ENVER'S 100,000

MARCH 11, 1919

Et d'un! as Monte Cristo used to say. RESHID BEY, sometime Governor of Diarbekir,
one of the guiltiest planers, and executors of the Armenian butcheries, killed himself the
other day when caught by the police. He seems to have been intending to take refuge in
Anatolia, where he might have made trouble. The arrest of drivers and unary grandees of
the Committee of Union and Progress spoiled his plans, and the police were too hot on
his track. If he dies unwipped of justice, yet "suicide is confession."
Perhaps the strangest story in all the motley multifarious history of the Committee
attributes to it the dispatch of missionaries to the Russian Bolsheviki. Turkish nationalism
has vanished; but the far-scattered survivors of the Committee may well have seen that
their sole, if desperate, chance lay or lies in the spread of Bolshevism to the west. TO the
Turks themselves the economic, social, and political doctrines and practice of Bolshevism
would be about as intelligible and interesting as the nebular hypothesis. In so far,
however, as it is mere looting and murder, it has been practiced by the Turks in Asia and
Europe for hundreds of years. The assassins of Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Syrians,
understand that part of the Bolshevist gospel. The Kurds are illustrious professors of it.
The Committee of Union and Progress, or its thriftiest members now in exile, are
supposed to have plenty of money in Swiss, German, Austrian, Dutch banks. It will
require a credulity almost unimaginable to believe that these chevaliers of political and
financial industry will be inclined to waste any of the proceeds of their virtue on the
dissemination of Bolshevism. In Constantinople an unexpected but lovely fruit of the
Bolshevist missionary work carried on by the Committee or its colporteurs is the belief,
according to a London Correspondent, that ENVER PASHA "will shortly return from
Russia with an army of 100,000 desperate characters who will restore Committee rule."
Evidently ENVER is rapidly becoming a legendary character. It is only just to his merits
to say that, compared with his gentle character and achievements, the 100,000
desperadoes, if he could raise them, would be like an infant school headed by one of
those eminent pirates, Flint or Blackbeard.