Constantinople Old and New

XVI War Time 1912-1913

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.

I felt not even a little heroic by the time I went into the yard of this school, next the field where the heap of dead soldiers lay, and saw these voluntary exiles coming and going in their oilskins. I felt rather how rarely, in our padded modern world, is it given a man to come down to the primal facts of life. This reflection, I think, came to me from the smart tan gloves which one of the Samaritans wore, and which, associating them as I could with embassies and I know not what of the gaieties of life, looked so honourably incongruous in that dreadful work. The correspondent, of course, was under orders to take photographs; but his camera looked incongruous in another way in the face of realities so horrible—impertinent, I might say, if I did not happen to like the correspondent. A soldier lurched out of the school with the gait and in the necessity characteristic of his disease. He looked about, half dazed, and established himself at the foot of a tree, his hands clasped in front of his knees, his head sunk forward on his breast. Other soldiers came and went in the yard, some in their worn khaki, some in their big grey coats and hoods. One began to rummage in the circle of débris which marked the place of a recent tent. He picked up a purse—one of the knitted bags which the people of Turkey use—unwound the long string, looked inside, turned the purse inside out, and put it into his pocket. An older man came up to one of my companions. “My hands are cold,” he said, “and I can’t feel anything with them. What shall I do?” We also wore hats and spoke strange tongues, like the miracle-workers within: the poor fellow thought we could perform a miracle for him. As we did not he started to go into the street, but the sentry at the gate stopped him. Two orderlies came out of the school carrying a stretcher. A dead man lay on it, under a blanket. The wasted body raised hardly more of the blanket than that of a child.

When we went away the sick soldier was still crouching at the foot of his tree, his hands clasped about his knees and his head sunken on his breast.

VI — The Pontiff of the East

The incidents of the Balkan War monopolised so much interest that another incident of those days in Constantinople attracted less attention. It is, perhaps, natural that those not on the ground should have small understanding of the part the Ecumenical Patriarchate has played in the politics of Turkey. In the Levant, however, the death of His All-Holiness Joachim III, Patriarch of Constantinople and ranking prelate of the Greek Orthodox Church, was an event no less important than in the West would be the death of the Pope. And for those of his spiritual flock, as for many outside it, the disappearance, at such a moment, of that remarkable personality, together with the circumstances of his funeral, were a part of the larger aspects of the war.

The organisation of the Eastern church is far less centralised than that of the Western, and the political relations of the countries in which it holds sway have tended to keep it so. There are three other Patriarchs within the Turkish empire—in Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—while the churches of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Roumania, Russia, and Servia, as well as of the Orthodox populations of Austria-Hungary, are independent of Constantinople. One of these churches, the Bulgarian, has been excommunicated by the Patriarchate. Over two others only, those of Greece and Servia, does the Phanar maintain so much authority as to provide them with the oils for the sacrament of the Holy Chrism. But the Patriarch of Constantinople enjoys dignities accorded to no other primate of his faith, and as spiritual chief of the Greeks of Turkey he exercises much of the temporal power claimed by the Pope. The autocephalous sister churches, moreover, acknowledge his spiritual supremacy, and have usually been careful to avoid the name of patriarch in their own hierarchies. And to his throne attaches all the prestige of its ancient history. That history, reaching back without a break to the time of Constantine, has not yet found its Von Ranke. The schism of East and West and the political as well as the religious relation of Western Christianity to Rome has caused Constantinople to be neglected by Western scholars. But if the Patriarchate can boast no such brilliant period as that of the papacy during the Renaissance, its closer association with the establishment and early development of the church, and with the lands where Christianity originated, gives it an interest which the papacy can never claim.

When the Roman Empire came to an end and every Greek Orthodox country except Russia was overrun by the Turks, the Patriarchate did not cease to play a great rôle. As a matter of fact, it began to play a greater one than for many centuries before. It would be a study worth undertaking to determine the part the Patriarchs have acted in the gradual release from Islam of Orthodox Christendom. The weapon for this release was given them by the Conqueror himself. On the 1st of June, 1453, three days after Mehmed II stormed the city, he ordered the clergy left in Constantinople to elect a successor to the late Patriarch and to consecrate him according to the historic procedure. The candidate chosen was the learned monk Gennadius, otherwise known as George Scholarius, of the monastery of the Pantocrator. This was where the Venetians had their headquarters during the Latin occupation, and the palace of the Balio which the Genoese pulled down in 1261 seems to have been a part of the monastery. Its great triple church, now known as Zeïrek Kil’seh Jami, was where the Venetians put the icon of the Shower of the Way when they stole it from St. Sophia. Other relics of the church are now in the treasury of St. Mark’s. I do not know whether the portrait of Gennadius is to be seen in the Riccardi Chapel at Florence, where Benozzo Gozzoli painted his delightful fresco of the Three Kings and put so many faces of noted men of his time. One of the Three Kings is none other than John VII Palæologus, whom Gennadius accompanied in 1438 to the Council of Ferrara in an attempt to bring about the reunion of the churches. In 1452, however, Gennadius defeated the last effort to reconcile the two rites, and he became the first Patriarch under the régime which, as the catchword of the day had it, preferred the turban of the Turk to the tiara of the Pope. In the ceremony of his investiture the Sultan played the part formerly enacted by the Greek emperor, with the sole exception of receiving the communion from the hands of the new pontiff. The Conqueror then invited Gennadius to a private audience, at which he received him with every distinction. When the Patriarch took leave the young Sultan presented him with a jewelled staff of office, and said: “Be Patriarch, and may Heaven guide you. Do not hesitate to rely on my friendship. Enjoy all the rights and privileges which your predecessors have enjoyed.” He then accompanied his guest to the outer gate, ordering the highest dignitaries of his own suite to accompany His All-Holiness to the Patriarchate. Which was done, the Patriarch riding one of the Sultan’s finest horses. The Conqueror afterward confirmed his words in writing, making inviolable the person of the Patriarch, and confirming the Greeks in the possession of their churches and their cult. Thus the Greek Patriarch is one of the greater dignitaries of the Ottoman Empire. He ranks immediately after the members of the cabinet, taking precedence of every Mohammedan cleric except a Sheï’h ül Islam in office.

We have already seen how the Sultan made similar concessions in favour of the Latins of Galata. These two acts, purely voluntary, created the precedent for the status of non-Moslems in the Ottoman Empire. This status is one of the most peculiar features of Turkish polity. The Armenians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Levantine Catholics, and various other fractions of races and religions form each what is called in Turkish a millet—a nation. Each has its own spiritual head, who also exercises jurisdiction in all temporal matters of his flock that concern marriage, the family, and education. Similarly, those who are not Ottoman subjects enjoy rights and privileges which no Western country would tolerate for one moment. This is in virtue of the capitulations granted by early sultans, partly out of magnanimity, partly out of disdain. The Conqueror has been praised for his generosity and statesmanship in granting these concessions. From the Christian point of view he may deserve praise. But if I were a Turk I would be more inclined to denounce his youth and lack of foresight for creating conditions that entailed the ruin of the empire. He did not, it is true, altogether create those conditions. The Byzantine emperors, who ruled an empire more diverse than his own, set the example which Mehmed II followed. But if he had shown less mercy as a conqueror or less deference as a newcomer among old institutions, if he had cleared the Christians out or forced them to accept all the consequences of the conquest, he would have spared his successors many a painful problem. He might even have assimilated a hopelessly heterogeneous population, and his flag might fly to-day on the shore of the Adriatic.

Be that as it may, the Turks lived to regret the policy of the Conqueror. The whole history of the Patriarchate during the Turkish period has been one of constant encroachment on its privileges and constant attempts to preserve them. During this long struggle not even the person of the Patriarch has always been safe. At least four have met violent deaths at the hands of the Turks. The last was Gregory V, who, in revenge for the part played by the Phanariotes in the Greek revolution, was hanged on Easter morning of 1822 in the gateway of his own palace. This gate, at the top of a re-entering flight of steps, has never since been opened. The Conqueror himself, having already seized the glorious cathedral of Eastern Christianity, so far went back on his word as to take possession of the Church of the Holy Apostles. This structure, built by Constantine and magnified by Justinian, had been an imperial Pantheon. After the loss of St. Sophia it became the seat of the Patriarchate. It is true that the Latins had sacked it in 1204, and that Gennadius had voluntarily moved his throne to the church of the All-blessed Virgin. Nevertheless, it was not precisely in accord with the Conqueror’s promises when he razed to the ground the magnificent church that had been the model for St. Mark’s of Venice, and built on its site the first of the mosques bearing a sultan’s name. This example was so faithfully followed by his successors, that of the twenty-five or thirty Byzantine churches still in existence only one is now in Greek hands. It is only fair to add, however, that a few modern churches in Stamboul occupy ancient sites, and that the decrease of the Greek population caused others to be abandoned by their original worshippers.

The one exception I have noted is a small church in the Phanar quarter called St. Mary the Mongolian. This curious name was that of the founder, a natural daughter of Michael Palæologus. After driving out the Latins in 1261 the emperor thought to consolidate his position by offering the hand of the Princess Mary to Holagou, that redoubtable descendant of Tamerlane who destroyed the caliphate of Bagdad. Holagou died, however, while his bride was on her way to him. But the Palæologina continued her journey and married the son of her elderly fiancé. After he in turn had gone the way of his father, the princess returned to Constantinople and built her church and the monastery of which it formed a part. The Lady of the Mongols, as the Greeks called her, was the first member of her house whom the founder of the house of Osman had seen, and she treated him so contemptuously that he paid her back by capturing the city of Nicæa as a base for his future operations against the empire of her fathers. When, less than two hundred years later, the descendant of Osman took the capital of the Palæologi and built there his great mosque, he made a present of St. Mary the Mongolian to his Greek architect. So it is that the Greeks have always been able to retain possession of the church.

Joachim III, two hundred and fifty-fourth in the long line of Ecumenical Patriarchs of Constantinople, played a memorable part in the struggle between the two powers. Like his cousin of the Vatican, he was of humble family. His father was a fisherman in the village of Boyaji-kyöi, on the Bosphorus. The boy was given to the church when he was no more than twelve years old, going in 1846 with his village priest to a monastery of Mount Athos. After the death of his priest, three years later, he found a more powerful protector in the person of the Metropolitan of Cyzicus, who sent him to Bucharest in charge of the Metropolitan of that city. For in those days Bucharest was merely the capital of Wallachia, a Turkish province governed by Phanariote Greeks. In Bucharest the young ecclesiastic definitely took orders and was ordained as a deacon at the age of eighteen. Before his eventual return to Constantinople he found occasion to see something more of the world, spending not less than four years in Vienna. These wanderjahren made up to him in considerable measure his lack of any systematic education. In 1860 his protector became Patriarch, and the young priest was called to make part of his court. Three years later the Patriarch fell from power. But in 1864 Joachim was elected Metropolitan of Varna. The fisherman’s son had already become, that is, and without the favour of his protector, a prince of the church; for the Metropolitans of the Patriarchate form a body corresponding to the College of Cardinals. Eight years later he became a member of the Holy Synod, which is the executive council of the Patriarchate, composed of twelve Metropolitans. In 1874 he was transferred to the important see of Salonica. It is rather curious that the three cities of his longest ecclesiastical residence outside of Constantinople should have passed out of Turkish hands during his lifetime, and in the order of his residence in them. He remained but four years in Salonica. In 1878, at the age of forty-four, he was elected to the throne of St. John Chrysostom.

Sultan Abd ül Hamid II had but recently come to the throne of Osman. As he took account of his empire, shaken by a disastrous war, and gathered the reins of government into his own hands, he discovered that the Orthodox Church had a stanch defender at its head. In 1884, however, Joachim III was compelled to retire. The Sultan, who was no less stanch a defender of the rights of his people as he saw them, had decreed that in all questions at law the Greek priests should no longer be subject to the Patriarchate, but should be tried like Turkish priests by the Moslem religious courts. This the Patriarch stoutly objected to; but he finally expressed his willingness to agree that in criminal cases his priests should be given up to the Turkish courts. The concession was to him a verbal one only, since it is not often that a priest becomes entangled in criminal procedure. As it involved the whole question of the rights of the Patriarchate, however, the Holy Synod refused to countenance even a verbal concession, and Joachim resigned. He then spent sixteen years in “repose,” visiting the different Patriarchates of the empire and finally establishing himself on Mount Athos. He occupied there for several years the picturesque residence of Milopotamo, a dependency of the monastery of the Great Lavra. But in 1901 he was elected a second time to the Patriarchal throne, which he thereafter occupied to the day of his death.

His second reign of eleven years coincided with one of the most crucial periods in Turkish history. The early days of it were marred by such bitterness between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia that Joachim III must have been surprised himself, during the last days of his life, to see soldiers of the two races fighting together against a common enemy. He had grown up in a church that acknowledged no rival and that had formed the habit of detecting and opposing encroachments on its privileges. Not only did he live, however, to see the boundaries of the Patriarchate draw nearer and nearer Constantinople, but to hear members of its diminished flock request the right to use languages other than the Greek of the Gospels, to be served by clergy from among themselves. He had been a bishop in Bulgaria when the Turks, past masters in the art of dividing to rule, listened to the after all not unreasonable plea of the Bulgars to control their own religious affairs and still further narrowed the powers of the Patriarchate by creating a new Bulgarian millet with a primate of its own called the Exarch. A hundred years previously, as a matter of fact, the Bulgarians had had a Patriarch of their own at Ochrida, in Macedonia. But this brought down, in 1870, the ban of excommunication. There followed a merciless feud between the two churches and their followers which reached its height during the second reign of Joachim III. And the odium theologicum was imbittered by an old racial jealousy reaching far back into Byzantine history; for each church was the headquarters in Turkey of a nationalist propaganda in favour of brothers across the border.

In the meantime the revolution of 1908 created new difficulties for the Patriarchate. The Young Turks avowed more openly than the old Turks had done their desire to be rid of capitulations, conventions, special privileges, and all the old tissue of precedent that made the empire a mass of imperia in imperio. Joachim III, however, had profited by the lesson of his first reign. During his retirement the Patriarchate, refusing to yield to Abd ül Hamid, had answered him by closing the churches. To us this seems a childish enough protest, but it is a measure of rigour immensely disliked by the Turks on account of the discontent it arouses among the large Greek population. After holding out six years, the Sultan finally gave in to the Patriarchate, and in 1891 a species of concordat was drawn up between the two parties. Joachim III, accordingly, met the Young Turks more vigorously than he had met Abd ül Hamid. So vigorously did he meet them that Mahmoud Shefket Pasha, in the heat of a controversy over the military service of non-Moslems, burst out one day at the Patriarch: “I will smash the heads of all the Greeks!” The question of schools also became acute, the government demanding a supervision of Greek institutions which the Patriarchate refused to admit. And a policy of pin-pricks was instituted against all the heads of the non-Moslem communities, in a belated attempt to retake the positions lost by Mehmed II and to limit the Patriarchs to their spiritual jurisdiction. It was only after the outbreak of the Italian War and the consequent fall of the Committee of Union and Progress that normal relations with the Porte were restored.

An outsider is free to acknowledge that it was natural enough for the Turks to regret the mistakes of a mediæval policy and to wish to do what they could to unify their very disparate empire. They made the greater mistake, however, of not seeing that it was too late; that, if they were not strong enough to tear up agreements when it suited them, the only course left was to devise some frank and just federation between the different elements of the empire. On the other hand, an outsider is also free to acknowledge that the Patriarchate was, perhaps, too prone to fancy itself attacked, too ready to credit the Turks with stupidity or ill will, too obsessed by the memory of its own historic greatness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Joachim III was a remarkable prelate. If there was anything personal in his ambition to unite the churches of the East under the ægis of the Phanar, he proved that his views had broadened since the days of the Bulgarian schism and that he held no mean conception of his rôle as the shepherd of a disinherited people. Imposing in his presence, a natural diplomat, more of a scholar than his youthful opportunities had promised, and for those who knew him a saint, he faced the cunning Abd ül Hamid like an equal monarch, never allowing himself to be cozened out of his vigilance. He did more than protect his people. He gave them weapons. He wished his clergy and his laymen to be educated, to be better educated than the masters of the land. He therefore built great schools for them, and created a press. He was not only a statesman, however. It was a matter of concern with him that his church should be alive. Many interesting questions of reform arose during his incumbency—of what would be called, in the Roman Church, Americanism. Indeed, he was sometimes taxed with being too progressive, almost too protestant. He and the Archbishop of Canterbury made overtures to each other, from their two ends of Europe, in the interest of a closer union of Christendom. I know not what there may have been of politics in this ecclesiastical flirtation.

At the outbreak of the Balkan War Joachim III was seventy-eight years old. He was none the less able to conduct the affairs of his church. No one can have taken a greater interest than he in the earlier events of that remarkable campaign. He was still alive when the Bulgarian cannon drew so near that their thunder was audible even at the Phanar. What feelings did the sound rouse in that old enemy of the Exarchate? He must, at all events, have hoped that to him would be given the incomparable honour of reconsecrating St. Sophia. That consummation, which for a moment seemed within the possibilities, was not granted him. He died while the negotiations for an armistice were going on at Chatalja. His funeral took place on the 1st of December, 1912.

The Patriarch Gennadius, as we have seen, first took up his residence in the church of the Holy Apostles and afterward in that of the Pammakaristos—the All-blessed Virgin. There sixteen of his successors reigned in turn till 1591, when Sultan Mourad III turned that interesting eighth-century church into Fetieh Jami—the Mosque of Conquest—in honour of his victories in Persia and Georgia. Then the Patriarchate moved three times more, finally settling in 1601 in the church of St. George at the Phanar. This has been the Vatican of Constantinople for the past three hundred years. The Patriarchs have never made, at the Phanar, any attempt at magnificence. Exiled from St. Sophia, and hoping, waiting, to return thither, they have preferred to live simply, to camp out as it were in expectation, thinking their means best devoted to schools and charitable institutions. The wooden palace of the Patriarchate is a far from imposing building, while the adjoining church is small and plain. It contains little of interest save an old episcopal throne and a few relics and icons, which are supposed to have been saved from St. Sophia. Nevertheless the funeral of Joachim III was a dignified, an imposing, even a splendid ceremony. To this result the Turkish authorities contributed not a little, by maintaining a service of order more perfect than I have seen at any other state pageant in Constantinople. No one who had not a card of admission was allowed even in the street through which the procession was to pass. Along this street black masts were set at intervals, from which hung black gonfalons with white crosses in the centre, while black and white wreaths or garlands decorated all the houses. On either side of the rising curve from the main street to the gate of the Patriarchate, students from the theological college at Halki made a wonderfully picturesque guard of honour in their flowing black robes and brimless black hats, each supporting the staff of a tall church lantern shrouded in black. Within the church even stricter precautions had been taken to prevent the dignity of the ceremony from being marred. The number of tickets issued was sternly limited to the capacity of the narrow nave, and none were granted to ladies—a severity which brought down a violent protest from the better half of Byzantium.

A Greek church sometimes impresses a Westerner as containing too many glittering things within too small a space. On this occasion the natural twilight of the interior and the black gauze in which lamps and icons were veiled toned down any possible effect of tawdriness, while the tall carved and gilded ikonostasion made the right background for the splendour of the ceremony. One hardly realised that it was a funeral. There was no coffin, no flowers, no mortuary candles. The dead Patriarch, arrayed in his pontifical cloth of gold and crowned with his domed gold mitre, sat in his accustomed place at the right of the chancel, on a throne of purple velvet. I was prepared to find it ghastly; but in the half light I found rather a certain Byzantine solemnity. On the purple dais at the right of the Patriarch stood his handsome Grand Vicar, in the flowing black of the church. At the left another priest stood, one of the twelve archimandrites attached to the Patriarchate, holding the episcopal staff which the Conqueror is supposed to have given Gennadius, tipped like Hermes’ caduceus with two serpents’ heads of gold. In front of the dais burned an immense yellow candle, symbolic of the Light of the World, which an acolyte called the Great Candle-bearer always carries before the Patriarch.

The officiating clergy, consisting of the members of the Holy Synod and a number of visiting bishops, stood in front of the ikonostasion, some in simple black, others in magnificent vestments of white satin embroidered with gold. The rest of the church was given up to invited guests. In stalls at the dead Patriarch’s left sat the heads of the other non-Moslem communities of the empire, headed by the Armenian Patriarch and including the Grand Rabbi of Turkey, and even a representative of the Bulgarian Exarch. At the right were grouped the representatives of the Sultan, of the cabinet, and of different departments of government, all in gala uniform and decorations. On the opposite side of the chancel was ranged the diplomatic corps, headed by the Russian ambassador with all his staff and the Roumanian minister. Their Bulgarian, Greek, Montenegrin, and Servian colleagues, being absent, seemed at that historic moment to be only the more present. The other foreign missions, as less concerned with the Orthodox Church, were represented by two secretaries apiece. The overflow of the diplomatic corps, the officers of the international squadron then in the Bosphorus, and a number of Greek secular notabilities filled the body of the nave, in chairs which had been provided for them contrary to all precedents of the Greek Church. The spectacle was extremely brilliant, nor less so for the twilight of the church—and a strange one when one realised that it was all in honour of the old man in the purple chair, his head bowed and his eyes closed, sitting so still and white in his golden robes. But strangest of all was something unuttered in the air, that reminded me a little of when Abd ül Hamid opened his second parliament—a feeling of all that was impersonated there by robe and uniform and star, a sense of forces interwoven past extricating, a stirring of old Byzantine ghosts in this hour of death, which was also in some not quite acknowledged way an hour of victory. Joachim III would scarcely have had a more dramatic funeral if it had taken place in St. Sophia.

The ceremony was not very long. It consisted chiefly of chanting—of humming one might almost say, so low was the tone in which the priests sang the prayers for the dead. No instrumental music is permitted in the Greek rite. At one point of the office two priests in magnificent chasubles, one of whom carried two candles tied together and the other three, went in front of the Patriarch, bowed low, and swung silver censers. Then the secretary of the Holy Synod mounted a high pulpit and delivered a panegyric of Joachim III. And at last he was lifted as he was, sitting on his throne, and carried in solemn procession to his grave in the monastery of Balîklî.

I did not see the procession in any ordered picture but only as a current surging down the steps, from a door at right angles to the one where Gregory V was hanged a hundred years ago, and away between the motionless black figures with their tall lanterns—a crowded current of robes, of uniforms, of priests swinging censers, of other priests carrying jewelled decorations on cushions, and one who bore a silver pitcher of wine to be poured into the grave in the fashion of the older Greeks. Turkish soldiers made a guard of honour before the steps, at this pause of another Greek war. They looked up with a sort of wondering proud passivity at the figure of the dead pontiff, and the two-headed Byzantine eagle emblazoned in gold on the back of his purple throne. I did not see either the last embarking of Joachim III on the yacht lent by the government—did not Mehmed II lend Gennadius his horse?—or his triumphal progress, surrounded by the prelates of his court, through the opened bridges of the harbour, to the Marmora side of the city. We drove, instead, to the monastery of Our Lady of the Fishes, outside the walls, where the priests showed us the church darkened with crape and the grave that was not quite ready. It was an underground room rather, with tiled floor and cemented walls, and beside it lay iron girders for roofing over the top. For the Patriarchs are buried as they come to the grave, sitting, according to the ancient custom of their church.

Presently a false alarm called us to the open, where another crowd was waiting. There was still a long time, however, before the procession came into sight. We spent it in the cypress lane which leads, between Turkish cemeteries, to the monastery. Among the graves a camp of refugees from Thrace was quarantined. Twenty or thirty new mounds were near them, scattered with chloride of lime. Ragged peasants leaned over the wall, grateful, no doubt, for something to break the monotony of their imprisonment. The names of Kîrk Kil’seh and Lüleh Bourgass recurred in their talk. At last an advance guard of cavalry spattered down the muddy lane. After them came policemen, mounted and on foot, followed by choir-boys carrying two tall silver crosses and six of the six-winged silver ornaments symbolising the cherubim of the Revelation. Then all the Greeks about us began to exclaim: “There he is!” and we saw the gold-clad figure coming toward us between the cypresses on his purple throne. Until then there had seemed to me nothing ghastly or barbaric about it. I had looked upon it as a historic survival worthy of all respect. But the dignity was gone as the tired bearers stumbled through the mud carrying the heavy dais. And the old man who had been so handsome and imperious in life looked now, in the clear afternoon sunlight, weary and shrunken and pitiful. I was sorry I had come to stare at him once more. And long afterward an imagination of him haunted me, and I wondered if he were in his little tiled room at last, sitting at peace in his purple chair.

VII — Refugees

They say they do not like Christians to live in the sacred suburb of Eyoub. But they are used by this time to seeing us. Too many of us go there, alas, to climb the hill and look at the view and feel as sentimental as we can over Aziyadé. And certainly the good people of Eyoub made no objection to Lady Lowther when she established in their midst a committee for distributing food and clothing and fuel to the families of poor soldiers and to the refugees. The hordes of Asia had not stopped pouring through the city on their way to the west before another horde began pouring the other way, out of Europe. Within a month there could hardly have been a Turk left between the Bulgarian border and the Chatalja lines. It was partly, no doubt, due to the narrowness of the field of operations, lying as it did between two converging seas, which enabled the conquering army to drive the whole country in a battue before it. But I cannot imagine any Western people trekking with such unanimity. They would have been more firmly rooted to the soil. The Turk, however, is still half a tent-man, and he has never felt perfectly at home in Europe. So village after village harnessed its black water-buffalo or its little grey oxen to its carts of clumsy wheels, piled thereon its few effects, covered them with matting spread over bent saplings, and came into Constantinople.

How many of them came I do not imagine any one knows. Thousands and tens of thousands of them were shipped over into Asia Minor. Other thousands remained, in the hope of going back to their ruined homes. The soldiers and the sick had already occupied most of the spare room that was to be found. The refugees had to take what was left. I knew one colony of them that spent the winter in the sailing caïques in which they fled from the coast villages of the Marmora. Being myself like a Turk in that I make little of numbers and computations, I have no means of knowing how many men, women, and children, from how many villages, swelled the population of Eyoub. I only know that their own people took in a good number, that they lived in cloisters and empty houses, that certain mosques were given up to them entirely, that sheds, storehouses, stables, were full of them. I even heard of four persons who had no other shelter than a water-closet. And still streets and open spaces were turned into camping grounds, where small grey cattle were tethered to big carts and where people in veils and turbans shivered over camp-fires—when they had a camp-fire to shiver over. They could generally fall back on cypress wood. It always gave me a double pang to catch the aroma of such a fire, betraying as it did the extremity of some poor exile and the devastation at work among the trees that give Constantinople so much of its colour.

I have done a good deal of visiting in my day, being somewhat given to seek the society of my kind. But it has not often happened to me, in the usual course of visiting, to come so near the realities of life as when, with another member of our subcommittee, I visited the mosque of Zal Mahmoud Pasha, in Eyoub. The mosque of Zal Mahmoud Pasha is worth visiting. It was built by Sinan, and its founder, a Vizier of Selim II, was nicknamed Zal, after a famous Persian champion, because, with his own hands, he finally succeeded in strangling the strong young prince Moustafa, son of Süleïman the Magnificent. Like its greater neighbour, the mosque of Zal Mahmoud Pasha has two courts. They are on two levels, joined by a flight of steps, each opening into a thoroughfare of its own. And very cheerless they looked indeed on a winter day of snow, especially for the cattle stabled in their cloisters. The mosque itself was open to any who cared to go in. We did so, pushing aside the heavy flap that hangs at any public Turkish doorway in winter. We found ourselves in a narrow vestibule in which eight or ten families were living. One of them consisted of two children, a little boy flushed with fever and a pale and wasted little girl, who lay on the bricks near the door without mattress or matting under them. They were not quite alone in the world, we learned. Their mother had gone away to find them bread. The same was the case with a larger family of children who sat around a primitive brazier. The youngest was crying, and a girl of ten was telling him that their mother would soon be back with something to eat.

We lifted a second flap. A wave of warm smoky air met us, sweetened by cypress wood but sickeningly close. Through the haze of smoke we saw that the square of the nave, surrounded on three sides by a gallery, was packed as if by a congregation. The congregation consisted chiefly of women and children, which is not the thing in Turkey, sitting on the matted floor in groups, and all about them were chests and small piles of bedding and stray cooking utensils. Each of these groups constituted a house, as they put it. As we went from one to another, asking questions and taking notes, we counted seventy-eight of them. Some four hundred people, that is, were living huddled together under the dome of Zal Mahmoud Pasha. In the gallery and under it rude partitions had been made by stretching ropes between the pillars and hanging up a spare rug or quilt. In the open space of the centre there was nothing to mark off house from house save the bit of rug or matting that most of the families had had time to bring away with them, or such boundaries as could be drawn by the more solid of the family possessions and by the row of family shoes. Under such conditions had not a few of the congregation drawn their first or their last breath.

Nearly every “house” had a brazier of some kind, if only improvised out of a kerosene tin. That was where the blue haze came from and the scent of cypress wood. Some had a little charcoal, and were daily near asphyxiating themselves. Others had no fire at all. On a number of the braziers we noticed curious flat cakes baking, into whose composition went bran or even straw. We took them to be some Thracian dainty until we learned that they were a substitute for bread. The city was supposed to give each refugee a loaf a day, but many somehow did not succeed in getting their share. A few told us that they had had none, unless from their neighbours, for five days. It struck me, in this connection, that in no other country I knew would the mosque carpets still have been lying folded in one corner instead of making life a little more tolerable for that melancholy congregation. Of complaint, however, we heard as little as possible. The four hundred sat very silently in their smoky mosque. Many of them had not only their lost homes to think of. A father told us that when Chorlou was spoiled, as he put it, his little girl of nine had found a place in the “fire carriage” that went before his, and he had not seen her since. One old man had lost the rest of his family. He had been unable to keep up with them, he said: it had taken him twenty-two days to walk from Kîrk Kil’seh. A tall ragged young woman, who told us that her effendi made war in Adrianople, said she had three children. One of them she rocked beside her in a wooden washing trough. It came out only by accident that she had adopted the other two during the hegira from Thrace. We wondered how, if the effendi ever came out of Adrianople alive, he would find his wife and his baby; for hardly one in fifty of these peasants could read or write, and no exact register of them was kept. Many of them were ill and lay on the floor under a coloured quilt. If another member of the family wanted to take a nap he would crawl under the same quilt. Is it any wonder that diseases became epidemic in the mosques? Cholera did not break out in many of them except St. Sophia, which was used as a barracks. But in Zal Mahmoud Pasha there were at one time cases of consumption, pneumonia, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and smallpox. Five cases of the last were found under one quilt. Still, the refugees would not be vaccinated if they could help it. The only way to bring them to it was to cut off their bread. And not many of them were willing to go away or to let members of their families be taken away to hospitals. How did they know whether they would ever see each other again, they asked? A poor mother we knew, whose husband had been taken as a soldier and had not been heard of since, and whose home had burned to the ground before her eyes, lost her four children, one after the other. A neighbour afterward remarked of her in wonder that she seemed to have no mind in her head.

In distributing Lady Lowther’s relief we did what we could to systematise. Having visited, quarter by quarter, to see for ourselves the condition of the people and what they most needed, we gave the head of each house a numbered ticket, enabling him or her to draw on us for certain supplies. Most of the supplies were dealt out on our own day at home. They say it is more blessed to give than to receive. I found, however, that it was most possible to appreciate the humorous and decorative side of Thrace when we received, in the coffee-shop of many windows which was our headquarters. It is astonishing how large a proportion of Thrace is god-daughter to Hadijeh or Aïsheh, Mothers of the Moslems, or to the Prophet’s daughter Fatma. Many, nevertheless, reminded one of Mme. Chrysanthème and Madam Butterfly. On our visiting list were Mrs. Hyacinth, Mrs. Tulip, Mrs. Appletree, and Mrs. Nightingale. I am also happy enough to possess the acquaintance of Mrs. Sweetmeat, Mrs. Diamond, Mrs. Pink (the colour), Mrs. Cotton (of African descent), Mrs. Air (though some know her as Mother Eve), Miss May She Laugh, and Master He Waited. This last appellation seemed to me so curious that I inquired into it, and learned that my young gentleman waited to be born. These are not surnames, you understand, for no Turk owns such a thing. Nor yet, I suppose, can one call them Christian names! To tell one Mistress Hyacinth from another you add the name of her man; and in his case all you can do is to call him the son of so and so.

If we found the nomenclature of Mistress Hyacinth and her family a source of perplexity, she in turn was not a little confounded by our system of tickets. We had one for bread. We had another for charcoal. We had a third for groceries. We had a fourth and a fifth for fodder. We had a sixth, the most important of all, since it entitled the bearer to the others, which must be tied tight in a painted handkerchief and never be lost. “By God!” cried Mistress Hyacinth in her honoured idiom, “I know not what these papers mean!” And sometimes it was well-nigh impossible to explain it to her. A good part of her confusion, I suspect, should be put down to our strange accent and grammar, and to our unfamiliarity with the Thracian point of view. Still, I think the ladies of that peninsula share the general hesitation of their race to concern themselves with mathematical accuracy. Asked how many children they had, they rarely knew until they had counted up on their fingers two or three times. It is evidently no habit with them to have the precise number in mind. So when they made an obvious mistake we did not necessarily suspect them of an attempt to overestimate. As a matter of fact, they were more likely to underestimate. Other failures of memory were more surprising, as that of a dowager in ebony who was unable to tell her husband’s name. “How should I know?” she protested. “He died so long ago!” When questioned with regard to their own needs they were equally vague. “I am naked,” was their commonest reply. “Whatever your eye picks out, I will take.” But if our eye failed to pick out the right thing, they would in the end give us a hint.

Altogether it is evident that the indirections of Mistress Hyacinth follow a compass different from our own. I remember a girl not more than sixteen or seventeen who told us she had three children. Two of them were with her: where was the third, we asked? “Here,” she answered, patting herself with the simplicity of which the Anglo-Saxons have lost the secret. Yet she was most scrupulous to keep her nose and mouth hidden from an indiscriminate world. Another woman, asked about a child we knew, replied non-committally: “We have sent him away.” “Where?” we demanded in alarm, for we had known of refugees giving away or even selling their children. “Eh—he went,” returned the mother gravely. “Have you news of him?” one of us pursued. “Yes,” she said. And it was finally some one else who had to enlighten our obtuseness by explaining that it was to the other world the child had gone. But none of them hesitated to give the rest of us an opportunity to go there too. Many women came into our coffee-shop carrying in their arms a baby who had smallpox, and were a little hurt because we got rid of them as quickly as possible.

With great discreetness would Mistress Hyacinth enter our presence, rarely so far forgetting herself as to lean on our table or to throw her arms in gratitude about a benefactress’s neck. For in gratitude she abounds, and in such expressions of it as “God give you lives” and “May you never have less.” With a benefactor she is, I am happy to report, more reserved. Him she addresses, according to her age, as “my child,” “my brother,” “my uncle,” or haply “my mother and my father.” I grew so accustomed to occupying the maternal relation to ladies of all ages and colours that I felt slighted when they coldly addressed me as their lord. Imagine, then, my pleasure when one of them called me her creamy boy! In the matter of discretion, however, Mistress Hyacinth is not always impeccable—so far, at least, as concerns the concealment of her charms. Sometimes, indeed, she will scarcely be persuaded to raise her veil even for a lady to recognise her; but at others she appears not to shrink from the masculine eye. One day a Turk, passing our coffee-shop, was attracted by the commotion at the door. He came to the door himself, looked in, and cried out “Shame!” at the disreputable spectacle of a mild male unbeliever and a doorkeeper of his own faith within the same four walls as some of Lady Lowther’s fairer helpers and a motley collection of refugee women, many of them unveiled. But the latter retorted with such promptness that the shame was rather upon him, for leaving the gyaour to supply their wants, that he was happy to let the matter drop. On this and other occasions I gathered a very distinct impression that if Mistress Hyacinth should ever take it into her head to turn suffragette she would not wait long to gain her end.

The nails of Mistress Hyacinth—speaking of suffragettes—are almost always reddened with henna, I notice, and very clean. The henna often extends to her fingers as well, to the palms of her hands, and to her hair. If she happen to be advancing in years, the effect is sometimes very strange to a Western eye. There is no attempt to simulate a youthful glow. The dye is plentifully applied to make a rich coral red. In other points of fashion Mistress Hyacinth is more independent than her sisters of the West. What the ladies of Paris wear must be worn by the ladies of Melbourne, New York, or St. Petersburg. But no such spirit of imitation prevails in Thrace, where every village seems to have modes of its own. We had great difficulty in getting rid of a quantity of clothing sent out by charitable but unimaginative persons in England, who could hardly be expected to know the fashions of Thrace. Articles intended to be worn out of sight were accepted without a murmur when nothing better was to be had, such as a quilted coat of many colours that we bought by the hundred in the Bazaars, called like the Prophet’s mantle a hîrka. But when it came to some very good and long golf capes, the men were more willing to take them than the women—until they thought of cutting them up into children’s coats. Mistress Hyacinth herself scorned to put on even so much of the colour of an unbeliever, preferring the shapeless black mantle of her country, worn over her head if need be, and not quite hiding a pair of full print trousers.

The village whose taste I most admire is that of Vizeh, the ladies of which weave with their own hands a black woolen crash for their mantles, with patches of red-and-blue embroidery where they button, and with trousers of the same dark blue as the sailor collar of a good many of them. I wish I might have gone to Vizeh before the Bulgarians did. There must have been very nice things to pick up—in the way, for instance, of such “napkins” as Lady Mary Montagu described to her sister on the 10th of March, 1718, “all tiffany, embroidered with silks and gold, in the finest manner, in natural flowers.” She added: “It was with the utmost regret that I made use of these costly napkins, as finely wrought as the finest handkerchiefs that ever came out of this country. You may be sure that they were entirely spoiled before dinner was over.” But you, madam, may be sure they were not, for I bought some of them from the ladies of Thrace, rather improved than not by their many washings. They are technically known as Bulgarian towels, being really Turkish; but it seems to me that the tradition which persists in this beautiful peasant embroidery must be Byzantine. Mistress Hyacinth was able to make it, as well as to sell it. And to turn an honest penny she and her friends set up their funny little hand-looms in a house we hired for them, and wove the narrow cloth of their country, loosely mingled of linen or cotton and silk, and shot, it might be, with bright colours of which they had the secret.

The consort of Mistress Hyacinth, I regret to add, seemed to show less willingness to add to the resources of the family. Perhaps it was because of an inward conviction of which I once or twice caught rumours, that as unbelievers had deprived him of his ordinary means of sustenance, we other unbelievers were in duty bound to keep him alive. For the rest he is outwardly and visibly the decorative member of the family. He inclines less to bagginess than Mistress Hyacinth, or than his brother of Asia. He affects a certain cut of trouser which is popular all the way from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic. This trouser, preferably of what the ladies call a pastel blue, is bound in at the waist by a broad red girdle which also serves as pocket, bank, arsenal, and anything else he pleases. Over it goes a short zouave jacket, more or less embroidered, and round my lord’s head twists a picturesque figured turban, with a tassel dangling in front of one ear. He is a surprisingly well-made and well-featured individual—like Mistress Hyacinth herself, for that matter, and like the roly-poly small fry at their heels. On the whole they give one the sense of furnishing excellent material for a race—if only the right artist could get hold of it.

VIII — Semiphilosophic Finale

One day I stopped on the quay to watch a cheering transport steam down the Bosphorus. An old Turkish lady who happened to be passing stopped to watch it too.

“Poor things! Poor things!” she exclaimed aloud. “The lions! You would think they were going to a wedding!” And then turning to me she suddenly asked: “Can you tell me, effendim, why it is that Europe is against us? Have we done no good in six hundred years?”

The attitude of Europe was the crowning bitterness of the war. In the beginning, Europe had loudly announced that she would tolerate no change in the status quo. How then did Europe come to acquiesce so quickly in the accomplished fact? Why did Germany, the friend of Abd ül Hamid, and England, the friend of Kyamil Pasha, and France, the friend of everybody, raise no finger to help? I am not the one to suggest that Europe should have done otherwise. There is a logic of events which sometimes breaks through official twaddle—a just logic drawing into a common destiny those who share common traditions and speak a common tongue. I make no doubt that Austria-Hungary, to mention only one example, will one day prove it to her cost. Nevertheless, I am able to see that there is a Turkish point of view. And my old lady’s question struck me as being so profound that I made no pretence of answering it.

I might, to be sure, have replied what so many other people were saying: “Madam, most certainly you have done no good in six hundred years. It is solely because of the evil you have done that you enjoy any renown in the world. You have done nothing but burn, pillage, massacre, defile, and destroy. You have stamped out civilisation wherever your horsemen have trod. And what you were in the beginning you are now. Your enemy the Bulgarian has advanced more in one generation than you have in twenty. You still cling to the forms of a bloody and barbaric religion, but for what it teaches of truth and humanity you have no ear. You make one justice for yourself and one for the owner of the land you have robbed. Your word has become a byword among the nations. You are too proud or too lazy to learn more than your fathers knew. You fear and try to imitate the West; but of the toil, the patience, the thoroughness, the perseverance that are the secret of the West you have no inkling. You will not work yourself, and you will not let others work—unless for your pocket. You have no literature, no art, no science, no industry, worth the name. You are incapable of building a road or a ship. You take everything from others—only to spoil it, like those territories where you were lately at war, like this city, which was once the glory of the world. You have no shadow of right to this city or to those territories. The graves of your ancestors are not there. You took them by the sword, and, like everything else that comes into your hands, you have slowly ruined them. It is only just that you should lose them by the sword. For your sword was the one thing you knew how to use, and now even that has rusted in your hand. You are rotten through and through. That is why Europe is against you. Go back to your tents in Asia, and see if you will be capable of learning something in another six hundred years.”

So might I have answered my old lady—had my Turkish been good enough. But I would scarcely have convinced her. Nor would I quite have convinced myself. For while it is a simple and often very refreshing disposal of a man to damn him up and down, it is not one that really disposes of him. He still remains there, solid and unexplained. So while my reason tells me how incompetent a man the Turk is from most Western points of view, it reminds me that other men have been incompetent as well, and even subject to violent inconsistencies of character; that this man is a being in evolution, with reasons for becoming what he is, to whom Dame Nature may not have given her last touch.

In this liberal disposition my reason is no doubt quickened, I must confess, by the fact that I am at heart a friend of the Turk. It may be merely association. I have known him many years. But there is something about him I cannot help liking—a simplicity, a manliness, a dignity. I like his fondness for water, and flowers, and green meadows, and spreading trees. I like his love of children. I like his perfect manners. I like his sobriety. I like his patience. I like the way he faces death. One of the things I like most about him is what has been perhaps most his undoing—his lack of any commercial instinct. I like, too, what no one has much noticed, the artistic side of him. I do not know Turkish enough to appreciate his literature, and his religion forbids him—or he imagines it does—to engage in the plastic arts. But in architecture and certain forms of decoration he has created a school of his own. It is not only that the Turkish quarter of any Ottoman town is more picturesque than the others. The old Palace of the sultans in Constantinople, certain old houses I have seen, the mosques, the medressehs, the hans, the tombs, the fountains, of the Turks are an achievement that deserves more serious study than has been given them. You may tell me that they are not Turkish because they were designed after Byzantine or Saracen originals, and because Greeks and Persians had much to do with building them. But I shall answer that every architecture was derived from another, in days not so near our own, and that, after all, it was the Turk who created the opportunity for the foreign artist and ordered what he wanted.

I have, therefore, as little patience as possible with the Gladstonian theory of the unspeakable Turk. When war ceases, when murders take place no more in happier lands, when the last riot is quelled and the last negro lynched, it will be time to discuss whether the Turk is by nature more or less bloody than other men. In the meantime I beg to point out that he is, as a matter of fact, the most peaceable, with the possible exception of the Armenian, of the various tribes of his empire. Arab, Kürd, and Laz are all quicker with their blades. To his more positive qualities I am by no means alone in testifying. If I had time for chapter and verse I might quote more than one generation of foreign officers in the Turkish service, and a whole literature of travel—to which Pierre Loti has contributed his share. But I do not hesitate to add that this is a matter in which Pierre Loti may be as unsafe a guide as Mr. Gladstone. For blind praise is no more intelligent than blind condemnation. Neither leads one any nearer to understanding the strange case of the Turk.

To understand him at all, I think one needs to take a long view of history. When we consider how many æons man must have lived on this planet and how short in comparison has been the present phase of Western civilisation, it does not seem as if we had good ground for expressing definitive opinions with regard to Eastern peoples. A hundred years ago there was no hint in the West of the expansion that was to come through the use of steam and electricity. Three hundred years ago communications in most of Europe were not so good as, and I doubt if life and property were more secure than, they are in Turkey to-day. For some reason the Turk has lagged in his development. He is to all practical purposes a mediæval man, and it is not fair to judge him by the standards of the twentieth century.

Why it should be that men who have a common origin should have followed such different roads, and at such an uneven pace, is in many ways an insoluble problem. But it should not be, by this time, an unfamiliar one. It would rather be strange, and the world would be much poorer than it is, if humanity had marched from the beginning in a single phalanx—if the world had been one great India, or one great Egypt, or one great Greece. The Turk, then, as I have no need of insisting, is a mediæval man. And one reason why he is so may be that he has a much shorter heritage of civilisation than the countries of the West. He is a new man as well as a mediæval one. In Europe and in Asia alike he is a parvenu who came on to the scene long after every one else. It is only verbally that the American is a newer man; for in the thirteenth century, when the warlike Turkish nomads first began to make themselves known, the different states which have contributed to make America were already formed, while India, China, and Japan had long before reached a high degree of civilisation.

It seems to me that this fact might well account for much of the backwardness of the Turk. He has a much thinner deposit of heredity in his brain cells. It is conceivable, too, that another matter of heredity may enter into it. Whether civil life originated in Asia or not, it is certain that of existing civilisations the Oriental are older than the Occidental. Perhaps, therefore, the Asiatic formed the habit of pride and self-sufficiency. Then as successive tides of emigration rolled away, Asia was gradually drained of everything that was not the fine flower of conservatism. He who believed whatever is is best stayed at home. The others went in search of new worlds, and found them not only in the field of empire but in those of science and art. This continual skimming of the adventurous element can only have confirmed Asia in the habit of mind so perfectly expressed by the Book of Ecclesiastes. And the Turk, who was one of the last adventurers to emerge from Asia, impelled by what obscure causes we hardly know, must have a profound racial bent toward the belief that everything is vanity and vexation of spirit. He asks himself what is the use, and lets life slip by.

Many people have held that there is something in Islam which automatically arrests the development of those who profess it. I cannot think, myself, that the thesis has been sufficiently proved. While no one can deny that religion, and particularly that Islam, is a great cohesive force, it seems to me that people have more to do with making religions than religions with making people. The principles at the root of all aspiring life—call it moral, ethical, or religious, as you will—exist in every religion. And organised religion has everywhere been responsible for much of the fanaticism and disorder of the world. For the rest, I find much in Mohammedanism to admire. There is a nobility in its stern monotheism, disdaining every semblance of trinitarian subtleties. Its daily services impress me as being a more direct and dignified form of worship than our self-conscious Sunday mornings with their rustling pews and operatic choirs. Then the democracy of Islam and much of what it inculcates with regard to family and civil life are worthy of all respect, to say nothing of the hygienic principles which it succeeded in impressing at a very early stage upon a primitive people. At the same time there can be no doubt that Mohammedanism suffers from the fact that it was designed, all too definitely, for a primitive people. Men at a higher stage of evolution than were the Arabs of the seventh century require no religious sanctions to keep themselves clean. For modern men the social system of Islam, with its degrading estimate of woman, is distinctly antisocial. And many of them must find the Prophet’s persuasions to the future life a little vulgar. The question is whether they will be able to modernise Islam. It will be harder than modernising Christianity, for the reason that Islam is a far minuter system. Is there not something moving in the spectacle of a people committed to an order which can never prevail? Even for this one little ironic circumstance it can never prevail in our hurrying modern world, because it takes too much time to be a good Mohammedan. But the whole order is based on a conception which the modern world refuses to admit. The word Islam means resignation—submission to the will of God. And there can be no doubt that the mind of Islam is saturated with that spirit. Why does one man succeed and another fail? It is the will of God. Why do some recover from illness and others die? It is the will of God. Why do empires rise or fall? It is the will of God. A man who literally believes such a doctrine has no chance against the man, however less a philosopher, who believes that his destiny lies in his own hand.

It would be an interesting experiment to see what two generations, say, of universal education might do for the Turks. By education I mean no more than the three R’s, enough history and geography to know that Turkey is neither the largest nor the most ancient empire in the world, and some fundamental scientific notions. It is incredible how large a proportion of Turks are illiterate, and what fantastic views of the world and their place in it the common people hold. To nothing more than this ignorance must be laid a great part of Turkey’s troubles. But another part is due to the character of the empire which it befell the Turk to conquer. If he had happened, like ourselves, into a remote and practically empty land he might have developed his own civilisation. Or if he had occupied a country inhabited by a single race he would have stood a better chance. Or if, again, he had appeared on the scene a few centuries earlier, before Europe had had time to get so far ahead of him, and before the spread of learning and an increasing ease of communications made it increasingly difficult for one race to absorb another, he might have succeeded in assimilating the different peoples who came under his sway. Why the conquerors did not exterminate or forcibly convert the conquered Christians has always been a question with me. It may have been a real humanity on the part of the early sultans, who without doubt were remarkable men and who, perhaps, wished their own wild followers to acquire the culture of the Greeks. Or it may have been a politic deference to new European neighbours. In any case, I am convinced that it was, from the Turkish point of view, a mistake. For the Turk has never been able to complete his conquest. On the contrary, by recognising the religious independence of his subjects he gave them weapons to win their political independence. And, beset by enemies within and without, he has never had time to learn the lessons of peace.

Here, I think, we come very near the root of his difficulties. Not only has he paid, not only does he continue and will he long continue to pay, the price of the invader, incessantly preoccupied as he is with questions of internal order. He created a form of government which could not last. At its most successful period it depended on the spoils of war—not only in treasure but in tribute-boys, carefully chosen for the most famous corps of the army and for the highest executive posts in the empire. This form of government was highly efficient so long as the frontiers of the empire continued to advance. But it was not self-contained, and it kept the native-born Turk from developing normal habits and traditions of government. The traditions it chiefly fostered in him were those of plunder and idleness. Much of the proverbial readiness of Turks in office to receive “presents” is less a matter of dishonesty than the persistence of a time-honoured system of making a living in irregular ways. The system is one that naturally dies out with the disappearance of irregular sources of income. There must inevitably follow, however, a painful period of forming new habits, of creating new traditions. How radical this process had to be with the Turks can scarcely be realised by a country like England, for instance, which has been able to continue for a thousand years developing the same germ of government. The Turk himself hardly realises yet how little he can build on the foundations of his former greatness. And he has been the slower to come to any such realisation because circumstances have kept up an illusion of that greatness long after the reality was gone. If England, if France, if Germany, were to be left to-morrow without a bayonet or a battle-ship, they would still be great powers by the greatness of their economic, their intellectual, their artistic life. Could the same be said of the Ottoman Empire? For a century or more that empire has continued to play the rôle of a great power simply through comparison with smaller or the mutual jealousies of greater ones. It is a long time since the Turk has really stood on his own feet. He has too often been protected against the consequences of his own acts. And, the last comer into the land he rules, he has been too ready to ignore the existence of other rights. But now, stripped of his most distant and most ungovernable provinces, enlightened by humiliation as to the real quality of his greatness, he may, let us hope, put aside illusion and pretence and give himself to the humbler problems of common life. If he sincerely does he may find, in the end, that he has unwittingly reached a greatness beyond that won for him by the Janissaries of old.