Constantinople old and new

I.—THE HORDES OF ASIA

“The hordes of Asia....” That phrase, fished out of what reminiscence I know not, kept running through my head as the soldiers poured through the city. Where did they all come from? On the night of the 3d of October the streets began to resound portentously with drums, and out of the dark the voices of criers called every man, Moslem or Christian, married or single, to leave his house and defend his country. Then the crowded transports began to stream down the Bosphorus, sometimes as many as seven or eight a day. Opposite each village the whistle blew, the men cheered, and the people on shore waved handkerchiefs and flags. When the transports came down after dark it was more picturesque. Bengal lights would answer each other between sea and land, and the cheering filled more of the silence. It somehow sounded younger, too. And it insensibly led one into sentimentalities—into imaginations of young wives and children, of old parents, of abandoned fields, of what other fields in Thrace and Macedonia.

The hordes from the Black Sea made no more than their distant impression, perhaps no less dramatic for being so; and for them Constantinople can have been but a fugitive panorama of cypresses and minarets and waving handkerchiefs. They passed by without stopping to the ports of the Marmora. Other hordes, however, poured into the city so fast that no troop train or barracks could hold them. Hundreds, even thousands, of them camped every night under the mosaics of St. Sophia. At first they all wore the new hay-coloured uniform of Young Turkey. Then older reservists began to appear in the dark blue piped with red of Abd ül Hamid’s time. Meanwhile, conscripts and volunteers of all ages and types and costumes filled the streets. It took a more experienced eye than mine, generally, to pick out a Greek or an Armenian marching to war for the first time in the Turkish ranks. The fact is that a Roumelian or seaboard Turk looks more European than an Anatolian Christian. Nevertheless, the diversity of the empire was made sufficiently manifest to the most inexperienced eye. The Albanians were always a striking note. Hundreds of them flocked back from who knows where, in their white skull-caps and close-fitting white clothes braided with black. They are leaner and often taller than the Turks, who incline to be thick-bodied; fairer, too, as a rule, and keener-eyed. Something like them are the Laz, who are slighter and darker men but no less fierce. They have the name of being able to ride farther in less time than any other tribe of Asia Minor. Their uniforms were a khaki adaptation of their tribal dress—zouave-jackets, trousers surprisingly full at the waist and surprisingly tight about the leg, and pointed hoods with long flaps knotted into a sort of turban. This comfortable Laz hood, with slight variations of cut and colour, has been adapted for the whole army. I shall always remember it as a symbol of that winter war. Certain swarthy individuals from the Russian or Persian frontiers also made a memorable figure, in long black hairy sleeveless cloaks and tall caps of black lamb’s wool, tied about with some white rag. They gave one the impression that they might be very uncomfortable customers to meet in a blind alley on a dark night. These gentlemen, none the less, wore in their caps, like a cockade, what might have seemed to the vulgar a paint-brush, but what was in reality the tooth-brush of their country. Last of all the Syrians began to appear. They were very noticeably different from the broader, flatter, fairer Anatolian type. On their heads they wore the scarf of their people, bound about with a thick black cord, and on cold days some of them would drape a bournous over their khaki.

Just such soldiers must have followed Attila and Tamerlane, and the roving horseman who founded the house of Osman. And just such pack-animals as trotted across Galata Bridge, balking whenever they came to a crack of the draw. The shaggy ponies all wore a blue bead or two against the Evil Eye, and their high pack-saddles were decorated with beads or small shells or tufts of coloured worsted. Nor can the songs the soldiers sang, I imagine, have changed much in six hundred years. Not that many of them sang, or betrayed their martial temper otherwise than by the dark dignity of bearing common to all men of the East. It was strange to a Westerner to see these proud and powerful-looking men strolling about hand in hand. Yet it went with the mildness and simplicity which are as characteristic of them as their fierceness. One of them showed me a shepherd’s pipe in his cartridge belt. That was the way to go to war, he said—as to a wedding. Another played a violin as he marched, a quaint little instrument like a pochette or a viole d’amour, hanging by the neck from his hand. By way of contrast I heard a regimental band march one day to the train to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

At the train no more emotion was visible than in the streets. There was a certain amount of arranged band playing and cheering by command, but the men were grave and contained as ever. So were the friends who came to see them off—unless they happened to be Christians. Nothing could have been more characteristic than the groups of women, muffled in their black dominoes and generally veiled, who stood silent while the trains went out. The only utterance I ever happened to catch from them was from an old body who watched a regiment march into the station. “Let them cut,” she said, half to herself and half to those about her, making a significant horizontal movement of her hand. “Let them cut!” I heard of another who rebuked a girl for crying on a Bosphorus steamer after seeing off some member of her family. “I have sent my husband and my son,” she said. “Let them go. They will kill the unbelievers.”

I presume similar sentiments were expressed often enough by men. Why not, among so much ignorance, and at a time of so much resentment against the unbeliever? Yet I did not chance to hear anything of the sort. On the contrary, I was struck by what seemed to me a distinctly new temper in Mohammedans. Nazîm Pasha sounded the note of it when he proclaimed that this was a political, not a holy, war, and that non-combatants were to be treated with every consideration. If the proclamation was addressed partly to Europe, the fact remains that in no earlier war would a Turkish general have been capable of making it. It may be, too, that the disdain with which the Turk started out to fight his whilom vassals helped his tolerance. Nevertheless, as I somewhat doubtfully picked my way about Stamboul, wondering whether it was quite the thing to do at such a time, the sense grew in me that the common people were at last capable of classifications less simple than their old one of the believing and the unbelieving. It did not strike me, however, that even the uncommon people had much comprehension of the cause of the war. If they had I suppose there would have been no war. “We have no peace because of this Roumelia,” said an intelligent young man to me. “We must fight. If I die, what is it? My son at least will have peace.” Yet there was no particular enthusiasm, save such as the political parties manufactured. They organised a few picturesque demonstrations and encouraged roughs to break the windows of the Balkan legations. But except for the soldiers—the omnipresent, the omnipassant, hordes of Asia—an outsider might never have guessed that anything unusual was in the air. Least of all would he have guessed it when he heard people exclaim Mashallah! as the soldiers went by, and learned that they were saying “What God does will!” So far is it from Turkish nature to make a display of feeling. The nearest approach to such a thing I saw was on the day Montenegro declared war. Then smiles broke out on every face as the barefooted newsboys ran through Stamboul with their little extras. And the commonest phrase I heard that afternoon was: “What will be, let be.”

II.—RETROSPECTIVE

Did any one dream, then, what was to be? Yet one might have known. It was not a question of courage or endurance. Nobody, after the first surprise, doubted that. The famous hordes of Asia—they were indeed just such soldiers as followed Attila and Tamerlane, and the roving horseman who founded the house of Osman. That was the trouble with them. They had not learned that courage and endurance are not enough for modern warfare. All Europeans who have dealings with the Turk know that he is the least businesslike of men. He is constitutionally averse to order, method, promptness, discipline, responsibility. Numbers and calculations are beyond him. It is impossible to imagine him as a banker, a financier, a partner in any enterprise requiring initiative or the higher organising faculties. He simply hasn’t got them, or at all events he has never developed them. Moreover, there is about him a Hamlet-like indecision which he shares with the rest of Asia. He cannot make up his mind. He waits until he is forced, and then he has usually waited too long for his own good.

I could fill pages with anecdotes that were told me before the war, illustrating the endless dilly-dallying that was an inevitable part of every army contract. Soldiers were sent to the front, in consequence, with serious deficiencies in their equipment. There were not boots enough to go around, or overcoats enough, or knapsacks enough, or tents enough. Half the navy, at the beginning of winter, was in white duck, simply because blue serge comes from England and had not been ordered in time. As for ambulances and field-hospitals, there was practically nothing of the kind. Then, although the mobilisation took place with a despatch praised by foreign critics, it became evident that trains were not getting away with anything like clockwork. Regiments left hours, in some cases days, after the time appointed. And there began very early to be rumours that all was not well with the commissariat. A soldier whom I knew wrote back from Kîrk Kil’seh, ten days before the fatal battle, that he and the members of his company lived like dogs in the street, picking up food and shelter wherever they could. We heard the same thing from San Stefano, at the very gates of the capital. And at that time the general staff of the army was quartered there. They apparently had not read, marked, and inwardly digested the opinion put forth at a memorable council of war in that very town by Enrico Dandolo, Doge of Venice, in the year of grace 1203, when he said: “For he that has supplies wages war with more certainty than he that has none.” Regiments arriving by boat were given money to supply their own wants, in the absence of any other provision for them. But the resources of a village were inadequate to feed an army, and many soldiers went hungry. Bread was accordingly baked for them in Constantinople, and continued to be throughout the war. Sometimes, however, a bread train would return to the city unloaded, because it had been nobody’s business to attend to it. And for a while small riots took place in the capital on account of the shortage in the customary supply. The thing was the more serious because bread really is the staff of life in Turkey, and no one makes his own.

In spite of so many straws to show how the wind blew—and I have said nothing about the politics that honeycombed the army, the sweeping changes of personnel that took place no more than a month or two before the war, the mistake of sending first to the front untrained reserves and recruits who had never handled a rifle till they found themselves on the battle-field—the speed with which the allies succeeded in developing their campaign must have surprised the most turcophobe European. As for the Turks themselves, they have always had a fatalistic—a fatal—belief that they will one day quit Europe. Many times before and after the decisive battles I heard the question uttered as to whether the destined day had come. But no Turk can have imagined that his army, victorious on a thousand fields, would smash to pieces at the first onslaught of an enemy inexperienced in war. They forgot that the flower of the troops of the conquering sultans came from those very Balkan mountains.

At first the truth was held back. Long after Kîrk Kil’seh and Lüleh Bourgass and the loss of Macedonia there were men in Constantinople who did not know or could not believe the facts. The case must have been true much longer in the remote corners of Asia Minor. When the truth did come out it was crushing. The Turks had been too sure. Hardly an officer had not promised his friends post-cards from Sophia or Belgrade or Cettinje or Athens. And to have been beaten by the serfs of yesterday! But I, for one, have hardly yet the heart to say they deserved it. I remember too well a bey in civil life whom I knew, whose face two weeks of the war had ravaged like a disease, and the look with which he said, when I expressed regret at the passing of some quaint Turkish custom: “Everything passes in this world.” I quite understood the Turkish girls who went away in a body from a certain international school. “We cannot bear the Bulgarians,” they said. “They look at us—” It was characteristic, however, that they presently went back. One did not like, in those days, to meet one’s Turkish friends. It was like intruding into a house of death. But in this house something more than life had been lost. And I pay my tribute to the dignity with which that great humiliation was borne.

I stood one day at a club window watching a regiment march through Pera. Two Turkish members stood near me. “Fine looking men!” exclaimed one—and he was right. “How could soldiers like that have run away?” The other considered a moment. “If we had not announced,” he replied, “that this was not a holy war, you would have seen!” I am inclined to believe that there was something in his opinion. At the time, however, it reminded me of the young man who complained that the Turks had no peace. They were no quicker to understand the causes of their defeat than they had been to understand the causes of the war.

Not long afterward I spent an evening with some humble Albanians of my acquaintance. Being in a way foreigners like myself, they could speak with more detachment of what had happened, although there was no doubt as to their loyalty to the empire. They asked my views as to the reason of the disaster. I tried, in very halting Turkish, to explain how the Turk had been distanced in the art of war and many other arts, and how war no longer required courage alone but other qualities which the Turk does not seem to possess. I evidently failed to make my idea intelligible. Having listened with the utmost politeness, my auditors proceeded to give me their own view of the case. The one who presented it most eloquently had been himself a soldier in the Turkish army. It was under the old régime, too, when men served seven and nine years. He attributed the universal rout of the Turks less to the incompetence than to the cupidity of the officers. He believed, like his companions, and I doubt if anything will ever shake their belief, that the officers, from Nazîm Pasha down, had been bribed by the allies. What other possible explanation could there be of the fact that soldiers starved amid plenty and that Mohammedans ran—saving my presence!—from Christians? As for the European ingenuities that I made so much of—the ships, the guns, the railroads, the telephones, the automobiles, the aeroplanes—why should the Turks break their heads learning to make them when they could buy them ready-made from Europe? After all, what you need in war is a heart, and not to be afraid to die. My Albanian then went on to criticise, none too kindly, the Young Turk officer. In his day, he said, most of the officers rose from the ranks. They had been soldiers themselves, they understood the soldiers, and they could bear hardship like soldiers. The Young Turks, however, had changed all that. The ranker officers had been removed to make room for young mekteblis, schoolmen, who knew nothing of their troops or of war. They knew how to wear a collar, perhaps, or how to turn up their moustaches, à la Guillaume. But they didn’t know how to march in the rain or to sleep on the ground, and when the Bulgarians fired they ran away.

I am by way of being a schoolman myself, and I blushed for my kind as I heard this tall mountaineer make our indictment. What could I answer him? I knew that in many ways he was right. The schoolmen did not understand the fighting men as the rankers had done. Then there were far too few of them—as there were too many fighting men of the kind first sent to the front, whom I saw being recruited with handcuffs. And there had not been time to establish the new order of things on a sound footing.

III.—RED CROSS AND RED CRESCENT

After the hordes of Asia that went so proudly away it was a very different horde that began very soon to trickle back. No bands accompanied them this time, and if any of them had had violins or shepherds’ pipes they had lost them in the fields of Thrace. It was pitiful to see how silently, almost how secretly, those broken men came back. One would occasionally meet companies of them on the Bridge or in the vicinity of a barracks, in their grey ulsters and pointed grey hoods, shuffling along so muddy, so ragged, so shoeless, so gaunt and bowed, that it was impossible to believe they were the same men. Most of them, however, came back in the night and were not able even to shuffle. Two or three pictures are stamped in my memory as characteristic of those melancholy days. The first of them I happened to see when I moved into town for the winter, a few days after Kîrk Kil’seh. When I landed at dusk from a Bosphorus steamer, with more luggage than would be convenient to carry, I found to my relief that the vicinity of the wharf was crowded with cabs—scores of them. But not one would take a fare. They had all been commandeered for ambulance service. Near the first ones stood a group of women, Turkish and Christian, silently waiting. Some of them were crying. Another time, coming home late from a dinner-party, I passed a barracks which had been turned into a hospital. At the entrance stood a quantity of cabs, all full of hooded figures that were strangely silent and strangely lax in their attitudes. No such thing as a stretcher was visible. Up the long flight of stone steps two soldiers were helping a third. His arms were on their shoulders and each of them had an arm around him. One foot he could not use. In the flare of a gas-jet at the top of the steps a sentry stood in his big grey coat, watching. The three slowly made their way up to him and disappeared into the archway. Again, a lady who lives in Stamboul told me her own impressions so vividly that I remember them almost better than my own—of trains whistling all night long as they came in from the front, of city rubbish carts rumbling without end through the dark, and of peering out to see one under the window, full of wounded, with refugee women and children trudging behind in the rain.

After Lüleh Bourgass there was scarcely a barracks or a guard-house or a mosque or a school or a club or an empty house that was not turned into an impromptu hospital. For a moment, indeed, the resources of the city were swamped, and train loads of wounded would wait in the station for hours before any attempt could be made to unload them. Even then, thousands must have died for lack of care, for there were neither beds nor nurses enough. And it was only the more lightly wounded who came back. The others, in the general rout and in the lack of any adequate field-hospital service, died where they fell—unless the Bulgarians took pity on them. In either case no news about them was available. No casualty lists were published. I doubt if any one knew how many hospitals there were. Women would go vaguely from one to another asking for Ali or Hassan. There might be fifty Alis and Hassans in each one, or five hundred, and who was to know which from which?

In the face of so great an emergency every one, Mohammedan or Christian, native or foreigner, took some part in relief work. A number of Turkish ladies of high rank and the wives of the ambassadors had already organised sewing-circles. Madame Bompard, I believe, the French ambassadress, was the first to call the ladies of her colony together to work for the wounded. Mrs. Rockhill gave up her passage to America in order to lend her services. Although our embassy is much smaller than the others, a room was vacated for a workshop, a sailor from the despatch-boat Scorpion cut out after models furnished by the Turkish hospitals, and the Singer company lent sewing-machines—to any, in fact, who wanted them for this humanitarian use. Shall I add that America had a further share in these operations in that the coarse cotton used in most of the work is known in the Levant as American cloth? Lady Lowther organised activities of another but no less useful kind, to provide for the families of poor soldiers and for refugees. In the German embassy a full-fledged hospital was installed by order of the Emperor. At the same time courses in bandaging and nursing were opened in various Turkish and European hospitals. And Red Cross missions came from abroad in such numbers that after the first rush of wounded was over it became a question to know what to do with the Red Cross.

There is also a Turkish humane society, which is really the same as the Red Cross but which the Turks, more umbrageous than the Japanese with regard to the Christian symbol, call the Red Crescent. Foreign doctors, nurses, and orderlies wore the Turkish device on their caps or sleeves, and at first a small crimson crescent was embroidered by request on every one of the thousands of pieces of hospital linen contributed by different branches of the Red Cross. It is a pity that a work so purely humanitarian should in so unimportant a detail as a name arouse the latent hostility between two religious systems. Is it too late to suggest that some new device be found which will be equally acceptable to all the races and religions of the world? To this wholly unnecessary cause must be attributed much of the friction that took place between the two organisations. But I think it was only in humbler quarters that the Red Cross symbol was resented. At a dinner given by the prefect of Constantinople in honour of the visiting missions, it was an interesting thing, for Turkey, to see the hall decorated with alternate crescents and crosses. For the rest, any work of the kind is so new in Turkey that it was not surprising if some people failed to find the right note. It was entirely natural for the Turks to prefer to care for their own wounded, when they could, and to resent any implication that they were incapable of doing so. And the ignorance of tongues of the foreigners, with their further ignorance of Turkish tastes and the very doubtful human material some of them contributed, gave many just causes for complaint.

This relief-work marked a date in Turkish feminism, in that Turkish women for the first time acted as nurses in hospitals. They covered their hair, as our own Scripture recommends for a woman, but they went unveiled. Women also served in other capacities, and something like organised work was done by them in the way of preparing supplies for the sick. A lady who attended nursing lectures at a hospital in Stamboul told me that her companions, most of whom were of the humbler classes, went to the hospital as they would to the public bath, with food for the day tied up in a painted handkerchief. There they squatted on the floor and smoked as they sewed, resenting it a little when a German nurse in charge suggested more stitches and fewer cigarettes.

It was also a new thing for men to volunteer for hospital work, as a good many did under the auspices of the Red Crescent. They had charming manners, as Turks usually do; but they proved less efficient than the women, for the reason that the Turk of any breeding, and particularly the Constantinople Turk, has no tradition of working with his hands. It is not a question of snobbishness. He is in many ways more democratic than we. He treats servants on a greater equality, and the humble rise in the world even more easily than with us. But it is not the thing for him to use his hands except in sport and in war. He is far too dignified a being to carry a tray, for instance, in the presence of women or other inferiors. Add to this his natural disinclination to do anything he can get any one else to do, and you conceive the difficulties which might surround the attendance of such a helper.

Difficulties of another kind were sometimes experienced when Red Cross and Red Crescent doctors were thrown together. Medicine is a science to which the Turks rather lean, I believe, and there are excellent physicians and surgeons among them. But the excellent man, in science at any rate, is hardly appreciated in Constantinople as yet. The persuasive man has the lead of him. A foreign doctor described in my hearing the “eminent superficiality” of some of his Turkish colleagues, who had the graces and elegancies of diplomats and spoke French perfectly but who seemed to lack the plain, unvarnished, every-day essentials of surgery. And some sensitiveness or petty jealousy in them seemed to make them wish, although there was work enough for everybody, to make themselves felt wherever their foreign colleagues were at work. One of them was supposed to supervise the operations of my informant. The Turk was very agreeable, and interfered as little as possible, but reserved the right of prescribing whatever medicine might be required by the soldiers. This he did with great zeal, paying small heed to his European colleague’s opinion of a case. But to ascertain that the patient took the medicine prescribed he considered no part of his duty. Whole boxes of pills and powders were regularly found under the soldiers’ pillows, where they poked them as soon as the doctor turned his back.

The barracks and guard-houses allotted to some of the missions were Augean stables which required Herculean efforts to clean out. It was the more curiously characteristic because even the lower-class Turk is always cleanly. His ritual ablutions make him more agreeable at close quarters than Europeans of the same degree. I have one infallible way of picking out the Christian soldiers in a Turkish regiment: by their nails. The Turk’s are sure to be clean. And in his house he has certain delicacies undreamt by us. He will not wear his street shoes indoors. He will not eat without washing his hands before and after the meal. He considers it unclean—as, after all, it is—to wash his hands or his body in standing water. Yet vermin he regards as a necessary evil, while corporate cleanliness, like anything else requiring organisation and perseverance, seems as yet to be entirely beyond him.

I heard of a case in point from one of the great barracks in which two thousand invalids were looked after by different missions. The men were plentifully supplied with everything they required, but after the war had been going on two months or so the supply of linen began to fall amazingly low. The huge establishment was in charge of an amiable old pasha without whom nothing could be done, but who was, of course, much too grand a person to do anything himself. He asked the Red Cross to furnish a new supply of linen. The Red Cross took the liberty of asking him in return if his old linen had been washed. He replied emphatically that there could be no doubt of it: the barracks contained a perfect modern laundry. Nevertheless, no clean linen was forthcoming. One of the foreign doctors, therefore, began to explore. He finally discovered the perfect modern laundry, stuffed to the ceiling with an incalculable accumulation of dirty linen, not one piece of which had ever been washed. But the amiable pasha cried “Impossible!” when he was told of these facts. And he either did not know them or refused to take official cognisance of them until two ambassadresses, whom he could not refuse, led him, one by either hand, and made him stick his exalted nose into the perfect modern laundry. Shall I add that that laundry, neither so modern nor so perfect as the pasha affirmed, was finally taken in hand and run as long as the Red Cross had need of it by the doctor who discovered it? And shall I further be so indiscreet as to add that his name was Major Clyde S. Ford, U. S. A.?

Of the Turk as patient I heard nothing but praise. And, after all, there were many more of him. I take the more pleasure in saying it because I have hinted that in other aspects of the war the Turk did not always strike a foreign critic as perfect. I had it again and again, from one source after another, that as patients the Turks were perfect—docile and uncomplaining, in many ways like great children, but touchingly grateful. It became quite the thing for one of them who could write to send a letter to the Turkish papers in the name of his ward, expressing thanks to the doctors and nurses. And I wish I had space to quote some of those letters, so charmingly were they worded, with such a Lincolnian simplicity. It must have been a new and strange thing for most of the men to have women not of their families caring for them. They took a natural interest in their nurses, expressing a particular curiosity with regard to their état civil and wishing them young, rich, and handsome husbands when they did not happen to be already provided with such. But I heard of no case of rudeness that could not be explained by the patient’s condition. On the contrary, an English nurse told me that she found an innate dignity and refinement about the men which she would never expect from the same class of patients in her own country. They often had a child’s lack of realisation why one should be allowed what another was not. They smoked much more than children should, counting more on their cigarettes than on their food. They were also naturally inclined to find foreign cooking more medicinal than palatable. But they were rarely disobedient save when spirits or opiates were prescribed them. Those they often steadfastly refused to take. Chloroform, too, they sometimes objected to, as infringing the commands of the Prophet with regard to intoxicants. Perhaps they were a little afraid of it, suspecting in their peasant’s ignorance some foreign trick. I even heard of a Turkish doctor who asked a foreign surgeon to perform an operation for him, but who refused to allow an anaesthetic to be administered.

I am not fond of going to stare at sick people, but I happened for one reason or another to visit several hospitals and I brought away my own very distinct if very hasty impressions. I remember most vividly a hospital installed in a building which in times of peace is an art school. Opposite the door of one ward, by an irony of which the soldiers in the beds could scarcely be aware, stood a Winged Victory of Samothrace. Samothrace itself had a few days before been taken by the Greeks. The Victory was veiled—partly I suppose to keep her clean, and partly out of deference to Mohammedan susceptibilities. But there she stood, muffled and mutilated, above the beds of thirty or forty broken men of Asia. I shall always remember the look in their eyes, mute and humble and grateful and uncomprehending, as we passed from bed to bed, giving them sweets and cigarettes. The heads that showed above the thick coloured quilts were dressed in white skull-caps, for an Oriental cannot live without something on his hair. It is a point both of etiquette and of religion. Those who were farther on the way to recovery prowled mildly about in baggy white pyjamas and quilted coats of more colour than length. Their wearers had an admirable indifference as to who saw them. A great many had a left hand tied up in a sling—a hand, I suppose, that some Bulgarian had seen sticking a gun-barrel out of a trench in Thrace. Some limped painfully or went on crutches. But it was not always because of a bullet. There were a vast number of cases of gangrene, simply from ill-fitting shoes or from puttees too tightly bound which hands were too cold or too weak to undo. There were fewer resulting amputations than would have been the case in other countries. Many of the soldiers refused absolutely to have their legs cut off. Life would be of no further use to them, they said. I heard of one who would not go maimed into the presence of Allah. He preferred to go the sooner as he was. And he did, without a word, without a groan, waiting silently till the poison reached his heart. A European nurse told me that in all her long experience she had never seen men die like these ignorant Turkish peasants—so bravely, so simply, so quietly. They really believe, I suppose. In any case, they are of Islam, resigned to the will of God. After death they must lie in a place with no door or window open, for as short a time as possible. A priest performs for them the last ritual ablution, and then they are hurried silently away to a shallow grave.

IV.—RECONNOITRING BY TAXI

The war correspondent had arrived from Pekin too late to go to the front. The front, however, seemed to be making its way as fast as it could to the war correspondent. It was near enough, at any rate, to make him feel a certain independence of permits, passes, and other pieces of paper of which the War Office was exceeding chary. What could have made the situation more patent than that a war correspondent should engage a taxicab, a common Pera taxi, striped red and black and presumably not infallible as to its mechanism, and should invite an amateur and a British resident to help him ascertain whether the Chatalja lines were as unapproachable as they were reported?

Our first plan was to strike northwest in the hope of coming out somewhere between Hadem-kyöi, the headquarters of Nazîm Pasha, and the forest region of Derkos, which local rumour had lately peopled with Bulgarians. I may as well say first as last that this plan did not succeed. Before we were half-way to the lines our road petered out into a succession of quagmires and parallel ruts with heather growing so high between them that it threatened to scrape off the under works of the car. Into one of the quagmires we sank so deeply that only a pair of hairy black buffalo could haul us out. For an irresponsible amateur, however, the attempt had its impressions. The most abiding one was that of the Constantinople campagna. It undulated to the horizon so desolate in its autumn colour, so bare save for a few tawny clumps of wood, so empty and wild, that no one would suspect the vicinity of a great capital. We met almost no one. A few Greek peasants came or went to market, apparently oblivious to wars or rumours of them. Not so a convoy of Turkish refugees, toiling up a hill with all they had in the world piled under matting on ox-carts with huge ungainly wheels. We ran through one village inhabited by Greeks—Pyrgos is its name, and a famous panayíri is held there in August—who gave us anew a sense of the strange persistence of their type through so many vicissitudes. Among them were girls or women with big double-armed amphoræ on their shoulders that might have come out of a museum. As we rammed the furze a mile or two beyond we saw the minaret of a Turkish village, and heard a müezin call to noonday prayer. We heard a shot, too, crack suddenly out of the stillness. It had to do duty with us for an adventure—unless I mention a couple of deserters we met, one of whom drew his bayonet as we bore down upon him. But I must not forget the fine Byzantine aqueduct under which we stopped to lunch. As we stood admiring the two tiers of arches marching magnificently across the ravine we heard a sound of bells afar. The sound came nearer and nearer, until a string of camels wound into sight. They took the car as unconcernedly as the car took them, disappearing one by one through the tall gateway that Andronicus Comnenus built across that wild valley.

Our second attempt was more successful. It led us through Stamboul and the cemetery cypresses outside the walls, into a campagna flatter and more treeless than the one we had seen in the morning, but not so void of humanity. In the neighbourhood of the city the refugees made the dominant note, with their clumsy carts and their obstinate cattle and their veiled women and their own coats of many colours. Other refugees were camped on the bare downs. The children would run toward us when they caught sight of the car, laughing and shouting. For them war was a picnic. Farther out the soldiers were more numerous than the refugees. Every time we met one, at first, we expected to be stopped. Some of them were driving cattle and horses into the city. Others were going out with carts of supplies. Once we overtook a dark mass of redifs making in loose order for the isolated barracks of Daoud Pasha—where the Janissaries used to muster for a European campaign. We knew them by their blue uniforms, piped with red, of Abd ül Hamid’s time. They looked mildly at us as we charged them, and mildly made room. So did the officer who rode at their head. On the ascent beyond him we saw two men in khaki waiting for us. We concluded that our reconnaissance was at an end. But we presently perceived that the men in khaki wore red crescents on their sleeves and carried no rifles. They merely wanted to see us pass. It was the same at a gendarmerie station a little farther on, and at the aerodrome behind San Stefano.

We found the road unexpectedly good, after the heather and quagmires of the morning. There were bad bits in it, but they only gave us occasion to bless the French syndicate that had had time to make the good ones before the war broke out. After dipping through one wide hollow we came in sight of the Marmora. A battle-ship making for the city drew a long smudge of smoke across the vaporous blue—the German Goeben, we afterward learned she was. On the low shore the Russian war monument of 1878 lifted its syringe dome. Through all the region behind it a faint odour of carbolic hung in the air, a reminder of the place of horror that San Stefano had become since cholera broke out. We passed a few dead cattle. A huge dog was tearing at one carcass, a creature that twilight would have made a hyena. Some new-made graves, too, had their own story to tell.

Suddenly, on the brow of a hill, we came upon the sunset picture of Küchük Chekmejeh. Below us, at the left, was a bay into which the sun was dropping. To the right stretched a shining lake. And between them ran a long bridge with one fantastically high and rounded arch that looked at its own image in the painted water. I would like to believe that that arch is the one mentioned in the epitaph of the architect Sinan and romantically likened to the Milky Way; but I believe the true arch of the Milky Way is at Büyük Chekmejeh. The village of Küchük Chekmejeh—the Little Drawbridge—made a huddle of red-brown roofs at the right end of the bridge. As we ran down to it we encountered more soldiers guarding a railway line. In front of us a cart crossed the track with an empty stretcher. Near it two men were digging or filling a grave. The village itself was full of soldiers, who also guarded the bridge. We skimmed across it, no one saying a word to us, and up into another high bare rolling country bordered by the sea.

We decided to spend the night in Büyük Chekmejeh—the Great Drawbridge—which is the Marmora end of the Chatalja lines, and in front of which the Bulgarians were supposed to be massing for a battle that might be the end of all things. Soldiers grew thicker as we ran on. Presently we found ourselves in the midst of a camp. Fires were burning between the tents and soldiers went to and fro carrying food. Then we looked down on another picture, in composition very much like the first. The bay and the lake were bigger, however, and we saw no arch of the Milky Way as the bridge went lengthwise below us. The centre of interest this time was a man-of-war and half a dozen torpedo-boats. They, and the twilight in which we saw them, and the high black shores beyond, had an unexpectedly sinister air. Nevertheless, we began slowly picking our way down toward an invisible village. Soldiers were all about us. A line of them were carrying big round platters. Another line of them sat beside the road, in what I ingenuously took to be an unfinished gutter until the war correspondent called it a trench. We began to ask ourselves questions. We also asked them of a soldier, inquiring if we should find room in the village to spend the night. He assured us that we would find plenty of room: everybody had gone away. Oh! And where were the Bulgarians? He pointed over to the black line of hills on the other side of the bay.

We decided that we would not, after all, spend the night in Büyük Chekmejeh! Our taxi, that had behaved irreproachably all day, chose that inauspicious moment to balk. While the chauffeur was tinkering with it an officer rode up and recommended him to be off as quickly as possible. That officer was the first member of his army who had addressed a question or a remonstrance to us all day. The chauffeur stated our plight. “Never mind,” said the officer, as if a car were a mule that only had to be beaten a little harder to make it move, “you must go back. And you must be quick, for after six o’clock no one will be allowed on the roads.” It was then half past five. And we realised with extreme vividness that we were between the lines of the two armies, and that our lamps would make an excellent mark for some Bulgarian artilleryman if he took it into his head to begin the battle of Chatalja. As a matter of fact, he obligingly waited till the next night. In the meantime the car made up its mind to go on. We sputtered slowly up the long hill, passing lighted tents that looked cosy enough to an amateur bound for the rear. But once in open country a tire gave out and we lost our half-hour of grace.

As we coasted down the hill to the bridge which should have been of the Milky Way our lamps illuminated a hooded giant in front of us. He barred the road with his bayonet, saying pleasantly to the chauffeur:

“It is forbidden, my child.”

“What shall we do?” asked the chauffeur.

“In the name of God, I know not,” replied he of the hood. “But the bridge is forbidden.”

Personally, I did not much care. A southerly air warmed the November night, a half-moon lighted it, and while there was not too much room in the taxi for three people to sleep, still the thing could be done. The British resident, however, who had grey hairs and a family, asked to be taken to the officer in command. The gentleman in the hood did not object. The British resident was accordingly escorted across the bridge by another gentleman in a hood, who mysteriously materialised out of the moonlight, while we waited until our companion came back with his story. The point of it was that the officer in command happened to know the name and the face of the British resident, and agreed with him that, if stopping was to be done, it should have been done earlier in the day. The colonel, therefore, let us through his lines. But he gave strict orders that no one, thereafter, was to cross the bridge of Küchük Chekmejeh without a pass from the War Office.

I forbear to dwell too long upon the rest of our return. We fell once more into the hands of sentries, who were somehow softened by the eloquence of the chauffeur. We broke down again and hung so long on the side of a hill that we made up our minds to spend the night there. We fell foul of bits of road that made us think of a choppy sea; and, in turning off a temporary bridge into a temporary road, we stuck for a moment with one wheel spinning over eternity. We passed many military convoys, going both ways. Our lamps would flare for a moment on a grey hood, on a high pack-saddle, on a cart piled with boxes or sacks, and then the road would be ours again. Camp-fires flickered vaguely over the dark downs. Sometimes we would overtake a refugee cart, the head of the house leading the startled bullocks, the women and children walking behind. As we began to climb out of the last dip toward the cypresses and the city wall the road became one confusion of creaking wheels, of tossing horns, of figured turbans, of women clutching a black domino about their faces with one hand and with the other a tired child. Under the sombre trees fires burned murkily, lighting up strange groups of peasants and gravestones. And all the air was aromatic with burning cypress wood.

At the Top Kapou Gate, where Mehmed II made his triumphal entry in 1453, the press was so thick that we despaired of getting through. “It is no use,” said a peasant when we asked him to pull his cart to one side. “They are letting no one in.” It was true. The outbreak of cholera had made precautions necessary. A line of grey hoods stood outside the gate and kept back the carts that streamed townward more thickly than ever on the eve of Chatalja. But our infidel car was allowed to enter the city of the Caliph, although his true children, fleeing from an unknown terror, waited outside among the graves. Stamboul was almost deserted as we sped through the long silent streets, save for an occasional patrol or a watchman beating out the hour on the pavement with his club. Twice we met companies of firemen, pattering half naked after a white linen lantern, with their little hand-pumps on their shoulders. Then came the parallel lights of the new bridge, and dark Galata, and Pera that looked never so urban or so cheery after those desolate downs.

On the comfortable leather cushions of the club—somehow they made me think of the refugees among the cypresses—we told the story of our day.

“So,” said another war correspondent, who had been lucky enough to see the battle of Lüleh Bourgass through the eyes of a lost dragoman, “you saw nothing at all?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

V.—SAN STEFANO

It is strange how San Stefano, in spite of herself, like some light little person involuntarily caught into a tragedy, seems fated to be historic. San Stefano is a suburb on the flat northwestern shore of the Marmora that tries perseveringly to be European and gay. San Stefano has straight streets. San Stefano has not very serious-looking houses standing in not very interesting-looking gardens. San Stefano has a yacht-club whose members, possessing no yachts, spend their time dancing and playing bridge. And a company recently bought land and planted groves on the edge of San Stefano with the idea of making a little Monte Carlo in the Marmora. Whether San Stefano was trying to be worldly and light-minded as long ago as 1203, when Enrico Dandolo stopped there with the men of the fourth crusade, I cannot say—nor does Villehardouin. Another far-come army to stop there was that of the Russians, in 1878, who left not much light-heartedness in San Stefano. In 1909 the events which preceded the fall of Abd ül Hamid turned the yacht-club for a moment into the parliament of the empire, and the town into an armed camp. Turned into an armed camp again at the outbreak of the Balkan War, San Stefano soon became a camp of a more dreadful kind.

I did not see San Stefano, myself, at the moment of its greatest horror. When I did go, one cold grey November morning, it was rather unwillingly, feeling myself a little heroic, at all events wanting not to seem too unheroic in the eyes of the war correspondent and the other friend he invited to go. I did not know then, in my ignorance, that cholera can be caught only through the alimentary canal. And my imagination was still full of the grisly stories the war correspondent had brought back from his first visit. There was nothing too grisly to be seen, however, as we landed at the pier. Chiefly to be seen were soldiers, coated and hooded in grey, as usual, who were transferring supplies of different kinds from small ships to the backs of small pack-animals. The correspondent accordingly took out his camera; but he pretended to focus it on us, knowing the susceptibility of Turks in the matter of photography—a susceptibility that had been aggravated by the war. Seeing that the men were interested rather than displeased at his operations, he went about posing a group of them. Unfortunately an enterprising young police sergeant appeared at that moment. He took the trouble to explain to us at length that to photograph soldiers like that, at the pier, with hay on their clothes and their caps askew, was forbidden. People would say, when we showed the prints in our country, “Ha! That is a Turkish soldier!” and get a wrong impression of him. The impression I got was of his size and good looks together with a mildness amounting to languor. I do not know whether those men at the pier had been through the two great battles, or whether the pest-house air of the place depressed them. A Greek who witnessed our discomfiture came up and told us of a good picture we could take, unmolested by the police, a little way out of the village, where a soldier sat dead beside the railway track with a loaf of bread in his hands. We thanked the Greek but thought we would not trouble him to show us his interesting subject.

As we went on into the village we found it almost deserted except by soldiers. Every resident who could do so had run away. A few Greek and Jewish peddlers hawked small wares about. A man was scattering disinfecting powder in the street, which the wind carried in gusts into our faces. Patrols strolled up and down, sentinels stood at doors, other soldiers, more broken than any I had yet seen, shuffled aimlessly past. We followed a street that led toward the railway. On the sea side of the line we came out into an open space enclosed between houses and the high embankment. The grass that tried to grow in this space was strewn with disinfecting powder, lemon peel, odds and ends of clothing—a boot, a muddy fez, a torn girdle. That was what was left of the soldiers who strewed the ground when the correspondent was there before. There were also one or two tents. Through the open flap of the nearest one we saw a soldier lying on his face, ominously still.

We followed our road through the railway embankment. Sentries were posted on either side, but they made no objection to our passing. On the farther slope of the bank men were burning underbrush. A few days before their fellows, sent back from the front, had been dying there of cholera. A little beyond we came to a large Turkish cholera camp. By this time all the soldiers seemed to be under cover. We passed tents that were crowded with them, some lying down, others sitting with their heads in their hands. A few roamed aimlessly in the open. The ground was in an indescribable condition. No one was trying to make the men use the latrines that had been constructed for them. I doubt if any one could have done so. Some of the soldiers, certainly, were too weak to get so far. After all they had gone through, and in the fellowship of a common misery, they were dulled to the decencies which a Mohammedan is quicker than another to observe.

Near the station some long wooden sheds were being run up, to make shelter for the men in the tents and for those who were yet to come back from Hadem-kyöi. We made haste to be by, out of the sickening odour and the sense of a secret danger lurking in the air we breathed. We crossed the track and went back into the village, passing always more soldiers. Some were crouching or lying beside the road, one against the other, to keep warm. I could never express the shrunken effect the big fellows made inside their big overcoats, with dog-like eyes staring out of sallow faces. Some of them were slowly eating bread, and no doubt taking in infection with every mouthful. Venders of lemons and lemon-drops came and went among them. Those they seemed to crave above everything. In front of the railway station were men who had apparently just arrived from Hadem-kyöi. They were being examined by army doctors. They submitted like children while the doctors poked into their eyes, looked at their tongues, and divided them into categories. In a leafless beer-garden opposite the station tents were pitched, sometimes guarded by a cordon of soldiers. But only once did a sentry challenge us or otherwise offer objection to our going about.

We finally found ourselves at the west edge of the village, where a street is bordered on one side by open fields. This was where until a few days before hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men had lain, those with cholera and those without, the dying among the dead. The ground was strewn with such débris of them as we had seen under the railway embankment, but more thickly. And, at a certain distance from the road, was a débris more dreadful still. At first it looked like a great heap of discarded clothing, piled there to be burned—until I saw two drawn-up knees sticking out of the pile. Then I made out, here and there, a clinched hand, a grey face. A little omnibus came back from somewhere in the fields and men began loading the bodies into it. The omnibus was so short that most of the legs stuck out of the door. Sometimes they had stiffened in the contortion of some last agony. And half the legs were bare. In their weakness the poor fellows had foregone the use of the long girdle that holds together every man of the East, and as they were pulled off the ground or hoisted into the omnibus their clothes fell from them. We did not go to see where they were buried. There had been so many of them that the soldiers dug trenches no deeper than they could help. The consequence was that the dogs of the village pawed into many of the graves.

There are times when a man is ashamed to be alive, and that time, for me, was one of them. What had I done that I should be strolling about the world with clothes on my back and money in my pocket and a smug feeling inside of me being a little heroic, and what had those poor devils done that they should be pitched half naked into a worn-out omnibus and shovelled into trenches for dogs to gnaw at? They had left their homes in order to save their country. Before they had had time to strike a blow for it they had been beaten by privation and neglect. Starved, sick, and leaderless, they had fallen back before an enemy better fed, better drilled, better officered, fighting in a better cause. Attacked then, by an enemy more insidious because invisible, they had been dumped down into San Stefano and penned there like so many cattle. Some of them were too weak to get out of the train themselves and were thrown out, many dying where they fell. Others crawled into the village in search of food and shelter. A few found tents to crowd into. The greater number lay where they could through wet autumn days and nights, against houses, under trees, side by side in fields, and so died. Out of some vague idea of keeping the water uncontaminated, the sentries were ordered to keep the poor fellows away from the public drinking fountains, and hundreds died simply from thirst.

The commander of an Austrian man-of-war, hearing of this horrible state of affairs, went to see San Stefano for himself. He made no attempt to conceal his disgust and indignation. He told the authorities that if they wished to save the last vestige of their country’s honour they should within twenty-four hours put an end to the things he had seen. The authorities did so: by shipping several hundred sick soldiers—prodding them with bayonets when they were too weak to board the steamer—off to Touzla, on the Asiatic side of the Marmora, where they would be safely out of sight of prying foreigners. We were told several times, both by residents of the village and by outsiders, that they were actually prevented from doing anything to help, because, forsooth, the sick men had betrayed and disgraced their country and only deserved to die. I cannot believe that any such argument was responsibly put forward unless by men who needed to cover up their own stupidity and criminal incompetence. How could human beings be so inhuman? Were they simply overwhelmed and half maddened by their defeat? And, with their constitutional inability to cope with a crisis, with the lack among them of any tradition of organised humanitarianism, were they paralysed by the magnitude of the emergency? I am willing to believe that the different value which the Oriental lays on human life entered into the case. In that matter I am inclined to think that our own susceptibility is exaggerated. But that does not explain why the Oriental is otherwise. Part of it is, perhaps, a real difference in his nervous system. Another part of it is no doubt related to that in him which has kept him behind the West in all practical contrivances. Human life was not of much account in Europe a few hundred years ago. And in the back of the Turk’s brain there may be some proud Islamic view of battle and dying therein, descended from the same remote Asiatic conception as the Japanese theory of suicide. Certainly the Turk fears death less and bears it more stoically than we. Does that give him the right to think less of the life of his fellow beings?

The Austrian officer raised his voice, at least, for the soldiers in San Stefano. The first to lift a hand was a Swiss lady of the place. Her name has been pronounced so often that I shall not seem yellow-journalistic if I mention it again. Almost every resident who could possibly leave San Stefano had already done so. Fräulein Alt, however, remained. She carried the soldiers the water from which the sentries kept them. She also made soup in her own house and took it to the weakest, comforting as best she could their dying moments. It was, of course, very little that she could do among so many. But she was the first who dared to do it. She was soon joined by another lady of the place, Frau Schneider. And presently a few Europeans from the city helped them make a beginning of relief-work on a larger scale. One of the new recruits was a woman also, Miss Graham, of the Scotch mission to the Jews. The others were Rev. Robert Frew, the Scotch clergyman of Pera; Mr. Hoffman Philip, first secretary of the American embassy; and two gentlemen who had come to Constantinople for the war, the English writer Maurice Baring, and Major Ford, whom I have already mentioned, of our own army medical staff. English and American friends and the American Red Cross contributed help in other ways and obtained that of the authorities. These half-dozen good Samaritans left their own affairs and did what they could to make a hospital out of a Greek school into which sick soldiers had been turned. It was a heroic thing to do, for at that time no one knew that the men were chiefly suffering from dysentery brought on by privation, and Red Cross missions were hesitating to go. Moreover the sanitary conditions of the school were appalling. Six hundred men were lying there on the filthy and infected floor, as well as in a shed which was the rainy-day playground of the school, and in a few tents in the yard. Some of the soldiers had been dead two or three days. Many of them were dying. None of them had had any food besides the intermittent bread of the municipality, or any care save such as Fräulein Alt had been able to give them.