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"Then Marguerite and I were going to the Argentine, to dwell in rural felicity, and teach our children to bless the name of Mahomet and Abdul Hamid." "Marguerite is Mademoiselle Beaucaire?" "Yes, poor girl! I hear she is ill and in prison, together with her excellent father. Really, Mr. Brett, I cannot help liking you, but I ought to feel anxious to cut your throat."
All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they persevered: Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him; France deprived him of his hot-water bottle when she snatched at the Constantinople quays, and they all shook and slapped him when he went to war with Greece in 1896, and instantly deprived him of the territory he had won in Thessaly.
Not at all: he was much too anxious to get his request granted, to make himself disagreeable. But did his Christian brother really think that all those massacres over which Abdul Hamid had spent so much time and money, had been arranged in order to settle those nasty progressive Germans in the lands that had been so carefully depopulated?
But Abdul Hamid may, I think, be taken to be the true founder of the new Nationalism: at any rate it was he who had first seen the possibilities of massacre as a means of maintaining Ottoman supremacy. In the hands of Nationalists that was to prove a more effective weapon than the printing of railway tickets in Turkish.
But to be fair, one is bound to admit that they knew very well such lines would be used for strategical purposes, and they lived in terror of the Slav Adriatic line. Before judging Abdul Hamid harshly, let us consider at what period we should have allowed Russia to build and control a line across India "to advance trade." The year 1908 opened with the railway question.
That cursed Abdul Hamid had been rebuked by the powers of Europe for butchering Bulgars, so he turned on us Armenians in order to prove to himself that he could do as he pleased in his own house. I tell you, murder and rape in those days were as common as flies at midsummer! I escaped, and worked my passage in the stoke-hole of a little merchant steamer they were little ships in those days.
When that empire had emerged, shorn of several provinces in Europe, of Rumania, Serbia, and northern Greece, with Bulgaria also well on the road they had travelled to emancipation, and in Asia, of a broad slice of Caucasia Abdul Hamid cut his losses, and, under the new guarantee of the Berlin Treaty, took heart to try his hand at reviving Osmanli power.
Naturally in a country governed by monsters like Abdul Hamid and Enver Pasha in later days, they earned the enmity which is the tribute of barbarians to those who stand for civilisation, and when, owing to the extermination or flight of their Armenian flocks, they were left without a charge, and their schools were closed, we find a paean of self-congratulation going up from the Turkish press inspired by the butchers of Armenia.
I remember how, one night, in relating the fall of Abdul Hamid, Harrington had worked himself up to an extraordinary pitch of excitement.
The two can hardly, in their intimate conversations, have completely avoided the subject of the massacres; but after all, that was not such an unmanageably awkward topic, for Wilhelm II. could tactfully have reminded Abdul Hamid that his own throne also was based on the murderous progress of the Teutonic Knights.
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