We were unfortunately too late to see much of Nourredine Pasha—the General was starting on his Inspection. My guide had been too polite to tell me my watch was slow. The General, however, found time to entrust me with greetings to General Harington, and to express more hopeful confidence in the future relations of our two countries. I am certainly glad I did not accept anyone else’s judgment of this kind and distinguished man. He is, however, a good ten years older than the other generals of the Pasha’s new army whom I have met. I am now quite accustomed to statesmen and generals of forty.
I think I must really have seen everything in Broussa, including the burnt hamlets of the countryside. I remember a school-house in this district, where the master had been paid in corn, and in which four generations of women, who gave us sweet goat’s milk, were now all living in one room, tastefully arranged with cushions. They had been swept off the face of the earth with the village in which they dwelt, by the Greeks.
But I must not forget the hospital, full of poor women—victims of the Greeks. If there were such sights at the French Front, I mercifully escaped seeing them; and here, for the first time, I realised what some of my sisters have had to endure since the spirit of war has come over us. Greek hatchets had been at work on Mme. Roufy Bey’s patients; and, whether in face or hip, back or leg, too many of these terrible wounds were festering, because it had been impossible to attend to them in time.
I remember the mother who once answered her little girl’s natural questions by telling her: “You just grew on my heart.” “How lovely,” cried the child, “is that why mothers all carry the babies so near their hearts?” “Yes, it is where we keep them.” Here was a poor Turkish mother whose little one had been shot as it lay in her arms!
Through this devastated area, and having seen the utter destitution of these people, I should have expected to find far greater bitterness towards the Greeks. But they are well treated in all the prison-camps, and never handled with brutality as they work on the roads. Yet they look rough and desperate, showing none of the resignation with which the Turk faces captivity, however ragged and tattered. These Greeks even seem afraid if a Christian woman speaks to them, although they own that their alarm does not come from either a guilty conscience or from terror of their enemies, but only reveals the broken spirit of men betrayed and alone. I feel, however, that to be always surrounded by the useless and horrible devastation you have yourself inflicted, must unnerve the most callous of human beings.
At about six o’clock on our last morning, an officer arrives to conduct us to the station. The train starts at 7-30, reaching Moudania at nine o’clock, where the boat may leave at 9-30, or any time it likes. It is a short and uneventful train journey, only relieved by a brisk trade in tea at our two stopping-places.
We find a high wind and rough seas at Moudania, and the boat has not yet arrived! There is plenty of time to drive to a unit of headquarters, where the officer’s mother (whom he had “smuggled” through from Constantinople) gives me coffee and cigarettes beside a welcome fire. We pass the historic house in which Peace was signed; one of the many examples in Anatolia of great achievements from small beginnings.
Moudania is, on the whole, more depressing than any of the miserable towns I have been over; and the officer is, certainly, to be congratulated on having secured the company of his mother.