At first there was some doubt whether the disease was cholera. The disease which was manifest—and terribly manifest—did not include all the best-known symptoms of cholera. It was plain also that a great number of the soldiers were suffering simply from exhaustion, exposure, and starvation. But later on medical diagnosis was made, and the cholera microbe was discovered. A German cholera specialist who came from Berlin, Dr. Geissler, told me that there was no doubt of the existence of the cholera microbe. Besides which, some of the symptoms were startlingly different from those of mere dysentery. From the human point of view, and not from the scientific point of view, the question was indifferent. The solemn fact from the human point of view was that the Turkish soldiers at San Stefano were sick and dying from a disease that in any case in many points resembled cholera, and that others were dying from what was indistinguishable from cholera in its outward manifestations. Every day and every night so many soldiers died, but less and less as the days went on. One night thirty died; another night fifteen; another night ten; and so on.
I have called the Greek school a hospital, but when you think of a hospital you call up the vision of all the luxury of modern science—of clean beds, of white sheets, of deft and skilful nurses, of supplies of sterilised water, antiseptics, lemonade, baths, quiet, space, and fresh and clean air. Here there were no such appliances, and no such things. There were no beds; there were mattresses on the dusty and dirty floors. The rooms were crowded to overflowing. There was no means of washing or dressing the patients. It is difficult to convey to those who never saw it the impression made by the first sight of the rooms in the Greek school where the sick were lying. Some of the details are too horrible to write. It is enough to say that during the first few days after the sick were put into the Greek school, the rooms were packed and crowded with human beings, some of them in agony and all of them in extreme distress. They lay on the floor in rows along the walls, with flies buzzing round them; and between these rows of men there was a third row along the middle of the room. They lay across the doors, so that anybody opening a door in a hurry and walking carelessly into the room trod on a sick man. They were weak from starvation. They were one and all of them parched, groaning and moaning, with a torturing and unquenchable thirst. They were suffering from many other diseases besides cholera. One man had got mumps. Many of the soldiers had gangrened feet and legs, all blue, stiff and rotten, as if they had been frost-bitten. These soldiers had either to have their limbs amputated or to die—and there is no future for an amputated Turk. There is nothing for him to do save to beg. Some of them had swellings and sores and holes in their limbs and in their faces, and although most of them were wounded, all of them were unwashed and many of them covered with vermin. Most of them besides their overcoats and their puttees had practically no clothes at all. Their underclothes were in rags, and caked with dirt. The sick were all soldiers; most of them were Turks; some of them were Greeks.
In such a place any complicated nursing was out of the question. The main duties of those who attempted to relieve the sick consisted in bringing warm clothes and covering to those who were in rags and shivering; soup to those who were faint and exhausted, and water to those who were crying for it; and during the first few days at San Stefano all the sick were crying for water, and crying for it all day and all night long. You could not go into any of the rooms without hearing a piteous chorus of “Doctor Effendi, Doctor Bey, sou, sou” (sou is the Turkish for water). Luckily the water supply was good. There was a clean spring not far from the school, and water mixed with disinfectant could be given to the sick. The sick and the well at first were crowded together absolutely indiscriminately. A man who had nothing the matter with him besides hunger and faintness would be next to a man who was already rigid and turning grey in the last comatose stage of cholera.
During the first week of this desperate state of things Miss Alt and Madame Schneider worked like slaves. They spent the whole day, and very often the whole night, in bringing clothes to the ragged, food to the hungry, and water to the thirsty. Mr. Frew managed the whole commissariat and the food supply, and he managed it with positive genius. He smoothed over difficulties, he razed obstacles, and in all the creaking joints of the difficult machinery he poured the inestimable oil of his cheerfulness, his good-humour, and his kindness. Major Ford acted with an equal energy in taking over the medical side of the school and in sorting from the heaped-up sick those who were less ill, and separating them from those who were dangerously ill; and in this task he had the help of Mr. Philip. This sounds a simple thing to say. It was in practice and in fact incredibly difficult. During the first days there were scarcely any orderlies at all and few soldiers, and it was a desperately slow and difficult task to get people carried from one place to another. One afternoon, which I shall never forget as long as I live, Major Ford undertook in one of the crowded rooms to shift temporarily all the sick from one side of the room to the other side of it, and while they were there to lay down a clean piece of oilcloth. This was immensely difficult. The patients, of course, were unwilling to move. First of all it had to be explained to them that the thing was not a game, and that it would be to their ultimate advantage; and then they had to be bribed from one side of the room to the other with baits of lemons and cigarettes. Nevertheless, Major Ford managed to do it and get down a clean piece of oilcloth. When one had spent the whole day in this place, and one had seen people like Miss Alt, Madame Schneider, Major Ford, and Mr. Frew working like slaves from morning till night, one still had the feeling nothing had been done at all compared with what remained undone, so overwhelming were the odds. And yet at the end of one week there was a vast change for the better in the whole situation.
Great as was the distress of the wretched victims, they were sublime in their resignation. They consented, like Job, in what was worse than dust and ashes, to the working of the Divine will. They most of them had military water-bottles; they used to implore to have these bottles filled; and when they were filled—thirsty as they were—they would not drink all the water, but they kept a little back in order to perform the ablutions which the Mohammedan religion ordains should accompany the prayers of the faithful. Even in their agony the Turks never lost one particle of their dignity, and never for one moment forgot their perfect manners. They died as they lived—like the Nature’s noblemen they are—always acknowledging every assistance; and when they refused a gift or an offer they put into the refusal the graciousness of an acceptance.
Only those who have been to Turkey can have any idea of the politeness, the innate politesse du cœur, of the Turk. One day when I was coming back from San Stefano on board a Turkish Government launch, and together with an English officer I was talking to the Turkish naval officer who was in command of the launch, the Englishman offered a cigarette to the Turkish officer. He accepted it and lit it. The Englishman then offered one to the officer’s younger brother, who was there also. “He does not smoke,” said the officer. Then he added, after a pause, “I do not either.” “He has lit and smoked the cigarette so as not to offend me,” said the Englishman aside to me. This is typical of the kind of politeness the Turks show. Equally polite were the soldiers who were dying of a horrible disease amidst awful conditions. They never forgot their manners. They were childlike and infinitely pathetic in their wants. One man in a tent where some of the convalescent were assembled cried out in Turkish his need—which was interpreted to me by a Greek. He wanted a candle, by which a man, he said, might tell stories to the others; for, he added, it was impossible for a story-teller to tell stories in the dark; the audience could not see his face. There was no candle in the place, but I am not ashamed to say that I stole a small lamp and gave it to this man to afford illumination to that story-telling. Another man wanted a lemon. There were then no lemons. The man produced a five-piastre piece (a franc, nearly a shilling). This was a large fortune to him, but he offered it to me if I could get him a lemon. One soldier refused either to eat or to drink. He would not touch either soup or milk or water or sour milk, which was the favourite dish of the soldiers there, and which, being a national dish of Turkey, could be supplied to them in great quantities. He kept on reiterating one word. It turned out to mean prune soup. He was hankering after prune soup. He wanted prune soup and nothing else. Another man wanted a pencil above all things, which was duly given him.
The gratitude of these poor people to anyone who did any little thing for them was immense. “Allah will restore to you everything you have done for us a hundredfold,” they would say. Or again: “You are more than a doctor to us; you are a friend.” One day Mr. Philip brought some flowers to the sick soldiers. Their delight knew no bounds. The Turks love flowers. They treasured them. They even sacrificed their water-bottles—and every drop of water was precious to them—to keep the flowers fresh a little longer.
The curious resignation of the Turkish character used often to be manifest in a striking way, in little matters. Here is an instance which struck me. When lemons or cigarettes, or indeed anything else, were distributed to the patients, one cigarette or one lemon, as the case might be, was given to each man all round the room. Sometimes a patient would ask for two, and his demand used to arouse the indignation of his fellow-patients, which they often expressed in violent terms. Nevertheless, he would persist in his demand, and would keep on saying: “Give me two, Doctor, give me two”; and finally one of the Turkish orderlies present would nod his head and say: “Yes, give him two”; and then he would be given two, and the other patients, instead of grumbling, would acquiesce in the fait accompli and say: “Yes, yes, give him two.” It was curious that they never dreamt of all of them asking for two of any one thing; but the importunate were acknowledged to be privileged, if they were sufficiently importunate. One morning, when lemons were being distributed to the soldiers, each man receiving a lemon apiece, one, who like the rest wore a fez, said in a whisper to the distributor: “δῶσέ μοι δύο εἶμαι Χριστιανός” (“Give me two. I am a Christian”). There were several Greeks among the sick, and I regret to say that when they were given shirts they frequently sold them to their neighbours, and then appeared naked the next day and asked for another.
Miss Alt’s plan was to give to all who asked—the undeserving as well as the deserving—and the plan worked out quite well in the long run, for, as she said, they were none of them too well off.
After the first few days the Turkish medical authorities took steps in the matter of the Greek school. During the first week of the work there, a British unit of the Turkish Red Crescent arrived from England under the sound direction of Dr. Baines, and a further recruit joined the helpers in the person of Lady Westmacott, who brought with her an energetic, clever and untiring Russian doctor. Although it was impossible to persuade any of the owners of the houses at San Stefano to allow them to be used as hospitals, a house was found for Dr. Baines’ unit. He soon set up a lot of tents, withdrew from the overcrowded school a number of the patients, and was able to do excellent work. But he received this house for himself and his staff on the express condition that no sick of any kind whatsoever, and not even the owner’s father, should be allowed to go into it. Later on, a unit of the Egyptian Red Crescent arrived, with a staff of German doctors and an Englishman. Wooden barracks were built for them in the plain outside the Greek school, fronting the sea.