Unlike Abdul Hamid, the Young Turks found themselves in a position where they could carry out this “holy” enterprise. Great Britain, France, and Russia had stood in the way of their predecessor. But now these obstacles had been removed. The Young Turks, as I have said, believed that while they were at war with these nations they had no representatives in Turkey who could interfere with their internal affairs. Only one Power could successfully raise objections, and that was Germany. But Germany had never attempted to stop massacres in Turkey. In 1898, when all the rest of Europe was ringing with Gladstone’s denunciations and demanding intervention, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had gone to Constantinople, visited Abdul Hamid, pinned his finest decorations on that bloody tyrant’s breast, and kissed him on both cheeks. The same Kaiser who had done this in 1898 was still sitting on the throne in 1915, and was now Turkey’s ally. Thus for the first time in two centuries the Turks, in 1915, had their Christian populations utterly at their mercy. The time had finally come to make Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. [Illustration: Sheik-ul-Islam proclaiming a Holy War. [_To face p. 192._ ] [Illustration: The Bosphorus--Key to the Black Sea.] CHAPTER XXIII THE “REVOLUTION” AT VAN The Turkish province of Van lies in the remote north-eastern corner of Asia Minor; it touches the frontiers of Persia on the east and its northern boundary looks toward the Caucasus. It is one of the most beautiful and most fruitful parts of the Turkish Empire and one of the richest in historical associations. The city of Van, which is capital of the vilayet, lies on the eastern shores of the lake of the same name; it is the one large town in Asia in which the Armenian population is larger than the Moslem. In the fall of 1914, its population of about 30,000 people represented one of the most peaceful, happy, and prosperous communities in the Turkish Empire. Though Van, like practically every other section where Armenians lived, had had its periods of oppression and massacre, yet the Moslem yoke, comparatively speaking, rested upon its people rather lightly. Its Turkish Governor, Tahsin Pasha, was one of the more enlightened type of Turkish officials. Relations between the Armenians, who lived in the better section of the city, and the Turks and the Kurds, who occupied the mud huts in the Moslem quarter, had been tolerably agreeable for many years.