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By Root 1004 0

was by now a familiar pattern they appealed to history—the centuries that Armenians had lived there, the persistence of Armenian Christianity—to their services to the Allies (some Armenians had fought in Russia’s armies) and to Allied promises. And, like other delegations, they staked out a claim for a huge area of land, stretching south and west from the Caucasus down to the Mediterranean. Less typically, they also asked for the protection of an outside power, a wise request for a country with such neighbors and such a past. They placed their hopes on the United States. “Scarcely a day passed,” said an American expert, “that mournful Armenians, bearded and black-clad, did not besiege the American delegation or, less frequently, the President, setting forth the really terrible conditions in their own native land.”28

The Armenians brought one of the saddest histories to the conference. Between 1375, when the last independent Armenian state was conquered, and the spring of 1918, when nationalist forces had proclaimed the republic of Armenia on what had been Russian territory, they had lived under alien rule. After the Russians had advanced down into the Caucasus at the start of the nineteenth century, the Armenian lands were divided up among Russia itself, Ottoman Turkey and Persia. The Armenians, many of them simple farmers, had become Russian, Turkish or Persian, but as ideas of nationalism and self-determination swept eastward, the vision of a reborn Armenian nation took shape. It was not a coherent vision— Christian, secular, conservative, radical, pro-Turkish or pro-Russian, there was no agreement as to what Armenia might be—but it was increasingly powerful. Unfortunately, however, Armenian nationalism was not the only nationalism growing in that part of the world.

“Who remembers the Armenians today?” Hitler asked cynically. At the Paris Peace Conference, the horrors of what the Turks had done to the Armenians were still fresh, and the world had not yet grown used to attempts to exterminate peoples. The killings had started in the 1890s, when the old regime turned savagely on any groups that opposed it. Ottoman troops and local Kurds, themselves awakening as a nation, had rampaged through Armenian villages. The Young Turks, who took over the government in 1908, promised a new era with talk of a secular, multi-ethnic state, but they also dreamed of linking up with other Turkish peoples in central Asia. In that Pan-Turanian world, Armenians and other Christians had no place.

When the Ottoman empire entered the war, Enver Pasha, one of the triumvirate of Young Turks who had ruled in Constantinople since 1913, sent the bulk of its armies eastward, against Russia. The result, in 1915, was disaster; the Russians destroyed a huge Ottoman force and looked set to advance into Anatolia just when the Allies were landing at Gallipoli in the west. The triumvirate gave the order to deport Armenians from eastern Anatolia on the grounds that they were traitors, potential or actual. Many Armenians were slaughtered before they could leave; others died of hunger and disease on the forced marches southward. Whether the Ottoman government’s real goal was genocide is still much disputed; so is the number of dead, anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million.29

Western opinion was appalled. In Britain, Armenia’s cause attracted supporters from the duke of Argyll to the young Arnold Toynbee. British children were told to remember the starving Armenians when they failed to clean their plates. In the United States, huge sums of money were raised for relief. Clemenceau wrote the preface for a book detailing the atrocities: “Is it true that at the dawn of the twentieth century, five days from Paris, atrocities have been committed with impunity, covering a land with horror—such that one cannot imagine worse in time of the deepest barbarity?” The usually restrained Lansing wrote to Wilson, who was strongly pro-Armenian, “It is one of the blackest pages in the history of this war.” “Say to the Armenians,” exclaimed Orlando, “that I make their cause my