The Adventure Of The Fifty Hostages
Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the
green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the
Dardanelles. It is one of those crowded little Turkish towns set on a
blazing hillside--tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weather-warped frame
houses, with overhanging latticed windows and roofs of red tiles; little
walled-in gardens with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses;
fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets fork and women
come to fill their water-jars--a dreamy, smelly, sun-drenched little
town, drowsing on as it has drowsed for hundreds of years. Nothing ever
happens in Gallipoli--I speak as if the war hadn't happened! The
graceful Greek sloops, with their bellying sails and turned-up stems and
sterns, come sailing in much as they must have come when the Persians,
instead of the English and the French, were battering away at the
Hellespont. The grave, long-nosed old Turks pull at their bubble pipes
and sip their little cups of sweet, black coffee; the camel trains,
dusty and tinkling, come winding down the narrow streets from the
Thracian wheat country and go back with oversea merchandise done up in
faded carpets and boxes of Standard Oil. The wind blows from the north,
and it is cold, and the Marmora gray; it blows from the south, and all
at once the world is warm and sea and sky are blue--so soft, so blue, so
alive with lifting radiance that one does not wonder the Turk is content
with a cup of coffee and a view.
Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli--then the war came, and everything
happened at once. It was a still May morning, a Sunday morning, when
the English and French sent some of their ships up into the Gulf of
Saros, on the Aegean side of the peninsula, over behind Gallipoli.
Eight or ten miles of rolling country shut away the Aegean, and made
people feel safe enough. They might have been in the other wars which
have touched Gallipoli, but a few miles of country were nothing at all
to the guns of a modern battleship.
An observation-balloon looked up over the western horizon, there was a
sudden thunder, and all at once the sky above Gallipoli rained screaming
shells and death. You can imagine--at any rate remembering Antwerp, I
could very well imagine--how that hurricane of fire, sweeping in without
warning, from people knew not where, must have seemed like the end of
the world. You can imagine the people--old men with turbans undone,
veiled women, crying babies--tumbling out of the little bird-cage houses
and down the narrow streets. Off went the minaret, as you would knock
off an icicle, from the mosque on the hill. The mosque by the
water-front went down in a cloud of dust, and up from the dust, from a
petrol shell, shot a geyser of fire. Stones came rumbling down from the
old square tower, which had stood since the days of Bayazid; the faded
gray houses squashed like eggs. It was all over in an hour--some say
even twenty, minutes--but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, to
kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the rest into the caves
under the cliffs by the water, or across the Marmora to Lapsaki.
Now, while the bombardment of Gallipoli may not appear from a merely
human point of view, a particularly sporting performance, yet, as most
of those killed were soldiers, as Gallipoli had been a staff
head-quarters not long before and always has been a natural base for the
defense of the Dardanelles, the attack was doubtless justified by the
rules of war. It happens, however, that people who live in defenseless,
bombarded towns are never interested in the rules of war. So a new and
particularly disturbing rumor went flying through the crowded streets of
Constantinople.
It is a city of rumors, this beautiful, bewildering Bagdad of the West,
where all the races of the world jostle each other in the narrow
streets, and you never know how the man who brushes past you lives--let
alone feels and thinks. The Constantinople trolley-cars are divided by
a curtain, on one side of which sit the men, on the other the veiled
women. When there are several women the conductor slides the curtain
along, so that half the car is a harem; when there are none he slides it
back, and there is no harem at all.
And life is like that. You are at once in a modern commercial city and
an ancient Mohammedan capital, and never know when the one will fade out
like a picture on a screen and leave you in the Orient, facing its
mystery, its fatalism, its vengeance that comes in a night.
You can imagine what it must become, walled in with war and censorship,
with the English and French banging away at the Dardanelles gate to the
south, the Russian bear growling at the door of the Bosporus, so close
that you can every now and then hear the rumble of cannon above the din
of Constantinople--just as you might hear them in Madison Square if an
enemy were bombarding the forts at Sandy Hook. You wake up one morning
to hear that all the influential Armenians have been gathered up and
shipped to the interior; you go down to the ordinary-looking hotel
breakfast-room and the three Germans taking coffee in the corner stop
talking at once; at lunch some one stoops to whisper to the man across
the table, there is a moment's silence until the waiter has gone, and
the man across the table mutters: "The G. V. says not to worry"--"G.
V." meaning Grand Vizier. To-morrow the Goeben is to be blown up, or
there will be a revolution, or a massacre--heaven knows what! Into an
atmosphere like this, with wounded pouring back in thousands from the
Dardanelles, there came the news of the bombardment of Gallipoli. And
with it went the rumor of reprisal--all the English and French left
behind in Constantinople, and there were a good many who had been
permitted to go about their business more or less as usual, were to be
collected, men, women, and children, taken down to the peninsula and
distributed in the "unfortified" towns. The American ambassador would
notify England and France through Washington, and if then the Allies
chose to bombard, theirs was the risk.
The American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau, set about to see what could be
done. Presently the word went round that the women might stay behind,
but the men, high and low, must go. They came flocking to the embassy,
already besought for weeks by French Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in
distress, some begging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere
as their share of the war. The Turks were finally induced to include
only those between twenty and forty, and at the last moment this was cut
to an even fifty--twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French. The
plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known remnants of the French and
English colonies, and disappointed the chief of police, who had not
unreasonably hoped, as he wistfully put it, "to have some notables." Of
the fifty probably not more than a dozen had been born in England or
France, the others being natives of Malta, Greece--the usual Levantines.
Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were not "important,"
according to newspaper standards, they were, presumably, important to
themselves. They were very important, indeed, to the wives and mothers
and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea wall that Thursday morning,
weeping and wailing, and waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron
fence.
The hostages, one or two of whom had been called to their doors during
the night and marched away without time to take anything with them, had
been put aboard a police boat, about the size of a New York revenue
cutter, and herded below in two little cabins, with ten fierce-looking
Constantinople policemen, in gray astrakhan caps, to guard them. It was
from the water-line port-holes of these cabins that they waved their
farewells.
With them was a sturdy, bearded man in black knickerbockers and clerical
hat, the rector of the Crimean Chapel in Constantinople--a Cambridge and
Church of England man, and a one-time dweller in the wilds of Kurdistan,
who, though not called, had volunteered to go. The first secretary of
the American embassy, Mr. Hoffman Philip, an adventurous humanitarian,
whose experience includes an English university, the Rough Riders, and
service as American minister to Abyssinia, also volunteered, not, of
course, as hostage, but as friendly assistant both to the Turkish
authorities and to their prisoners.
To him was given the little deck-cabin, large enough for a man to
stretch out on the seat which ran round it; here, also the clergyman
volunteer was presently permitted, and here too, thanks to passports
vouch-safed by the chief of police, the chroniclers of the expedition,
Mr. Suydam of the Brooklyn Eagle, and myself.
The passports, mysterious scratches in Turkish, did not arrive until the
last minute, and with them came the chief, the great Bedri Bey himself--
a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark,
brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to envelop even a cup of
coffee and a couple of boiled eggs in an air of sinister romance.
The chief regretted that the craft was not "a serious passenger boat,"
for we should probably have to spend the night aboard. Arrangements for
the hostages and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just what
they would be it was difficult to say, as there were, he said, no hotels
in the place and the houses were all destroyed.
With this cheerful prospect he bade us farewell, and all being ready, we
waited two hours, and finally, just before noon, with deck-hands hanging
life belts along the rail to be ready for possible English submarines,
churned through the crowded shipping of the Golden Horn, round Stamboul,
and out into the blue Marmora.
The difficulties of the next few days--for which most of the hostages,
city-bred and used to the bake-shop round the corner, were unprepared--
promptly presented themselves. Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch.
There was not even bread. Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the
former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon--so appallingly soon
does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals--seemed an
almost immoral luxury. But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the
worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not
until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done.
Philip dug into his corned beef and what was left of the bread, and so
we curled up for the night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest
of us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we had, for one
of the Black Sea winds was blowing down the Marmora and it was as cold
as November.
The launch came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night and not long after
daylight we were shaken out of our blankets to receive the call of the
mutessarif, or local governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in
semi-riding-clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, who
spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few words of that. He was
accompanied by a sort of secretary or political director--a plump little
man, with glasses and a vague, slightly smiling, preoccupied manner, who
acted as interpreter.
The governor and Philip were addressed as "Excellence," the secretary as
"Monsieur Le Directeur," and, considering that all concerned were only
half awake, and we only half dressed, the interview, which included the
exchange of cigarettes and many salutes, was extremely polite. We
joined the mutessarif and his secretary in a stroll about the town.
It was deserted--closed shutters, empty houses and shops, not so much as
the chance to buy a round, flat loaf of black bread--a shell of a town,
with a few ravenous cats prowling about and forgotten chickens pecking
the bare cobblestones. We saw the shell hole in the little Mohammedan
cemetery, where four people, "come to visit the tombs of their fathers,"
had been killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, and dangling
rafters, and there came over one an indescribable irony as one listened,
in this Eastern world of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the
same grievances and indignations one had read in London editorials and
heard in the beet-fields of Flanders months ago.
The mutessarif took us to a little white villa on the cliff by the sea,
with a walled garden, flat black cedar, and a view of the Marmora, and
we breakfasted on tea, bread and butter, and eggs. Meanwhile the
hostages had been marched to an empty frame house on the beach, from the
upper windows of which, while gendarmes guarded the street-door, they
were gloomily peering when we returned to the launch. Philip, uneasy at
the emptiness of the town and leisurely fashion in which things were
likely to move, started for Lapsaki, across the Marmora, for food and
blankets, and Suydam and I strolled about the town. We had gone but a
few steps when we observed an aimless-looking individual in fez and
civilian clothes following us. We tramped up-hill, twisted through
several of the hot little alley-like streets--he followed like our
shadow. We led him all over town, he toiling devotedly behind, and when
we returned to the beach, he sat himself down on a wood-pile behind us,
as might some dismal buzzard awaiting our demise.
He, or some of his fellow sleuths, stuck to us all that day. Once, for
exercise, I walked briskly out to the edge of the town and back again.
The shadow toddled after. I went up to the basin beside the ruined
mosque, a sort of sea-water plaza for the town, and, taking a stool
outside a little cafe, which had awakened since morning, took coffee.
The shadow blandly took coffee also, which he consumed silently, as we
had no common tongue, rose as I rose, and followed me back to the beach.
Out in the Marmora, which is but little wider here than the Hudson at
Tappan Zee, transports crammed with soldiers went steaming slowly
southward, a black destroyer on the lookout for submarines hugging their
flanks and breaking trail ahead of them. Over the hills to the south,
toward Maidos and the Dardanelles, rolled the distant thunder--the
cannon the hapless fifty, looking out of their house on the beach, had
been sent down to stop--and all about us, in the dazzling Turkish
sunshine, were soldiers and supply-trains, landing, disembarking,
pushing toward the front. Fine-looking men they were, too, these
infantry-men, bronzed, well-built fellows, with heavy, high cheek-bones,
longish noses, black mustaches, and dark eyes, who, whatever their
qualities of initiative might be, looked to have no end of endurance and
ability to stay put. Bullock-carts dragged by big, black buffalo
cattle, carrying their heads far back, as if their big horns were too
heavy for them, crowded the street leading to the quay, and camels,
strung in groups of five, came swinging in, or kneeling in the dust,
waved their long, bird-like necks, and lifted up a mournful bellow, as
if protesting in a bored, Oriental way, at a fate which compelled them
to bear burdens for the nagging race of men.
It was to an accompaniment of these howls that a young Turkish officer
came over to find out who these strangers might be. We spoke of the
hostages, and he at once said that it was an excellent idea. The
English and French were very cruel--if now they chose to bombard. ...
"If a man throws a penny into the sea," he said, "he loses the penny.
It isn't the pocket-book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this
proverb, but remarked that after all they were civilians and had done
nothing. "That is true," he said, "but the English and French have been
very unjust to our civilians. They force us to another injustice--c'est
la guerre."
Toward the end of the afternoon the hostages, closely guarded, were
marched up into the town and lodged in two empty houses--literally
empty, for there was neither bed nor blanket, chair nor table--nothing
but the four walls. A few had brought mattresses and blankets, but the
greater number, city-bred young fellows, unused to looking after
themselves out of doors, had only the clothes they stood in. The north
wind held; directly the sun went down it was cold again, and, only half
fed with the provisions Philip brought over from Lapsaki, they spent a
dismal night,' huddled on the bare floor, under their suitcases or
whatever they could get to cover them, and expecting another bombardment
at dawn.
We, on the contrary--that is to say, Philip and his two guests--were
taken to a furnished house over-looking the Marmora--the house, as it
presently appeared, from the pictures of Waterloo on the walls and the
English novels in a bookcase up-stairs, lately occupied by the British
consular agent. To his excellency a room to himself up-stairs, with a
real bed, was given; the historians were made perhaps even more
comfortable on mattresses on the dining-room floor. We were all sleepy
enough to drop on them at once, but another diplomatic dinner had been
planned, it appeared, and Turkish politeness can no more be hurried nor
overcome than can that curious impassive resistance which a Turk can
maintain against something he does not wish done. It was nine o'clock
before we sat down with the mutessarif, his secretary, and the voluble
journalist to a whole roast kid, a rather terrifying but exceedingly
palatable dish, stuffed with nuts, rice, and currants, and accompanied
by some of the wine of Lapsaki, rice pudding, and a huge bowl of raw
eggs, which were eaten by cracking the shell, elevating one's head, and
tossing them down like oysters.
The dinner was served by one Dimitri, a brawny, slow-moving Greek.
Dimitri was dressed in a home-spun braided jacket and homespun Turkish
trousers, shaped like baggy riding-breeches, and his complete
impenetrability to new ideas was only equalled by the solemnity and
touching willingness with which he received them. It was after he had
served us in the ignoble capacity of dish-washer and burden-carrier for
several days that we were informed one evening by the governor's
secretary, in his vague way, that Dimitri was an "architect."
"Architecte naturel," suggested the urbane Philip, and the governor's
secretary assented. Slow Dimitri might be, but once he grasped an idea,
no power could drag it from him. When one asked him where he learned to
build houses of a certain style, he always replied that so they were
built by Pappadopoulos--Pappadopoulos being dead these twenty or thirty
years. Dimitri, the secretary ventured, had been architect of the
mosque on the water-front, and when he found that we were pleased with
this idea, everything else in Gallipoli became Dimitri's. The
lighthouse, the hospital, the three white houses by the quay--we had but
to mention a building and he would promptly murmur, in his dreamy,
half-quizzical way;
"Oui-i-i ... c'est Dimitri!"
Early next morning, just after we had discovered that under the cliff
was water like liquid lapis lazuli and flat-topped rocks rising just
above it on which you would not have been in the least surprised to find
mermaids combing their hair, or sirens sitting, and that it was a simple
matter to climb down and be mermen, the clergyman-volunteer arrived
with reports of the first night. It had been dismal, there were one or
two intransigent kickers, and the aesthetic young Frenchman who spent
his idle time drawing pictures of fashion-plate young ladies, had become
so unstrung that he had regularly "thrown a fit" and been unconscious
for half an hour until they could massage him back to life again. Humor
was quite gone out of them, and when the clergyman suggested that it was
a compliment to be sent out to be shot at--flattering, at any rate, to
the prowess of the Allies--a Frenchman emphatically denied it. "Pas du
tout!" he exploded. While we talked there was a knock at the front
door, and through the grating we saw the red fez and vaguely smiling
visage of the mutessarif's secretary. It was the first of a series of
visits, which, before we left Gallipoli, were renewed almost every hour,
of dialogues deserving a better immortalization than can be given here.
You must imagine, on one side of the dining-room table, the plump little
bey, with his fez and glasses, quick little salutes each time he took a
match or cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffable
flannels or riding-clothes--for the embassy secretary is one of those
who believe that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner
man. Cigarettes--coffee--assurances to his excellency that the house is
his, to Monsieur Le Directeur of our pleasure and profound
consideration. Minutes pass, an hour--the bey knows no such thing as
time, the other is as unhurried as he. The talk, in somewhat halting
French, is of war, weather, French culture, marriage, those dreadful
Russians, punctuated by delicate but persistently recurring references,
on one side, to mattresses and food for the hostages, by the little
bey's deep sighs and his "Mais ... que fairef"
That "But what can be done?" like the Mexican's "Who knows?" fell like a
curtain on every pause, it was the bey's answer to all life's riddles--
the plight of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of being
governor of a province close to Constantinople. One can hear him now
through that cloud of cigarette smoke, "Mais--" with a pause and
scarcely perceptible lifting of the shoulders--"que faire..."
We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get blankets and buy or
order mattresses, and found it much what Gallipoli must have been a few
days before--sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretchers and
Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting streets, noisy with traders
and refugees.
You can imagine the excitement over this mysterious stranger with an
unlimited supply of gold lire and big silver medjidies, asking not what
kind of blankets, but how many did they have, how long would it take
them to make not one, but fifty mattresses! Greek traders, Jews from the
Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths in fez and American clothes, with
recommendations from American Y. M. C. A.'s--it was a great afternoon
for Lapsaki!
A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town
by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her
hospital. It had been started only a fortnight before, there were no
beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on the floor. One man,
whose face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster,
had been burned at Gallipoli. Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a
hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth. In
spite of it he took Philip's cigarette and smoked it. He was dead when
we came back three days later. On another mattress was a poor little
brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in the spine and
paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gallipoli and now delirious. Philip
later took him back to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might
save his life.
It was sundown when we got back to the hostages with our spoils. The
thing had begun to get on their nerves. The English said little,
determined evidently to remain Britons to the last, but some of the
Levantines let themselves go completely. A pale gentleman with a poetic
beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent. It was not
a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried. Another declared that without
bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war,
probably, they must at least have food--that was a need "primordial!"
Another stood apart, whacking his chest and addressing the empty air,
"C'est moi, c'est moi, qui n'a pas d'argent!"--it was he who had no
money and nothing to cover him, and what did they want him to do? If he
had come down to be shot at, well and good, but if he was to be frozen
and starved by inches...
Philip smoothed them down as best he could and returned to invite the
governor's secretary to stay for dinner, a repast for which Hassan, the
embassy khavass who accompanied the expedition, had procured, as he put
it, "some fresh eggies from a nice little man."
The bey, who, that morning, had leaned toward the French, now warmed to
America. The French were enlightened, he said, but without morals, the
English civilized but jealous; if he had any sons he would send them to
America, the only place where young men were both civilized and properly
"serieux." In the midst of these amiable speculations it was suggested
that, in view of the difficulty of getting mattresses, the government
might even requisition them. The suggestion drew a regretful sigh from
the bey, for Turkey was a constitutional country, he said, the shops and
houses were closed and their owners gone, and there was no way in which
such a thing could be done.
In addition to Hassan's eggies, Philip's Man Friday, the incomparable
Levy, had constructed some rice puddings, and it was in despair that he
announced, just before they were to be served, that two had "gone by the
cats"! We had, indeed, by this time attracted most of the cats in
Gallipoli. They streaked through the rooms like chain lightning, and in
the dead of night went galloping over the piano keyboard with sounds so
blood-curdling that Suydam put his mattress on the sofa and his
sleeping-bag on top of that, and, shutting himself in, defied them. The
incomparable Levy was Italian by his birth and cheerfulness, Jewish on
his father's side, Turkish by the fez he wore and a life spent in
guiding strangers about Constantinople. He had the face of a dean of a
diplomatic corps or one of those comfortable old gentlemen in spats who
have become fixtures in some city club.
It was his employer's humor to befriend and defend him in private, but
to his face assume, with the most delicate irony, that this marvel among
men was always late, forgetful, rattle-brained, and credulous. And it
was Levy's gift to play up to this assumption, to hang on his employer's
words with breathless anxiety, to relax into a paternal smile when safe,
and to support his omelets and his delays with oaths and circumlocutions
stranger even than the dishes themselves. They were odd enough, those
dinners, sitting in our little oasis of light in that deserted town, not
knowing what the next hour might bring.
Next day we again went to Lapsaki, and, although the entire industrial
resources of the place had apparently been cornered in the meantime by a
Dardanelles Jew, returned with several more mattresses and the promise
of the remainder. We found the hostages more cheerful. With the relief
money Philip had distributed the day before, and the food they had been
able to buy, they had shaken themselves together, gifted cooks had
turned up, they had made a baseball out of rags, painted humorous signs
on the doorways of their rooms--they had actually begun to sing.
And now, with that curious subsequentness with which things sometimes
happen in Turkey, the mutesarif discovered half a dozen mattresses
himself, and announced that to-morrow there would be enough for all.
Nay, more--the government would allow each hostage four piasters a day
for food, a cook would be brought down from Constantinople and meals
served in a restaurant, that they might be saved, as his secretary
observed, from the unlovely "odeurs de'cuisine."
Then it was discovered that the men might stroll about town, provided
they were in groups. They went to the beach and discussed the
feasibility of swimming, they even demurred against the Constantinople
cook as limiting their means of amusing themselves; the aesthetic young
man recovered now, polished his shoes and put a lavender handkerchief in
his breast pocket. The hostages were in a fair way to annex the
deserted village, when a bombshell burst in the shape of a despatch from
the American ambassador that permission had been obtained for all to
come home.
The changing wind now swung full upon us. Scarcely had the message
arrived ere the mutessarifs secretary followed it, lamenting that we
must go. A peacock reposing majestically in the arms of a patient hamal
appeared at the front door, a souvenir for "his excellency."
Appeared also, out of thin air, a neat little horse and phaeton, and a
trooper perched on a high Turkish saddle, with a rifle slung rakishly
across his back, and the bey himself, glasses, fez, and all, astride an
Arab steed. We were to be taken for a drive. Toward the end of it we
reached the flour-mill, the only modern edifice in this ancient town, and
were ushered into the office to sit in a constrained circle, with the
slightly ironical-looking young proprietor--accustomed, perhaps, to such
visits--and his associates, while coffee and cigarettes were brought.
The engineer, an Italian, welcomed us in French; the proprietor, who
spoke nothing but Turkish, smiled inscrutably, and overhead, in several
brass cages, canaries sang.
Philip, gazing upward, admired their song, whereat the bey at once
announced that they were his. The American protested that, much as the
gift delighted his taste and roused his gratitude, it was impossible to
think of carrying a canary back to Constantinople.
"If you please..." insisted the imperturbable bey. "It is yours!"
Scarcely had we returned, indeed, before another patient hamal knocked,
lugging the hapless bird.
The hostages, not to be outdone, invited Philip, the bey, and ourselves
to lunch. There was chicken soup and chicken, and salad and native
wine, and, for the corner of the improvised table, where the guests were
seated, the hospitable young men had actually procured several bottles
of Gallipoli champagne. The barber with the poetic beard leaped to his
feet, as fluent in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a few
evenings before, while the aesthetic young man smiled pensively down at
a long-stemmed fleur-de-lis which he slowly twirled in his fingers. The
cashier of a Constantinople department store sang from "Tosca."
With him as leader they all sang--a song of the Pyrenees mountaineers,
then a waltz from the cafes chantants: "Bien gentiment l'on se balade.
C'est la premiere promenade--"
In another week we should have had a Gallipoli Glee Club.
And so ended the adventure of the fifty hostages, who went out to be
shot at--the end of the comedy, which had its climax at the beginning.
The next morning we were up at daylight, and after several hours' delay
the mutessarif and his lieutenant came down to permit us to leave. There
were cigarettes and salutes, the secretary scribbled in Turkish
characters on his knee, the governor signed the permit, and we said
good-by to Gallipoli. Next morning we again threaded the shipping in
the Golden Horn.
The ten policemen who had looked so formidable a week before, expressed
a wish for what was left of the tinned corned beef. And with hackmen
yelling from the street and caique men shouting from the water, the
fifty hostages were swallowed up in the sunshine and smells and clatter
of Constantinople.