"We will destroy the Young Turks!" said a speaker, "we will destroy the Young Turks and cut them in little pieces!"
He was harmonizing his words with indescribably graphic gesture, when his expressive hands opened in a bland expression of resignation.
"What, therefore, can we do, my friends?" he continued. "We must remain calm, and retain our dignity as citizens of a great city."
Nobody looked round or betrayed surprise; but the alien presence was sensed by all. Soon after this scene the meeting adjourned to a cellar, where a quiet, elderly gentleman, the proprietor of an hotel inhabited chiefly by German officers, declared himself desirous of cutting his clients' throats.
In war-time Constantinople one grew accustomed to this atmosphere of melodrama, and learned not to regard it too seriously. The more one knows of the Constantinopolitans of to-day the less can one trust any estimate of them. Eternally fickle, like their forerunners who looked on with equal enthusiasm at the triumph and execution of emperors and sultans, they saw no incongruity in the city's hero-worship of Enver Bey in 1908 and its deep detestation of Enver Pasha in 1918. Even now, after welcoming the French and British with mad joy one short year ago, they are restless, and again wear the cloak of conspiracy.
The wayward fickleness of Constantinople ruined the Byzantine Greeks, and sapped the strength of the Roman Empire. Now, after a long period of fretful wedlock, she is shaking herself free from the Turk. Whoever next attempts to rule her will have some restless days and nights.
At the beginning of September there arrived in Constantinople another escaped prisoner, who was to play an important part in the sensational events that preceded the downfall of the Young Turks and their German partners.
Several months earlier Lieutenant-Colonel Newcombe, D.S.O., R.E., had been imprisoned in the Turkish Ministry of War, while awaiting court-martial for an attempted escape. After his acquittal, owing to lack of evidence, he was allowed into the city with the prison interpreter. In a Pera tea-shop he met Mlle. "X", a Franco-Greek lady of Entente sympathies, who offered to help him in any way possible. A secret correspondence followed; and when Colonel Newcombe was sent to the prison camp at Broussa, Mlle. "X", with her maid, followed him.
She stayed at a small hotel, on the pretence of taking the sulphur baths for which Broussa was famous. Several meetings took place, including a rendezvous at the house of the local Austrian Consul, whose daughters were school-fellows of Mlle. "X."
The final interview at Broussa was when Colonel Newcombe, having obtained the clothes of an Arab imam,[ [2] disguised himself in this dress and slipped out of camp unobserved. He walked to the hotel, and there the scheme of escape was definitely arranged. He then returned, and by climbing over a wall, got back into the prison house without being seen.