The Making Of A Novelist / An Experiment In Autobiography

by David Christie Murray

'I don't lay out to know much,' he said to me one day; 'but I have made one discovery. Civilisation and the paper collar air ttwrterminous. Turkey is a civilised country. I bought half a gross of paper collars at the Bon Marché this morning. So long as I can purchase a paper collar I know I am in a civilised country, and when I cayn't, I ain't.'

I met the doctor a day or two after the publication of this memorable discovery, He was talking with one of the officers of the expedition, and suddenly he threw the walking-stick he carried high into the air.

'That lets me out!' he said, in a very loud and decided tone; and, quitting his companion, he beckoned to me to follow him. The old gentleman's face and gesture were so urgent that I joined him at once. He told his story in a vernacular racier than I dare to copy; but it came to this. The Government had got wind of the precious scheme (to which it had, of course, never given a moment's sanction), and had come down with an intimation that the originator of it and his subordinates would do well immediately to leave the country.

The chieftain was not thus easily to be balked, however. He called a council of war, and proposed to his astonished satellites that they should steal a gun-boat and turn pirates against the Russians on their own account. This delectable scheme was instantly rejected by the gentlemen to whom it was submitted, and it was the news of it which let the doctor out. He took steamer that afternoon for Syra, and I have never since heard of him. The officers of the letter of marque surrendered their uniforms to the tailor whom they had blessed with their patronage, and the chieftain went for a day or two to the lock-up at the British Consulate.

Sir John Fawcett—Mr. Fawcett he was in those days—chose rather to laugh at the whole business than to treat it seriously, and the adventurous young gentleman was released on a promise to leave the country. I myself was offered a post of honour in this remarkable contingent. The secret at which all Constantinople had been laughing for a week was confided to me in whispers at the Concert Flamm. I think—but at this distance of time I am not quite sure—that the post offered to me was that of Captain of Marines. I don't mind confessing, in justice to my own unwisdom at that time of day, that if there had been a boat and a marine I might have thought twice before refusing the offer. As it was, of course it was simply a matter for laughter.

I hardly like to leave Constantinople without a memory of the Polish Legion. I took a journey by the Shooting Star Railway with a chance companion, to see him sworn in and receive his commission as an officer of that regiment The place of assignation was a loft over an untenanted stable, for the time being the head-quarters of the corps. I never heard of their having any others; and I remember with unusual distinctness an interview one of the officers had with Said Pasha, who told him, with a perfect absence of reserve, that the Legion 'would be sent to the front and would be dissipated.' As a matter of fact, it never got really into form. I believe that there was never at any moment a solitary private in its ranks. So long as it lasted it consisted entirely of officers of various grades. Many of these, seeing how hopeless the whole enterprise had grown to be, abandoned it openly; others quietly slipped away without warning; and a good many willingly allowed themselves to be drafted into other regiments, where some of them did good service.

The English journalists in Turkey were divided by faction. We were mainly Philo-Turkish or Philo-Russian, according to the political colours of the journals we represented; and I know now very well that I was, for my own part, so impressed by the Bulgarian atrocities scare that I hardly knew how to look for mercy or right feeling in a Turk. The plain truth was very hard to get at, but now, through the far perspective of the years that lie between, it is easier to see with a judicial eye. If there is to be found anywhere in the world a gentler, a more hospitable, a more sober, a more chaste, truthful, and loyal creature than the citizen Turk, I confess that I should like to meet him. If there is anywhere to be found a man more devoted to duty, braver, simpler, gentler than the common soldier of the Turkish army, I would walk a long way to find him.

While the war went on, half of the men who sent the news of it out to the civilised world found the Turk anathema maranatha, and the other half were persuaded that the Bulgarian was a beast altogether despicable and cowardly. Since the Bulgarians have had a chance to govern themselves they have amply disproved that unfavourable theory, and 'the unspeakable Turk,' of whom we heard so much in those days, was in the main as good a sort of fellow as might be found in Europe.

The atrocities which shocked the world were, without exception, the work of the auxiliaries—the Tchircasse, the Bashi-Bazouk, the Zeibeck, the Smyrniote and Tripolite. I claim to know something of the doings of these gentry, for Mr. Francis Francis (then representing the Times) and myself were for six weeks the only Englishmen in what was known as the 'Roumelian atrocity district.' Day after day we lived among the Christian dead, night after night we saw the incendiary fires. From the heights of the lower Balkans—as at Sopot—we could see the horizon red. The deserted villages stank with the unburied bodies of men and animals. About them in the night-time hordes of vagabond dogs howled lugubriously in the dark.

It was wonderful and terrible to see how the old savage Eastern spirit could revive itself in these modern days—'Kill, slay! leave not one stone standing upon another.' In Kalofer, where there had been a busy and thriving population a fortnight before our arrival, there was not a creature left, and scarcely a wall on the summit of which one might not have laid one's hand. The town still sent up a melancholy smoke to heaven as we entered it late in the evening, and the last torch of war shone from a thatched roof at the uttermost limit of the place against the lowering darkness of the sky. The arabajee who drove the lumbering little vehicle in which our few belongings were stored fell upon his knees in the middle of the stony desert street, and delivered to mean impassioned address of which I could not make out one syllable. My dragoman translated for my benefit 'Man with the two sweet eyes,' said the kneeling orator, in possible tribute to my spectacles, 'why did we enter upon this disastrous journey? Allah has forgotten us. Let us return.' We were in two minds about it already, for the place was weird to look at and the air was a slow poison; but the horses were tired, and we ourselves had had almost enough of the day s march.