Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

There are times when a man is ashamed to be alive, and that time, for me, was one of them. What had I done that I should be strolling about the world with clothes on my back and money in my pocket and a smug feeling inside of me being a little heroic, and what had those poor devils done that they should be pitched half naked into a worn-out omnibus and shovelled into trenches for dogs to gnaw at? They had left their homes in order to save their country. Before they had had time to strike a blow for it they had been beaten by privation and neglect. Starved, sick, and leaderless, they had fallen back before an enemy better fed, better drilled, better officered, fighting in a better cause. Attacked then, by an enemy more insidious because invisible, they had been dumped down into San Stefano and penned there like so many cattle. Some of them were too weak to get out of the train themselves and were thrown out, many dying where they fell. Others crawled into the village in search of food and shelter. A few found tents to crowd into. The greater number lay where they could through wet autumn days and nights, against houses, under trees, side by side in fields, and so died. Out of some vague idea of keeping the water uncontaminated, the sentries were ordered to keep the poor fellows away from the public drinking fountains, and hundreds died simply from thirst.

The commander of an Austrian man-of-war, hearing of this horrible state of affairs, went to see San Stefano for himself. He made no attempt to conceal his disgust and indignation. He told the authorities that if they wished to save the last vestige of their country’s honour they should within twenty-four hours put an end to the things he had seen. The authorities did so: by shipping several hundred sick soldiers—prodding them with bayonets when they were too weak to board the steamer—off to Touzla, on the Asiatic side of the Marmora, where they would be safely out of sight of prying foreigners. We were told several times, both by residents of the village and by outsiders, that they were actually prevented from doing anything to help, because, forsooth, the sick men had betrayed and disgraced their country and only deserved to die. I cannot believe that any such argument was responsibly put forward unless by men who needed to cover up their own stupidity and criminal incompetence. How could human beings be so inhuman? Were they simply overwhelmed and half maddened by their defeat? And, with their constitutional inability to cope with a crisis, with the lack among them of any tradition of organised humanitarianism, were they paralysed by the magnitude of the emergency? I am willing to believe that the different value which the Oriental lays on human life entered into the case. In that matter I am inclined to think that our own susceptibility is exaggerated. But that does not explain why the Oriental is otherwise. Part of it is, perhaps, a real difference in his nervous system. Another part of it is no doubt related to that in him which has kept him behind the West in all practical contrivances. Human life was not of much account in Europe a few hundred years ago. And in the back of the Turk’s brain there may be some proud Islamic view of battle and dying therein, descended from the same remote Asiatic conception as the Japanese theory of suicide. Certainly the Turk fears death less and bears it more stoically than we. Does that give him the right to think less of the life of his fellow beings?

The Austrian officer raised his voice, at least, for the soldiers in San Stefano. The first to lift a hand was a Swiss lady of the place. Her name has been pronounced so often that I shall not seem yellow-journalistic if I mention it again. Almost every resident who could possibly leave San Stefano had already done so. Fräulein Alt, however, remained. She carried the soldiers the water from which the sentries kept them. She also made soup in her own house and took it to the weakest, comforting as best she could their dying moments. It was, of course, very little that she could do among so many. But she was the first who dared to do it. She was soon joined by another lady of the place, Frau Schneider. And presently a few Europeans from the city helped them make a beginning of relief-work on a larger scale. One of the new recruits was a woman also, Miss Graham, of the Scotch mission to the Jews. The others were Rev. Robert Frew, the Scotch clergyman of Pera; Mr. Hoffman Philip, first secretary of the American embassy; and two gentlemen who had come to Constantinople for the war, the English writer Maurice Baring, and Major Ford, whom I have already mentioned, of our own army medical staff. English and American friends and the American Red Cross contributed help in other ways and obtained that of the authorities. These half-dozen good Samaritans left their own affairs and did what they could to make a hospital out of a Greek school into which sick soldiers had been turned. It was a heroic thing to do, for at that time no one knew that the men were chiefly suffering from dysentery brought on by privation, and Red Cross missions were hesitating to go. Moreover the sanitary conditions of the school were appalling. Six hundred men were lying there on the filthy and infected floor, as well as in a shed which was the rainy-day playground of the school, and in a few tents in the yard. Some of the soldiers had been dead two or three days. Many of them were dying. None of them had had any food besides the intermittent bread of the municipality, or any care save such as Fräulein Alt had been able to give them.

Cholera

Photograph by Frederick Moore

I felt not even a little heroic by the time I went into the yard of this school, next the field where the heap of dead soldiers lay, and saw these voluntary exiles coming and going in their oilskins. I felt rather how rarely, in our padded modern world, is it given a man to come down to the primal facts of life. This reflection, I think, came to me from the smart tan gloves which one of the Samaritans wore, and which, associating them as I could with embassies and I know not what of the gaieties of life, looked so honourably incongruous in that dreadful work. The correspondent, of course, was under orders to take photographs; but his camera looked incongruous in another way in the face of realities so horrible—impertinent, I might say, if I did not happen to like the correspondent. A soldier lurched out of the school with the gait and in the necessity characteristic of his disease. He looked about, half dazed, and established himself at the foot of a tree, his hands clasped in front of his knees, his head sunk forward on his breast. Other soldiers came and went in the yard, some in their worn khaki, some in their big grey coats and hoods. One began to rummage in the circle of débris which marked the place of a recent tent. He picked up a purse—one of the knitted bags which the people of Turkey use—unwound the long string, looked inside, turned the purse inside out, and put it into his pocket. An older man came up to one of my companions. “My hands are cold,” he said, “and I can’t feel anything with them. What shall I do?” We also wore hats and spoke strange tongues, like the miracle-workers within: the poor fellow thought we could perform a miracle for him. As we did not he started to go into the street, but the sentry at the gate stopped him. Two orderlies came out of the school carrying a stretcher. A dead man lay on it, under a blanket. The wasted body raised hardly more of the blanket than that of a child.

When we went away the sick soldier was still crouching at the foot of his tree, his hands clasped about his knees and his head sunken on his breast.