[From Men of Wealth, pages 337–372.]
If the Lord God Jehovah had not created Basil Zaharoff, some novelist sooner or later would certainly have got around to the job. Indeed, it is by no means certain that Zaharoff, as we have him, is not the joint product of God and the fiction writers.
Lieutenant Colonel Walter Guinness, member for Bury St.Edmonds, committed the blunder against history of referring to Zaharoff in the House of Commons in 1921 as the "Mystery Man of Europe." Having fixed upon him that fascinating label, the figure of Zaharoff became thereafter a costumer's dummy upon which the news caricaturists of Europe draped whatever garments would vindicate his reputation.
Mysterious indeed he is and still more mysterious he became at the hands of the sensational news portrait painters. The mystery begins with his birth. A French biographer, Roger Menevee? records that he was born in Moughliou, or Mugla, on the Anatolian coast. But a German, Robert Neumann, asserts that Zaharoff, testifying in a London court as a young man, said he was born in the Tatavla or poor section of Constantinople, and he notes that the Mugla nativity is attested by an affidavit of a Greek priest made forty-two years after the event and was based upon memory.
It was never known with complete certainty to what country he owed allegiance. He was a Greek, born in Turkey, who lived in Paris. His right to the ribbon of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor was questioned in the Chamber of Deputies and M. Clemenceau had to assure the Chamber that "M. Zaharoff is a Frenchman." But also he was throughout his life the guiding genius of a great British armament concern, acted as a British agent, was a Knight of the Bath, known in England as Sir Basil Zaharoff.
Journalists said he spoke fluently fourteen languages — which is probably an extravagant exaggeration. They reported how he had confided to a written record the story of his life, filling fifty-eight volumes which he ordered to be burned at his death, while others told how he had himself destroyed the record, two days being consumed in reducing it to ashes in the furnace of his Paris home. Extravagant tales were told of his habits, his amours, his dinners, and the exotic dishes brought fresh by plane from immense distances for his table. But, in fact, the reporters and the historians have produced but little about the personal life and affairs of the man. Searching the extensive but empty records, one fails to discover any documents or letters or speeches or records or meetings or conferences or instances in which the man is actually present. Always one hears that he is somewhere in the background, off in the shadows, pulling the strings, supplying the stratagems and the money.
Yet it is certain that he remains the most considerable figure in that feverish world of the munitions makers that has had so much advertisement since the Great War. Only a few names take first rank among this dubious company — old Alfred Krupp, the cannon king of Essen, the Schneiders of Creusot, Thomas Vickers, the English gun maker of Sheffield, Skoda, du Pont de Nemours, the American powder king, Colt and Winchester and Remington and Maxim. They were all, as Messrs. Englebrecht and Hanighen have called them, "Merchants of Death." But the mightiest "merchant" among them, the man who played the largest role in the "merchandising" of munitions, the greatest market maker, was Basil Zaharoff.
It was his melancholy good fortune to come upon the scene when the world went in for arms on an unprecedented scale and it was he who, more than any other man, developed the international market for arms. He did not invent it, to be sure. Old Alfred Krupp had played off Turkish orders against his native Prussia when Zaharoff was a mere fireman in Tatavla. And long before either of them — centuries before — old Andries Bicker, Burgomaster of Amsterdam, had built and supplied and provisioned and even financed a complete navy for Spain when the Spanish king was waging war upon Holland. He then explained to the outraged Dutch that if Holland had not armed the Spanish enemy, the Danes would have done it and reaped the profit.
But Zaharoff played a leading, if not the leading, role in that strange world comedy of the arms makers leading the double life of chauvinists and internationalists. They gave us the spectacle of Boers mowing down English regiments with Vickers' pom-poms, Prussian surgeons picking out of Prussian wounded Austrian shrapnel fired by Krupp's cannon, French poilus massacred by shot poured out of guns made in Le Creusot, English Tommies killed by weapons produced by Armstrong and Vickers, and American ships sent to the bottom by U-boats built on models supplied by American submarine builders. Zaharoff was the master of what one biographer has called the "principle of incitement,"under which war scares were managed, enemies created for nations,airplanes sold to one nation and antiaircraft guns to her neighbors, submarines to one and destroyers to another. He did what the cigarette people did, what the liquor industry, the beauty industry did — created a demand for his merchandise. The armament industry became a game of international politics, the arms salesman a diplomatic provocateur, the munitions magnates of all nations partners in cartels, combines, consolidations; exchanging plans, secrets, patents. He was the greatest of all the salesmen of death, and, as one commentator has observed, if you would see his monument, look about you at the military graveyards of Europe.
II.
Zacharias Basileios Zacharias — later to be known as Basil Zaharoff — was born October 6, 1849, apparently in Mugla, near the Turkish capital of Angora. His people were Greeks who had lived in Constantinople, fled to Odessa during the Turkish persecutions in 1821, returned to Mugla, and then, when Basileios was three years old, took up their home again in the Tatavla or poor district of Constantinople. The boy went to school until he was sixteen, when some disaster to his father forced him to go to work. He worked, we are told, as a fireman, a guide, a moneychanger. There is more than a hint that these early years were passed amid rough surroundings and that this impulsive and somewhat lawless boy — like one of our prominent labor racketeers, to use his own explanation of his twisted ethics — suffered from lack of "bringing-up."
When he was twenty-one he found work with an uncle in Constantinople who had some sort of mercantile business. One day Basileios disappeared, taking with him money from the cash drawer. The infuriated uncle traced him to London where he was arrested. How or why he was arrested in London for a crime committed in Turkey is not made clear. It was perhaps a stage in the process of extradition. In any event Zaharoff pleaded that he was a partner, not an employee, of his uncle, producing a paper attesting that fact — a paper he had miraculously discovered in his trouser pocket on his way to the courthouse — and was let off. This episode is by no means clear. But what there is of it reveals the more or less dark cloud in which he began his career.
As in all things relating to Zaharoff, there are other versions of this flight. Robert Neumann, who spent some time investigating the story, but unfortunately envelopes all that he writes in a cloud of luminous smoky words, insists that it was not money, but goods that Zaharoff stole and not from an uncle but from a Mr. Hiphentides; and, having converted the merchandise into money, fled to London where he was arrested on the complaint of Mr. Hiphentides, after which he was not acquitted but let off with a reprimand on his promise to make amends.
Zaharoff, after this narrow escape, went to Greece, Turkey being "no thoroughfare" to him. In Athens he made his Basileios Zacharias into Basil Zaharoff. He remained in Athens from 1873 to 1877, living by odd jobs of all sorts. Somehow stories of Zaharoff's unsavory past leaked out in Athens. The atmosphere chilled for him among the youthful compatriots with whom he fraternized. Apparently Athens became too unpleasant, and the harassed youth moved on. A singular piece of good fortune overtook him at this point. Shortly after his disappearance a brief newspaper story told how a prisoner, Basileios Zaharoff, in an attempt to escape from the old prison of Garbola in Athens, had been shot and killed by a sentry. Zaharoff had made one friend in Athens — Stephen Skouloudis, later the compliant premier of King Constantine in his attempt to put Greece on the side of Germany, and then well on his way to riches. He had taken a fancy to Zaharoff and he was shocked at this story of his death.
Skouloudis went to Garbola, got a description of the prisoner who had been killed, had the body exhumed, and satisfied himself that it was not his maligned young friend. He traced the incident farther and learned that the shameful calumny had been printed by a reporter who hated Zaharoff. Having fled to England once more — this time to Manchester — Zaharoff returned to Athens as soon as he heard of Skouloudis' vindication of him to take advantage of the sympathy created for him by this shocking injustice. This seemingly happened in 1877. He needed work and Skouloudis added another claim upon his gratitude by recommending him to the representative of a Swedish gun maker, who was leaving Greece and looking for a successor. Zaharoff got that job, rushed in a frenzy of gratitude to Skouloudis' home, fell upon his knees, covered his hands with kisses and tears, and swore eternal friendship. Thus the first phase of the career of this young Monte Cristo ended. Strangely, one does not hear of further contact with Skoulbudis until 1915, when Skouloudis was made Prime Minister of King Constantine and Zaharoff was the brains and moneybag behind the conspiracy of France and Britain to dethrone Constantine and bring the Greeks in on the side of the Allies.
III.
Zaharoff — twenty-eight years old — was now in the munitions industry in which he spent the remainder of his eventful life. Torsten Vilhelm Nordenfeldt, a small Swedish manufacturer, commissioned Zaharoff as his agent for the whole Balkan territory at a salary of five pounds a week, later augmented by commissions. It was a small beginning, but in a most opportune time. The whole face of the munitions industry was changing — due to the pressure of inventors, politicians, and merchants.
There was, of course, nothing new about the arms industry. It was not invented before the World War or by the German junkers. It is a business, like any other. Man, in his discussions with other men about questions of religion, statecraft, geography, trade, has always reached a point in the discussion where it has seemed wise to reply to his opponent by disemboweling him or knocking his brains out. The demand for instruments of discussion of this type, from the day of the leathern armor and the flint spear, has always, quite naturally, inspired thrifty entrepreneurs to provide them for profit. It is a business like law or prostitution or hanging or banking or making shoes. Before the conqueror can lift his sword the armorer