In the spring of 1921 I lay on the deck of the steamship _Gratz_,
7,000 tons, once Austrian and now flying the Italian flag, bound from
Brindisi to Constantinople. With me as a comrade was my young son.
Our fellow passengers were a strange company, mostly Jews from America,
Germany, and Greece, going to sell surplus stocks, if they could, to
merchants in Pera. They talked interminably in terms of international
exchange, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, drachmas, and kronen, and
raised their hands to the God of Abraham, because of the stagnation of
the world’s markets. There was also a sprinkling of dark-complexioned,
somber-eyed men of uncertain nationality until we came in sight of
Constantinople, when they changed their bowler hats or cloth caps for
the red fez of Islam. One of them was very handsome and elegant, with
a distinguished but arrogant manner. I tried to get into conversation
with him, but he answered coldly and in monosyllables until we passed
the narrows of the Dardanelles when his eyes glowed with a sudden
passion, and he told me he had fought against the British there, below
the hill of Achi Baba. It had been a great victory, he said, for
Turkish arms.
There were some queer women aboard, international in character, given
to loud, shrill laughter and amorous ogling. One of them, a buxom
creature of middle age, drank champagne at night in the smoking saloon
with one of the American Jews, enormously fat, foul in conversation,
free with his money, who seemed to covet her favor, and was jealous of
a young Turk who, unlike others of his race aboard, was as noisy as a
schoolboy and played pranks all day long up and down the ship.
A young British officer, now “demobbed,” was resuming his career as a
commercial traveler in woollen vests and socks. He showed me his diary.
Before the war he had made as much as £3,000 in one year, as commission
on business with Turkish merchants in Constantinople, Stamboul, Smyrna.
He spoke well of the Turks’ commercial honesty. Their word was good.
They had always paid for orders. A simple soul, this young man who had
been a temporary officer in the Great War, believed that trade was
reviving and that Europe would recover quickly from the effects of war.
There were others on board who did not think so. “After
Austria--Germany,” said the fat American Jew. Lying on the sun-baked
decks I listened to conversations by these students of international
business, as, for two years and more, since the war, I had been
listening to the talk of men and women in Belgium, France, Italy,
Austria-Germany, Canada, and the United States. It was always the
same. They had no certainty of peace, no sense of security, but
rather an apprehension of new conflicts in Europe and outside Europe,
a fear of revolution, anarchy, and upheaval of forces beyond the
control of men like themselves of international mind, business common
sense. But here, on this boat, there was talk of peoples and forces
not generally discussed in these other conversations to which I had
listened, in wayside taverns, in railway trains, in wooden huts on the
old battlefields, in the drawing-rooms of London, Paris, Rome, Vienna,
Berlin, and New York.
“The Angora Turks have got to be reckoned with.” ... “Greece is out for
a big gamble.” ... “The Armenians have not all been massacred.” ...
“The East is seething like a cauldron.” ... “It’s the oil that will
put all the fat in the fire.” ... “The Bolshies have got Batoum.”
... “Mesopotamia means oil.” ... “Russia is not dead yet, and make no
mistake!” ... “My God! This peace is just a breathing space before
another bloody war.” ... “It’s a world gone mad.” ... “What we want is
business.”
Then back again to dollars, pounds, lire, marks, drachmas, kronen,
roubles.
They ate enormously at meal times, and took snacks between meals.
The fat American Jew at my table ate greedily, forgetting his fork
sometimes, and mopping his plate with bits of bread. He bullied the
stewards for bigger or tenderer helpings. He spoke Russian, German,
and American with equal fluency, but an international accent. At night
there was card playing, outbursts of song, gusts of laughter, popping
of champagne corks, whisperings and chasings along the dark decks, a
reek of cigar smoke, no silence or wonderment because of the beauty
through which our boat was passing.
The Ionian Sea, merging into the Adriatic, was so calm that when our
ship divided its waters, leaving behind a long furrow, the side of each
wave was like a polished jewel, and reflected the patches of snow still
on the mountain crests (though it was May, and hot) and the fissures in
the rocks. It was unbroken by any ripple, except where the boat stirred
its quietude by a long ruffle of feathers, and it was so blue that it
seemed as though one’s hand would be dyed, like a potter’s, to the same
color, if one dipped it in. With this sea, and the sky above, we went
on traveling through a blue world, except where our eyes wandered into
the gorges of those mountains along the coast of old Illyria, where the
barren rocks are scarred and gleam white, or when they were touched by
the sun’s rays at dawn and sunset and glittered in a golden way, or
became washed with rose water, or all drenched in mist as purple as the
Imperial mantle which once fell across them. All day long the ship was
followed by a flight of sea gulls skimming on quiet wings and calling
plaintively so that we heard again the sirens who cried to Ulysses as
he sailed this way through the Enchanted Seas.
We steamed slowly through the Gulf of Corinth, so narrow that if any
boulder had fallen from its high walls it would have smashed a hole in
our ship. Small Greek boys ran along a foot path, clamoring for pennies
like gutter urchins beside an English char-à-banc. Then we lay off
Athens, but in spite of a special Greek _visa_ from the consulate in
London for which I had paid a fee, I was not allowed to land. Through
my glasses I saw, with a thrill of emotion, the tall columns of the
Parthenon. At our ship’s side was a crowd of small craft rowed by
brown-skinned boatmen who kept up a chant of _Kyrie! Kyrie!_ (Lord!
Lord!) like the _Kyrie eleison_ (Lord have mercy!) of the Catholic
Mass, touting for the custom of passengers, as they did three thousand
years ago, with those same shouts and waving of brown arms, and curses
to each other, and raising of oars, when ships came in from Crete and
Mediterranean ports with merchandise and travelers.
So we passed into the Ægean Sea, and saw on our port side, like
low-lying clouds, the Greek islands in which the Gods once dwelt, and
the old heroes. We drew close to Gallipoli, and I thought of heroes
more modern, lying there in graves that were not old, who had done
deeds needing more courage than that of Ulysses and his men, and who
had faced monsters of human machine guns more dreadful than dragons
and many-headed dogs, and the Medusa head. The trenches were plainly
visible--British and Turkish--and the old gun-emplacements, and the
Lone Tree, and the barren slopes of Achi Baba where the flower of
Australian and New Zealand youth had fallen, and many Irish and English
boys.
“Quite a good landing place,” said one of the passengers by my side.
I looked at him, suspecting irony, and remembering the landing of the
Twenty-Ninth Division, and the Australian troops, under destroying
fire. But this elderly Jew said again, in a cheerful way, “A nice cove
for a boat to land.”
We went on slowly through the narrow channel, until in the morning
sunlight we saw the glory of the Golden Horn and the minarets of
Constantinople. It was then that half the passengers put on the red
fez of Islam, and paced the deck restlessly, with their eyes strained
toward the city of the Sultan.
The fat American Jew touched me on the arm and spoke solemnly, with a
kind of warning. “For those who don’t wear a fez Constantinople won’t
be a safe place, I guess. They say there are bodies floating every
morning at the Golden Horn--stabbed in the back. I’m keeping close to
Pera.”
The first view of the Golden Horn was as beautiful as I had hoped,
more than I had imagined, as we rounded the old Seraglio Point and
saw in the early sunlight of a May morning the glittering panorama of
Constantinople.
The domes of San Sophia lay like rose-colored clouds above the cypress
trees. Beyond was the great mosque of Suleyman, its minarets, white and
slender, cutting the blue sky like lances. Further back, rising above a
huddle of brown old houses, was the mosque of Mohammad, the conqueror
who, five hundred years ago, rode into San Sophia on a day of victory,
over the corpses there, and left the imprint of a bloody hand on one of
the pillars where it is now sculptured in marble. White in the sun on
the water’s edge were the long walls of the Sultan’s palace. One could
see Galata, and the old bridge which crosses from Stamboul, and above,
on the hill, Pera, with its Grand’ Rue, its night clubs, its cabarets,
its Christian churches, and haunts of vice.
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.
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!”
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.