THE AUSTRIAN KALEIDOSCOPE
their prospects are anything but enviable, and we may expect an acute and growing conflict between the rival forces.
"The Clean-Fighting Turk"
In politics, as in other things, distance lends enchantment to the view; and there has been nothing more extraordinary in the history of this war than the legend which has gradually been allowed to grow up round the figure of the "clean-fighting Turk." The ferocity displayed by the German High Command, its brutal disregard for the rights of civilians and the rules of international conventions, above all, the hideous excesses to which deliberate encouragement from above gave rise, have produced a frame of mind in this country, in which some people affect to regard the German as a savage and the Turk as a gentleman. In reality, the German combines the qualities of the bully with habits of extreme docility such as render him peculiarly amenable to superior orders, of whatever character. His excesses are imposed upon him by an iron discipline which seeks to exploit his exaggerated sentimentalism and transform it into "frightfulness." The Turk also takes his behaviour on order, but in his case it is the unchaining of the natural savage, not the reversion of the civilised man. Thus it comes about that the same troops which had perpetrated, according to a secret official programme, some of the worst atrocities in the Armenian massacres of 1896, comported themselves like lambs during the campaign against Greece in the following year, when the mot d'ordre was exemplary conduct in the face of Europe. And thus, too, it came about that the same troops which won the respect of our soldiers at Gallipoli could commit the fiendish cruelties of which the Armenian nation has been the victim.
The volume dealing with the fate of Armenia which has been compiled under the auspices of Lord Bryce and the skilful editorship of Mr. Arnold Toynbee,[1] will remain in history as one of the most terrible documents of the Great War. It is much more than a mere record of "atrocities," though every page is filled with them. It is a human
- ↑ "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon." (Hodder and Stoughton.) 3s. net.
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