Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

Union and Progress, that took the practical form of implicit obedience to the Committee's mandates, so that it had little difficulty in preserving order. All over the country there were great demonstrations and rejoicings of enthusiastic and goodnatured crowds, that touched foreign spectators of these scenes and compelled the sympathy even of the cynically inclined. In the streets and cafés and tramcars of the capital, wherein men had been wont to meet in silence, each suspecting the other, strangers, united by a common joy, now spoke to each other freely and in kindly fashion. It was a reign of universal amity, and it seemed as if all that is best in human nature had come to the top. European witnesses have described the wonderful fraternisations of men of all races and creeds; how Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians and Jews harangued sympathetic crowds in the streets of the capital, preaching peace and good will among men; how even in Beyrout, notorious for the massacres of Christians under the late régime, Christian priests and turbanned mollahs embraced publicly before fraternising mobs of Moslems and Armenians; how in the same city the Turkish commander with his officers and troops attended a service in the Armenian church to lament over the massacres of their Christian fellow-countrymen; and how, with the same object, crowds of Moslems in Stamboul went to the Armenian cemetery to pray and place flowers upon the graves of those

who had been slaughtered by the orders of the Palace. It was the same in Jerusalem, where the various Christian sects-hitherto kept from flying at each other's throats by the bayonets of the Moslem soldiery-now made friends and joined in processions with Mussulmans and Jews.

In Salonica, the headquarters of the revolution, there were scenes of intense national rejoicing that astonished European observers. The Bulgarian, Greek, and other leaders of bands, the Albanian brigand chiefs, and all their followings of ferocious outlaws of the hills, on whose heads there had been a price for years, men of different races who since boyhood had been burning each other's villages and killing each other's women, flocked into the town to submit to the Committee, to be reconciled to one another and to become the friends of the Moslem Turks. Sandansky himself, the king of the mountains, the most formidable of the Bulgarian leaders of bands, came in, harangued the crowds on liberty, fraternity and justice, and was received with the greatest enthusiasm. All these fighting men, who had spread terror through Macedonia and Albania, clad in the picturesque dress of Europe's wildest and least known regions, forgot civil war and blood feuds, fraternised with each other and with the Turkish soldiery, marched down the streets roaring the songs of liberty, hobnobbed together over cups of coffee, and sometimes mastic

and raki, in the cafés, embraced each other and swore to be brothers.

I was in Salonica four months after Turkey had won her freedom, and the national jubilation had not yet subsided; it was everywhere exultation and good-fellowship. Here, in this city of many races, I found myself surrounded by a refreshing atmosphere of joyous delight in the new-found liberty. From the window of my hotel I looked out upon the busy quay and the blue sea that stretched to the snows of Olympus. Along this quay passes most of the life of the town, and at frequent intervals something happened in front of me to remind me of the revolution and of the keenness of the people. Now it was a procession of Christians and Mussulmans fraternising and singing patriotic songs on their way to the railway station to cheer a newly elected Deputy who was starting for Constantinople; now it was a body of troops of the Macedonian army marching through crowds which hailed them as their liberators; now a battalion paraded on the quay to be exhorted by some general before embarking for Constantinople, for at that time the Young Turks were despatching more of their faithful troops to the capital, determined to be in readiness should the forces of reaction reassert themselves; now it was the return from over the water of some exile of despotism to the friends and relatives who had not seen him for years. Thus

one morning I saw a flag-decorated tender come off from a newly-arrived steamer and land on the stage in front of me the Albanian General, Mehmed Pasha, just freed from a long exile in Bagdad; he was welcomed with shouts and clapping of hands by the large crowd of Albanians and others who had come to escort him to his house.

There were most affecting sights, too, to be seen in those early days of liberty. When it was decreed that political prisoners should be liberated, the gates of the prisons were thrown open, and out poured, in their thousands, the captives of the Despotism, to be received by crowds of deeply moved sympathisers. Many of these unfortunate men had been confined for years in cells but twelve feet square, and came out into fresh air and sunshine dazed and weak in mind, like the prisoner of the Bastille in Dickens' famous story, to be led home by relatives and friends. Here one would see outside the prison door a husband and wife greet each other with tears of joy after years of separation, and here some poor wretch, with spirit long since tortured out of him, weeping miserably as he wandered to and fro because no dear ones had come to meet him, and he realised that they had died while he was in captivity.

It was pleasant to observe the confidence and pride of the population in the Young Turk leaders, who had sacrificed so much for liberty

and justice. The patriotism of the people of Salonica was then being displayed in various ways. Large sums were being collected to supply comforts to the troops who throughout the winter were to guard the northern frontier against any attack on the part of Turkey's enemies, and a movement had also been started in the town, which, if it spreads far enough, may relieve the Government of some of its embarrassments. Officers of the garrison and civil servants of all grades, reading of the depleted treasury and the heavy burden of the floating debt, were abandoning their claims to their arrears of pay, because, as they said, their country needed the money. Deputies, also, were refusing to accept their travelling allowances.

For one who knew Turkey under the old régime it was very interesting, in Constantinople, to observe the outward signs of the great change which had come to the country, and to note the attitude of a population which found itself suddenly in the enjoyment of the widest liberty. In most countries, after such a revolution, the people would have been intoxicated with their new freedom; the forces of disorder would have been let loose; there would have been, for a while, a condition approaching anarchy. But Constantinople is not like other European capitals, and it took its revolution in a sensible fashion. All the old restrictions had been swept away; but liberty

« AnteriorContinuar »