Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

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.

Arriving from Asia

Reserves

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.

Recruits

Hand in hand

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.”

Demonstration in the Hippodrome

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.”