Similarly in Syria the outbreak of war put an end to ’the humiliating and dangerous situation’ of the presence of French schools and missions.  There, for many years, French missioners had done the same work as Americans in Armenia, work in every sense liberal and civilising, but undenominational in religious matters and unproselytising.  That came to an end earlier than the organisations in Armenia, and in Syria now, as over the rest of the Turkish people, Arabs and Jews and Greeks have nothing except German influence and Kultur to stand between them and the spirit of Turkish progress of which the Armenian massacres were the latest epiphany.  Germany, as we have seen, stood by and let the Armenian massacres go on, professing herself unable to interfere in the internal affairs of Turkey, though at the time there was not a single branch of Turkish industries, railways, telegraphs, armies, navies over which she had not complete control, exercising it precisely as she thought fit.

It is useless, then, to base any confidence in the safety of Jews, Greeks, and Arabs from suffering the same fate as the Armenians, on a veto from Germany.  If it suits Germany to let those unfortunate peoples be murdered or deported to agricultural colonies, Germany will assuredly not stir a finger on their behalf nor prevent a repetition of the horrors I have dealt with in the previous chapter.  Sooner than risk her hold over Turkey by enforcing unacceptable demands, she will, unless other considerations of self-interest determine her, let further massacres occur, if Talaat Bey insists on them.  That spokesman of her policy, Ernst Marre, makes this perfectly explicit in his book, Die Tuerken und Wir nach dem Kriege, upholding from the German standpoint the right of Turkey and the wisdom of Turkey in dealing with her subject peoples as she had dealt with the Armenians.  ‘The Turkish State,’ he tells us, ’is no united whole:  Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, cannot be welded together.’ (This, by a somewhat grim and ominous coincidence, is in exact accordance with a remark made to a Danish Red Cross Sister by a Turkish gendarme then engaged in massacring Armenians:  ‘First we get rid of the Armenians,’ he said, ’then the Greeks, then the Kurds.’) Or again, in defence of the Armenian massacres, ’Only by energetic interference and by expelling of the obstinate Armenian element, could the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian dominion.’  Or again, ’The non-Turkish population of the Ottoman Empire must be Ottomanised.’  Here, then, is the German point of view:  the Ottoman Government will be right to ‘dispose of’ its subject peoples as it thinks fit.  So far from interfering, Germany endorses, and German influence to-day is all that stands between ‘the murderous tyranny’ and its subject peoples.  French, English, and finally American pressure can no longer, since the entry of these nations into the war, be exercised within the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, and the