t mortality was not so
successful among the wealthier, who could, to some extent, purchase
food. So Jemal the Great set to work among them. He began by hanging the
heads of Syrian-Arabs in Damascus, Beirut, and other cities. No
semblance of trial, no prosecution or arraignment, were necessary: he
established courts-martial under military control, made lists of the
accused, and ordered the courts-martial to condemn them to death.
Sometimes he made mistakes, appointing as the members of his
court-martial men who were not such sturdy patriots as he, and refused
to sentence for no crime the accused whom he nominated. He remedied such
mistakes by appointing new boards of more seasoned stuff. Moslem and
Christian alike were brought before them, and a general accusation of
pro-French tendencies seems to have been sufficient to secure a sentence
of death or lifelong imprisonment. He aimed not at the poor and the
obscure, for whom hunger and pestilence were providing, but at the rich
and the influential. The higher clergy in Christian circles, Bishops and
Monsignors, were a favourite target, and among Moslems influential
Sheikhs. Sometimes there was a parody of a trial; sometimes the parody
was dispensed with, and when the black curtain was last raised over
Syria, Jemal the Great had disposed of over eight hundred of the heads
of the most influential of Syrian Arabs. He had got rid, in fact, of
the whole House of Lords, and something more. Those who are acquainted
with 'feudal values' among the Arabs will understand what that means. He
decapitated, not individuals only, but groups. For devilish ingenuity in
this combination of starvation and pestilence for the poor, and death or
lifelong imprisonment for the chiefs, Jemal the Great must take rank
with Abdul Hamid and the contrivers of the Armenian massacres. He
cannot, it is true, owing to lack of troops, obtain the swift results of
Enver in Armenia, but between typhus, starvation, and courts-martial,
his solution of the Arab question in Syria is making steady progress.
And those measures, hideously efficient in themselves, are, beyond any
doubt whatever, only the precursors of more sweeping exterminations of
the Arab race, which will be effected after the war, if the Allied
Powers do not step in to save it. The Faithful of the Holy City, Mecca,
have revolted and thrown off the Turkish yoke, and while the war lasts,
and Turkish troops are otherwise occupied under Teutonic supervis