Returning to Galata, I found the approaches of the Bridge guarded by soldiers, who kept the centre of the street clear. The sidewalks were packed with people who waited—they did not know for what. More soldiers passed, with flags and bands. It began to be whispered that a new sultan was going over to Stamboul that afternoon. The rumour was presently confirmed by an extra of the Osmanischer Lloyd, an enterprising Franco-German paper, which was the first in Constantinople to publish the news of Abd ül Hamid’s dethronement and the accession of his brother. But still people could not believe the news they had been expecting so long. They continued to wait, to see what would happen. I met some friends who suggested going to the vicinity of Dolma Ba’hcheh Palace, the residence of the heir presumptive. If he went out that afternoon we should be surer of knowing it than if we joined the crowds in the city. At the junction of the Pera road with the avenue behind Dolma Ba’hcheh we were stopped by a white-legginged Albanian with a Mauser. This tall, fair-haired, hawk-nosed, and serious young man saw no reason why we should occupy better posts than the rest of the people—happily not many—he held at bay. We accordingly waited with them, being assured by the inexorability of the Albanian and by the presence of gunners mounting guard beyond him that we should not wait in vain.
In front of us a wide paved space sloped down to the Bosphorus, pleasantly broken by fresh-leaved trees and a stucco clock-tower. To the left ran a tree-shaded perspective cut off from the water by the white mass of Dolma Ba’hcheh. Before long we saw three steam-launches pass close in front of us, making for the harbour. A few minutes later a cannon banged. Another banged after it, another, and another, till we could doubt no longer that what we had been waiting for had really happened at last. Then, before we had time to taste the rushing emotion of new and great things, a small-arm cracked in the distance. That sharp little sound caused the strangest cold sensation of arrest. More rifles cracked. People looked at each other. The soldiers began feeling for their cartridges, their eyes on their officers. As the firing became a fusillade, and drew nearer, one of the latter made a sign to our Albanian. “Go back!” commanded that young man fiercely, thrusting his musket at us. There was an instant retreat. Could it be that reactionaries had chosen this moment to make an attack on the new Sultan, that there had been a reply, and that battle was beginning again in the streets? We had not gone far, however, before we saw men shooting revolvers into the air and laughing. So we returned, not without sheepishness, to our places. We were just in time to see our Albanian discharge his rifle with the delight of a boy. The volley that followed did not last long. “Who told you to fire?” demanded the officer who had been so uneasy a moment before. “Eh, the others are firing,” replied the Albanian. “Never mind what the others do,” retorted the officer sharply. “We came here to show that we know how to obey orders. Now, stop firing.” His soldiers did, although the city was by that time one roar of powder.
Mehmed V driving through Stamboul on his accession day, April 27
Photograph by W. G. M. Edwards
It was not long after three o’clock. We still had nearly four hours to wait before Sultan Mehmed V should land at Seraglio Point, proceed to the War Office for the first ceremonies of investiture, return to the Seraglio to kiss the mantle of the Prophet, and then drive past us to his palace. I could not help thinking of the other palace on top of the hill from which the servants had been taken that morning. The boom of saluting guns, the joyous crackle accompanying it, must have gone up with cruel distinctness, through the still spring afternoon, to the ears of one who had heard that very sound, on the supplanting of a brother by a brother, thirty-three years before. As the time wore away our Albanian grew less fierce. The light, unfortunately, did likewise, until all hope of snap-shots failed. I then took my place at the edge of the avenue. Finally, toward seven o’clock, a piqueur galloped into sight from behind the wall that hid the right-hand stretch of the street. Behind him, in the distance, rose a faint cheering. It came nearer, nearer, nearer, until a squadron of dusty cavalry clattered into sight. After the cavalry clattered a dusty brougham, drawn by two black horses, and in the brougham an elderly man with a double chin bowed and smiled from the windows as the crowd shouted: “Padishah’m chok yasha-a-a!” I shouted with them as well as I could, not stopping to inquire why anything should impede the throat of an indifferent impressionist from oversea, at the spectacle of a fat old gentleman in a frock coat driving out between two disreputable columns of cavalry. They made a terrific dust as they galloped away through the young green of the avenue toward the white palace—dust which a condescending sun turned into a cloud of glory.
During the days and nights of flags and illuminations that followed there were other sights to see. One of them was the Selamlîk of the ensuing Friday. It took place at St. Sophia, whither Mehmed II rode to pray after his conquest of Constantinople, and where popular opinion willed that a later Mehmed, after this memorable recapture of the town, should make his first public prayer. About this ceremony was none of the pomp that distinguished the one I had witnessed the week before. A few Macedonian Blues were drawn up by the mosque, a few Macedonian cavalrymen guarded the gates of the Seraglio, and they were not all in place by the time the Sultan, in a new khaki uniform, drove slowly through the grounds of that ancient enclosure. Again, on the succeeding Monday, we beheld the grisly spectacle of those who fomented the mutiny among the soldiers, and who, in long white shirts, with statements of their names and deeds pinned to their bosoms, swung publicly from great tripods at the scene of their several crimes—three at the Stamboul end of the Bridge, five in front of Parliament, and five in the square of the War Department. And the new Sultan was once more the centre of interest on the day he was girded with the sword of Osman. He went to the sacred mosque of Eyoub with little of the pageantry that used to celebrate that solemn investiture—in a steam-launch, distinguishable from other steam-launches only by a big magenta silk flag bearing the imperial toughra. From Eyoub he drove round the walls to the Adrianople Gate, and then through the city to the Seraglio. His gala coach, his scarlet-and-gold coachman, his four chestnut horses, his blue-and-silver outriders, and his prancing lancers were the most glittering part of that long procession. The most Oriental part of it was the train of carriages bearing the religious heads of the empire, white-bearded survivors of another time, in venerable turbans and green robes embroidered with gold. But the most significant group in the procession was that of the trim staff of the Macedonian army, on horseback, headed by Mahmoud Shefket Pasha. Not least notable among the conquerors of Constantinople will be this grizzled, pale, thin, keen, kind-looking Arab who, a month before that day, was an unknown corps commander in Salonica. His destiny willed that hardly more than four years after that day he should even more suddenly go again into the unknown. His fate was a happy one in that it overtook him at the height of power a Turkish subject may attain, when he was at once Field-Marshal, Minister of War, and Grand Vizier, and that it left in suspense the colder judgment of his time with regard to the actual degree of his greatness. Legends and hatreds naturally gathered around such a man. I do not know whether it was true that he took the city before he was ready, with barely fifteen thousand men, on a sudden night warning that the desperate Sultan plotted a massacre for the next day. Neither was I there to see whether he actually sent back to the new Sultan his present of a magnificent Arab charger, saying that he was a poor man and had no stable for such a steed. The crucial test of the Balkan War he had no opportunity to undergo. But less than any other personality discovered by the Turkish revolution does he need the favouring kindness of uncertainty. At the moment when if he chose he might have been dictator, he did not choose. And the decision, the promptness, the tact, the strategic ability with which he grasped the situation of the mutiny and threw an army into Chatalja before the blundering mutineers knew what he was about, made for him the one clear and positive record of that confused time. They say he suffered from an incurable disease, and captured cities for distraction.
Mehmed V on the day of sword-girding, May 10