Difficulties of another kind were sometimes experienced when Red Cross and Red Crescent doctors were thrown together. Medicine is a science to which the Turks rather lean, I believe, and there are excellent physicians and surgeons among them. But the excellent man, in science at any rate, is hardly appreciated in Constantinople as yet. The persuasive man has the lead of him. A foreign doctor described in my hearing the “eminent superficiality” of some of his Turkish colleagues, who had the graces and elegancies of diplomats and spoke French perfectly but who seemed to lack the plain, unvarnished, every-day essentials of surgery. And some sensitiveness or petty jealousy in them seemed to make them wish, although there was work enough for everybody, to make themselves felt wherever their foreign colleagues were at work. One of them was supposed to supervise the operations of my informant. The Turk was very agreeable, and interfered as little as possible, but reserved the right of prescribing whatever medicine might be required by the soldiers. This he did with great zeal, paying small heed to his European colleague’s opinion of a case. But to ascertain that the patient took the medicine prescribed he considered no part of his duty. Whole boxes of pills and powders were regularly found under the soldiers’ pillows, where they poked them as soon as the doctor turned his back.
The barracks and guard-houses allotted to some of the missions were Augean stables which required Herculean efforts to clean out. It was the more curiously characteristic because even the lower-class Turk is always cleanly. His ritual ablutions make him more agreeable at close quarters than Europeans of the same degree. I have one infallible way of picking out the Christian soldiers in a Turkish regiment: by their nails. The Turk’s are sure to be clean. And in his house he has certain delicacies undreamt by us. He will not wear his street shoes indoors. He will not eat without washing his hands before and after the meal. He considers it unclean—as, after all, it is—to wash his hands or his body in standing water. Yet vermin he regards as a necessary evil, while corporate cleanliness, like anything else requiring organisation and perseverance, seems as yet to be entirely beyond him.
I heard of a case in point from one of the great barracks in which two thousand invalids were looked after by different missions. The men were plentifully supplied with everything they required, but after the war had been going on two months or so the supply of linen began to fall amazingly low. The huge establishment was in charge of an amiable old pasha without whom nothing could be done, but who was, of course, much too grand a person to do anything himself. He asked the Red Cross to furnish a new supply of linen. The Red Cross took the liberty of asking him in return if his old linen had been washed. He replied emphatically that there could be no doubt of it: the barracks contained a perfect modern laundry. Nevertheless, no clean linen was forthcoming. One of the foreign doctors, therefore, began to explore. He finally discovered the perfect modern laundry, stuffed to the ceiling with an incalculable accumulation of dirty linen, not one piece of which had ever been washed. But the amiable pasha cried “Impossible!” when he was told of these facts. And he either did not know them or refused to take official cognisance of them until two ambassadresses, whom he could not refuse, led him, one by either hand, and made him stick his exalted nose into the perfect modern laundry. Shall I add that that laundry, neither so modern nor so perfect as the pasha affirmed, was finally taken in hand and run as long as the Red Cross had need of it by the doctor who discovered it? And shall I further be so indiscreet as to add that his name was Major Clyde S. Ford, U. S. A.?
Of the Turk as patient I heard nothing but praise. And, after all, there were many more of him. I take the more pleasure in saying it because I have hinted that in other aspects of the war the Turk did not always strike a foreign critic as perfect. I had it again and again, from one source after another, that as patients the Turks were perfect—docile and uncomplaining, in many ways like great children, but touchingly grateful. It became quite the thing for one of them who could write to send a letter to the Turkish papers in the name of his ward, expressing thanks to the doctors and nurses. And I wish I had space to quote some of those letters, so charmingly were they worded, with such a Lincolnian simplicity. It must have been a new and strange thing for most of the men to have women not of their families caring for them. They took a natural interest in their nurses, expressing a particular curiosity with regard to their état civil and wishing them young, rich, and handsome husbands when they did not happen to be already provided with such. But I heard of no case of rudeness that could not be explained by the patient’s condition. On the contrary, an English nurse told me that she found an innate dignity and refinement about the men which she would never expect from the same class of patients in her own country. They often had a child’s lack of realisation why one should be allowed what another was not. They smoked much more than children should, counting more on their cigarettes than on their food. They were also naturally inclined to find foreign cooking more medicinal than palatable. But they were rarely disobedient save when spirits or opiates were prescribed them. Those they often steadfastly refused to take. Chloroform, too, they sometimes objected to, as infringing the commands of the Prophet with regard to intoxicants. Perhaps they were a little afraid of it, suspecting in their peasant’s ignorance some foreign trick. I even heard of a Turkish doctor who asked a foreign surgeon to perform an operation for him, but who refused to allow an anaesthetic to be administered.
Convalescents
I am not fond of going to stare at sick people, but I happened for one reason or another to visit several hospitals and I brought away my own very distinct if very hasty impressions. I remember most vividly a hospital installed in a building which in times of peace is an art school. Opposite the door of one ward, by an irony of which the soldiers in the beds could scarcely be aware, stood a Winged Victory of Samothrace. Samothrace itself had a few days before been taken by the Greeks. The Victory was veiled—partly I suppose to keep her clean, and partly out of deference to Mohammedan susceptibilities. But there she stood, muffled and mutilated, above the beds of thirty or forty broken men of Asia. I shall always remember the look in their eyes, mute and humble and grateful and uncomprehending, as we passed from bed to bed, giving them sweets and cigarettes. The heads that showed above the thick coloured quilts were dressed in white skull-caps, for an Oriental cannot live without something on his hair. It is a point both of etiquette and of religion. Those who were farther on the way to recovery prowled mildly about in baggy white pyjamas and quilted coats of more colour than length. Their wearers had an admirable indifference as to who saw them. A great many had a left hand tied up in a sling—a hand, I suppose, that some Bulgarian had seen sticking a gun-barrel out of a trench in Thrace. Some limped painfully or went on crutches. But it was not always because of a bullet. There were a vast number of cases of gangrene, simply from ill-fitting shoes or from puttees too tightly bound which hands were too cold or too weak to undo. There were fewer resulting amputations than would have been the case in other countries. Many of the soldiers refused absolutely to have their legs cut off. Life would be of no further use to them, they said. I heard of one who would not go maimed into the presence of Allah. He preferred to go the sooner as he was. And he did, without a word, without a groan, waiting silently till the poison reached his heart. A European nurse told me that in all her long experience she had never seen men die like these ignorant Turkish peasants—so bravely, so simply, so quietly. They really believe, I suppose. In any case, they are of Islam, resigned to the will of God. After death they must lie in a place with no door or window open, for as short a time as possible. A priest performs for them the last ritual ablution, and then they are hurried silently away to a shallow grave.
IV.—RECONNOITRING BY TAXI
The war correspondent had arrived from Pekin too late to go to the front. The front, however, seemed to be making its way as fast as it could to the war correspondent. It was near enough, at any rate, to make him feel a certain independence of permits, passes, and other pieces of paper of which the War Office was exceeding chary. What could have made the situation more patent than that a war correspondent should engage a taxicab, a common Pera taxi, striped red and black and presumably not infallible as to its mechanism, and should invite an amateur and a British resident to help him ascertain whether the Chatalja lines were as unapproachable as they were reported?
