Fully a fourth of the uniforms you see on the streets are Russian, either the old Imperial army or the troops of Wrangel, Denikin and Yudenitch. Their wearers fled to Constantinople or were evacuated with the remnants of the counterrevolutionary forces, and have not had enough money since to buy any other clothes. Just how Kemal, and his allies of the cheka, will dispose of these men in the high-booted, loosely bloused, worn old Russian uniforms who have been fighting against the Soviets and cannot disguise the fact, is not a pleasant problem.
I would hate to be Kemal with all the dangerous prestige of a great victory behind me and these problems ahead. All the East says that Mustapha Kemal Pasha is a great man. At least he is a successful man, but his entry into Constantinople will be the first indication of whether his fame is to be merely the bubble of military reputation, always burst by the first defeat, or the greatness of a man who can deal with the problems his victory has brought him.
The cards look stacked against him in Constantinople, but if he can accomplish a peaceful entry, keep his troops in hand, and see there is no reign of terror, it will be of greater permanent value to Turkey than many victories in Thrace.
A Silent, Ghastly Procession
The Toronto Daily Star
October 20, 1922
ADRIANOPLE.—In a never-ending, staggering march, the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads toward Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.
This main stream is being swelled from the back country. They don’t know where they are going. They left their farms, villages and ripe, brown fields and joined the main stream of refugees when they heard the Turk was coming. Now they can only keep their places in the ghastly procession while mud-splashed Greek cavalry herd them along like cow-punchers driving steers.
It is a silent procession. Nobody even grunts. It is all they can do to keep moving. Their brilliant peasant costumes are soaked and draggled. Chickens dangle by their feet from the carts. Calves nuzzle at the draught cattle wherever a jam halts the stream. An old man marches under a young pig, a scythe and a gun, with a chicken tied to his scythe. A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in labor in one of the carts to keep off the driving rain. She is the only person making a sound. Her little daughter looks at her in horror and begins to cry. And the procession keeps moving.
At Adrianople where the main stream moves through, there is no Near East Relief at all. They are doing very good work at Rodosto on the coast, but can only touch the fringe.
There are 250,000 Christian refugees to be evacuated from Eastern Thrace alone. The Bulgarian frontier is shut against them. There is only Macedonia and Western Thrace to receive the fruit of the Turk’s return to Europe. Nearly half a million refugees are in Macedonia now. How they are to be fed nobody knows, but in the next month all the Christian world will hear the cry: “Come over into Macedonia and help us!”
Russia Spoiling the French Game
The Toronto Daily Star
October 23, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—At Mudania, a hot, dusty, badly battered, second-rate seaport on the Sea of Marmora, the West met the East. In spite of the towering deadliness of the Iron Duke, the British flag-ship, that brought the Allied generals to confer with Ismid Pasha, the West was coming to ask for peace—not to demand it nor to dictate terms.
There were no newspapermen allowed to see the meeting because of the attitude of a certain lieutenant colonel in charge of the press, who still believes that what the army decides as to the fate of the world is none of the world’s business. But even if no one was ever allowed to mention the meeting, if no one ever admitted that the West had come to the East to ask for peace, still the meeting would have the same significance, for it marks the beginning of the end of European domination in Asia.
Just now the Turkish Nationalists, who are the same thing as the Kemalists, are under French influence. This came about in a perfectly simple way. About two years ago Mustapha Kemal Pasha was denounced by the Earl of Balfour as a common bandit. He was, speaking in the broadest sense, for sale to the highest bidder. The French bought him. They supplied him with arms, ammunition and money. In return, it is rumored they received certain oil concessions in Asia Minor.
The British wanted control in Asia Minor but Kemal did not look like a good buy to them. So they backed the Greeks. The Greeks looked an excellent bet. But, as several people have remarked in the House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George backed the wrong horse.
Kemal whipped the Greeks, as everyone knows. But when you realize that he was fighting a conscript army whose soldiers hated the barren country they were fighting to gain, who had been mobilized for nine years, who had no desire as men to conquer Asia Minor, and who were thoroughly fed up and becoming conscious that they were going into battle to die doing a cat’s-paw job, it was not the magnificent military achievement that it is made out to be. Especially is that shown when you realize that Kemal’s troops were fanatical patriots, anxious to drive the invaders out of their country.
The ratio of effectiveness of well-trained, well-armed, high fanatical patriots fighting in their own country against halfhearted, poorly officered, homesick conscript invaders is somewhere about ten to one. However, when Britain backed the Greeks she did not know that state of efficiency the Kemalists were going to reach.
Now, in the victorious Kemalist troops, French influence is at its height. I think it has reached the crest and will be on the downgrade from now on because of Kemal’s affiliations with Soviet Russia. It is that which will sooner or later bring him into difficulties with France, and it is that which, next to the conflict between Islam and Christianity, makes the greatest danger to the peace of the world.
If Russia is the next dominant influence in Turkey, and every sign points to the fact that she will be, there will be a great curving horn of pro-Soviet countries with the Soviet Republic of Georgia and South Russia at the base curving along the Black Sea, crossing the straits and extending up into the heart of the Balkans with Bulgaria at its point, driving a wedge between Yugoslavia and Rumania.
That of course is only about as dangerous to the peace of the Balkans, which has managed to pretty consistently mean the peace of Europe, as going to bed with a percussion-capped stick of dynamite between the mattress and the springs. It may not go off, of course, for some time. Still it is not oversecure.
The next danger is the straits. The straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean are Russia’s natural outlet. Constantinople, as you remember, was promised to Russia during the last war. There was once a war, of which no one remembers much except the charge of a certain British cavalry regiment and the work of a certain woman nurse, fought on the same question. There is not much difference, however, between Russia dominating the straits and Russia dominating Kemal who dominates the straits.
Sooner or later, under these circumstances, no matter how many statements Kemal may make saying he recognizes the principle of the freedom of the straits, unless England controls the straits she is going to find them shut against her. Then we can fight Gallipoli over again.
Turks Distrust Kemal Pasha
The Toronto Daily Star
October 24, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—Mustapha Kemal Pasha a few months ago was regarded as a new Saladin by the Moslem world. He was to lead Islam into battle against Christianity and to spread a holy war through all the East. Now the East is beginning to distrust him. Mohammedans I have talked to say: “Kemal has betrayed us.” There is no talk now of the holy war.
This has happened because Kemal, the conquering general, has shown himself to be Kemal the businessman. He is now in something of the position Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins occupied in Ireland just before their death. That is, he is taking the tangibl
e gains offered him, making what appear to the Pan-Islamites to be humiliating compromises, and trying to salt down his winnings—always planning to try for more when these are consolidated.
As yet his de Valera has not appeared. But if he continues to play a waiting game, there will be a de Valera sooner or later. And this possibility of a split in the Turkish forces may be the saving of the western power in the Orient.
One thing that may bring it about is the report that is current that the heads of the Turkish nationalist movement, which it should always be remembered is the Kemalist party, are many of them atheists and French Freemasons rather than good Mohammedans. That is the report you get as gossip when the Mohammedans talk politics and it is bringing about a distrust that is growing up in regard to Kemal in the minds of those people who had regarded him as a conquering Messiah for the Mohammedan peoples.
The Jews claim that Kemal is a Jew. His thin, intense, rigid face does look Jewish. But the Jews also claim Gabriele D’Annunzio and Christopher Columbus and a thousand years or so from now may even be claiming Henry Ford. At any rate that rumor about Kemal is doing him no harm and gaining very little credence; the charge of atheism is much more dangerous, for that is the one crime that any Turk is prepared to believe any other Turk is guilty of but there is no blacker crime in the Mohammedan world.
The Kemalists have a treaty and an alliance with Bolshevist Russia. They also have a treaty and something very like an alliance with France. As I explained in my last article, one of these alliances must go. Whichever alliance Turkey drops clears the air very little, because the one big aim of the Kemalists, the aim for which they are being criticized now in their own circles for not having fulfilled, the aim which does not appear in any published pacts but that everyone in the country understands is the possession of Mesopotamia. [Editor’s note: A cable dispatch received yesterday says it is understood the Turks will claim Mesopotamia at the peace conference.] Turkey is bound to have Mesopotamia. If France is her ally when she goes after it or if, having broken with France, she is backed by Russia, the situation is equally dangerous. If there is war in Mesopotamia between Great Britain and Turkey, and I give Mustapha Kemal twenty months to consolidate his present gains before he provokes such a war, it may be the blaze that will start the holy war that the Pan-Islamites are praying for to destroy all western domination in the east. France, if she is Kemal’s ally at that time, will probably remain neutral. Russia might not remain neutral.
It is oil that Kemal and company want Mesopotamia for, and it is oil that Great Britain wants to keep Mesopotamia for, so the East that is disappointed in Kemal the Saladin because he shows no inclination to plunge into a fanatical holy war may yet get their war from Kemal the businessman.
Near East Censor Too “Thorough”
The Toronto Daily Star
October 25, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—A censorship as rigid as it is unintelligent for all cable dispatches touching on any phase of the Near East situation is the reason the public at home has been so inaccurately and unreliably informed on the true state of Near East affairs.
It is very easy for the government to issue an appeal to the dominions to send troops to meet a certain crisis, but it is very hard for the dominions to know what the crisis is about when nothing but official communiqués on the situation are allowed to reach them.
Constantinople is a very simple place for the censor to control. There is only one cable company, and it has only one office where cables can be sent. The censor was naturally posted there. We all expected it, and no one worried over the matter when a notice was glued up that from September 20 a censor would be on duty in the office of the cable company for the convenience of correspondents who would continue to hand their messages in over the counter in the usual manner. It all sounded very simple and sweet.
The first break came when someone discovered that the censor was absent for periods of three and four hours at a time during the day, and that no relief man was taking his place. During his absence cables sent “urgent” at a cost of two and three hundred dollars would accumulate on his desk.
Four hours may not be much in the life of a censor but it is an eternity to a daily newspaper or a news service. Especially is it an eternity if the censor has passed the dispatch of a rival paper or news service immediately before going out to tea. A united protest of correspondents finally brought on a relief censor.
It was the haphazard manner of chopping up dispatches, a method without visible plan or purpose, except to censor everything by a system that everything ought to have something cut out of it, that made the most trouble. We had no way of knowing, for several days, what was being done to our dispatches. They were handed in over the counter and that was the last we saw of them.
One morning a correspondent of a New York paper found a note saying that his cablegram of the afternoon before had been held by the censor. He found that his references to the “level-headedness of Sir Charles Harington” had been deleted as an unjustified discussion of a military figure. On the same day all that was left of a dispatch of mine to the Star was a mention of the “good sense of General Harington.” I was outlining the strong position the Turks had gained prior to the conference of Mudania by their peaceful penetration of the neutral zones which enabled them to mass over one hundred thousand troops between the straits and Constantinople. With those troops in position it was impossible for the Allies to dictate to them as they would have been able to if they occupied the most advantageous positions. The censor cut it all out.
I fought it out with him and was finally allowed to send a dispatch mentioning that the Turkish concentration of troops between the straits and Constantinople had given them a good position to talk from. The only difference between the blue-penciled dispatch and the one sent was that the first was accurate and exact, while the second contained the same information in an awkward form.
The maddening part was the way one of the censors would pass the dispatch of one correspondent while the next man on duty would cut out entirely the dispatch of another correspondent containing precisely the same information.
Another example of the thoroughness of the ban on information was at the time of the Mudania Conference. A dispatch stated: “War and peace hang in the balance today at Mudania, a town of six thousand inhabitants, forty-seven miles from Constantinople.” All was cut, though what damaging effect the information that Mudania has six thousand inhabitants and is forty-seven miles from Constantinople could have on the British or any other public, I am unaware. At another point the dispatch mentioned that “Kemal had driven the invaders out of the country.” All that was cut too, though every paper in the world had been publishing that information for weeks.
Personally I have never met nicer chaps than the two officers who were on censor duty at the telegraph office. We were always on the best of terms. I like them both tremendously. But I would rather have an unattractive, ugly, crabbed, sour-faced, dyspeptic, moss-covered paralytic censor my dispatches and have him know his business than to pass them through the hands of the most charming amateur on earth.
“Old Constan”
The Toronto Daily Star
October 28, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—In the morning when you wake and see a mist over the Golden Horn with the minarets rising out of it slim and clean toward the sun and the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer in a voice that soars and dips like an aria from a Russian opera, you have the magic of the East.
When you look from the window into the mirror and discover your face is covered with a mass of minute red speckles from the latest insect that discovered you last night, you have the East.
There may be a happy medium between the East of Pierre Loti’s stories and the East of everyday life, but it could only be found by a man who always looked with his eyes half-shut, didn’t care what he ate, and was immune to the bites of insects.
No one knows how many people there are in Constan. Old-timers always call it C
onstan, just as you are a tenderfoot if you call Gibraltar anything but Gib. There has never been a census. Estimates of the population give a million and a half inhabitants. This does not include hundreds of battered Fords, forty thousand Russian refugees in every uniform of the Czar’s army in all stages of dilapidation, and about an equal number of Kemalist troops in civilian clothes who have filtered into the city in order to make sure that Constantinople will go to Kemal no matter how the peace negotiations come out. All these have entered since the last estimate.
If it doesn’t rain in Constan the dust is so thick that a dog trotting along the road that parallels the Pera hillside kicks up a puff like a bullet striking every time his paws hit the ground. It is almost ankle-deep on a man and the wind swirls it in clouds.
If it rains this is all mud. The sidewalks are so narrow that everyone has to walk in the street and the streets are like rivers. There are no traffic rules and motorcars, streetcars, horse cabs and porters with enormous loads on their backs all jam up together. There are only two main streets and the others are alleys. The main streets are not much better than alleys.
Turkey is the national dish in Turkey. These birds live a strenuous life chasing grasshoppers over the sun-baked hills of Asia Minor and are about as tough as a racehorse.
All the beef is bad because the Turk has practically no cattle. A sirloin steak may be either the last appearance of one of the black, muddy, sad-eyed buffalo with the turned-back horns who sidle along the streets drawing carts or the last charge of Kemal’s cavalry. My jaw muscles are beginning to bulge like a bulldog’s from chewing, or chawing, Turkish meat.
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