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But this freedom was misunderstood by Jemal, who gradually grew bolder, until his revolutionary utterances went beyond all endurance. He scarcely veiled his contempt for the Crown, and his opinion that all should combine to rid Persia of the rule of the Shah and the continuance of the Kajar dynasty.
In a discussion between Enver, Jemal, and myself, Enver decided first of all to strengthen the IVth Army by the inclusion of one division from the Army Group. This division would suffice to ward off attack. The Irak undertaking could be carried through at the same time.
That done, Jemal became Jemal the Great by reason of his national services, and paid a visit to Germany. On his return we shall hear of him again. Meanwhile, from all the reports that have arrived from missionaries and others, we may take one or two, almost at random. At certain places, as in the governments of Ismid, Angora and Diarbekr, the Armenian population was completely wiped out.
The people are, of course, told, with suitable statistics, how famine is decimating England and France, and how the total starvation of those unfortunate countries is imminent. Indeed, of all the signs of want of confidence in their German overlords, by far the most promising are the facts that Talaat and Enver have sent their money out of the country, and that Jemal the Great has a swelled head.
All day the sorry pageant lasted, the ragged, half-starved crowd streamed by the house of Jemal the Great, with murmurs of thanksgiving and uplifted hands, and all manner of obeisances, while Jemal the Great stood in his porch with stern, impassive face, and hand on his sword-hilt in the best Potsdam manner, and acknowledged these thanksgivings....
Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot, and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.
But Jemal the Great, black with his triumph over the Armenians at Zeitun, was Military Governor of Syria, and, the Armenian question being solved, he began to get to work on the Arab question.
There was an all-important meeting of Turkish Generals in the latter half of August, and Jemal stood to his guns. Von Falkenhayn could not get him to abate one item of his demands, and there can be no doubt that Falkenhayn, obsessed though he was with the importance of getting Bagdad, could see that Jemal was right.
He pointed out the demoralising effect of the Armenian massacres, and the danger of Jemal the Great's attitude towards the Arabs in Syria, realising, and seeking to make them realise, the stupendous folly of making enemies of the subject peoples, and urging the re-establishment of cordial relations between the Turks and them.
It is not in the interest of the Germans to save them, and no check is being put on Jemal the Great to hinder him from assisting starvation and typhus to ravage the country, and supplementing their deadly work by court-martial without trial. Equally significant of the rage for the destruction of Arabs was the treatment of the Bagdad Arab army corps.
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