THE TOTTERING TURK

BY FULLERTON L. WALDO, F. R. G. S.
ASSOCIAATE EDITOR OF THE PHILADELPHA PUBLIC LENGER
OCTOBER 25, 1915
WHEN I was in Constantinople the air seemed more than ordinarily surcharged with that
sense of things sinister and gruesome that somehow the city never quite shakes off even
in its most lethargic moods in times of peace. The Armenians, in mid-August, had spread
about, like running torches, the rumors that sealed orders were at every police station for
a general slaughter on the third day of Beiram. Twenty years ago the pavements were
reddened with the blood of 8000 massacred innocents: and those who remembered
thought the time ripe for a repetition of the horrors of 1895. For the Young Turks, betwixt
the upper millstone of a German vassalage and the nether of the Allies battering at the
Dardanalles and toiling up thru Mesopotamia, have determined on Turkey for the Turks,
and Armenia without the Armenians. Betwixt devil and deep sea, the German incubus
and the Egean, Enver Pasha, Tallat Bey and Shukri Bey are playing out the lurid drama to
the end.
There are 100,000 Armenians in Constantinople. The Turks whenever they please hale
them to the police stations, soak their feet in salt water, and then apply the bastinado till
their victims have to walk about on their knees for many days thereafter, if they walk at
all. One man I talked with, a cook in charge of a bake oven at an American institution,
had recently received the full official tale of seventy strokes while the doctor held his
pulse to make sure the exquisite torment did not send the victim's fluttering life quite over
the brink. But a weak old man, who in the same hour was given but twenty strokes, died
on the day following.
The newspapers today are filled with the execrable deeds of hireling Kurds and Bashi-
Bazouks in Asia Minor. And still, Ambassador Morgenthau assured me, the half has not
been told. The Black Sea and the Tigris River hold the secret of struggling thousands
ruthlessly thrown into deep water and shot from the bank. A good woman that I knew
wanted to go down from Scutari to Nicomedia by rail to help the evicted there, but the
Turks would not let her, for they did not wish her to see the crimes committed and apprise
the world of them. From that region 30,000 at least had been thrust forth to desert
wanderings, and tens of thousands more were interned in and around the station, waiting
till the cattle-cars had dumped their human freight and returned for more.
Of course, the Turks, with his sluggish mentality, is jealous of the Armenian's progressive
temper that out bargains, out builds, outplays and in all non-military ways outgenerals
him. The Turks fears the league of the Armenians and the Russians, for which the former
have toiled as their one hope of political and social salvation.
In the meantime, this man Morgentau, his soul fired to white heat by Russia's oppression
of his own people, the Jews, is determined to do his best for those whom Turkey so
barbarously mishandles. On his executive capacity nine nations at lest are now
depending, and the embassy is the camp of refuge for black-clad weeping Armenian
women with their infants in their arms, for priests and merchants and teachers with a
Damocletian sword over their heads in a region of terror. When the Turks on a drenching
day of rain began to throw the French nuns and the orphans out into the street,
Morgenthau rushed round to their place, and Mrs. Morgenthau went with him. While the
Ambassador got a stay from the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mrs. Morgenthau
procured the title deeds and the money and ran the gauntlet with them hidden in her dress
and her heart fast beating. The Turks tried to kidnap Sir Edwin Pears, for two score years
a highly respected advocate whose knowledge of the Levant almost reached to the
encyclopedic understanding of the late Dr. Washburn. Morgenthau heard of it and saved
him, and sir Edwin is now safe at home in England.
Then there is William Wheelock, the famous missionary treasurer. He has been thirty-
four years on the scene, and knows Asia Minor, Macedonia, Albania as a Hadji knows the
Koran. "How are you getting the money to the missionaries in these troublous times?" I
asked. "I used the money-orders of the post office till the post broke down," he said "then
the tobacco monopoly distributed it for me, and now it is the Standard Oil agents.
They've never been able to stump me yet !" That is the American spirit--the same spirit
that keeps Gates at Robert College, Dr. Patrick at Constantinople College, Dr. Hayward
Bliss at the Syrian Protestant College, Beirut, determined not to haul down the flag to
Islam. I talked with an ensign from our tiny stationnare the "Scorpion." She is a boat of
900 tons, carrying ninety men. The Turks have moved her to the far end of the Golden
Horn, within the two bridges and the tangle of shipping, where in no case can her limited
puissance be made available, though her men ashore might guard the Embassy. Aside
from the "Scorpion's" complement there are perhaps 150 Americans in the city.
Daily more audacious, the Turks cut mail to ribbons and deny to travelers the least
written communication in their baggage. They have erased the French and English signs,
and ordered these languages off the streets. They aim--successfully--to keep the
foreigners in Cimmerian darkness as to all that goes on at Gallipoli. They poison the
mind of the Turk against the American munitions feed the guns of the Allies. In spite of
all, Robert College--typical of these brave American institutions--has started the year
with an enrollment of nearly 400, in the teeth of a famine in oil and coal and bread and
many things. There is, at any rate, no dearth of the splendid courage that holds the fort
"till the day break and the shadows fled away."
Philadelphia
Constantinople is now the critical point in the Great War. The issue of the conflict turns
upon it, and the next few weeks may decide the question. The city is besieged by armies of
Russians, English, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, French, Senegalese and
Italians. Armies of Austrians and Germans are pushing down thru Serbia to reach
Constantinople before it falls. British, French and Italian troops have rushed to stop their
onward march. Meanwhile "the Sick Man of the East" is in mortal dander. The Turk feels
that he is losing his grip and the subject races who have suffered under his tyranny for
centuries are getting restive at the thought that the day of their deliverance is at hand. He
has determined that they shall be destroyed rather than be freed. The colleges which
Americans have founded in Turkey are threatened with extinction. It makes an American
thrill with pride to read in Mr. Waldo's article how these educational outposts of ours in
the East are calmly continuing their work in the midst of war. ---THE EDITOR.