A FIGHT FOR THREE THOUSAND CIVILIANS

On May 2nd, 1915, Enver sent his aide to the American Embassy, bringing a message which he requested me to transmit to the French and British Governments. About a week before, the Allies had made their landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They had evidently concluded that a naval attack by itself could not destroy the defences and open the road to Constantinople, and they had now adopted the alternative plan of despatching large bodies of troops, to be supported by the guns of their warships. Already many thousands of Australians and New Zealanders had entrenched themselves at the tip of the Peninsula, and the excitement that prevailed in Constantinople was almost as great as that which had been caused by the appearance of the fleet two months before.

Enver now informed me that the Allied ships were bombarding in reckless fashion, and ignoring the well-established international rule that such bombardments should be directed only against fortified places. British and French shells, he said, were falling everywhere, destroying unprotected Moslem villages and killing hundreds of innocent non-combatants. Enver asked me to inform the Allied Governments that such activities must immediately cease. He had decided to collect all the British and French citizens who were then living in Constantinople, take them down to the Gallipoli Peninsula, and scatter them in Moslem villages and towns. The Allied fleets would then be throwing their projectiles not only against peaceful and unprotected Moslems, but against their own countrymen. It was Enver’s idea that this threat, communicated by the American Ambassador to the British and French Governments, would soon put an end to “atrocities” of this kind. I was given a few days’ respite to get the information to London and Paris.

At that time about 3,000 British and French citizens were living in Constantinople. The great majority belonged to the class known as Levantines; nearly all had been born in Turkey, and in many cases their families had been domiciled in that country for two or more generations. The retention of their{154} European citizenship is almost their only contact with the nation from which they have sprung. Not uncommonly we meet in the larger cities of Turkey men and women who are English by race and nationality, but who speak no English, French being the usual language of the Levantine. The great majority have never set foot in England, or any other European country; they have only one home, and that is Turkey. The fact that the Levantine usually retains citizenship in the nation of his origin was now apparently making him a fitting object for Turkish vengeance.

Besides these Levantines, a large number of English and French were then living in Constantinople as teachers in the schools, as missionaries, and as important business men and merchants. The Ottoman Government now proposed to assemble all these residents, both those who were immediately and those who were remotely connected with Great Britain and France, and to place them in exposed positions on the Gallipoli Peninsula as targets for the Allied fleet.

Naturally my first question when I received the startling information was whether the warships were really bombarding defenceless towns. If they were murdering non-combatant men, women, and children in this reckless fashion, such an act of reprisal as Enver now proposed would probably have had some justification. It seemed to me incredible, however, that the English and French could commit such barbarities. I had already received many complaints of this kind from Turkish officials which, on investigation, had turned out to be untrue. Only a little while before, Dr. Meyer, the first assistant to Suleyman Nouman, the Chief of the Medical Staff, had notified me that the British fleet had bombarded a Turkish hospital and killed 1,000 invalids. When I looked into the matter, I found that the building had been but slightly damaged, and only one man killed.

I now naturally suspected that this latest tale of Allied barbarity rested on a similarly flimsy foundation. I soon discovered, indeed, that this was the case. The Allied fleet was not bombarding Moslem villages at all. A number of British warships had been stationed in the Gulf of Saros, an indentation of the ?gean Sea, on the western side of the Peninsula, and from this vantage point they were throwing shells into the city of Gallipoli. All the “bombarding” of towns in which they were now engaging was limited to this one city. In doing this the British Navy was not violating the rules of civilised warfare, for Gallipoli had long since been evacuated of its civilian population,{155} and the Turks had established military headquarters in several of the houses, which had properly become the object of the Allied attack. I certainly knew of no rule of warfare which prohibited an attack upon a military headquarters! As to the stories of murdered civilians—men, women, and children—these proved to be gross exaggerations; as almost the entire civilian population had long since left, any casualties resulting from the bombardment must have been confined to the armed forces of the Empire.

I now discussed the situation for some time with Mr. Ernest Weyl, who was generally recognised as the leading French citizen in Constantinople, and with Mr. Hoffman Philip, the Conseiller of the Embassy, and then decided that I would go immediately to the Sublime Porte and protest to Enver.

The Council of Ministers was sitting at the time, but Enver came out. His mood was more demonstrative than usual. As he described the attack, of the British fleet he became extremely angry; it was not the imperturbable Enver with whom I had become so familiar.

“These cowardly English!” he exclaimed. “They tried for a long time to get through the Dardanelles, and we were too much for them! And see what kind of a revenge they are taking. Their ships sneak up into the outer bay, where our guns cannot reach them, and shoot over the hills at our little villages, killing harmless old men, women, and children, and bombarding our hospitals. Do you think we are going to let them do that? And what can we do? Our guns don’t reach over the hills, so that we cannot meet them in battle. If we could, we would drive them off, just as we did at the straits a month ago. We have no fleet to send to England to bombard their unfortified towns as they are bombarding ours, so we have decided to move all the English and French we can find to Gallipoli. Let them kill their own people as well as ours.”

I told him that, granted that the circumstances were as he had stated them, he had grounds for indignation. But I called his attention to the fact that he was wrong; that he was accusing the Allies of crimes which they were not committing.

“This is about the most barbarous thing that you have ever contemplated,” I said. “The British have a perfect right to attack a military headquarters like Gallipoli.”

But my argument did not move Enver. I became convinced that he had not decided on this step as a reprisal to protect his own countrymen, but that he and his associates were really looking for revenge. The fact that the Australians and New{156} Zealanders had successfully effected a landing had aroused their most barbarous instincts. Enver referred to this landing in our talk. Though he professed to regard it lightly, and said that he would soon push the French and English into the sea, I saw that it was causing him much concern. The Turk, as I have said before, is psychologically primitive; to answer the British landing at Gallipoli by murdering hundreds of helpless British who were in his power would strike him as perfectly logical. As a result of this talk I gained only a few concessions. Enver agreed to postpone the deportation until Thursday—it was then Sunday—to exclude women and children from the order, and to take none of the British and French who were then connected with American institutions.

“All the rest will have to go,” was his final word. “Moreover,” he added, “we don’t purpose to have the English ships fire at the transports we are sending to the Dardanelles. In the future we shall put a few Englishmen and Frenchmen on every ship we send down there as a protection to our own soldiers.”

When I returned to our Embassy I found that the news of the proposed deportation had been published. The amazement and despair that immediately resulted were unparalleled, even in that city of constant sensations. Europeans, by living for many years in the Levant, seem to acquire its emotions, particularly its susceptibility to fear and horror, greatly accentuated by their deprivation of the protection of their Embassies. A stream of frenzied people now began to pour into the Embassy. From their tears and cries one would have thought that they were immediately to be taken out and shot; that there was any possibility of being saved seemed hardly to occur to them. Yet all the time they insisted that I should get individual exemptions. One could not go because he had a dependent family; another had a sick child; another was ill himself. My ante-room was full of frantic mothers, asking me to secure exemption for their sons, and of wives who sought special treatment for their husbands. They made all kinds of impossible suggestions. I should resign my ambassadorship as a protest; I should even threaten Turkey with war by the United States! They constantly besieged my wife, who spent hours listening to their stories and comforting them. In all this exciting mass there were many who faced the situation with more courage.

The day after my talk with Enver, Bedri, the Prefect of Police, began to arrest some of the victims.

The next morning one of my callers made what would ordinarily have seemed to be an obvious suggestion. This{157} visitor was a German. He told me that Germany would suffer greatly in reputation if the Turks carried out this plan; the world would not possibly be convinced that Germans had not devised the whole scheme. He said that I should call upon the German and Austrian Ambassadors; he was sure that they would support me in my pleas for decent treatment. As I had made appeals to Wangenheim several times before on behalf of foreigners, without success, I had hardly thought it worth while to ask his co-operation in this instance. Moreover, the plan of using non-combatants as a protective screen in warfare was such a familiar German device that I was not at all sure that the German Staff had not instigated the Turks. I decided, however, to adopt the advice of my German visitor and seek Wangenheim’s assistance. I must admit that I did this as a forlorn hope, but at least I thought it only fair to Wangenheim to give him a chance to help.

I called upon him in the evening at ten o’clock and stayed with him until eleven. I spent the larger part of this hour in a fruitless attempt to interest him in the plight of these non-combatants. Wangenheim said point-blank that he would not assist me. “It is perfectly proper,” he maintained, “for the Turks to establish a concentration camp at Gallipoli. It is also proper for them to put non-combatant English and French on their transports and thus insure them against attack.” As I made repeated attempts to argue the matter, Wangenheim would deftly shift the conversation to other topics. According to my record of this talk, written out at the time, the German Ambassador discussed almost every subject except the one upon which I had called.

“This act of the Turks will greatly injure Germany——” I would begin.

“Do you know that the English soldiers at Gaba Tepe are without food and drink?” he would reply. “They made an attack to capture a well and were repulsed. The English have taken their ships away so as to prevent their soldiers from retreating——”

“But about this Gallipoli business,” I interrupted. “Germans themselves here in Constantinople have said that Germany should stop it——”

“The Allies landed 45,000 men on the Peninsula,” Wangenheim answered, “and of these 10,000 were killed. In a few days we shall attack the rest and destroy them.”

When I attempted to approach the subject from another angle, this master diplomatist would begin discussing Rumania{158} and the possibility of obtaining ammunition by way of that country.

“Your secretary, Bryan,” he said, “has just issued a statement showing that it would be unneutral for the United States to refuse to sell ammunition to the Allies, so we have used this same argument with the Rumanians; if it is unneutral not to sell ammunition, it is certainly unneutral to refuse to transport it!”

The humorous aspects of this argument appealed to Wangenheim, but I reminded him that I was there to discuss the lives of between 2,000 and 3,000 non-combatants. As I touched upon this subject again, Wangenheim replied that the United States would not be acceptable to Germany as a peacemaker now, because we were so friendly to the Entente. He insisted on giving me all the details of recent German successes in the Carpathians and the latest news on the Italian situation.

“We would rather fight Italy than have her for our ally,” he said.

At another time all this would have greatly entertained me, but not then. It was quite apparent that Wangenheim would not discuss the proposed deportation further than to say that the Turks were justified. His statement that it was planned to establish a “concentration camp” at Gallipoli unfolded his whole attitude. Up to this time the Turks had not established concentration camps for enemy aliens anywhere. I had earnestly advised them not to establish such camps, thus far with success. On the other hand, the Germans were protesting that Turkey was “too lenient,” and urging the establishment of such camps in the interior. Wangenheim’s use of the words “concentration camps in Gallipoli” showed that the German view was at last prevailing and that I was losing my battle for the foreigners.

An internment camp is a distressing place under the most favourable circumstances, but who, except a German or a Turk, ever conceived of establishing one right in the field of battle? Let us suppose that the English and the French should assemble all their enemy aliens, march them to the front, and place them in a camp in No Man’s Land, directly in the fire of both armies. That was precisely the kind of “concentration camp” which the Turks and Germans now intended to establish for the resident aliens of Constantinople—for my talk with Wangenheim left no doubt in my mind that the Germans were parties to the plot. They feared that the land attack on the Dardanelles would succeed, just as they had feared that the naval attack would succeed, and they were prepared to use any weapon, even the{159} lives of several thousand non-combatants, in their efforts to make it a failure.

My talk with Wangenheim produced no results, so far as enlisting his support was concerned, but it stiffened my determination to defeat this enterprise. I now called upon Pallavicini, the Austrian Ambassador. He at once declared that the proposed deportation was “inhuman.”

“I will take up the matter with the Grand Vizier,” he said, “and see if I can stop it.”

“But you know that is perfectly useless,” I answered. “The Grand Vizier has no power—he is only a figurehead. Only one man can stop this; that is Enver.”

Pallavicini had far finer sensibilities and a tenderer conscience than Wangenheim, and I had no doubt that he was entirely sincere in his desire to prevent this crime. But he was a diplomat of the old Austrian school. Nothing in his eyes was so important as diplomatic etiquette. As the representative of his Emperor, propriety demanded that he should conduct all his negotiations with the Grand Vizier, who was also at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs. He never discussed State matters with Talaat and Enver—indeed, he had only limited official relations with these men, the real rulers of Turkey. And now the saving of 3,000 lives was not, in Pallavicini’s eyes, any reason why he should disregard the traditional routine of diplomatic intercourse.

“I must go strictly according to rules in this matter,” he said. And, in the goodness of his heart, he did speak to Sa?d Halim. Following this example, Wangenheim also spoke to the Grand Vizier. In Wangenheim’s case, however, the protest was merely intended for the official record.

“You may fool some people,” I told the German Ambassador, “but you know that speaking to the Grand Vizier in this matter is as inconsequential as shouting in the air.”

However, there was one member of the diplomatic corps who worked whole-heartedly on behalf of the threatened foreigners. This was M. Kolouch............