Part 5 (1/2)
Before us we saw the yellow walls and crenellated towers of that city where Paul preached to the Thessalonians]
Now Sabatai evidently had grave doubts about his self-a.s.sumed divinity being arrow-proof, for he protested vigorously against the proposal to make a human pin-cus.h.i.+on of him, whereupon the Sultan, his suspicions now confirmed, gave him his choice between being impaled upon a stake, a popular Turkish pastime of the period, or of renouncing Judaism and accepting the faith of Islam. Preferring to be a live coward to an impaled martyr, he chose the latter, yet such was his influence with the Jews that thousands of his adherents voluntarily embraced the religion of Mohammed. The Dounme of Salonika are the descendants of these renegades. Two centuries of waiting have not dimmed their faith in the eventual coming of their Messiah. So there they wait, equally distrusted by Jews and Moslems, though they form the wealthiest portion of the city's population. But they live apart and so dread any mixing of their blood with that of the infidel Turk or the unbelieving Jew that, in order to avoid the risk of an unwelcome proposal, they make a practise of betrothing their children before they are born. It strikes me, however, that there must on occasion be a certain amount of embarrasment connected with these early matches, as, for example, when the prenatally engaged ones prove to be of the same s.e.x.
I used to be of the opinion that Tiflis, in the Caucasus, was the most cosmopolitan city that I had ever seen, but since the war I think that the greatest variety of races could probably be found in Salonika. Sit at a marble-topped table on the pavement in front of Floca's cafe at the tea-hour and you can see representatives of half the races in the world pa.s.s by--British officers in beautifully polished boots and beautifully cut breeches, astride of beautifully groomed ponies; Highlanders with their kilts covered by khaki ap.r.o.ns; raw-boned, red-faced Australians in sun helmets and shorts; swaggering _chausseurs d'Afrique_ in wonderful uniforms of sky-blue and scarlet which you will find nowhere else outside a musical comedy; soldiers of the Foreign Legion with the skirts of their long blue overcoats pinned back and with mushroom-shaped helmets which are much too large for them; soldierly, well set-up little Ghurkas in broad-brimmed hats and uniforms of olive green, reminding one for all the world of fighting c.o.c.ks; Sikhs in yellow khaki (did you know, by the way, that _khaki_ is the Hindustani word for dust?) with their long black beards neatly plaited and rolled up under their chins; Epirotes wearing the starched and plaited skirts called _fustanellas_, each of which requires from twenty to forty yards of linen; Albanian tribal chiefs in jackets stiff with gold embroidery, with enough weapons thrust in their gaudy sashes to decorate a club-room; Cretan gendarmes wearing breeches which are so tight below the knee and so enormously baggy in the seat that they can, and when they are in Crete frequently do, use them in place of a basket for carrying their poultry, eggs or other farm produce to market; coal-black Senegalese, coffee-colored Moroccans and tan-colored Algerians, all wearing the broad red c.u.mmerbunds and the high red tarbooshes which distinguish France's African soldiery; Italian _bersaglieri_ with great bunches of c.o.c.ks' feathers hiding their steel helmets; Serbs in ununiform uniforms of every conceivable color, material and pattern, their only uniform article of equipment being their characteristic high-crowned _kepis_; Russians in flat caps and belted blouses, their baggy trousers tucked into boots with ankles like accordions; officers of Cossack cavalry, their tall and slender figures accentuated by their long, tight-fitting coats and their high caps of lambskin; Bulgar prisoners wearing the red-banked caps which they have borrowed from their German allies and Austrian prisoners in worn and shabby uniforms of grayish-blue; Greek soldiers bedecked like Christmas trees with medals, badges, fourrageres and chevrons, in the hope, I suppose, that their gaudiness would make up for their lack of prowess; Orthodox priests with their long hair (for they never cut their hair or beards) done up in Psyche knots; Hebrew rabbis wearing caps of velvet shaped like those worn by bakers; Moslem muftis with their snowy turbans encircled by green scarves as a sign that they had made the pilgrimage to the Holy Places; Jewish merchants and money-changers in the same black caps and greasy gabardines which their ancestors wore in the Middle Ages; British, French, Italian and American bluejackets with their caps c.o.c.ked jauntily and the roll of the sea in their gait; A.R.A., A.R.C., Y.M.C.A., K. of C. and A.C.R.N.E. workers in fancy uniforms of every cut and color; Turkish sherbet-sellers with huge bra.s.s urns, hung with tinkling bells to give notice of their approach, slung upon their backs; ragged Macedonian bootblacks (bootblacking appeared to be the national industry of Macedonia), and hordes of gipsy beggars, the filthiest and most importunate I have ever seen. All day long this motley, colorful crowd surges through the narrow streets, their voices, speaking in a score of tongues, raising a din like that of Bedlam; the smells of unwashed bodies, human perspiration, strong tobacco, rum, has.h.i.+sh, whiskey, arrack, goat's cheese, garlic, cheap perfumery and sweat-soaked leather combining in a stench which rises to high Heaven.
On the streets one sees almost as many colored soldiers as white ones: French native troops from Algeria, Morocco, Madagascar, Senegal and China; British Indian soldiery from Bengal, the Northwest Provinces and Nepaul. The Indian troops were superbly drilled and under the most iron discipline, but the French native troops appeared to be getting out of hand and were not to be depended upon. To a man they had announced that they wanted to go home. They had been through four and a half years of war, they are tired and homesick, and they are more than willing to let the Balkan peoples settle their own quarrels. They were weary of fighting in a quarrel of which they knew little and about which they cared less; they longed for a sight of the wives and the children they had left behind them in Fez or Touggourt or Timbuktu. Because they had been kept on duty in Europe, while the French white troops were being rapidly demobilized and returned to their homes, the Africans were sullen and resentful. This smoldering resentment suddenly burst into flame, a day or so before we reached Salonika, when a Senegalese sergeant, whose request to be sent home had been refused, ran amuck, barricaded himself in a stone outhouse with a plentiful supply of rifles and ammunition, and succeeded in killing four officers and half-a-dozen soldiers before his career was ended by a well-aimed hand grenade. A few days later a British officer was shot and killed in the camp outside the city by a Ghurka sentinel. This was not due to mutiny, however, but, on the contrary, to over-strict obedience to orders, the sentry having been instructed that he was to permit no one to cross his post without challenging. The officer, who was fresh from England and had had no experience with the discipline of Indian troops, ignored the order to halt--and the next day there was a military funeral.
Salonika is theoretically under Greek rule and there are pompous, self-important little Greek policemen, perfect replicas of the British M.P.'s in everything save physique and discipline, on duty at the street crossings, but instead of regulating the enormous flow of traffic they seem only to obstruct it. When the congestion becomes so great that it threatens to hold up the unending stream of motor-lorries which rolls through the city, day and night, between the great cantonments in the outskirts and the port, a tall British military policeman suddenly appears from nowhere, shoulders the Greek gendarme aside, and with a few curt orders untangles the snarl into which the traffic has gotten itself and sets it going again.
Picturesque though Salonika undeniably is, with its splendid mosques, its beautiful Byzantine churches, its Roman triumphal arches, and the brooding bulk of Mount Olympus, which overshadows and makes trivial everything else, yet the strongest impressions one carries away are filth, corruption and misgovernment. These conditions are due in some measure, no doubt, to the refusal of the European troops, with whom the city is filled, to take orders from any save their own officers, but the underlying reason is to be found in the indifference and gross incompetence of the Greek authorities. The Greeks answer this by saying that they have not had time to clean the city up and give it a decent administration because they have owned it only eight years. All of the European business quarter, including a mile of handsome buildings along the waterfront, lies in ruins as a result of the great fire of 1917.
Though a system of new streets has been tentatively laid out across this fire-swept area, no attempt has been made to rebuild the city, hundreds of shopkeepers carrying on their businesses in shacks and booths erected amid the blackened and tottering walls. All of the hotels worthy of the name were destroyed in the fire, the two or three which escaped being quite uninhabitable, at least for Europeans, because of the armies of insects with which they are infested. I do not recall hearing any one say a good word for Salonika. The pleasantest recollection which I retain of the place is that of the steamer which took us away from there.
Before we could leave Salonika for Constantinople our pa.s.sports had to be vised by the representatives of five nations. In fact, travel in the Balkans since the war is just one d.a.m.n vise after another. The Italians stamped them because we had come from Albania, which is under Italian protection. The Serbs put on their imprint because we had stopped for a few days in Monastir. The Greeks affixed their stamp--and collected handsomely for doing so--because, theoretically at least, Salonika, whose dust we were shaking from our feet, belongs to them. The French insisted on viseing our papers in order to show their authority and because they needed the ten francs. The British control officer told me that I really didn't need his vise, but that he would put it on anyway because it would make the pa.s.sports look more imposing. Because we were going to Constantinople and Bucharest, whereas our pa.s.sports were made out for ”the Balkan States,” the American Consul would not vise them at all, on the ground that neither Turkey nor Roumania is in the Balkans.
About Roumania he was technically correct, but I think most geographers place European Turkey in the Balkans. As things turned out, however, it was all labor lost and time thrown away, for we landed in Constantinople as untroubled by officials and inspectors as though we were stepping ash.o.r.e at Twenty-third Street from a Jersey City ferry.
There were no regular sailings from Salonika for Constantinople, but, by paying a hundred dollars for a ticket which in pre-war days cost twenty, we succeeded in obtaining pa.s.sage on an Italian tramp steamer.
The _Padova_ was just such a cargo tub as one might expect to find plying between Levantine ports. Though we occupied an officer's cabin, for which we were charged _Mauretania_ rates, it was very far from being as luxurious as it sounds, for I slept upon a mattress laid upon three chairs and the mattress was soiled and inhabited. Still, it was very diverting, after an itching night, to watch the c.o.c.kroaches, which were almost as large as mice, hurrying about their duties on the floor and ceiling. Huddled under the forward awnings were two-score deck pa.s.sengers--Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Roumanians. Sprawled on their straw-filled mattresses, they loafed the hot and lazy days away in playing cards, eating the black bread, olives and garlic which they had brought with them, smoking a peculiarly strong and villainous tobacco, and torturing native musical instruments of various kinds. At night a young Turk sang plaintive, quavering laments to the accompaniment of a sort of guitar, some of the others occasionally joining in the mournful chorus. I found my chief recreation, when it grew too dark to read, in watching an Orthodox priest, who was one of the deck-pa.s.sengers, prepare for the night by combing and putting up his long and greasy hair.
Another of the deck-pa.s.sengers was a rather prosperous-looking, middle-aged Levantine who had been in America making his fortune, he told me, and was now returning to his wife, who lived in a little village on the Dardanelles, after an absence of sixteen years. She had no idea that he was coming, he said, as he had planned to surprise her.
Perhaps he was the one to be surprised. Sixteen years is a long time for a woman to wait for a man, even in a country as conservative as Turkey.
The officers of the _Padova_ talked a good deal about the mine-fields that still guarded the approaches to the Dardanelles and the possibility that some of the deadly contrivances might have broken loose and drifted across our course. In order to cheer us up the captain showed us the charts, on which the mined areas were indicated by diagonal shadings, little red arrows pointing the way between them along channels as narrow and devious as a forest trail. To add to our sense of security he told us that he had never been through the Dardanelles before, adding that he did not intend to pick up a pilot, as he considered their charges exorbitant. At the base of the great mine-field which lies across the mouth of the Straits we were hailed by a British patrol boat, whose choleric commander bellowed instructions at us, interlarded with much profanity, through a megaphone. The captain of the _Padova_ could understand a few simple English phrases, if slowly spoken, but the broadside of Billingsgate only confused and puzzled him, so, despite the fact that he had no pilot and that darkness was rapidly descending, he kept serenely on his course. This seemed to enrage the British skipper, who threw over his wheel and ran directly across our bows, very much as one polo player tries to ride off another.
”You ---- fool!” he bellowed, fairly dancing about his quarter-deck with rage. ”Why in h.e.l.l don't you stop when I tell you to? Don't you know that you're running straight into a mine-field? Drop anchor alongside me and do it ---- quick or I'll take your ---- license away from you. And I don't want any of your ---- excuses, either. I won't listen to 'em.”
”What he say?” the captain asked me. ”I not onderstan' hees Engleesh ver' good.”
”No, you wouldn't,” I told him. ”He's speaking a sort of patois, you see. He wants to know if you will have the great kindness to drop anchor alongside him until morning, for it is forbidden to pa.s.s through the mine-fields in the dark, and he hopes that you will have a very pleasant night.”
Five minutes later our anchor had rumbled down off Sed-ul-Bahr, under the shadow of Cape h.e.l.les, the tip of that rock, sun-scorched, blood-soaked peninsula which was the scene of that most heroic of military failures--the Gallipoli campaign. Above us, on the bare brown hillside, was what looked, in the rapidly deepening twilight, like a patch of driven snow, but upon examining it through my gla.s.ses I saw that it was a field enclosed by a rude wall and planted thickly with small white wooden crosses, standing row on row. Then I remembered. It was at the foot of these steep and steel-swept bluffs that the Anzacs made their immortal landing; it is here, in earth soaked with their own blood, that they lie sleeping. The crowded dugouts in which they dwelt have already fallen in; the trenches which they dug and which they held to the death have crumbled into furrows; their bones lie among the rocks and bushes at the foot of that dark and ominous hill on whose slopes they made their supreme sacrifice. Leaning on the rail of the deserted bridge in the darkness and the silence it seemed as though I could see their ghosts standing amid the crosses on the hillside staring longingly across the world toward that sun-baked Karroo of Australia and to the blue New Zealand mountains which they called ”Home.” It was a night never to be forgotten, for the gla.s.sy surface of the aegean glowed with phosph.o.r.escence, the sky was like a hanging of purple velvet, and the peak of our foremast seemed almost to graze the stars. Across the h.e.l.lespont, to the southward, the sky was illumined by a ruddy glow--a village burning, so a sailor told me, on the site of ancient Troy. And then there came back to me those lines from Agamemnon which I had learned as a boy:
_”Beside the ruins of Troy they lie buried, those men so beautiful; there they have their burial-place, hidden in an enemy's land!”_
We got under way at daybreak and, picking our way as cautiously as a small boy who is trying to get out of the house at night without awakening his family, we crept warily through the vast mine-field which was laid across the entrance to the Dardanelles, past Sed-ul-Bahr, whose sandy beach is littered with the rusting skeletons of both Allied and Turkish wars.h.i.+ps and transports; past Kalid Bahr, where the high bluffs are dotted with the ruins of Turkish forts destroyed by the sh.e.l.l-fire of the British dreadnaughts on the other side of the peninsula and with the remains of other forts which were destroyed in the Crusaders' times; past Chanak, where the steep hill-slopes behind the town were white with British tents, and so into the safe waters of the Marmora Sea. Though I was perfectly familiar with the topography of the Gallipoli Peninsula, as well as with the possibilities of modern naval guns, I was astonished at the evidences, which we saw along the sh.o.r.e for miles, of the extraordinary accuracy of the fire of the British fleet. Virtually all the forts defending the Dardanelles were bombarded by indirect fire, remember, the whole width of the peninsula separating them from the fleet. To get a mental picture of the situation you must imagine wars.h.i.+ps lying in the East River firing over Manhattan Island in an attempt to reduce fortifications on the Hudson. Men who were in the Gallipoli forts during the bombardment told me that, though they were prevented by the rocky ridge which forms the spine of the peninsula from seeing the British wars.h.i.+ps, and though, for the same reason, the gunners on the s.h.i.+ps could not see the forts, the great steel calling-cards of the British Empire came falling out of nowhere as regularly and with as deadly precision as though they were being fired at point-blank range.
The successful defense of the Dardanelles, one of the most brilliantly conducted defensive operations of the entire war, was primarily due to the courage and stubborn endurance of Turkey's Anatolian soldiery, ignorant, stolid, hardy, fearless peasants, who were taken straight from their farms in Asia Minor, put into wretchedly made, ill-fitting uniforms, hastily trained by German drillmasters, set down in the trenches on the Gallipoli ridge and told to hold them. No one who is familiar with the conditions under which these Turkish soldiers fought, who knows how wretched were the conditions under which they lived, who has seen those waterless, sun-seared ridges which they held against the might of Britain's navy and the best troops which the Allies could bring against them, can withhold from them his admiration. Their valor was deserving of a better cause.
CHAPTER V
WILL THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE RECOVER?
Each time that I have approached Constantinople from the Marmora Sea and have watched that glorious and fascinating panorama--Seraglio Point, St.
Sophia, Stamboul, the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge, the heights of Pera, Dolmabagtche, Yildiz--slowly unfold, revealing new beauties, new mysteries, with each revolution of the steamer's screw, I have declared that in all the world there is no city so lovely as this capital of the Caliphs. Yet, beautiful though Constantinople is, it combines the moral squalor of Southern Europe with the physical squalor of the Orient to a greater degree than any city in the Levant. Though it has a.s.sumed the outward appearance of a well-organized and fairly well administered munic.i.p.ality since its occupation by the Allies, one has but to scratch this thin veneer to discover that the filth and vice and corruption and misgovernment which characterized it under Ottoman rule still remain.
Barring a few munic.i.p.al improvements which were made in the European quarter of Pera and in the fas.h.i.+onable residential districts between Dolmabagtche and Yildiz, the Turkish capital has scarcely a bowing acquaintance with modern sanitation, the windows of some of the finest residences in Stamboul looking out on open sewers down which refuse of every description floats slowly to the sea or takes lodgment on the banks, these ma.s.ses of decaying matter attracting great swarms of pestilence-breeding flies. The streets are thronged with women whose virtue is as easy as an old shoe, attracted by the presence of the armies as vultures are attracted by the smell of carrion. Saloons, brothels, dives and gambling h.e.l.ls run wide open and virtually unrestricted, and as a consequence venereal diseases abound, though the British military authorities, in order to protect their own men, have put the more notorious resorts ”out of bounds” and, in order to provide more wholesome recreations for the troops, have opened amus.e.m.e.nt parks called ”military gardens.” In spite of the British, French, Italian and Turkish military police who are on duty in the streets, stabbing affrays, shootings and robberies are so common that they provoke but little comment. Petty thievery is universal. Hats, coats, canes, umbrellas disappear from beside one's chair in hotels and restaurants.
The Pera Palace Hotel has notices posted in its corridors warning the guests that it is no longer safe to place their shoes outside their doors to be polished. The streets, always wretchedly paved, have been ground to pieces by the unending procession of motor-lorries, and, as they are never by any chance repaired, the first rain transforms them into a series of hog-wallows. The most populous districts of Pera, of Galata, and of Stamboul are now disfigured by great areas of fire-blackened ruins--reminders of the several terrible conflagrations from which the Turkish capital has suffered in recent years. ”Should the United States decide to accept the mandate for Constantinople,” a resident remarked to me, ”these burned districts would give her an opportunity to start rebuilding the city on modern sanitary lines” and, he might have added, at American expense.
The prices of necessities are fantastic and of luxuries fabulous. The cost of everything has advanced from 200 to 1,200 per cent. The price of a meal is no longer reckoned in piastres but in Turkish pounds, though this is not as startling as it sounds, for the Turkish _lira_ has dropped to about a quarter of its normal value. Quite a modest dinner for two at such places as Tokatlian's, the Pera Palace Hotel, or the Pera Gardens, costs the equivalent of from fifteen to twenty dollars.
Everything else is in proportion. From the ”Little Club” in Pera to the Galata Bridge is about a seven minutes' drive by carriage. In the old days the standard tariff for the trip was twenty-five cents. Now the cabmen refuse to turn a wheel for less than two dollars.
Speaking of money, the chief occupation of the traveler in the Balkans is exchanging the currency of one country for that of another: lira into dinars, dinars into drachmae, drachmae into piastres, piastres into leva, leva into lei, lei into roubles (though no one ever exchanges his money for roubles if he can possibly help it), roubles into kronen, and kronen into lire again. The idea is to leave each country with as little as possible of that country's currency in your possession. It is like playing that card game in which you are penalized for every heart you have left in your hand.