That evening I sat with a young British naval officer in the Pera Palace hotel and heard the other side of the story. He had been looking angrily at some Cossack officers and their ladies, laughing over their coffee cups.
“I’m not bloodthirsty,” he said, “but it would give me the greatest pleasure in the world to cut one of those fellow’s throats.”
He told me the cause of his bitterness—the inefficiency, the corruption, the vanity, the damned selfishness, the jealousy of those White officers. We had sent out vast stores of arms and ammunition, but they never got to the front. Crowds of these fellows, swaggering about in uniform, never went near their wretched men in the trenches, and were hundreds of miles behind, gambling, drinking, indulging in amorous adventure. The women were just as bad, many of them. Worse, if anything! We had sent out consignments of clothes for the Russian nurses, who were in rags at the front where they were looking after the wounded. That underclothing, those stockings, and boots, and raincoats never reached the nurses. They had been seized and worn by the female harpies hundreds of miles behind the line. He had more respect for the Reds than for this White rabble. One day the British taxpayer would want to know why we were keeping thousands of them in the island of Prinkipo and elsewhere....
I went out to Prinkipo, and did not feel the bitterness of that young officer who had no patience with our charity. A boatload of refugees, with a crowd of women and children, had just arrived and were sitting among their bundles and boxes on the quayside, forlorn, melancholy, sick after a long voyage across the Black Sea, and after the horror of flight from the Red Terror. We could not let them starve to death without a helping hand.
Certainly we were doing them rather well on Prinkipo, and it seemed to me an island of delight where I, for one, would gladly have stayed a month or two, or a year or two, if my own folk had been there. These Russian exiles made the best of it. Their laughter rang out in a wooden restaurant where a party of them dined to the music of a little orchestra which played mad and merry music. Some of those Russian girls were amazingly beautiful, patrician in manner and grace.
Along a road leading through green woods to a golden shore lapped by little frothing waves, came a cavalcade of Russians on donkeys, which they raced with each other, screaming with laughter. Further on, where the woods ended, there was a smooth greensward on which a crowd of Russian folk were dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy. Hand in hand young Russian men and women, once great people in Moscow and Odessa, wandered playing the pleasant game of love-in-idleness. Not too bad to be a refugee at Prinkipo, until they awakened from their lotus eating to the hopelessness of their state, to the raggedness of their clothes, to their life without purpose and prospect, and, later on, to a new menace of death from bloodthirsty Turks in alliance with Red Russia. There would not be much good will to Russian Royalists living here on Prinkipo in the wooden villas and palaces built by Turkish pashas for their summer pleasure.
When the last wave of flight came, after Wrangel’s downfall, Prinkipo became overcrowded and fever-stricken, and the Russians in Constantinople, tens of thousands of poverty-stricken folk of peasant class, would have starved to death but for the charity of British and American relief work. They were panic-stricken as well as poverty-stricken, after the burning of Smyrna.
So in Constantinople I saw the drama of a city in which the East met the West—across the Galata Bridge—and where the strife and agony of many races upheaved by war and revolution, seethed as in a human cauldron. In this city of the Mohammadan world, and of Russia in exile, and of French, German, Italian, and Greek intrigue, the peace of the world did not seem secure and lasting. It filled me with sinister forebodings.