Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

The British troops did not seem nervous. They are never nervous, but take things as they come. At the upper end of the Rue de Pera there were numbers of wine shops and dancing halls where they gathered in the evenings. As I passed them I saw groups like those with which I had been familiar in the estaminets on the Western front. They were singing the same old songs. Through the swing doors came gusts of laughter and those choruses roared by lusty voices. In Constantinople as in Flanders! The Y.M.C.A. was doing good work in keeping them out of temptation’s way, down back alleys, where Greek girls waited for them, or where Turkish ladies hid in the dark courtyards. On the whole they gave no great trouble to the “red caps” who rounded them up at night. The American Jacks gave more. Coming from “dry” ships, they drew a bee line for the booze shops, and were mad drunk rapidly. The British A.P.M. with whom I went round the city one night, had the genial permission from the American Admiral to have them knocked on the head by the naval police as quickly and smartly as possible. It was safer for them.

I shall never forget one of those young American sailors whom I encountered at a music hall close to the Pera Palace, known as the “Petits Champs.” A variety show was given there nightly, by Russian singers and dancers with a Russian orchestra, and it was crowded with all the races of the world which met in Constantinople. Some of the dancing girls had been ladies of quality in Russia. Now they showed their bodies to this assembly of wine-drinking men and evil women, of East and West, for the wages of life. The orchestra played Russian music with a wild lilt in it—the rhythm of the primitive soul of the old Slav race. It worked madness in the brain of the young American Jack, who sat next to me, with one of his petty officers. He was a nice, sweet-faced fellow, but with too much beer in him to withstand this music. For a time he contented himself with dangling his watch in his glass of beer, but presently his body swayed to the rhythm, and he waved his handkerchief to the ladies on the stage. Then he seized a great tin tray from a passing waiter and danced the hula-hula with it, with frightful crashes and bangs. No one took much notice of him. The petty officer smiled, as at a pleasant jest. Our own sailors were merry and bright, and there was a great noise in the cabaret of the Petits Champs.

There was no noise, but a kind of warm silence, if such a thing may be, in a Turkish house on the hillside overlooking the Bosphorus, where my son and I took dinner with a young English merchant and his wife. It was an old wooden house called a “palace,” with a broad balcony above a little tangled garden. Down there among the trees with a little old mosque with one minaret, and far below the British fleet lay at anchor, mirrored in the glasslike water. The spearheads of black cypress trees in our garden pointed to the first stars of evening in a turquoise sky, faintly flushed by the rose tints of sunset. Beyond, the Asiatic shore stretched away, with the lights of Scutari clustered at the water’s edge below the slopes of Bulgaria, and clear-cut against the sky rose the tall white minarets of Buyak Djami, the great mosque built in honor of Mirimah, the daughter of Suleyman the Magnificent. A band was playing on one of our warships, and its music came faintly up to us. When it ceased, there was a great silence around us, except for the flutter of bats skimming along our balcony.

The young English merchant—the head of the greatest trading house in the Near East—sat back in a cane chair, talking somberly of the stagnation of his business owing to the effects of war and the failure of peace. He was anxious about the Nationalists in Angora. That fellow Mustapha Kemal—The Greeks might not have the strength to hold Smyrna! Every Turk had vowed to get back Smyrna at all costs. It was the worst wound to their pride. The future was very uncertain. Damned bad for trade. What was going to happen in Europe with all these race hatreds, political intrigues, jealousies between French and British, Italian and French, Greeks and all others. Venizelos had claimed too much. More than Greece could hold....

He was newly married, this young merchant of the Near East, and his wife was beautiful and restless, and rather bored. She liked dancing better than anything in the world, and had enjoyed it on the Iron Duke with young British officers. Her merchant husband was not keen on it—especially when his wife danced with those young naval officers, I thought. He was a little annoyed now when she brought a gramaphone on to the balcony and set it going to a dance tune and offered her arms to a boy who had brought the latest steps from London—my son. While they moved about to the rhythm of a rag-time melody, the young merchant continued his analysis of a situation ugly with many perils and troubles, and then was silent over his pipe. From the garden came another kind of music as the rose flush faded from the sky and the cypress trees were blacker against a paler blue. A white-robed figure stood in the little turret of the minaret and turned eastward and raised his voice in a long-drawn chant, rising and falling in the Oriental scale of half-tones. It was the imam, calling to the Faithful of the Prophet in the city of Mohammad. It was the voice of the East as it has called through the centuries to desert and city and camel tracks, to the soul of Eastern peoples under this sky and stars. It rose above the music of a gramaphone playing rag-time melody, and called across the waters of the Bosphorus where Western battleships were lying, with their long guns, like insects with their legs outstretched, as we looked down on them. Faintly from the shadow world, and through this warm-scented air of an evening in Constantinople, came answering voices, wailing, as the imams in each minaret of the city of mosques, gave praise to God, and to Mohammad his Prophet.

“The Turks aren’t finished yet,” said the young English merchant. “And behind the Turk is Russia—and the East.”

A chill made me shiver a little.... The sun had gone down.

With Percival Phillips, sometimes, we visited the mosques and explored Turkish street life on the Stamboul side of Constantinople, and went up to Eyoub and the Sweet Waters of Europe, and wandered among the charred ruins of a quarter of the city where a great fire had raged. Once, with the young commercial traveler in vests and pants—three years before an officer in the Great War—we walked to lonely districts where the Indian cavalry had pitched their camps beyond the city and when in a little Turkish coffee shop, remote and solitary, some wild Gypsy women in tattered robes of many colors, through which could be seen their bare brown limbs, danced and sang. No need to ask the origin of the Gypsy folk after seeing these. They were people of the Far East, and their songs had the harsh and ancient melody of Oriental nomads.

“Not particularly safe to wander far afield like this,” said the young commercial traveler. He told stories of Turkish robbers and assassins in the outskirts of the city. But no harm befell us.

In narrow streets off the Grand’ Rue de Pera, we came into touch with another aspect of life in Constantinople—the heart of the Russian tragedy among the Royalist refugees. Those people had arrived in successive waves of flight following the defeat and rout of the “White” expedition under Denikin, Wrangel, and others. The luckiest among them, who had jewels to sell and a business instinct, had set up little restaurants and wine shops in Pera. Somehow or other many of them were able to get enough money to eat and drink in these places, and they were always filled with Russian officers in uniform, with their ladies. Those who served were often of higher rank than those who dined, and a score of times I saw an officer rise, bow profoundly, and kiss the hand of the waiting girl before he ordered his bortsch. Probably she was a Princess. One could hardly order a cup of tea in Constantinople without receiving it from a Russian princess or at least a lady of quality in the old régime. I had a pork chop handed to me by a bald-headed man with an apron round his waist whom I knew afterward as the Admiral of the late Czar’s yacht. His fellow serving men were aristocrats and intellectuals, wearing white linen jackets and doing their job as waiters with dignity as well as skill. Poor devils! In spite of their courage and their gayety, they were having a rough life in Constantinople with no hope ahead, except the fading dreams that Soviet Russia would be overthrown by some internal plot or foreign intervention. In spite of all the millions lent to Russia by Great Britain, and all the arms and ammunition supplied by us to Koltchak, Denikin, and all the “White” Armies, they regarded England as the chief cause of their repeated failures, and as a nation which had not helped their cause with proper loyalty. It was the one-time Admiral of the Czar’s yacht who made this complaint to me, and said, “England has betrayed us!”