World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
Who, then, it may be asked, were the murderers, the people who killed
about a million Armenians and quite a lot of Greeks? Well, just anybody
and everybody. A Turkish peasant with a plough in his hand is a
generous, open-hearted, simple fellow. A Turkish peasant with a gun in
his hand is a brigand. The lower orders of the town are straightforward,
simple people, but come a massacre, and they take their part. Probably
things in France were not a bad parallel at the great St. Bartholomew’s
Eve. And it must always be remembered that the great drive of the
Armenians was a Government affair, a national policy. Turks cannot stand
having power. A private soldier who becomes an N.C.O. becomes, nine
times out of ten, a black-guard. An ordinary citizen who becomes an
official becomes, ten times out of ten, a thief. A common man who is
invited to kill his Christian neighbour, free of all danger of
punishment, does so. Throughout captivity the guards were faithful
mirrors of the powers above. In the time of Chukri Bey they were kind,
faithful dragomen who did their best to save us from being swindled in
the bazaars. In the days of his successor, their vocabulary was limited
to “Yok” and “Yassak”--“no” and “forbidden.”
Beneath the surface of life in Turkey there was always a grim
undercurrent of cruelty. And in that land there is more unnecessary
human suffering than in any land of the world. There were dens in the
town of Angora where Christian deserters--Conchies, perhaps--were kept,
sometimes in chains. We used to see them marching out between their
guards to work on the railway. Thin, grey, starved creatures, dying on
their feet. Later on our men suffered in exactly the same way and about
four-fifths of them died.
When the men went to Changri we kept our orderlies, and throughout
captivity our orderlies were safe. But the rest of the men worked on the
roads and railways all over Turkey, hundreds of miles from their
officers, and the greater part of them died.
For the first two or three weeks of this season of exploration we lived
in a Greek hotel at the bottom of the town. As hotels go in that part of
the world, it was a good one. Downstairs there was the public
eating-room on one side of the entrance and the coffee-room on the
other; and upstairs there was a landing with a settee and a few chairs,
and nine bedrooms. The beds were quite comfortable, but were infested
with vermin, and the smell from the drain was perfectly awful. This was
not the whole of the premises, for it formed one side only of a hollow
square. The other three sides were occupied by Turkish soldiers, and the
hollow square was really a caravanserai. Those rooms which faced the
rear, into the hollow square, were the most infested, but the smell was
the same everywhere. There was no garden, but a narrow space, cut off
from the road by palings, was planted with half a dozen small trees, and
used as an outdoor café.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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