CHAPTER XXICONSTANTINOPLE (1909)

“The North Street Gazetteis a journal written for the rich by the poor.“The North Street Gazettewill be printed and published by the proprietors at and from 6 North Street, Smith Square, Westminster, London, S.W. This, the first number, appears upon the date which it bears; subsequent numbers will appear whenever the proprietors are in possession of sufficient matter, literary and artistic, or even advertisement, to fill its columns. No price is attached to the sheet, but a subscription of one guinea will entitle a subscriber to receive no less than twenty copies, each differing from the last. These twenty copiesdelivered, none will be sent to any subscriber until his next subscription is paid.“The North Street Gazettewill fearlessly expose all public scandals save those which happen to be lucrative to the proprietors, or whose exposure might in some way damage them or their more intimate friends.“The services of a competent artist have been provisionally acquired, a staff of prose writers, limited but efficient, is at the service of the paper; three poets of fecundity and skill have also been hired. Specimens of all three classes of work will be discovered in this initial number.“A speciality of the newspaper will be that the Russian correspondence will be written in Russian, and the English in English.“All communications (which should be written on one side of the paper only) will be received with consideration, and those accompanied by stamps will be confiscated.”

“The North Street Gazetteis a journal written for the rich by the poor.

“The North Street Gazettewill be printed and published by the proprietors at and from 6 North Street, Smith Square, Westminster, London, S.W. This, the first number, appears upon the date which it bears; subsequent numbers will appear whenever the proprietors are in possession of sufficient matter, literary and artistic, or even advertisement, to fill its columns. No price is attached to the sheet, but a subscription of one guinea will entitle a subscriber to receive no less than twenty copies, each differing from the last. These twenty copiesdelivered, none will be sent to any subscriber until his next subscription is paid.

“The North Street Gazettewill fearlessly expose all public scandals save those which happen to be lucrative to the proprietors, or whose exposure might in some way damage them or their more intimate friends.

“The services of a competent artist have been provisionally acquired, a staff of prose writers, limited but efficient, is at the service of the paper; three poets of fecundity and skill have also been hired. Specimens of all three classes of work will be discovered in this initial number.

“A speciality of the newspaper will be that the Russian correspondence will be written in Russian, and the English in English.

“All communications (which should be written on one side of the paper only) will be received with consideration, and those accompanied by stamps will be confiscated.”

Then followed a leading article composed entirely of clichés; a long article advocating votes for monkeys, written by Belloc and afterwards republished by him; “Society Notes”; a “City Letter”; and a poem by Belloc, called “East and West,” parts of which, but not the whole of it, are to be found in his bookThe Four Men.

The version I print here is the original form of this spirited lyric:

“EAST AND WEST“The dog is a faithful, intelligent friend,But his hide is covered with hair.The cat will inhabit a house to the end,But her hide is covered with hair.The camel excels in a number of ways,The Arab accords him continual praise,He can go without drinking for several days—But his hide is covered with hair.Chorus:Oh! I thank my God for this at the least,I was born in the west and not in the east!And he made me a human instead of a beast:WhoseHide is Covered with Hair.The cow in the pasture that chews the cud,Her hide is covered with hair,And even a horse of the Barbary bloodHis hide is covered with hair.The hide of the mammoth is covered with wool,The hide of the porpoise is sleek and cool,But you find if you look at that gambolling fool—That his hide is covered with hair.The lion is full of legitimate pride,But his hide is covered with hair;The poodle is perfect except for his hide(Which is partially covered with hair).When I come to consider the Barbary ape,Or the African lynx, which is found at the Cape,Or the tiger, in spite of his elegant shape,His hide is covered with hair.The men that sit on the Treasury Bench,Their hide is covered with hair,Etc. etc. etc.Chorus:Oh! I thank my God for this at the least,I was born in the west and not in the east!And he made me a human instead of a beast:WhoseHide is Covered with Hair.”

“EAST AND WEST

“The dog is a faithful, intelligent friend,But his hide is covered with hair.The cat will inhabit a house to the end,But her hide is covered with hair.

“The dog is a faithful, intelligent friend,

But his hide is covered with hair.

The cat will inhabit a house to the end,

But her hide is covered with hair.

The camel excels in a number of ways,The Arab accords him continual praise,He can go without drinking for several days—But his hide is covered with hair.

The camel excels in a number of ways,

The Arab accords him continual praise,

He can go without drinking for several days—

But his hide is covered with hair.

Chorus:Oh! I thank my God for this at the least,I was born in the west and not in the east!And he made me a human instead of a beast:WhoseHide is Covered with Hair.

Chorus:

Oh! I thank my God for this at the least,

I was born in the west and not in the east!

And he made me a human instead of a beast:

WhoseHide is Covered with Hair.

The cow in the pasture that chews the cud,Her hide is covered with hair,And even a horse of the Barbary bloodHis hide is covered with hair.

The cow in the pasture that chews the cud,

Her hide is covered with hair,

And even a horse of the Barbary blood

His hide is covered with hair.

The hide of the mammoth is covered with wool,The hide of the porpoise is sleek and cool,But you find if you look at that gambolling fool—That his hide is covered with hair.

The hide of the mammoth is covered with wool,

The hide of the porpoise is sleek and cool,

But you find if you look at that gambolling fool—

That his hide is covered with hair.

The lion is full of legitimate pride,But his hide is covered with hair;The poodle is perfect except for his hide(Which is partially covered with hair).

The lion is full of legitimate pride,

But his hide is covered with hair;

The poodle is perfect except for his hide

(Which is partially covered with hair).

When I come to consider the Barbary ape,Or the African lynx, which is found at the Cape,Or the tiger, in spite of his elegant shape,His hide is covered with hair.

When I come to consider the Barbary ape,

Or the African lynx, which is found at the Cape,

Or the tiger, in spite of his elegant shape,

His hide is covered with hair.

The men that sit on the Treasury Bench,Their hide is covered with hair,Etc. etc. etc.

The men that sit on the Treasury Bench,

Their hide is covered with hair,

Etc. etc. etc.

Chorus:Oh! I thank my God for this at the least,I was born in the west and not in the east!And he made me a human instead of a beast:WhoseHide is Covered with Hair.”

Chorus:

Oh! I thank my God for this at the least,

I was born in the west and not in the east!

And he made me a human instead of a beast:

WhoseHide is Covered with Hair.”

Then came a city letter, an account of a debate in the House of Lords, and some book reviews.

This was the review ofHamlet:

“The number of writers who aspire to poetic drama is becoming legion; Mr. William Shakespeare’s effort—not his first attempt in that kind—is better in some ways than some others which we recently noticed. We regret, therefore, all the more that the dominant motive of his drama makes it impossible for us to deal with it.“Mr. Shakespeare has taken his subject from the history of Denmark, and in his play King Claudius is represented as murdering his brother and marrying Queen Gertrude, his deceased brother’s wife. There was a KingClaude(whether there has been an intentional change of name we do not know) who succeeded his brother Olaf II. We hear a good deal about him, his parentage, and life at court. That he was intemperate and hasty—he was known to exceed at meals, and on one occasion he boxed the Lord Chamberlain’s ears—need hardly be said. But there is nowhere we can discover a hint of the monstrous wickedness Mr. Shakespeare has attributed to him. Were this vile relationship (i.e.the King’s marriage with his murdered brother’s wife) a fact, it might fairly be a themefor the dramatist to deal with; but we repeat we certainly do not care to criticise the drama in which it is treated.“We regret this, because we see unmistakable signs of power in Mr. Shakespeare’s verse. He has a real instinct for blank verse of the robustious kind, and the true lyric cry is to be found in the songs of his play, although they are too often marred by deplorable touches of coarseness.“He will, we suppose, regard us as fusty old-fashioned critics for the line we have taken; but, trusting to the promise which we think we discern in Mr. Shakespeare, it is by no means unlikely that in ten years’ time he will be the first to regret his extravagance and to applaud our disapproval.“At any rate, although we must speak frankly of such a plot asHamlet, we have not the slightest desire wholly to condemn Mr. Shakespeare as a poet because he has written a play on an unpleasant theme.“If he turns his undoubted poetic gifts to what is sane and manly we shall be the first to welcome him among the freemasonry of poets. At the same time we should like to remind him that speeches do not make a play, and that his dialogue, halting somewhere between what is readable and what is actable, loses the amplitude of narrative without achieving the force of drama.”

“Mr. Shakespeare has taken his subject from the history of Denmark, and in his play King Claudius is represented as murdering his brother and marrying Queen Gertrude, his deceased brother’s wife. There was a KingClaude(whether there has been an intentional change of name we do not know) who succeeded his brother Olaf II. We hear a good deal about him, his parentage, and life at court. That he was intemperate and hasty—he was known to exceed at meals, and on one occasion he boxed the Lord Chamberlain’s ears—need hardly be said. But there is nowhere we can discover a hint of the monstrous wickedness Mr. Shakespeare has attributed to him. Were this vile relationship (i.e.the King’s marriage with his murdered brother’s wife) a fact, it might fairly be a themefor the dramatist to deal with; but we repeat we certainly do not care to criticise the drama in which it is treated.

“We regret this, because we see unmistakable signs of power in Mr. Shakespeare’s verse. He has a real instinct for blank verse of the robustious kind, and the true lyric cry is to be found in the songs of his play, although they are too often marred by deplorable touches of coarseness.

“He will, we suppose, regard us as fusty old-fashioned critics for the line we have taken; but, trusting to the promise which we think we discern in Mr. Shakespeare, it is by no means unlikely that in ten years’ time he will be the first to regret his extravagance and to applaud our disapproval.

“At any rate, although we must speak frankly of such a plot asHamlet, we have not the slightest desire wholly to condemn Mr. Shakespeare as a poet because he has written a play on an unpleasant theme.

“If he turns his undoubted poetic gifts to what is sane and manly we shall be the first to welcome him among the freemasonry of poets. At the same time we should like to remind him that speeches do not make a play, and that his dialogue, halting somewhere between what is readable and what is actable, loses the amplitude of narrative without achieving the force of drama.”

The newspaper ended with a sonnet written in the House of Commons by Belloc, and by a correspondence column written by Raymond Asquith—both of which items I transcribe. This correspondence is, I think, the most brilliant of Raymond Asquith’s ephemera.

“SONNET WRITTEN IN DEJECTION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.“Good God, the boredom! Oh, my Lord in Heaven,Strong Lord of Life, the nothingness and voidOf Percy Gattock, Henry Murgatroyed,Lord Arthur Fenton, and Sir Philip Bevan,And Mr. Palace! It is nearly seven;My head’s a buzz, my soul is clammed and cloyed,My stomach’s sick and all myself’s annoyedNor any breath of truth such lees to leaven.No question, issue, principle, or right;No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and nightThe old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;The while three journalists and twenty JewsDo with the country anything they choose.”

“SONNET WRITTEN IN DEJECTION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

“Good God, the boredom! Oh, my Lord in Heaven,Strong Lord of Life, the nothingness and voidOf Percy Gattock, Henry Murgatroyed,Lord Arthur Fenton, and Sir Philip Bevan,And Mr. Palace! It is nearly seven;My head’s a buzz, my soul is clammed and cloyed,My stomach’s sick and all myself’s annoyedNor any breath of truth such lees to leaven.No question, issue, principle, or right;No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and nightThe old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;The while three journalists and twenty JewsDo with the country anything they choose.”

“Good God, the boredom! Oh, my Lord in Heaven,Strong Lord of Life, the nothingness and voidOf Percy Gattock, Henry Murgatroyed,Lord Arthur Fenton, and Sir Philip Bevan,

“Good God, the boredom! Oh, my Lord in Heaven,

Strong Lord of Life, the nothingness and void

Of Percy Gattock, Henry Murgatroyed,

Lord Arthur Fenton, and Sir Philip Bevan,

And Mr. Palace! It is nearly seven;My head’s a buzz, my soul is clammed and cloyed,My stomach’s sick and all myself’s annoyedNor any breath of truth such lees to leaven.

And Mr. Palace! It is nearly seven;

My head’s a buzz, my soul is clammed and cloyed,

My stomach’s sick and all myself’s annoyed

Nor any breath of truth such lees to leaven.

No question, issue, principle, or right;No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and nightThe old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;

No question, issue, principle, or right;

No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:

No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and night

The old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;

The while three journalists and twenty JewsDo with the country anything they choose.”

The while three journalists and twenty Jews

Do with the country anything they choose.”

“To the Editor ofThe North Street GazetteMr. Gladstone’s Diction“Sir,—Mr. Tollemache’s letter (in which he shows that Mr. Gladstone invented the phrase ‘bag and baggage’) has suggested to me the following reminiscences. I was the humble means of bringing together Mr. Gladstone and the late Mr. Cheadle ffrench (at a breakfast-party which I gave at Frascati’s in 1876). I remember that Mr. Gladstone turned to me towards the close of the meal, and remarked in his always impressive manner, ‘We shall hear more of that young man.’ The prediction was never fulfilled (though Mr. ffrench was about to become a J.P. when he died so suddenly two years ago), but the anecdote is worthy of record as illustrating the origin of another phrase which has since passed into popular parlance. On a different occasion I recollect Mr. Gladstone (who was a good French scholar) employing the (now familiar) expression ‘Dieu et Mon Droit.’ I also had the honour to be present when Mazzini altered the famous epigram (afterwards remembered and quoted against him) ‘non vero ma ben trovato.’ I remember too the pleasure which was caused by another gentleman present (who shall be nameless) neatly capping it with the expression ‘Trocadero.’ But those were indeed ‘noctes cenœque deum!’ I recollect telling this story to Jowett. He replied by asking me in his curious high voice whether I had read his translation of Thucydides. I confessed somewhat shamefacedly that I had not, and I remember that he made no reply at all (either then or afterwards), but remained perfectly silent for three days (from Saturday to Monday). It was characteristic of the man.—Yours, etc.,“Lionel Bellmash.“(All this is very interesting, and proves what we have always asserted, that wit as well as honesty and logic is on the side of the Free Trader.—Editor,The North Street Gazette.)

“To the Editor ofThe North Street Gazette

Mr. Gladstone’s Diction

“Sir,—Mr. Tollemache’s letter (in which he shows that Mr. Gladstone invented the phrase ‘bag and baggage’) has suggested to me the following reminiscences. I was the humble means of bringing together Mr. Gladstone and the late Mr. Cheadle ffrench (at a breakfast-party which I gave at Frascati’s in 1876). I remember that Mr. Gladstone turned to me towards the close of the meal, and remarked in his always impressive manner, ‘We shall hear more of that young man.’ The prediction was never fulfilled (though Mr. ffrench was about to become a J.P. when he died so suddenly two years ago), but the anecdote is worthy of record as illustrating the origin of another phrase which has since passed into popular parlance. On a different occasion I recollect Mr. Gladstone (who was a good French scholar) employing the (now familiar) expression ‘Dieu et Mon Droit.’ I also had the honour to be present when Mazzini altered the famous epigram (afterwards remembered and quoted against him) ‘non vero ma ben trovato.’ I remember too the pleasure which was caused by another gentleman present (who shall be nameless) neatly capping it with the expression ‘Trocadero.’ But those were indeed ‘noctes cenœque deum!’ I recollect telling this story to Jowett. He replied by asking me in his curious high voice whether I had read his translation of Thucydides. I confessed somewhat shamefacedly that I had not, and I remember that he made no reply at all (either then or afterwards), but remained perfectly silent for three days (from Saturday to Monday). It was characteristic of the man.—Yours, etc.,

“Lionel Bellmash.

“(All this is very interesting, and proves what we have always asserted, that wit as well as honesty and logic is on the side of the Free Trader.—Editor,The North Street Gazette.)

“COINCIDENCES“Sir,—The following may not be without interest to those of your readers who care for natural history. Yesterday as I was walking home from the city, I noticed a large flock of flamingoes (Phœnicopterus ingens) hovering over Shaftesbury Avenue. This was at 6.17 p.m. On reaching home I went up to dress to my own room, which communicates with my wife’s by a stained oakdoor. Judge of my surprise to find it tenanted by a giraffe (Tragelaphus Asiaticus). Surely the coincidence is a remarkable one.“The only analogy which occurs to me at this moment (and that an imperfect one) is a story which my father used to tell, of how he was one day driving down Threadneedle Street and observed a middle-aged man of foreign appearance standing under a lamp-post and apparently engaged in threading a needle! On inquiry he discovered that the man’s name was Street!—Yours, etc.,Foxhunter.“P.S.—It is only fair to mention that the man was not really threading a needle, but, as it afterwards turned out, playing upon a barrel-organ. My father’s mistake was due to his defective vision. But this does not affect the point of the story.“(Our correspondent’s letter is both frank and manly; and we shall be interested to know whether any of our other readers have had similar experiences.)”

“COINCIDENCES

“Sir,—The following may not be without interest to those of your readers who care for natural history. Yesterday as I was walking home from the city, I noticed a large flock of flamingoes (Phœnicopterus ingens) hovering over Shaftesbury Avenue. This was at 6.17 p.m. On reaching home I went up to dress to my own room, which communicates with my wife’s by a stained oakdoor. Judge of my surprise to find it tenanted by a giraffe (Tragelaphus Asiaticus). Surely the coincidence is a remarkable one.

“The only analogy which occurs to me at this moment (and that an imperfect one) is a story which my father used to tell, of how he was one day driving down Threadneedle Street and observed a middle-aged man of foreign appearance standing under a lamp-post and apparently engaged in threading a needle! On inquiry he discovered that the man’s name was Street!—Yours, etc.,

Foxhunter.

“P.S.—It is only fair to mention that the man was not really threading a needle, but, as it afterwards turned out, playing upon a barrel-organ. My father’s mistake was due to his defective vision. But this does not affect the point of the story.

“(Our correspondent’s letter is both frank and manly; and we shall be interested to know whether any of our other readers have had similar experiences.)”

The North Street Gazettedied after its first number, but it was perhaps the indirect begetter of another newspaper, that had a longer life,The Eye Witness, which in its turn begatThe New Witness.

The Eye Witnesswas edited at first by Belloc, and then by Cecil Chesterton. Cecil Chesterton editedThe New Witnessuntil he went as a private soldier to France to fight in the war and to die. The editorship was then taken over by his brother Gilbert.

During the next years, until the outbreak of the war, my life was divided between journalistic work in London and long sojourns in Russia; while I was in Russia I wrote books on Russian matters, literary and political. During this period I went twice to Turkey—once for theMorning Post, to see the Turkish Revolution in May 1909; and once for theTimes, to try and see something of the Balkan War in 1912. Early in 1912 I went round the world. On three separate occasions I went for a cruise in a man-of-war. One of these cruises—in December 1908, when I went as the guest of Commander Fisher on board theIndomitable—lasted for several weeks, and I was privileged during this visit to see a sight of thrilling interest—gun-layer’s test and battle practice in Aranci Bay.

On the eve of Candlemas 1909, I was received into theCatholic Church by Father Sebastian Bowden at the Brompton Oratory: the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted. Father Sebastian began life as an officer in the Scots Guards. He had served as A.D.C. under the same chief and at the same time as my uncle, Lord Cromer. He lived all the rest of his life at the Oratory and died in 1920. He was fond even in old age of riding about London on a cob. His face was stamped with the victory of character over all other elements. He was a sensible Conservative, a patriot, a fine example of an English gentleman in mind and appearance; a prince of courtesy, and a saint; and I regard my acquaintance with him and the friendship and sympathy he gave me as the greatest privilege bestowed on me by Providence.

I arrived at Constantinople in May 1909, on the same day that the Sultan Abdul Hamid left the city. A revolution had just occurred. The Young Turk party had dethroned the Sultan. The revolution was a military one.

When I arrived, the surface life of Constantinople was unchanged. The only traces of the crisis were a few marks, and some slight damage done by shells and bullets on the walls of the houses. The streets were crowded with soldiers. The tram-cars and the cabs were full of dusty men, stained with the marks of campaigning: Albanians with rifles slung across their shoulders, Macedonian gendarmes in light blue uniforms. The mosques were crowded with soldiers. Shots were sometimes heard, but none of the soldiery except the marines gave any trouble.

I lived at the Little Club at Pera. My bedroom looked out on to the Golden Horn. In the foreground were dark cypresses. Across the water I could see Stamboul, soft as a soap-bubble in the haze, milky-white and filmy with a hundred faint rainbow hues. The Club was a centre of gossip and mild gambling. Enver Pasha used to frequent it, and one evening a man called Assiz Bey walked in to play cards, with a piece of a rope which had just served to hang a man.

I attended the Selamlik of the new Sultan. It was a casual ceremony. Most of the troops were drawn up in places where it was impossible for the Sultan to pass, and up to the last all were in doubt as to what the Sultan’s route would be. At the last minute the whole cortège was stopped by a large hay wagon which leisurely took its way along the road which had been cleared for the Sultan. In Stamboul the brightestof crowds swarmed—men and women of every colour, dressed in all colours, chirruping like sparrows, hanging out of wooden balconies beside broken Byzantine arches, where one caught sight of trailing wistaria and sometimes of a Judas tree in blossom. The Sultan had no military escort and only onesais, dressed in blue and gold, as an outrider. There was no pomp about the ceremony, which passed off well. The Turkish Parliament was sitting not a stone’s throw from St. Sophia, and not far from the site where Justinian’s Palace once stood. The crowd wandered and lolled about, smoking cigarettes by the gates of the Parliament; the fickle, opportunist, supple-minded, picturesque crowd of Stamboul, was, I think, akin to that which fought for the “Blues” or the “Greens” in the days of Justinian and Theodora.

One night, I was invited to meet the leading men of the Young Turk party, Talaat Bey and others. They all drank water at the meal, but before the meal began, we were all offered a stiff glass of whisky to show that the new Government had discarded the old-fashioned Mohammedan principles. But though the hosts drank the whisky they did not appear to enjoy it.

The heat at Constantinople, and the atmosphere of the place, sapped one’s energy. The manifold activities of the human machine seemed to exhaust themselves in the acts of drinking coffee and in having one’s boots cleaned. You had your boots finished off out of doors after they had been preliminarily cleaned indoors. You sat on a chair and a man in a shirt and a fez, rubbed them, waxed them, greased them, kneaded them with his bare hand, brushed them, dusted them, polished them with a silk handkerchief, and painted the edges of them with a spirit. And during this process you looked on at the shifting crowd, sipped your coffee, and thought long thoughts which led nowhere.

One morning streams of people were walking briskly from Pera to Stamboul, in the same direction. They were making for the Galata Bridge, for there was news in the air that they had been hanging some Turkish Danny Deevers in the morning. Nobody quite knew whether they had been hanged yet or not. Some people said they had been hanged at dawn; others, that they were about to be hanged; others, that they had just been hanged. They had, as a matter of fact, been hanged atdawn: three of them at the end of the bridge, three of them opposite St. Sophia, four, I think, opposite the House of Parliament, and three somewhere else—making thirteen in all. They were soldiers, and one of them was an officer. They were hanged for having taken part in a recent mutiny in the cause of Abdul Hamid, and for having murdered some men.

As you walked farther along the bridge the crowd grew denser, and right at the end of the bridge it was a seething mass, kept back by soldiers from the actual spot where the victims were hanging—the crowd, not a London-like crowd, all drab and grey, but a living kaleidoscope of startling colours—the colours of tulips and Turkey carpets and poppy-fields, red, blue, and yellow. The gallows, which were in line along the side of the street beyond the bridge, were primitive tripods of wood. Each victim was strung up by a rope fixed to a pulley. The men were hanged by being made to stand on a low chair. The chair was kicked away and the sharp jerk killed them. They were hanging not far above the ground. They were each covered by a white gown, and to the breast of each one his sentence was affixed, written in Turkish letters. They looked neither like felons nor like murderers, but rather like happy martyrs (in a sacred picture), calm, with an inscrutable content. I had but a glimpse of them, and then I was carried away by the swaying crowd, which soldiers were prodding with the butts of their rifles. The dead soldiers were to hang there all day. I did not go any farther.

As I was trying to make my way back through the crowd, a Hodja (a Moslem priest) passed, and he was roughly handled by the soldiers, and given a few sharp blows in the back with their rifles. I heard fragments of conversation, English and French. Some people were saying that the exhibition would have a satisfactory effect on the populace. I saw a Kurd, a fierce-looking man who was gnashing his teeth—not at the victims, to be sure, but at the sight of three Moslems who had died for their faith, and for having defended it against those who they were told were its enemies, being made into a spectacle after their death for the unbeliever and the alien.

The following afternoon I was wandering about the streets of Stamboul when, amongst the indolent crowd, I noticed several men who were peculiar. Firstly, they were walking in a hurry. Secondly, they were dressed like Russians,in long, grey, shabby redingotes, what the Russians callpadevki, and their hair, allowed to grow long, was closely cropped at the ends just over the neck, where it hung in a bunch. They wore high boots. I knew they were Russians, and paid but little attention to them, since Constantinople is not a place, like London, where the appearance of an obvious foreigner is a remarkable sight. But I met an English friend, who said: “Have you seen the Russian pilgrims?” This led me to run after them. I soon caught them up, for they were delayed under an arch by some soldiers who were escorting some prisoners (soldiers also).

“Are you Russian?” I asked one of the pilgrims—a tall, fair man.

“Yes,” he answered; “I am from Russia.”

“You are a pilgrim?”

“Yes; I come from Jerusalem.”

The man was walking in a great hurry, and by this time we had reached the Galata Bridge.

“Who were those men the soldiers were leading?” the pilgrim asked me.

“Those were prisoners—soldiers who mutinied.”

Here two others, a grey-bearded man, and a little, dark man, joined in; the grey-bearded man had a medicine bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. I am certain it contained an intoxicating spirit.

“Some soldiers were hanged here,” I added.

“Where?” said the man.

“There,” I answered, showing him the exact spot. “They stayed there all day.”

“For all the people to see,” said the pilgrim, much impressed. “Why were they hanged?”

“They mutinied.”

“Ah, just like in our own country!” said the pilgrim.

“But,” joined in the dark man, “have not you sent away yourGosudar?” (Sovereign).

“I am not from here; I am an Englishman.”

“Ah, but did the people here send away theirGosudar?”

“They did.”

“And was it done,” asked the grey-haired pilgrim, “with God favouring and assisting (Po Bozhemu) or not?”

I hesitated. The brown man thought I did not understand.

“Was it right or wrong?” he asked.

“They said,” I answered, “that their Sultan had not kept his word; that he had given a ‘Duma’ and was acting against it.”

“Ah!” said the brown-haired man. “So now they have a ‘Duma’!”

“Yes,” I said; “they have liberty now.”

“Ah! Liberty! Eh! Eh! Eh!” said the grey-haired man, and he chuckled to himself. Oh, the scepticism of that chuckle!—as much as to say, we know whatthatmeans.

“And you have a Sovereign?” asked the brown-haired man.

“Yes; we have a King.”

“But your Queen, who was so old, and ruled everybody, she is dead.”

“Yes; she is dead.”

“Ah, she was wise, very wise!” (mudraya).

We had now crossed the bridge. The pilgrims had hastened on to their steamer, which was alongside the quay. They were going back to Russia. But one of them lagged behind and almost bought a suit of clothes. I say almost, because it happened like this: A clothes-seller—Greek, or Armenian, or Heaven knows what!—was carrying a large heap of clothes: striped trousers, black waistcoats, and blue serge coats. The brown pilgrim chose a suit. The seller asked five roubles. The pilgrim offered three. All the steps of the bargain were gone through at an incredible speed, because the pilgrim was in a great hurry. The seller asked him among other things if he would like my blue serge jacket. The pilgrim said certainly not; it was not good enough. Finally, after looking at all the clothes and trying on one coat, which was two sizes too small, he made his choice and offered three roubles and a half. The bargain was just going to be closed when the pilgrim suddenly said the stuff was bad and went away as fast as he could, bidding me good-bye. He was a native of Voronezh.

After a short spell of cold weather the spring came back once more and opened “her young adventurous arms” to greet the day of the “Coronation” of the new Sultan. There was that peculiar mixture of warmth and freshness in the air, that intoxicating sweetness, which you only get in the South; and after a recent rainfall the green foliage in which the red-tiledhouses of the city are embedded, like red bricks in moss, gleamed with a new freshness. The streets were early crowded with people eager to make their way towards Eyoub, to the mosque where the Sultan is invested with the Sword of Osman.

I drove with Aubrey Herbert across the old bridge into the straggling Jewish quarter on the other side of the Golden Horn. The houses there are square and wooden, rickety and crooked, top-heavy, bending over the narrow street as though they were going to fall down, squalid, dirty, dusty, and rotten; they are old, and sometimes you come across a stone house with half-obliterated remains of beautiful Byzantine window arches and designs. Every now and then you got glimpses of side streets as steep as Devonshire lanes and as narrow as London slums, with wistaria in flower trailing across the street from roof to roof. All along the road people were at their doorsteps, and people and carriages were moving in the direction of Eyoub. After a time, progress, which up to then had been easy and rapid, came to a dead stop, and the coachman who was driving Herbert and myself dived into a side lane and began driving in the opposite direction, back, as it seemed, towards Constantinople. Then he all at once took a turning to the right, and we began to climb a steep and stony track until we reached the walls of Constantinople. These walls, which were built, I believe, by the Emperor Theodosius, are enormously thick and broad. As we reached them, people were climbing up on to the top of them.

Soon we came to a crowd, which was being kept back by soldiers, and the intervention of an officer was necessary to let us drive through the Adrianople Gate into the road along which the Sultan was to pass on his way back to Constantinople after the ceremony. We drove through the gate, right on to the route of the procession, which was stony, rough, and steep. We were at the top of a high hill. To the right of us were the huge broad walls, as thick as the towers of our English castles, grassy on the top, and dotted with a thick crowd of men dressed in colours as bright as the plumage of tropical birds. At this moment, as I write, the colour of one woman’s dress flashes before me—a brilliant cerulean, bright as the back of a kingfisher, gleaming in the sun like a jewel. To the left was a vista of trees, delicate spring foliage, cypresses, mosques, green slopes, and blue hills. Both sides of the roadwere lined with a many-coloured crowd—some sitting on chairs, some in tents, some on primitive wooden stands. Lines of soldiers kept the people back. The road itself was narrow. It was a crowd of poor people, but it was none the less picturesque on that account. Vendors of lemonade and water-carriers walked up and down in front of the people. Some of the spectators hung small carpets from their seats. The tents varied in size and quality, some boasting of magnificent embroideries and others were such as gipsies pitch near a race-course. We drove on and on through this double line of coloured people and troops, down the narrow cobbled way, until we reached the level, and there, after a time, we were obliged to leave the carriage and go on foot.

The makeshift stands, the extemporary decorations, the untidy crowd, proved that in the East no elaboration and no complicated arrangements are necessary to make a pageant. Nature and the people provide colours more gorgeous than any wealth of panoplies, banners, and gems could display, and the people seem to be part of nature herself and to share her brightness.

We walked through a cordon of cavalry until we reached the mosque of Eyoub. The Sultan had already arrived and his carriage was waiting at the gate. The carriages of other dignitaries were standing in a side street. A small street of wooden houses led up to the mosque. We were beckoned to the ground floor of one of these houses by a brown personage in a yellow turban. We were shown on to a small platform divided into two tiers, crowded with Turkish men and women; others were standing on the floor. Some of the spectators were officers; some wore uniform; among those on the lower tier were some soldiers, a policeman, and a postman. We were welcomed with great courtesy and given seats. But whenever we asked questions, every question—no matter what it was about—was taken to mean that we were anxious to know when the Sultan was coming. And to every question the same answer was made gently by these kind and courteous people, as though they were dealing with children: “Have patience, my lamb, the Sultan will soon be here.”

Immediately in front of us stood the large French barouche of the Sultan, drawn by four bay horses, the carriage glittering with gilding and lined with satin. We waited about an hour,the people every now and then continuing to reassure us that the Sultan would soon be there. Then we heard the band. Two men spread a small carpet on the steps of the carriage, into which the Sultan immediately stepped, and drove off, headed by asaisdressed in blue and gold and mounted on a bay horse.

As this large gilded barouche passed, with the Sultan in uniform inside it, the spirit of the Second Empire seemed for one moment to hover in the air, and I half expected the band to play:

“Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre,Voici le sabre, le sabre de mon père,”

“Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre,

Voici le sabre, le sabre de mon père,”

which, as far as the words go, would have been appropriate, as the Sultan had just been girded with the sword of his predecessors. This sudden ghost of the Second Empire contrasted sharply with the spectators with whom I was standing. They belonged to the Arabian Nights, to infinitely old and far-off things, like the Old Testament. They became solemn when the Sultan passed, and murmured words of blessing. But there was no outward show of enthusiasm and no cheering nor even clapping.

I wondered whether the ghost of the Second Empire, which had seemed to be present, were an omen or not, and whether the ceremony which marked the inauguration, not only of a new reign but also of a new régime—a totally different order of things, a fresh era and epoch—were destined to see its hope fulfilled, or whether under the gaiety and careless lightness it was in reality something terribly solemn and fatal of quite another kind, namely, the funeral procession of the Ottoman Empire.

Towards the end of my stay I was taken by the British Ambassador and Lady Lowther in their yacht to Brusa, where we spent three nights. Brusa in spring is one of the most lovely places in the world. It is nested high on a hill, which you reach after a long drive from the coast, and before you towers Mount Olympus. Brusa is a place of roses and streams and elegant mosques, and baths built of seaweed-coloured marbles. The cool rivulets flow down the hill like the little streams described by Dante:

“Li ruscelletti che de’ verdi colliDel Casentin discendon giuso in Arno,Facendo i lor canali e freddi e molli,”

“Li ruscelletti che de’ verdi colli

Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno,

Facendo i lor canali e freddi e molli,”

The water of the springs and streams at Brusa seemed to have a secret freshness of their own. The roses were in full bloom; nightingales sang all day; and the cool sound of running water was always in one’s ears.

I left Constantinople in the middle of June, convinced of one thing, that the new Turkish régime was not unlike the old one, and that what a man who had lived for years in Constantinople had told me was true. When I had mentioned the Young Turks to him, he said: “Qui sont les jeunes Turcs? Il n’y a que les Turcs.”

“On arrive novice à toutes les guerres,” wrote the French philosopher; or if he did not, he said something like it. I have never known a place where being on the spot made so sharp a difference in one’s point of view as the Near East, and where one’s ignorance, and the ignorance of the great mass of one’s fellow-countrymen, was so keenly brought home to one. The change in the point of view happened with surprising abruptness the moment one crossed the Austrian frontier. There are other changes of a physical nature which happen as well when one crosses the frontier into any kingdom where war is taking place. The whole of the superficial luxuries of civilisation seem to disappear in a twinkling; and so adaptable a creature is man that you feel no surprise; you just accept everything as if things had always been so. The trains crawl; they stop at every station; you no longer complain of the inadequacy of the luxuries of your sleeping-car; you are thankful to have a seat at all. It is no longer a question of criticising the quality of the dinner or the swiftness of the service. It is a question whether you will get a piece of bread or a glass of water during the next twenty-four hours.

Belgrade Station was full of reservists and peasants: men in uniform, men half in uniform, men in the clothes of the mountains—sheepskin coats, putties, and shoes made of twisted straw; dark, swarthy, sunburnt and wind-tanned, hard men, carrying rifles and a quantity of bundles and filling the cattle vans to overflowing. At every station we passed trains, most of them empty, which were coming back to fetch supplies of meat. Every platform and every station were crowded with men in uniforms of every description. A Servian officer got into the carriage in which I was travelling. He was dressed inkhaki. He wore a white chrysanthemum in his cap, a bunch of Michaelmas daisies in his belt, and he carried, besides his rifle and a khaki bag which had been taken from the Turks, a small umbrella. He had been wounded in the foot at Kumanovo. He was on his way to Uskub. He was a man of commerce, and had closed his establishment to go to the war; the majority of the officers in his regiment were men of commerce, he said. They had sacrificed everything to go to the war, and that was one reason why they were not going to allow the gains of the war, which they declared were a matter of life and death to their country, to be snatched from them by diplomatists at a green table. “If they want to take from us what we have won by the sword,” he said, “let them take it by the sword.”

I asked him about the fighting at Kumanovo. He said the Turks had fought like heroes, but that they were miserably led. He then began to describe the horrors of the war in the Servian language. As I understood about one word in fifty, I lost the thread of the discourse, and so I lured him back into a more neutral language. He told me that someone had asked a Turkish prisoner how it came about that the Turks, whom all the world knew to be such brave soldiers, were nevertheless always beaten. The Turk, after the habit of his race, answered by an apologue as follows: “A certain man,” he said, “once possessed a number of camels and an ass. He was a hard taskmaster to the camels, and he worked them to the uttermost; and after trading for many years in different lands, he became exceedingly rich. At last one day he himself fell sick; and feeling that his end was drawing nigh, he wished to relieve himself of the burden on his soul, so he bade the camels draw near to him, and he addressed them thus: ‘I am dying, camels, dying, only I have most uncivilly kept death waiting, until I have unburdened my soul to you. Camels, I have done you a grievous wrong. When you were hungry, I stinted you of food, when you were thirsty, I denied you drink, and when you were weary, I urged you on and denied you rest; and ever and always I denied you the full share of your fair and just wage. Now I am dying, and all this lies heavily on my soul, I crave your forgiveness, so that I may die in peace. Can you forgive me, camels, for all the wrong I have done you?’ The camels withdrew to talk it over. Aftera while the Head Camel returned and spoke to the merchant thus: ‘That you ever overworked us, we forgive you; that you underfed us, we forgive you; that you never remembered to pay us our full wage, we forgive you; but that you always let the ass go first, Allah may forgive you, but we never can!’”

It took over twelve hours to get from Belgrade to the junction of Nish, where there was a prospect of food. When we stopped at one station in the twilight there was a great noise of cheering from another train, and a dense crowd of soldiers and women throwing flowers. Then in the midst of the clamour and the murmur somebody played a tune on a pipe. A little Slav tune written in a scale which has a technical name—let us say the Phrygian mode—a plaintive, piping tune, as melancholy as the cry of a seabird. The very voice of exile. I recognised the tune at once. It is in the first ten pages of Balakirev’s collection of Russian folk-songs under the name “Rekrutskaya”—that is to say, recruits’ song. Plaintive, melancholy, quaint, and piping, it has no heartache in it; it is the luxury of grief, the expression of idle tears, the conventional sorrow of the recruit who is leaving his home.

“You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette,And there’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget.”

“You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette,

And there’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget.”

So, in the song of our grandfathers which I have quoted earlier in the book, the maiden sang to the conscript, adding that were she King of France, “or, still better, Pope of Rome,” she would abolish war, and consequently the parting of lovers. But the song of the Slav recruit in its piping notes seems to say: “I am going far away, but I am not really sorry to go. They will be glad to get rid of me at home, and I, in the barracks, shall have meat to eat twice a day, and jolly comrades, and I shall see the big town and find a new love as good as my true love. They will mend my broken heart there; but in the meantime let me make the most of the situation. Let me collect money and get drunk, and let me sing my sad songs, songs of parting and exile, and let me enjoy the melancholy situation to the full.”

That is what the wistful, piping song, played on a wooden flageolet of some kind, seemed to say. It just pierced through the noise and then stopped; a touching interlude, like theshepherd’s piping amidst the weariness, the fever and the fret, the delirious remembrance and the agonised expectation, of the last act of Wagner’sTristan und Isolda. The train moved on into the gathering darkness.

We arrived at Nish at eight o’clock in the evening. It was dark; the station was sparsely lighted; the buffet, to which we had been looking forward all day, was as crowded as a sardine-box and apparently devoid of anything suggesting food. Wounded soldiers, reservists, officers filled the waiting-room and the platform. The Servian officer dived into the crowd and returned presently, bringing his sheaves with him in the shape of three plates of hot chicken.

Nish seemed an unfit-like meeting-place for triumphant soldiers; it resembled rather the scene of a conspiracy in a melodrama, where tired conspirators were plotting nothing at all. One felt cut off from all news. In London, one knew, in every sitting-room people were marking off the movements of the battles with paper flags on inaccurate maps. Here at Nish, in the middle of a crowd of men who either had fought or were going to fight, one knew less about the war than in Fleet Street. One bought a newspaper, but it dealt with everything except war news.

A man came into the refreshment-room—the name was in this case ironical—and said, “I have had nothing to eat, not a piece of bread and not a drop of water, for twenty-four hours,” and then, before anybody could suggest a remedy—for food there was none—he went away. Afterwards I saw him with a chicken in his hand. One man was carrying a small live pig, which squealed. In the corner of the platform two men, with crutches and bandages, dressed in the clothes of the country, were sitting down, looking as if they were tired of life. I offered them a piece of cold sausage, which they were too tired to accept; only at the sight of a cigarette one of them made a gesture, and, being given one, smoked and smoked and smoked. I knew the feeling. Suddenly, in the darkness, a sleeping-car appeared, to the intense surprise of everyone—an International sleeping-car, with sheets, and plenty of room in it. My travelling companion and myself started for Sofia, where we arrived the next morning.

At Sofia the scene on the platform was different. The place was full of bustle; the platform crowded with Red Crossmen, nurses, and soldiers, in tidy, practical uniforms. The refreshment-room, too, was crowded with doctors. You heard fragments of many languages: the scene might have been Mukden, 1904, or, indeed, any railway station in any war anywhere. An exceedingly capable porter got me my luggage with dispatch, and I drove to the hotel in a “phaeton,” but not with the coursers of the sun. The horses here had all gone to the war. At the hotel I was first given—the only room said to be vacant—a room which was an annex to the café. For furniture it had six old card-tables and nothing else.

Full of Manchurian memories, I was about to think this luxurious, when the offending Adam in me quite suddenly revolted, and I demanded and obtained instead a luxurious upper chamber. I stayed about a week at Sofia, and made unavailing efforts to get to the front. I was then told I would find it easier to get to the front where the Servian Army was fighting. So, laden with papers and passports, I started for Uskub.

I travelled from Sofia to Nish in the still existing comfortable sleeping-cars; but when I arrived once more at the junction of Nish I learnt a lesson which I thought I had mastered many years ago, and that is, take in a war as much luggage as you possibly can to your civilised base, but once you start for the front or anywhere near it, take nothing at all except a tea-basket and a small bottle of brandy. I had only a small trunk with me, but the stationmaster refused to let it proceed. War goes to the heads of stationmasters like wine. This particular stationmaster had no right whatsoever to stop my small trunk on the grounds that it was full of contraband goods, and he could perfectly well have had it examined then and there; instead of which he said it would have to be taken to the Custom House Office in the town, which would involve a journey of two hours and the missing of my train. I was obliged to leave my trunk at the station, nor cast one longing, lingering look behind. The only reason I mention this episode, which has no sort of interest in itself, is to illustrate something which I will come to later. At Nish I got into a slow train. The railway carriage was full of people. There was in it a Servian poet, who had temporarily exchanged the lyre for the lancet, and enrolled himself in the Medical Service. His name was Dr. Milan Curçin—pronounced Churchin. He showed me the utmost kindness.Like all modern poets, he was intensely practical, and an admirable man of business, and he promised to get me back my trunk and either to bring it to Uskub himself, as he was continually travelling backwards and forwards between Uskub and Nish, or to have it sent wherever I wished. He spoke several languages, and we discussed the war. He said the Servians resented the abuse which had been levelled against them by Pierre Loti. Pierre Loti, he said, accused them of being barbarians and of attacking Turkey without reason.

“We,” said the poet, “hate war as much as anyone. What does Pierre Loti know of our history? What does he know of Turkish rule in Servia? He knows Stamboul; ‘but what does he know of Turkey who only Stamboul knows?’ Besides, if Pierre Loti’s knowledge of Turkey was anything like his knowledge of Japan, as reflected in that pretty book calledMadame Chrysanthème—a book which made all serious scholars of Japan rabid with rage—it is not worth much.” He had no wish to deny the Turks their qualities. That was not the point. The point was Turkish rule in Servia in the past, and that was unspeakable. The poet was obliged to get out at the first station we stopped at, and after his departure I moved into another compartment, in which there were a wounded soldier, a young Russian volunteer, who was studying at the Military Academy at Moscow, two men of business who were now soldiers, and a gendarme who had been standing up all night, and who stood up all day. I offered these people some tea, having a tea-basket with me. They accepted it gratefully, and after a little time one of them asked me if I were an Austrian. I said no; I was an Englishman. They said: “We thought it extremely odd that an Austrian should offer us tea.” The wounded soldier, thinking I was a doctor, asked me if I could do anything to his wound. As he spoke Servian I could only understand a little of what he said. It seemed heart-breaking, just as one began to get on more or less in Bulgarian, to have to shift one’s language to one which, although the same in essentials, is superficially utterly different in accent, intonation, and in most of the common words of everyday life! Servian and Bulgarian are the same language at root, but Servian is more like Polish, Bulgarian more like Russian. Servian is a great literary language, with a mass of poetry and a beautiful storeof folk songs and folk epics. Bulgarian compared with it is more or less of a patois; it is like Russian with all the inflections left out. With the help of the Russian student I gathered that the soldier had been wounded at the battle of Kumanovo, that his wound had been dressed and bandaged by a doctor, but that subsequently he had gone to a wise woman, who had put some balm on it, and that the effect of the balm had been disastrous. I strongly recommended him to consult a doctor on the first possible occasion. It is travelling under such circumstances, in war-time especially, that one really gets beneath the crust of a country. Every man who travels in an International sleeping-car becomes more or less international; and it is not in hotels or embassies that you get face to face with a people, however excellent your recommendations. But travel third-class in a full railway carriage, in times of war, and you get to the heart of the country through which you are travelling. The qualities of the people are stripped naked—their good qualities and their bad qualities; and this is why I mentioned the episode of the trunk, in order to call attention to the extreme kindness shown to me by the Servian poet, Dr. Curçin, who rescued the trunk for me at great personal inconvenience. I hoped that the “Georgian” poets would do the same for a Servian war correspondent, supposing there were a war in England and they were to come across one.

After many hours we came to a stop where it was necessary to change, at Vranja; and then began one of those long war waits which are so exasperating. The station was full to overflowing with troops; there was no room to sit down in the waiting-room. We waited there for two hours, and then, at last, the train was formed which was bound for Uskub. There were several members of the Servian Parliament who had reserved places in this train, and in a moment, it appeared to be quite full, and there seemed to be no chance of getting a place in it. I was handicapped also by carrying a saddle and a bridle, which blocked up the narrow corridor of the railway carriage. But I got a place in the train, and room was found for the saddle owing to the kindness of an aviator called Alexander Maritch. He was one of those extremely unselfish people who seem to spend their life in doing nothing but extremely tiresome things for other people. He carried my saddle in his hands for half an hour, and at last managed tofind room for it where it would not be in the way of all the other passengers. He was an astonishingly capable man with his hands and his fingers. There appeared to be nothing he could not do. He uncoupled the railway carriages; he mended during the journey a quantity of broken objects, and he spent the whole of the time in making himself useful in one way or another.

Towards nightfall we arrived at the station of Kumanovo, and got out to have a look at the battlefield. It was quite dark and the ground was covered with snow. Drawn up near the station were a lot of guns and ammunition carts which had been taken from the Turks. Here were some Maxim guns whose screens were perforated by balls, which shows that they could not have been made of good material; and indeed at Uskub I was told that there were no doubt cases where the Turkish material was bad; but another and more potent cause of the disorganisation in the Turkish Army was the manner in which the Turks handled, or rather mishandled, their weapons. They forgot to unscrew the shells; they jammed the rifles. This is not surprising to anyone who has ever seen a Turk handle an umbrella. He carries it straight in front of him, pointing towards him in the air, if it is shut, and sideways and beyond his head, if it is open.

We arrived at Uskub about half-past eight. The snow was thawing. The aspect was desolate. The aviator found me a room in the Hôtel de la Liberté; but the window in it was broken, and there was no fuel. It was as damp as a vault. We had dinner. I happened to mention that it would be nice to smoke a cigarette, but I had not got any more. At once the aviator darted out of the room and disappeared. “He won’t come back,” said one of his friends, “till he has found you some cigarettes, you may be sure of that.” In an hour’s time he returned with three cigarettes, having scoured the town for them, the shops, of course, being shut.

Uskub is a picturesque, straggling place, and at that time of the year, swamped as it was in melting snow, an incredibly dirty place, situated between a mountain and the river Vardar. Like all Turkish towns, it is ill-paved, or rather not paved at all, and full of mud. It is—or was—largely inhabited by Albanian Mohammedans. As the headquarters of the Servian Army, it was full of officers and soldiers; there was not muchfood, and still less wood. Here were the war correspondents. They had not been allowed to go any farther; but the order went out that they could, if they liked, go on to Kuprulu, a little farther down the line, whence it was impossible to telegraph. A stay at Uskub, as it was then, would afford a tourist a taste of all the discomforts of war without any of its excitement. The principal distraction of the people at Uskub was having their boots cleaned; and as the streets were full of large lakes of water and high mounds of slush, the effect of the cleaning was not permanent. Matthew Arnold was once asked to walk home after dinner on a wet night in London. “No,” he said; “I can’t get my feet wet. It would spoil my style.” Matthew Arnold’s style would have been annihilated at Uskub.

The stories told by eye-witnesses of the events immediately preceding the occupation of Uskub by the Serbians were tragicomic in a high degree. In the first place, the population of the place never for one moment thought that the Turks could possibly be beaten by the Servians. Suddenly, in the midst of their serene confidence, came the cry: “The Giaours are upon us.” Every Turkish official and officer in the place lost his head, with the exception of the Vali (head of the district), who was the only man possessing an active mind. Otherwise the Turkish officers fled to the Consulates and took refuge there, trembling and quaking with terror.

The two problems which called for immediate solution were: (a) to prevent further fighting taking place in the town; (b) to prevent a general massacre of the Christians before the Servians entered the town. To prevent fighting in the town, the Turkish troops had to be persuaded to get out of it. This was done. The only hope of solving both these problems lay in the Vali. All the Consuls, as I said, agreed that the Vali’s conduct on this occasion shone amidst the encircling cowardice of the other officers and officials. Already before the news of the battle of Kumanovo had reached the town about two hundred Christians had been arrested on suspicion and put in prison. They were not of the criminal class, but just ordinary people—priests, shopmen, and women. About three hundred Mohammedans were already in the prison. News came to the Russian Consul-General, M. Kalnikoff, that these prisoners had had nothing to eat for two days. He went at once to the prison and demanded to be let in. He heard shots being fired inside. Some of theAlbanians were firing into the air. He asked the Governor of the prison whether it was true that the prisoners had had no food for two days, and the Governor said it was perfectly true, and that the reason was that there was no bread to be had in the town.

“In that case,” said the Consul-General, “you must let all these prisoners out.”

“But if I let them out,” said the Governor, “the Mohammedans will kill the Christians.”

Finally it was settled that the prisoners should be let out a few at a time, the Christians first, and the Mohammedans afterwards, through a hedge of soldiers; and this was accomplished successfully. M. Kalnikoff told me that among the prisoners were many people he knew.

Then came the question of giving up the town to the Servians without incurring a massacre. I am not certain of the chronology of the events, and all this was told me in one hurried and interrupted interview, but the Vali took the matter in hand, and as he was driving to the Russian Consulate a man in the crowd shot him through the arm and killed the coachman. This man was said to be mad.

In the meantime, the various Consulates were crowded with refugees, and in the French Consulate a Turkish officer fainted from apprehension, and another officer insisted on disguising himself as akavass. The Servians, who were outside the city, at some considerable distance, thought that the Turks meant to offer further resistance in the town.

It was arranged that the various Consuls and the Vali (in their uniforms) should set out for the Servian headquarters and deliver up the town. This was done. They drove out until they met Servian troops. Then they were blindfolded and marched between a cordon of soldiers through the deep mud until they reached those in authority. They explained matters, and the Servian cavalry rode into the town, just in time to prevent a massacre of the Christian population. As it was, the Albanians had already done a good deal of looting. That there was no fighting in the town, and consequently no massacre, was probably due to the prompt action of the Vali.

When the Turkish and Albanian soldiers retired south from Kumanovo they were apparently completely panic-stricken. At Uskub, horses belonging to batteries were put in trains, whilethe guns were left behind. There is not the slightest doubt that the troops massacred any Christians they came across. At the military hospital at Nish I saw a woman who was terribly cut and mutilated. She told the following story: Her house, in which were her husband, her brother, his son-in-law, and her two sons, was suddenly occupied by Arnaut refugees. These were Albanians from the north, who were fighting with the Turks. The Arnauts demanded weapons, which they were given. They then set fire to the house, killed the woman’s husband and everyone else who was there, and no doubt thought that they had killed her also. But she was found still breathing, and taken to the hospital. The doctor said that she might recover. Stories such as these, and far worse, one heard on all sides. The Arnauts were an absolutely uncompromising people. They gave and expected no quarter. In the hospitals they bit the doctors who tried to help them. They fought and struck as long as there was a breath left in their bodies.

At the military hospital of Nish I saw many of the wounded. The wounds inflicted by bullets were clean, and the doctors said that they were such that the wounded either recovered and were up and about in a week, or else they died. There were cases of tetanus, and I saw many men who had received severe bayonet wounds and fractures at the battle of Perlepe, where some of the severest fighting had taken place.

At the beginning of this battle somebody on the Servian side must have blundered. A regiment was advancing, expecting to meet reinforcements on both sides. In front of them, on a hill, they saw what they took to be their own men, and halted. Immediately a hot fire rained on them from all sides. The men they had seen were not their own men but Turks. The Servians had to get away as fast as ever they could go, otherwise they would have been surrounded; as it was, they incurred severe losses.

You had only to be a day in Servia to realise the spirit of the people. They were full of a concentrated fire of patriotism. The war to them was a matter of life and death. They regarded their access to the sea as a question of life and death to their country. They had been the driving power in the war. They had had to make the greater sacrifices; and the part they had played certainly was neither realised nor appreciated. The Servians were less reserved than the Bulgarians,but they had the same singleness of purpose and the same power of cleaving fast to one great idea.

I only spent four or five days at Uskub, and as there seemed to be no chance of getting within range of any fighting, I went back to Sofia. I stopped on the way to Nish, where I visited the military hospital, and there I met once more the Servian poet, and received my lost trunk from his hands. Just outside the Servian hospital there was a small church. This church was originally a monument built by the Turks to celebrate the taking of Nish, and its architecture was designed to discourage the Servians from ever rising against them again, for the walls were made almost entirely of the skulls of massacred Servians.

As soon as I got back to Sofia I found that there would be nothing of interest for me to do or see there, and no chance of getting to the Bulgarian front. I might perhaps have got to Headquarters, but that would have been of little use, and theTimes, for whom I was writing, already had one correspondent with the Bulgarian army. So I settled to go to ConstantinopleviaBucharest.

I spent a night at Bucharest, and I arrived at Constantinople on a drizzly, damp, autumn day in November.

Many people have recorded the melancholy they have felt on arriving at Constantinople for the first time, especially in the autumn, under a grey sky, when the kaleidoscopic, opalescent city loses its radiance, suffers eclipse, and seems to wallow in greyness, sadness, dirt, and squalor. A man arriving at Constantinople on November 19, 1912 would have received this melancholy impression at its very intensest. The skies were grey, the air was damp, and the streets looked more than usually squalid and dishevelled. But in addition to this, there was in the air a feeling of great gloom, which was intensified by the chattering crowds in Pera, laughing and making fun of the Turkish reverses, by the chirping women at the balconies, watching the stragglers and the wounded coming back from the front, and listening, in case they might hear the enemy sullenly firing. In the city you felt that every Turk, sublimely resigned as ever, and superficially, at least, utterly expressionless and indifferent as usual, was walking about with a heavy heart, and probably every thinking Turk was feeling bitterly that the disasters which had come were due to the criminal folly of a band of alien and childishly incompetent political quacks. You felt also above everything else theinvincible atmosphere of Byzantium, which sooner or later conquers and disintegrates its conquerors, however robust and however virile. Byzantium, having disintegrated two great Empires, seemed to be ironically waiting for a new prey. One remembered Bismarck’s saying that he could wish no greater misfortune to a country than the possession of Constantinople.

But so quick are the changes there, so chameleon-like is the place, that all this was already out of date two days later. In three days the mood of the city completely changed: people began to talk of the enemy being driven right back to Sofia; the feast of Bairam was celebrated; the streets were decked with flags; the men-of-war were dressed; and, in the soft autumnal sunshine, the city glowed once more in its ethereal coat of many colours.

The stories of the cholera, people said, had been grossly exaggerated; 8000 Bulgarians had been taken prisoners (800 was the subsequent figure, some people said three, some people said one). Cholera was raging in the enemy’s lines. New troops were pouring in. The main enemy would be repulsed; the others would be dealt with piecemeal, “as before”; in fact, everything was said to be going well.

But I saw a thing with my eyes, which threw some light on the conditions under which the war was being carried on. One morning I drove out in a motor-car with two companions and a Turkish officer, with the intention of reaching the Tchataldja lines. Until that day people had been able to reach the lines in motor-cars. Probably too many people had done this; and most properly an order had been issued to put a stop to the flood of visitors. In spite of the presence of a Turkish officer with us we could not get beyond the village of Kutchuk Tchekmedche, which is right on the Sea of Marmora. Not far from the village, and separated from it by a small river, is a railway station, and as we drove past the bank of the railway line we noticed several dead men lying on the bank. The station was being disinfected. We stopped by the sandy beach to have luncheon, and before we had finished a cart passed us with more dead in it. We drove back through San Stefano. We entered through a gate and drove down the suburb, where, bounded on one side by a railway embankment, and on the other hand by a wall, there was a large empty space intersected by the road.Beyond this were the houses of San Stefano. It was in this space that we were met by the most gruesome and terrible sight I have ever seen; worse than any battlefield or the sight of wounded men. This plot of ground was littered with dead and dying men. The ground itself was strewn with rags, rubbish, and filth of every kind, and everywhere, under the wall, on the grass, by the edge of the road, and on the road, were men in every phase and stage of cholera.

There was nobody to help them; nobody to look after them; nothing to be done for them. Many of them were dead, and lay like terrible black waxworks in contorted shapes. Others were moving and struggling, and others again were just gasping out the last flicker of life. One man was making a last effort to grasp a gourd. And in the middle of this there were other soldiers, sitting patiently waiting and eating bread under the walls of the houses. There was not a sound, not a murmur. Imagine a crowd of holiday-makers at Hampstead Heath suddenly stricken by plague, and you will have some idea of this terrible sight. Imagine one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Dante’s “Inferno” made into atableau vivantby some unscrupulous and decadent artist. Imagine the woodcuts in old Bibles of the Children of Israel stricken in the desert and uplifting their helpless hands to the Brazen Serpent. Deserted, helpless, and hopeless, this mass of men lay like a heap of half-crushed worms, to suffer and to die amidst indescribable filth, and this only seven miles from the capital, where the nurses were not allowed to get patients! Soon after I saw this grisly sight I met Mr. Philip, First Secretary of the U.S.A. Embassy, at the Club. He told me he had been to San Stefano, and that he and a U.S.A. doctor, Major Ford, were trying to do something to relieve the people who were suffering from cholera. Would I come and help them?

The next day I went to San Stefano.

San Stefano is a small suburb of Constantinople whose name, as we all know, has been written in history. Possibly some day Clapham Junction will be equally famous if there is ever a Treaty of Clapham, subsequently ratified by the Powers at a Congress of Constantinople or Delhi. It contains a number of elegant whitewashed and two-storied houses, inhabited by the well-to-do of Constantinople during the summer months. San Stefano—why or how I know not—became during the warone of the smaller centres of the sick—in other words, a cholera camp.

San Stefano, at the time of my visit, was entirely deserted; the elegant summer “residences” empty. The streets were silent. You could reach San Stefano from Constantinople either by steamer, which took a little over an hour and a half; or by train, which took an hour (but there were practically no trains running); or in a carriage, which took two hours and a half. The whole place was lifeless. Only on the quay, porters and Red Crescent orderlies dealt with great bales of baggage, and every now and then in the silent street you heard the tinkling, stale music of a faded pianoforte which played an old-fashioned—not an old—tune. I wondered, when I heard this music, who in the world could be playing the pianoforte in San Stefano at such a moment. I need hardly say that the effect was not only melancholy but uncanny; for what is there sadder in the world than out-of-date music played on an exhausted and wheezy instrument?

At the quay a line of houses fronted the sea. You then turned up a muddy side street and you came to a small square, where there were a few shops and a few cafés. In the cafés, which were owned by Greeks, people were drinking coffee. The shops were trading in articles which they have brought from the bazaars and which they thought might be of use to the cholera patients. A little farther on, beyond the muddy square, where a quantity of horses, donkeys, and mules were tethered to the leafless trees, you came to a slight eminence surrounded by walls and railings. Within these walls there was a small building made of stucco, Grecian in style. It was the deserted Greek school. This is the place where cholera patients at last found shelter, and this is the place which I was brought to by Major Ford, U.S.A., and Mr. Philip, who both of them went to San Stefano every day.

It was at San Stefano that under the outside wall of the town, and on the railway embankment, the dead and dying were lying like crushed insects, without shelter, without food, without water. Miss Alt, a Swiss lady of over seventy, and a friend of hers, an Austrian lady, Madame Schneider, heard of this state of things and seeing that nothing was being done for these people, and that no medical or other assistance was allowed to be brought them, took the matter into their own handsand started a relief fund with a sum of £4, and did what they could for the sick. They turned the deserted Greek school into a hospital, and they were joined by Mr. Frew, a Scotch minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Constantinople. Funds were then supplied them by the British and American Embassies, and Major Ford and Mr. Philip joined these two ladies and Mr. Frew.

The first day I went there, no other medical helpers except these volunteers had a Turkish sergeant; but the day after, a Turkish medical officer arrived, and the whole matter was nominally under his charge. The medical work of the place was undertaken by Major Ford, and the commissariat was managed by Mr. Frew. There were in the Greek school nine rooms altogether. Of these six were occupied by patients, one formed a kind of kitchen and store-room, and two of the rooms were taken over by the medical staff of the Turkish Red Crescent. Besides this there was a compound roofed over in the open air, and there were a certain number of tents—a dozen or so. In this house, and in these tents there were at first thrown together over 350 men, all in various stages of sickness. Some of them were in the last stage of cholera; some of them had dysentery; some of them had typhus; some were suffering from exhaustion and starvation, and the greater part of them were sick.

At first there was some doubt whether the disease was cholera. The disease which was manifest—and terribly manifest—did not include all the best-known symptoms of cholera. It was plain also that a great number of the soldiers were suffering simply from exhaustion, exposure, and starvation. But later on medical diagnosis was made, and the cholera microbe was discovered. A German cholera specialist who came from Berlin, Dr. Geissler, told me that there was no doubt of the existence of the cholera microbe. Besides which, some of the symptoms were startlingly different from those of mere dysentery. From the human point of view, and not from the scientific point of view, the question was indifferent. The solemn fact from the human point of view was that the Turkish soldiers at San Stefano were sick and dying from a disease that in any case in many points resembled cholera, and that others were dying from what was indistinguishable from cholera in its outward manifestations. Every day and everynight so many soldiers died, but less and less as the days went on. One night thirty died; another night fifteen; another night ten; and so on.

I have called the Greek school a hospital, but when you think of a hospital you call up the vision of all the luxury of modern science—of clean beds, of white sheets, of deft and skilful nurses, of supplies of sterilised water, antiseptics, lemonade, baths, quiet, space, and fresh and clean air. Here there were no such appliances, and no such things. There were no beds; there were mattresses on the dusty and dirty floors. The rooms were crowded to overflowing. There was no means of washing or dressing the patients. It is difficult to convey to those who never saw it the impression made by the first sight of the rooms in the Greek school where the sick were lying. Some of the details are too horrible to write. It is enough to say that during the first few days after the sick were put into the Greek school, the rooms were packed and crowded with human beings, some of them in agony and all of them in extreme distress. They lay on the floor in rows along the walls, with flies buzzing round them; and between these rows of men there was a third row along the middle of the room. They lay across the doors, so that anybody opening a door in a hurry and walking carelessly into the room trod on a sick man. They were weak from starvation. They were one and all of them parched, groaning and moaning, with a torturing and unquenchable thirst. They were suffering from many other diseases besides cholera. One man had got mumps. Many of the soldiers had gangrened feet and legs, all blue, stiff and rotten, as if they had been frost-bitten. These soldiers had either to have their limbs amputated or to die—and there is no future for an amputated Turk. There is nothing for him to do save to beg. Some of them had swellings and sores and holes in their limbs and in their faces, and although most of them were wounded, all of them were unwashed and many of them covered with vermin. Most of them besides their overcoats and their puttees had practically no clothes at all. Their underclothes were in rags, and caked with dirt. The sick were all soldiers; most of them were Turks; some of them were Greeks.

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