Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

Before we anchored, our ship was surrounded by a swarm of boats, as at Athens, but these were the narrow caïques of the Golden Horn, rowed by Turks, who hung on by thrusting grapnel hooks through our portholes and by clinging on to ropes. They were old sun-baked Turks, with white beards, and young Turks with only down on their faces and roving eyes for the unveiled women on our decks, and together they raised a wild chant as they called “Effendi! Effendi!” and invited us to go ashore. Other ships passed us—a steamer crowded with Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik pursuit of Wrangel, a British destroyer, sailing boats with leg-o’-mutton sails, billowing white above the blue water, and many of the little caïques where, on Turkish rugs, sat Turkish ladies like bundles of black silk, deeply veiled, so that one had no glimpse of a face.

My young son and I, with light baggage, secured a caïque with the fat American Jew, who had enormous cases of samples which nearly sank the boat when they were dumped in by the Turkish porters. We were rowed across the Golden Horn to the Customs office by two Kurdish boatmen, and there were seized upon by a crowd of Turks who fought each other for our baggage. In the customs office the Turkish officials were highly arrogant young men in uniform, who smoked innumerable cigarettes and refused to pass the American’s samples of boots and shoes until he had bribed them with some of his very best pairs. After that long delay we took a carriage and two horses and drove at a smart trot to the Pera Palace Hotel where I found my comrade of the war, Percival Phillips, and a bevy of English and American correspondents watching the secret progress of a drama which might result in another European war and set the whole East aflame. It was Phillips, as well as the High Commissioner, Admiral Webber, and various Intelligence officers, who “put me wise,” as the Americans say, to the situation which had its secret plot in Constantinople, but its fighting center in Angora. Here in “Constant” there was a mask of peaceful obedience to the decrees of the International Occupation. It was called “International,” and there were French and Italian troops and police on both side of the Galata Bridge, but the real command was in the hands of the British High Commissioner and the real power in the hands of the British fleet. The French were “huffy” because of that, and General Franchet de l’Esperay had left in a temper because he would not take orders from the British, and was up to his eyes in political intrigue. The Sultan was a puppet in the hands of the British, ready to sign any document they put before him, provided his personal safety was assured. But every Turk in his palace, and in the back streets of Galata and Stamboul, were rebels against his submission, and spies and agents on behalf of the Nationalist Turks in Angora. Those were the real fellows. They refused to recognize the Allied terms of peace, or any peace. They were contemptuous of the Sultan’s enforced decrees. They even denied his religious authority. They had raised the old flag of Islam and were stirring up fanaticism through the whole Mohammadan world as far as India. But they were modern in their ideas and methods, “Nationalist” and not religious in their faith, like the Irish Sinn Feiners who put national liberty before Catholic dogma. They were raising levies of Turkish peasants, drilling them, arming them (with French weapons!), teaching them that if they wanted to keep their land they must fight for it. There was a fellow named Mustapha Kemal. He would be heard of later in history as a great leader. He was raiding up the coast as far as Ismid, and little companies of British Tommies had had to fall back before his irregulars. Not good for our prestige! But what could we do on the Asiatic side, with only a few battalions of boys? Meanwhile, the Turks in Constantinople were sending money, men and munitions to the Nationalists, and there was precious little we could do to stop them, in spite of our troops and police. Why, there was gun-running under the Galata Bridge, almost as open as daylight! Mustapha Kemal’s strength was growing—nobody knew how strong. Perhaps it was underestimated. Perhaps one day the Greeks, holding a long line across Asia Minor for the protection of Smyrna, would get a nasty surprise. Who could trust a Greek Army, anyhow? And what was the British Government—that beggar Lloyd George!—doing with all their pro-Greek policy? It was doing us no good in the Mohammadan world. Even India was getting restless because their political agitators were pretending the Sultan was a prisoner and the Prophet insulted! Not that the Indian Mohammadans cared a curse about the Sultan really, belonging to a different sect. But it was all propaganda, and dangerous. The whole situation was full of danger, and Constantinople was a very interesting city in this time of history.

That was the gist of the conversation I heard from Phillips, and British Intelligence officers, and naval lieutenants, and travelers from the Near or Far East, in the smoking room of the Pera Hotel, which looked out to the Grand’ Rue with its ceaseless procession of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Israelites, French and Italian officers, Persians, Arabs, Negroes, Gypsies, American “drummers,” British soldiers, and Russian refugees—the queerest High Street in the world, the meeting place between the East and the West, the unsafe sanctuary of those in flight from the greatest tragedy in the world, which was in Russia.

For one scene in this drama the dining room of the Pera Palace Hotel—a thieves’ kitchen in the way of fleecing the visitor—was an entertaining prologue. Rich Turks came here to listen to incautious conversations by foreign journalists, or irresponsible young middies from the British fleet lying in the Bosphorus, or to act as liaison officers between Mustapha Kemal and his political supporters in the sacred city. There was one Turkish family who dined here every day, the women unveiled as a sign of their modernism, and one of them so beautiful with her dark liquid eyes touched by kohl, that she had to sustain the gaze of young Christian dogs in naval uniform—and did not seem to mind. Greek and Armenian merchants brought their ladies here, dressed in Paris fashions by way of the Grand’ Rue de Pera, and light in their way of behavior, despite the glowering eyes of old Turks who watched them sullenly. Cossack officers who had lost their command, and all but their pride, came in full uniform, with black tunics crossed by cartridge belts, high, black boots, and astrachan caps. One of them was a giant with a close-cropped head like a Prussian officer, and a powerful, brutal face, but elegant drawing-room manners, as when he bent over the hands of lady friends and kissed their rings. These last fugitives from the last expedition against Bolshevik Russia lived gayly for a time on the diamonds they had hidden in their boots. Their motto was the old one: “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die!” They gave banquets to each other while they had any means of paying the bill. That was easy while they had a few jewels, for in a private room at the Pera Palace were Jew dealers who would value a diamond ring with expert knowledge and pay in Turkish pounds. One general paid for his dinner party in a different way. At the end of the meal he took his wife’s fur tippet from her shoulders, handed it to the waiter, and said, “Bring me the change!”

Their own paper money was almost worthless in purchasing value, whether Czarist roubles, or Denikin roubles, or Soviet roubles. One of the Cossack officers ordered a cocktail, and paid 100,000 roubles for the little nip of stimulant.

Once or twice a week there was a dance after dinner at this hotel patronized by the younger officers of the British and American fleets and the society of Pera. Some of the women there were beautiful, though mostly too plump, which is the way of Greek ladies and Armenian, after a certain age. Their shoulders rose above their low-cut dresses. Young naval lieutenants winked at each other, sometimes danced with each other and said, “Hot stuff, dear child! Beware!”

In such a place, at such a time, there was no sense of the East, near or far, no reminder of the tragedies within a stone’s throw of the windows, no reminder of great menace creeping across the clock of Time to this city and its mixed inhabitants, no fear of massacre. Yet, when I went outside that hotel, by day, and often by night, I was aware of those things, smelt something evil here, beyond the noxious stench of the narrow streets. The Turks who slouched up the Grand’ Rue, or crowded the bazaars of Stamboul and Galata, had no love for the Christian inhabitants, civil or military. I saw them spit now and then, when British Tommies passed giving the glad eye to young Turkish women who let down their veils like window blinds hurriedly drawn.

Often I went down to the Galata Bridge with my young son, glancing often over my shoulder when there was any crush, because I did not want his young life ended by a stab in the back which happened sometimes, I was told, to soldier boys of ours. Beyond that bridge, where two Turks stood receiving toll from all who passed, was the beginning of the East, stretching away and away to that great swarming East which was held back from Europe by a few battleships, a few British regiments, and the last prestige of the European peoples, weakened by its internecine warfare. Could we hold back the East forever, or even the Turkish nationalists from this city on the Bosphorus? Across the bridge came Turkish porters carrying great loads at the nape of the neck, Persians in high fur caps, Kurds, Lazis, Arabs, Soudanese, negroes, Gypsy queens in tattered robes, smart young Turks in black coats and the red fez, Turkish women in blue silk gowns, deeply veiled. In the bazaars near by there were swarms of Turks, Armenians, and Jews, selling German and American goods, Oriental spices, Turkish and Persian carpets, dried fruits, shell oil. Around the mosques of Stamboul sat groups of Turks smoking their narghili and talking, between the hours when they washed their feet according to the law of the Prophet. Camel caravans, with mangy, tired beasts, heavily laden, plodded down narrow streets, and their drivers had news to tell, exciting to little groups of Turks who gathered round. What news? What excitement?... There were hidden emotions, passions, secrets, among these people, at which I could only guess, or fail to guess.

I thought of a story I had heard of the Reverend Mother in a Catholic convent here in Constantinople. She had a Turkish porter at the convent gate, an old man who had been a faithful servant. She asked him if he thought there would be any rising in the city among the Turks, and, if so, whether her convent school would be respected. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “When the massacre begins I myself will kill you without any pain.” He promised her an easy death.

There was, I thought, only one safeguard against massacre in this city seething with racial hatred. It was the fear of those young British soldiers, with their French comrades, and sailor cousins, who kept order in Constantinople. It was a fear inspired mainly by British prestige. We had no great strength at that time, as far as I could see, less than two full Divisions of infantry—mostly boys who had been too young to fight in the Great War—and some Indian cavalry, Mohammadans like the Turks. In the Bosphorus, it was true, there was a considerable fleet, led by the Iron Duke, and some American warships, but a rising in Constantinople, an attack on the European quarters, would lead to dirty work. There would be many Christian throats cut.