TOPICS OF THE DAY.
iB.el WAR BETWEEN TURKEY AND GREECE.
WAR has at last been declared formally, but the first events of the campaign have not been happy. The aptitude of the Ottoman tribe for war, which for four centuries has enabled them to conquer and plunder races more civilised than themselves, aided by the callous selfishness of the European Powers, has once more postponed the day of just retribution. The gallant little people who, with insufficient numbers, insufficient artillery, and insufficient money, have dared to face the common enemy of Eastern Europe, will, we fear, find themselves, as the Greeks of Constantinople did in 1453, overmatched in their loneliness. The fight is by no means over, and we shall hear no more of the Greek deficiency in courage ; but the Ottomans are nearly double their opponents in number, they are for the most part veterans, reserve men drawn from their farms in Asia, and looking strangely old, and they are commanded by officers with a traditional knowledge of campaigning on the great scale. They are as brave as Soudanese, they are full of the Asiatic contempt for Europeans, sharpened by the fact that the Greeks they usually see are their own prostrate sub- jects, and they are splendidly supplied. The favourites of the Palace have not been allowed to plunder the arsenals completely, and all observers report that the Turkish artillery is numerous, efficient, and well served. The Greeks, though they have some heavy guns at Larissa, fight in that respect almost with bare hands, and they have not, like the Americans and the Swiss, cultivated sharp-shooting till the rifles almost make up for the absence of artillery. We do not pretend to be experts, but judging by the reported facts, and by the history of the two races, we fear that when Edhem Pasha has concentrated his force opposite Larissa, and the Greeks try their first pitched battle in modern times, they will be totally defeated. We fear this the more be- cause Edhem Pasha, a General of experience, is evidently not rushing his work. He carried the Malouna Pass, the best entrance from Macedonia into Thessaly, principally by availing himself of his superiority in artillery ; he will doubtless clear the other Pass, Reveni, before he moves forward in force ; he is gathering masses of cavalry for the battle in the plain ; and he has asked for forty thousand more men, who are being forwarded without delay. That is taken as evidence that he perceives the work before him will be more serious than he at first ex- pected; but it is also evidence that he trusts nothing to chance, that he intends to crush his enemy, and that he makes no mistake as to the resistance which courage, the consciousness of a good cause, and despair may impel the Greeks to make. He knows perfectly well what, with a Sultan like Abd-ul-Hamid, would be the fate of a defeated General ; he is ready, like every Asiatic soldier, to pour out lives like water ; and his experience has all been acquired in battles against the stubborn Russians, who take such a deal of killing. Isandlana in his eyes would be a petty skirmish with an unlucky end. There is always ground for hope in a battle when men are so brave and devoted as the Greeks, for accident has much to do with the result ; a chance shot which kills a trusted General may spread panic among his men, the Duke of Sparta may prove himself a soldier of genius, or the struggle may be pro- tracted by the use of the spade till the Turkish supplies fall short, and, from a general rising behind them, cannot be freely renewed. But we confess the pessimistic view seems to us the more probably true, and that we expect the victory of the hour, for the thousandth time in history, will remain with the wrongdoers. The result of one of the noblest, if the most rash, uprisings of our time will be that the Turks, who lost Thessaly through diplomacy, will recover it through battle, and that the fate of Greece will be at the disposal of Powers who, because she has gone a better way than theirs, have, out of sheer mortified pride, sentenced her to such terrible blood- letting by Asiatic troops. If the Turks were urged, as the Greeks suspect., by Germany and Russia to invade Thessaly, nothing so cynical has ever been done in our time even in diplomacy. It is reported that Edhem Pasha, even d thoroughly successful, will not go beyond Larissa, and we can -believe the report to be well founded. He does not want to wage a guerilla war in the mountains of Greece, nor does his master care to occupy territories which he knows he will not be permitted to keep and ruin under pretence of tax-collecting. The Sultan will have Thessaly to ex- change for good terms, he will be master of the five million Greeks in his dominions, who after such a lost battle will be simply slaves, and he will be rehabilitated in the eyes of his Ottoman subjects, who hold that the true Sultan is the Sultan who succeeds in war, and who by succeeding shows that he has favour in Allah's sight. He will be "most moderate" in his demands, and the Ambassadors at Constantinople will return delightedly to their old task of weaving ropes of sand. Crete must accept autonomy under the Sultan, the Turkish troops will remain under one pretext or another in the island, and till the Mussulmans once more begin shelling the Christians as they did in Belgrade, there will be supposed to be order. It will be a hideous disappointment for all good men; but in history there is hardly a case, except the revolt of Holland against Spain, where the goodness of a cause has made up for the want of big battalions. Formerly a nation as brave and as fully aroused as the Greek could hardly be defeated, because the levee en masse of a small people furnished a large army, and every man had military weapons and some tincture of a soldier's training ; but science has changed the conditions, and success now belongs to the largest force, the quickest-firing weapons, and the skill which can best accumulate masses upon the essential points. As yet those advantages have been with the Turk, who has always been, and till a scientific army makes an end of him will always remain, as good a soldier as the Spanish man-at-arms who followed Alva.
If the campaign goes finally against Greece—and though our judgment inclines that way we will not entirely give up hope till we see that the fleet can effect nothing—the best chance for Eastern Europe will probably be that the Mussulmans round the throne should be inflated with pride, and that even the Sultan should cease to believe that for him all depends upon adroit evasions. Nothing is solved by a defeat of the Greeks in Thessaly, or even by the departure of Colonel Vassos from the island of Crete. The Powers have still to fear insurrections, massacres, and all the forma of dis- order which misgovernment produces, and these in provinces which some of them covet and others are determined to protect. The whole Eastern question is still before them, and they have still to obtain from the Sultan guarantees that misgovernment shall cease. How are they to obtain these guarantees now ? Some of them affect the Sultan's control of the Treasury, some will limit his despotic authority, some will interfere with. his choice of counsellors to advise him, and to all it is certain that AM-ul-Hamid will oppose all the resistance in his power. He may think that power sufficient. The fumes of military success rise rapidly to the brain. With a great and victorious Army, with proof that his Ottoman subjects will rise at his command, with soldiers for coun- sellors instead of slaves, there may easily come a moment when Abd-ul-Hamid may remember that he claims to be Khalif, that as such he is no more subject to control than the Pope is subject to control, and may meet a sincere demand from Europe by a flat refusal. The only alternatives will then be retreat or coercion, and coercion once begun cannot stop until the Powers, or some of them, are ruling directly or indirectly in Con- stantinople. That is the danger to the peace of Europe which existed at the beginning, and which will not be removed, but rather accentuated, by victories in Greece. Before them the Sultan was a timid, hesitating man, doubtful if he had resources left, inclined to believe that nothing but evasion could protect him, uncertain even whether he must not surrender himself entirely to. Russian guardianship and authority. It was that dis- position which saved him ; but can that disposition last when he hears of military triumphs, when soldiers are all round him, and when he is told that he has only to choose the bold course, to defy Europe, to rely upon the Ottomans, and he will be, like his ancestors, a free Sultan, not able, indeed, like them, to imprison Am- bassadors in the Seven Towers, but able, like them, to treat all remonstrances and demands with suave indifference ? If he is like other men at all he will be a different man after the occupation of Larissa from what he was before it, and in that difference there may be a chance of emanci- pation for his subjects. It is but a poor one, but with Greece falling under Turkish blows, and all Christians in Turkey given up to the Sultan, and Europe looking on, half pitying, half cynically exulting in Christian suffering, the millions of men in the East who are expecting massacre as an incident in their lives may be forgiven if they grasp at very slender hopes. A Sultan who is satisfied that Europe can never reach him is the Sultan to be wished for now, and such a Sultan the occupation of Larissa might by possibility yield.
Previous page
