Chapter XIII: Part 13

It was for the last time. But the situation seemed to clear. That afternoon Mahmoud Shefket Pasha, generalissimo of the Macedonian forces, whom I did not see at Chatalja, issued the first of a notable series of manifestoes. He announced his assumption of command at the front and his intention to punish only those responsible for the late disturbance. One phrase attracted particular attention. He said: “Certain intriguers, in fear of punishment, have spread the rumour that the above-mentioned forces have arrived in order to depose the sovereign. To these rumours I oppose a formal denial.” Every foreign correspondent in Constantinople thereupon telegraphed to his paper that the Salonica troops would make a peaceful entry into the city and that Abd ül Hamid would remain on the throne.

* * * * *

The next morning, Saturday, I was roused before six o’clock by a member of our country household. “I don’t know,” he said, “but do you hear anything?” I listened. I heard a light air in the garden trees, a pervading twitter of birds. Then it seemed to me that I heard something else in the distance, something faintly crackling, followed occasionally by something more deeply booming. It sounded like firing, and I suddenly remembered my friends of the white leggings. Yet the morning was so delicious, the sky was so soft, the garden so full of birds. By the time I got down to the wharf a few people were gathered there, talking gravely in low voices. The shots we heard did not altogether break the tension of the last few days. My friend the ticket seller gave me serious advice. “Go back to your house,” he said. “Sit in your garden, and be at peace. Lead falls into the sea like rain at Beshiktash. No steamers run. They have all been sent back.” I was disinclined to believe him. It seemed incredible that anything particular was happening—on such a day, after so many overtures to the Macedonians. Among those at the _scala_ I saw Habib the boatman, whom all men know for a liberal and a reader of papers. “Habib,” I said, “let us row to the city. It is necessary for me to go, and there seem to be no steamers. I will pay you a dollar.” Habib regarded me as one might regard a lunatic for whom one entertains friendly sentiments. “_Effendim_,” he replied, “what do you say? They are fighting at Yîldîz, and not for one or for many dollars will I go. What have you to do in town to-day?” I began to be rather annoyed. I had to get some films, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t, if they were fighting at Yîldîz. It didn’t occur to me that there could be trouble anywhere else in the town. But neither boat nor boatman could be induced to go down the Bosphorus.

I climbed Hissar hill again, to warn the rest of a town-going household of the situation and to collect recruits for a forced march of seven miles across country. They were not difficult to obtain. Three of us were starting for a last reconnaissance of the _scala_, when we heard a steamer whistle. We were just in time to jump triumphantly on board. So the croakers were mistaken, after all! The passengers were few, however. At the next station of Bebek, where a considerable English colony lives, a number of friends joined us. At the station below that the captain threw up the sponge. An up-bound steamer was there, which had turned back. We told our captain he was a fool, a coward, and as many other uncomplimentary things as we could think of, but he refused to budge. We accordingly got off and took the stony street following the shore to the city. People stared at us as Habib had stared at me. The tide of travel was all the other way. There were carriages full of Turkish women, with eunuchs on the box. There were Armenians, Greeks, and Jews of the lower classes—the last distinguishable by the furred robes of the old men—hurrying northward on foot, with babies and bundles in their arms. There were, more notably, soldiers of the garrison, singly, in groups, with or without rifles. We stopped the first we saw and asked what was up. They all declared that they knew nothing, showing much haste to be on. We afterward realised that they were running away. We saw some of them bargaining for boats to take them to the Asiatic side.

There had been no firing for some time, and the sight of row-boats so much nearer the scene of action than Hissar convinced me anew of a false alarm. The Macedonians had probably come into town at last. The Palace guard might very well have made a row. Perhaps even the Sultan had been deposed, and had objected to it. But how was it possible that there should be any general fighting? At Orta-kyöi, next to the imperial suburb of Beshiktash, six of us got in to two _sandals_. We soon separated. The boat in which I sat had not gone far toward the harbour before firing broke out again. There was no doubt about it this time. The crack of musketry, intensely sharp and sinister in the clear spring morning, would be followed by the deeper note of a field-piece. But we could see nothing. The roofs of Yîldîz nestled serene as ever among their embosoming gardens. The imperial flag still floated from its accustomed staff. Not a cloud, not a puff, indicated the direction of the firing. It was uncanny. What could have happened? We skirted the artillery magazines of Top Haneh, passed the embassy despatch-boats, and began rounding into the harbour. Suddenly the man in the stern of the boat uttered a quick “By Jove!” and ducked. A bullet had whizzed behind his ear. Another splashed the water off our bow. A third sang over our heads. I began to think that they had not been wrong at Roumeli Hissar when they advised me to sit in my garden and be at peace. I was far from being at peace and I decidedly wished that I were in my garden. The next best place seemed to be the bottom of the boat. In the face of public opinion, however, as represented by two Englishmen and a Turk, the only course left a scared impressionist was to continue taking uncomfortable impressions in as erect a posture as possible and be shot like a gentleman. The sole satisfaction I had was in meditating of my last will and testament, providently made the day before, and of its eventual discovery. But it was never discovered and none of us were laid low. While a few more bullets spattered around us, we were soon out of range alongside Galata quay.

The first thing I saw there was a pair of white leggings on guard at a gate. I went up to the sunburned soldier who wore them as to a long-lost brother, and asked for news. My reception, I regret to confess, was not too cordial. “Do not stop,” admonished the Macedonian. “If you have business, do it and go. There is no danger, but the bridge is closed and boats do not run. To-morrow everything will be the same as yesterday.” In one respect, at least, he was right. The bridge was closed. Access not only to Stamboul but to the great street of Galata was cut off by white leggings. There was, accordingly, no chance of making the tunnel to Pera. As my friends were divided as to their projects, I explored certain noisome alleys leading back from the quay to see if I could reach the street of steps climbing past the Genoese tower. On the way I met a party of American tourists, hurrying for their steamer in charge of an embassy _kavass_. They amusingly looked to an impressionist forgetful of his partiality for the bottoms of boats as if they doubted whether they would escape with their lives. Step Street luckily proved open. The shops, however, were shut, and pedestrians were remarkably scarce. Moreover most of them wore white leggings, or grey-blue ones. Young gentlemen so apparelled, with rifles slung across their backs and cartridges festooned about them, strolled up and down the streets or lolled in front of public buildings. There was an engaging negligence about these picturesque persons, who had an air of keeping an eye on things in spite of manifold cigarettes. Rifles might pop desultorily in the distance, but there was no doubt what had happened. The Macedonians had captured Constantinople.

Photograph by W. G. M. Edwards]

I went to the American Embassy to obtain details as to this historic event. I found the gate guarded by cadets of the War College and Macedonian Blues. One of the latter smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk and scrutinised every one who passed. At a sign from him an approaching group of marines was stopped and searched. A Turkish _hoja_ was even more roughly handled, for his honourable cloth had been a favourite disguise for political agitators. No one suspected of carrying weapons was let by. The man in blue, it transpired, was one of many officers who escaped during the mutiny and came back with the invading army as privates, or so dressed for strategic reasons. As for news, it was remarkably meagre. The Macedonians had occupied both banks of the Golden Horn early in the morning and had encountered resistance at some of the barracks. There were conflicting reports of the first shots being due to a mistake and of treacherous flags of truce. At all events, the affair was not finished, for every now and then we heard firing. But so far as any one knew there had been no fight at Yîldîz.

What made me realise more sharply than anything else the seriousness of the affair was the further news that Frederick Moore, of the New York _Sun_, whom I had often met during the last six months, had been badly wounded. I started up Pera Street to see what I could see. More people were about by that time, but the shops were shut and no cabs or trams were running. All the embassies, legations, and consulates were guarded, like ours, by cadets and Macedonian gendarmes. Other Macedonians, they of the white caps and white leggings, they of the careless Mauser and the casual cigarette, mingled informally with the crowd. As an inhabitant of a captured city, it was interesting to note the friendliness of captives and captors. A rare shot was the sole reminder that there might be more than one side to this question. By the time I reached the vicinity of the Taxim artillery barracks, however, there were other reminders. I saw an iron shutter neatly perforated by dozens of small round holes. The windows of houses in otherwise good repair were riddled and broken. Walls were curiously pockmarked, and I saw a shell embedded in one. These phenomena were particularly visible about the local guard-house, which I was told had only just surrendered. Several stretchers passed me, carrying soldiers in contorted attitudes. A man went into the guard-house with a ridged pine coffin on his back, followed by two of the dervishes who wash the bodies of dead Mohammedans. I didn’t count how many more coffins and dervishes I saw go into that guard-house.

I followed one of the stretchers into the adjoining French hospital, in hope of hearing from Moore. The resources of the place were evidently overtaxed, and I took the liberty of going farther to verify the information given me by a white-winged sister of charity. At a hospitable English house across the street I found Mrs. Moore. Mr. Graves, of the London _Times_, who had been reported as dead, was also there, and two English officers of the Macedonian gendarmerie. They had come up unofficially from Salonica to see how their men acquitted themselves. It seemed they and Mr. Booth, of the _Graphic_, had been with Moore that morning. They ran into the firing before they knew it, thinking, as other people did, that the action was taking place around Yîldîz. Their position was the more awkward because the Macedonians were determined to prevent the soldiers of the garrison from getting down into Pera, and there was cross-firing from side streets. The two correspondents were wounded almost at the same moment, Booth getting a bullet that grazed his scalp, and Moore being shot clean through the neck. A Greek behind him was killed, apparently by the same ball. The officers got Booth into an adjoining house, but by a regrettable misunderstanding they left Moore lying in the street, whence he was rescued by a young Greek sculptor.

The streets grew more animated until the Grande Rue de Pera assumed the appearance of a Sunday afternoon. But another aspect of the situation was presented to me when I bearded the Blues of the telegraph office for Mrs. Moore, and heard clerks politely regretting that all wires were down except those to Europe by way of Constantza. I concluded that Shefket Pasha, who did not trouble Yîldîz until he was sure of the city, proposed to leave no loophole for reactionary telegrams to the provinces. Returning to the Taxim for further reconnaissance, I was taking snap-shots when shots of another kind began to snap again. They were neither near nor many, but they caused an extraordinary panic. People ran wildly back into Pera, the women screaming, the men tucking those near and dear to them under their arms or abandoning them to the mercy of the foe as their motor centres dictated. I, seeing some soldiers grin, waited in the lee of a tree. When the street was clear I went on to the artillery barracks that had given so much trouble in the morning. The big building was quiet enough now, under the afternoon sun that made jagged black shadows in the holes torn by Macedonian shells. Beyond, at the far corner of the Taxim Garden, I saw a group of white leggings. A bugle blew, and some of them crept around the wall into the side street. As I came nearer a soldier ran toward me, brandishing his rifle. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. I replied as politely as I could that I was taking photographs. “Is this a time to take photographs?” he vociferated. “We are killing men. Go back!” If other argument were needed I had it in the form of renewed shots that banged behind him, where I could see through trees the yellow mass of Tash Kîshla. I went back less rapidly than I might have done, remembering the people who had just run away. Opposite the garden was the parade-ground of the barracks, bounded on its farther side by stables and a strip of wall behind which heads bobbed. I began to repent of my retreat, also to thirst for human companionship, and I resolved to join those comfortably ensconced spectators. As I strolled toward them across the great empty space of sun they hailed me from afar. I then perceived with some embarrassment that they wore white caps, _à la macédonienne_, and that a portentous number of rifle barrels were gaping at me. They were, in fact, reserves posted for the afternoon attack on Tash Kîshla.

I cannot say that they received me too civilly. Grace, however, was given me to appreciate that the moment was not one for civilities, especially from men who had been under action for twelve hours. I also appreciated the opportunity, urged without forms upon me, of studying their picturesque rear. Tired soldiers smoked or slept on a steep grass slope, and a mule battery lurked in the gully below. Wondering if it might not yet be possible to see what was going on, I approached a young man who stood at the door of a house behind the artillery stables and asked him in my best French if he objected to my ascending to a balcony I saw on the top story of his house. He, being a Greek, replied in his best English that he would be happy to accompany me thither. On the way up he pointed out to me, at a broken window of the opposite stable, the figure of an artilleryman, his rifle across his knees, sitting dead and ghastly against a wall. And he told me about the engagement of which he had been an uncomfortably close witness: how the Macedonians marched in from the valley of the Golden Horn early in the morning; how the first of them were allowed to pass the artillery barracks, and were even cheered; how another lot, who scrambled up the gully from Kassîm Pasha, saw a white flag flying from the artillery stables, advanced more confidently, and were met by a treacherous fire; how they then retired for reinforcements, brought up machine guns and field-pieces, and took stable, barracks, and guard-house after a nasty little fight of five hours.

From the balcony we had a perfect view of the last operations around Tash Kîshla. That great yellow barracks will be memorable in the annals of the Turkish revolution. Many an officer is said to have been tortured there on suspicion of being connected with the Young Turks. It was there that a detachment of the imperial guard fired on the first sharpshooters brought up from Salonica to replace them. And there a battalion of those same sharpshooters, who had been corrupted into fomenting the late revolt and who knew how little quarter they might expect from their old comrades, held out desperately, long after the other barracks had given in. The last act of the tragedy looked less real than a stage tragedy on that divine spring afternoon while we watched, as from a box at the play, the white-legged figures crouching behind their wall, the farther figures stealing up the side of a sunny road, the sortie of the last handful of sharpshooters from their shot-riddled stronghold. They took refuge in a garden before the barracks, where rifles blazed and men dropped until a desperate white handkerchief fluttered among the trees.

The surrender of Tash Kîshla—the Stone Barracks—practically completed the occupation of the city. But the tension was not over. There were yet three days of uncertainty, of waiting, of a strange sense in the air of contrast between the April sunlight and dark forces working in silence. For Yîldîz, as ever, remained inscrutable. From the top of Pera we could see, across the valley of Beshiktash, the scene of Friday’s _Selamlîk_. No sign of life was visible now at the archway in the Palace wall, on the avenue leading to the mosque. Had the Sultan surrendered? Had he abdicated? Had he fled? All we knew, until the end, was that white flags floated over two of the imperial barracks and that white leggings nonchalantly appeared on Sunday morning at the Palace gates. In the meantime Shefket Pasha, the man of the hour, continued to secure his position. The redoubtable Selimieh barracks, scene of Florence Nightingale’s work in Haïdar Pasha, he took on Sunday with half a dozen shells. On the same day he proclaimed martial law. No one was allowed in the streets an hour after sunset, weapons were confiscated, suspicious characters of all sorts were arrested, and the deserters of the garrison were rounded up. Thousands of them were picked out of row-boats on the Bosphorus or caught in the open country. The poor fellows were more sinned against than sinning. The most absurd stories had been spread among them: that the invaders were Christians come forcibly to convert them; that the son of the King of England intended to turn Abd ül Hamid off the throne in order to reign himself; that if taken they would all be massacred. Dazed by all that had been told them, lost without their officers, worn out by the excitement and confusion of the last ten days, their one idea was to get back to their Asiatic villages. On Monday morning several hundred of them, including the remnant of the Tash Kîshla sharpshooters, were marched away to the court martial at Chatalja. The rest, who were merely the victims of an ignorant loyalty to their Caliph, were sent to Macedonia for lessons in liberalism and road making.

Photograph by George Freund]

I wondered whether it were by accident that the prisoners sent to Chatalja marched down the hill by which their captors had entered Pera, as preparations were being made on the same height, since named of Perpetual Liberty, for the funeral of the first volunteers killed. A circular trench was dug on the bare brown hilltop, and in it fifty ridged deal coffins were symmetrically set toward the east, each covered with the star and crescent and each bearing a fez at the head. Then a long double file of whitecaps drew up beside it, and a young officer made a spirited address. Not knowing, in my ignorance, who the officer was or much of what he said—he turned out to be the famous Nyazi Bey of Resna—I wandered away to the edge of the bluff. A few tents were still pitched there, overlooking the upper valley of the Golden Horn. Seeing a camera and hearing a foreign accent, the men were willing enough to be photographed. They were from Cavalla, they said, where an American tobacco company maintains a factory. One of them offered me his tobacco-box in English. He had lived two years and a half in New York. When I got back to the trench the soldiers had gone and the coffins were almost covered. One officer was left, who made to the grave-diggers and the few spectators a speech of a moving simplicity. “Brothers,” he said, “here are men of every nation—Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews; but they died together, on the same day, fighting under the same flag. Among us, too, are men of every nation, both Mohammedan and Christian; but we also have one flag and we pray to one God. Now, I am going to make a prayer, and when I pray let each one of you pray also, in his own language, in his own way.” With which he raised his hands, palms upward, in the Mohammedan attitude of prayer. The other Mohammedans followed his example, while the Christians took off their caps or fezzes and crossed themselves; and a brief “_amin_” closed the little ceremony.

Photograph by W. G. M. Edwards]

By Tuesday, parliament having returned to town the day before, and having sat in secret session with no outward result, people began to say again that the Sultan would keep his throne. As the morning wore on, however, there began to be indications of a certain nature. In Pera Street I encountered a long line of open carriages, each containing two or three black eunuchs and a Macedonian soldier. The odd procession explained itself. The eunuchs were from the Palace. Some of them looked downcast, but the majority stared back at the crowd with the detachment supposed to be of their nature, while a few of the younger ones appeared to be enjoying an unaccustomed pleasure. It was not so with a procession I saw later, crossing Galata Bridge. This was composed of the lower servants of the Palace, on foot, marching four and four between a baker’s dozen of sardonic Macedonians. There was no air of palaces about them. Some were in _stamboulines_, frock coats with a military collar, that looked the worse for wear. Others wore a manner of livery, coarse black braided with white. Others still were in the peasant costume of the country. They were followed by the last of the Palace guard, shuffling disarmed and dejected between their sharp-eyed captors. A few jeers were raised as they passed, but quickly died away. There was something both tragic and prophetic about that unhappy company.

Returning to Galata, I found the approaches of the Bridge guarded by soldiers, who kept the centre of the street clear. The sidewalks were packed with people who waited—they did not know for what. More soldiers passed, with flags and bands. It began to be whispered that a new sultan was going over to Stamboul that afternoon. The rumour was presently confirmed by an extra of the _Osmanischer Lloyd_, an enterprising Franco-German paper, which was the first in Constantinople to publish the news of Abd ül Hamid’s dethronement and the accession of his brother. But still people could not believe the news they had been expecting so long. They continued to wait, to see what would happen. I met some friends who suggested going to the vicinity of Dolma Ba’hcheh Palace, the residence of the heir presumptive. If he went out that afternoon we should be surer of knowing it than if we joined the crowds in the city. At the junction of the Pera road with the avenue behind Dolma Ba’hcheh we were stopped by a white-legginged Albanian with a Mauser. This tall, fair-haired, hawk-nosed, and serious young man saw no reason why we should occupy better posts than the rest of the people—happily not many—he held at bay. We accordingly waited with them, being assured by the inexorability of the Albanian and by the presence of gunners mounting guard beyond him that we should not wait in vain.

In front of us a wide paved space sloped down to the Bosphorus, pleasantly broken by fresh-leaved trees and a stucco clock-tower. To the left ran a tree-shaded perspective cut off from the water by the white mass of Dolma Ba’hcheh. Before long we saw three steam-launches pass close in front of us, making for the harbour. A few minutes later a cannon banged. Another banged after it, another, and another, till we could doubt no longer that what we had been waiting for had really happened at last. Then, before we had time to taste the rushing emotion of new and great things, a small-arm cracked in the distance. That sharp little sound caused the strangest cold sensation of arrest. More rifles cracked. People looked at each other. The soldiers began feeling for their cartridges, their eyes on their officers. As the firing became a fusillade, and drew nearer, one of the latter made a sign to our Albanian. “Go back!” commanded that young man fiercely, thrusting his musket at us. There was an instant retreat. Could it be that reactionaries had chosen this moment to make an attack on the new Sultan, that there had been a reply, and that battle was beginning again in the streets? We had not gone far, however, before we saw men shooting revolvers into the air and laughing. So we returned, not without sheepishness, to our places. We were just in time to see our Albanian discharge his rifle with the delight of a boy. The volley that followed did not last long. “Who told you to fire?” demanded the officer who had been so uneasy a moment before. “Eh, the others are firing,” replied the Albanian. “Never mind what the others do,” retorted the officer sharply. “We came here to show that we know how to obey orders. Now, stop firing.” His soldiers did, although the city was by that time one roar of powder.

Photograph by W. G. M. Edwards]

It was not long after three o’clock. We still had nearly four hours to wait before Sultan Mehmed V should land at Seraglio Point, proceed to the War Office for the first ceremonies of investiture, return to the Seraglio to kiss the mantle of the Prophet, and then drive past us to his palace. I could not help thinking of the other palace on top of the hill from which the servants had been taken that morning. The boom of saluting guns, the joyous crackle accompanying it, must have gone up with cruel distinctness, through the still spring afternoon, to the ears of one who had heard that very sound, on the supplanting of a brother by a brother, thirty-three years before. As the time wore away our Albanian grew less fierce. The light, unfortunately, did likewise, until all hope of snap-shots failed. I then took my place at the edge of the avenue. Finally, toward seven o’clock, a piqueur galloped into sight from behind the wall that hid the right-hand stretch of the street. Behind him, in the distance, rose a faint cheering. It came nearer, nearer, nearer, until a squadron of dusty cavalry clattered into sight. After the cavalry clattered a dusty brougham, drawn by two black horses, and in the brougham an elderly man with a double chin bowed and smiled from the windows as the crowd shouted: “_Padishah’m chok yasha-a-a!_” I shouted with them as well as I could, not stopping to inquire why anything should impede the throat of an indifferent impressionist from oversea, at the spectacle of a fat old gentleman in a frock coat driving out between two disreputable columns of cavalry. They made a terrific dust as they galloped away through the young green of the avenue toward the white palace—dust which a condescending sun turned into a cloud of glory.

* * * * *

During the days and nights of flags and illuminations that followed there were other sights to see. One of them was the _Selamlîk_ of the ensuing Friday. It took place at St. Sophia, whither Mehmed II rode to pray after his conquest of Constantinople, and where popular opinion willed that a later Mehmed, after this memorable recapture of the town, should make his first public prayer. About this ceremony was none of the pomp that distinguished the one I had witnessed the week before. A few Macedonian Blues were drawn up by the mosque, a few Macedonian cavalrymen guarded the gates of the Seraglio, and they were not all in place by the time the Sultan, in a new khaki uniform, drove slowly through the grounds of that ancient enclosure. Again, on the succeeding Monday, we beheld the grisly spectacle of those who fomented the mutiny among the soldiers, and who, in long white shirts, with statements of their names and deeds pinned to their bosoms, swung publicly from great tripods at the scene of their several crimes—three at the Stamboul end of the Bridge, five in front of Parliament, and five in the square of the War Department. And the new Sultan was once more the centre of interest on the day he was girded with the sword of Osman. He went to the sacred mosque of Eyoub with little of the pageantry that used to celebrate that solemn investiture—in a steam-launch, distinguishable from other steam-launches only by a big magenta silk flag bearing the imperial _toughra_. From Eyoub he drove round the walls to the Adrianople Gate, and then through the city to the Seraglio. His gala coach, his scarlet-and-gold coachman, his four chestnut horses, his blue-and-silver outriders, and his prancing lancers were the most glittering part of that long procession. The most Oriental part of it was the train of carriages bearing the religious heads of the empire, white-bearded survivors of another time, in venerable turbans and green robes embroidered with gold. But the most significant group in the procession was that of the trim staff of the Macedonian army, on horseback, headed by Mahmoud Shefket Pasha. Not least notable among the conquerors of Constantinople will be this grizzled, pale, thin, keen, kind-looking Arab who, a month before that day, was an unknown corps commander in Salonica. His destiny willed that hardly more than four years after that day he should even more suddenly go again into the unknown. His fate was a happy one in that it overtook him at the height of power a Turkish subject may attain, when he was at once Field-Marshal, Minister of War, and Grand Vizier, and that it left in suspense the colder judgment of his time with regard to the actual degree of his greatness. Legends and hatreds naturally gathered around such a man. I do not know whether it was true that he took the city before he was ready, with barely fifteen thousand men, on a sudden night warning that the desperate Sultan plotted a massacre for the next day. Neither was I there to see whether he actually sent back to the new Sultan his present of a magnificent Arab charger, saying that he was a poor man and had no stable for such a steed. The crucial test of the Balkan War he had no opportunity to undergo. But less than any other personality discovered by the Turkish revolution does he need the favouring kindness of uncertainty. At the moment when if he chose he might have been dictator, he did not choose. And the decision, the promptness, the tact, the strategic ability with which he grasped the situation of the mutiny and threw an army into Chatalja before the blundering mutineers knew what he was about, made for him the one clear and positive record of that confused time. They say he suffered from an incurable disease, and captured cities for distraction.

Photograph by Apollon, Constantinople]

I had the honour of meeting Mahmoud Shefket Pasha a little later, in company with Mr. Booth; and I owed it to the latter’s bandaged head and to the interest which the general took in the wounded journalist that I also obtained the coveted leave to visit Yîldîz. Yîldîz had so long been a name of legend that one approached it with the vividest curiosity—even though the innermost enclosure, jutting out into the park from the crest of the hill on a gigantic retaining wall, at first remained impenetrable. When at last the gates of the Forbidden City itself were opened, it was strange to discover that the Sultan who stood for all that was conservative and Oriental, who spent as he pleased the gold of the empire, who might have created anew the lost splendours of the Seraglio, had chosen to surround himself with would-be European cottages, for the most part of wood, with a profusion of gables and jig-saw carpentry. The more ornate were those intended for the reception of ministers and ambassadors. The simplest and the largest was the long, low, L-shaped structure where Abd ül Hamid lived with his extensive family. His private apartments gave a singular picture of that singular man. The rooms were all jealously latticed, even behind the fortifications of Yîldîz, and one was scarcely to be distinguished in its use from another, so full were they all of desks, screens, couches, weapons, and pianos. In one of the least ambiguous, where white chairs stood about a long table, was shown the gilt Vienna _Récamier_ in which Abd ül Hamid received the notification of his dethronement. An orchestrion filled one end of the room, where also was a piano. No less than four of these instruments were in another room. Farther on were the empty safes where the old man hoarded his gold and his famous jewels, a cupboard of ugly tiles that was a mixture of Turkish _hamam_ and European bath, without the luxuries of either, and a perfectly appointed carpenter’s shop. It is an old tradition for the princes of the house of Osman to learn some trade, in case their _kîsmet_ should suddenly require them to make their own living. One chamber had more the air of a bedroom than any other. For the Sultan rarely slept two nights in succession in the same place, or undressed to do so. On a table were two of the bullet-proof waistcoats he wore at _Selamlîk_. A handsome case of arms stood by the door. High on the walls hung some crude pictures which he perhaps painted himself. He was fond of playing with the brush. A canvas somewhere else represented a boat full of priests, standing, to whom a group of plump pink sirens beckoned from an arsenic shore. The officer in charge told us that the faces of the priests were those of Midhat Pasha and other reformers. With all their oddity, the rooms had a familiar air of habitation. Things of use and of ornament were where Abd ül Hamid dropped them the night he was taken away. Writing materials were strewn on the desks. A photograph of the German imperial family looked out of a gold frame set in brilliants. In a corner stood a table, a chair, and a footstool, all with crystal legs, where the Sultan sat in thunder-storms. The whole palace was full of small human touches of the suspicious, ignorant, lonely old man who lived there. And East and West were strangely jumbled in his well-worn furniture, as they were in his ancient empire—as they were in the visitors inquisitively trampling the carpets and fingering the belongings of the fallen master of the house.

The harem, by a characteristic piece of Oriental reserve, was not opened even by its despoilers to the gaze of the profane. But we were allowed to go into the harem garden, overlooked by the Sultan’s lattices. An artificial canal wound through the middle of it. Row-boats, a motor-boat, even a small sailboat, were moored there. Under the trees stood a miniature replica of the fountain at Gyök Sou. Pigeons fluttered everywhere and water-fowl were playing in the canal, while against the wall cutting off the immense prospect the garden might have enjoyed stood cages of gaudy birds. At one spot only did a small kiosk, execrably furnished, give access to the view. Through the telescope on the upper floor Abd ül Hamid used to watch the city he dared not enter. We also saw a little theatre that communicated by a bridge with the harem. In this bonbon box of red velvet the singers and variety actors visiting the city used to be invited to perform—sometimes before a solitary spectator. King Otto of Bavaria would have found no kinship with him, though. On the wall a photograph of Arturo Stravolo, an Italian transformationist, hung beside a large and bad portrait of Verdi.

Outside this inner citadel the fabled gardens descended to the sea. Fabled they proved, indeed—as some city park, perhaps, though not so neatly kept. A driveway, fabulously dusty, led between the massive retaining wall and a miniature lake to Merassim Kiosque, a tawdry little palace in an enclosure of its own which was built for William II of Germany. I threaded a tortuous space, at one end of it not quite touching the bastion of the Forbidden City, where a small iron door in the kiosk faced a small iron door in the bastion. They had a potency, those small iron doors, upon the imagination of a romantic impressionist. Beyond stretched courts and stables, deserted save for a few last activities of departure. A eunuch was giving shrill orders to a soldier. A drove of buffaloes stood mild-eyed under a plane-tree, waiting to be driven away. A horse whinnied in the silence. A cat lay blinking in the sun, indifferent to the destinies of kings.

On a slope of thin shade farther on were grouped an ornate wooden villa, a castellated porcelain factory, kennels where a few dogs yelped miserably, and enclosures for all sorts of animals and birds. The one really charming part of the park was the ravine behind Chira’an Palace, cool with secular trees and the splash of water. Nightingales and strange water-fowl had their habitation there, and some startled colts galloped away as I descended a winding path. The look of the paths, neither wild nor ordered, made me wonder again what four hundred gardeners did at Yîldîz. I suppose they did what any gardener would do whose master never came to see his garden. Chalets and summer-houses with red seals on their doors stood among the trees. I went into an open lodge beside a gateway. A bed was torn to pieces, clothes and papers strewed the floor, a cut loaf and an open bottle stood on a shelf as if dropped there in some hasty flight.

There was a point on the hillside whence a long view opened—of domed Stamboul and cypressed Scutari reaching toward each other across an incredible blue, with dim Asiatic mountains in the background. From the height above he must often have looked out on that scene who brooded for thirty-three years, in silence and darkness, behind the walls his terror raised. So noble against sea and sky, so vastly spreading, so mysterious in its invisible activities, the city must have been as redoubtable to him as his bastioned hilltop was to the city. And I could not help imagining how, during the days so lately passed, as he watched the city that feared his power and whose power he feared, sounds must have come up to him: of the foolish firing he ordered for the 13th of April; of a more sinister firing eleven days later, when he waited for his deluded and officerless soldiers, shut up in their barracks, to save his throne; of that last firing, for him the sound of doom, proclaiming to his face the joy of the distant city that his power over it was no more.

As we went away a line of buffalo carts, piled with nondescript furniture, began to creak down the avenue where the imperial guard used to parade at _Selamlîk_. A Macedonian gendarme stood in the great arched gateway of the Palace court and checked them as they passed. Behind him a monkey sat in the coil of a black tail, surveying the scene with bright, furtive, troubled eyes.

XVI

WAR TIME

1912-1913

I.—THE HORDES OF ASIA

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

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

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

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

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

II.—RETROSPECTIVE

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

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