I asked whether it would be possible for me to obtain precise figures of the devastations, and he promised they should be prepared for my use at once. When I reminded him of the “waiting” train, he merely waived such difficulties aside as a “secondary consideration,” begging me “not to mention it.”
Naturally, I found one ruined town very like another. There was, in a sense, little to see beyond “parts of” the mosques, badly scorched or half-burnt minarets, and, at Manissa, no more than one thousand houses standing out of fourteen! Also, the statistics reveal a heartrending loss of life!
The women and children, I learnt, had been driven into the mosques, which were surrounded by machine-guns to ensure against any possibility of escape, and then set on fire. As the full realisation of such hideous barbarity took hold of my imagination, it was as if all my senses were paralysed. That cold perspiration which so often precedes a faint, seized my limbs. I was powerless either to speak or move. How would our twentieth century appear to the old cave-dwellers it has pleased us to call savage? Mrs. de C—— was right, indeed, to say that the Turks were “moderate.” Such scenes must compel revenge and let loose the worst passions of men.
On our return the cheik tactfully endeavoured to distract our thoughts by hospitable preparations for lunch. However little one felt disposed to eat, he could have devised no kinder or more wise expression of sympathy and understanding. Unfortunately, we had not yet escaped the company of swarming flies, which afterwards vanished, however, with startling completeness, when the train climbed into colder altitudes.
Our next halt was at Kassaba, where the “notables” again paid us a visit, offering both coffee and tea, one after the other. When the cheik mentioned the loss of our food, and my partiality for fruit, a messenger was at once sent into the town for bread and the most luscious melons, which reach to the highest possible perfection in Anatolia. I have always been grateful for Turkish fruit!
The Governor told me “he had simply nowhere to house the poor people.” He “dare not think” of how they could pass the winter! I saw them, sitting in holes among the ruins, cooking whatever they had been able to scrape together for a meal; the women huddled together in the “beds” of fountains which were covered with straw and carpets, after the water had been drained out. This arrangement permitted the slight protection of an awning, only too badly needed for their threadbare clothes!
There seems no way of coping with the emergency, since they had no tools for even the most primitive building. Except for those lucky enough to secure one of the few booths in the town, the shopkeepers had to set out their stock upon the cobblestones!
I dare not ask how many babies had died of cold. Anatolia has been bled white through twelve years of war! Whatever the nation’s quarrel, it was from hence were taken father, or brother, or son. Yet still, beside these shivering women, you see long train-loads of more soldiers, cattle-trucks full of human beings, called to some new “front.”
How is it these women can, even now, tenderly hush “the cry of the children,” and give their men? Theirs is a “willing” sacrifice for an ideal, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland.