THE TURKO-GRECIAN WAR
THE Turks are not the ferocious fanatics that our respect for the commandment against bearing false witness does not forbid us to affirm. They are a good-natured, rather indolent people, among whom all races and religions find security in good behavior, and, in so far as differences of social and religious customs will allow, fraternity. They are a trifle corrupt, but from neither an American legislator nor his constituents is censure of political profligacy in other lands than ours an edifying utterance. In Mohammedan countries even slavery is a light affliction. As to “savagery,” “butchery” and the rest of it, let the ten thousand Americans murdered with impunity by their own countrymen last year open their white lips and testify. And let the ten thousand who are to be murdered this year reserve judgment on the right of the American character to mount the pulpit anddeal damnation round on heads that wear the fez.
Like the Bulgarian “massacres” of a few years ago, which so pained the blameless soul of Christendom and drew from holy Mr. Gladstone that Christianly charitable term, “the unspeakable Turk,” the Armenian “massacres” are mostly moonshine—as massacres. It should never be forgotten that our accounts of these deplorable events come almost altogether from Christian missionaries—narrow, bigoted zealots, who doubtless stand well in the other world, but in this world are untrustworthy historians of the troubles which their impenitent meddlesomeness incites. They are swift and willing witnesses, and their interest lies in the direction of exaggeration. Not much of moderation and disinterestedness can under any circumstances be expected of persons who make it the business of their lives to go abroad to crack theological nuts upon the heads of others and eat the kernels themselves. A man of sane heart and right reason will no more interfere with the spiritual affairs of others than with their temporal. This much any one may know who has the sense to learn: that the troubles in Armenia are not religious persecutions, butpolitical disturbances, and that next to Mohammedan Kurds the most incorrigible scamps in Asia are Armenian Christians.
Among military men the superior character of Turkish soldiers is a familiar consideration. The war minister or general who should order or conduct a campaign against them without conceding to their terrible fighting qualities a particular attention in reckoning the chances of success would show a lamentable ignorance of his business. For that veritable folly the Greeks recently paid through the nose. With a childish trust in an enthusiasm that hardly outlasted the smoke of the first gun, they threw their undisciplined crowds against superior numbers of these formidable fighters in a quarrel in which their only hope of national existence if beaten lay in the magnanimity of the Powers whose protection they disclaimed. It is by the sufferance and grace of these Powers that the name of Greece remains on the map of Europe.
All this sentiment about the debt that civilization owes to Greece is foolish: the Greece to which civilization is indebted for its glorious heritage of art, philosophy and literature is dead these many ages—a memory anda name. The debtor is without a creditor, the claimant without a claim. Greece would herself be justly liable for her share of the debt if there were anybody to whom to pay it. As to the claims of “our common religion” (that is, the right to our assistance in violating our common religion’s fundamental and most precious precepts) it should be sufficient to say that if the modern Greek is a Christian Christ was not. If Christ were among the Athenians to-day they would part his raiment among them before crucifixion and cast lots for his vesture with loaded dice.
From the first the cause of the Greeks was hopeless. They were a feeble nation making unjust war against a strong one. They were a merely warlike people attacking a military people—the worst soldiers in Europe, without commanders, challenging the best soldiers in the world led by two able strategists. Without resources, without credit, without allies, and relying upon miracles, they flung themselves upon an enemy favored by united Europe. It was the act not of heroes, but of madmen. Had they been content to accept the autonomy of Crete their action in occupying that island would have commanded at least the respect of every poker-player in theworld. Demanding all, they naturally got nothing. True, they had the moral support of that part of Christendom addicted to the flourish of tongues, and were particularly rich in resolutions of American sympathy, some of them beautifully engrossed on parchment.
One of the most amusing rascalities of that war was the attempt to invest it with a religious character. This smug villainy was especially manifest in the “resolutions” and the telegrams of press correspondents, from whom we heard very little about the Turks and the Greeks, but a great deal about the “Moslems” and the “Christians.” Even the soldierly superiority of the Turks in valor and discipline was perverted to their disparagement. We were told of their “mad, fanatical charges,” which by way of variety were called also “irresistible rushes of crazy zealots”; and one splendorous historiographer described the victorious battalions as “drunken with Armenian blood”! How to distinguish between an assault that is fanatical and one that is merely courageous—that is a secret that neither the saintly scribe nor the sober Greek lingered to learn. In a general way the gallant charge is made by troops of our own race and religion, the fanaticalrush by those of another and inferior faith.
Hardly less brilliant were the accounts of “Moslem” cruelty, particularly to prisoners, under whom their captors kindled discomforting fires—a needless labor, for it would have been greatly easier to make the fire on unoccupied ground and superpose the prisoner afterward. The customary rites of parting the heads of women and eviscerating babes were not neglected: all the requirements of invasion received careful attention—as they did in Cuba, as they once did in France, as they previously did in the Southern States of our Union, and before that in the revolted colonies of Great Britain. Edhem Pasha was a strict constructionist of the popular law; as a conscientious invader operating among an inhospitable populace, he thoughtfully gave himself the trouble to be a “butcher”—as Cornwallis was in the Colonies, as Grant was in the South, as Von Moltke was in France, and as Weyler was in Cuba. If it were not for picturesque narratives of tortured prisoners, multisected women, children ingeniously bayoneted and old men fearfully and wonderfully defaced by the hand of an artist, the literature of conquestwould lack the salt that keeps it sweet in the memory and the spice that gives it glow.
Of course it is all nonsense: cruelties are not practiced in modern wars between civilized nations. (It is true that the Turks, or some of them, are so uncivilized as to have a number of Turkesses each, but that is not visibly bad for them, and appears to be condemned on the ground that it is somehow bad for us.) Indubitably Turkey’s doom as a European Power was long ago pronounced in the Russian language, but she dies with a dignity befitting her glorious history. Foot to foot and sword to sword she struggles with the hosts assailing her, now on this side, and now on that. Against attack by her powerful neighbors and insurrection of her heterogeneous provinces, she has manifested a courage, a vitality, a fertility of resource, a continuity and tenacity of purpose which in a Christian nation would command our respect and engage our enthusiasm. Unfortunately for them, her people worship God in a way that is different from our way, and with a sincerity which in us would be zeal if we had it, but which in them is fanaticism. Therefore they are hateful. Therefore they are unspeakable. Therefore we lie about them and,because of the respectability of the witnesses, believe our own lies. Truth is not in us, nor the sense of its need; charity nor the memory of its primacy among virtues.
1897.