Constantinople in War-Time

I

‘THE hordes of Asia —' That phrase, fished out of what reminiscence I know not, kept running in my head as the Anatolian soldiers poured through the city. Where did they all come from? Every day, for three weeks and more, the crowded transports steamed 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 simply a fugitive panorama of cypresses and minarets and waving handkerchiefs. They passed by, without stopping, to the ports of the Sea of 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 haycolored uniform of Young Turkey. Then older reservists began to appear in the dark-blue, piped with red, of Abdul 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 Roumania 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 from the region of Trebizond, 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 color, has been adopted for the whole army. I shall always remember it as a sort of symbol of that winter war.

Certain swarthy individuals from the Persian or Russian frontiers also made memorable figures, 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 unpleasant customers to meet on a dark night. These gentlemen, none the less, wore in their caps, like a cockade, what might have seemed to the vulgar a paintbrush, but was in reality the toothbrush 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 even draped 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, around their necks or in their manes, against the Evil Eye; and their high packsaddles were decorated with beads or small shells or tufts of colored worsted. Nor can the songs the soldiers sang have changed much, I imagine, 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 stroll 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 cartridgebelt. That was the way to go to war, he said,—as to a wedding. Another played on a violin as he marched, a quaint little instrument like a pochette or 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. The only utterance I happened to catch 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 with 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 often enough expressed by men. Why not, among so much ignorance and at a time of such resentment against the unbeliever? Yet I did not chance to hear anything of the sort. I was struck, on the contrary, by what seemed to me a distinctly new temper in Mohammedans. Nazim Pasha sounded the note of it when he proclaimed that this was a political, not a holy war, and that noncombatants 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, 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 causes 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 organized a few picturesque demonstrations and encouraged roughs to break legation windows. 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 outward enthusiasm 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

Did any one dream, then, what was to be? 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 had dealings with the Turk know that he is the least businesslike of men. He is constitutionally averse to order, method, discipline, promptness, 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 organizing faculties. He simply has n’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 waits until he is forced, and then he has usually waited too long for his own interest.

In spite of so many straws to show how the wind blew, 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 be smashed to pieces at the first onslaught of an enemy inexperienced in war. 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 the face of a Bey in civil life whom I knew, and whom two weeks of the war had made haggard 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—' One did not care, in those days, to meet one’s Turkish friends. It was like intruding into a house of death. In this house of death, however, 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 said, ‘that this was not a holy war, you would have seen!’ I am inclined to believe there was something in his opinion. At the time, however, it reminded me of the young man who complained that Roumelia gave the Turks 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 afterwards, 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 not to the incompetence, but to the cupidity, of their officers. He believed like his companions, and I doubt if anything will ever shake their belief, that the officers, from Nazim 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 — saving my presence! — ran 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 criticize, 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 ranked officers had been removed to make room for young mekteblis, schoolmen, who knew nothing of their men or of war. They knew how to wear a collar perhaps, or how to turn up their moustaches à la Guillaume, but not how to sleep on the ground; and when the Bulgarians fired they ran away.

III

The crowning bitterness was the attitude of Europe. 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 Abdul Hamid, and England, the friend of Kiamil 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 diplomatic 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 that it must seem very hard, having been helped so often, not to be helped once more.

I remember, apropos of that point of view, an old lady who watched a cheering transport steam down the Bosphorus. Long after the armistice had been signed they continued to bring their hordes.

’Poor things! Poor things!' exclaimed my old lady. ‘The lions! You would think they were going to a wedding!’ And then turning to me she asked, ‘Can you tell me, Effendim, why it is that all Europe is against us? Have we done no good in six hundred years?’

It was a very profound question the old lady asked me. I made no pretense of answering it then, nor can I hope to answer it now. Yet it has remained insistently in the back of my mind ever since. I might, to be sure, have said what so many other people are 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. Your horsemen have stamped out civilization wherever they have trod, and what you were in the beginning you are now. Your conqueror, 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 by-word among the nations. And you are too proud or too lazy to learn. 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 industry, no science, no art, no literature 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 are now 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 you have slowly ruined them, like everything else that comes into your hand. 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 should scarcely have convinced her. Nor should 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 which 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 about him something which 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 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 Anatolian town is more picturesque than the others; the old palace of the Sultans in Constantinople, certain old houses I have seen, the mosques, the theological schools, the tombs, the fountains, of the Turks, are an achievement which deserves a more serious study than has been given it. You may tell me that these things are not Turkish, because they were modeled after Byzantine originals or 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 view 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. Kurd, Laz, Arab, and Albanian, 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 foreign officers in the Turkish service and a whole literature of travel — to which Pierre Loti has contributed his share. But I admit that this is a matter in which Pierre Loti may be as unsafe a guide as Mr. Gladstone. Neither leads one any nearer to understanding the strange case of the Turk: why, individually so honest, he is corporately so corrupt; why some strange infection seizes him as soon as he begins to rise in the world; why he can never keep a thing going; what it is that apparently makes him incapable of what we glibly call progress.

To understand him at all, I think, one needs to take a long view of history. For some reason the Turk has lagged in his development. He is to all intents and purposes a mediæval man. And it is not fair to judge him by the standards of the twentieth century.

It would be rather 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 must be that he has a much shorter heritage of civilization 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 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 form America were already well established, while India, China, and Japan had long before reached a high degree of civilization.

It seems to me that this fact may 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 civilizations, 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 that 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 know not, 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 this 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 make religions, not that religions make people. The principles at the root of all aspiring life — call it moral, ethical, or religious, as you will — exist in every religion. And organized 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 simpler and more dignified expression 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 them 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 modernize Islam. It will be harder than modernizing 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 does not 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 and fall? It is the will of God. Any man who literally believes such a doctrine is lost.

It would be an interesting experiment to see what two generations, say, of education might do for the Turks. By education I mean no more than the three Rs, 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, info a remote and practically empty land, he might have developed a civilization of his own. Or if he had conquered a country inhabited by a single race, he would have had 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 an increasing ease of communication made it increasingly difficult for one race to absorb another, he might have succeeded in assimilating the different, peoples that 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 perhaps wished their own wild followers to acquire the culture of the Greeks. Or it may have been a politic deference to new European neighbors. In any case, I am inclined to believe 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 recognizing 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. More than that, he has never been made to feel their need. He walked into a readymade empire. He consequently proceeded to enjoy a ready-made greatness. It happened that the strategic position of the empire maintained the illusion. He has rarely had to stand or fall by the consequences of his own acts. For the past hundred years the greatness of the Turkish Empire has been more than ever a fiction, maintained solely by the jealousies of covetous neighbors. If England, if France, if Germany, were to be left to-morrow without a bayonet or a battleship, they would still be great powers, by the greatness of their economic, their intellectual, their artistic life. But Turkey has no other greatness than can be measured by bayonets and kilometres. The Turk has played the rôle of a great power without the ability to govern one village. Forever protected against the consequences of his own folly, how should he learn to govern a village? He has not stood on his own feet. But now, stripped of his most distant and most disparate provinces, enlightened by humiliation as to the real quality of his greatness, he may, perhaps, if it is not too late, begin at last to live and learn.

IV

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 violins or shepherds’ pipes they lost them in the fields of Thrace. It was pitiful to see how silently, how almost 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 gray ulsters and pointed gray 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 in the night. Two or three pictures are stamped in my memory as characteristic of those melancholy times. The first I happened to see when I moved into town for the winter, a few days after Kirk Kilissé. 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 ambulanceservice. 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 about him. One foot he could not use. In the flare of a gasjet at the top of the steps a sentry stood in his big gray coat, watching. The three slowly made their way to him and disappeared within the doorway.

After Lule Burgas 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.

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 organized 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 for America in order to lend her services. Although our embassy is much smaller than the others, a room was found for a workshop, a sailor from the dispatch boat Scorpion cut out, after models furnished by the Turkish hospitals, and the Singer Company lent sewingmachines to any, indeed, who wanted them for this humanitarian use. America had a further share in these operations in that the coarse cotton used in most of the work is known in this part of the world as American cloth. And shall I add that the wives of the British ambassador and of the Belgian and Swedish ministers are Americans? Lady Lowther organized activities of another but no less useful kind, to provide for the families of poor soldiers and for the 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 and orderlies wore the Turkish device on their caps or sleeves, and at first a small red crescent was embroidered, by request, on every one of the thousands of pieces of hospital linen contributed by foreigners. 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 badge be devised 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 organizations. But I think it was only in irresponsible quarters that the Red Cross symbol was misunderstood. At a dinner given by the Prefect of Constantinople, in honor of the visiting missions, it was an interesting thing, for Turkey, to see the hall decorated with alternate crescents and crosses.

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 that a woman should do, but they went unveiled. Women also served in humbler capacities, and something like organized 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, many of whom were of the lower 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.

The barracks and guard-houses allotted to some of the missions were augean stables which required herculean efforts to clean them 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 Christian from Turkish soldiers — by their nails. The Turk’s are sure to be clean. And in his house he has certain delicacies undreamed of 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 organization and perseverance, seems to be entirely beyond him.

Of the Turk, as patient, I heard nothing but praise. I take the more pleasure in saying it because I have hinted that, in other capacities, the Turk does not always strike a foreign critic as perfect. I had it again and again, from one source after another, that the soldiers made perfect patients, docile and uncomplaining, in many ways like great children, but touchingly grateful for what was done for them. It has become quite a habit for one of them who can write to send a letter to the Turkish papers in the name of his ward, expressing thanks to the doctors and nurses. It must be a new and strange thing for most of the men to have women not of their families caring for them. They take 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 do not happen to be already provided with such. But I have 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 fineness about the men which she would never expect from the same class of patients in her own country.

I am not very 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 hardly 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 colored quilts were covered with white skull-caps, for an Oriental cannot live without something on his head. It is a point both of etiquette and of religion.

Those who were further on the way to recovery prowled mildly about in baggy white pajamas and quilted coats of more color than length. They 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, which some Bulgarian had seen sticking, with a gun-barrel, out of a trench in Thrace. Some limped painfully or went on crutches. But it was not often because of a bullet. There have been a vast number of cases of gangrene, simply from ill-fitting shoes or from putties too tightly bound, which hands were too weak or too numb to undo. There have been fewer resulting amputations than would be the case in other countries. Not a few of the soldiers refused 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 die. 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 simply, so bravely, 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.