Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

I stood one day at a club window watching a regiment march through Pera. Two Turkish members stood near me. “Fine looking men!” exclaimed one—and he was right. “How could soldiers like that have run away?” The other considered a moment. “If we had not announced,” he replied, “that this was not a holy war, you would have seen!” I am inclined to believe that there was something in his opinion. At the time, however, it reminded me of the young man who complained that the Turks had no peace. They were no quicker to understand the causes of their defeat than they had been to understand the causes of the war.

Not long afterward I spent an evening with some humble Albanians of my acquaintance. Being in a way foreigners like myself, they could speak with more detachment of what had happened, although there was no doubt as to their loyalty to the empire. They asked my views as to the reason of the disaster. I tried, in very halting Turkish, to explain how the Turk had been distanced in the art of war and many other arts, and how war no longer required courage alone but other qualities which the Turk does not seem to possess. I evidently failed to make my idea intelligible. Having listened with the utmost politeness, my auditors proceeded to give me their own view of the case. The one who presented it most eloquently had been himself a soldier in the Turkish army. It was under the old régime, too, when men served seven and nine years. He attributed the universal rout of the Turks less to the incompetence than to the cupidity of the officers. He believed, like his companions, and I doubt if anything will ever shake their belief, that the officers, from Nazîm Pasha down, had been bribed by the allies. What other possible explanation could there be of the fact that soldiers starved amid plenty and that Mohammedans ran—saving my presence!—from Christians? As for the European ingenuities that I made so much of—the ships, the guns, the railroads, the telephones, the automobiles, the aeroplanes—why should the Turks break their heads learning to make them when they could buy them ready-made from Europe? After all, what you need in war is a heart, and not to be afraid to die. My Albanian then went on to criticise, none too kindly, the Young Turk officer. In his day, he said, most of the officers rose from the ranks. They had been soldiers themselves, they understood the soldiers, and they could bear hardship like soldiers. The Young Turks, however, had changed all that. The ranker officers had been removed to make room for young mekteblis, schoolmen, who knew nothing of their troops or of war. They knew how to wear a collar, perhaps, or how to turn up their moustaches, à la Guillaume. But they didn’t know how to march in the rain or to sleep on the ground, and when the Bulgarians fired they ran away.

I am by way of being a schoolman myself, and I blushed for my kind as I heard this tall mountaineer make our indictment. What could I answer him? I knew that in many ways he was right. The schoolmen did not understand the fighting men as the rankers had done. Then there were far too few of them—as there were too many fighting men of the kind first sent to the front, whom I saw being recruited with handcuffs. And there had not been time to establish the new order of things on a sound footing.

III.—RED CROSS AND RED CRESCENT

After the hordes of Asia that went so proudly away it was a very different horde that began very soon to trickle back. No bands accompanied them this time, and if any of them had had violins or shepherds’ pipes they had lost them in the fields of Thrace. It was pitiful to see how silently, almost how secretly, those broken men came back. One would occasionally meet companies of them on the Bridge or in the vicinity of a barracks, in their grey ulsters and pointed grey hoods, shuffling along so muddy, so ragged, so shoeless, so gaunt and bowed, that it was impossible to believe they were the same men. Most of them, however, came back in the night and were not able even to shuffle. Two or three pictures are stamped in my memory as characteristic of those melancholy days. The first of them I happened to see when I moved into town for the winter, a few days after Kîrk Kil’seh. When I landed at dusk from a Bosphorus steamer, with more luggage than would be convenient to carry, I found to my relief that the vicinity of the wharf was crowded with cabs—scores of them. But not one would take a fare. They had all been commandeered for ambulance service. Near the first ones stood a group of women, Turkish and Christian, silently waiting. Some of them were crying. Another time, coming home late from a dinner-party, I passed a barracks which had been turned into a hospital. At the entrance stood a quantity of cabs, all full of hooded figures that were strangely silent and strangely lax in their attitudes. No such thing as a stretcher was visible. Up the long flight of stone steps two soldiers were helping a third. His arms were on their shoulders and each of them had an arm around him. One foot he could not use. In the flare of a gas-jet at the top of the steps a sentry stood in his big grey coat, watching. The three slowly made their way up to him and disappeared into the archway. Again, a lady who lives in Stamboul told me her own impressions so vividly that I remember them almost better than my own—of trains whistling all night long as they came in from the front, of city rubbish carts rumbling without end through the dark, and of peering out to see one under the window, full of wounded, with refugee women and children trudging behind in the rain.

After Lüleh Bourgass there was scarcely a barracks or a guard-house or a mosque or a school or a club or an empty house that was not turned into an impromptu hospital. For a moment, indeed, the resources of the city were swamped, and train loads of wounded would wait in the station for hours before any attempt could be made to unload them. Even then, thousands must have died for lack of care, for there were neither beds nor nurses enough. And it was only the more lightly wounded who came back. The others, in the general rout and in the lack of any adequate field-hospital service, died where they fell—unless the Bulgarians took pity on them. In either case no news about them was available. No casualty lists were published. I doubt if any one knew how many hospitals there were. Women would go vaguely from one to another asking for Ali or Hassan. There might be fifty Alis and Hassans in each one, or five hundred, and who was to know which from which?

In the face of so great an emergency every one, Mohammedan or Christian, native or foreigner, took some part in relief work. A number of Turkish ladies of high rank and the wives of the ambassadors had already organised sewing-circles. Madame Bompard, I believe, the French ambassadress, was the first to call the ladies of her colony together to work for the wounded. Mrs. Rockhill gave up her passage to America in order to lend her services. Although our embassy is much smaller than the others, a room was vacated for a workshop, a sailor from the despatch-boat Scorpion cut out after models furnished by the Turkish hospitals, and the Singer company lent sewing-machines—to any, in fact, who wanted them for this humanitarian use. Shall I add that America had a further share in these operations in that the coarse cotton used in most of the work is known in the Levant as American cloth? Lady Lowther organised activities of another but no less useful kind, to provide for the families of poor soldiers and for refugees. In the German embassy a full-fledged hospital was installed by order of the Emperor. At the same time courses in bandaging and nursing were opened in various Turkish and European hospitals. And Red Cross missions came from abroad in such numbers that after the first rush of wounded was over it became a question to know what to do with the Red Cross.

There is also a Turkish humane society, which is really the same as the Red Cross but which the Turks, more umbrageous than the Japanese with regard to the Christian symbol, call the Red Crescent. Foreign doctors, nurses, and orderlies wore the Turkish device on their caps or sleeves, and at first a small crimson crescent was embroidered by request on every one of the thousands of pieces of hospital linen contributed by different branches of the Red Cross. It is a pity that a work so purely humanitarian should in so unimportant a detail as a name arouse the latent hostility between two religious systems. Is it too late to suggest that some new device be found which will be equally acceptable to all the races and religions of the world? To this wholly unnecessary cause must be attributed much of the friction that took place between the two organisations. But I think it was only in humbler quarters that the Red Cross symbol was resented. At a dinner given by the prefect of Constantinople in honour of the visiting missions, it was an interesting thing, for Turkey, to see the hall decorated with alternate crescents and crosses. For the rest, any work of the kind is so new in Turkey that it was not surprising if some people failed to find the right note. It was entirely natural for the Turks to prefer to care for their own wounded, when they could, and to resent any implication that they were incapable of doing so. And the ignorance of tongues of the foreigners, with their further ignorance of Turkish tastes and the very doubtful human material some of them contributed, gave many just causes for complaint.

This relief-work marked a date in Turkish feminism, in that Turkish women for the first time acted as nurses in hospitals. They covered their hair, as our own Scripture recommends for a woman, but they went unveiled. Women also served in other capacities, and something like organised work was done by them in the way of preparing supplies for the sick. A lady who attended nursing lectures at a hospital in Stamboul told me that her companions, most of whom were of the humbler classes, went to the hospital as they would to the public bath, with food for the day tied up in a painted handkerchief. There they squatted on the floor and smoked as they sewed, resenting it a little when a German nurse in charge suggested more stitches and fewer cigarettes.

It was also a new thing for men to volunteer for hospital work, as a good many did under the auspices of the Red Crescent. They had charming manners, as Turks usually do; but they proved less efficient than the women, for the reason that the Turk of any breeding, and particularly the Constantinople Turk, has no tradition of working with his hands. It is not a question of snobbishness. He is in many ways more democratic than we. He treats servants on a greater equality, and the humble rise in the world even more easily than with us. But it is not the thing for him to use his hands except in sport and in war. He is far too dignified a being to carry a tray, for instance, in the presence of women or other inferiors. Add to this his natural disinclination to do anything he can get any one else to do, and you conceive the difficulties which might surround the attendance of such a helper.