WITH CLANKING CHAINS AND CREAKING LIMBERS
BATTERIES ARE GOING TO THE FRONT
IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS’ ASSOCIATION WITH THE
ARMY WE HAVE NOT SEEN SUCH ACTIVITY
“It does look bad,” I admitted. On the table stood my typewriter and beside it, two piles of stationery, the one of cable blanks and the other for letter use. The moment we landed these were the first things Morris unpacked. As soon as we entered a room in a new hotel, he would ring for the bell boy and freeze him with a look, as he called for cable blanks. I considered the situation for a moment. Obviously there was nothing definite to be learned here. The rail to Russia was no longer to be figured on. The wires were not working. No news was coming out. The first thing to do was to get on the spot, and the second to provide myself with the means of getting my stories out. The boats had stopped running. Clearly enough there was but one thing to do. These thoughts ran through my mind, and I sat down and wrote a cable to Chicago—“Nothing definite obtainable here. Rumors indicate excellently. If you consider situation warrants, propose charter steamer and cover all points interest Black Sea, answer.” I handed it to Morris. From the depths of gloom to the radiancy of bliss his spirits leaped in an instant. He grinned from ear to ear.
“Fine business! Yes, sir, I call that fine business,” and he was off down the hall like a shot out of a gun. I looked out the window, and a moment later saw him dash off in a two-horse carriage for the cable office. Heaven only knows what he told Leo, the performer of everything in that hotel. Anyway Leo had mounted on the box with the driver, some A D C to his own august person, and with a gallop the horses plunged through the narrow streets, while the assistant on the box called out to clear the way.
While Morris was sending my first dispatch, I was embodying in a three-hundred-word news cable the estimate of the general situation in the Black Sea, as seen from the haze of Constantinople ignorance and aloofness from the outer world. This message was the boiling down of my interviews with the various consuls and ambassadors and the information which Morris had gotten from his tours along the water front among the captains and officers of incoming steamers.
As soon as the first message was out of the way I sent my Ethiopian Mercury with No. 2, and he paid down 243 francs for charges to London, where my paper maintained an office, as a sort of clearing house for European news. As there were some seventy-five men in the various European cities corresponding for the paper, all messages were sent through the English office where news that had already been printed and duplications were “killed,” and the valuable stuff “relayed” to America, thus saving cable tolls on unusable copy.
If the Turkish customs officials were annoying the cable authorities were beyond the pale. Their theory was that every sender of a cable was a suspicious character and must be watched until he has proven his innocence of evil intents towards the Sultan. The very act of sending a dispatch was ground for grave doubt as to his true business in Turkey.
For two days I supposed that my “situation” cable had gone. On the third, in reply to a personal cable, I sent a code message to Minnesota. An hour later it was returned, and with it, to my disgust, my first newspaper story, unsent. The cable office had been unable to read English in the first instance, and thought it best to be on the safe side, and had calmly held the message until it should develop whether or not I really was a safe person to be trusted with such an important privilege as sending a dispatch. My code message of two words had convinced them that something was wrong, with the result that neither story went, and my 243 francs were refunded. I afterwards learned that the operators were not required to know much English, but were carefully drilled in a few important words, such as “riot,” “revolution,” “disorders,” “bomb,” “anarchist,” etc. The instructions were that any message containing any such dreadful words should be held pending an investigation. The fact that the allusions in my cable were to Russia, and not Turkey, had no bearing on the case whatever. The operator did not know anything about that, but did know that no peaceable man should be sending any such inflammable words. Anyway it was against the rules, so for the moment I was blocked on my cables, but it was only for the hour which it took me to arrange by wire for an agent in Sansum (which is just across the frontier in Bulgaria) to whom I might mail my cables, thus creating a delay of but a few hours. I reinforced this arrangement by closing a deal with a sad-looking German, whose first name was Lewis, and whose last name I never knew, who stood ready to start at a moment’s notice for the frontier, to carry my dispatches in case the mailing system failed. A wire from London the next day told me that my mail wire had been telegraphed from the frontier and had come through safely, with only a few hours’ delay, so I held Lewis as a reserve, but as a matter of fact, I only used him once during activities in Turkey. On that occasion I did not dare trust a world beat of 2000 words to the mail, and so it was that the melancholy Lewis went for a trip over the frontier.
But to return to my first morning in Turkey, it was obvious that at least a day must elapse before I could receive the necessary authority to charter a boat (for even the Turks had passed that telegram) could be expected, so that afternoon I spent in a pouring rainstorm on a tiny launch among the shipping interests of the Bosphorus, looking for a boat that might answer my purposes.