THE history of the Turks has formed the subject of much scientific research, hampered considerably by a want of material, by a lack of information on the subject, handed down from earlier days. The Turks themselves have no liking for literature, have no bent in that direction, and all they have ever produced in that line are a series of stories relating the doings and sayings of Nasreddin Hodja, whose rÔle is much like that of Till Eulenspiegel in Germany. These stories of Nasreddin Effendi are humorous in their way, but are to a great extent too indecent for the fastidious Western mind. The humour, too, is of the obvious order, from which the West is gradually, painfully emerging. I will give only one sample of Nasreddin’s wit. This worthy was awakened one night by a noise in his garden. He went to the open window, looked out, and saw something large and white moving about below. Nasreddin took down his bow, his quiver full of arrows, and sent one in the direction of the white object, then returned to bed and to sleep. The next morning he went out into his garden to ascertain the cause of the nocturnal disturbance, and discovered his shirt, hung out to dry, transfixed by the arrow. “How fortunate it is that I was not inside that shirt last night,” quoth Nasreddin.

Proverbs give some idea of the working of a people’s soul, but in this respect too the Turk is not very prolific, certainly not original. Herewith a few samples:

The sentiment has nothing to recommend it, and is certainly better expressed by La Fontaine:

Or again:

Also to be found in other languages:

Or the simpler German:

There are no epics in the Turkish language, yet their wanderings should have called forth some such ebullition had they ever had some slight tendency to rise out of their primordial inarticulateness. They have little songs which the Anatolian peasants sing when the day’s work is done, which sound through the latticed windows of the women’s secluded chambers. But these songs are generally of love or homely matter, and do not tend to inspire the listener with ambition to emulate the deeds of his fathers for the honour and glory of his race and country. Other races emerging from barbarism to this day sing of their national heroes. What traveller along the lower reaches of the Danube has not listened to those bands of wandering Tsigani?

Then again, the Highlands of Scotland ring still with the recital of some great clan leader’s doughty deeds. True, they are mostly tales of strife and bloodshed, but they hold the germs of history and record it in the manner most likely to lead others to higher aims. Of all this the Turk knows nothing. No epic tells of those days when his wild forebears left the congeries of nomad tribes which haunted the hunting-grounds north of the Hwang-Ho, of Tibet, and the rolling plains beyond the Hindu-Kush. Mongol and Manchu, Tartar and Magyar, forming groups of nomad tribes, akin and possibly speaking the same primitive language, which, when history became articulate, only differed in vocabulary, hardly at all in structure, as it does so widely from Aryan and Chinese. Of these races Manchu and Tartar have risen to greatness; Manchu till recently reigned over China from Peking, while one Osmanli, descendant of a wandering Tartar tribe, sits in the seat of former Roman Emperors of the East. The Finns, belonging to the same race, have in the course of centuries developed a literature of a high order, and are among the most enlightened of the children of the Tsar of all the Russias; Hungary’s history lives in glowing epics and passionate song; and both these scions of the same stock are valuable factors in the Æsthetic life of Europe. But the Manchus have fled from Peking after centuries of dark incompetence, and the Sultan, whose palace stands on the European banks of the Bosphorus, has during his short reign seen the provinces won by the sword of Othman torn from him by younger nations, whose soul has been nourished by stirring recital of their former greatness, whose heroes live in song and epic, which by these puts heart into the warrior and leads him on to victory.

Now those young nations are without the gates of Constantinople; they have reduced the Turkish Empire in Europe to a narrow strip of land between the Bosphorus and a line of defences, stretching from the Sea of Marmora to the Black Sea, the lines of Chatalja.

The Turks themselves claim descent from Japheth, the son of Noah, as do the Armenians, by the way, and there is no reason to dispute with them about their traditional ancestor, who, by all accounts, was a most respectable person, and will serve as well as any other for genealogical mystification. Undoubtedly the Turks and their origin began to attract attention comparatively early in the history of Europe, and an English historian (Knolles) of the seventeenth century writes of them as follows: “The glorious empire of the Turks, the present terrour of the world, hath amongst other things nothing in it more wonderful or strange than the poor beginning of itself, so small and obscure as that it is not well knowne unto themselves, or agreed upon even among the best writers of their histories; from whence this barbarous nation that now so triumpheth over the best part of the world, first crept out and took their beginning. Some (after the manner of most nations) derive them from the Trojans, led thereunto by the affinity of the word Turci and Teucri; supposing (but with what probability I know not) the word Turci, or Turks, to have been made of the corruption of the word Teucri, the common name of the Trojans.”

Others have ingeniously endeavoured to identify the Turks with the lost “Ten Tribes”; these mysterious people have frequently been called upon to act as ancestors to modern nations. I remember well an English matron, mother of a promising family, who tried to foist this ancestry upon the people of Great Britain. However, she was advised to look at her domestic treasures, and the sight of her snub-nosed offspring seriously shook her strange belief.

Perhaps, though it seems no adequate reason, the constant infusion of fresh blood, the mixing by marriage with the women of conquered or conquerors, has prevented a national expression of sentiment based on historic facts, and the Turks, even before they emerged from distant Asia, had absorbed several other races not akin to them, or had been absorbed by some temporarily more powerful nation. There is sufficient reason to suppose that the Iranians, the original inhabitants of Bokhara, were the foundation and predominant note in the tribes which after a while became defined as Turks. The Chinese seem to have been the first to become acquainted with the Turks, and that so long ago as 1300 B.C. Chinese records of 300 B.C. mention a warlike race called Hiung-nu. Vigorous, active, restless, always on horseback, these savages hovered round the frontiers of the Celestial Empire. They were, it seems, divided into tribes, which when not acting in concert on some greater raid, probably behaved much as Scottish clans did not so long ago, and quarrelled and fought amongst each other. So it appears that a clan called the Asena sought the protection of a stronger one, which Gibbon called the Giougen, or Jwen-jwen. The Asena settled for a while in the district where now stands Shan-tan, in which district a hill called DÜrkÖ (helmet), from its shape, is said to have originated the name “Turk.”

In course of time, about a century, the Asena began to feel their strength and tried it on their hosts, the result a massacre of Giougen and their disappearance from the pages of history. Again no epic tells us the stirring story of those days, and what is known is due to the researches of men like Chavannes and E. H. Parker. But the Turks from this time came into the field of history and into the purview of the West; they had gained in strength and importance with astounding rapidity, and were making their presence felt on the nations to westward of their former haunts. They still clung to their habits of nomadic hunters, but, it seems, engaged in trade as well, carrying goods for others in their caravans, connecting East and West with links of doubtful trustiness.

It was through this trading that they first came into contact with the Western world. Persia stood in the way of this young Turkey’s commercial development, and would insist on Turkish silks finding their outlet to the Persian Gulf rather than by the roads of the old Roman Empire of the East. Thus it came that Turkish envoys sought out Emperor Justin at Constantinople. The Emperor was somewhat chary of dealing with these strangers, but little more than half a century later Turkish warriors were assisting Heraclius against the Persians. As the Turks increased in number they felt the need of further expansion, so a section of them made its way north towards Lake Baikal and menaced China, but were subdued in 630. China then set about creating ill-feeling between the two sections of the Turkish people, the northern and the western tribes, and brought about a division which seems to have been final. In the meantime another force had arisen in Asia Minor which was destined to overrun that district, surge into Syria, conquer Egypt and the African countries washed by the Mediterranean Sea, and send its tide up against the barriers of the Pyrenees.

The Arabs had come from out of the desert and, fired by the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, had carried their green banner victorious over the ruins of former Empires. The Caliphate, the Arab Empire, grew as rapidly under the immediate successors of the Prophet as the Turkish State, if it could be so called, had done a century before. Persia went under before the furious onslaught of the Arabs in 639, and the conquerors overflowing into Transoxania had subjected the peoples living there by 714. The Arabs spread westward as well, and only forty-six years after the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, in the seventh century the Sea of Marmora was alive with the lateen sails of the swarthy marauders. They dashed out their souls against the strong defences of Constantinople, the Walls of Theodosius, in successive attempts to capture the City of fabulous wealth, but were forced to retire defeated. However, the Turks, who nearly ten centuries later broke down those stout defences, became subject to the Caliphate.

This applies to the Western Turks only; they vanished as a political entity and gradually became converted to a creed well suited to bring out the qualities of a high-spirited, martial race of nomads. It sanctified their lust of blood and conquest, and gave fuller force to this people’s fighting spirit by imposing the strict discipline of Islam, “obedience,” but made no mention of that broad tolerance breathed by the Founder of Christianity to which the West owes so much of its civilization. It is doubtful though whether those early Turkish tribes, if they had come under the influence of Christianity instead of Islam, would have advanced any further on the path of culture than they have arrived to-day. Though they have been in contact with the West since the seventh century, though they conquered the Empire of the East and made its Christian peoples their subjects, and from the City of Constantine overflowed Eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna, yet the Turk has learnt nothing. This people, still nomad, has taken nothing from the West but a misunderstood, misapplied idea of representative Government which failed at its inception and has hastened the downfall of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It has absorbed nothing but a dim idea of a military organization which when applied to a civilized, cultured nation makes for military perfection, when attempted on nomads leads to such debacles as the plains of Thessaly, the mountainous districts of Macedonia, and the stricken fields of Thrace have recently witnessed.

British naval officers have for years been acting as instructors to the Turkish Navy, which from a collection of obsolete iron tanks has to outward appearance assumed the semblance of a war fleet; left to themselves, what has that fleet done to help Turkey in her present straits? The Greek Navy is afloat and preventing transhipment of Turkish troops from Asia Minor—but the Sultan’s fleet did not move out to help! Only some mines were laid and allowed to float about the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, endangering foreign commerce from which Turkish officials indirectly draw their means of livelihood. The “Hamidieh,” her officers warned time and again to take precautions against torpedo attack, was laid up in dock with a gaping rent in her bows caused by a Bulgarian torpedo, and only the “Khairreddin Barbarossa,” named after Turkey’s greatest sailor, lying at the southern end of the lines of Chatalja, has taken any part in a war in which naval power, properly applied, could have turned the fortunes of the day.[5]

The sea-coast of Bulgaria lay exposed; a strong naval force to escort transport would have made practicable a landing of Turkish troops behind the enemy’s lines and threatened his communications, thus checking his advance on Adrianople. But the Turkish Navy was content to throw a few shells into a harmless convent, or monastery, at Varna. Possibly there were no transports, probably there was no definite scheme, but certainly there was no navy commensurate with the power assumed by the Osmanli in the comity of European nations.

Money was spent on the Sultan’s navy, and it failed. Money, much money, was given for the Sultan’s army. The highly trained officers, carefully selected from Europe’s most efficient military organization, were acquired as instructors, and worked hard at what must have seemed the labours of Sisyphus. The Sultan’s army took the field, and all the work of years seemed as if thrown away. Instead of military organization there was chaos. Nominal army corps with staff and commanders figured on paper. In reality commanders of army corps, divisions, brigades waited for the troop trains at wayside stations, and as each tactical unit detrained and fell in on the platforms, these commanders without commands gathered together such units as they thus found and extemporized commands. Transport failed completely, and at Rodosto men landing from Asia Minor cried for bread, hundreds strayed starving in search of food for five and six days on end, and then were driven back by cavalry into the firing line—to fight!

Of all the costly engines of war ordered and paid for, field telegraphs, field telephones, not one was in evidence. Thousands of Anatolian peasants, greybeards and youths, swelled the ranks, untrained many of them, some only used to muzzle-loading rifles. Some two hundred thousand of these men, Turkish soldiers, clung on to the lines of Chatalja; others, in thousands, stragglers from the battlefield, collected from day to day in the purlieus of Stamboul and returned unwilling to the front. Among these were even officers—an official announcement ordered the imams, the priests, to render to the military police authorities lists of all officers living in the streets of their respective districts—officers here in the capital of an Empire, the existence of which in Europe is threatened as gravely as was ever any Empire of the world, and out in the West, but fifty miles away, is the front, the line of Chatalja’s defences, result of Valentine Baker Pasha’s military skill. Impregnable, they say, are those lines, and that they would be, and will remain, if all available sons of Othman put their backs into the work. Yet there were officers and men of the Sultan’s army frittering away their time and wasting opportunities of at last doing something for the country they profess to love, here in the capital with the enemy hammering at the outer defences. And would it be believed, those lines of Chatalja, just before the debacle of LÜle Burgas, were left in charge of two men, whose function was to see that no thief removed doors, shutters, or any other portable trifles from the many Government buildings on the lines!

It is no wonder that the example set by many officers of the Sultan’s army had discouraged the troops, who, seeing everything going against them, starving, diseased, turned their weary eyes homeward to the East, to Asia, the Turk’s real home, and dragged their tired, wounded limbs over the incredibly bad roads till the soaring minarets and their rivals the cypresses, the domes of mosques built to commemorate the conquests of former warrior Osmanli, gladdened their sight. Beyond those imposing temples lay the sea, and across it, only a little way, Anatolia—Home.

The Mosque of Mohammed Built to commemorate the Conqueror of Constantinople. He lies buried under the shadow of this Mosque.
The Mosque of Mohammed
Built to commemorate the Conqueror of Constantinople. He lies buried under the shadow of this Mosque.

Of the thousands of broken-spirited, ignorant peasant-soldiers who left their country’s colours, a term the inner meaning of which was incomprehensible to the majority of them, many fell by the way. Thousands clambered into railway trucks, on to the roofs, of any train starting for the base, and of these many died and their comrades threw them out by the way; corpses strewed the railway embankments. Many reached St. Stefano, where preliminary peace was signed after another Northern foe, Russia, had defeated the Osmanli in the field. Of these one-third, it is said, died of cholera, exposure, starvation, their festering bodies covering the pavements. Considerable numbers reached Stamboul and took refuge in the mosques, perhaps hoping that Allah might help them out of their affliction. St. Sophia was crowded with sick and despondent humanity, the flotsam and jetsam of a war of East and West: one side all unprepared, purposeless, corrupt; the other in well-ordered array, conscious of power and of purpose, and using intelligently all the dread weapons of modern warfare.

With the fugitive soldiery came columns of refugees, peasants of Thrace and Macedonia, Pomaks—Bulgarian converts to Islam; they came across the rolling plains with all their portable belongings, their trail marked by an occasional grave, by a dead horse or bullock by the roadside. These, too, sought shelter in the courtyards of the mosques; they streamed in at the City gates, chiefly EdirnÉ Kapoo, as the Turks renamed the ancient Gate of Adrianople. I have seen them here herded without the gate awaiting admission, crowded in the courtyard of the Mosque of Mihrama, which occupies the site of a church once dedicated to St. George in the days of old Byzant.

St. George, the patron saint of warriors, was entrusted with the defence of Constantine’s City here where the Walls of Theodosius reach this highest point. A glorious view spreads at your feet from their height; past groves of solemn cypress trees, which cast their long shadows over the graves of faithful followers of the Prophet, thousands of whom in distant ages assailed the strong defences of the City, your eye travels along the hoary walls, over a ruined palace to where Galata arises beyond the Golden Horn. Forests of masts, smoke rising from the funnels of ocean-going steamers or busy ferry-boats speak of commercial activity contrasting with the Oriental repose of Stamboul at your feet. Little wooden houses, some of warm purply greys, others are painted with some bright colour; fig trees and cypresses on the rising ground towards the east, where many mosques, the only lasting monument a Turk builds, stand out above the clustering houses, their blue-grey domes crowned with gleaming crescent, light against the deep blue of the Anatolian mountains, attendant minarets a dazzling white against the southern sky. And then to southward another mosque or so with minaret and sentinel cypress, and over them the sparkling waters of the Sea of Marmora, where the Prince’s Islands seem floating in the fairy haze of a southern summer day. This was when I saw it a few short years ago; to-day the sky is grey and cloudy, the smoke hangs heavy over the leaden waters of the Golden Horn, mosques and minarets loom dark against the faint, watery outlines of the distant hills, the fig trees have shed their leaves and throw out writhing arms against winter’s inclemency, and sullen cypresses bend ungraciously before the north wind. Grey despondency is the keynote of the picture, for from the south-west and the west, and from the north-east, the foes have gathered in strength and hold Constantinople in bonds, and beyond those dark heights to westward an enemy, strong and purposeful, is demanding admission to Turkey’s last foothold in Europe.

The untidy street from EdirnÉ Kapoo to the heart of Stamboul is punctuated here and there by mosques—there is the Mosque of Mihrama, already mentioned, where once stood a Christian church; there is the Mosque of Mohammed II the Conqueror, built on the site of a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles, for long the resting-place of those far-off Byzantine Emperors, the last of whom perished when the City fell before the sword of Othman. Around it stand the academies where are trained those destined to expound the teaching of the Prophet. Under a wintry sky, amidst the squalor of a people incapable of elementary hygiene, the glory of the Conqueror’s deeds is dimmed, and the vanquished, despondent sons of his fierce warriors huddle in groups about this monument to an epoch-making victory. The road leads for a while along an aqueduct attributed to Valens, the Emperor who was killed in battle at Adrianople by the Goths. Bulgarians are this day holding the city of Emperor Hadrian in an iron vice. Along here are other ruins, more recent, the result of a fire probably; no rebuilding has been attempted, everywhere is dirt, squalor, and decay.

The street opens out on to a large square, one side of which is occupied by the Seraskierat, the War Office. From here came the order to the Sultan’s officers that they should pack up their full-dress uniforms for the triumphal entry of the Othman army into Sofia. To-day weary stragglers from the battlefields of Thrace lean against the walls of the Seraskierat, heavy-eyed, hungry, diseased, despondent. Surely there were some whose business is between these walls cognisant of the real state of affairs! It is said that of some eighteen German instructors sixteen declared the Turkish Army to be quite unfit to take the field; yet those holding office at the Seraskierat heeded not and sent hundreds of thousands in smaller tactical units, under-officered, to take what place they could in the fighting line; no scheme was ready, or if there was no one adhered to it, no adequate provision for commands and staff, for communications, for commissariat preceded the flood of miscellaneous soldiery which flowed out to meet the enemy’s advance and then ebbed back, carrying with it all the human wreckage thrown up on to the ill-kept pavements of the mosques of conquerors.

And while this mass of suffering Eastern humanity was but fitfully and quite inadequately cared for by the Turkish authorities, Western humanity was putting forth its finest efforts to alleviate this awful distress by all the means of Western civilization, against which the Turk is making his last stand. In the old Seraglio, at Galata and Pera hospitals have been opened to receive the sick and wounded soldiers of the Sultan, and they now readily make their way to where the Red Crescent flies by the side of the ensigns of Great European Powers. I know fair English women, all unused to the sights and sounds, the aftermath and echo of glorious war, who are giving all their strength to works of mercy, Germans and Austrians, French and Italians, all moved by the spirit which informs Christianity. Do they expect gratitude in return, I wonder! I hope not, for they are likely to be disappointed. One gentle lady I know of, who has worked hard amongst all this misery, asked some of her patients whether in case of a massacre of Christians they would at least protect those who had nursed them back to life. After some deliberation the answer came: “No, not that. But we would kill you first, so that you may escape torture, and worse, from others.” Again, at a meeting where many ladies were busy preparing hospital necessaries, the talk turned to the question of a massacre of Christians. A Turkish lady, a lady of high degree, turned on her fellow-workers and declared that should her people be driven to the last extremity they would certainly wreak vengeance on the Christian population, and she herself would be the first to incite them, to goad them on to murder and rapine, until the streets should run with the blood of Christians, and Christian habitations became a howling wilderness, to show a horror-stricken world in what manner a race of warriors goes out of history.

Personally I do not think any such catastrophe will happen; the Turkish soldiers I saw daily straggling into hospital are too broken in spirit, too sick in mind and body, to carry out such atrocities as those with which they have from time to time sullied the pages of their history. Nevertheless, those two accounts I have given above, of the truth of which I am convinced, prove to me that when the Turk finally leaves Europe he will take with him nothing which the West has tried to teach him, least of all any conception of the divine quality of mercy.