Greeks crowded into the streets, and clapped their hands when the crash and rumble of a bomb was heard in the Turkish quarter of Stamboul.
"The Sultan is going to make peace," they told me. "He has refused to gird on the Sword of Othman until the Committee of Union and Progress give an account of their funds."
"Hurrah for the English!" shouted others, quite undismayed by the shrapnel and falling pieces of shell.
Here are some chance remarks, actually heard during air raids.
"Ah! Here is the revolution at last!" said a Turkish officer in a chemist's shop in the Grand Rue de Pera, thinking the firing meant the downfall of Enver Pasha and his gang.
"Bread costs four shillings a two-pound loaf," said an Armenian in the suburb of Chichli—"and as often as not there is a stone or half a mouse thrown into the four shillings' worth, for luck. May this gang of swindlers perish!"
"Allah! send the English soon," wailed a Turkish widow in a hovel in Stamboul, where she was living with her five starving children. "We are being killed by inches now; it would be better to be killed quickly by bombs. The English cannot be worse than Enver."
This, indeed, was the general opinion in Constantinople. Few of the population, outside the high officials, bore us any grudge. The thieving of the Young Turks was on as vast a scale as their ambition. From needy adventurers they had become the prosperous potentates of an Empire. No country, surely, has ever been the prey of such desperate and determined men.
The air raids were one of the first causes of their weakening hold on the people. The moral effect of these demonstrations was incalculable, coming as it did at a time when the Sultan was supposed to be in favour of peace.
Peace, indeed, was the only faint hope of salvation that remained to the very poor. Milk had almost disappeared from the open market, and for some time past children had been exposed in the street, their mothers being unable to support them any longer.