The Armenian genocide and beyond: the road to Deir al-Zor.

• Author: Morris, Benny
• Position: Reviews of three books - Book review

Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: the Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 442 pp., $32.00.

Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": a History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 520 pp., $35.00.

Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 312 pp., $29.95.

This year, Turkey moved its Gallipoli anniversary commemoration, traditionally marked on April 25--the day the Allies landed on the peninsula just west of Istanbul--to April 24. April 24, of course, is the day on which Armenians around the world have traditionally commemorated the slaughter of their forefathers by the Ottoman Turkish government. That day, in 1915, the police in Constantinople rounded up some 250 Armenian leaders for deportation and death. This act was followed by systematic mass deportations and massacres.

This year was the centenary of both World War I events. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with his wonted crudity and cynicism, moved the Gallipoli remembrance by a day in order to overshadow the Armenian commemoration and divert international attention away from the Turks' crime against humanity, considered by most historians to be the first genocide of the twentieth century.

All Turkish governments since World War I have denied Turkish responsibility for the mass murder and, indeed, have usually denied that it actually took place, explaining that a much smaller number of Armenians had died (much, incidentally, as Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian "president," in his PhD thesis claimed that "only" several hundred thousand Jews had died during the Holocaust). Instead, Turkish governments have claimed that the Armenians, a disloyal people, had rebelled against the country and tried to stab it in the back during the war; that the Armenian victims were the result of clashes between armed rebels and the empire's security forces; and that, if massacres occurred, they were the doing of overzealous local officials and/or Kurdish tribesmen, rather than a product of the policy of the central government, which had merely ordered the removal of Armenians from war zones.

Few, if any, of the foreign dignitaries who attended Erdogan's festivities at Gallipoli, including princes Charles and Harry from Great Britain and the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, whose troops had participated in the landings on the peninsula, were probably aware of the grim irony that undercut the Turkish celebrations. This irony was embodied in the story, in which Gallipoli and the genocide intersect, of Captain Sarkis Torossian. His war memoir, From Dardanelles to Palestine, which had originally appeared back in Boston in 1947, was now available in Turkish, published in 2013 and edited by a Turk, Professor Ayhan Aktar of Istanbul's Bilgi University.

Torossian was an Armenian from Everek, near Kayseri, who, unusually for an Armenian, managed to enroll in and graduate from Turkey's military academy just before World War I. In 1913 he was stationed at Gallipoli, where he commanded artillery that badly mauled the British fleet in the Dardanelles. For his service, he was personally awarded the Ottoman State War Medal by Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister who, alongside Talaat Pasha, the interior minister, was one of the main architects of the Armenian genocide. During the following months, Torossian appealed to Enver to intercede and save his family. (Officially, close relatives of Armenian officers were supposed to be spared though, in fact, many were deported and killed.) Torossian's father and mother were among those murdered, and his sister Bayzar and fiancee, Jemileh, both died of disease in the Syrian deserts (as did hundreds of thousands of Armenian women and children during the forced treks southward or in the concentration camps around Deir al-Zor). Jemileh, incidentally, was, it appears, an Armenian who had been found wandering near her home at the age of two and had been "adopted" by an Ottoman Arab general during the earlier major bout of Turkish massacres of Armenians, in 1894-1896, and had been brought up as a Muslim. Later, in 1918, Torossian, understandably embittered, switched sides and deserted to the British army during General Edmund Allenby's conquest of northern Palestine. He subsequently served in an Armenian unit in the French Army during the Franco-Turkish hostilities in Cilicia. He emerged from his military career with a fistful of Ottoman, British and French medals.

What Torossian's story shows is that Christian soldiers, when...