Bulgarian horrors and British outrage

C. P. Snow

'Bulgarian Atrocities'. Nowadays this country wouldn't be stirred by any such item of news, about Bulgaria or anywhere else: but it was different a hundred years ago. England didn't look inward the whole time. Despite all the sources of information available now, people then seem to have been more interested in the outside world. Today, persons interviewed on TV would have no idea whether the atrocities had been committed upon the Bulgarians, or by them, and wouldn't care if this was a contemporary event. A hundred years ago they did care.

It wasn't only intellectuals and professional liberals who cared. Just a hundred years ago, in the summer of 1876, the Bulgarian rising—and the massacre by the Turks that followed—was the fighting point of English national politics.

The 04toman Turks had conquered Bulgaria five hundred years before, and had ruled over it, as over most of the Balkans, ever since. The Turks were a military race, and maintained a fair degree of martial competence, centuries after the rest of their impetus had gone (as the English were to discover at Gallipoli). The Turkish rule over the Balkans was a military administration. They brought very little to their subject peoples. The impression is of a kind of lazy tolerance mixed with spasms of random ferocity.

The Bulgarians didn't like it. They had had their own picturesque history, and somehow kept sparks of their culture and spirit alive. They had the most miscellaneous heritage of any Balkan people. Thracians, language unknown, illiterate, gifted in the visual arts as the great recent exhibition demonstrated to dazzled spectators: Slays, coming in early in the Christian era and imposing their own language: the original Bulgars from somewhere in Asia, soon assimilated in the Slav population. The culture became Slav, with a written alphabet that spread to Russia and the religion of the Orthodox Church. Today they are the most deeply Slav of all the people outside Great Russia, but you can still see a remarkable variety of physical types on the streets of Sofia.

Throughout the nineteenth century they were developing the stubborn Slavonic capacity for resistance. They were going to win their independence whatever it cost. The Russians felt much kinship with them. This was partly for political motives, but also, and often more deeply, for human ones. Before the time of the Uprising, it was liberal Russia which was most fervently proBulgar. Read Turgenev's On the Wheel. Turgenev was a Westernised liberal, and his ideal hero is the Bulgarian Insarov, dedi

cated to nothing but setting his people free. Turgenev, like other Russian liberals of his period, didn't much believe in the Russian capacity for action, and in Insarov he discovered his supreme man of action. The character is, incidentally, a fine achievement of the empathetic imagination.

In the early 1870s there were a number of Insarovs in Bulgaria. Typically, they were men who had somehow got an education and become schoolteachers, journalists, and so on. They were, like Insarov, very young. Levsky, the ablest of them, was hanged by the Turks in Sofia at the age of thirty-six. Botev, the most gifted and a famous poet, died in battle at the end of the Uprising, when he was twenty-seven.

Among the insurrectionaries were a good many parish priests. Botev, strongly anticlerical, like most of the nineteenth-century nationalist leaders anywhere, said that the church hierarchy aided and abetted the Turks. On the other hand, it seems certain that the lower clergy, as in Ireland, were active on the popular side. For generations, they must have been a core which helped preserve the national identity, and above all the language.

The uprising was planned and organised from outside Bulgaria, mainly in Romania, where the leaders were scraping a bare living. Like Insarov, they didn't care about their own material existence. Like Insarov also, they had no experience in planning an insurrection. In fact, the organisation was, by twentieth-century standards, pathetically amateur. They had contacts scattered all over Bulgaria, ready to take up arms and act as officers. But there were almost no arms to take up. They made primitive cannon out of hollow tree-trunks, firing— or so they hoped—solid balls. This was 1876, and the Turkish troops were quite well equipped. They had reasonable intelligence of what was going to happen, and were waiting for it.

The Uprising never stood a chance. It lasted the inside of two months. The Bulgarians fought, with miserable weapons and no training, and also with the courage of Slav soldiers. The Turks mowed them down. Mowed them down not only on the battlefield, but in their villages, along with their wives and children. From the beginning, the Turks were giving a vigorous prefiguration of the episode of My Lai. Leaders were burned alive. Women and children were raped, collected in houses or preferably churches, which were then bombarded or burned over their heads. Our sensibilities have been dulled by the scale of twentiethcentury atrocities. The number of Bulgarian victims therefore doesn't seem to us so

large. It was never accurately computed, but seems to have been between twenty and thirty thousand.

The news went quickly round EuroPe• While the rising was still unsuppressed,

accounts of horrors committed by the Turks were being published in the western press.

As R. T. Shannon records in Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation; 'The Spectator of 3 June 1876 included an article which,

while misconstruing the situation, did have some claims to be "the first alarm" of the

Bulgarian Atrocities. This article was later reprinted as a pamphlet, The First Alarni Respecting the Bulgarian Outrages. Richard Holt Hutton, who edited the Spectator, was ' a very vigorous supporter of the agitation, It is fair to say, however, that the principal

source of news from Turkey was Edward

Pears, Constantinople correspondent of the Daily News, a leading opposition newspaper' which became and remained the strongest pro-Bulgar organ in England. Figaro in Paris took a similar line to that of the DailY News, as did the liberal press throughout the rest of the Continent.

Liberal opinion took fire. The reports were convincing. Much Christian opiniOn was also deeply moved. Not clerical ot Catholic opinion, which was in gened opposed to nationalist outbursts, except ia

Ireland, and anyway, the Muslims were nut persecuting Catholics, so it didn't matter. But Protestants everywhere, humanitarians, any kind of progressives, however much in the middle of the road, believed what the read in their papers and were outraged. And what they read in their papers was in essence true.

It won't surprise anyone who has lived in our century to learn that some respectable

persons denied it. Human capacity not tu

believe what one doesn't want to believe is almost infinite. Witness the labyrinthine denial of outrages if committed by one's favourite side anywhere on the planet, 1r0 Spain to the Pacific. In 1876, the Times in London announced magisterially that ce-i grettable episodes had been the eq113,1 responsibility of the rebels and a snla"

number of Bashibazouks (irregular Turkish

soldiers). The Morning Post dismissed the possibility of the Sublime Porte departing from high standards of civilised behaviour' Perhaps no journal, not even the most hien peasant, in France, touched the lofty height: of the Spanish civil war—when, since it wa clearly unthinkable that German Planes could have bombed Guernica, the CO clusion was reached that the Basques Mus have done it themselves.

The nineteenth century hadn't clOite

attained our mastery of double-talk, selfhallucination, or, not to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, lying through our teeth. Still, they were making a promising beginning. The British Government in 1876 was very promising indeed. It was a Conservative administration, presided over for the last time (1874-80) by Disraeli. It is hard not to reveal a sympathetic grin for that singular figure. He was, as usual, the brains of his party. But it is important to remember that he was not as detached, not even as cynical, as he seemed. He shared a lot of the Conservative folk-prejudices. In this Balkan situation, for instance, he was Profoundly and sentimentally pro-Turkish, 4 much so as Queen Victoria, or the simplest Tory squire.

This tenderness for Turkey was linked, of Course, with the chronic Russophobia of all official England, just as unassuageable in the nineteenth century as it has been in our tiine. You can read leaders about Russia written a hundred years ago which, without Changing more than three words, could be Printed today Anything Russia did was, of necessity, to be suspected. Russia was (a) devastatingly incompetent but also, and simultaneously (b) overwhelmingly dangerous. Russia wanted everything. Russia wanted India. The GreafGame. Turkey, good old Turkey, faithful old friend, must be kept in Europe. It Was rather a nuisance that their subjects happened to be Christian, but no doubt they Were better off under decent Muslim Turks than loathsome, if Christian, Russians. Kussia must not have Constantinople.

, So, throughout the Uprising, Disraeli ,m1Passively denied that any atrocities were naPpening. Whether he believed what he was saying, it isn't possible to guess. Politieians and men of action have d remarkable gift for believing their own lies. He was given invaluable moral support by the ambassador in Istanbul, Sir Henry Elliott. Elliott 17,as one of the most preposterous of all .11131ish ambassadors. Like his famous predecessor, Stratford Canning, he was anatically pro-Turkish. Like Stratford Canning, he wanted to decide foreign policy On his own. But Canning was an able man, and Elliott was a fool, something like a later disaster in the line of British emissaries, Sir Nevile Henderson. His signals were about accurate as Henderson's. The Uprising, t e reported, was a trivial affair, confined L° a few agitators. It had, needless to say, 'ten provoked and initiated by Russian agents. There had been no horrors. Any st12:.ch rumours were invented in Russia. Thus h Israeli, who had become Lord Beaconsheld, soothingly informed the House of :-ords. All well. If there had been any uninward events, the accounts had been much !itaggerated. But even Disraeli couldn't 4nothe everyone for ever. Victor Hugo was tiltnducing majestic satires in France. 'Yes, Were is exaggeration. The town of Batak 44 turned into a heap of ashes in a few ,.aYs and not in a few hours. . . Prisoners were castrated but they also had their heads

cut off which minimises the crime. The child that was thrown from the point of one lance to another was in fact only pierced with a bayonet. Yes, there is exaggeration'.

Investigative journalism isn't a modern invention. Figaro sent a competent observer to Bulgaria. The Daily News employed one of the brightest young journalists in Europe, with the splendid name of Januarius MacGahan. Both papers had received completely documented articles before the end of July.

Then Mr Gladstone interrupted his summer holiday. Gladstone was an altogether more complicated character than Disraeli, and his motives for high-principled actions were often not as single-minded as he thought. His enemies felt that God had a way of inserting an ace of trumps up his sleeve, which he used with the certainty of perfect righteousness. And yet—however his moral conscience operated, it sometimes burst out with volcanic force, and burst out for causes which would do him personal and political harm. This was true over Ireland in the 'eighties, at the end of his career. It was true in 1876 about Bulgaria. True, he regarded Disraeli as an agent of the devil, and this was another chance to expose him. True, in terms of harsh power politics Gladstone considered—and was later proved to be right—that the British proTurkish doctrine was a piece of muddled and unrealistic thinking. But none of that would have made Gladstone so enraged. His campaign wasn't good politics. He and his friends were experienced politicians. They knew that politics were about bread and butter and that foreign policies were never an issue with the electorate. When Gladstone championed Bulgaria, he must have known that there were no votes in the cause.

That didn't count. Gladstone was outraged. He was a man of passionate human emotions. He was also a devout Christian. It was enough for him that Christians were being tormented. Once set in motion, Gladstone was like a force of nature. He had disproportionate energy for a man in his seventies. He made speeches in Parliament and at meetings up and down the country. He wrote articles and in September collected them in a brochure called Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. That brochure was an immediate best-seller.

Just for once, the facts were too naked to be explained away. Disraeli was a master of the intricate defensive. Regrettably, he said even more soothingly, there had been some atrocities, but much fewer than the opposition claimed, perhaps twelve thousand. That was terrible, no one felt more grief than he did, but was that a reason for abandoning the traditional and valuable foreign policy ?

Gladstone roared on, more speeches, another brochure. If the Russians went to war with Turkey, the surge of popular feeling in England, especially in influential circles, was rising high: too high for Britain to give Turkey any kind of military aid. That was soon demonstrated. Russia sent armies into the Balkans in 1877. All the western powers, amidst dark private predictions of catastrophe inside the English Foreign Office, left Turkey to cope by herself. Bulgaria was rapidly liberated and set up as an independent nation. In Plovdiv—one of the most ancient towns in Europe—there are two statues close together. One is of a Tsarist soldier, commemorating the liberation of 1877-8: the other of a Soviet soldier commemorating the liberation of 1944. They preside together over a magnificent view of the mediaeval town.

There are streets in various towns in Bulgaria named after Gladstone, which is only just. Is there any plaque to Januarius MacGahan ? He did them a major service. He became a war correspondent with the Russian army, got wounded, and died of typhus in Istanbul in 1878, still very young.

For a period after those events of a hundred years ago, the English took an affectionate interest in Bulgaria. Ivan Vazov's Under the Yolk, was translated here very soon after its publication in Bulgaria, and widely read. It is the classical novel of Bulgarian literature, and a fine one by any standards, human, unchauvinistic in spite of the proud nationalist theme. Anthony Hope's second attempt at a Prisoner of Zenda story is set in a Balkan country, Kravonia, which is a romantic and simplified Bulgaria, with a capital remarkably like late-nineteenth-century Sofia. The English were more knowledgeable about the Balkans than they have been since. The Bulgarians had a reputation for the military virtues, which Shaw teased amiably in Arms and the Man. Since then Bulgarian regimes got caught up in Great Power politics, and entangled in the German domain in both world wars. Britain has become more parochial. With incomparably better communications, we seem to know much less.

It is a pity, and we lose a lot. Bulgarians know more about us than we do about them. Our culture travels, theirs doesn't. Yet they have a rich literature and plenty of good contemporary writers. Anyone can see that for himself if he takes the trouble to read their English language literary magazine Obzor. They have produced one of the best graphic artists of our age, Beshkov, who can stand comparison with Daumier.

Their high literature has a quality which seems to be a special gift of the best Slav writing, and which we seriously lack. It consists of being able to combine sophistication and openness at the same time. Openness isn't the exact word, nor is naiveté. Russians call it shirokaya natura, broad nature. It is refreshing for us to meet.

Visitors go and have a look at the Black Sea. Agreeable, and all very well and good. They have a look at the picturesque landscapes. But it is a comedown, and our deprivation, that we are not so serious, so imaginative, so anxious to discover what other people are like, as our forebears were in Mr Gladstone's time.