Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
mirrors and windows, others take the marble tops of the tables and smash
them to bits. In a few minutes the place has been completely gutted.
This demonstration comprised the “Holy War,” so far as Constantinople
understood it. Such was the inglorious end of Germany’s attempt to
arouse 300,000,000 Mohammedans against the Christian world! Only one
definite result did the Kaiser accomplish by spreading this inciting
literature. It aroused in the Mohammedan soul all that intense animosity
toward the Christian which is the fundamental fact in his strange
emotional nature, and thus started passions aflame that afterward spent
themselves in the massacres of the Armenians and other subject peoples.
CHAPTER XV
DJEMAL, A TROUBLESOME MARK ANTONY--THE FIRST GERMAN ATTEMPT TO GET A
GERMAN PEACE
In early November, 1914, the railroad station at Haidar Pasha was the
scene of a great demonstration. Djemal, the Minister of Marine, one of
the three men who were then most powerful in the Turkish Empire, was
leaving to take command of the Fourth Turkish Army, which had its
headquarters in Syria. All the members of the Cabinet and other
influential people in Constantinople assembled to give this departing
satrap an enthusiastic farewell. They hailed him as the “Saviour of
Egypt,” and Djemal himself, just before his train started, made this
public declaration:
“I shall not return to Constantinople until I have conquered Egypt!”
The whole performance seemed to me to be somewhat bombastic. Inevitably
it called to mind the third member of another bloody triumvirate who,
nearly two thousand years before, had left his native land to become the
supreme dictator of the East. And Djemal had many characteristics in
common with Mark Antony. Like his Roman predecessor, his private life
was profligate; like Antony, he was an insatiate gambler, spending much
of his leisure over the card table at the Cercle d’Orient. Another trait
which he had in common with the great Roman orator was his enormous
vanity. The Turkish world seemed to be disintegrating in Djemal’s time,
just as the Roman Republic was dissolving in the days of Antony; Djemal
believed that he might himself become the heir of one or more of its
provinces and possibly establish a dynasty. He expected that the
military expedition on which he was now starting would make him not only
the conqueror of Turkey’s fairest province, but also one of the powerful
figures of the world. Afterward, in Syria, he ruled as independently as
a medieval robber baron--whom in other details he resembled; he became a
kind of sub-sultan, holding his own court, having his own selamlik,
issuing his own orders, dispensing freely his own kind of justice, and
often disregarding the authorities at Constantinople.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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