Читать книгу An Englishwoman in Angora - Grace Ellison - Страница 11

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EMOTIONS AND IMPRESSIONS—“ON THE WAY.”—NOWHERE TO HOUSE THE POOR PEOPLE

It was, indeed, a kindly Providence that led the cheik to accompany us upon this stage of my tour. No one could have been more polite and thoughtful, more ready to gratify my every wish at great personal sacrifice, than the officer from Smyrna. But he had not been at Oxford; he could not speak our language with the distinguished accent of that University; above all, he had not the vast culture of this man of God. His information would have been conveyed in German, a language I speak with no pleasure.

The cheik has large brown eyes, a dusky skin, and a face which, though stamped with suffering, is kindness itself. He wore a long grey coat and turban, and appeared to me at that moment years older than his actual age. Maybe my inborn veneration for Oxford professors misled me; and no doubt I was also influenced by the obvious respect of the many hoary-headed disciples who came to the station to bid their “Master” farewell, bending to kiss his hand and receive his blessing. Great erudition, again, must always add to a man’s appearance of age, and his allusions to varied experiences in many a Moslem land did certainly suggest the passing of years.

Like myself, however, he was going to Angora for the first time, venturing behind the long line of bayonets which still separates that troubled land from the rest of the world.

In complete sympathy with my admiration for these men who had suffered and been victorious, he was eager to learn a little of the tribulation through which they had fought their way to liberty and freedom.

“It seems to me,” I began, “that were I the British High Commissioner, I should have found some means of, at least, paying a visit to Angora. What do our legislators yet know about this land under their charge, for which they have been made responsible? They can have no idea of the people’s aims, their faults and their virtues. You might as well take charge of some province in heaven of which you only know that it exists.”

“There is not a Turk to-day who would not welcome you as British High Commissioner,” was the gallant reply. “We are, indeed, deeply grateful for your trust. You have found the key to unlock Moslem hearts—to trust us.”

“Surely it is with nations as with individuals, the man who trusts and is deceived will yet prevail over his deceiver, whatever temporary profits that traitor may grasp. There can be no final conquest over truth. That was my late father’s teaching, and if it has sometimes left me an easy prey to liars and thieves, it has not killed my faith in human nature or hurt my pride. Self-respect will always compel me to treat every man as my friend.”

As we proceeded on our journey, one felt hourly more conscious of the barrier that has been so unwisely set up between the Allies and Angora. As railway and telegraphic communications had been cut off, news was not only delayed, but distorted beyond recognition. One only marvels that some grave disaster has not arisen from such confused reports, apparent contradictions, stern threats, and frequent misunderstandings. It would seem as if the Allied Commissioners had no desire to keep in touch with this “little Republic of the Mountains.”

In all my wanderings I have never experienced such an overpowering sense of isolation. For me there have been no “personal” communications from Europe since October. That “English letters are not accepted in Anatolia,” that all my friends’ news will be returned to them marked “Service suspended” or “cannot be reached,” may explain the facts but does not make them easier to bear. When homeless dogs howl and whine outside my bedroom window, superstitions will intrude—dread of disaster to distant friends.

There is, however, another and far more cheering side to our experiences on the road. The “stranger within the gates” is still a sacred person to these peasants, even although from an “enemy” land. There was absolutely no sign of hostility all along the line, but everywhere the greatest kindness. One and all gave me the gracious Eastern welcome, in picturesque phrases, commending me to the care of Allah; these “fanatics” from whom mere murder was the smallest evil I had been told to expect!

Though we had started, through no fault of our own, without any provision for food, I did not anticipate any serious inconvenience on this account. In these hospitable countries I knew we had only to name our need. The cheik, indeed, had been presented with two large baskets of food by his disciples, and also carried a picturesque terra-cotta water-pot, which he could refill whenever we stopped to alight.

“Eat, my children,” said he, “and when all is finished, the Lord will provide.”

“What a feast from the Song of Solomon,” I exclaimed, as the contents of his basket were disclosed—pomegranates, spices, nuts, helva (i.e., honey and nut-cheese), raisins, and bread!

One is grateful for these slow trains that afford such ample opportunity for seeing the country, with its fig-trees, olives, and palms, and the bright sun bringing a climate that recalls the South of France. Yet everywhere, long before we reached the actual devastations, one felt that despair and sadness were hovering over the land. At first, we sought in vain for the reason of our impressions. Then suddenly I knew: There were no cattle.

Of course, Mrs. de. C—— had told me, they had all been brought into Smyrna by the Greeks. Outside her house mules were being sold for fourpence or sixpence apiece, and if no purchaser could be found even at that figure, the wretched creatures were left mutilated on the wayside, their eyes burnt out, their legs broken by hatchets!

Our first halt was at Manissa, once a flourishing town of about ninety thousand inhabitants, standing some sixty-five kilometres above sea-level. The Governor and all the “notables” were on the platform to welcome the travellers, and had arranged that the “train should wait,” for us to be shown round.

Some kind of most primitive carriage had been produced from somewhere, and we were driven through more “ruins” to the “temporary” town hall for the inevitable coffee and cigarettes. In the best English, the governor told us of Greek atrocities and the victory of M. Kemal Pasha, introducing us also to his whole staff.

I asked whether it would be possible for me to obtain precise figures of the devastations, and he promised they should be prepared for my use at once. When I reminded him of the “waiting” train, he merely waived such difficulties aside as a “secondary consideration,” begging me “not to mention it.”

Naturally, I found one ruined town very like another. There was, in a sense, little to see beyond “parts of” the mosques, badly scorched or half-burnt minarets, and, at Manissa, no more than one thousand houses standing out of fourteen! Also, the statistics reveal a heartrending loss of life!

The women and children, I learnt, had been driven into the mosques, which were surrounded by machine-guns to ensure against any possibility of escape, and then set on fire. As the full realisation of such hideous barbarity took hold of my imagination, it was as if all my senses were paralysed. That cold perspiration which so often precedes a faint, seized my limbs. I was powerless either to speak or move. How would our twentieth century appear to the old cave-dwellers it has pleased us to call savage? Mrs. de C—— was right, indeed, to say that the Turks were “moderate.” Such scenes must compel revenge and let loose the worst passions of men.

On our return the cheik tactfully endeavoured to distract our thoughts by hospitable preparations for lunch. However little one felt disposed to eat, he could have devised no kinder or more wise expression of sympathy and understanding. Unfortunately, we had not yet escaped the company of swarming flies, which afterwards vanished, however, with startling completeness, when the train climbed into colder altitudes.

Our next halt was at Kassaba, where the “notables” again paid us a visit, offering both coffee and tea, one after the other. When the cheik mentioned the loss of our food, and my partiality for fruit, a messenger was at once sent into the town for bread and the most luscious melons, which reach to the highest possible perfection in Anatolia. I have always been grateful for Turkish fruit!

The Governor told me “he had simply nowhere to house the poor people.” He “dare not think” of how they could pass the winter! I saw them, sitting in holes among the ruins, cooking whatever they had been able to scrape together for a meal; the women huddled together in the “beds” of fountains which were covered with straw and carpets, after the water had been drained out. This arrangement permitted the slight protection of an awning, only too badly needed for their threadbare clothes!

There seems no way of coping with the emergency, since they had no tools for even the most primitive building. Except for those lucky enough to secure one of the few booths in the town, the shopkeepers had to set out their stock upon the cobblestones!

I dare not ask how many babies had died of cold. Anatolia has been bled white through twelve years of war! Whatever the nation’s quarrel, it was from hence were taken father, or brother, or son. Yet still, beside these shivering women, you see long train-loads of more soldiers, cattle-trucks full of human beings, called to some new “front.”

How is it these women can, even now, tenderly hush “the cry of the children,” and give their men? Theirs is a “willing” sacrifice for an ideal, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland.

I had been “protected” in advance, I found, by the authorities, who had announced by telegram the arrival of “an American lady.” It was, perhaps, perverse, even ungrateful, but I persisted in contradicting the news at every stage. I would far sooner take all risks under my own flag than falsely accept shelter beneath the “Stars and Stripes.” “I have no dislike for America,” I assured those who assumed that explanation of my obstinacy, “it simply does not happen to be my country, any more than India is yours.... I have nothing but good to say of individual Americans; the most charming people on the face of the earth.”

Nevertheless “I keenly resent the clamour of Mr. Morgenthau for ‘an ideal republic of his own making on the banks of the Bosphorus, to be backed by all that “Tammany” means in the U.S.A.’ I am for asking him, then, to start by making an ‘ideal’ republic on the banks of the Hudson.”

American oil-hunters are always boasting that they never declared war on Turkey. “You did not,” I have admitted, “but you urged, nay begged and almost ordered, us to do it for you.... Your Literary Digest printed at least one eloquent appeal to Great Britain for a ‘holy’ war against the ‘unspeakable Turk’!” And if they resent my protest at being called “an American,” I am convinced they would have done the same in my place. They, too, have the virtue of national pride.

The train was held up once more for a little excursion to what had been the prosperous town of Alaşehir, a well-wooded district with abundance of fresh water. Here out of four thousand eight hundred houses only one hundred remain, and the women and children have been simply wiped out! Unfortunately, we had not time to visit the Hodja, who had found a quite comfortable lodging in the trunk of an oak tree—a philosopher and a man of letters. “I cannot live in a tub, like Diogenes, because I do not possess a tub; but there is nothing wrong with this oak, which I suspect will prove even warmer.”

Everywhere, at Manissa and Kassaba—even at Salihli, with its houses reduced to four!—we were invited to stay and “put up for the night!” Here were about two hundred inhabitants surviving from two thousand five hundred, and from fifteen to twenty families sleeping in the mosque. Yet, they would “certainly arrange something,” and it needed all my tact to refuse any more extended hospitality than tea and coffee, served on the roof of one of their four houses, from which we could look down upon the skeleton town. Apparently, these stricken people found some sort of comfort in the mere idea of my having seen their suffering, though often enough I could not even find words for the sympathy no one could fail to feel.

Once more lunch in the train. Pomegranate seeds should be eaten one by one, a slow process, but as the cheik says “it passes the hours!”

He apologised for the number of times I had been reminded of what in Turkey they call “the work of the British ex-Premier.”

“I had to expect that,” I replied, “when I came to Anatolia; and it gives me the chance of reminding the Turks what part was played by M. Venizelos!”

He tactfully turned the conversation to Oxford, paying a very high tribute to Mr. Asquith’s brilliant son: “A noble character, highly intelligent and broad-minded. A victim of war we could ill afford to lose!”

Association inevitably led to the question I must have been asked a hundred times during my journey, “Why does Lloyd George hate us so bitterly? How can he admire the Greeks?”

“He knows little of either,” I replied, “nothing, at any rate, from personal observation of them in their own lands. We have first-class Near-East specialists, no doubt; but his chief informants have been nonconformist preachers, even more biassed than he. Nonconformity is the traditional foe of the Turks. Their boasted ‘freedom of thought and conscience’ does not extend to the Servants of the Prophet, and as they once echoed Gladstone, to-day they echo Lloyd George.”

“And in America?” asked the cheik.

“Their church is an advertising agency. They have transformed ‘dissent’ to a ‘trust.’ Go to the States with an idea, and, if it pleases them, they will ‘put it across’ like any other commodity, as a ‘cute’ business proposition. With a colony of two million Greeks, and, maybe, as many Armenians (whose exaggerated and unchecked ‘lamentations’ have full Free-Church support), America will never give Turkey even a fair hearing. You have read their ‘Press’?”

“Alas,” he answered, “I fear the East is losing its faith in the West.”

“Do not say that,” I answered. “Men like you, who have known us at our best, must declare that to-day’s madness is but a phase. Tell us these things should never have been and shall not continue. Write as you can write, and teach the people of Europe to be once more themselves.

“When East and West shake hands again, there will be peace, and peace we must have!”