Every decent-living person was likely to feel the tentacles of Young Turk tyranny, as personified by Bedri Bey, Prefect of Police, and Djevad Bey, Military Governor of Constantinople. Only the unrighteous flourished. The speculation and graft were colossal, and beyond the most extravagant dreams of the British brand of war profiteer. Everybody was on the make. Ministers and high officials received huge bribes, little politicians made little fortunes by acting as go-betweens, rich merchants manipulated so as to get hundreds per cent profit.
To take but a few of the swindles that I remember from my Constantinople days, there were: the Smyrna sugar affaire, involving the barefaced theft of twenty truckloads of a consignment from Austria; the tobacco swindle, which made three directors of the Régie very wealthy men within a month; the cocaine and quinine corner, engineered by a few Jewish speculators, so that for a time the doctors could obtain these drugs only at the price of a hundred pounds a kilo; the oil scandal, the wood scandal, and the widespread flour-adulteration scandal, whereby the lowest grade of bread, which was all that the poor could afford, became not only unnourishing but inedible.
There being no system of rationing, only the well-to-do could buy the dearer necessities of ordinary life. The poor remained sugarless, for example, because sugar cost from two pounds sterling a kilo; and the chances were that even when bought at that price it would have been mixed with powdered marble. Thousands actually starved; while the beautiful island of Prinkipo, with its summer palaces and villas, swarmed with oily, scoundrelly, enormously wealthy Levantine vulgarians.
Some of the Ministers traded openly. Enver Pasha and his associates owned two of the largest shops in Stamboul. The Committee of Union and Progress, a vampire of corruption that drained the very life blood of Turkey, engaged enthusiastically in the orgy of speculation, and, by controlling the transport, amassed millions for their party. These sums the Committee had begun to invest in Switzerland and elsewhere as early as 1917; so that when the crash came Enver, Talaat, and other Young Turk leaders were able to abscond with bulging pockets.
The police, of course, shared in the plunder, and dabbled in every species of blackmail. They waxed fat on the system that entitled them to see the vecikas (identity papers) of any able-bodied man at any time. As the city contained many thousands of deserters, without taking into account those who obtained exemption from military service by continued bribes to recruiting officers and gendarmes, this was a profitable responsibility. A forged vecika, properly stamped, cost anything from fifty to a hundred dollars. To buy off a policeman when unprovided with a vecika was more speculative. A solitary gendarme, alone in a dark street, might be content to accept twenty-five dollars; whereas two gendarmes together could be persuaded only with difficulty to accept twenty, their mutual dignity and that of their official positions having to be maintained in face of each other.
The city was full of suppressed identities. Deserters were as common as nuts in May, and so were disguises. An enormous game of hide-and-seek was in progress, with police baksheesh as the forfeit for being caught.
When a rich man—Turk, Greek, Jew, or Armenian—was conscripted he could always pretend sickness, bribe the military doctor to send him to a hospital, bribe the hospital doctor who examined him, and finally bribe the medical board to give him leave. At the larger hospitals of Constantinople, such as Haidar Pasha and Gumuch Souyou, the recognized tariff was a hundred and twenty-five dollars for each month's leave, with pretended complaints suggested by the doctor by way of bonus.
The discontent and the misery twice showed itself in shots at Enver Pasha, as he drove through the streets in his Mercèdes; but the bullets either missed him or flattened themselves on the chain mail which he was reputed to wear.
Otherwise its outward manifestation was confined to the spreading of rumours indicative of an early victory for the Allies. The "Tatavla Agency," so-named from a district inhabitated by Greek merchants, was the centre of anti-German propaganda. From it, even at the time of Hindenburg's last great drive, there spread the wildest reports of Ententist successes. Some, no doubt, were concocted to influence the Bourse; but the object of most was to encourage the starving population in their hopes for the downfall of the Young Turco-German régime.
No statement was too far-fetched to be believed in the bazaars and cafés. When the British aeroplanes renewed their bomb-raids on Constantinople, in the autumn of 1918, Yeats-Brown dropped hints that the attacks were not the work of the British, but were a display of German frightfulness, to show what would happen if Turkey's loyalty to Germany wavered. After an interval of weeks this beautiful lie was whispered back to him by a Greek, with well-imagined circumstances and details to make it the more plausible.