I had been “protected” in advance, I found, by the authorities, who had announced by telegram the arrival of “an American lady.” It was, perhaps, perverse, even ungrateful, but I persisted in contradicting the news at every stage. I would far sooner take all risks under my own flag than falsely accept shelter beneath the “Stars and Stripes.” “I have no dislike for America,” I assured those who assumed that explanation of my obstinacy, “it simply does not happen to be my country, any more than India is yours.... I have nothing but good to say of individual Americans; the most charming people on the face of the earth.”
Nevertheless “I keenly resent the clamour of Mr. Morgenthau for ‘an ideal republic of his own making on the banks of the Bosphorus, to be backed by all that “Tammany” means in the U.S.A.’ I am for asking him, then, to start by making an ‘ideal’ republic on the banks of the Hudson.”
American oil-hunters are always boasting that they never declared war on Turkey. “You did not,” I have admitted, “but you urged, nay begged and almost ordered, us to do it for you.... Your Literary Digest printed at least one eloquent appeal to Great Britain for a ‘holy’ war against the ‘unspeakable Turk’!” And if they resent my protest at being called “an American,” I am convinced they would have done the same in my place. They, too, have the virtue of national pride.
The train was held up once more for a little excursion to what had been the prosperous town of Alaşehir, a well-wooded district with abundance of fresh water. Here out of four thousand eight hundred houses only one hundred remain, and the women and children have been simply wiped out! Unfortunately, we had not time to visit the Hodja, who had found a quite comfortable lodging in the trunk of an oak tree—a philosopher and a man of letters. “I cannot live in a tub, like Diogenes, because I do not possess a tub; but there is nothing wrong with this oak, which I suspect will prove even warmer.”
Everywhere, at Manissa and Kassaba—even at Salihli, with its houses reduced to four!—we were invited to stay and “put up for the night!” Here were about two hundred inhabitants surviving from two thousand five hundred, and from fifteen to twenty families sleeping in the mosque. Yet, they would “certainly arrange something,” and it needed all my tact to refuse any more extended hospitality than tea and coffee, served on the roof of one of their four houses, from which we could look down upon the skeleton town. Apparently, these stricken people found some sort of comfort in the mere idea of my having seen their suffering, though often enough I could not even find words for the sympathy no one could fail to feel.
Once more lunch in the train. Pomegranate seeds should be eaten one by one, a slow process, but as the cheik says “it passes the hours!”
He apologised for the number of times I had been reminded of what in Turkey they call “the work of the British ex-Premier.”
“I had to expect that,” I replied, “when I came to Anatolia; and it gives me the chance of reminding the Turks what part was played by M. Venizelos!”