the Near and 
 Middle East enable them to see the situation from inde- 
 pendent points of view. Some have gone as business men, 
 others as soldiers, others as doctors, others as consuls, others 
 as missionaries. Any point on which the majority of these 
 diverse first-hand observers agree, cannot easily be dis- 
 missed as a delusion; yet they are almost unanimous?! in 
 the verdict that, as an individual human being in the local 
 environment, the Turk is not the Greek’s inferior. They 
 find him no less honest in his dealings, no less admirable in 
 his character, and no less pleasant as a companion. 
 
 This consensus among Westerners who have had 
 direct relations with both nationalities cannot possibly be 
 the product of Turkish propaganda. In the first place, the 
 people who hold this view have formed it as the result of 
 experience ; and, secondly, the Turks, as a nation, are almost 
 ludicrously innocent of the propagandist’s art. The differ- 
 ence between Western and Middle Eastern social conventions 
 has restricted those forms of personal contact on which 
 propaganda (as well as the more reputable forms of self- 
 revelation) largely depends. The revolution in the position 
 of Turkish women, which has been in progress for the last 
 ten years, is beginning to break this barrier down, but it is 
 still there. In addition to this material obstacle, there are 
 
 + The chief exceptions are, of course, to be found among the missionaries, 
 but (i) whenever I have heard them maintain the superiority of non- 
 Western Christians over Moslems, it has been a priori and not with refer- 
 ence to their own experience ; and (ii) a strong party among them take the 
 same view as other Western residents. 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 345 
 
 subjective inhibitions. The Turks are aware of the pre- 
 judice against them that exists in Western minds, and are 
 inclined to despair of the possibility of overcoming it. This 
 pessimism arises partly from discouraging experiences and 
 partly from pride, for the Turks have not lost possession of 
 their distinctive Middle Eastern civilisation. It may have 
 been a failure, it may even be inherently inferior to that of 
 the West, yet it is, after all, a system of life which is a law 
 unto itself and has its own standards and ideals. The more 
 the West displays contempt and aversion, the more it dis- 
 courages the Middle East from the pursuit of a modus 
 vwendi and impels it to retire into itself. If there is any 
 question of propaganda, it is on the other side. This ques- 
 tionable art, which is unfortunately characteristic of Western 
 culture (the very name having originated in the bosom of 
 our greatest Western institution, the Roman Catholic Church) 
 has been acquired by the Greeks with uncommon virtuosity. 
 The Greek colonies in the principal urban centres of the 
 Western world, with their intimate affiliations—through 
 business, naturalisation, and intermarriage—with ‘ influen- 
 tial circles’ of Western society, are admirably equipped 
 for practising it. They will themselves be the first to 
 admit that they have not neglected their opportunity. 
 This is not to their discredit, but it does suggest that the 
 influence of propaganda is to be traced in the second-hand 
 opinions of the majority of the Western public that has 
 stayed at home, rather than in the first-hand experience of 
 the minority that has been in contact with the Greeks and 
 the Turks in their native surroundings. 
 
 The natural explanation of this minority’s judgment is 
 that it is correct, in so far as categorical judgments are 
 applicable at all in a realm of relativity, where the positions 
 of Greeks, Turks, and Westerners are changing all the time 
 in respect of one another. If ‘ suggestion’ plays any part, 
 it is rather an ‘ inverse suggestion ’ set up by the false pre- 
 judice with which the Western observer on the spot has 
 
346 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 previously been indoctrinated. The mental associations of 
 ‘ Christianity,’ ‘ Europe,’ and ‘ Hellenism,’ which the Modern 
 Greeks have taken such pains to attach to their own image 
 in Western minds, are really prejudicial to them. Because 
 (as I have tried to show) they do not correspond to the facts, 
 they cause embarrassment as soon as Greeks and Westerners 
 who have theoretically accepted them attempt to establish 
 personal relations. Each finds himself in a false position. 
 The Greek assumes a character which he does not possess. 
 He poses as a scion of Ancient Hellenic society, who has 
 rejoined his long-lost Western brother after an interval of 
 adversity, due to the accident of a brutal barbarian conquest. 
 The Westerner, on his side, starts from the generous assump- 
 tion that the only essential difference between them consists 
 in his own accidental better fortune, and that if the Greek 
 bears the marks of what he has been through, it is only 
 delicate to draw a veil over a temporary infirmity. From 
 the moment of contact, however, these mutual assumptions 
 begin to break down, and the process of disillusionment is so 
 awkward, and sometimes even painful, for the Western 
 party to the relationship that he tends to bring it to an end 
 and to avoid its renewal. In fact, he often cherishes a quite 
 unjust resentment against the Modern Greek, because the 
 latter does not come up to expectations which he would 
 never have entertained if he had exercised his judgment. 
 It is not to the interest of either Greeks or Westerners that 
 this source of misunderstanding should be perpetuated. 
 This phenomenon in the relationships between people of 
 different civilisations is a commonplace in those between 
 individuals of different classes in the same society. A 
 cultivated class, for example, finds most difficulty in 
 getting on with another which has acquired part—but 
 only part—of its culture and customs, and which seeks 
 on this account to establish the convention that no class- 
 distinction is there, when both parties are secretly aware of 
 its presence. On the other hand, it is comparatively at ease 
 
 2. 
 
2 
 
 al 
 
 y 
 i 
 
 NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 347 
 
 in its intercourse with members of one which makes no 
 pretensions to similarity. In this relationship both parties 
 can be themselves, and they can each enjoy the experience 
 of discovering the other’s distinctive qualities, without the 
 discomfort of detecting insincerity in his attitude and their 
 own. Indeed, this relationship inclines people to be, if any- 
 thing, unduly charitable. Each party having assumed that 
 the other’s standards differ—and that legitimately—from 
 his own, is easily led to suspend judgment. A working- 
 man often makes allowances for an acquaintance who is a 
 gentleman, and a gentleman for a working-man, which they 
 would not either of them make readily for individuals of 
 their respective species, or ever for a shopkeeper. This 
 well-known psychological fact has not been without benefit 
 to the Turk. When a Westerner meets a Turk (whether it 
 be an unsophisticated peasant or a Western-educated doctor, 
 official or officer), he finds himself in contact with an individual 
 who has traditions, standards, manners, and a soul of his 
 own. Social relations with him are straightforward and 
 full of interest. They possess all the charm and vividness 
 of intercourse with a live human being, with a minimum of 
 those moral commitments which ordinarily follow. The 
 Western traveller takes the same aesthetic enjoyment in his 
 live Turk as in the fictitious personalities of a novel or a play, 
 or as in the ghosts of a dead civilisation. The author, and 
 every reader after him, of Paradise Lost can idealise and 
 sympathise with Satan in the imaginary world of that poem, 
 without having to feel the disapproval obligatory when 
 much less serious offences are committed in this world by 
 sons of Adam. Scholars, too, can take delight in the poetry 
 of Aeschylus, the heroism of Leonidas, and all the glories of 
 Ancient Hellenic civilisation, without being unduly distressed 
 by the paederasty and infanticide which co-existed with 
 them. In the same way, a Westerner who has once made 
 friends with a Turk will shake hands with him again, next 
 time he visits Turkey, without embarrassment, however red 
 
348 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 the hands of other Turks may have been stained, sinee his 
 last visit, by massacre. Without his being aware of it, the 
 conventional picture of the ‘blood-stained Turk,’ with 
 which he has been familiarised since infancy, has made him 
 proof against being shocked by the reality. This feature in 
 the personal relationship between Westerners and Turks, 
 on its present footing, is as undesirable as that noted above 
 in the case of Westerners and Greeks ; but it has the same 
 psychological origins, and neither feature will disappear 
 until the ‘complex’ of prejudice in Western minds has been 
 removed. 
 
 It is imperative to remove it, for unwarrantable prejudice 
 and unwarrantable indulgence do not in this case counter- 
 balance one another. When you have made a spoilt-child 
 of the Greek, it is no good rounding on him as an impostor ; 
 and when you have used the Turk as a whipping-boy, you 
 do not heal the stripes that you have inflicted by congratu- 
 lating him on his fortitude. Unnatural treatment is made 
 doubly harmful by inconsistency in its application, and the 
 deplorable effects of Western behaviour towards both 
 nationalities are written large on the characters of the 
 present generation. In both cases, the evil that we have 
 done to them exceeds, and will probably outlive, the good. 
 
 It is not my intention to minimise the advantages which 
 the Greeks—to consider them first—have derived from 
 Western goodwill. Our sympathy has stimulated their 
 efforts, our charitableness encouraged them to retrieve their 
 mistakes, our exceptional disinterestedness and even 
 generosity towards them has thrown open to them the 
 highest career as a nation for which they may be qualified 
 by their talents. When they took up arms for their inde- 
 pendence and began to be worsted in an unequal struggle, 
 Great Britain, France, and Russia agreed on intervention,} 
 and a few months afterwards the power of the Ottoman and 
 Egyptian Governments to carry on the war was broken— 
 
 1 Treaty of the 6th July 1827 for the Pacification of Greece, 
 
 —— 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 349 
 
 ‘ accidentally on purpose ’"—by the Allied fleets at Navarino.1 
 Again, when state organisation had to be provided for the 
 liberated Greek nation, Western statesmen bestowed on 
 Greece, from the outset and on their own initiative, that 
 “sovereign independence’ which they and their successors 
 have always refused (in practice if not in theory) to Turkey. 
 The demand for the realities of this status, formulated in 
 Article 6 of the Turkish National Pact of 1920,2 has been 
 stigmatised as ridiculous and impertinent. On the other 
 hand, the first point settled in a Protocol signed by the three 
 Powers at London on the 3rd February 1830 was that 
 “Greece shall form an independent state, and shall enjoy all 
 the political, economic, and commercial rights attaching to 
 complete independence.’ Yet, at that date, the Greeks had 
 given no proof of capacity for self-government. They had 
 fought two civil wars before they were half-way through 
 their war against the Turks, squandered their Western loans, 
 and generally ignored their Western advisers. The grant of 
 sovereign independence in these circumstances was an act 
 of faith on the part of Western statesmen, and if it has been 
 justified by the event in Greece, they might be well advised 
 to repeat the experiment for the benefit of Turkey. 
 
 At the same time, Greece has, on the whole, received 
 greater injury than advantage from the Western attitude 
 towards her during the first century of her independent 
 existence. The general stimulus to her vitality and the 
 concrete services rendered to her are outweighed by the 
 demoralising effects upon her national character. / We have 
 encouraged her to be conceited and pharisaical—to over- 
 estimate her own merits and achievements, and to ignore the 
 qualities of the Turk (in spite of the fact that those qualities 
 gave him the dominion over her for four centuries). Taking 
 as their standard of comparison their respective degrees of 
 Westernisation, the Greeks have learnt to regard the Turks 
 
 1 On the 20th October 1827. 
 2 See Text of the Turkish National Pact, pp. 207-10 above. 
 
350 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 as immeasurably their inferiors. They do not realise that 
 their present relative positions, even in this respect, are only 
 temporary; and having staked their own fortunes on 
 assimilation to the West, they do not suspect that, in the 
 long run, it may prove no disadvantage to a non-Western 
 people to have remained ‘ radically alien to Western civilisa- 
 tion.’ In national conflicts, it is courting disaster to mis- 
 conceive the potentialities of an adversary, and the Anatolian 
 campaign, the history of which has been narrated in Chapter 
 VI., is an illustration of the misfortunes which Greece has 
 several times brought upon herself by this error of judgment. 
 But the worst elements introduced into the Greek character 
 by intercourse with the West have been the more impalpable 
 weaknesses of superficiality and lack of originality. Having 
 by our sympathy stimulated the Greeks to make efforts, we 
 have often tempted them to relax them by premature and 
 insincere commendation; and by placing our spiritual 
 heritage unreservedly at their disposal, we have led them to 
 turn their backs upon their own. 
 
 Instead of indulging in complacent reflections on their 
 superiority to the Turks, it would be salutary for the Greeks 
 to compare themselves with the Russians—a people of their 
 own Near Eastern civilisation, who came into contact with 
 the West at about the same date as they and under parallel 
 conditions. Why has Russia made so much more mark 
 than Greece during the last two centuries? Why, in 
 particular, has she had a more momentous and intimate 
 effect upon the destinies of Western society ? Her greatness 
 cannot simply be explained by material factors, such as her 
 earlier assertion of her independence against her Middle 
 Eastern conquerors,’ or her larger territory, population, and 
 resources. These, of course, account for her military and 
 diplomatic achievements, but not for her contributions to 
 
 literature and music—spheres in which greatness has no 
 
 * The Khans of the ‘Golden Horde’ (the north-western group of the 
 Mongol Confederacy) maintained an effective domination over Russia from 
 A.D. 1238 to 1478, 
 
 | 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 351 
 
 connection with man-power, minerals, armaments or 
 frontiers. The secret of Russia’s mental greatness appears 
 to be that she has kept her spiritual individuality. While 
 embracing the West, she has refused to surrender herself to 
 itentirely. This persistent independence of mind (if without 
 first-hand knowledge one may venture an opinion) is the 
 dynamic force in recent Russian history—the source from 
 which both works of genius and ‘times of trouble’ have 
 come. In politics, its protean presence is discernible in 
 movements of the most opposite complexion. The re- 
 actionary Slavophilism of the nineteenth century was a 
 recoil from Westernisation and a harking back towards a 
 mythical ‘Golden Age,’ before the raw human life of the 
 marshes and forests had received the distinctive impress of 
 any civilisation. Again, the revolutionary Bolshevism of 
 the twentieth century is an enthusiastic acceptance of a 
 condemnation passed by the Western conscience itself upon 
 the structure of Western society. The West was content to 
 put its self-criticism on record. . Russia has taken it in 
 earnest, and has attempted to make it a basis for reconstruct- 
 ing her life on a new non-Western plan.! The same vein 
 of aloofness from the West and repugnance towards its per- 
 vasive influence on Russian life has surely been the inspira- 
 tion of Russian literature. Its uncanny clear-sightedness, 
 its superhuman breadth of vision, its power of objective 
 description and analysis, its melancholy, and the subtle dis- 
 quietude which it succeeds in communicating even to 
 Western readers, seem traceable to this psychological origin. 
 Nothing could be more different than the genius of this 
 other modern Near Eastern people from the spirit of Modern 
 Greece. What Russia has preserved and created gives the 
 measure of what Greece has lost, or failed to win, and enables 
 
 * I must guard myself by mentioning that I regard the Bolshevik régime 
 as a ‘time of trouble’ and its effects as disastrous. It is one of the destruc- 
 tive manifestations of the Russian attitude towards the West. At the same 
 time, I maintain that, on the balance, that attitude has been more fruitful 
 than the Greek. 
 
352 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 us to find a formula for the curse which the West has set 
 upon her. It is spiritual pauperisation. 
 
 The Turks have been demoralised in a different way. 
 Certainly we have avoided killing them by kindness, and if 
 it is wholesome for the character never to be flattered or 
 favoured and to be thrown upon one’s own resources, we 
 have done them some negative service in this respect. In 
 fact, the Turks have not only had the discipline of ‘ self- 
 help.’ As depositaries of the Caliphate and as the only even 
 quasi-independent Power surviving in the Middle Eastern 
 world, they have been looked up to by the other members of 
 Middle Eastern society, and have had to shoulder some part 
 of their burden in addition to their own immoderate load. 
 This ordeal of acting as bulwarks against Western aggression 
 might have been preferable to being made, like the Greeks, 
 into protégés of the Western intelligentsia, if their Western 
 adversaries had shown chivalry or had even played fair. 
 But unhappily the record of the West in its dealings with 
 Turkey has been not only ungenerous but unscrupulous. 
 This was forcibly illustrated by the attitude of the West in 
 and after 1908, when the Turks tried to throw off their 
 chains as the Greeks had done in 1821. Almost every 
 Western Power took some selfish advantage of the situation. 
 Austria completed her acquisition of Bosnia-Herzegovina by 
 a formal annexation, and persuaded Bulgaria to give her 
 countenance by a simultaneous repudiation of Ottoman 
 suzerainty—both without provocation and in violation of the 
 Treaty of Berlin. Italy, after careful preparation, shame- 
 lessly invaded and seized the outlying Ottoman provinces of 
 Tripoli and Benghazi, and thereby gave Turkey’s Near 
 Eastern neighbours their long-sought opportunity to fall 
 upon her and teke from heralmostall her remaining territories 
 in Rumelia. Great Britain, though to her credit she did not 
 attempt at that time to alter the status quo in Egypt, 
 adopted a supercilious if not hostile attitude, or at least 
 (what had the same appearance from the Turkish angle of 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 353 
 
 vision) she permitted such an attitude to be adopted by those 
 who represented her at Constantinople. Germany guilefully 
 assumed the role of the friend in need, in order to make 
 Turkey subservient to her designs and to involve her, as it 
 turned out, in their disastrous miscarriage. France alone ! 
 can claim the negative distinction of not having rendered 
 herself odious in some way or other to the Turks during the 
 years between the Revolution of 1908 and the European 
 War. This fact, which is generally overlooked in Great 
 Britain, goes far to explain the recent comparative cordiality 
 of Franco-Turkish relations. 
 
 But, as in the case of Greece, the concrete actions of 
 Western Powers in war and diplomacy have mattered less, 
 for good or evil, than the overwhelming though imponderable 
 ‘suggestion ’ exercised upon the Turkish by the Western 
 mind. We have injured the Turks most by making them 
 hopeless and embittered. Our scepticism has been so pro- 
 found and our contempt so vehement, that they have almost 
 ceased to regard it as possible to modify them by their own 
 action. They incline to accept these Western attitudes as 
 fixed stars in their horoscope, with a fatalism which we incor- 
 rectly attribute to the teaching of their religion, without real- 
 ising that our own conduct has been one of its potent causes. 
 But while they are discouraged, they are not deadened to 
 resentment. They see us in a light in which we too seldom 
 look at ourselves, as hypocrites who make self-righteous 
 professions a cloak for unscrupulous practice; and their 
 master-grievance against us so fills their minds that it leaves 
 little room for self-examination. If a charge is brought 
 against them from a Western source, that is almost enough 
 in itself to make them harden their hearts against it, however 
 just it may be. They do not get so far as to consider it on 
 its merits. They plead ‘ not guilty,’ and put themselves in 
 a posture of defence, to meet what experience has led them 
 
 1 In 1908, Russia was temporarily paralysed by her recent defeat at the 
 hands of Japan, but it was obvious in her case that only the power and not 
 the will to injure Turkey was lacking. 
 
 vA 
 
354 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 to regard as one of the most effective strokes in the Western 
 tactic of aggression. In 1921, I seldom found the Turks 
 defend the fearful atrocities which they had committed six 
 years previously against the Armenians, but repentance and 
 shame for them were not uppermost in their minds—not, I 
 believe, because they were incapable of these feelings, but 
 because they were preoccupied by indignation at the con- 
 duct of the Allied Powers in fomenting a war-after-the-war 
 in Anatolia. Remorse cannot easily co-exist with a grievance, 
 and until we relieve the Turks of the one, we shall certainly 
 fail, as we have done hitherto, to inspire them with the other. 
 
 In attempting to express and explain the Turkish point of 
 view, I am not seeking to suggest that it is right, or to deny 
 the charges brought against the Turkish nation and Govern- 
 ment for their treatment of subject peoples during the past 
 century. Their crimes are undoubtedly exaggerated in the 
 popular Western denunciations, and the similar crimes com- 
 mitted by Near Eastern Christians in parallel situations are 
 almost always passed over in silence. At the same time, the 
 facts substantiated against the Turks (as well as against their 
 neighbours) by authoritative investigation are so appalling 
 that it is alnrost a matter of indifference, from the point of 
 view of establishing a case, whether the embroideries of the 
 propagandists are counterfeit or genuine. The point which 
 I wish to make is that, if our aim is not simply to condemn 
 but to cure, we can only modify the conduct of the Turks by 
 altering their frame of mind, and that our only means of 
 doing that is to change our own attitude towards them. So 
 long as we mete out one measure to them, another to the 
 Greeks, and yet a third to ourselves, we shall have no moral 
 influence over them. 
 
 If it be objected that moral influence is not a relevant 
 factor, on the ground that Turkish-speaking Moslems with 
 
 a nomadic strain in their blood have an innate criminal 
 
 tendency, it may be answered that there is no logical con- 
 nection whatever between these linguistic, religious, and 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 355 
 
 economic characteristics on the one hand and a depraved 
 moral constitution on the other, and that the empirical 
 method of inquiry leads to opposite conclusions. To illus- 
 trate this, one has only to compare the Osmanli Turks with 
 the Kazan Tatars, another Turkish-speaking Moslem people 
 descended from a minority of nomad immigrants grafted on 
 to a more numerous sedentary population. The chief physical 
 and cultural difference between the Osmanlis and the Kazanlis 
 is that while the ancestors of the former were mostly Greek- 
 speaking Orthodox Christians with a Near Eastern civilisa- 
 tion, the non-nomadic ancestors of the Kazanlis were uncivi- 
 lised Finns. Philhellenes are bound to admit that if the 
 moral character of a nation is determined once for all by race, 
 language, and religion, there are more promising ingredients 
 in the Osmanli compound. In view of this, I commend to 
 their attention the following passages from a British official 
 publication, compiled by a distinguished English scholar : 1— 
 “The Volga Turks are, on the whole, distinguished by 
 
 their sobriety, honesty, thrift, and industry. By their 
 assiduity they often acquire considerable wealth. They live 
 
 on the best of terms with their Russian peasant neighbours. 
 The chief occupation of the Kazan Turk is trade, to which 
 
 he turns at once when he has acquired a small capital by 
 agriculture. On his commercial journeys he is always a 
 
 propagandist of Islam. His chief industries are soap-boiling, 
 spinning, and weaving. He is sometimes a worker in gold. 
 
 He makes a good shoemaker and coachman. . . . These 
 Turks are more cleanly in their houses than the Russian 
 peasantry. . . 
 
 ‘Till the end of the sixteenth century, no mosques were 
 tolerated in Kazan, and the Tatars were compelled to live 
 in a separate quarter. But the predominance of the Moslems 
 gradually prevailed, so that in the second half of the eighteenth 
 century there were as many as 250 mosques in the Govern- 
 ment of Kazan. A ukase of tolerance promulgated in 1773 2 
 
 * Manual on the Turanians and Pan-Turanianism, compiled by the Geo- 
 graphical Section, Naval Intelligence Division, Naval Staff, Admiralty 
 (author’s name not published): sold by H.M. Stationery Office. 
 
 * The date of the Ottoman Government’s charter to the Greek community 
 of Aivali (see Chapter IV.). Russia and Turkey, being engaged at the time 
 in a desperate war, each found it advisable to make concessions to subject 
 minorities of the same civilisation as the enemy Power. 
 
356 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 helped the cause of Islam among these Turks. Far from 
 being won by Russian tolerance, the Moslems of the Volga 
 have in modern times become more closely united than ever 
 with the Mohammedan world... . 
 
 ‘There has been a rapid increase in the number of mosques 
 and a steady improvement in the status of Moslem schools 
 
 in the Government of Kazan. . . . These schools have not 
 been affected in the least by the Russian educational 
 system. .. 
 
 ‘In consequence of the attention paid to education, the 
 percentage of Kazan Turks who cannot read and write is 
 extremely low. The production of printed books has also 
 been considerable among these Moslems. . . . 
 
 ‘Thus, during a period of 360 years of Russian rule, the 
 Asiatic conservatism of these Kazan Moslems has in no way 
 been weakened or influenced by Russian culture. . . . No 
 conversion except among their ruling families takes place, 
 and only the quite uneducated element is liable to be absorbed 
 in the Russian population. . . .’ 
 
 Take this passage; substitute ‘Anatolian Greek’ for 
 ‘Volga Turk,’ ‘Osmanli’ for ‘ Russian,’ and ‘ Orthodox 
 Christianity ’ for ‘Islam’; and then read it again, without 
 altering the dates or even omitting the meaningless word 
 ‘ Asiatic.’ You will find in it an accurate summary of the 
 facts and events already discussed in Chapter IV. of this 
 book. The bent for commerce and manufacture, even down 
 to the specialisation in soap-making and the carpet-industry ; 
 the renascence after several centuries of alien domination ; 
 the zeal for education and the rapprochement with more 
 numerous and powerful co-religionists abroad ; the impervi- 
 ousness to the culture of the surrounding majority—feature 
 by feature, with astonishing exactitude, the portrait of the 
 Orthodox Christian minorities in Anatolia is reconstructed 
 in this description of the Volga Turks. Confronted with - 
 this, can any one any longer maintain that the character of 
 Osmanli and Kazanli Turkish-speaking Moslems, or indeed 
 that of Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians, is deter- 
 mined a priori by their race, language, and religion, and is 
 not the product of the particular political, social, and 
 economic environment in which they happen to find them- 
 
| 
 | 
 
 NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 357 
 
 selves for the time being? There is a legend that male, 
 white-coated, blue-eyed Angora cats are invariably deaf, by 
 a law of nature which has never been fathomed but which 
 always works. I have made no personal investigations, but 
 I venture to submit that if specimens were examined and 
 fifty per cent. of them turned out to be sound of hearing, the 
 legendary hypothesis would have to be discarded. | 
 
 The unfortunate effect of all these misconceptions upon 
 the life of the Greeks and the Turks would not, however, be 
 a tragedy of any great interest, except for the victims them- 
 selves, if our attitude towards them were not a test case of 
 our relations with the great contemporary non-Western 
 societies to which they respectively belong. That is the 
 interest and the danger of the situation. Inveterate pre- 
 judices in regard to two minor nationalities, ploughing 
 furrows in Western minds, have not only dug trenches across 
 the fields of Anatolia, but actually threaten to dig the 
 graves of civilisations. 
 
 Now that, for good or evil, the living civilisations of the 
 world have come into contact with each other, three alterna- 
 tive possibilities lie before them—a struggle for supremacy, 
 non-co-operation, or the discovery of a modus vivendt. Of 
 these, the struggle for supremacy has unhappily been an 
 element in the situation from the beginning. The present 
 dominion of Western Powers over non-Western countries and 
 peoples was in most cases established originally by military 
 conquest; and though Western imperialism has been 
 honourably distinguished by a desire to place its authority 
 on a moral basis, the spirit of the ‘ dominant race ’ flares up 
 in us whenever our non-Western subjects cross our wills. 
 It comes out strikingly even in our attitude towards the 
 theoretically sovereign and independent Osmanlis. For 
 example, in approaching the problem of protecting the alien 
 minorities in Turkey, we are tempted to give way to pride at 
 the expense of humanitarianism. We cannot bear that our 
 wishes regarding this or any other matter should be set at 
 
358 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 defiance by a non-Western Power ; and we go on attempting 
 to settle the minorities question by force (often with dis- q 
 astrous consequences to our would-be protégés), because we 
 cannot bring ourselves to negotiate with the Turks as equals, 
 to consider their point of view, or to enlist their goodwill. 
 ‘The Turk understands nothing but force.’ If true, that is 
 a condemnation of his teachers, for Western diplomacy has 
 given him no reason for believing in anything else. When 
 and how did Turkey succeed in shaking off the galling 
 shackles of the Capitulations ? Not in peace-time, and not 
 by the liberal consent of the Western parties to these 
 onerous diplomatic contracts. She shook them off first 
 during the European War, by a unilateral act of denunciation 
 which the Entente Powers could not, in the circumstances, 
 prevent or the Central Powers refuse to sanction. The 
 Capitulations were imposed again immediately after the 
 armistice, and re-embodied in the Treaty of Sévres. They 
 were shaken off a second time by force of arms in the \ 
 territories liberated from Allied control by the Nationalist | 
 Movement. With these precedents, it will need a diplomatic a 
 tour de force to transfer the question of the Capitulations, or 
 any other question pending between Turkey and the Western | 
 Powers, from the plane of force to the plane of rational 
 negotiation. The same tradition of violence prejudices 
 almost all the relations of the West with non-Western 
 societies, and the reaction of the Turkish Nationalists to it 
 has its parallel in wider anti-Western movements like 
 militant Pan-Islamism. It is unnecessary to point out that 
 if this state of mind prevails it will be disastrous to all | 
 parties, but there is some need for Westerners to remind 
 themselves that the main responsibility for banishing it 
 rests upon them. He who takes the sword shall perish by 
 the sword, unless another spirit moves him in time to put up 
 his sword into the sheath and to heal any wound which it 
 may have inflicted. 
 
 The second alternative of non-co-operation has recently | 
 
 | 
 
 semen 
 
 A SB Sass ann 
 ——— 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 359 
 
 been preached as a doctrine in India by Mr. Gandhi and 
 4 pursued impulsively by the people of the United States. 
 But is it really possible for different societies, when once they 
 have met, to recover their original independence of one 
 another? Even the Americans are not thorough-going in 
 bY] their avoidance of commitments. They have refused a 
 h | political mandate in the Near and Middle East, but they 
 have not recalled their educationalists and missionaries.2 
 These devoted American apostles of mental and spiritual 
 
 | union between West and East have been labouring for a 
 
 | century in the Turkish, Syrian, Persian, Indian, and Far 
 Kastern fields, and have received wider support among their 
 distant compatriots at home than the missionaries of any 
 European country (except possibly Scotland). The trader 
 | | already follows, and he is only late in the field because 
 bi American industry has hitherto been pre-occupied with the 
 exploitation of its own continent. The exceptional oppor- 
 \ tunity for internal expansion that has existed in the United 
 \ States has been the psychological foundation of the ‘ Monroe 
 it Doctrine,’ but the vacuum will not continue for ever, and, as 
 ‘ soon as it is filled, the economic energies previously attracted 
 into it will be driven to search for foreign outlets. As for 
 the other great industrial countries of the Western world, 
 
 they have depended on the Middle Eastern, Indian, and Far 
 
 Eastern markets since the beginning of the Industrial 
 Revolution. Without the mass-demand of non-Western 
 
 peoples for cotton goods, modern Lancashire (for example) 
 
 would hardly have come into existence, and it certainly 
 
 : * When Japan adopted the policy of non-co-operation in the seven- 
 teenth century, she was more drastic. In 1636 the Japanese Government 
 ‘ordained that no Japanese vessel should go abroad, that no Japanese 
 subject should leave the country, and that, if detected attempting to do so, 
 he should be put to death’ (Zncyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 15, p. 234). The 
 Abyssinians, who expelled all Westerners, neck and crop, from their country 
 within a year or two of their expulsion from Japan, proceeded to isolate 
 | themselves with equal thoroughness. This policy was right at the time, for 
 it enabled both peoples to preserve their independence unbroken. On the 
 other hand, both were quick to reverse it when times had changed, and 
 
 deliberately reopened relations with the West about the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 caer ae 
 
 at 
 
360 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 could not continue to support its present population if 
 that demand were brought to an end by Mr. Gandhi's 
 preaching. 
 
 From the Western point of view, therefore, non-co-opera- 
 tion involves such economic dislocation that a serious 
 adoption of this policy by the other side might lead us into 
 the fatal course of repression. But, again, is it a strategy 
 which Mr. Gandhi’s countrymen could carry to a conclusion, 
 even if they did not encounter violent forms of opposition ? 
 The obvious way, after all, to drive out one nail is with 
 another. The organisation (as distinct from the mere 
 generation) of a mass-movement is itself a characteristically 
 Western idea, and Mr. Gandhi has used the Western tech- 
 nique of newspaper and conference to translate it into 
 action. His movement, passing as it almost inevitably 
 would from non-violence to the use of force, might conceiv- 
 ably succeed in bringing to an end the military, political, and 
 economic ascendency of a particular Western Power over 
 the territory of India, but the process might very pos- 
 sibly establish the ascendency of Western civilisation over 
 Indian society. The products of the Lancashire factories 
 are surely less likely to be driven out of India by the spinning- 
 wheels and hand-looms which the mahatma commends to 
 his followers, than by similar products of similar factories at 
 Poona, The English civil servant will hardly be relieved of 
 his functions by the Indian guru until the latter has trans- 
 formed himself from a saint into an administrator ; and the 
 transfer of authority will probably be postponed till the day 
 when a native Indian army has sufficiently mastered the 
 Western technique of war to measure itself against the 
 Western army of occupation. The Westerner might go, 
 but his works would remain, and the Indian—labouring ten 
 hours a day in order to supply wants learnt from the West 
 by tending Western machinery, spending perhaps three 
 years of his life in compulsory military service, and making 
 the other sacrifices of happiness demanded from human 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 361 
 
 beings by the Western system of society—might find that 
 in order to liberate his body he had given the West dominion 
 over hissoul. In other words, the policy of non-co-operation 
 is not at all likely to attain or even to approach its goal. If 
 \ carried to any lengths, it would merely revive the struggle 
 | for supremacy and reverse the roles of the antagonists. As 
 the process worked itself out, the material and therefore 
 ‘4 comparatively superficial ascendency previously exercised 
 by Western Powers would be wrested from them by the 
 subject populations, but Western civilisation would invade 
 and subjugate the inner life of non-Western societies to a 
 degree which might not have been possible when it was 
 \ working through a handful of Western conquerors, and not 
 | through the hearts and minds and daily habits of the con- 
 quered peoples. Such a result might delight Mr. Thomas 
 . Hardy’s Spirit Ironic, for it would be just as disastrous as 
 that of open war. 
 
 A positive modus vivendi is the only escape from these 
 other alternatives, and the task of finding one must princi- 
 pally devolve upon the West. At the moment, ours is the 
 greatest civilisation in the world, and though our superiority 
 may be temporary, it imposes obligations on us so long as it 
 lasts. By our exuberant vitality, if by no finer qualities, 
 we have profoundly affected the development of other 
 societies, deflected them from their course, and set forces in 
 motion within them which may not only transform their 
 characters but may react perilously upon ours. It is thus 
 our interest as well as our duty to forecast and if possible 
 avert these dangers by laying the foundations of a wider 
 society, in which the several great societies now existing may 
 take their place as members, and so contrive to live side 
 
 by side without bringing one another to destruction. The 
 material problems connected with this task need not cause 
 iF us anxiety. World-systems of finance, commerce, and 
 i transport have been created already by the Western genius, 
 and it is not beyond our wit to plan the political machinery 
 
362 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 for an all-inclusive League of Nations. The test of our 
 greatness will be our success in creating the necessary mental 
 atmosphere—that charity between members of different 
 civilisations, without which it profiteth nothing to have the 
 gift of prophecy and to understand all mysteries and all 
 knowledge. 
 
 If the right moral has been drawn in this book from the 
 events with which it deals, such charity can only be imported 
 into our unhappy contemporary relationships by a combina- 
 tion of the two principles of reciprocity and individuality. 
 Their combination is the essential] condition, for the failure 
 of our differential treatment of the Greeks and Turks 
 demonstrates the inadequacy of either principle in isolation 
 from the other. It needs little virtue, indeed, to give a seat 
 at our banquet to the stranger who has obligingly put on 
 our wedding garment ; or, again, to tolerate his companion’s 
 outlandish costume, if we keep him in outer darkness as a 
 penalty for his obstinacy in refusing to change it. True 
 charity means sitting at the same board without formalities 
 or conditions, and taking pleasure in the differences as 
 well as in the likenesses between ourselves and our fellow 
 human beings. 
 
 At present, these differences are a stumbling-block. The 
 non-Western societies are oppressed by our chilly shadow, 
 while we are resentful when they assert their individuality. 
 This is partly what arouses our animus against the Turks 
 and the Russians. They do not fit into our Western 
 scheme, and so it bothers us to be reminded of their existence. 
 At the same time, our lack of interest in them, to which 
 attention has been drawn repeatedly in the preceding 
 chapters, is probably a sign of well-being in our own society. 
 So long as a civilisation is fulfilling its potentialities and 
 developing in accordance with its genius, it is a universe 
 in itself. Impressions from outside distract it without 
 bringing it inspiration, and it therefore excludes them as far 
 as possible from its consciousness. But no civilisation has 
 
NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS 363 
 
 yet found the secret of eternal youth, still less of immortality. 
 Sooner or later, they are each overtaken by some irreparable 
 catastrophe, which not only cuts short their growth but 
 strangely transmutes their essence. The steel, formerly so 
 clear and hard, becomes soft and rusty. It is a tragic trans- 
 formation. Yet this rust, which in the craftsman’s eyes is 
 a foul accretion, is revealed to the scientific vision as a subtle 
 compound, in which unlike elements, miraculously blended, 
 acquire properties foreign to each of them before their 
 union. 
 
 ‘When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and 
 walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when thou shalt be 
 old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall 
 gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.’ For 
 a living creature, the supreme agony is to be caught thus on 
 the wheel of circumstance. Yet no man liveth to himself 
 and no man dieth to himself, and the power which girds and 
 carries whither they would not the civilisations whose 
 creative force is spent, is nature herself. She will not suffer 
 any of her creatures to pass out of existence until they have 
 reproduced their kind, and higher organisms cannot do this 
 except by intercourse with one another. For this reason, 
 no society is ever able to hold itself permanently aloof from 
 its contemporaries. Our spiritual ancestors the Ancient 
 Greeks, in whom Hellenic civilisation had been incarnated, 
 believed, in the pride of their youth, that they were of a 
 different clay from the Ancient Orientals. They would 
 have been incredulous if it had been prophesied to them in 
 the fifth century before Christ that nature would one day 
 bring them together in order to bring us, their descendants, 
 to birth. Yet the century which carried them to the 
 pinnacle of their greatness quickly struck them down by the 
 catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War. From that time 
 forward they walked no longer whither they would. They 
 stretched forth their hands to grope after a fellowship which 
 they did not suspect, and from which, had they divined it, 
 
364 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 they would still have recoiled in surprise. Their Oriental } 
 contemporaries understood the course of nature more clearly 
 than they did, and the last act of their tragedy was foretold 
 to them, rather less than five centuries after the outbreak of 
 the fatal conflict between Athens and Sparta, by a Hellenised 
 Jew from a cosmopolitan town in Cilicia. 
 
 ‘Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, 
 “Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too 
 superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devo- 
 tions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UN- | 
 KNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him at 
 declare I unto. you. 
 
 *** God that made the world and all things therein, seeing 
 that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples : 
 made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, 
 as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life, . 
 and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood { 
 all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, ( 
 and hath determined the times before appointed, and the 
 bounds of their habitation ; that they should seek the Lord, 
 if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he 
 be not far from every one of us; for in him we live, and 
 
 move, and have our being ; as certain also of your own poets 
 have said, For we are also his offspring.” ’ , 
 
TABLE OF DATES 
 
 1914 November 5 Great Britain declared war on Turkey. 
 1915 October 1 Allied officers arrived at Salonika to arrange for the 
 landing of an expeditionary force. 
 
 = 5 3 Russian ultimatum to Bulgaria. 
 oe = 5 Allied diplomatic representatives left Sofia. 
 3 a 5 King Constantine received and accepted Mr. Veni- 
 zelos’s resignation. 
 1915 April 10 The Allied Powers informed the Greek Government 
 ] of their intention to establish naval bases on 
 
 Greek islands in the Aegean. 
 - August 30(?) National defence movement started at Salonika. 
 { 5 September 25 Mr. Venizelos left Athens for Krete. 
 
 { 4 October 9 Mr. Venizelos arrived at Salonika and formed a provi- 
 sional government. 
 ., December 1-2 Action between Greek and Allied troops at Athens, 
 
 followed by the imposition of the blockade upon 
 Greek territories under the Royal Government’s 
 control. 
 
 1917 June 11 Ultimatum presented by M. Jonnart, High Commis- 
 sioner of the Allied Powers, to King Constantine’s 
 Government at Athens. 
 
 a = 14 King Constantine left Greece. 
 5 fs 25 Mr. Venizelos returned to Athens, escorted by a 
 } French expeditionary force, from Salonika. 
 | re fs 27 Mr. Venizelos formed a new Government at Athens, 
 ! which formally intervened in the War on the side 
 
 of the Allies. 
 1918 October 30 Turkey concluded an armistice with the Allies. 
 | 1919 March 29 Italian troops landed at Adalia. 
 I ,, April 24 Signor Orlando left Paris for Rome ; the Italian Dele- 
 gation officially suspended its participation in the 
 Peace Conference. 
 
 a: (nay: 5 Signor Orlando left Rome for Paris again, but the 
 deadlock over the Adriatic Question continued. 
 
 = os 15 Gnreex TROOPS LANDED AT SMYRNA. 
 
 3 ‘a 21 Mr. Sterghiddhis arrived at Smyrna. 
 
 ,, By end of May Greek forces had occupied Manysa and Aidin, and 
 Italian forces Scala Nuova. 
 
 » dune 17 Ottoman Delegation (Damad Ferid Pasha, Tewfik 
 Pasha, and Riza Tewfik Bey) stated their case 
 before the Council of Ten at Paris. 
 
 365 
 
August 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 26 
 5 
 
 1] 
 
 Text of the Council of Ten’s Reply published. 
 
 British War Office, in an official communiqué, attri- 
 buted a Kurdish rising at Suleimanié to the instiga- 
 tion of Turkish agitators. 
 
 Mastafa Kemal Pasha outlawed by the Ottoman 
 Government at Constantinople. 
 
 23 (?) Turkish Nationalist Congress at Erzerum. 
 
 29 
 
 24 
 
 September 13 
 
 October 
 
 a 
 
 November 4 
 
 December 10 
 
 January 
 
 February 
 
 79 
 
 March 
 
 1] 
 
 19 
 
 26 
 
 15 
 
 16 
 
 Mr. Venizelos and Signor Tittoni signed an agree- 
 ment respecting Greek and Italian interests in 
 Rhodes, the Dodekanese, and the Maeander Valley. 
 
 First sitting of the Commission of Inquiry sent to 
 Smyrna by the Governments of the Principal Allied 
 Powers and the United States. 
 
 Turkish Nationalist Congress at Sivas. 
 
 Damad Ferid Ministry at Constantinople replaced by 
 an Ali Riza Ministry, with a mandate from the 
 Sultan to hold a general election. 
 
 Mustafa Kemal Pasha telegraphed to the Ottoman 
 Government the peace-terms formulated at the 
 Congresses of Erzerum and Sivas. 
 
 Aintab taken over by French forces from the British : 
 withdrawal of British forces from the Taurus 
 begun. 
 
 British War Office announced the completion of the 
 withdrawal of the British forces from Cilicia and 
 Syria to the south side of the Palestine frontier. 
 
 Session of the Ottoman Parliament began at Con- 
 stantinople. 
 
 Turkish Nationalist forces attacked the French garrison 
 at Marash, 
 
 Turkish Nationalist forces successfully raided a dump 
 of munitions on the Gallipoli Peninsula. 
 
 Signature of members of the Ottoman Parliament 
 affixed to the Turkish National Pact. 
 
 French garrison evacuated Marash ; Armenian civilians 
 massacred. 
 
 The Circassian chetté-leader Anzavur Bey drove the 
 Nationalist forces out of Bigha. 
 
 Debate in the House of Commons at Westminster on 
 the future of Constantinople. 
 
 In the House of Commons, Mr. Bonar Law refused to 
 publish the report of the Smyrna Commission of 
 Inquiry. 
 
 Prominent Turks at Constantinople arrested during 
 the night by British officers and deported to 
 Malta. 
 
 In the House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George refused 
 to publish the report of the Smyrna Commission of 
 Inquiry. 
 
 SS 
 
1920 March 
 
 ”» 
 
 > 
 
 ”» 
 
 “ 
 
 ” 
 
 ” 
 
 ” 
 
 3? 
 
 By April 
 
 April 
 
 ”? 
 ” 
 
 ” 
 
 16 
 
 16 
 
 24 
 
 10 
 
 11 
 
 12 
 18-27 
 18 (?) 
 
 By end of April 
 
 April 
 
 24 (2) 
 
 TABLE OF DATES 367 
 
 Naval and military occupation of Constantinople 
 by the Allied Powers and simultaneous recall 
 of the Allied control-officers from the interior of 
 Anatolia. 
 
 Jafar Tayar Bey, commanding the Turkish forces in 
 Eastern Thrace, repudiated the authority of the 
 Ottoman Government of Constantinople. 
 
 In the House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George refused 
 to publish the report of the Smyrna Commission of 
 Inquiry. 
 
 In the House of Commons, Mr. Bonar Law refused to 
 publish the report of the Smyrna Commission of 
 Inquiry. 
 
 All British forces in Anatolia, east of Ismid, had been 
 withdrawn into the Ismid Peninsula. 
 
 Ali Riza Ministry replaced by a second Damad Ferid 
 Ministry. 
 
 French garrison of Urfa, which had capitulated to 
 the Nationalist forces on condition of receiving a 
 safe conduct, was massacred on the march. 
 
 Publication of an Imperial Rescript, a Fetwa of the 
 Sheikhu'l-Islam, and a Proclamation by the Ali 
 Riza Ministry, all denouncing the Nationalist 
 Movement. 
 
 ttoman Parliament dissolved. 
 
 Conference of Allied Powers at San Remo. 
 
 Anzavur Bey repulsed by Nationalist forces, 
 
 Anzavur Bey had been driven out of Panderma and 
 Bigha by Nationalist forces. 
 
 Turkish Great National Assembly met at Angora and 
 
 - set up a Government. 
 
 Before end of April (?) Military convention concluded by the Govern- 
 
 May 
 
 6 
 
 11 
 
 12 
 
 ments of Angora and Moscow. 
 
 Peace Delegation of the Constantinople Government 
 arrived at Paris. 
 
 Draft of the Peace Treaty handed to the Constantinople 
 Delegates. 
 
 Draft of the Peace Treaty published in the British Press. 
 
 28 (?) French garrison of Bozanty taken prisoner by Turkish 
 
 Nationalist forces, while attempting to retreat to 
 the coast. 
 
 30 (?) Armistice arranged between the French and Turkish 
 
 forces in Cilicia. (N.B. This broke down within 
 a fortnight. ) 
 
 By end of May Nationalist forces had occupied Adapazar and Yalova. 
 
 June 
 
 3 
 
 Albanians attacked the Italian garrison of Avlona after 
 delivering an ultimatum (see Times of 31st July 
 1920) ; Italian railwaymen and seamen refused to 
 handle munitions for the Albanian War. 
 
368 
 
 1920 June 
 
 bed ”? 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 11 
 
 15 
 
 21-2 
 
 22 
 
 25 
 30 
 
 30 
 
 », During June (?) 
 
 - July 
 
 » August 
 
 2 
 2 
 6 
 6 
 8 
 9 
 
 14 
 
 15 
 20 
 23 
 25 
 25 
 
 3 
 
 Mutiny of Italian troops at Trieste when ordered to 
 embark for Albania. 
 
 Turkish Nationalist forces attacked the British Indian 
 garrison of Ismid. 
 
 Conference between Mr. Venizelos and Mr. Lloyd 
 George at No. 10 Downing Street. 
 
 Conference at Hythe (Present: Mr. Lloyd George, 
 M. Millerand, Mr. Venizelos, Marshal Foch, 
 General Weygand, Field - Marshal Sir Henry 
 Wilson). 
 
 All British naval units in the Mediterranean ordered 
 to Constantinople. 
 
 Conference of Allied Powers at Boulogne. 
 
 Mr. Venizelos announced to the Press that the 
 Boulogne Conference had sanctioned military action 
 by Greece in Anatolia. 
 
 Greek Army’s offensive against the Turkish National- 
 ist forces began, 
 
 British naval forces occupied Mudania. 
 
 Publication of the Constantinople Government’s 
 counter-proposals to the Allied Governments’ draft 
 of the Peace Treaty. 
 
 Italian Government announced the transference of the 
 civil administration of Avlona to the Albanians. 
 Political understanding arrived at by the Coverangaye 
 
 of Angora and Moscow. 
 
 British and Greek naval forces occupied Panderma, 
 
 Arab rising in Mesopotamia began. 
 
 British naval forces occupied Gemlik. 
 
 Italian forces evacuated Durazzo. 
 
 Greek Army occupied Brusa, = 
 
 British garrison evacuated Batum (thus severing the 
 last link of the Armenian Republic of Erivan with 
 the West) in order to reinforce the garrison of 
 Constantinople. 
 
 General commanding the French forces on the Syrian 
 littoral sent an ultimatum to the Arab National 
 Government of Damascus. 
 
 French forces invaded the territory of the Arab 
 National Government. 
 
 Greek and British forces occupied Rodosto. 
 
 French forces occupied Aleppo. 
 
 Greek forces occupied Adrianople, taking Ja far Tayar 
 Bey prisoner. 
 
 French forces occupied Damascus and overthrew the 
 Arab National Government. 
 
 Agreement signed by the Italian and Albanian Govern- 
 ments, assigning Avlona to Albania and the island 
 of Saseno to Italy. 
 
 ee LN 
 
1920 August 10 
 
 » 29 
 September 
 ¥9 17 
 
 Before end of 
 September 
 October 15 
 
 %» 17 
 
 ” 20 
 
 November 2 
 
 = 14 
 ee 14 
 - 16 
 ” 17 
 December 2 
 
 = 5 
 
 = 19 
 By end of 
 December 
 January 9 
 February 21 
 
 March jo 
 
 TABLE OF DATES 369 
 
 Signature at Sévres of (i) Treaty of Peace between the 
 Allies and Turkey ; (ii) Tripartite Treaty between 
 Great Britain, France, and Italy regarding Anatolia; 
 (iii) Treaty between Greece and the Principal Allied 
 Powers regarding minorities ; (iv) Treaty between 
 the Armenian Representatives and the Principal 
 Allied Powers regarding minorities; (v) Protocol 
 between Greece and Italy regarding Rhodes and 
 the Dodekanese. 
 
 Greek Army occupied Ushaq. 
 
 5 (?) Last Italian troops left Avlona. 
 
 India Office announced that Sir Perey Cox was being 
 sent to Mesopotamia with the mission of setting up 
 an Arab State there. 
 
 Turkish Nationalist forces under Kiazym Kara Bekir 
 Pasha invaded the Armenian Republic of Erivan. 
 
 Fall of the Armenian town of Hajin in the Cilician 
 Highlands, and massacre of the inhabitants by 
 Turkish Nationalist forces, 
 
 Soviet Government of Moscow sent an ultimatum to 
 the Republic of Erivan. 
 
 British War Office announced the completion of the 
 principal operations for the re-establishment of 
 British military control in Mesopotamia. 
 
 Death of King Alexander of Greece. 
 
 Soviet forces broke through General Wrangel’s lines 
 at Perekop. 
 
 Kiazym Kara Bekir’s forces captured Kars. 
 
 General Election in Greece. 
 
 General Wrangel’s Army evacuated Sebastopol. 
 
 General Wrangel’s Army arrived at Constantinople. 
 
 Mr. Venizelos resigned office. 
 
 Overthrow of the Dashnakist Government and estab- 
 lishment of a Soviet Government at Erivan. 
 
 Ultimatum from the Government of Moscow to the 
 Turkish Nationalists, forbidding them to advance 
 further into Armenian territory ; followed within 
 a few days by a signature of peace between the 
 Governments of Angora and Erivan, 
 
 Plebiscite held in Greece on the question of the recall 
 of King Constantine. 
 
 King Constantine arrived at Athens. 
 
 The last tribes had capitulated to the British forces in 
 Mesopotamia. 
 
 Greek reconnaissance in force from Brusa to In Onii. 
 
 Conference of the Allied Powers at London, attended 
 by Delegations from the Governments of Athens, 
 Constantinople, and Angora. 
 
 Conference of London terminated. 
 
 ag 
 
370 
 
 192] 
 
 99 
 
 > 
 
 », Beginning of June 
 
 ” 
 
 ” 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 March 16 
 » 23 
 April 4 
 Middle of April 
 
 May 18 
 
 June 21 
 » 25 
 =e: 25-30 
 
 July 10 
 ” 17 
 ” 19 
 ne 21 
 
 August 14 
 os 24 
 
 September 8 
 
 a 12-13 
 
 9 16 
 
 ” 23 
 October 13 
 x 20 
 March 22 
 ba 26 
 
 = 31 
 April 5 
 a 15 
 
 ” 23 
 May 16 
 
 Treaty signed at Moscow by the Governments of 
 Moscow and Angora, 
 
 Greek Spring Offensive began. 
 
 Greek Spring Offensive terminated. 
 
 Greek organised atrocities began. 
 
 Proclamation of neutrality and designation of neutral 
 zones by the three Allied High Commissioners at 
 Constantinople. 
 
 Turkish organised atrocities began. 
 
 British Government invited the Greek Government to 
 accept the mediation of the Allies. 
 
 Semi-official summary published at Athens of the Greek 
 Government’s note declining mediation. 
 
 Greek forces evacuated the Ismid enclave and the 
 Yalova Peninsula. 
 
 Greek Summer Offensive began. 
 
 Greek Army captured Kiutahia. 
 
 Greek Army captured Eski Shehir. 
 
 Turkish counter-attack against the Greek Army east of 
 Eski Shehir failed. 
 
 Greek Army began a fresh advance eastwards. 
 
 Greek Army began a general offensive against the new 
 Turkish positions on the Sakkaria and the Gék Su. 
 
 Turkish counter-attacks began. 
 
 Greek Army recrossed the Sakkaria. 
 
 Withdrawal of the Greek Army began. 
 
 Greek Army halted at its previous positions covering 
 Eski Shehir. 
 
 Treaty signed at Kars by the Governments of Angora 
 and of the three Transcaucasian Soviet Republics. 
 
 Agreement signed at Angora by M. Franklin-Bouillon 
 and Yusuf Kemal Bey. 
 
 British, French, and Italian Foreign Ministers met in 
 Conference at Paris and proposed an armistice in 
 the Graeco-Turkish War, on the basis of the 
 evacuation of Anatolia by the Greek Army. 
 
 British, French, and Italian Foreign Ministerscommuni- 
 cated proposals for a peace-settlement to the Govern- 
 ments of Athens, Constantinople, and Angora. 
 
 Lord Curzon spoke in the House of Lords on the peace 
 proposals of March 26. 
 
 Angora Government accepted the proposals of March 
 26 subject to the:immediate evacuation of Anatolia. 
 
 Allied High Commissioners at Constantinople replied 
 to the Angora Government’s note of April 5. 
 
 Angora Government insisted on the Greek evacuation 
 of Anatolia being simultaneous with the proposed 
 armistice. 
 
 In the House of Commons, Mr. Chamberlain quoted 
 
TABLE OF DATES 371 
 
 telegrams from H.M. High Commissioner at 
 Constantinople, reporting accounts by American 
 eye-witnesses of Turkish organised atrocities in 
 North-Eastern Anatolia. 
 
 1922 June 7 Greek fleet bombarded Samsun. 
 
 » duly 29 Having reinforced the Greek Army in Thrace, the 
 Greek Government requested the Allied Govern- 
 ments to sanction a Greek military occupation of 
 Constantinople. 
 
 = * 30 Greek request refused by the Allied Powers. 
 
 es Pe 30 Greek High Commissioner at Smyrna proclaimed ‘ the 
 autonomy of Ionia.’ 
 
 ,. August 3(?) Arrival in London of Fethi Bey, Minister of the 
 Interior in the Angora Government, with proposals 
 for the neutralisation of the Straits under the con- 
 trol of the League of Nations. 
 
 re - 4 Speech by Mr. Lloyd George in the House of Commons 
 on the last day of the session (portions of which 
 were subsequently quoted by the Greek High 
 Command to the Greek Army in an order of the 
 day). 
 
 - ‘ig 23 Reconnaissances by the Turkish Army on the Maeander 
 and Bilejik fronts. 
 
 if = 26 Turkish offensive launched against Afium Kara Hissar. 
 
 = - 27 Fall of Afium Kara Hissar. 
 
 ,, September 1-2 Greek Army evacuated Eski Shehir. 
 
 Ss 2 2 Fethi Bey received at Rome by the Italian Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 . 9 Turkish Army entered Smyrna. 
 
 a Fe 12 French Ambassador in London assured H.M. Govern- 
 ment that France would maintain her solidarity 
 with Great Britain in regard to the freedom of the 
 Straits, ‘ while desiring to safeguard the legitimate 
 susceptibilities of Turkey.’ 
 
 - - 12 Charter for Minorities laid before the Assembly of the 
 League of Nations by Professor Gilbert Murray. 
 * is 13 Great Fire of Smyrna began. 
 
 14 Note from the Russian to the British Government 
 regarding the Straits. 
 
 re ¥ 15 Note from the French to the British Government 
 giving assurances of solidarity in regard to the 
 freedom of the Straits and the inviolability of the 
 neutral zones proclaimed on May 18, 1921. 
 
 = es 16 British Government communicated to the Press a 
 
 manifesto announcing that the British Dominions, 
 
 Jugoslavia, and Rumania had been asked to 
 
 promise military support, if necessary, for main- 
 
 taining the freedom of the Straits, but making no 
 
 reference to the future of Eastern Thrace. 
 
372 
 
 1922 September 
 
 October 
 
 23 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 18 
 
 19 
 
 19 
 20 
 
 21 
 
 23 
 23 
 
 23 
 
 23 
 
 24 
 
 24 
 
 French Government ordered the withdrawal of the 
 French troops on the Anatolian side of the Straits 
 within twenty-four hours. 
 
 British Government communicated to the Press a 
 commentary on the manifesto of September 16. 
 
 Lord Curzon arrived in Paris. 
 
 Conversations began in Paris between Lord Curzon 
 and M. Poincaré. 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George interviewed by a Trades Union Dele- 
 gation on the subject of the Eastern crisis. 
 
 Agreement reached by Lord Curzon and M. Poincaré. 
 
 Principal Allied Powers invited the Angora Govern- 
 ment to a peace conference on two bases: (i) the 
 restoration of Turkish sovereignty in Thrace up to 
 the River Maritsa; (ii) the inviolability of the 
 neutral zones, and the exclusion of Turkish 
 military forces from Thrace, during the interim 
 period. 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George made a statement to journalists on 
 the position at Chanak. 
 
 Turkish cavalry entered the neutral zone on the 
 Anatolian side of the Dardanelles. 
 
 Note from the Russian to the British Government 
 claiming to participate in the settlement of the 
 Straits. 
 
 Revolutionary movement started among Greek troops 
 in. Mitylini and Khios. 
 
 25 (?) Greek revolutionary movement spread to Salonika. 
 
 26 
 27 
 27 
 27 
 28 
 
 29 
 
 TIARPL MS 
 
 Manifestos of the Greek revolutionary movement 
 dropped by aeroplanes over Athens. 
 
 Revolutionary troops landed at Lavrion. 
 
 Abdication of King Constantine. 
 
 Revolutionary Committee requested Mr. Venizelos to 
 undertake the representation of Greek interests 
 abroad. 
 
 Triumphal entry of the revolutionary army into 
 Athens. 
 
 Angora Government accepted the invitation sent by 
 the Allied Powers on September 23, and suggested 
 a preliminary armistice conference. 
 
 Departure of King Constantine from Greece. 
 
 Opening of the Armistice Conference at Mudania. 
 
 Further communications from the Angora Government 
 to the Allied Powers regarding the definitive peace 
 conference. 
 
 Night meeting of the British Cabinet. 
 
 Lord Curzon returned to Paris. 
 
 Letter in the Times from Mr. Bonar Law. 
 
 Agreement between Lord Curzon and M. Poincaré 
 
TABLE OF DATES 373 
 
 | regarding the method of evacuation of Thrace by 
 the Greeks. 
 1922 October 8(?) Bulgarian Government pronounced itself in favour of 
 autonomy for the whole of Thrace. 
 es « 8 Greek Government resigned themselves to the loss of 
 Eastern Thrace, on the advice of Mr. Venizelos. 
 = = 11 Signature of the Armistice Convention at Mudania. 
 = = 14 Speech at Manchester by Mr. Lloyd George. 
 = es 14 Terms of the Mudania Convention accepted by the 
 Greek Government. 
 S .». 17(?) Note from the British to the Italian Government re- 
 garding the disposal of the Dodekanese. 
 a eS 18 Turkish Nationalist gendarmerie detachment forbidden 
 to land at Constantinople. 
 © s 19 Arrival at Constantinople of Rafet Pasha as Governor 
 of Eastern Thrace on behalf of the Angora Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 # = 19 Resignation of Mr. Lloyd George. 
 
 = = 21(?) British Government received a further note from the 
 Russian Government asserting their claim to parti- 
 cipate in the forthcoming peace conference. 
 
 aa = 27 Invitation to a peace conference at Lausanne issued 
 by the Principal European Allied Powers to 
 Angora, the Sublime Porte, Greece, Jugoslavia, 
 Rumania, Japan, and the United States, with a 
 further invitation to Russia and Bulgaria to parti- 
 cipate in certain parts of the proceedings. 
 
 a RS 29 Interview at Constantinople between Rafet Pasha 
 and the Sultan-Caliph. 
 
 “a _ 30 Resolutions against the Sultan-Caliph passed in the 
 Great National Assembly at Angora. 
 
 ce ee 31 Invitation to Lausanne accepted by the Angora 
 Government. 
 
 ;, November 1 Great National Assembly at Angora declared itself 
 sovereign of Turkey; abolished the Sultanate and 
 the Ottoman Empire; voided all official acts of 
 
 | the Sublime Porte since March 16, 1920; and 
 
 \ asserted its right to elect the Caliph from among 
 
 | the members of the House of Osman. 
 
 = =F 3(?) Invitation to Lausanne declined by the Sublime Porte. 
 
 = s 4 Coup détat by Rafet Pasha at Constantinople and 
 resignation of the Sultan’s Government. 
 
 = = 4 Mr. Stambolisky, the Bulgarian Prime Minister, 
 visited Bukarest, as a preliminary to visiting 
 Belgrade. 
 
 = < 5 Evacuation of Constantinople demanded by Rafet 
 Pasha in a note to the Allied High Commissioners. 
 
 = 7 6(2?) Ali Kemal Bey, editor of the Peyghami-Sabuh, 
 lynched at Ismid. 
 
| 
 | 
 
 374 
 
 1922 
 
 a9 
 
 99 
 
 LE 
 
 ne 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 November 9 
 10-12 
 
 14 
 
 Restricted invitation to Lausanne declined by Russia. 
 
 Mr. Politis, the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, 
 visited Belgrade. 
 
 Memorandum containing sine qué non conditions for 
 British participation in the peace conference com- 
 municated by the British to the French Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Resignation of the Government in ‘Iraq. 
 
 Sultan-Caliph went on board H.B.M.S. Malaya. 
 
 Lord Curzon, M. Poincaré, and Signor Mussolini met 
 at Territet. 
 
 Ex-Sultan-Caliph, Mehmed Vahyd-ed-Din Efendi, 
 arrived at Malta. 
 
 Offer of the Caliphate accepted by ‘Abdu’l-Mejid 
 Efendi. 
 
 Opening of the Peace Conference of Lausanne. 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER V 
 
 Wuen the first draft of Chapter V. had gone to press, the 
 official apologia of the Greek Administration in the occupied 
 territories of Anatolia came into my hands.! While the 
 general tone of this document is naturally self-laudatory, 
 the only point on which it differs from my previous informa- 
 tion is with regard to the Moslem Ecole Polytechnique at 
 Smyrna (see pp. 171 and 174 above). While admitting that 
 the control of this institution had been taken over by the 
 Greek authorities, the Greek official publication states that 
 210 Moslem children were still ‘boarded, educated and taught 
 various trades’ in it, and that the Greek Administration 
 ‘expends for this purpose L.T. 36,000 paper yearly.’ My 
 information was to the effect that the Greek Administration 
 had not only taken over control but had appropriated the 
 endowment to its own purposes. On the other hand, since 
 I had no time to make a personal visit to the school, and 
 cannot therefore speak at first hand, I have not left on 
 record in the text the Turkish version of what was done 
 with regard to it, but have made some further inquiries 
 from independent sources. From these it appears that the 
 Greek Administration had appropriated part of the building 
 to Greek military purposes (a point not mentioned in the 
 apologia). On the other hand, the remainder had been left 
 to the Ecole Polytechnique, and the revenues of this institu- 
 tion (which is evidently identical with the Turkish Orphanage 
 referred to on p. 168) had been supplemented (as stated) 
 out of the public funds of the occupied territories. On the 
 balance, therefore, their treatment of the Ecole Polytechnique 
 
 1 Greek Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Press Bureau: (reece in Asia Minor, 
 Athens, 1921 [in English]. 
 375 
 
376 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 is to the credit of the Greek Administration. I have also 
 learnt that a second Turkish school (though not one of 
 such importance as the Sultaniyyah) had been closed by 
 the Greeks, and that, in place of the two, they had opened 
 a (not at all equivalent) high school, as stated on p. 6 of their 
 apologia. 
 
 In other respects, the Greek apologia contains several 
 serious omissions and mis-statements. Not only is there no 
 reference whatever to the Sultaniyyah School or to the 
 Turkish Hospital, but the Greek Administration claims 
 “never once ’ to have ‘ requisitioned buildings belonging to 
 the management of the Vakufs nor laid a hand on their 
 revenues,’ and to have ‘ contributed to the improvement of 
 all [the italics are mine] the Mohammedan schools which 
 were in operation under the former régime in the region 
 ceded,’ These statements are irreconcilable with the un- 
 disputed facts in regard to the treatment of the Sultaniyyah. 
 
 The apologia further mentions (p. 37) a dispensary for 
 Moslem refugees opened since the Ist March 1921 in the 
 “Rue Ketsedjidika, in the Turkish quarter.’ Not knowing 
 the street, I cannot say whether this is identical with the 
 dispensary opened, by Turkish initiative and with Turkish 
 funds, in the Iki Cheshmelik [Iki Chesmé Jadesi] in lieu of 
 the requisitioned hospital. The Greek apologia does not 
 expressly state that the dispensary to which it refers was 
 either administered or paid for by the Greek authorities. 
 Finally, I note that the apologia confirms (p. 6) my informa- 
 tion (p. 173 above) that the new Turkish Educational Com- 
 mission had only been given control over primary education. 
 
 The preface to the apologia contains the following 
 passage :— 
 
 ‘Certain organs of the European Press, misled by the 
 enemies of Greece, recently published inexact information 
 with regard to the Greek administration in Asia Minor. We 
 regret that they should thus have become the defenders of 
 Turkish barbarity, which has now withdraw[n] into the 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER V 377 
 
 interior of Asia. On the other hand, we rejoice at the appear- 
 ance of, and indeed we thank those who have given publicity 
 to, these falsehoods, as they afford us the opportunity, in our 
 reply, of making known to the general public the colossal 
 civilising work carried out by Greece in Asia Minor, a work 
 which no bona fide observer who has passed through Smyrna 
 has failed to perceive and acclaim.’ 
 
 In view of this passage, I must draw attention to the fact 
 that, on my second visit to Smyrna (3rd to 8th August 1921), 
 I twice wrote to Mr. Sterghiddhis, reminding him of the 
 kindness with which he had received me on my earlier visit, 
 and asking him, in entirely courteous and inoffensive terms, 
 to give me the favour of a further interview, in order to 
 discuss with him frankly the events which I had witnessed 
 in the interval. In each note, I mentioned the date of my 
 departure and placed myself at his disposal at any previous 
 hour convenient to him, and I delivered both notes at his 
 house with my own hand. I received no answer, cither 
 written or verbal, to either of them, and, in the light of this, 
 the protest quoted above from the Greek apologia appears 
 to me hypocritical. 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Greek version of events on the 15th May 1919 
 and the following days at Smyrna. 
 
 DvRine my visits to Smyrna in 1921, when I was seeking 
 information with regard to the outbreak of atrocities which 
 accompanied the original Greek landing there, I confined my 
 inquiries to British eye-witnesses not born or bred in the 
 Levant. Greek and Turkish witnesses are ex hypothesi 
 interested parties, and French, Italian, and Levantine! 
 witnesses might be suspected a priori of an anti-Greek bias, 
 and therefore I felt it safer not to have recourse to them. 
 Since my return to England, however, and particularly 
 since my first draft of Chapter VII., I have had submitted 
 to me documents giving the Greek version of what occurred. 
 T have hesitated to take them into consideration, first because 
 it seemed sounder to rely exclusively upon the evidence of 
 third parties, and secondly because I have no ex parte state- 
 ments from the Turkish side to set against these ex parte 
 statements from the Greek side. On the other hand, the 
 principal complaint (whether justified or not) from the 
 Greek side against the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry 
 
 * I hasten to add that I altogether dissent from the view, frequently 
 insinuated in Greek propaganda, that Levantines in the technical sense of 
 the name (that is, people of Western descent who have been born and bred 
 in the Levant) ought not to be heard in evidence because they are notori- 
 ously bad characters. The very numerous and important Western colonies 
 in the Levant contain families of every class and individuals of every shade 
 of character. So far as they differ from their kinsmen in their countries of 
 origin, it is through having intermarried with local Orthodox and Gregorian 
 Christians and having (in varying degrees) adopted their ways. Reflections 
 upon their credibility as witnesses, in such a case as the events that occurred 
 at Smyrna on the 15th May 1919, therefore reflect at least equally upon 
 Greek witnesses. Indeed, the name Levantine has acquired a certain odium 
 in the West because in popular usage there it is not confined to Levantines 
 of Western origin, but is applied wholesale to the non-Moslem inhabitants 
 of the Levant ports. Greek propaganda sometimes takes improper advantage 
 of the double use of the name, by the singular device of using an existing pre- 
 judice against the Greek nation in order to create one against other people. 
 
 378 
 
 nn, 
 
 ee 
 
ee ee 
 
 an 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII = 379 
 
 which investigated these events in the summer of 1919, has 
 been that the Greeks were not at that time given a sufficient 
 opportunity of presenting their case, and Greek apologists 
 have argued that since they have been placed in the position 
 of defendants, they are entitled to its privileges. I have 
 therefore decided to discuss this Greek evidence in the 
 present additional note, to which reference is made in a 
 footnote to the text of Chapter VII. 
 
 My Greek informants are four in number :— 
 
 (A), a gentleman who had been at Smyrna for many weeks 
 before the events occurred, was present during their occur- 
 rence,! and had the best opportunities for seeing what was 
 going on ; 
 
 (B), a naval officer on board a Greek warship anchored 
 in the offing ; 
 
 (C) and (D), two gentlemen in official positions connected. 
 with the late Venizelist Government, both of whom were 
 peculiarly concerned with the facts and had special access 
 to Greek official sources of information. (D) was in a higher 
 position than (C), but had not the same opportunity for 
 personal investigation, and except in so far as his evidence 
 is derived from (C)’s, it seems to me considerably less valu- 
 able than that of the other three witnesses. 
 
 Informant (B) is Captain George Pandas, C.M.G., at that 
 time in command of the battleship Limnos. The other 
 three desire to remain anonymous (all for legitimate reasons, 
 which have no bearing on the value of their evidence). 
 Their statements were avowedly transmitted to me in order 
 to put the least unfavourable construction (from the Greek 
 point of view) upon the events in question. On the other 
 side, it is perhaps worth mentioning that these witnesses, 
 while all Greeks, are none of them Anatolians. 
 
 In general, they do not dispute the broad facts of the 
 massacre of Turks and looting of their property by Greek 
 
 1 Not leaving Smyrna till the 2lst May 1919, the day of Mr, Ster- 
 ghiddhis’s arrival, 
 
 — ~~ 
 
380 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 soldiers and civilians, but they seek to prove that the extent 
 of both forms of excess was less than that alleged by non- 
 Greek witnesses ; that the Turks had previously arranged 
 for resistance to the Greek occupation of the city ; that the 
 Turks fired the first shot ; and that the Greek authorities 
 subsequently took steps to stop the atrocities committed 
 by their own side and to punish the offenders. I propose 
 to summarise and compare their evidence very briefly on 
 certain crucial points :— 
 
 (i) Numbers of killed and wounded. 
 (a) On the Turkish side. 
 
 On the 15th May, (A) saw the Greek crowd on the quay 
 kill two Turkish policemen, who had been arrested by Greek 
 soldiers on the charge of firing from the windows of houses, 
 and throw one Turkish officer into the sea. Visiting the 
 Greek Red Cross Hospital after lunch, he saw dead and 
 wounded Turks and Greeks being brought in, and carts full 
 of corpses standing at the entrance. He testifies that, by 
 the 17th May, the American hospital at Smyrna had col- 
 lected 48 Turkish corpses, and that 18 more had been found 
 in the grounds of the British Gas Company, into which they 
 had been thrown. On the 20th May, he estimated the total 
 Turkish casualties during the 15th and 16th May at 124 dead 
 and 112 wounded. If the corpses subsequently washed up 
 from the sea are taken into account, and allowance is made 
 for those which did not come to his notice, this estimate does 
 not conflict with that mentioned in Chapter VII. 
 
 (C), who made his investigations some time later, estimates 
 the total deaths on both sides on the first day at about 100, 
 and states that ‘all witnesses agree’ that the number of 
 disarmed Turkish soldiers killed on the quay after their 
 surrender was between 15 and 20. 
 
 (b) On the Greek side. 
 (A) quotes Captain Papayoryiu, commanding the com- 
 pany of évzoni (light infantry) which headed the column 
 
 ( 
 
 = 
 
 | 
 | 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII 381 
 
 despatched about 10 a.m. from the main point of dis- 
 embarkation towards the Turkish government building 
 (konak), as having stated to him (A) personally that, at 
 the first outburst of firing, five Greek civilians and one 
 soldier were shot dead, and fifteen persons (apparently 
 including both Greek civilians and soldiers) were wounded. 
 Captain Papayoryiu added that, in the process of occu- 
 pying the konak, barracks, and prison he lost one more 
 soldier killed, one who died of wounds a few days after- 
 wards, and eleven wounded. On the afternoon of the 
 15th, (A) himself saw one dead and one dying evzone 
 brought into the Greek Red Cross Hospital; and these 
 must be identical with the two killed that morning in 
 Captain Papayoryiu’s company, for next day (A) attended 
 the official funeral of ‘ the two evzones killed yesterday.’ 
 
 (C) alleges that in an attack on the Greek Consulate, which 
 was guarded by a detachment of Greek sailors, the latter 
 were compelled to return the fire in self-defence, and that 
 two ‘ military persons’ (‘ stratiotiki’) who exposed them- 
 selves recklessly were killed. It is not clear whether the 
 casualties thus described refer to Greek sailors or to persons 
 in Turkish military uniform among the alleged assailants, 
 but had two Greek sailors as well as two Greek soldiers been 
 
 _ killed on the 15th, it is evident that they would have shared 
 
 the honours of the official funeral next day.* 
 
 On the Greek evidence, one may therefore safely reckon 
 the casualties in killed among the Greek naval and military 
 forces as one evzone killed outright on the 15th, one who died 
 of wounds the same day, and one who died of wounds several 
 days later. It is noteworthy, however, that this evidence 
 is obtained by piecing together unofficial accounts; and 
 although there must be exact records in the Archives 
 of the Greek Ministry of War, the Greek Government 
 have never, as far as I can make out, published any 
 
 1 A fuller version, since communicated to me, of (C)’s statement mentions 
 explicitly that these two victims were Turks, 
 
382 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 official return of casualties incurred on this occasion. 
 This omission tells as strongly against them as similar 
 omissions to publish statistics which must automatically 
 have been recorded told against the British Government 
 during the Irish terror. 
 
 (C) gives no estimate of Greek casualties. (D), to whom 
 all official returns were accessible, lumps together the total 
 Greek military and civilian casualties and puts them at 
 11 killed and 47 wounded. On the 20th May, (A) reckoned 
 the total Greek casualties on the 15th and 16th (civilians and 
 soldiers being similarly lumped together) at 25 killed and 
 72 wounded. 
 
 I must draw attention to the presumption, on which one 
 of my English witnesses strongly insisted, that many of these 
 Greek casualties were caused by Greek bullets. Both these 
 English witnesses described to me how, when once the firing 
 had begun, the Greek soldiers started shooting wildly in all 
 directions, and they declared that this went on for several 
 hours. Captain Pands writes that ‘two men from my ship, 
 forming part of the covering landing-party, were slightly 
 wounded while at the Port Office 1 [at the entrance to the 
 northernmost of the two piers enclosing the inner harbour] 
 from shots coming from the direction of the Custom House.’ 
 Now (A) mentions that the Custom House, as well as the 
 Port Office, was occupied as early as 7.30 a.m. that morning 
 by naval detachments from the Avérof, Limnos (Captain 
 Panas’s ship), and Léon ; and the Custom House stands on 
 the southern pier enclosing the inner harbour, while the 
 Turkish firing broke out (according to Captain Papayoryiu’s 
 account) at a point south of this again. Captain Pands’s 
 and Captain Papayoryiu’s statements only fit into one 
 another on the hypothesis that the Greek naval detachment 
 at the Custom House, seeing firing break out to the south, 
 lost its head and began to shoot in all directions, incidentally 
 
 * For the topography, see map between pp. 332 and 333 of Baedeker’s 
 Konstantinopel und Kleinasien (Leipzig, 1914", Baedeker). 
 
 tet etter 
 
2 eee 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII 383 
 
 wounding two Greek sailors stationed on the pier to the 
 
 north. 
 
 (ii) Hatent of the looting and destruction of Turkish property 
 by Greek soldiers and civilians. 
 
 (A) testifies, as a first-hand witness, that general looting of 
 Turkish shops and houses in the city of Smyrna began on the 
 afternoon of the 15th May, as soon as the Greek forces had 
 passed through the city to the heights commanding it from 
 the land side; that, while it was mostly perpetrated by 
 native Greek civilians, soldiers were also implicated ; that on 
 the 16th May, Mr. Mavrudhis, the Greek official representa- 
 tive at Smyrna before the military occupation, asked Colonel 
 Zaphirfu, commanding the occupying forces, to land naval 
 detachments in order to restore order in the city and stop the 
 plundering of Turks by Greeks; that Colonel Zaphiriu de- 
 clined to do this, on the ground that he had already taken all 
 necessary measures for the preservation of order, and con- 
 tented himself with issuing a severe proclamation ; and that 
 official measures for the preservation of order were not in 
 fact taken till the 19th and 20th May. 
 
 (A) also mentions incidentally the lifting of cattle belong- 
 ing to Turks in the residential suburb of Buja, and the partial 
 
 or total looting and destruction of eight Turkish villages in 
 
 the district of Vurla by the local Greek population. 
 
 Like my English witnesses, he describes the strong im- 
 pression made on him, when he went out of doors on the 
 morning of the 16th May, by the fact that no Turkish shops 
 were open and that no one was wearing a fez (the reason, 
 given by my English witnesses, being that any one wearing 
 a fez had been in danger of his life since the outbreak began 
 the day before). In this connection, he adds that there was 
 still intermittent firing that morning. 
 
 (iii) Was there a Turkish plan for armed resistance ? + 
 (A), (B), and (C) all lay stress on inflammatory proclama- 
 
 1 T must note that American informants reported to me very similar stories 
 (on which they laid no stress, as they had no more proof of them than the 
 
384 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 tions alleged to have been distributed among the Turkish 
 population of Smyrna the night before the landing. They 
 also put a sinister interpretation upon the fact that when 
 the news spread that Greek troops were to occupy the city 
 the following morning, the Turkish population was panic- 
 stricken and streamed out of the Turkish quarter on to the 
 hills inland, where they lit fires and passed the night. This, 
 however, was surely a symptom of fear (only too well justified 
 by the event) and not of aggressive intentions,! and the pos- 
 sibility of any widely-organised plan of resistance is ruled out 
 by the time-table given by (A). He states that the official 
 announcement of the impending occupation was made 
 simultaneously by Mr. Mavrudhis to the Greek community 
 and by the representatives of the Allies to the Turkish com- 
 munity at 6.30 p.m. on the 14th May, i.e. just thirteen hours 
 before the landing began, and that it was only after this that 
 the news spread through the city. Finally, (C), while 
 maintaining that a party among the Turks did make plans 
 and arm itself, expressly exculpates the Turkish civil and 
 military authorities,*? on the ground that, had they been 
 implicated, they would not have ‘ limited their resistance ’ 3 
 to the buildings round the konak, or have themselves 
 remained in that locality. 
 
 (iv) Who fired the first shot ? 
 The statements of all my four informants, in regard to this, 
 can be traced back at second or third hand to the account 
 
 Greeks have against the Turks) of the smuggling in of arms by the Greeks 
 during the preceding weeks, particularly through the agency of the Greek 
 Red Cross. (C) does not refer to this, but, in the fuller version now before 
 me, he admits that, before the disembarkation of the Greek troops, the Greek 
 civilian population of Smyrna had armed themselves by looting the military 
 stores in which the local Turkish war-material had been deposited [by the 
 Allied control-officers]. On the other hand, he states in this connection 
 that the Greek military authorities, so far from distributing arms them- 
 selves, put a stop to the looting of the Turkish stores—a step which is 
 greatly to their credit. 
 
 1 See translations of the Turkish proclamations on p. 392. 
 
 ® (D) incorrectly ascribes the opposite opinion to (C). 
 
 * A few lines further down, (C) contradicts these words by affirming the 
 ‘absolute certainty’ that the Turks also attacked the Greeks at many other 
 localities in the city. 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII = 385 
 
 given by Captain Papayoryiu, commanding the leading 
 company of the evzone regiment which started, at 10 A.M. 
 on the 15th May, to march south along the quay, from the 
 main point of disembarkation north of the inner harbour, 
 towards the konak. According to (A), who obtained his 
 version direct from Captain Papayoryiu, this company of 
 evzones, and the crowd of Greek civilians that was following 
 at their heels, were suddenly fired upon, on their march, 
 from the Custom House warehouses on the one side and from 
 Turkish kaiks, moored at or close to the quay, on the other. 
 These indications fix the point at somewhere along the quay 
 to the south of the Custom House pier, between it and the 
 konak, for while the Custom House itself stands on the 
 southern pier enclosing the inner harbour, the Custom House 
 warehouses flank the quay on the land side for several 
 hundred yards, running parallel to the thoroughfare along 
 the quay, and the moorings of the Turkish kaiks are south of 
 the Custom House pier. Moreover, this is about the point 
 from which my English witnesses judged that the first sound 
 of firing came. It therefore seems reasonably certain that 
 the first firing did break out here, but who started it? We 
 may dismiss the phrase ‘ volley-firing,’ employed by (A). 
 Volleys fired, literally at two or three yards’ distance, into 
 troops in column of route and a dense crowd of civilians, 
 would certainly have inflicted far heavier casualties than 
 those reported by the Greeks themselves. But was the 
 trouble started by isolated shots fired by Turks? On this 
 point I will quote a statement by (B) Captain Pandas :-— 
 ‘Captain Boyle, of H.M.S. Adventure [the British warship 
 which was “ in the port with its stern made fast to the quay,” 
 as stated by Captain Pands in another passage], one day 
 while we were chatting over matters together, insisted also 
 that no shots were fired from buildings around and [from the] 
 Custom House, and based his belief on [the fact] that no 
 arms were found afterwards, neither on a small Turkish 
 gunboat in the harbour nor in the Custom House ; but I cer- 
 
 tainly do not think that is proof enough, as rifles or revolvers 
 may be easily hidden or thrown in the sea. Lots of Turkish 
 
 2B 
 
386 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 boatmen were seen firing and were brought to me, but nothing 
 was found in their boats, so evidently they had managed to 
 sink whatever they had used for firing.’ 
 
 This passage bears evident marks of frankness and good 
 faith, but I doubt whether readers of it will be convinced by 
 Captain Panas’s reasoning. Obviously the burden of proof 
 lies not upon the Turkish boatmen, to demonstrate their 
 innocence in spite of the fact that no evidence was found 
 against them, but upon the Greeks to show grounds for their 
 accusation. Neither Captain Pands nor my three other 
 Greek informants nor Captain Boyle nor the two English 
 witnesses on whose information I have based my account in 
 the text, were eye-witnesses of these particular occurrences, 
 and the whole story goes back to the statements (unsupported 
 by material evidence) of Captain Papayoryiu. I know 
 nothing either to the credit or to the discredit of this Greek 
 officer, but in view of what followed, he (as the responsible 
 officer in command at the point where the outbreak occurred) 
 had a stronger personal interest than any other individual 
 concerned, in making out that the firing was started by 
 Turks. On the strength of his account, presented at second- 
 hand, I cannot alter my judgment, given in Chapter VIL., 
 that the provenance of the first shot is an open question. 
 It is for the Greek Government to throw further light upon 
 this vital point by obtaining and publishing sworn deposi- 
 tions from Captain Papayoryiu and from other Greek 
 soldiers, Greek civilians, and Turkish boatmen who were 
 actually eye-witnesses. Possibly the question has been 
 investigated adequately by the Inter-Allied Commission of 
 Inquiry, which a pricrt is a more impartial body than any 
 Greek or Turkish official or non-official investigators ; but 
 that must remain unknown until the veto placed by the 
 Allied Governments upon the publication of the Commis- 
 sion’s Report has been removed. 
 
 With regard to subsequent firing by Turks, my English 
 witnesses never witnessed any. On the other hand, (A), 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII = 387 
 
 who was standing on the quay near the main point of dis- 
 embarkation, states that when, about 10.10 a.m. on the 15th 
 May, word arrived of the outbreak further south, some Turks, 
 concealed in the hotels along the quay, fired from the windows 
 upon the disembarking troops, quite close to where he was. 
 He does not state, however, either that he himself identified 
 the persons firing as Turks, or that the Greek troops fired 
 upon suffered any casualties. Readers acquainted with the 
 circumstances of the first landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula 
 during the Dardanelles Expedition, will receive this with 
 scepticism. On that occasion, the casualties suffered by 
 troops crowded upon transports and lighters brought up to 
 the shore were murderous, and the points from which they 
 were fired upon by the Turks opposing their landing were 
 considerably further off than were the houses facing the 
 Smyrna quay. (A) further mentions that at 8 a.mM.—more 
 than two hours earlier—certain suspected hotels along this 
 part of the quay had been cleared of their occupants, as a 
 safeguard, by Greek naval detachments. It is therefore 
 improbable that the firing was directed against the dis- 
 embarking troops, or that those who fired were Turks. My 
 English witnesses testify, when once the firing had started, 
 to firing having broken out all round them, but all the 
 persons whom they actually saw firing were Greek soldiers 
 or Greek civilians who had borrowed or seized soldiers’ rifles. 
 (A) himself repeatedly recurs to the fact that the civilians had 
 got out of hand ; mentions that one of his own friends, in his 
 exaltation of spirits, borrowed a military rifle and uniform ; 
 and censures the troops for not having been sufficiently 
 severe with the Greek crowd. Thus, while I do not doubt 
 (A)’s word that he saw firing from neighbouring windows, I 
 am not convinced by his explanation. Those who fired may 
 have been Turks with a singularly bad eye for their targets, 
 or they may have been Greeks firing at random. In the 
 Near and Middle East, it is customary for people with fire- 
 
 1 For the arming of the Greek civilians, see footnote on p. 383. 
 
DE POR eS a Sessaee: ae. ee _- 
 
 388 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 arms in their hands to fire into the air whenever their 
 emotions are aroused, either pleasantly! or unpleasantly. 
 The only further information given by (A), or by my other 
 Greek informants, on this question is at second-hand. (A) 
 saw two Turkish policemen (those massacred by the Greek 
 crowd : see above) and one ‘ komitajy ’ (i.e. as far as ocular 
 evidence went, a Turk in civilian clothes) being marched 
 along under arrest, by Greek soldiers who alleged that they had 
 been firing from windows. 
 
 The whole controversy as to who began the firing on the 
 15th May 1919 at Smyrna, reminds me irresistibly of the 
 similar controversy in regard to the outbreak at Louvain 
 on the 25th August 1914, which I once had the unpleasant 
 task of examining rather closely. After the publication of 
 voluminous documents, interpretations, and counter-inter- 
 pretations from the Belgian and the German side respectively, 
 it became evident that the Germans could not substantiate 
 their charge that the Belgians had fired first, while the 
 Belgians (almost from the nature of the case) could not 
 demonstrate what parties in a court of law are never asked 
 to demonstrate—namely, that their opponents’ charges 
 against them were not merely unsubstantiated by the 
 evidence brought forward, but were impossible in them- 
 selves. This, it seems to me, is the position in which the 
 present controversy must be left until the Inter-Allied Com- 
 mission’s Report is published or further investigations are 
 made. On the available evidence, it is not yet proved that the 
 Turks fired the first shot, nor, on the other hand, is that yet 
 disproved by counter-evidence to the effect that the first shot 
 was fired by the Greeks. It may be added that whether the 
 Greeks at Smyrna on the 15th May 1919, or the Germans at 
 Louvain on the 25th August 1914, had or had not received 
 any provocation for the acts which they committed, those 
 acts completely eclipse in their atrocity the utmost provoca- 
 tion which those guilty of them respectively allege. 
 
 ' Hg. on Easter Day. 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII 389 
 
 (v) Steps taken by the Greeks themselves to stop the Greek 
 atrocities and punish the offenders. 
 
 This is the strongest part of the Greek case, for while such 
 measures as were taken incidentally reveal the gravity of the 
 crimes that had been committed, the fact that steps were 
 taken offers a certain atonement (the only possible one) and, 
 what is perhaps more important, a certain hope for the future. 
 Atrocities, whether committed by Near Easterners, Middle 
 Kasterners, or Westerners, will never be brought to an end 
 by repressive measures from outside, but only by shame or 
 remorse in the minds of the guilty parties themselves. 
 
 While the Greek commandant, Colonel Zaphiriu, appears 
 to have been guilty of culpable negligence in regard to the 
 restoration of order, and the Greek soldiery of somewhat less 
 culpable indulgence towards the Greek crowd, active steps 
 towards stopping the killing and looting were apparently 
 taken from the beginning by individual Greeks.1 
 
 Moreover, on the 18th May, a court-martial was held by 
 the Greek military authorities, and some severe sentences 
 were passed. I give the statistics, which do not entirely 
 coincide, of my several Greek informants :— 
 
 | 
 
 : | eae se Sees 
 | Hard | ‘Irkti’(C); |Phylikisis’(C);| Total 
 Death | Hard | Labour |‘ Détention’(D);| ‘Emprisonne- | Number | 
 
 Sen- | Labour| fora 10 to 20 ment’ (D); 2to5 of 
 tence. |for Life.;Termof| Years’Im- |Years’Imprison-| Sen- | 
 Years. | prisonment (M). ment (M). tences, | 
 
 All three informants agree in stating that the persons 
 condemned consisted of 48 Greeks, 13 Turks, 12 Armenians, 
 
 1 #.g. at Buja a Greek lawyer, Mr, Athenoyénis, is stated to have stopped 
 the looting, with the assistance of other Greek inhabitants of good repute 
 and of the local Greek Boy Scouts, and to have obtained the restoration of 
 sixty per cent. of the stolen cattle to their Turkish owners. 
 
 2 Mr. John Mavrogordato, of 5 Linnell Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 
 London, N.W.11. 
 
Re. __= 
 
 390 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 and 1 Jew. The total of 74 is therefore probably correct, 
 and the statistics of the various sentences (taken in the order 
 of the schedule above) are probably 3 sentences of death ; 
 4 of hard labour for life ; 2 of hard labour for a term of years ; 
 12 of longer, and 53 of shorter periods of ordinary imprison- 
 ment. None of those who give the above statistics mention 
 how the different sentences were apportioned among the 
 different nationalities, except for a statement by Mr. Mavro- 
 gordato that all three death sentences were passed upon 
 Greeks. This is confirmed, for two out of the three, by (A), 
 who, though he gives no general statistics, was present at the 
 court-martial, and describes the passing of the death sentence 
 upon Konstandinos Tsigards, a Greek civilian of Buja, and 
 upon Dhimitrios Tsarukhas, an evzone.! 
 
 (D) further mentions that Colonel Zaphiriu and Lieutenant- 
 Colonel Stavrianédpulos were both deprived of. their com- 
 mands and placed on the retired list, on account of their 
 conduct during these days, and that Lieutenant-Colonel 
 Stavriandépulos was also subjected to forty days’ rigorous 
 arrest. On the other hand, (C), and (D) following him, 
 invoke the authority of the British naval officers on board 
 H.M.S. Adventure for stating that both the Greek naval 
 detachment stationed at the Custom House, and Lieutenant- 
 Colonel Skhinas, commanding the 4th Infantry Regiment, 
 with the officers under him, made energetic efforts to restore 
 order, to keep the crowd’s hands off the Turkish prisoners, 
 and to shelter the latter in warehouses. 
 
 (D) adds that a Graeco-Turkish mixed tribunal, for assess- 
 ing damages and making reparations, was afterwards set up 
 by the new Greek High Commissioner, Mr. Sterghiddhis, on 
 his own initiative, and Mr. Mavrogordato estimates the total 
 sum paid on this head at four million franes. 
 
 These facts are creditable and ought in fairness to be given 
 just as much publicity as the others, but unfortunately the 
 latter weigh considerably more heavily in the balance. In 
 
 1 He adds that they were executed the same evening. 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII 391 
 
 concluding this résumé of the Greek version of the case, I 
 must again draw attention to the facts that none of my in- 
 formation, either in this supplementary note or in Chapter VII. 
 itself, comes from Turkish sources; that the Report of the 
 Inter-Allied Commission, which investigated these events 
 within the first four months after they took place, has been with- 
 held from publication, by a decision contrary to the usual 
 practice of Governments in such circumstances ; and that 
 while the Turks have always pressed for its publication, 
 Mr. Venizelos made energetic diplomatic démarches in order 
 io prevent it. The Greeks take it for granted that the 
 Commissioners were prejudiced against them; but they 
 advance no proof of this, and there is no a priori likelihood 
 of it. Inasmuch as the four countries which the Com- 
 missioners respectively represented were in alliance with 
 Greece, and as their Governments had themselves taken the 
 decision to send the Greek troops to Smyrna, the presump- 
 tion is that the Commissioners were biassed in favour of 
 Greece, if either way. But in view of the fact that they were 
 distinguished public servants of four of the greatest civilised 
 Western nations, and that the honour of none of the nations 
 (as distinct from the Governments) to which they belonged 
 was directly implicated in their verdict, there was a reason- 
 able expectation that they would be impartial. Ifthe Turks 
 (the recent enemies of the Entente Powers) were eager that 
 their verdict should be made public, and this in circumstances 
 in which, ea hypothesi, they could not know for a fact what 
 the verdict was, it is reasonable to infer from this a conviction 
 on the Turks’ part that an impartial inquiry into the events 
 of the 15th May 1919 and the following days at Smyrna, was 
 bound to result in their own favour. Did Mr. Venizelos 
 himself believe that any inquiry, properly conducted, would 
 result in anything but discredit to his fellow-countrymen ?¢ 
 
 1 The facts which they adduce all find their natural explanation in the 
 anxiety of the Commissioners to shield their Turkish witnesses. See Chapter 
 III., pp. 79-80 above. 
 
392 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 The Turkish Proclamations distributed at Smyrna on the 
 evening of the 14th May 1919. 
 
 I have made the following English translations from 
 Greek translations, communicated to me, of the Turkish 
 originals, to which I have not had access : 
 
 *‘DOowN-TRODDEN TuRK,—Your country [has been given] 
 to the Greeks. Raise your voice in protest, to repudiate 
 this flagrant injustice. All Moslems and all friends of the 
 Turks will assemble this evening, and remain till morning, 
 at the Jewish hospital. Attend, if possible, with all your 
 household. This is your last day; do not neglect [this 
 appeal], oppressed Turk !’ 
 
 ‘Unnarpy Turk,—They are robbing you of your rights 
 and trampling on your honour, under the pretext of the 
 Wilsonian Points. They say that the Greeks here are many 
 [? the majority], and that the Turks will welcome the annexa- 
 tion of this region to Greece. On this account, they are 
 handing over to Greece your beautiful country. We ask 
 you: Are the Greeks more numerous ? And do you consent 
 to Greek domination ? Show now of what sort [rotor.. Query 
 emend to récot=how many] you are. All your brothers 
 are at the Jewish hospital. Flock there in your thousands, 
 and show to the whole world your crushing superiority of 
 numbers. Proclaim and demonstrate it, and [Lacuna in 
 the Greek text]. On this occasion there is no distinction 
 between rich and poor, educated and illiterate—only an 
 overwhelming mass repudiating Greek domination. This is 
 the supreme duty incumbent upon you. Do not fail. Faint- 
 heartedness is good for nothing. Hasten in hundreds of 
 thousands to the Jewish cemetery. Put yourselves under 
 the orders of the National Committee. - 
 
 [Signed] ‘The National Committee for the rejection of 
 Union ’ [with Greece]. 
 
 In these documents, at any rate in the form in which 
 they have reached me, there is no incitement whatever to 
 resist the Greek landing by force of arms. On the other 
 hand, there is an explanation of the actual behaviour, as 
 reported independently, of the Turkish population of 
 Smyrna during the night between the 14th and the 15th 
 May. The assembly en masse on a conspicuous hillside 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII 393 
 
 above the Turkish quarter, and the lighting of bonfires 
 which made the crowd visible from the warships in the 
 harbour, were evidently naive and pathetic attempts at an 
 improvised plebiscite or ocular demonstration of how the 
 destiny of Smyrna ought to be decided on the principle of 
 self-determination—as if a prior: principles—Wilsonian or 
 any other—had determined the decision of the ‘ Big Three ’ 
 to send the Greeks to Smyrna, or as if Admiral Calthorpe 
 could, on his own initiative, suspend his superiors’ orders at 
 the eleventh hour! No, the Smyrna Turks were obviously 
 in need of a mandatory. They were far too ignorant of the 
 methods of Western politics and administration to be fit 
 to govern themselves. 
 
 ADDENDUM TO CHAPTER V, PAGE 194 
 
 Two pieces of testimony have been brought to my notice 
 by members of my seminar at the London University Insti- 
 tute of Historical Research. The references are to vol. i. 
 p. 126 of Poujoulat, B.: ‘ Voyage a Constantinople ’ (Paris 
 1840-1, Ducollet, 2 vols.), and to p. 41 of Bowen, G. F.: 
 - *Mount Athos, Thessaly and Epirus’ (London, 1852, 
 
 Rivingtons). Both these travellers state expressly that the 
 Orthodox Christians in the interior were in their time using 
 Turkish for their ritual (Poujoulat’s words are ‘1’Evangile 
 et les priéres de I’Eglise’) as well as for their vernacular. 
 Poujoulat testifies to this for the Christians of Kula and 
 Ushagq, two places which he visited himself. 
 
INDEX 
 
 [Not including Table of Dates or Additional Notes to 
 Chapters V. and VII.] 
 
 Note.—The letter » after a number means that the reference is to a footnote on 
 the page in question, but I have not added it in cases where there is a refer- 
 
 ence to both text and footnote on the same page. 
 
 Particular references to 
 
 eertain general heads will be found classified respectively under these heads, 
 
 in alphabetical order, and not indexed separately. 
 
 The heads are :— 
 
 Colonies, Commissions of Inquiry, Conferences (including Congresses), 
 Education, Elections, Languages, Law, Minorities, Navies, Railways, Re- 
 fugees (including Deportees), Revolutions, Treaties (including Agreements, 
 Conventions, and Protocols), and Wars. 
 
 Abbasid Empire: see Arab Empire. 
 
 Abdu’l-Hamid, Sultan: 29, 131, 135-6, 
 166 nm, 182-3, 202-4. 
 
 Abioi: 339. 
 
 Abyssinians: 359 n. 
 
 Adalia, Gulf of: 216-17. 
 
 town of: 51, 77, 120, 218, 226 n. 
 
 Adam: 347. 
 
 Adana: 3127. 
 
 Adnan Bey, Dr.: 179. 
 
 Adrianople: 61. 
 
 Adriatic Sea: 197. 
 
 Aegean Sea: 34, 37-8, 69, 88, 121-2, 
 132, 142, 149, 220, 222, 231 n, 239, 
 333. 
 
 Aeschylus: 347. 
 
 Aetolia, Ancient: 41, 
 
 Afghanistan: 30, 46, 155. 
 
 Afium Kara Hissar: 57, 215-16, 218-19, 
 226 m, 228, 231, 233-4, 236, 239, 246, 
 
 Africa, Continent of: 334. 
 
 North: 30, 35. 
 Tropical: 46, 60 n. 
 
 Afrieans, South: 334. 
 
 Agesilaos, King: 221. 
 
 Agra: ee¢ Taj Mahal. 
 
 Agreements: see Treaties. 
 
 Ahmed at Constantinople, Mosque of 
 Sultan: 10. 
 
 Aidin, District of : 290-1, 319. 
 
 Town of: .123, 125, 151-2, 161, 
 166 n, 168, 193, 196-8, 226-7, 229, 
 273-4, 299. 
 
 Vilayet of : 68, 71, 78, 116 (Princi- 
 pality of), 120, 134 n, 280. 
 
 Ainegél: 247, 253. 
 
 Aivali, 17, 95, 121-2, 125-7, 141, 143.4, 
 168, 332, 355 n. 
 
 , Academy of: 122, 124. 
 
 Aivalyk : see Aivali. 
 
 Akbar, Emperor: 10n. 
 
 304 
 
 Akhissar, District of : 318. 
 Town of: 289-90, 
 Akkeui (Kaza of Yalova): 263, 301-5, 
 307, 311. 
 Acting hoja at: 303. 
 Alashehir: 173 n, 201, 229, 290. 
 Albania: 18-19, 59. 
 Albanians :—Moslem: 136; 
 dox: 195. 
 Alcohol, Prohibition of : 240, 
 Aleppo: 56, 85. 
 Alexaékis, Mr. Iodnnis: 161 n. 
 Alexander the Great: 22, 29, 128, 149, 
 222, 238. 
 King of Greece ; 
 Alexandretta: 85 n,. 
 Alexandria, Orthodox Patriarchate of : 
 
 8. 
 
 Alfred, King: 128. 
 
 Algeria: 211m, 224. 
 
 Ali Bey of Odemish: 171 n. 
 
 Allenby, General Lord: 86. 
 
 Allied Governments, Note of llth 
 January 1917 to President Wilson 
 from the: 328. 
 
 ‘ Alpine’ Racial Type: 113, 119. 
 
 Alsace-Lorraine: 88-9. 
 
 Amanus Tunnel: 85, 218. 
 
 Amasia, Sanjak of: 311. 
 
 Town of: 154. 
 
 Ambassadors, Conference of, concern- 
 ing Aegean Islands: 70. 
 
 Ambelékia: 124. 
 
 America and American Citizens : 
 United States of America, 
 
 Amorion; 218. 
 
 Anatolia :—Allied control-officers in: 
 145-8, 153-4, 179, 186-7, 227, 270, 
 273; Central and Eastern: 107, 
 110-14, 146, 186-7, 192, 213-14, 218, 
 220, 224, 237; Central Desert of: 
 
 Ortho- 
 
 83. 
 
 8ee 
 
INDEX 
 
 59, 214, 127, 226 n, 231, 288; Cradle 
 of Near Eastern Civilisation in: 11, 
 109-10, 332; Evacuation of, by 
 Greek Army: 100, 299; Feudalism 
 in East Roman: 110-14; French 
 Zone in: 49-50, 56-7, 104, 214; In- 
 vasion of, by Russians (1916-18): 
 50, 191, 213; Italian Zone in: 51-2, 
 56-7, 151, 154, 161, 196-7, 201, 226; 
 Plateau of: VI. passim; Western : 
 17-18 (racial war in), 34-6 (Greek 
 military occupation), 68-71 (Mr. 
 Venizelos’s claims), 73-4, 84, 107, 
 114-15, 122-4 (Modern Greek coloni- 
 sation in), 140-5 (Turkish reprisals 
 against Greeks in), Chapters V., VI., 
 II. passim. 
 
 Anatolia College at Marsovan: 154. 
 
 Anglo-Franco-Russian Rivalry with 
 Germany in the East: 44, 46. 
 
 French correspondence coneern- 
 ing the Franklin-Bouillon Agree- 
 ment: 105. ‘ 
 
 French Rivalry in the East: 3, 
 44-62, 80, 83-106, 153, 254-8. 
 
 —— Russian Rivalry in the East: 44, 
 46. 
 
 Angora: 128, 154, 159, 162, 170, 179- 
 180, 190, 218-19, 226 n, 231, 237-8, 
 243, 275, 290, $33, 
 
 Government : 
 tional Government. 
 
 Anna Comnena: 7 
 
 Antioch, Ancient : 
 
 Antwerp: 225. 
 
 Anzavur Bey Cherkess: 183-4. 
 
 Arab Empire, Ancient: 9, 22, 111, 
 194 n, 214 n, 267-8. 
 
 Arab :—Nationalist Movement: 18, 
 45, 47-9, 55, 86, 105 n, 117, 214; 
 Provinces of Ottoman Empire: 49, 
 55, 136, 145, 189, 207, 209, 212. 
 
 Arabia: 20. 
 
 Arabian Desert: 213-14, 224. 
 
 Aratos of Soloi (quoted by St. Paul): 
 364. 
 
 Archaeologists :—Austrian : 149; Ger- 
 man: 65, 1662; Western: 238. 
 Archipelago, Aegean: 123, 231 , 325. 
 Ardsahan: see Kars-Ardahan-Batum 
 
 District. 
 
 Argonauts: 216. 
 
 Aristion of Ancient Athens, Professor : 
 178 n. 
 
 ‘ Aristoménis and Gorgdé, History of’: 
 338. 
 
 Aristonikos of Ancient Pergamon: 223, 
 
 Armenia: 18, 110%; see also Erivan, 
 Republic of. 
 
 Armenian : — National Home: 95; 
 Nationalism: 18; Patriarchate at 
 Constantinople: 187; Vilayets of 
 Ottoman Empire (Cossack colonies 
 in): 50. 
 
 Armenians :—In Anatolia and Con- 
 stantinople : 32-3, 130, 136, 176, 191, 
 206, 271, 300, 307-8, 310, 323; in 
 
 see Turkish Na- 
 
 "922, 
 
 395 
 
 Cilicia: 84, 104 n, 119, 121: in 
 Russia, 50; massacred in 1895-7; 
 17, 27, 261; massacred in 1909: 265, 
 269 n; massacred in 1915-22: 49, 
 140, 143, 191, 265-6, 276-7, 280, 284, 
 291, 312-13, 342, 354; British 
 Government’s Blue Book on Treat- 
 ment of (Miscellaneous No. 31, 1916): 
 50, 266 n, 312 n. 
 ‘ Armenoid’ Racial Type: 113. 
 Armistice of 1lth November 1918 with 
 Germany: 262. 
 of 30th October 1918 with 
 Turkey: 3, 36, 77-9, 85, 117 », 131, 
 145, 151, 153 n, 168, 178, 181, 187, 
 189, 207, 209, 212, 256, 320, 353. 
 Armudlu (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 143, 148, 269, 276, 286, 293-6. 
 Arnautkeui (Bosphorus): 180 #2. 
 (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 282, 287, 296. 
 Arnold, Professor Sir T. W.: 
 267 n. 
 Artemis of the Ephesians: 150. 
 Asia, Central: 111, 114, 208, 339, 342, 
 343 n. 
 Assumptionist 
 French: 298. 
 Assyria, Ancient: 213 ». 
 Athenian Confederacy, Ancient : 220-1. 
 Athenians, Ancient: 220-1, 364. 
 Athens, Academy at Ancient: 336. 
 Modern :—Armed conflict in 
 (1st December 1916): 67,89; Dukes 
 of: 38; Government of Greek 
 Kingdom at: 93, 98n, 106", 163, 
 244m; Holy Synod at: 195; 
 People of : 194, 242; University of : 
 173 
 
 114 x, 
 
 Brothers at Ismid, 
 
 Athos, Mount: 333. 
 Atlantic Ocean: 334. 
 Atrocities ; passim. 
 Australasia: 134, 334. 
 Australians : — Blackfellows : 
 Whites: 134, 334. 
 Austrasian Franks : 
 Austria (Proper) : 
 189, 323; see 
 Monarchy. 
 Hungary, see Hapsburg Monarchy. 
 Austrian Army: 257 
 Austrians, German : 
 Avghyn: 255. 
 Aya Soffa: 30, 336. 
 Ayasoluk (=Modern Ephesus): 161. 
 Azerbaijan, Transcaucasian Republie 
 of; 42-3. 
 
 134; 
 
 29. 
 43, 112, 180, 132, 
 also Hapsburg 
 
 129, 182, 180. 
 
 Bafra, District of : 289, 292. 
 Town of: 289, 292. 
 
 Baghchejik (near Ismid): 292. 
 
 Baghcheshmé (Ismid): 298. 
 
 Baghdad: 56. 
 
 Baku: 42, 
 
 Baleha Ova (Aidin Vilayet): 169. 
 
 Balfour, Sir Arthur: 76. 
 
396 
 
 ‘ Balkanisation’: 25-7. 
 
 Balkan Peninsula: 108, 110, 160-1, 
 194 n, 219, 221-3, 279. 
 
 Balykesry: 1438. 
 
 Bantus: 334. 
 
 Bashkirs: 198. 
 
 Bashlamysh (Aidin Vilayet): 288. 
 
 Bashy-Bozuks: 27, 279. 
 
 Basil 1., East Roman Emperor: 110n. 
 
 Basques: 342 n. 
 
 Basra: 213. 
 
 Bas-Reliefs, Ancient Egyptian: 113. 
 
 Batum: 257, 283 n; see also Kars- 
 Ardahan-Batum District. 
 
 Bavarians: 65. 
 
 Bayndyr, District of: 290, 318. 
 
 Bazar Keui: see Pazarkeui. 
 
 Beicos: 275. 
 
 Beirut: 56, 213. 
 
 Beirut, American College at: 256. 
 
 Bekir Samy Bey: 93 n, 94, 97 n. 
 
 Belfast: 262. 
 
 Belgians and Belgium: 16, 26, 83, 
 225, 262, 275, 342. 
 
 Benes, Dr.: 43. 
 
 Benghazi: 352. 
 
 Bergama, District of: 156 n, 161, 170. 
 
 Town of: 123-5, 140, 143, 168, 
 
 227. 
 
 Bible: 119, 193-4. 
 
 Bigha, Peninsula of: 47, 57 n, 183. 
 
 ‘Big Three’ at Peace Conference of 
 Paris: 78-9. 
 
 Bismarck, Prince: 4. 
 
 ‘Black and Tans’: 262. 
 
 Blackfellows: see Australians, s.v. 
 
 Black Sea: 34, 59, 68, 150, 162, 194 n, 
 215, 283 n, 291, 313. 
 
 Riverains of: 48, 71, 92. 
 
 Blockade, Naval, during European 
 War: 26, 67. 
 
 Boars, Wild: 199. 
 
 Bohemia: 112, 269. 
 
 Bohemians, German: 129. 
 
 Bolsheviks: see Revolutions, Russian 
 and Russia, Soviet Government of, 
 at Moscow. 
 
 Bosnia-Herzegovina: 211 n, 352. 
 
 Bosniaks: 139 
 
 Bosphorus: 71, 78. 
 
 Boz Oyuk:; 248, 250-1. 
 
 Breslau, University of: 178 n. 
 
 Bristol, Admiral: 78, 
 
 British :—Army : 20, 32-3, 86, 88, 154, 
 229 n, 235 n, 239, 252 ; Columbians : 
 134; Empire (including Great 
 Britain): 31, 34-5, 40, 42, 117, 171, 
 174, 189-90, 211 n, 254, 348, 352-3, 
 360-1. 
 
 Brooke, Rajah: 38. 
 
 Brusa;: 10 (Green Mosque at), 115, 143, 
 157 n (Military Hospital at), 159 n, 
 216, 228-30, 232-6, 240-1 (Turkish 
 officer prisoners at), 246, 249, 253-5, 
 256 (Military Hospital at), 294, 299, 
 317. 
 
 Brussels: 166 n. 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Bryce Reports ; 80; see also Armenians, 
 British Government’s Blue Book on 
 Treatment of, 
 
 Bryony, H.M.S.: 264, 285-6. 
 
 Buldur: 218. 
 
 Bulgaria: 18, 27-8, 43-4, 64-7, 69, 71-2, 
 96, 195, 239, 244, 323-4, 352. 
 
 Bulgars: 44, 91, 110, 120 n, 129, 136, 
 138, 161, 176, 323, 342. 
 
 Bureaucracy: 132. 
 
 | Byzantine: see East Roman. 
 
 Churches: 129, 150. 
 
 Californians: 134. 
 
 Caliphate, Ottoman: 24, 28-32, 182-5, 
 208, 210, 352. 
 
 Caliphs, Arab: 
 Ancient. 
 
 Calthorpe, Admiral: 78. 
 
 Calvinism: 8. 
 
 Capetian Dynasty of France: 110. 
 
 Capitulations: 94, 163, 189, 209-210, 
 321, 358. 
 
 ‘Cappadocia’: 119, 124, 194. 
 
 Carnegie Endowment for International 
 Peace: 138 n. 
 
 Carolingian Dynasty: 11, 29. 
 
 Carpet-making: 170, 355-6. 
 
 Carthage, Ancient: 41. 
 
 Caspian Sea: 194 n, 213. 
 
 Catholic Church: 184, 329-330, 345. 
 
 Catholics, Roman: 26 (Irish), 118 n 
 (Arabic-speaking), 132 (English), 262 
 (in Ulster). 
 
 Cats, Angora: 357. 
 
 Cattaro: 334. 
 
 Caucasia, Northern: 281. 
 
 Caucasus Mountains: 213, 224. 
 
 Cayster River: 149, 161, 200-2, 229. 
 
 Chalyjakeui (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Chamberlain, Mr. Austen: 97 n. 
 
 Chanak Kalé (Dardanelles): 55, 184. 
 
 Charlemagne: 29 (sword and crown 
 of), 268. 
 
 Charles, late ex-King of Hungary: 90. 
 
 Chatalja Lines: 68, 71, 138. 
 
 Chengeller (near Gemlik): 284, 
 
 Cheshmé, Peninsula of: 333. 
 
 Chettés: 140, 156-7, 161, 188, 186, 
 200, 226, 230, 232, 234, 239, 
 258, Chapter VII. passim, 278-280 
 (definition of). 
 
 Chibukli: 275. 
 
 Chicago: 28. 
 
 Chichérin, Mr. George: 178. 
 
 Childs, Mr. W. J.: 265. 
 
 China (Far East): 38 (Genoese over- 
 land trade with), 114 n, 342. 
 
 China (town in 8.W. Anatolia): 196. 
 
 Chinese :—Moslems: 29; Emigrants : 
 134. 
 
 ‘Christendom’: 74, 329. 
 
 Christian Church, Early: 328, 
 
 Christianity: 74, 90-1, 268, 327-31, 
 336, 346. 
 
 Cilicia: 22, 49-51, 59, 84-7, 107, 110 n, 
 312-13, 364. 
 
 see Arab Empire, 
 
INDEX 
 
 Cilician Campaign: see Wars, Franco- 
 Turkish, in Cilicia. 
 
 Circassians: 130, 139, 156-7, 
 171, 183-4, 227, 281-3, 288. 
 
 ‘City, The’ (=Constantinople): 61. 
 
 Classes, Relationships between social : 
 346-7. 
 
 Clemenceau, M. Georges: 76, 83, 86-7, 
 
 9 
 
 160 n, 
 
 89. 
 
 Climatic Cycles: 114 n, 339-42. 
 
 Coal Strike in Great Britain (1921): 3. 
 
 Colonies :—Ancient Greek in Anatolia : 
 108, 220-2; Modern Greek in West- 
 ern Anatolia: 122-4; Modern Greek 
 in the West: 28, 345; Western in 
 Constantinople: 144n, 148, 154; 
 Western in Smyrna: 122-3, 144 n, 
 148, 158, 165. 
 
 Colour Prejudice: 327 n. 
 
 Commandments, Ten: 283. 
 
 Commissions of Inquiry, Inter-Allied : 
 —At Smyrna (1919): 78-80, 151, 
 227, 270; in the Yalova-Gemlik and 
 Ismid Peninsulas (1921): 169, Chap- 
 ter VII. passim. 
 
 Commons, House of, at Westminster : 
 79, 86, 97 n, 99. © 
 
 Conferences :—Berlin (1878): 40, 160; 
 Boulogne (1920): 228, 2n; 
 Erzerum (1919): 187; London 
 (1921): 3, 93-7, 133, 134, 198, 
 232-3; Paris (1919): 48n, 67-68, 
 81-2, 86, 131, 133, 313; Paris (1922) : 
 106 n, 244"; San Remo (1920) : 227; 
 Sivas (1919): 187 ; Vienna (1814): 45. 
 
 Confucianism: 330. 
 
 Conscription, Military: 18-19 (in 
 Turkey), 360 (hypothetical, in India). 
 
 Constantine Dhraghasis, last East 
 Roman Emperor: 243. 
 
 King of Greece: Chapter II. 
 
 passim, 67 (abdication of), 164, 180, 
 
 183, 232, 235, 243, 244 n, 315, 322, 
 
 Porphyrogenitus’; 336. 
 
 Constantinople :—Allied High Com- 
 missioners at: 55, 179, 185, 188, 
 259 n, 287, 291-2, 312; Allied Occu- 
 pation of: 32, 55, 57, 80, 153-4, 175, 
 182, 190, 227, 242; American 
 College for Girls at: 180; General 
 references: 29, 30, 34, 38, 45, 47 
 (Russia to annex), 56, 61, 70-3 
 (Mr. Venizelos’s policy regarding), 
 77, 89, 94 (contingent expulsion of 
 Turkey from), 107, 108-9, 114, 120, 
 122, 130, 132, 138, 139 n, 148, 153 n, 
 159, 162, 169, 172-3, 185-7, 194-5, 
 206, 208, 210, 248, 245, 254-5, 263, 
 296, 299, 301, 305, 307-8, 333, 336, 
 353 ; Greek High Commissioner at : 
 301, 307; Oecumenical (Orthodox) 
 Patriarchate at: 8, 120, 187, 192-6, 
 259, 294; Ottoman University of: 
 173. 
 
 Constanza: 34. 
 
 Consulates (Western) : 
 158 n, 165, 290, 
 
 ‘ 
 
 45, 58, 104, 
 
 397 
 
 Copts: 117 n, 118. 
 
 Cordelié (Smyrna): 157 n. 
 
 Cossacks: 50, 281, 341. 
 
 Costas: see Kostas. 
 
 Council of Ten at Peace Conference of 
 Paris: 71. 
 
 Supreme, of the Allies: 
 226-7, 229, 232, 259. 
 
 Crimea: 38, 89, 223, 225. 
 
 Croats: 44. 
 
 Cromer, Lord: 167. 
 
 Cross, Sign of the: 240, 297-8, 
 
 Crusade, Fourth: 7, 114. 
 
 Crusaders: 9, 11. 
 
 ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’: 269. 
 
 Currant-culture: 123, 245, 
 
 Curzon, Lord: 106 n, 178. 
 
 ears 51, 64. 75, 211 n, 222 n. 
 yzicus, Ancient: 222. 
 
 Dagh Emir (near Aidin): 197-200. 
 
 Dalmatia: 126, 130. 
 
 Damascus: 55-6, 213. 
 
 Danube, River: 188, 248. 
 
 Delta, Islands in the: 211 n. 
 
 Danzig: 126. 
 
 Dardanelles: 45, 56, 71, 184, 219. 
 
 Expedition: 66, 179, 225, 233. 
 
 Darius (last King of the Achaemenid 
 Dynasty): 204, 224. 
 
 Dark Ages:—Western and Near 
 Eastern: 9, 108, 111, 127; Middle 
 Eastern: 9, 115 », 268. 
 
 Dawkins, Professor R. M.: 119 n. 
 
 Deirmenderé (Gulf of Ismid), Skala 
 and village of: 288, 316. 
 
 Democratic Control of Foreign Policy : 
 60 
 
 78-9, 
 
 Denikin, General: 83, 225. 
 
 Denizli, Sanjak of: 69. 
 
 Deportees: see Refugees and De- 
 portees, 
 
 Derekeui (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Deuealion : 334. 
 
 Dhimitri of Koiru: 294. 
 
 Dhraghitmis, late Mr. Ion: 81. 
 
 Dijankeui (Kaza of Gemlik): 284. 
 
 Dikeli: 140, 143, 168. 
 
 Dispensary, Turkish, at Iki Cheshmelik 
 (Smyrna): 176. 
 
 Dobrujalys: 139, 1947. 
 
 Dodekanese: 211 n. 
 
 Don, Genoese Colonies on River : 
 
 Dérpfeld, Dr. W.: 65. 
 
 ‘Dorylaion’: see Eski Shehir. 
 
 Downing Street: 39. 
 
 Drachma, Exchange value of the 
 Greek: 235, 244-5. 
 
 ‘Dragon’s Teeth’: 259. 
 
 Drang nach Osten (of the Hapsburg 
 Monarchy): 4. 
 
 Druses: 465. 
 
 Duma, Russian: 342. 
 
 Dismanis, General: 235. 
 
 Dutch dominion over non-Western 
 civilised peoples: 29, 31, 106. 
 
 38. 
 
398 
 
 Dynasties :—of the Modern Kingdom 
 of Greece: 65, 322; Ottoman Dy- 
 nasty: 29, 182-3, 247 
 
 Eastern Question: 1, 9, 41, 45, 76, 99, 
 255, 
 
 East India Company, British: 38. 
 Indies, Moslemsin: 29. 
 Roman Empire: 6, 38, 109-16, 
 193, 194”, 2l4n, 218, 243, 332, 
 335-7. 
 —— Bey of Salyhly: 
 
 Edirné : see Adrianople. 
 
 Education :—Modern Greek: 21, 33, 
 120, 124, 132, 172, 176, 245, 356; 
 Turkish: 132, 171-7, 184; Volga 
 Turkish: 3856; Western in the 
 East: 45, 104, 154, 176, 180, 182, 
 184, 190, 359, 
 
 Educational Commission, Turkish, in 
 Smyrna Zone: 173-5, 
 
 Eftim esas desi Papa, of Keskin : 
 192- 
 
 Bgirdir, Lake : 
 Egypt, Ancient, Ptolemaic 
 Power in: 41, 222 
 Modern: 11, 45, 86, 127, 166», 
 171, 174, 181, 190, 211”, 213, 256, 
 348, 352. 
 Egyptian Civilisation, Aneient : 
 113, 222, 329, 363-4. 
 Nationalism, Modern : 
 Eisner, Kurt: 262. 
 Elections: —In Greece 
 1920): 68, 81, 244”; 
 (1919-20): 153, 187-8. 
 Eliot, Sir Charles: 338 7, 
 Elmalyk (near Yalova): 284, 307, 
 Embassies: 32, 45, 58, 104, 279, 
 Emery mines in Greece; 245. 
 Eminé of Armudlu: 295. 
 Engheré (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 282 n, 297, 
 England: 110-11, 178, 228, 299, 342. 
 Entente (Anglo-French): see Anglo- 
 French Rivalry. 
 Little: 43-4. 
 
 Enver Pasha: 179, 186, 191. 
 Ephesus: 10 (Great Mosque at), 120, 
 148-52, 161, 221. 
 
 Epirus: 164-6. 
 Eregli (under Taurus) : 
 (on Ismid Gulf) : 
 Erivan, Republic of: 
 191, 313, 323-4, 326. 
 Ertoghrul, father of Osman : 
 Erzerum: 154, 218-19. 
 Eshref Bey of Sokia: 156, 171 n, 281. 
 Hski Shehir: 57, 98, 128, 159n, 
 Chapter VI. passim, 275, 278, 299, 
 315, 319. 
 Established Church, ral 
 Euphrates, River: 224. 
 Railway Bridge over River, at 
 Jerablus: 88. 
 Eurasia: 383. 
 
 156, 171%, 
 
 191. 
 Great 
 
 9, 22, 
 117 n, 118. 
 
 (November 
 in Turkey 
 
 218-19. 
 288. 
 42, 56, 107, 
 
 114, 247. 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Europe :—Concert of: 385, 279, 324; 
 Continent of: 328, 332-4, 346; 
 Western: 9, 16, 28, 111, 128, 177, 
 202-3, 257, 334-5, 342 », 359. 
 
 Evangeliki Skholf at Smyrna : 
 
 Evrenés, Family of: 115. 
 
 Fan Noli, Bishop: 195. 
 
 Far Eastern Civilisation : 330, 332, 359. 
 
 Feisal (bin Husein), Emir: 39, 60, 86, 
 118, 228. 
 
 ‘Felicity, Abode 
 stantinople. 
 
 Ferid Pasha, Damad : 
 281, 
 
 Finlay, George: 122 n. 
 
 Finns; 342 n, 355. 
 
 Firoz Shah of Delhi: 10n. 
 
 Fisheries, North American: 46. 
 
 Fistikli ‘(Yalova- Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 286, 296. 
 
 Fistikli, villages round: 276, 282, 
 287, 
 Fiume: 
 
 Flags: 102. 
 Florence: 38. 
 ’Forty-Five, The: 269%. 
 
 France: 40, 42, 54, 128, 178, 189, 
 246-7, 254, 262, 269, 342, 348, 353. 
 Northern: 148, 275. 
 Franchet d’Esperey, General : 
 Francis 1. of France, King: 89. 
 
 Franco-British : see Anglo-French. 
 Frangépulos, Mr.: 166, 201-4. 
 ‘Franks’: see Westerners. 
 Franz-Ferdinand, Arch-Duke: 262. 
 French: —Army: 86, 88, 239, 241, 
 252; Bondholders : y hy Pee 2 
 Colonial Party : 76; Dominion over 
 non-Western civilised peoples: 31, 
 34-5, 190, 2llm; General Staff: 
 228-9, 232; Vice-Consul at Aivali: 
 143. 
 Frontiers ;—Scientific : 
 tion of : 325-6. 
 Fulajyk (Karamursal District) : 
 
 124. 
 
 of’: see Con- 
 
 181, 183-5, 227, 
 
 126. 
 
 26. 
 
 224; Stabilisa- 
 284. 
 
 ‘Gaelic Question,’ Absence of, in 
 Twentieth-Century Great Britain : 
 269 n. 
 
 Gagauz: see Turks, s.v. 
 
 Galata: 37-8. 
 
 Serai Lycée: 173, 175. 
 
 Galatians, Ancient: 219, 222. 
 
 Gallipoli Peninsula :—Russia to annex : 
 47; Allied occupation of: 57; 
 Turkish Nationalists raid munition 
 dump on: 227. 
 
 Gamaliel, Rabbi: 181. 
 
 Gandhi, Mahatma: 359-61. 
 
 Gate, Golden: 243. 
 
 Gaulis, Madame: 102. 
 
 Gauls, Ancient: 128. 
 
 Gedelik (near Gemlik): 296. 
 
 Gehri, M. Maurice: 259 n, 278, 284-5, 
 299-311, 317. 
 
 Gemlik, Gulf of : 284, 313, 315. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Gemlik, Town of: 108, 139, 229, 259, 
 264, 282, 284, 286-7, 292, 204-6, 
 302, 306, 311, 313, 317». 
 
 Geneva, University of: 8. 
 
 Genoese, The: 37-8. 
 
 Georgia (in Transcaucasia): 18, 42-3. 
 
 German :—Policy towards Turkey: 
 88-9, 353; Rivers: 188; Socialist 
 Party: 25; Ultimatum to Belgium : 
 83; Universities: 65, 112. 
 
 Germans: 112, 149, 176, 179, 225, 
 231 n, 241, 247. 
 
 Germany: 3 (Relations of, with 
 Entente Powers in 1921), 40, 42, 
 65-6 (Debt of Greece to), 106, 144 n, 
 189, 225, 235, 323, 358. 
 
 Ghajyk (Kaza of Yalova): 306, 309-11. 
 
 Ghalaxidhi: 124. 
 
 Ghunarakis, Mr.: 1347. 
 
 Ghunaris: see Gounaris. 
 
 Ghuzz: see Turks, s.v. 
 
 Gibbon, Edward (quoted): 7. 
 
 Gibbons, Mr. H. A.: ll4n. 
 
 Glencoe, Massacre of: 269 n. 
 
 ‘God, The Unknown’: 364. 
 
 Gokje Deré (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Gok Su (Tributary of River Sakkaria) : 
 237. 
 
 Tepé (Trans-Caspia): 342. 
 
 Gélde (near Kula): 119, 129. 
 
 ‘Golden Ages’: 131, 351. 
 
 Golden Horde, The: 350. 
 
 Horn, The: 38. 
 
 Gordez (near Akhissar): 318. 
 
 ‘Gordian Knot,’ The: 128, 222. 
 
 Gordion, Ancient: 238. 
 
 Goths, Ancient: 128. 
 
 Gottingen, University of: 166. 
 
 Gotnaris, Mr.: 81, 83. 
 
 Graeco-Roman: see Hellenic. 
 
 Great Britain: see British Empire. 
 
 Greece :—European: 109, 118, 220-2, 
 241-2; Modern Kingdom of, Build- 
 ing up of: 15, 18, 26, 35, 66, 195, 
 348-9; Modern Kingdom of, Factions 
 in: Chapter III. passim, 144, 163, 
 173, 196, 281, 242-4, 322; War- 
 weariness in: 81, 243-6. 
 
 Greek Army :—Conscription of Otto- 
 man Greeks for: 169, 205, 235, 
 239; Eleventh Division: 288,317”; 
 First Corps: 247, 317; General 
 references: 20, 72, Chapters V., 
 VI., VII. passim ; Second Division : 
 231”; Seventh Division: 233, 
 247-254; Sixteenth Infantry Regi- 
 ment: 288; Tenth Division: 102- 
 103, 239, 250-1, 295, 301, 306, 3177”; 
 Third Corps: 235”; Third Divi- 
 sion: 254; Thirteenth Division: 
 231n; Thracian Levies: 239; 
 Twenty-Highth Infantry Regiment : 
 286. 
 
 Boy Scouts: 125, 198; Censor- 
 ship: 34; Corporate spirit: 124, 
 132; Merchant Marine: 244 ; 
 National Assembly (1920-2): 94; 
 
 399 
 
 National Defence Movement (1916- 
 17)::_-67. 
 
 Gregorian Church : 
 also Monophysites. 
 
 Gregory the Great, Pope: $29. 
 
 Gul-t-Nthal, Red Crescent S§.S8.: 
 276 », 287, 299-311. 
 
 Gillik (Kaza of Yalova): 811. 
 
 Gurus, Indian: 360. 
 
 Gyparis, Mr.: 81. 
 
 118-19, 121; see 
 
 268, 
 
 Haidar Pasha (Asiatic suburb of Con- 
 
 stantinople): 149, 184, 218. 
 eninsula: see Ismid Penin- 
 sula. 
 
 Hajin (Cilicia): 312-18. 
 
 Hajji Mehmed Chiftligi (Kaza of Ya- 
 lova): 307. 
 
 Halidé Hanum: 180. 
 
 Hapsburg Monarchy: 4-5, 25, 40, 129- 
 130, 211, 214, 225, 269, 352, 358. 
 
 Haramein, The: 198. 
 
 Hardy, Mr. Thomas: 39, 361. 
 
 ‘Harmosts’: 76, 177, 299. 
 
 Hashimite family, Sherifs of the: 30, 47. 
 
 Headgear, Significance of : 204, 256-7, 
 272, 283, 309. 
 
 Hellen, son of Deucalion: 3834. 
 
 ‘ Hellene,’ Name of: 336-7. 
 
 Hellenic Civilisation, Ancient: 5 9, 
 22, 74, 76, 108-9, 117, 121, 128-9, 
 220-4, 328-9, 334-8, 346-7, 363-4. 
 on Ancient: 117, 329-30, 
 
 Helvetian Republic: see Switzerland. 
 
 Hermus, River: 116, 151, 215, 229. 
 
 Herodotus: 52, 221 n, 340 n. 
 
 Hijaz: 48-9, 52n. 
 
 Hijazis: 30, 45, 213. 
 
 Hijra of the Prophet Muhammad: 329. 
 
 Hilmi Reis of Armudlu: 295, 
 
 Hindu Civilisation; 11-12. 
 
 Extremists: 322. 
 
 Hindus: 25, 261. 
 
 Hippocrateum, Corpus{quoted): 334 n. 
 
 Hittites: 113, 129. 
 
 Hohenstaufen Dynasty: 128. 
 
 Hoja-Bashys, Moreot Greek: 337. 
 
 Hoja Deré=Khoja Deré (Yalova- 
 Gemlik Peninsula): 276, 296-7. 
 
 Hojas: see Islamic Ecelesiastics. 
 
 Homer: 29, 339-40 (quoted). 
 
 Hospital at Smyrna, Turkish : 
 176-7. 
 
 Hungary: 42-3, 189, 323. 
 
 Huns: 334, 342. 
 
 Huntington, Dr. Ellsworth: 340 n. 
 
 Hurriet : see Revolutions, s.v. Ottoman 
 (1908). 
 
 Husein, Sherif of Mecea and King of 
 the Hijaz: 47-9, 51. 
 
 Husni Bey, Mutesarrif of Manysa: 
 171 n. 
 
 Hyperion: 338. 
 
 171, 
 
 Idrisi of the Yemen, The: 30. 
 Thsanié (near Fistikli): 293. 
 
400 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Iki Cheshmé (Turkish quarter, 
 Smyrna): 157, 176. 
 
 Imperialism: 40, 357. 
 
 India: 10-11, 35, 38, 45-6, 115 », 163, 
 171, 174, 224, 343, 359-61. 
 
 Indian :—Army: 20, 86, 360; Emi- 
 grants: 134; Moslems: 29, 31, 57, 
 182, 261, 322. 
 
 Industrialism : 26, 341, 359-60. 
 
 Infanticide in Ancient Greece: 347. 
 
 In Onii, Battle of : 38, 97, 102, 157 n, 
 233, 235-6, 238-40, 242, 246-54, 275, 
 278, 295, 315-16. 
 
 Intermarriage: 28, 241, 345. 
 
 ‘International, Green’: 44. 
 
 Interpreters: 32-3, 167, 198, 286, 307. 
 
 Tnterregna between Civilisations: see 
 Dark Ages. 
 
 Ionia, Ancient: 220-2. 
 
 ‘Tonia ’=Smyrna Zone of the Treaty of 
 Sévres: 61, 76, 177, 220. 
 
 Tonian Islands: 202, 338. 
 
 Iraq: 11, 34, 59, 85, 190, 213-14, 225. 
 Rising of 1920 in, against British 
 military occupation: 55, 60, 230 n. 
 
 Traqis: 29, 134. 
 
 Ireland: 3, 26, 112, 158, 167, 184, 
 262, 269. 
 
 Ironic, Spirit: 361. - 
 
 Iskender Beg (=Scanderbeg): 338. 
 
 Islam: 12, 114, 222, 224, 257, 327n, 
 328-332, 348, 353 (Fatalism incor- 
 rectly attributed to), 354-6. 
 
 Islamic :—Ecclesiastics: 132, 181-2, 
 184-5; Law: see Law, s.v. Islamic ; 
 Literature: 117, 329; Traditions: 
 
 Islands, Greek: see Archipelago, 
 Aegean. 
 
 Ismid, Gulf of : 162 n, 287-8, 292, 296. 
 
 Peninsula and District of: 47, 
 55, 57, 242, 259n, 274n, 281, 
 285, 315. 
 
 —— Town of: 162n, 228-9, 230n, 
 231, 240, 259, 274n, 282, 287-8, 
 292, 297-8, 312 n, 315-16, 317 n. 
 
 Isnik, Lake of : 275, 313, 315. 
 
 Town of: 111, 275, 284. 
 
 Istria: 130. 
 
 Italian :—Army: 20, 59, 226”; City 
 States, Mediaeval: 6n, 37-8, 44; 
 Delegation at Paris Peace Conference 
 (1919): 77; Dominion over non- 
 Western civilised peoples: 31, 42, 
 106, 2lln; Risorgimento: 185; 
 Secret Service: 51. 
 
 Italy (and Italians): 126, 128, 229n, 
 342, 352. 
 
 ‘Izzet Pasha: 185. 
 
 Jacobean Architecture: 37. 
 
 Janissaries: 10-11, 18, 183. 
 
 Japan: 353 n, 359 n. 
 
 Japanese Emigrants: 134, 334. 
 
 Jaurés, J.: 262. 
 
 Jemal Pasha (Colleague of Enver and 
 Talaat Pashas): 186. 
 
 Jemil Bey (Turkish Nationalist Gover- 
 nor of Bafra, 1921): 289. 
 
 Jerusalem: 198. 
 
 Jews: 45, 173, 178, 189, 1947, 261, 
 267, 271, 298, 364. 
 
 Joan of Arc: 128. 
 
 Jonescu, Mr. Take: 44. 
 
 Jonnart, M.: 67. 
 
 Jugoslavia: 18, 25-8, 43, 52n, 176, 
 189, 244, 323. 
 
 Jugoslavs: 110. 
 
 Jungle Book, The: 181. 
 
 Justinian, Emperor: 336. 
 
 Kaiajyk (near Akhissar): 318. 
 
 Kaikos, River: 123. 
 
 Kaisaria: 143, 150, 219, 238, 241. 
 
 Kaloyerépoulos, Mr.: 94-5. 
 
 Kapakly (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 285-6, 293, 295-6. 
 
 Kara Bekir Pasha, Kiazym, and his 
 campaign against the Republic of 
 Erivan (1920): 56, 257, 313. 
 
 Karait Jews: see Turks, s.v. 
 
 Karaja Ali (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 293, 295-6. 
 
 Karakeui Defile: 232, 247, 250-1, 253. 
 
 Karakiliss6 (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Karaman, Principality of: 119, 124. 
 
 Karamanly Orthodox Christians: 33, 
 119 n, 120, 157 n, 194. 
 
 Karamursal, Peninsula of : see Yalova- 
 Gemlik Peninsula. 
 
 Town of: 288, 315 n, 316. 
 
 Karatepé (Aidin District): 319. 
 
 Karatheodhoris, Professor Constantine : 
 166, 168. 
 
 Kars, Town of: 257. 
 
 -Ardahan-Batum District: 56-7, 
 75 n, 188, 208-9, 2117. 
 
 Kasaba, District of : 290. 
 
 Katyrly (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 
 282 n, 287, 294, 296. 
 
 Kavala: 69. 
 
 Kazaks, Kirghiz; ll4n, 342. 
 
 Kazan Tatars: see Turks, Volga. 
 
 ‘Kemalists’: see Turkish Nationalist 
 Government and Movement. 
 
 Kerensky, Mr.: 342. 
 
 Keskin (in South-Central Anatolia) : 
 192. 
 
 Khadija of Karamursal: 288, 
 
 Khairié (near Fistikli): 287, 298. 
 
 Khilafat Movement in India: 24, 28- 
 32, 182. 
 
 Khios: 17, 38, 70, 130, 140, 143. 
 
 Khorofilaki (=Gendarmerie) in Ana- 
 tolia, Greek: 166-7, 299. 
 
 Khosru Nushirwan, Shah: 336. 
 
 Khristo of Hajji Mehmedin Chiftligi : 
 307. 
 
 Kristo of Katyrly, Taukju oghlu : 294-5. 
 
 Kiatyb oghlu (Smyrna): 157. 
 
 Kilisman (near Smyrna): 157 n. 
 
 Kinik (near Bergama): 123, 143, 168. 
 
 Kirazly (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Kiresiin (= Kerasund): 156, 289. 
 
INDEX 401 
 
 Kirkinje: 120, 124. 
 Kiutahia: 98, 236-7, 319. 
 Klagenfurt: 188. 
 Klazomenai: 222. 
 Klephts: 279, 338. 
 Klionas, Mr.: 168. 
 Knidos, Peninsula of: 333. 
 *Knock-out Blow’: 212, 224. 
 Kocho of Armudlu, Mumju oghlu: 295. 
 Koiru (Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula) : 2 
 Kolchak, General: 83. 
 Kolokotrénis, Theédhoros: 337-8. 
 Komitajys: 161, 279. 
 K6miirderé (near Smyrna): 157 n. 
 Konia: 52, 119, 218-19, 231, 241, 256. 
 Konstandinos Porphyroyénnitos: see 
 Constantine, s.v. 
 Korais, Adhamd&ndios: 9, 332, 335, 
 337-8. 
 Koressos, Mount (above Hellenistic 
 Ephesus): 149, 151. 
 Késhk: 291, 319. 
 Kostas, Lieut. Ioannis, of 28th Greek 
 Infantry Regiment: 286-7. 
 Kosti of Constantinople: 307. 
 of Elmalyk: 307. 
 Koumla: see Kumla. 
 Kovalyja (=Kovalitsa): 233n, 248- 
 250, 252, 255, 257. 
 Kozak, The (north of Bergama): 156 n. 
 Kretan ‘Special Constabulary’ at 
 Athens (1920): 81. 
 Krete: 37, 67, 96, 163, 197. 
 “Kula(Aidin Vilayet) : > 1295128, 
 150, 170, 290. 
 Kum Kale (Dardanelles): 219. 
 Kumla, Kuchuk (Yalova-Gemlik 
 Peninsula): 264, 285-6, 296. 
 Kurdistan :—Hypothetical Govern- 
 ment of: 53, 95; Western: 50. 
 Kiirdkeui (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 Kurds: 85, 104n, 136. 
 Kurujus, Greek, in Turkish villages: 
 278, 294-5, 302. 
 Kush Adasy : see Scala Nuova. 
 Kutu’l-Amara :—British prisoners 
 from: 142; Siege of: 228. 
 Kydhoniés: see Aivali. 
 Kyrillos, Oecumenical Patriarch: see 
 Lukaris, Cyril. 
 Kyrkagach (Aidin Vilayet): 157 n. 
 Kyzylja (near Smyrna): 319. 
 Kyzyl Yrmak (‘ Red River’ =Ancient 
 Halys): 119. 
 
 Labrador Indians: 127. 
 
 Lancashire: 359-60. 
 
 Lane-Poole, Mr. Stanley: 10n. 
 
 Languages :—Arabic: 4, 117-18; Ar- 
 menian: 118-19; English: 112, 
 249; Flemish: 111; French: 4, 
 111-12; German, High: 4, 112; 
 Greek, Ancient: 20-1, 109, 194, 
 335; Greek, Modern: 20-1, 109, 113, 
 119-20, 123-4, 167, 249; Indo- 
 European : 342-3; Iranian, Modern : 
 343; Latin: 109; Near Eastern 
 
 vernacular: 8-9; Oriental, Depari- 
 ment of, in new Greek University at 
 Smyrna: 168; Prakrit, Modern 
 forms of: 4, 343; Pre-Greek in 
 Anatolia: 108, 129, 204; Sanskrit: 
 343; Syriac: 117; Turanian: 
 342, 343; Turkish: 117, 119-20, 
 123-4, 129, 166-7 (ignorance of, 
 among Greek gendarmerie in Ana- 
 tolia), 192-4; Western, Modern, 
 taught in English schools: 4. 
 
 Lapps: 342 n. 
 
 Law :—Islamic: 184n, 267, 329; 
 Roman: 329. 
 
 Laz (nationality): 283 n, 309. 
 
 League of Nations: 94-5, 326-7, 362. 
 
 Lebanon: 45, 96. 
 
 Légion @ Orient, French: 51, 118, 121, 
 312. 
 
 ‘Legitimate Warfare’ : 
 
 Lenin, Mr.: 83. 
 
 Leonardhépulos, General: 264-5, 284, 
 286, 299-311. 
 
 Leonidas, King: 347. 
 
 Levant, The: 40, 45-6, 76, 267. 
 
 Lewis guns: 151. 
 
 Liautey, General: 167. 
 
 Liebknecht, Karl: 262. 
 
 Liége, University of : 166 n. 
 
 Liman von Sanders, General: 144 n. 
 
 Lincolnshire: 215. 
 
 Liquorice: 170. 
 
 Lira :—Italian: 244; Turkish: 245. 
 
 Liutprand of Cremona, Bishop: 7. 
 
 Liverpool: 28. 
 
 Lloyd George, Mr. David: 73-80, 86-7, 
 89-91, 94, 96, 98-9, 178, 181, 228-9, 
 313. 
 
 Lombardy: 130. 
 
 Londi Kaptan of Engheré: 282 n. 
 
 London: 28, 34, 104, 151, 178, 244”; 
 see also Conferences and Treaties, s.v. 
 
 Lords, House of: 106 n. 
 
 Lukaris, Cyril: 8. 
 
 Lutfié (near Fistikli): 293 n. 
 
 Luxemburg, Rosa: 262. 
 
 Lybyer, Professor A. H.: 107. 
 
 Lydia, Ancient Kingdom of: 220, 222. 
 
 Lydians, Ancient: 116, 129, 204. 
 
 Lysimachus (General of Alexander the 
 Great): 149, 150, 152. 
 
 170, 260-1. 
 
 Macedonia, Ancient Kingdom of: 41, 
 222. 
 
 —— Eastern: 65, 67, 69. 
 
 Modern: 17-18, 27, 70, 115, 129, 
 
 140, 145-6, 160-2, 242, 246, 276, 279, 
 
 332, 
 
 Western: 243. 
 
 Mackensen, General: 26. 
 
 Madras Presidency of India: 24. 
 
 Maeander, River: 57, 116, 123, 151-2, 
 170, 196, 198, 200, 202, 215-16, 226 n, 
 229, 242, 274. 
 
 Magyars: 176, 342. 
 
 Mahmud 11., Sultan: 18, 45, 183, 344. 
 
 Malaria: 168, 238. 
 
 2c 
 
402 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Malatia: 110n. 
 
 Malta: 38, 153. 
 
 Maltaise, Prison in Rue (Smyrna): 
 204-7, 
 
 Manchester: 28. 
 
 Mandated Territories: 34, 55, 57, 86. 
 
 Mani, The (in the Peloponnese): 336. 
 
 Manysa, District of : 289-90, 318. 
 
 Town of: 95n, 142, 148, 1717, 
 226-8. 
 
 Marash: 86. 
 
 Margoliouth, Professor D.8.: 267 n. 
 
 Marmara, Sea of: 33-4, 47, 56, 69, 102, 
 121, 142, 208, 210, 216-18, 228, 260, 
 263, 315-17. 
 
 Maronites: 45. 
 
 Marseilles: 28. 
 
 ‘Mars’ Hill’ (=Areopagus): 364. 
 
 Marsovan: 154, 277, 289, 297. 
 
 Marx, Gospel according to: 351. 
 
 Masaryk, President: 39, 178%, 181, 
 185. 
 
 Massacres : passim. 
 
 Masséras, Andréas (Private in Greek 
 Army): 288. 
 
 Masuria: 188. 
 
 Mecca: 30, 198, 329 n. 
 
 Mediation in Anatolian War by Western 
 Powers: 93-8, 101, 106 n. 
 
 Medina: 198, 329 n. 
 
 ‘Mediterranean’ Racial Type: 119, 
 122. 
 
 Sea: 41, 215, 223, 333. 
 
 Mehmed Ali, Pasha of Egypt: 15, 45, 
 211 n. 
 
 Mejidié (near Fistikli): 293. 
 
 Mesopotamian Civilisation, Ancient : 
 9, 22, 222, 329, 363-4. 
 
 Mesopotamia, Modern: see Iraq. 
 
 Messana, Ancient: 41. 
 
 Mestrius Florus, L., Proconsul of Asia : 
 150. 
 
 Middle Ages, Near Eastern and 
 Western: 128. 
 
 Eastern Civilisation defined: 9- 
 
 Mogul (=Moghal) Dynasty: 10n, 45. 
 
 Moldavia: 96. 
 
 Mongol :—Confederacy: 350”; Dy- 
 nasty in China (=Yuen): 330. 
 
 ‘Mongoloid’ Racial Type: 113, 119. 
 
 Mongols: 115, 334, 340-1. 
 
 Monophysites: 268, 328-9; see also 
 Gregorian Church. 
 
 ‘Monroe Doctrine’: 359, ~ 
 
 Montpellier, University of : 335. 
 
 Moplahs of Madras Presidency: 24- 
 
 Morea : see Peloponnese. 
 
 Moriscos of Spain: 267. 
 
 Morocco, Sherif of : 29. 
 
 Moscow: 44. 
 
 Mosul: 45, 76, 86. 
 
 Mowgli: 181. 
 
 Mudania, Gulf of : see Gemlik, Gulf of. 
 
 Town of: 218, 229. 
 
 Mughla (S.W. Anatolia): 196, 216-17. 
 
 Muhammad, The Prophet: 329 n. 
 
 (Mehmed) 11. Fatih, Sultan: 10. 
 
 Ghori: 102. 
 
 Museum, British: 178. 
 
 Mustafa Kemal Pasha: 39, 178-81, 
 187, 223, 247, 255, 333. 
 
 Mykali, Cape: 333. 
 
 Mysians, Ancient: 219. 
 
 or 
 
 Nabi Bey, Representative of the 
 Sublime Porte at Paris: 101. 
 
 Naburis, Mr. I. A.: 166 n. 
 
 Nantes, Revocation of the Edict of: 
 269. 
 
 Napoleon 1., Emperor: 39, 45, 338. 
 
 N = (Seer Peninsula): 293, 
 
 95-6. 
 
 Deré (Aidin Vilayet): 169. 
 
 Nationality, Western idea of political : 
 4, 15-18, 25, 90, 117-18 (in Syria), 
 118-48 (in Anatolia), 158, 190, 195, 
 212, 243, 268, 321-3. 
 
 Navarino, Battle of : 349. 
 
 Navies :—British : 35, 74, 88, 99, 103, 
 121, 143-4, 147, 229, 235 n, 270, 272n, 
 349; French: 35, 59 and 77 (mutiny 
 in), 88, 229n, 298, 349; Greek: 
 229, 245, 287, 291. 
 
 Nazyf Pasha (near Brusa): 247, 253-4. 
 
 Nazylly (Aidin District): 123, 290. 
 
 Near Eastern Civilisation defined: 5-9. 
 
 ar ag in United States, Lynching of : 
 
 Nestorians: 268, 328-9. 
 
 Neutrality, Declaration of, by Allied 
 Powers (1921): 315. 
 
 Greek, in European War: Chap- 
 ter ITI. passim. 
 
 New World: 334. 
 
 York: 28. 
 
 Zealanders: 134. 
 
 Nicaea: see Isnik. 
 
 Nidher, General: 235 n. 
 
 — ae of (Sanjak of Smyrna): 
 
 Nihad Reshad Bey, Dr.: 134 n. 
 
 Nile, Basin of River: 35, 45. 
 
 14. 
 
 Midhat Pasha: 190. 
 
 Mihal of Hajji Mehmedin Chiftligi : 
 307. 
 
 Millet-i-Rum: see Rum Milleti. 
 
 System: 135, 173, 267-8. 
 
 Minorities :—Economic basis of: 16, 
 126-7, 146-8; German: 25, 176; 
 Inter-migration of : 70-1, 141-2, 146- 
 147; Magyar: 25,176; Moslem: 27; 
 Protection of: 53-4, 71, 90-1, 104-5, 
 127, 130, 137-8, 188-9, 192, 208, 210, 
 241, 321, 322-7; Treaties concerning : 
 see Treaties, s.v. 
 
 Missionaries :—Catholic: 8, 38, 465, 
 104, 298, 334; Protestant: 38, 45, 
 104, 119, 344, 359. 
 
 Mithridates of Pontus, King: 223-4. 
 
 Mitylini: 70, 125, 130, 140, 143, 166 n. 
 
 Modus Vivendi between different 
 civilisations: 14, 31, 36, 177, 190, 
 321-2, 345, 357, 361-4. 
 
INDEX 403 
 
 * Noble Lies’: 104. 
 
 Nomadism, Central Asian: 9, 10-11, 
 111, 113-14, 203, 223, 268, 331, 334- 
 335, 338-344, 354-6. 
 
 Nonconformists, English: 132. 
 
 Non-co-operation: 60, 357-61. 
 
 ‘Nordic’ Racial Type: 119-20. 
 
 Normans: 7, 110-11. 
 
 Norway: 202. 
 
 Odemish, District of : 290, 318. 
 
 Town of: 17] », 227. 
 
 Odessa: 77, 202, 225, 245. 
 
 Olive-culture: 122-5, 151, 203, 245. 
 
 Olmsted, Frederick Law: 338 n. 
 
 Olympian Gods, Cult of the: 336. 
 
 Olympus, Mysian Mt.: 216, 249, 253. 
 
 Omer Bey (near Gemlik): 103, 292, 
 313-19. 
 
 Efendi of Késhk, Sultanhissarly 
 oghlu: 291. 
 
 Orange-eulture in Greece: 245. 
 
 Orphanage at Smyrna, Turkish: 168. 
 
 Orta Burun (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Orthodox Church: 6 (overshadowed 
 by East Roman Empire), 8 (Synod of 
 
 1691), 20, 118-14, 118-21, 128, 
 
 161, 192-6 (Turkish-speaking adher- 
 
 ents of), 329, 338 (Book of Offices and 
 Chant-Book of), 355-6. 
 
 Osman Ertoghrul oghlu, Emir: 144, 247. 
 
 Agha Kiresiinlii: 156, 277, 289- 
 290, 297. 
 Otto of Greece, King: 166. 
 
 Ottoman Army : 18-20 (Westernisation 
 
 of), Chapters V., VI., VIII. passim. 
 Caliphate: see Caliphate, s.v. 
 
 and 18 (crisis of 1774-1841), 42, 45, 
 
 95-6 (autonomy in), 115-17 (rise of), 
 
 182-6 (political parties in), 3387, 
 348-4, 355 n, 356. 
 
 War: 64, 141, 
 
 Parliament : 135, 153, 187-8, 190, 
 207, 209, — 
 
 ‘Ottomanisation’: 1365. 
 
 Oxford, University of: 66. 
 
 Pacific Ocean; 3, 
 
 Padua, University of: 8. 
 
 Paederasty in Ancient Greece ; 347. 
 
 Palestine : 34, 38, 45, 55, 86, 118, 190, 
 213. 
 
 Lord Allenby’s vietory in (1918) : 
 85, 87, 230 n, 256. 
 
 Pamirs, The: 149. 
 
 Panayoti of Arnautkeui, Hajji Topuz (?) 
 oghlu: 282. 
 
 Panderma: 216, 228. 
 
 Pan-Islamism: 214, 358. 
 
 Turanianism : 42, 180, 214, 355 n. 
 
 Papagrigoriu, Captain Dhimftrios: 
 299-311. 
 
 Papoultépoulos, Adjutant (28th In- 
 
 fantry Regiment of Greek Army): 
 28 
 
 e 
 
 Empire: 9-12 (institutions of), 15 
 
 Intervention of, in European 
 
 Papulas, General: 222, 305. 
 
 Paradise Lost: 347. 
 
 Paris: 28, 34, 104, 136, 262 (Commune 
 of, in 1871), 335. 
 
 University of : 66, 202. 
 
 Parthia, Ancient: 224. 
 
 Pashakeui (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 Patriarchate at Constantinople, Oecu- 
 menical: see Constantinople, s.v. 
 
 Paul, St.: 364. 
 
 : Prison of’: 149. 
 
 Pawns, Small Powers used as: 61-2, 
 Chapter III. passim. 
 
 Pazarjyk (near Brusa): 247, 250-1, 
 253, 255. 
 
 Pazarkeui (near Gemlik): 284, 296, 311. 
 
 Peloponnese: 109, 114-15, 122, 124, 
 242-3, 325, 336-7. 
 
 — Governments, Ancient : 
 
 0. 
 
 Pergamon, Ancient Kingdom of: 41, 
 222-3. 
 
 Pericles: 29, 128, 221. 
 
 Persia: 11, 29, 30, 46, 194%, 213, 
 343, 359. 
 
 Anglo-Russian Agreement eon- 
 cerning : see Treaties, Anglo-Russian 
 (1907). 
 
 Persian Empire, Ancient: 216, 220-2. 
 
 National Movement, Modern: 214. 
 
 Persians: 188, 
 
 ‘Personal Statute’: 120n. 
 
 Pertev Mehmed Pasha Jamy’‘sy (Ismid): 
 298. 
 
 Peter the Great, Tsar: 8. 
 
 Petrograd: 44, 48, 245. 
 
 Pétses: 124, 
 
 Phanariots: 1667. 
 
 Philhellenism : 28, 139, 177, 240, 245, 
 305, 338, 355. 
 
 Philologists, Western; 343. 
 
 Philosophers, The Seven Last Ancient : 
 336 
 
 Phokiés: 143 n, 169. 
 
 Photi of Imraly, Papa (Orthodox Priest 
 of Armudlu): 294. 
 
 Phrygian Kings, Citadel and Sepul- 
 chres of Ancient: 218. 
 
 Phrygians, Ancient : 113, 116, 129, 204, 
 219, 
 
 Picot, M. Georges: 48. 
 
 Pilsudsky, General: 39. 
 
 Pitt, The Younger: 39, 64. 
 
 Puis 1x., Pope: 185. 
 
 Plato: 10, 194, 336. 
 
 Plebiscites: 164, 188, 208-10, 
 
 Poland: 42-3, 89, 148, 176, 189, 214, 
 261, 323. 
 
 Poles: 44, 112, 245. 
 
 Polytechnique at Smyrna, Turkish 
 Ecole: 171, 174, 177. 
 
 Pompeii: 204. 
 
 Pompey the Great: 223-4. 
 
 Pontus, Ancient: 223-4. 
 
 ‘Pontus,’ Modern Greek Nationalism 
 in: 119, 154, 156, 190, 192, 275, 
 289-91, 311-3. 
 
404 
 
 Poona: 360. 
 Porte, Sublime : 
 172, 179, 181, 
 210, 259. 
 Potti(? Photi) of Arnautkeui, Kumarjy 
 oghlu: 282 n. 
 Prag, University of : 
 Princeton University : 
 Prisons at Smyrna, Greek : 
 Professors in Politics: 178. 
 Propaganda: 28, 344-5, 
 Protestant Universities: 8. 
 Protestantism: 262 (Ulster), 269 
 (Hungarian and South German), 
 327 (American), 328 (Near and 
 Middle Eastern), (Reformation). 
 ‘ Proto-Aryas’: 343 
 Prussia, Kingdom of : "40, 214, 269. 
 Prussians, Old: 268. 
 Psalter: 338. 
 
 Quai d’Orsay: 39, 105, 
 Qur’an: 198, 267. 
 
 93, 100, 106 n, 
 183, 185, 187, 
 
 154, 
 208, 
 
 112, 1787. 
 178 n. 
 169, 204-7. 
 
 Rahmy Bey, Ex-Vali of Smyrna: 175. 
 
 Railways : — Aidin (=Ottoman) 
 [British]: 58n, 123, 170, 191, 202, 
 213, 215-16, 226, 274, 319; Ana- 
 tolian [German]: 232, 247, 251; 
 Baghdad [German]: 54, 57, 85, 104, 
 149, 214, 218, 222, 247; Eski 
 Shehir-Kara Hissar Section of Ana- 
 tolian: 217-19, 230-1, 232, 236; 
 General, in Anatolia: 145, 154, 215, 
 218-19, 231; Iraq, Built by the 
 British Army in: 213”; Kasaba 
 [French]: 128, 213,. 216, 226; 
 Oriental [Austrian]: 34, 243; Pan- 
 derma Branch of Kasaba: 216, 228, 
 230; Syrian [French] 213; Trans- 
 Caspian [Russian]: 341-2; Trans- 
 Siberian [Russian]: 333; Trans- 
 Turkestan [Russian]: 333. 
 
 Raki: 296. 
 
 Rawlinson, Colonel: 154, 
 
 Rayah: 11, 30, 268. 
 
 Record Office, British Public: 73. 
 
 Red Crescent Society, Ottoman :— 
 Constantinople Branch: 139; Mis- 
 sion of, to S.E. coasts of the Sea 
 of Marmara: 33, 102, Chapter VII, 
 passim ; Smyrna Branch: 176. 
 
 Cross at Geneva, International 
 Committee of the: 259 n, 278, 284-5, 
 299, 306. 
 
 —— Indians: 
 
 Sea: 197. 
 
 Reform Bill of 1832: 66. 
 
 Refugees (and Deportees) :—Alien, 
 from East Coast of Great Britain : 
 144; Armenian (1915): see Arme- 
 nians massacred in 1915-22; Cilician 
 (1921-2): 242, 312; Greek from 
 Hast Roman Empire : 335; Greek 
 from ‘Pontus’: see *‘ Pontus,’ Mo- 
 dern Greek Nationalism in; Greek 
 from Western Anatolia; 122, 133, 
 
 134. 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 140-6, 167-8; Kretan Moslem: 120, 
 139, 171, 281 ; Ottoman Ministry of : 
 138-9, 140n, 169, 191; Rumili 
 Moslem: 138-40, 144-6; Turkish 
 from Anatolia: 133, 139, 168-9, 
 Chapter VII. passim; Turkish 
 from Constantinople (March 1920): 
 153-4, 227. 
 
 Relativity : 
 
 Renaissance, The : 
 
 Renegades: 115. 
 
 Reparations, German: 3, 76. 
 
 Reshadié (Kaza of Yalova): 284, 311. 
 
 Revolutions: — English ‘Glorious’ 
 (1688): 269; Froneh (1788 segq.) : 
 183, 262, 265, 337-8; Industrial : 
 359-360 ; Ottoman (1908) : 131, 186, 
 190, 202, 269 n, 352-3; Russian Bol- 
 shevik (1917): 46, 154, 183, 202, 
 351; Russian Liberal (1917): 48, 342. 
 
 Rhine, River: 112, 188. 
 
 Frontier, The: 76. 
 
 Rhodes, Cecil: 38. 
 
 Island of: 38, 41, 222. 
 
 Rifat Bey, Kaimakam of Alashehir 
 (1921): 290. 
 
 Riga: 334. 
 
 Riza Tewfik Bey, ‘the Philosopher’ 
 181, 185-6. 
 Roman Empire : 
 221-4, 268. 
 
 Senators: 337. 
 
 Rome: 106n, 151. ‘ 
 
 ‘Romyi’ (=Rum): 130, 194, 336. 
 
 Ross, Ludwig: 166 n. 
 
 Rum: 31, 130, 194. 
 
 Rumania: 18, 25-8, 43, 64, 176, 189, 
 195, 244, 323. 
 
 Rumans: 44, 110. 
 
 Rumelia: see Rumili. 
 
 Eastern: 96. 
 
 Rum Milleti: 120, 122 n, 130. 
 
 Rumili: 120, 124, 129-30, 146, 179, 
 195, 212, 382, 352. 
 
 Rupel, Fort: 67. 
 
 Russia :—General;: 6, 38, 40, 42-3, 48, 
 110, 114, 127, 148, 195 (secession 
 of Orthodox Church in, from Oecu- 
 menical Patriarchate), 204, 211, 214, 
 218-19, 223, 225, 239, 245, 261, 262 Nn, 
 281, 313, 321, 333 (Russia i in Europe 
 and Asia), 341- 2 (Expansion of, over 
 nomad pasture-lands), 348, 350-1 
 (attitude of, towards the West), 
 353 n, 355-6, 362; Soviet Govern- 
 ment of, at Moscow: 23, 48, 59, 76 
 89, 92, 190, 214, 225, 245; ‘Times 
 of Trouble’ in: 351. 
 
 Russian :—Literature: 350-1; Mos- 
 lems: 29, 42, 355-6; Music: 350; 
 Muzhiks: 342; ‘Whites’: 89, 225, 
 245. 
 
 Russo-British : 
 
 Russo-Turkish Entente (1920-2) : 
 
 13, 345, 350. 
 330. 
 
 9, 11, 41, 116, 128, 
 
 see Anglo-Russian. 
 23-4. 
 
 76. 
 181, 185, 
 
 Saar, Basin of River : 
 Sabahu’d-Din, Prince: 
 
INDEX 
 
 | Shukri 
 
 Sadyk Bey (Turkish Nationalist Com- 
 missioner at Marsovan in 1921): 
 277, 289. 
 
 Saguntum, Ancient: 41. 
 
 St. Davids, Lord : 
 
 Sakkaria, River: 57, 98, 192, 237, 239, 
 242, 315, 319. 
 
 Sakkaris, Mr. G.: 121 n. 
 
 Salisbury, Lord: 40. 
 
 Saljuqs : see Turks, Saljuq. 
 
 Salonika: 45, 67, 109, 129, 130, 143, | 
 
 167, 194 n. 
 
 —— Expedition (1915-18): 66-7, 82, | 
 | Slovenes: 44, 
 Smyrna :—City and Zone of: 34, 52, 
 
 225, 236 n, 239, 252. 
 Salyhly, District of : 290. 
 
 Town of: 123, 173, 201. 
 Salzburg, Prince Bishop of: 269. 
 Samanly (Kaza of Yalova): 
 
 301-5, 311. 
 Dagh: see Yalova-Gemlik Penin- 
 sula, 
 Samos: 96, 123, 130, 140, 166». 
 Samsun, Sanjak of : 311. 
 San Francisco: 28. 
 San‘a, Imam of: 29. 
 Sanhedrin, Ancient Jewish: 181. 
 Sapaunjoghlu, M. (French Vice-Consul 
 at Aivali): 143. 
 Saraikeui-on-Maeander: 216. 
 Sarukhan, Principality of : 116. 
 Sary Su (tributary of Maeander) : 
 200. 
 
 293-4, 
 
 Satan, Miltonic: 347. 
 
 Saxons, Old: 268. 
 
 Scala Nuova (=Kush Adasy): 161 n, 
 226 a. 
 
 Scheldt, River: 188. 
 
 Schliemann, Heinrich: 65. 
 
 Scientists, Ancient Greek: 333-4. 
 
 Scotland: 359. 
 
 Scots: 188, 
 
 . Seripts, Armenian and Greek: 119-20, 
 129, 193, 
 
 Seutari (suburb of Constantinople) : 
 180 n, 310. 
 
 Seythians; 334. 
 
 Seely, Major-General: 97 n. 
 
 se Sa Ancient Empire of the: 41, 
 
 Self-determination: 188-9. 
 
 Selimié (near Fistikli): 287. 
 
 Senusi Fraternity: 30. 
 
 Seraglio Point : 310. 
 
 Serbia: 64, 67 (Treaty with Greece), 
 96, 148, 195 (secession of Orthodox 
 Church in, from Oecumenical 
 Patriarchate). 
 
 Serbian Army: 20. 
 
 Serbs: 44, 129, 136, 138, 161. 
 
 Serres: 194 n. 
 
 Shamanism : 
 
 Shanghai: 37. 
 
 Sheikhu’l-Islam, Fetwa of Ottoman: 
 184-5. 
 
 Shere Khan: 181. 
 
 Shiis: 9, 29. 
 
 405 
 
 Efendi Chiftligi (Kaza of 
 
 ‘Sick Man of Europe,’ The: 96. 
 
 Silesia : 3, 26, 112, 188, 231 n. 
 
 Sillé (near Konia): 119 n. 
 
 Simav: 150, 216-18, 228. 
 
 Sindaghmatarkhs (=Bimbashys): 299. 
 
 Sinn Feiners: 262. 
 
 Sivas: 218-19, 238. 
 
 Slavophilism : 3651. 
 
 Slavs, Migrations of the: 109, 336. 
 Spread of Near Eastern Civilisa- 
 
 tion among the: 11. 
 
 56, 64, 70, 76-7, and thereafter 
 passim ; Landing of Greek troops at 
 (15th May 1919): 17, 35, 78-80, 
 83-5, 92-3, 107-8, 130-1, 133, 145, 
 148, 151, 153-4, 164, 168n, 173-4, 
 179, 183, 186-7, 226, 232n, 244%, 
 265, 270-3, 276, 298, 312; New 
 Greek University at: 166, 173, 175; 
 Orthodox Metropolitan Bishop of: 
 271; Local Parliament prescribed 
 for: 155, 164, 172; Statistics of 
 population in: 93, 133-4. 
 
 Soap-making : 122, 151, 355-6. 
 
 Sofia: 34. 
 
 Soghanderé District (Aidin Vilayet) : 
 
 318, 
 
 Sokia: 226 n, 
 
 Soma: 166. 
 
 ‘Souls, Women and negroes have no’: 
 327, : 
 
 Soviet Government of Russia at Moscow: 
 see Russia, 8.v. 
 
 Sodyiid: 217, 219, 247. 
 
 Soyuljak (near Yalova): 284. 
 
 Spain: 40, 267, 
 
 Sparta, Ancient; 177, 212, 364. 
 
 Sperkhiés, River: 242, 
 
 Stambolisky, Mr,: 39, 43. 
 
 Stamboul: 132, 263. 
 
 Steffens of Breslau, Professor: 178 7, 
 
 Sterghiddhis, Mr.: Chapter V. passim, 
 272 
 
 Strabo: 150. 
 Straits, Black Sea: 34, 46-7, 70-1, 74, 
 76, 87, 188, 208, 210, 219, 227-9. 
 Command of, by Allied 
 Navies: 55, 91, 145, 153%; Com- 
 mission of: 94; Zone of: 47, 70-1, 
 94 
 
 Stratighos, K.: 237 n. 
 Struma, Valley of River: 69. 
 Stiirgkh, Count: 262. 
 Styliands of Arnautkeui: 294, 
 of Katyrly (? identical with the 
 above): 282 n. 
 Styrians: 129. 
 Sudan, Egyptian: 45. 
 Suez, Isthmus of: 45. 
 Canal: 213. 
 Suleiman the Magnifieent, Sultan : 183. 
 of Tiré, Isbartaly Hajji: 291. 
 
406 
 
 we ey Turkey, H.M. the reigning : 
 Sultanié (near Fistikli): 187, 193. 
 (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Sultaniyyah (Sultanié) Sehool 
 Smyrna: 171-7. 
 
 Sunium, Cape: 333. 
 
 Sunnis: 29. 
 
 Susa, Ancient: 220. 
 
 Sweden: 40. 
 
 Switzerland: 16, 202, 237. 
 
 Sword, Knights of the: 268. 
 
 Syghyrjyk (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 Sykes, Sir Mark: 487. 
 
 —— Picot Agreement: see Treaties, 
 Anglo-Franco-Russian (1916). 
 
 Syphilis: 168. 
 
 Syra, Island of: 34. 
 
 Syracuse, Ancient: 41. 
 
 Syria: 11, 34, 55, 57, 60, 74, 84-7, 
 104, 110 n, 117-18, 190, 213-14, 224, 
 228, 281, 359. 
 
 Syrians: 30, 45. 
 
 at 
 
 Taghmatarkhs (== Yuzbashys): 299. 
 Taj Mahal (at Agra): 10. 
 Talaat Pasha: 186, 191. 
 Talents, Parable of the: 134. 
 Tarsus, Ancient: 364. 
 Taurus Mountains: 213. 
 Tunnel: 214, 218. 
 Taxpayers: 59, 84. 
 Tchecho-Slovakia:; 43, 176, 189, 323. 
 Tchechs: 44, 112, 132, 181. 
 Tekké, Deserted (in Cayster Valley) : 
 201. 
 
 Telegraph Company, Eastern: 305. 
 Tepé Keui (near Torbaly): 201-3. 
 Tepékhané (Ismid): 298. 
 
 Terror, French: 262. 
 
 Teutonic institutions: 11. 
 
 Tewfik Pasha (Grand Vizier): 185. 
 
 Theism : 330. 
 
 Theophilus, Emperor: 1947. 
 
 Thessaly : 132, 202, 
 
 Thomas of Elmalyk: 307. 
 
 Thrace, Eastern: 17, 27, 34, 66, 68, 73, 
 76, 82, 93, 95, 109, 133 n, 139 nm, 194, 
 222, 228, 332. 
 
 Western: 68-9, 71, 
 109, 188, 208, 210, 332. 
 
 Thueydides: 29, 221 n. 
 
 Tigris, River: 85, 213, 
 
 Times Correspondent at Constan- 
 tinople : 39, 100-1, 192, 237 n, 277 n, 
 289 n. 
 
 Timur Lenk (=Tamerlane): 116. 
 
 Tiré, District of : 290, 318. 
 
 Town of: 161, 198-201, 291. 
 
 Tisza, Count: 262. 
 
 Tiyenli (Aidin Vilayet): 289. 
 
 Tobacco-culture in Greece: 245. 
 
 Tolstoy, Leo: 198. 
 
 Torbaly (Cayster Valley): 
 202, 290. 
 
 Tralleis: 196, 216. 
 
 73, 76, 82, 
 
 161, 168, 
 
 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Transcaucasia: 43, 50, 56n, 59, 74, 
 110, 118, 145, 211 », 213, 218-19, 313. 
 
 Treaties :—Alexandropol (1920): 56; 
 Anglo - Franco - Russian concerning 
 Constantinople (1915): 47-8, 54-6; 
 Anglo - Franco - Russian concerning 
 Asiatic Turkey (1916): 48-51, 53- 
 86, 214; Anglo-Russian concerning 
 Persia (1907): 46, 53-4; Berlin 
 (1878): 75, 145, 279, 332, 352 ; 
 Brest-Litovsk (1918): 25; Bukarest 
 (1913): 141; Cyprus Convention 
 (1878): 75”; ¥Franklin-Bouillon 
 Agreement (1921): 54, 56-7, 60, 84- 
 85, 89, 101, 104-5, 178; Kars (1921): 
 56”; Kuchuk Kainarjy (1774): 13, 
 30, 321; London (for pacification of 
 Greece, 1827): 348”; London 
 (Protocol of 1830): 349; London 
 (Convention of 1832): 65%; Lon- 
 don (Agreement between Entente 
 Powers and Italy, 1915): 51; Mi- 
 norities, Treaties coneerning pro- 
 tection of: 323; Moscow (1921): 
 56”; Saint Jean de Maurienne 
 (1917): 51-3, 56-7, 77; San Stefano 
 (1878): 75”; Sévres (Treaty of 
 Peace with Turkey, 1920): 3, 27, 34- 
 35, 47, 49-50, 52, 56-7, 64, 80, 82-3, 
 85, 93-6, 98, 104, 133, 155, 163-4, 
 172-3, 177; 188, 227, 321, 358; 
 Sévres (Tripartite Treaty of, 1920): 
 50, 52-4, 104; Trianon (1920): 43; 
 Versailles (1919): 25, 90. 
 
 Trebizond, Town of: 50, 283 n. 
 
 —— Vilayet of: 311. 
 
 Trentino: 130. 
 
 Trieste: 28, 126, 130. 
 
 Tripoli (North Africa): 211%, 352. 
 
 Troad: 216, 228. 
 
 Trotsky, Mr.: 83. 
 
 Trumbi¢, Dr.; 185. 
 
 Tsardom, Russian: 92, 214, 342. 
 
 Tulu Punar (near Ushaq): 234, 236. 
 
 Tundras: 333. 
 
 Tunis; 21ln, 
 
 Turcification of Anatolia: 111-17, 220. 
 
 Turcophilism ; 28-32, 
 
 Turco-Russian : see Russo-Turkish. 
 
 ‘Turk, The Unspeakable’; 327 (‘in- 
 capable of progress ’), 334. 
 
 Turkey : see Ottoman Empire, 
 
 Turkish Army: 94, 123%, 142, 153, 
 156, 157”, 188, 205, Chapters VI. 
 and VII. passim, 237 n (strength of), 
 240-1 (prisoners of war in Greek 
 hands). 
 
 Empire in Central Asia: 336% ; 
 ‘Entente Libérale’ Party: 181, 
 185; Government at Constantinople : 
 see Porte, Sublime: Great National 
 Assembly at Angora: 54, 97, 178, 
 190, 238, 333; Intervention in the 
 European War: 141, 213; Mu- 
 sicians: 161; Nationalist Govern- 
 ment at Angora: 23, 39, 54, 56, 84, 
 93, 100-1, 104-5, Chapter V. passim, 
 
INDEX 
 
 214, 223, 245, 277, 289-90, 311; 
 Nationalist Movement: 18, 30, 57, 
 84, 92, 153-4, 179-96, 214, 229, 312, 
 322, 358; National Pact: 84, 188- 
 190, 207-10, 349; War-material: 153, 
 186, 227; Women: 180, 344, 
 
 Turks :—Christian: 192-6; Gagauz: 
 194”; Ghuzz: 194; #£Karait 
 Jewish: 194n; Saljuq: 111-15, 
 119, 129, 150, 193, 194"; Tiirkmens: 
 342; Vardariots: 194; Volga: 
 355-6; Young: 129, 135-6, 269n; 
 see also Union and Progress, Com- 
 mittee of. 
 
 Ukrainians: 110, 112. 
 Ulashly Iskelesi: 287 », 288. 
 Ulster Auxiliaries: 262. 
 Ulstermen: 26, 
 Unemployment 
 (1921): 3. 
 
 Union and Progress, Committee of: 
 129, 135, 151, 178, 186, 280. 
 
 United States of America: 28 (Greek 
 colonies in), 60 (Senate of, and Non- 
 co-operation Movement in), 66 
 (Spoils system in), 82 (Intervention 
 of, in European War), 87, 125, 134 
 (attitude of, towards Far-Eastern 
 immigrants), 162 (citizens of, travel- 
 ling in Anatolia), 177, 189, 203-4, 
 249, 257, 261-2 (lynching of negroes 
 in), 289 (citizens of, eye-witnesses 
 of Turkish atrocities), 327 n and 338 n 
 (Southern States of), 335 (classical 
 studies in), 359 (Non-co-operation 
 Movement in). 
 
 Ushaq: 157, 173, 215-16, 229-30, 
 233, 236, 290. 
 
 Uvez Punar (Kaza of Yalova): 311. 
 
 in Great Britain 
 
 Vacua, International: 40-4. 
 
 Varna: 34, 168. 
 
 Vases, Ancient Greek: 204. 
 
 Vasilikés, Mr. G. P.: 166 n. 
 
 Vendée, La: 262. 
 
 Venetia: 130. 
 
 Venetian Villa: 37. 
 
 Venice: 8, 37-8. 
 
 Venizelos (= Venezélos), Mr. Elef- 
 thérios: 39, Chapter III. passim, 
 141, 163-4, 180-1, 183, 228-9, 232, 
 243, 271, 313. 
 
 Vespasian, Emperor: 150. 
 
 Vienna: 28-9, 204. 
 
 Vistritza (=Haliakmon), River: 242. 
 
 Vurla; 141. 
 
 Wahhabis: 30. 
 
 Wakf: 172. 
 
 Wallachia: 96. 
 
 Wars :—Balkan (1912-13): 17, 69-70, 
 129, 137-40, 145, 160, 231”, 235, 
 239, 243, 276, 332, 352; Candia, of 
 (1644-69): 37; Crimean (1854-6): 
 153; European (1914-18): 2, 36, 
 
 407 
 
 47, 58, 62, Chapter ITI. passim, 107 
 112, 118, 141-5, 148, 151, 156, 159, 
 175, 185, 188, 190%, 202, 2l1ln, 
 213, 225, 234, 236, 239, 241, 244, 
 246, 262, 294, 320, 342, 358; Franco- 
 Prussian (1870-1): 262; Franco- 
 Russian (1812): 230; Franco- 
 Turkish in Cilicia (1920-1): 84, 90, 
 104, 154, 191, 228, 242,312; Graeco- 
 Bulgar (913-1019): 6, 110; Graeco- 
 Turkish=Greek War of Independ- 
 ence (1821-9): 15, 17, 18, 64, 66, 122, 
 131, 167, 190, 243, 279, 337, 348-9, 
 352; Graeco-Turkish (1897): 17, 
 37, 132, 160; Graeco-Turkish (1919- 
 1922): 27, 34-6, 39-40, 91-2, 97-8, 
 100-1, 103, 107-8, 128, 155-6, 159, 
 162-3, 192, Chapters VI. and VII. 
 passim, 350, 354, 357; Greek Civil 
 (1823-4): 64, 349; Peloponnesian 
 (431-404 B.c.): 221, 363-4; Russo- 
 Turkish (1768-74): 355; Russo- 
 Turkish (1828-9): 15, 18; Serbo- 
 Turkish (1804-17): 17. 
 
 Washington, George: 180. 
 
 Western :—Churches: 28, 329; Civil- 
 isation, homelands of: 11; Hypoc- 
 risy: 353; Imperialism: Chapters 
 II. and III. passim, 357; Intelli- 
 gentsia: 352; Military attachés: 
 102-3, 254-8, 263, 294n, 298, 299- 
 311; Political ideas, Spread of: 4; 
 Press: 28, 59, 91, 360; Public 
 opinion and prejudice : 35, 58-62, 
 74, 76, 89-91, 105, 137, 177, 190, 
 211-12, 327-53 ; Religious toleration : 
 8, 267-9; seamen: 188; soldiers: 
 2, 59, 84, 103, 344. 
 
 Westerners (=Franks): 9, 31, 198, 
 259 (conventional humanitarianism 
 of modern), 344 (residing in the Hast), 
 359 (expelled from Japan and 
 Abyssinia in the 17th century). 
 
 Whitehall: 132. 
 
 Wilhelm 11. of Germany, Emperor: 89. 
 
 William 111. of England, King: 269 n. 
 
 Wilson, President Woodrow: 50, 60, 
 76, 178, 328. 
 
 Winterton, Earl: 79». 
 
 Wrangel, General: 83, 89, 225. 
 
 Xenophon: 216, 221. 
 Xerxes: 220. 
 
 Yalova, Kaza of: 259, 283, 293. 
 Town of: 139, 263, 275, 
 287, 294, 299-311, 315, 
 Gemlik Peninsula: 143, 
 242, 269, 277-8, 283-8, 292, 
 297, 311, 313, 315-16. 
 Yannina: 139, 164. 
 Ydhbra: 124. 
 Yemen: 19-20. 
 Yenij6é Vardar: 115. 
 Yorgo Kaptan of Gemlik: 286-7. 
 Yortan (Kaza of Yalova): 306, § 
 311. 
 
408 THE WESTERN QUESTION 
 
 Yoryi of Arnautkeui, YokAtos: 282. | Yusuf Kemal Bey: 54, 60, 84, 101 
 Ormanjy (Greek Kuruju of; 178-9. 
 Samanly): 294. 
 Yudenich, General: 50. | 
 Yukara Bey Keui (near Bergama): | Zaghlul Pasha, S.: 181. 
 161, 170. Zante: 338. 
 ‘Yunanistan ’ (<= Kingdom of Greece): | Zara: 126. 
 
 130. Zimmis: 268. 
 Yuruk Ali (Chett6 leader in the | Zionism: 45. 
 
 Maeander Valley): 196. | Zoological Gardens (London): 41. 
 Yuruks: 199-200. | Zoroastrians : 224, 268. 
 
Brindisi 
 
 11-13 Jan. 
 
 oo 
 .) 
 
 Corfu Y 
 
 14 Jan, 
 
 Florinag 
 
 3 Sept. Salonika 
 
 ZR2-7 Sept. 
 
 ozhani 
 é oet-6 Sept. 
 Shatishta 
 5 Sept. 
 
 Larisag 
 
 Olympia 
 024.26 Aug. 
 
 Ky < iaal 
 23 Aug. ~ \9% 
 wned’®ud R- 
 19vaX*  Sparta\/6-17-Aug. 
 
 vty 
 
 TO ENGLAND 
 
 16 Sept. a 
 
 CONSTANTINOPLE 
 17 March-2 Aug. 
 9-16 Sept. 
 
 3- ril 
 6-9 March. 7.13 April 
 ukara Bey Keui 
 fare 
 Pergama 2-5 March 
 
 Kinik 2 March 
 
 W(16 March 
 
 seit &, 
 30 Mi 
 
 Yalova 
 / 24-25 May, 4-6 June. 
 / 
 
 smid 
 29 June-3 July. 
 a ae 
 y~~S-—— Karamursal 
 a 1 July. 
 —~Gemlik 9 April, 2-4 June, 
 O, \___ 13-15 June, 23 June. 
 
 g\. “Ermeni Sélos 
 ss 9-10 April 
 Headquarters of Greek 
 3rd.Division at 
 Kopru Hissar 3 April 
 
 Headquarters of Greek 
 7th. Division 
 
 \ 
 
 31 March - 2 April 
 Manysa 26 Feb.-1 March 
 Sardis 8 Feb, 
 
 Kula 
 P6-7 Feb. 
 
  oUshagq 2-5 Feb 
 
 Ne “= Alashehirl-2 & 5-7 Feb. 
 ~S Salyhly 7-8 Feb, 
 \ Smyrna 27 Jan.-15 March 3-8Aug 
 Tiré 16 Feb. 
 
 \ \Dagh Emir 15 Feb. 
 
 \ Aidin 13-75 Feb, 
 Kirkinjé 12-13 Feb. 
 
 THE 
 
 AUTHOR'S JOURNEYS IN 1921 
 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 lh 
 
 ij i 
 | 004056415 
 | 40K 
 | 956 ol 
 | 766831 
 | cee 
 e 
 | DATE DUE 
 
 >. 
 ~ es 
 ay iY 
 "7 ae 
 ei 
 
 pe] 
 o 
 
 < 
 Z 
 
 uy 
 2 
 1] 
 m 
 So 
 
 | \ 1951 
 Ika JAN 1 7 1966 
 
tas 
 
 2>= 
 
 . 5a 
 es? = 
 
 »4 
 +a y eee 
 
 a 
 
 a 
 
 ‘ 
 a 
 ' 
 
 ce 
 
 < 
 
 rat 
 
 inthe 
 hares * 
 se 
 
 ain n wn nit nnswte BP 
 
 apie?