be noticed that there is no suggestion of the Turks
recovering their lost provinces and kingdoms in Europe,
Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Servia, and the rest, for
it would never do to let Fox Ferdinand awake from
his hypnotic sleep of a sort of Czardom over
the Balkans, or cease to dangle dreams, that included
even Constantinople before the shifty eye of King
Constantine So, before Turkey was spread the prospect
of appropriating Russian and Persian spoils:
Prussia had already given the lost Turkish kingdoms
in Europe elsewhere, but would there not be a dismembered
Russian Empire to dispose of? The Crimea, the
province of Kazan, the province of Trans-Caucasia:
all these might be held before Turkey’s nose,
as a dog has a piece of meat held up before it to
make it beg. Then there was the province of Adarbaijan:
certainly Turkey might be permitted to promise herself
that, without incurring the jealousy of Austria or
Bulgaria. Greedily Turkey took the bait.
She gulped it down whole, and never considered that
there was a string attached to it, or that, should
ever the time come when Germany, the conqueror of
the world, would be in a position to reward her Allies
with the realisation of the dreams she had induced,
the string would be pulled, and up, with retchings
and vomitings, would come these succulent morsels
of Russia and Persia. Indeed these bright pictures
flashed on to the sheet as the visions of Nationalists
are but the slides in a German magic-lantern, designed
to keep Turkey amused, and it was with the same object
that Ernst Marre, in his Die Tuerken und Wir nach
dem Kriege, was bidden to make other pictures
ready in case Turkey grew fractious or sleepy.
’From the ruins of antiquity,’ he says,
when speaking of the Ottoman Empire, ’new life
will spring, if we can manage to raise the treasures
which time and sand have covered.’ Then
he remembers that he must be less Pan-Germanic for
the moment, and dangles the bait again. ‘In
doing this,’ he adds, ’we are benefiting
Turkey. The Turkish state is no united whole,
and it has always been very difficult to govern.
Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, cannot be
welded together. This is a war of liberation for
Turkey.... Only by energetic interference, and
by “expelling” the obstinate Armenian
element could the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian
domination.... The non-Turkish population of the
Ottoman Empire must be Ottomanised.’
There is no need for further quotations, which might be multiplied indefinitely. The Prussian programme is for the moment identical with the Turkish Nationalist programme: Turkey, in order to be kept ‘in with’ Germany, must be encouraged to dream of depopulated Armenia (that dream has come tragically true) and of annexations in Russia and Persia. All this fitted in with the Turkish programme: Germany had scarcely to inspire, only to encourage. That encouragement she gave, for, simultaneously she was penetrating Turkey as water penetrates a sponge,