Several of the dynamiters went up with their bombs; some were killed by the soldiers in the streets during the night, but a majority (I was told by an insurgent) got out of the town safely before morning and made their way, singly and severally, to join other bands in the mountains.
Early the following morning the Turkish population came down from the hill in a body, yataghans in hand, ready to clear out the Bulgarian quarter. But Hassan Fehmi Pasha, the Vali of Salonica, had anticipated this descent of the ‘faithful,’ and himself drove out and cut them off and persuaded them to leave the work to the soldiers. A house-to-house search of the Bulgarian quarter was begun at once, and every male Bulgarian of fighting age was hounded out. They had barred their doors and hidden themselves in the darkest corners of their houses. But the bars did not defy the soldiers’ axes, and their hiding places were generally shallow, and practically the whole male population was locked up in ‘Bias Kuler’ (White Tower) and the prison in the wall. No women were arrested in this ‘round up,’ but one was shot in the streets. The reason, it is said, was that her figure was padded with dynamite bombs.
Just two months prior to this general incarceration of Bulgarians a general amnesty had taken place. The Sultan by a single Iradé reprieved all Bulgarian prisoners. The prisons of European Turkey were thrown open, exiles were brought back from across the seas and set free. Political and criminal offenders were treated alike. Brigands returned to the mountains, petty thieves to the cities, and insurgents to revolutionary bands. Among the last was the chief of the ‘internal organisation,’ Damian Grueff, who returned from Asia Minor to resume supreme command of the committajis. This was one of the features of the Austro-Russian ‘reform’ scheme. The Sultan evidently desired to begin it with a grand display of beneficence, perhaps foreseeing the result of this liberality. The British Government, at any rate, appreciated the error of the act and protested against its being executed; but Great Britain had given a mandate to Russia and Austria to do in Turkey what one of them cannot do at home, and what both are seriously doubted of honestly desiring.
Almost as absurd as this general amnesty were the general arrests which now followed the ‘Salonica outrages.’ Not only was the Bulgarian community of Salonica put behind bars, but an attempt was made to extend the wholesale incarceration throughout Macedonia. This proved a failure for two reasons: the Turks could not catch the revolutionists, and they had not gaols enough to contain the unarmed Bulgars. When the gaols were filled with ‘suspected’ peasants extraordinary tribunals were created in the several consular towns to judge the prisoners. I visited one of these while ‘in session.’ The building was a shanty in the outskirts of the town; it had been whitewashed for this function. The usual cellar (an excavation under a Macedonian house) served to hold the prisoners in waiting. A score of them, manacled, were brought from the gaols every morning, and choked into this dark hole, whence, one at a time, they were unchained from their partners and sent up the ladder into the court. Three dreamy looking Turks and two corrupted Christians (a feature of the reforms) tried the peasants. There were no witnesses—at least not when I was present—and the case seemed to go for or against the prisoner as he himself could persuade the sleepy judges of his innocence. The judges never asked a question; the whole evidence, pro and con, was drawn by one Turk in a shabby uniform, who stood before the handcuffed prisoner, questioned him, and then advised the judges—still sleeping—of his testimony. Judgment was by no means summary; it was not ‘Who are you?’—‘Ivan Ivanoff.’—‘Guilty!’ Every Bulgar had an hour or more to talk. So slow was the process of these courts that another amnesty took place before they had tried half the prisoners. Nevertheless, the number of condemned was large, and for many months the weekly steamer which conveys political prisoners into exile was crowded on touching at Salonica.
EXILES, SHIPPED WEEKLY FROM SALONICA.
The week we spent at Salonica after the dynamiting bristled with incident. The days we devoted to gathering news and material for ‘letters,’ and the nights we put in ‘writing up.’ In making our rounds of the town it seemed that every sentry would have his turn challenging us, and the Turkish post office insisted on searching me before I entered, and relieving me, for the time being, of my pistol. Even at night we were not free from the investigation of the now cautious authorities. Every patrol passing the Angleterre would rouse the house and ask why the candles burned at so late an hour in the room we occupied. We had just time each day to swallow a hasty dinner at the little restaurant opposite the hotel when the ‘all in’ hour, sundown, arrived. But we took a supper of yowolt (a kind of curdled milk) and bread to our rooms to eat at midnight. At six o’clock each morning we were on our way to the railway station to hand our despatches to the Consular kavass. Of course we could trust none of our ‘stuff’ to the Turkish telegraph or post offices. For one thing, no report was permitted to pass the censor which did not in all cases describe the insurgents as ‘brigands,’ and this word throughout a despatch would lend a false colour to it. There is, besides, no assurance that either a letter or a telegram will ever reach its destination through the Turkish institutions; and so we had deposited a sum of money with the telegraph operator at Ristovatz, the Servian frontier station, and sent our despatches to him by either of the messengers who take the mails of the English, French, and Austrian post offices to the frontier daily.
One morning, after we had worked all night and got to bed only after delivering our despatches safely into the hands of the French messenger, a skirted kavass with a tremendous revolver, we were rudely awakened at nine o’clock by a continuous booming of cannon in the harbour. We knew it was a foreign fleet, and had rather looked forward to its arrival, but we were perfectly willing to have it stay away altogether rather than come at this hour. It boomed on and on until there was nothing for us to do but get up and go to see how many warships and whose they were. We dressed and went up on the broad terrace of the Cercle de Salonique, to which the American Consul had given us cards. There we breakfasted and watched them sail into the bay under Olympus, still snow-capped, standing higher than the cloud line, his smaller companions tapering off to his right and left.
There was a coarse rumble as the heavy chain of the first warship, an Austrian, followed its anchor to a bed. For a week we watched the Italians and the Austrians rivalling each other in this naval demonstration. An Austrian, then an Italian; then three Austrians, three Italians—at the end of the week nearly a score of foreign ships swung on their anchors in two parallel lines, the torpedo boats close in to the shore and the big ships in deeper water. Neither nation could let the other appear the stronger in the eyes of the Turks or, more particularly, the Albanians.