The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (55 page)

An 1878 government report on the famine absolved the government of all responsibility and blamed it entirely on the weather. The official estimate was that 5.5 million died in the British territory, not counting the native states, but various scholars later estimated that either 10.3, or 8.2, or 6.1 million died across India during the 1876 famine.

1896–97

After it became clear that many millions of Indians had died during the 1876 famine, the government put together reports, plans, and a special Famine Fund to make sure it never happened again. Then twenty years later, it happened again, and it turned out that much of the Famine Fund had already been spent when no one was looking.
¹⁵

The government in London had financed the Famine Fund with revenues from India, not Britain. Following the usual pattern of politics, Liberals in Parliament tried to maintain the insurance fund by placing an income tax on the wealthy and cutting military expenditure, while the Tories preferred filling the fund by raising the salt tax and restoring a license fee on petty merchants, which fell more heavily on the Indian poor. The Tory plan passed Parliament, but, as usual, this influx of ready cash got redirected toward the politicians’ pet projects, rather than set aside for future famines. The extra money allowed Lytton in 1879 to remove the tariff on cotton goods entering India from Britain, thereby helping the British textile companies of Lancashire while impoverishing the local Indian cotton industry. And there was still plenty of money left over to invade Afghanistan.
¹⁶

By 1892, a quarter of India’s total government revenue went to maintain the burden of the government itself: supporting British pensions, the India Office, and interest on the debt. Very little of this was put back into the local economy; most went to banks and retirees in Britain. These home charges drained off whatever surplus the peasant economy could produce, including the grain from good harvests that normally would have been set aside to cushion against bad years.
¹⁷

Then, in 1896, the monsoon rains failed to come, and the crops failed. Once again, the price of grain shot up beyond the reach of the common Indian. Once again, people starved.

One witness described a child of five he found among starving peasants: “Its arms were not so large around as my thumb; its legs scarcely larger; the pelvic bones were plainly shown; the ribs, back and front, started through the skin like a wire cage. The eyes were fixed and unobservant; the expression of the little skull face solemn, dreary and old. Will, impulse, and almost sensation, were destroyed in this tiny skeleton, which might have been a plump and happy baby. It seemed not to hear when addressed. I lifted it between my thumbs and forefingers; it did not weigh more than seven or eight pounds.”
¹⁸

A missionary described a Muslim farmer who sold his land, then his house, then his cooking utensils to buy food for his family. When that ran out, he gave his son to the missionaries to keep. After tearfully assuring the boy that this didn’t mean he didn’t love him, and that he had no choice, the man walked away, leaving his son to be raised as a Christian.
¹⁹

1899–1900

Today we know that these droughts were caused by the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sporadic warming on the surface of the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru, which throws weather systems all over the world out of whack, bringing rain where it’s usually dry and drought where it usually rains. After a brief break in the drought, El Niño returned in 1899 for an even longer dry spell.

In spite of all of the past practice the authorities had had before, this new famine went just as badly as the previous ones. The new viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, repeated most of the policies that had killed so many in the earlier famine. Native princes did no better. The maharaja of Indore vetoed all expenditures for relief, while Curzon deported refugees who arrived from the autonomous princely states.
²⁰
In the affected regions, as many as one out of every seven peasants was bankrupt and evicted. As the Indian peasantry became broken and driven into the cities, the British hold on the subcontinent strengthened.
²¹

With the local scarcity of grain, food prices soared. A Methodist in Hyderabad wrote, “The people had no reserves either of strength or grain to fall back on, the debts of the previous famine still hung around their necks, money was impossible to get, for lenders tightened their purse strings when they saw no chance of recovering their loans.”
²²

British authorities saw cheaters everywhere and suspected that many of the Indians applying for relief had “buried hoards of grain and ornaments.”
²³
Tests designed to keep as many Indians as possible off the dole prevented a million people from collecting relief in the Bombay Presidency.
²⁴

Three-fourths of a million bushels of grain was exported from Berar province in the north even as 143,000 people starved to death there.
²⁵
When Kansas Populists in the United States shipped 200,000 bags of grain to ease the famine “in solidarity with India’s farmers,” British officials taxed the shipment.
²⁶
The standing order among officials was that “the revenue must at all costs be gathered in.”
²⁷

Cholera swept through the starving refugees. A Western doctor described one camp: “Millions of flies were permitted undisturbed to pester the unhappy victims. One young woman who had lost every one dear to her, and had turned stark mad, sat at the door vacantly staring at the awful scenes around her. In the entire hospital I did not see a single decent garment. Rags, nothing but rags and dirt.”
²⁸

In spite of the worldwide population explosion that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the population of India suffered an absolute decline between 1895 and 1905—the only time this has happened since the first census was taken in 1872.
²⁹
The mortality of the 1899–1900 famine has been estimated at either 19.0, or 8.4, or 6.1 million—in the same level of magnitude as the 1876 famine. This time, however, the British government report written after the fact recognized that the famine came from the failure of the economy more than a failure of weather. There had been plenty of grain in Burma and Bengal that could have been sent south and west to feed the starving:

Owing to the excellent system of communication which now brings every person of [India] into close connexion with the great market, the supplies of food were at all times sufficient, and it cannot be too frequently repeated that the severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture and other industries, but the failure of the harvests caused loss of ordinary income in an enormous area and to an “unprecedented extent.”
³⁰

RUSSO-TURKISH WAR

Death toll:
500,000
¹
(208,000 or 283,000 soldiers)

Rank:
70

Type:
clash of cultures

Broad dividing line:
Turks vs. Christians

Time frame:
1877–78

Location:
Balkans

Major state participants:
Russia, Ottoman Turkey

Minor state participants:
Austria-Hungary, Wallachia, Moldavia

Major non-state participants:
Bosnians, Bulgarians

Who usually gets the most blame:
Turkey

W
HEN A REVOLT AGAINST TURKISH RULE ERUPTED IN BOSNIA IN 1876, IT
quickly spread to all of the Christian subjects of the sultan in the Balkans as well—Macedonians, Serbs, and Bulgarians. The most distant rebels, the Bosnians, were taken under the protection of Austria. Unfortunately, the nearest, the Bulgarians, were within easier reach of Ottoman retribution, and when Turkish troops arrived to put down the revolt, they swept through the rebellious villages and slaughtered 30,000 Bulgarians of all ages and genders.

The massacres horrified Europe, and everyone insisted that someone
do
something. At first the Russian government hesitated. It was an internal matter after all, and no one wanted to start a general European war over some damn fool thing in the Balkans. Treaties forbade Russia from interfering in Turkey, but many idealistic Russian army officers resigned and joined the rebels to fight on behalf of their fellow Slavs anyway.

With European opinion in their favor, the Russians finally launched a surprise attack in April 1877 south along the Black Sea coast and liberated Bulgaria from Turkish rule. This soon became the only popular war in Russia’s history, and for a few years volunteers outnumbered draftees in annual recruitment. The Russians pressed on and knocked aside several Ottoman attempts to stop them. As the Russians closed in on Constantinople in July, they got bogged down facing the trenches just outside the Turkish city of Plevna. Months of fruitless assaults chewed up the Russian army, and by the time Plevna surrendered in November, the war had stalled long enough for pragmatism to replace idealism in the capitals of Europe. Public opinion in the West shifted away from stopping the Turks in favor of saving them. As the British fleet steamed toward the war zone, a rerun of the Crimean War seemed inevitable until everyone backed away from the brink.
²

In the end, the Ottoman Empire was taken down a notch in favor of local nationalities. The first treaty imposed by the Russians attempted to create a big Bulgarian nation that included just about everything the Turks still had in Europe, but the other powers would not allow it. Another treaty negotiated in Berlin trimmed Bulgaria down to just the south bank of the lower Danube, and then split this into two countries. The Turkish vassals Serbia and Romania were granted full independence, and Austria was allowed to occupy—though not own—Bosnia. The Turks also gave the island of Cyprus to Britain as thanks for being a friend in their time of need.
³
To purify their lands of all traces of the enemy, the Bulgarians expelled more than a half-million Muslim residents with considerable brutality, uncounted thousands of whom died in the exodus.

Pop Culture

The sons of the Prophet are brave men and bold

And quite unaccustomed to fear,

But the bravest by far in the ranks of the shah,

Was Abdul Abulbul Amir.

Now the heroes were plenty and well known to fame

In the troops that were led by the Czar,

And the bravest of these was a man by the name

Of Ivan Skavinsky Skavar.

One day this bold Russian, he shouldered his gun

And donned his most truculent sneer,

Downtown he did go where he trod on the toe

Of Abdul Abulbul Amir . . .

—Percy French, “Abdul Abulbul Amir,” 1877

Even though the British stayed out of the war, the Russo-Turkish conflict left an odd relic in their vocabulary. In addition to the song “Abdul Abulbul Amir” written by a student at Trinity College, Dublin, another hit in the music halls based on current events was a proud little song written by G. W. Hunt and performed by G. H. “The Great” MacDermott:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,

We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,

The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

From this chorus came the English word for enthusiastic warmongering—
jingoism
.

These two songs nicely represent the two sides that seem to emerge in every debate about foreign intervention. There’s the attitude that we can’t just sit by and watch while those foreigners do something awful, and the attitude that these foreigners have been killing each other for years and will continue to do so, regardless of what we do about it.

Casualties

After most of the battles in this book so far, armies usually left wounded soldiers unattended and groaning where they fell until the army got a good night’s sleep. Fighting battles was exhausting. Gathering and patching the wounded took too much time and too many resources for armies to make more than a token effort while the enemy was still in the neighborhood threatening to resume the attack. In fact, helping to evacuate the wounded to the rear was widely seen as a coward’s trick to get out of harm’s way and armies often had rules against it.
⁴
During the decade and a half preceding the Russo-Turkish War, humanitarians in the West had been busy organizing a neutral organization dedicated to getting wounded soldiers off the battlefield and into hospitals without waiting for generals to get around to it. As long as they didn’t take sides, the Red Cross would be allowed to travel freely in hostile territory to fulfill its mission.

After a promising start in a small war between Prussia and Denmark in 1864, the movement gained wider acceptance in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, but it hit its first snag in the Russo-Turkish War. In a war between Muslims and Christians, Turkish soldiers had trouble believing that strangers marked with a big red cross weren’t the enemy. To calm their suspicions, from this point forward the Red Cross would be the Red Crescent in Muslim lands.

Death Toll

The Russian military recorded some 35,000 battle deaths and 83,000 deaths by disease and accident.
⁵
Turkish military deaths have been estimated at 90,000
⁶
or 165,000.
⁷

None of the civilian death tolls I’ve encountered inspire great confidence. Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis estimated some 300,000 to 400,000 excess civilian deaths
in Russia
even though the war wasn’t fought there.
⁸
Turkish nationalists swear that the Bulgarians massacred 260,000 Turks while purging their new country of their former oppressors, but this estimate began with Justin McCarthy, who is outside the mainstream.
⁹
Although the specifics are debatable, an authentic civilian death toll of a couple hundred thousand is probably hidden somewhere in these confusing numbers, but we can’t say who, how, or where.

A splash in the Black Sea one dark moonless night

Caused ripples to spread wide and far,

It was made by a sack fitting close to the back,

Of Ivan Skavinsky Skavar.

A Muscovite maiden her lone vigil keeps,

’Neath the light of the cold northern star,

And the name that she murmurs in vain as she weeps,

Is Ivan Skavinsky Skavar.