alit MARTYRDOM OF ARMENIA.*
Ties is a deeply interesting though terribly painful book, for it describes what is the greatest tragedy of the war—the deliberate, systematic, and largely successful effort of the Turkish Government to exterminate the most intelligent, industrious, and loyal of the subject nationalities of the Ottoman Empire. Incidentally it furnishes the most damning refutation of Germany's professed interest in the small nationalities, for Germany not only never uttered a word of protest against the Armenian policy of her ally, but has officially condoned and even justified it. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Germany is a revs co, fitens. for much of the evidence in this volume is supplied by German eyewitnesses—missionaries and members of the German Red Cross. Their testimony is the weightiest of all. The majority of the witnesses, however, are foreign residents in the Ottoman Empire or the Persian province of Azerbaijan, and nearly all of these, again, are citizens of neutral countries, either European or American ; missionaries, teachers, doctors, Red Cross nurses or officials, who have no connexion, either public or private, with the Turco-German Alliance or with the Entente. Practically all the documents from this source are written at first hand. Them remain the documents written by Armenian or Nestorian natives of the regions concerned, and if their evidence may be thought to be less cogent in view of their personal prejudices, the editor, Mr. A. J. Toynbee, does well to insist that it is borne out not only by the con- currence of the testimony of different native witnesses, but also by the statements of neutrals and subjects of States allied to Turkey in the present war. Cleo say nothing of the verdict on the value of the evidence as a whole delivered by Lord Bryce, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, and Professor Gilbert Murray, but we cannot refrain from printing the opinion of Mr. Moorfield Storey, ex-President of tho American Bar Association, as expressed in a letter to Lord Bryce :-
" Such statements as you print are the best evidence which, in the circumstances, it is possible to obtain. They come from persons holding positions which give weight to their words, and from other persons with no motive to falsify, and it is impossible that such a body of concurring evidence should have been manufactured. Moreover, it is confirmed by evidence from German sources which has with difficulty escaped the rigid censorship maintained by tho German authorities—a censorship which is in itself a confession, since there is no reason why the Germans should not give full currency to such evidence unless the authorities felt themselves in some way responsible for what it discloses. In my opinion, the evidence which you print is as reliable as that upon which rests our belief in many of the universally admitted facts of history, and I think it establishes beyond any reasonable doubt the deliberate purpose of the Turkish authorities practically to exterminate the Armenians, and their responsibility for the hideous atrocities which have been perpetrated upon that unhappy people."
These documents, which run to nearly six hundred pages, exhaust the gamut of human wickedness and human suffering. It would have been infinitely better for the victims if they had all been killed out of hand, instead of being doomed to the long-drawn agony of death by inches involved in the application of the deportation policy, and we can only surmise that the Turkish Government adopted this method in preference to that of immediate and wholesale massacre because it was nominally less rigorous—just as the Turk prefers to let a worn-out horse die of starvation rather than put it out of its pain. It was an apparent con- cession, since it allowed the women the loophole of escape through conversion to Islamism, of which however few availed themselves. But if the reader is sickened by the dreadful reiteration of horrors, of torture and murder and mutilation, of outrage and burning, of the sufferings of starving women forced to march on under a blazing sun when the pains of labour were on them, let him not fail to read Mr. Toynbee'a admirable historical retrospect of Armenia and his review of the antecedents and procedure of the deportation policy. In the former many points of interest emerge which illustrate the tenacity, vitality, and versatility of the race. Their geographical position ren- dered them terribly vulnerable ; they lay in the high road of successive waves of invasion, Seljuk and Mongol. As Mr. Toynbee puts it,
" The Armenians have been a very typical element in that group of humanity which Europeans call the Near East,' but which might equally well be called the Near West' from the Indian or the Chinese point of view. There has been something pathological about the history of this Near Eastern world. It has had an undue share of political me4 fortunes, and had lain for centuries in a kind of spiritual paralysis • The Treatment o the Armenian* in the Ottoman Empire : Documents Presented Co Viscount Orey Foliodon, &weary of SWUM. Foreign 4117aus. With a rtritCt by Viscount Bryce. London ; Hodder and SWughtos. Os. aet.l between East and West belonging to neither, partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself decidedly to one or the other— when It was involved with Europe in the European War. The shock of that crowning catastrophe seems to have brought the spiritual neutrality bf the Near East to a violent end, and however dubious the future of Europe may be, it is almost certain that it will be shared henceforth by all that lies between the walls of Vienna and the walls of Aleppo and Tabriz."
Mr. Toynbee reminds us that King Tiridates of Armenia was the first ruler in the world to establish the Christian faith as his State religion :-
"This nationalisation of the church was the decisive process by which . the Armenians became a nation, and it was also this that made them an integral part of the Near Eastern world. Christianity linked the country with the West as intimately as the cuneiform script of ITrartu had linked it with the civilisation of Mesopotamia ; and the Near Eastern phenomenon consists essentially in the paradox that a series of populations on the borderland of Europe and Asia developed a national life that was thoroughly European in its religion and culture, without _ever sueceeding in extricating themselves politically from that continual round of despotism and anarchy which seems to be the political dispen- sation of genuinely Oriental countries."
The most disastrous period in the political history of Armenia opened with the Seljuk invasions and closed with the rise of the Osmanli State, which at its outset showed a real genius for strong government and assimilation, and down to 1878 on the whole conferred substantial benefits on Armenia. The dispersion of the Armenians, who " next to the Jews are the most scattered nation of the world," is a compara- tively late factor in their history, and dates from the seventh century. Migrations due to invasion were the chief cause, but secessions from the national Gregorian Church have also contributed to dispersion, leading to settlements at Lemberg and Venice. Mr. Toynbee, however, attaches most importance to the influence of the American Missions in Turkey, to whose tolerance, " wide and well-planned educational activity," sincerity, and humanity he pays a glowing tribute :— " The Ottoman Government has trusted and respected them, because they are the only foreign residents in Turkey who are entirely disinterested onpolitical questions; the Gregorian Church co-operates with them and feels no jealousy, and all sections of the Armenian nation love them, because they come to give and not to get, and their gifts are without guile. America is exercising an unobtrusive but incalculable -influence over the Near East. In the nineteenth century the missionaries came to its rescue from America ; in the twentieth century the return movement has set in, and the Near `Eastern people are migrating in thousands across the Atlantic."
Returning to his political review, Mr. Toynbee disposes very conclu- sively of tho view that the revival of Armenia under the system of " Millets " was a menace to the Ottoman Empire, and shows us why they were specially singled out by Abdul-Hamid for his vengeance after the promise of reform contained in the Treaty of San Stefano was rendered abortive in the Treaty of Berlin. But though he en- couraged the Kurds to massacre the disarmed Armenians, he was -content with crippling them. The policy of extermination was reserved for the Young Turks, to whose support the Armenians loyally rallied in 1908 and 1912. In war and in peace, in the Army and in Parliament, 'the Armenians worked for the salvation of the Ottoman commonwealth until the intervention of Turkey in the European War in 1914. The three main contentions of the Turks in support of their Armenian policy are carefully examined and overthrown. That of armed revolt on the elide of the Russians is disproved by dates. All the instances of resistance were a consequence of the deportations and not their cause. The charge of a general conspiracy of Armenians throughout the Empire to bring about an internal revolution when all the Ottoman military forces were engaged on the frontiers, and so deliver the country into the hands of the Allies, rests on the most flimsy and frivolous grounds and breaks down at every point on examination. Lastly, the misfortunes of the Armenian civil population are attributed to the presence of Armenian volunteers in the Russian Army. Mr. Toynbee replies that these volun- teers owed no allegiance to Turkey at all, but were Russian subjects. Only two cases are adduced of Ottoman subjects who went over to the Russians before the atrocities began. No, the Young Turk Armenian policy was the monstrous outcome of their grand obsession—Ottomaniza- tion. They were doctrinaires of the school of Robespierre ; " no half- measures would content them ; no inhibitions of prudence or humanity deter them from the attempt to realise the whole."
Finally, Mr. Toynbee describes the methods and results of the exter- mination policy. The procedure was marked by three stages : disarma- ment; massacre of the able-bodied men; and deportation of women, children, and the residue of the infirm and aged males. In many districts the semblance of deportation was only preserved at the outset, and the exiles were invariably massacred after a few days on the road or drowned at sea. At best the convoys were terribly thinned by atrocities on the road. In the towns the clearance was practically complete. Placing the number of Armenians living within the Ottoman frontiers before the deportations began at one million eight hundred thousand, a modest estimate falling short by three hundred thousand of the figure given by the Armenian patriarchate, Mr. Toynbee comes to the conclusion, confining himself to testimony from foreign witnesses of neutral nation- ality, that about equal numbers of Armenians in Turkey seem to have escaped, to have perished, and to have survived deportation in 1915. In the first category he includes the exempted communities of Constanti-
nople and Smyrna and the refugees, three hundred and fifty thousand in all, and allows two luindred and fifty thousand for the Protestants, Roman Catholics, converts, and others who were spared. He draws no indictment against the nation. "Tire peasantry would never have attacked the Armenians if their superiors had not given them the word." Respectable Moslem townspeople in several instances intervened to prevent the massacres, and there were a certain number of humane and honourable Governors, but they were powerless to protect the Armenians in the provinces. Religious fanaticism played no part in this devil's work. "In one way or another, the Central Government enforced and controlled the execution of the scheme, as it alone had originated the conception of it; and the Young Turkish Ministers and their associates in Constantinople arc directly and personally responsible, from beginning to end, for the gigantio crime that devastated the Near East in 1915." The four members of the German Missions Staff in Turkey in their letter dated Aleppo—the chief focus of the convoys—October 8th, 1915, to the Imperial German Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Berlin, the authenticity of which is beyond doubt, speak of the grave danger of the German scutcheon " being smirched for ever in the memory of the Near Eastern peoples" :—
" Out of 2,000 to 3,000 peasant women from the Armenian Plateau who were brought here in good health, only forty or fifty skeletons are left. The prettier ones are the victims of their gaolers' lust ; the plain ones succumb to blows, hunger and thirst (they lie by the water's edge, but are not allowed to quench their thirst). The Europeans are forbidden to distribute broad to the starving. Every day more than a hundred corpses are carried out of Aleppo. All this happens 'under the ayes of high Turkish officials. There are forty or fifty emaciated 'phantoms crowded into the compound opposite our school. They are women out of their mind-; they have forgotten how to eat ; when one offers them bread they throw it aside with indifference. They only groan and wait for death. • See,' say the natives : Infilire el Almon {the teaching of the Germans).' "
But the German Government made no sign. After all, they had them- selves applied the extermination policy against the Hereros, and have begun to apply it in Belgium and in parts of. Northern Prance.
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