The band now strikes up the Austrian “Double-Eagle March.” It is almost imperative to have heard the famous trio of this most enthralling of military marches—a languorous, sensual theme—in order to gain an idea of the effect a military band is capable of producing upon a susceptible crowd. The popularity of the “Double-Eagle March” throughout Austria-Hungary and the German Empire has long been general. Composed by a bandmaster of an Austrian regiment, it has been set to music in close upon twenty different arrangements. A great deal of what is incomprehensible to strangers in latter-day Germany may be attributed to the effect of this popular military march on the public, and, what is more, on those who are supposed to influence and inspire it. If there is a march in the whole world which produces intoxication without either alcohol or hashish, it is this one.
A parallel to the last years of the Second Empire and Jacques Offenbach’s Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, General Boum-Boum, and Prince Paul would suggest itself on the occasions when foreign princes and princesses with their hungry retinues came to visit the Sultan. The Prince Imperial would find his counterpart in the Sultan’s poor little sons, who got on horseback and figured in the pageantry of the Selamlik. It is a wonder that there were still some quiet nooks in which a philosophic contemplation of the vanity of things could be indulged.
One day, now long ago, I paid a call on Munir Pasha at his office after the Selamlik. I have already had occasion to mention this high-bred, gracious, and kind Turkish gentleman. Not a breath of scandal, slander, or concession-mongering ever touched this man, whose influential position during many years might have brought him wealth for the mere asking.
“How are you to-day, my dear pasha?” I asked, as he came beaming with kindliness towards me, shaking hands in European fashion, a form of greeting rarely indulged in by the Turk. “Ah, mon cher!” he replied, as a hamal (porter) passed in front of the window, carrying a dinner tray on his head, “you see that poor fellow! How gladly would I exchange with him, and hand him over all my forty-two Grand Cordons into the bargain, if he could only give me his lusty health in return.” Munir Pasha was a martyr to asthma, and before my next visit to Constantinople he had passed away.
CHAPTER IX
SULTAN ABDUL HAMID
I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.