CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE (1912)
As soon as I got back to Sofia I found that there would be nothing of
interest for me to do or see there, and no chance of getting to the
Bulgarian front. I might perhaps have got to Headquarters, but that would
have been of little use, and the _Times_, for whom I was writing, already
had one correspondent with the Bulgarian army. So I settled to go to
Constantinople _via_ Bucharest.
I spent a night at Bucharest, and I arrived at Constantinople on a
drizzly, damp, autumn day in November.
Many people have recorded the melancholy they have felt on arriving at
Constantinople for the first time, especially in the autumn, under a grey
sky, when the kaleidoscopic, opalescent city loses its radiance, suffers
eclipse, and seems to wallow in greyness, sadness, dirt, and squalor. A
man arriving at Constantinople on November 19, 1912 would have received
this melancholy impression at its very intensest. The skies were grey,
the air was damp, and the streets looked more than usually squalid and
dishevelled. But in addition to this, there was in the air a feeling of
great gloom, which was intensified by the chattering crowds in Pera,
laughing and making fun of the Turkish reverses, by the chirping women
at the balconies, watching the stragglers and the wounded coming back
from the front, and listening, in case they might hear the enemy sullenly
firing. In the city you felt that every Turk, sublimely resigned as ever,
and superficially, at least, utterly expressionless and indifferent as
usual, was walking about with a heavy heart, and probably every thinking
Turk was feeling bitterly that the disasters which had come were due
to the criminal folly of a band of alien and childishly incompetent
political quacks. You felt also above everything else the invincible
atmosphere of Byzantium, which sooner or later conquers and disintegrates
its conquerors, however robust and however virile. Byzantium, having
disintegrated two great Empires, seemed to be ironically waiting for a
new prey. One remembered Bismarck’s saying that he could wish no greater
misfortune to a country than the possession of Constantinople.
But so quick are the changes there, so chameleon-like is the place, that
all this was already out of date two days later. In three days the mood
of the city completely changed: people began to talk of the enemy being
driven right back to Sofia; the feast of Bairam was celebrated; the
streets were decked with flags; the men-of-war were dressed; and, in the
soft autumnal sunshine, the city glowed once more in its ethereal coat of
many colours.
The stories of the cholera, people said, had been grossly exaggerated;
8000 Bulgarians had been taken prisoners (800 was the subsequent figure,
some people said three, some people said one). Cholera was raging in
the enemy’s lines. New troops were pouring in. The main enemy would be
repulsed; the others would be dealt with piecemeal, “as before”; in fact,
everything was said to be going well.
But I saw a thing with my eyes, which threw some light on the conditions
under which the war was being carried on. One morning I drove out in a
motor-car with two companions and a Turkish officer, with the intention
of reaching the Tchataldja lines. Until that day people had been able to
reach the lines in motor-cars. Probably too many people had done this;
and most properly an order had been issued to put a stop to the flood of
visitors. In spite of the presence of a Turkish officer with us we could
not get beyond the village of Kutchuk Tchekmedche, which is right on the
Sea of Marmora. Not far from the village, and separated from it by a
small river, is a railway station, and as we drove past the bank of the
railway line we noticed several dead men lying on the bank. The station
was being disinfected. We stopped by the sandy beach to have luncheon,
and before we had finished a cart passed us with more dead in it. We
drove back through San Stefano. We entered through a gate and drove down
the suburb, where, bounded on one side by a railway embankment, and on
the other hand by a wall, there was a large empty space intersected by
the road. Beyond this were the houses of San Stefano. It was in this
space that we were met by the most gruesome and terrible sight I have
ever seen; worse than any battlefield or the sight of wounded men. This
plot of ground was littered with dead and dying men. The ground itself
was strewn with rags, rubbish, and filth of every kind, and everywhere,
under the wall, on the grass, by the edge of the road, and on the road,
were men in every phase and stage of cholera.
There was nobody to help them; nobody to look after them; nothing to
be done for them. Many of them were dead, and lay like terrible black
waxworks in contorted shapes. Others were moving and struggling, and
others again were just gasping out the last flicker of life. One man was
making a last effort to grasp a gourd. And in the middle of this there
were other soldiers, sitting patiently waiting and eating bread under the
walls of the houses. There was not a sound, not a murmur. Imagine a crowd
of holiday-makers at Hampstead Heath suddenly stricken by plague, and
you will have some idea of this terrible sight. Imagine one of Gustave
Doré’s illustrations to Dante’s “Inferno” made into a _tableau vivant_ by
some unscrupulous and decadent artist. Imagine the woodcuts in old Bibles
of the Children of Israel stricken in the desert and uplifting their
helpless hands to the Brazen Serpent. Deserted, helpless, and hopeless,
this mass of men lay like a heap of half-crushed worms, to suffer and
to die amidst indescribable filth, and this only seven miles from the
capital, where the nurses were not allowed to get patients! Soon after
I saw this grisly sight I met Mr. Philip, First Secretary of the U.S.A.
Embassy, at the Club. He told me he had been to San Stefano, and that he
and a U.S.A. doctor, Major Ford, were trying to do something to relieve
the people who were suffering from cholera. Would I come and help them?
The next day I went to San Stefano.
San Stefano is a small suburb of Constantinople whose name, as we all
know, has been written in history. Possibly some day Clapham Junction
will be equally famous if there is ever a Treaty of Clapham, subsequently
ratified by the Powers at a Congress of Constantinople or Delhi. It
contains a number of elegant whitewashed and two-storied houses,
inhabited by the well-to-do of Constantinople during the summer months.
San Stefano—why or how I know not—became during the war one of the
smaller centres of the sick—in other words, a cholera camp.
San Stefano, at the time of my visit, was entirely deserted; the elegant
summer “residences” empty. The streets were silent. You could reach San
Stefano from Constantinople either by steamer, which took a little over
an hour and a half; or by train, which took an hour (but there were
practically no trains running); or in a carriage, which took two hours
and a half. The whole place was lifeless. Only on the quay, porters and
Red Crescent orderlies dealt with great bales of baggage, and every
now and then in the silent street you heard the tinkling, stale music
of a faded pianoforte which played an old-fashioned—not an old—tune. I
wondered, when I heard this music, who in the world could be playing the
pianoforte in San Stefano at such a moment. I need hardly say that the
effect was not only melancholy but uncanny; for what is there sadder
in the world than out-of-date music played on an exhausted and wheezy
instrument?
At the quay a line of houses fronted the sea. You then turned up a muddy
side street and you came to a small square, where there were a few shops
and a few cafés. In the cafés, which were owned by Greeks, people were
drinking coffee. The shops were trading in articles which they have
brought from the bazaars and which they thought might be of use to the
cholera patients. A little farther on, beyond the muddy square, where
a quantity of horses, donkeys, and mules were tethered to the leafless
trees, you came to a slight eminence surrounded by walls and railings.
Within these walls there was a small building made of stucco, Grecian in
style. It was the deserted Greek school. This is the place where cholera
patients at last found shelter, and this is the place which I was brought
to by Major Ford, U.S.A., and Mr. Philip, who both of them went to San
Stefano every day.
It was at San Stefano that under the outside wall of the town, and on the
railway embankment, the dead and dying were lying like crushed insects,
without shelter, without food, without water. Miss Alt, a Swiss lady of
over seventy, and a friend of hers, an Austrian lady, Madame Schneider,
heard of this state of things and seeing that nothing was being done for
these people, and that no medical or other assistance was allowed to be
brought them, took the matter into their own hands and started a relief
fund with a sum of £4, and did what they could for the sick. They turned
the deserted Greek school into a hospital, and they were joined by Mr.
Frew, a Scotch minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Constantinople.
Funds were then supplied them by the British and American Embassies, and
Major Ford and Mr. Philip joined these two ladies and Mr. Frew.
The first day I went there, no other medical helpers except these
volunteers had a Turkish sergeant; but the day after, a Turkish medical
officer arrived, and the whole matter was nominally under his charge.
The medical work of the place was undertaken by Major Ford, and the
commissariat was managed by Mr. Frew. There were in the Greek school nine
rooms altogether. Of these six were occupied by patients, one formed a
kind of kitchen and store-room, and two of the rooms were taken over by
the medical staff of the Turkish Red Crescent. Besides this there was a
compound roofed over in the open air, and there were a certain number
of tents—a dozen or so. In this house, and in these tents there were at
first thrown together over 350 men, all in various stages of sickness.
Some of them were in the last stage of cholera; some of them had
dysentery; some of them had typhus; some were suffering from exhaustion
and starvation, and the greater part of them were sick.
At first there was some doubt whether the disease was cholera. The
disease which was manifest—and terribly manifest—did not include all the
best-known symptoms of cholera. It was plain also that a great number
of the soldiers were suffering simply from exhaustion, exposure, and
starvation. But later on medical diagnosis was made, and the cholera
microbe was discovered. A German cholera specialist who came from Berlin,
Dr. Geissler, told me that there was no doubt of the existence of the
cholera microbe. Besides which, some of the symptoms were startlingly
different from those of mere dysentery. From the human point of view, and
not from the scientific point of view, the question was indifferent. The
solemn fact from the human point of view was that the Turkish soldiers
at San Stefano were sick and dying from a disease that in any case in
many points resembled cholera, and that others were dying from what was
indistinguishable from cholera in its outward manifestations. Every day
and every night so many soldiers died, but less and less as the days
went on. One night thirty died; another night fifteen; another night ten;
and so on.
I have called the Greek school a hospital, but when you think of a
hospital you call up the vision of all the luxury of modern science—of
clean beds, of white sheets, of deft and skilful nurses, of supplies of
sterilised water, antiseptics, lemonade, baths, quiet, space, and fresh
and clean air. Here there were no such appliances, and no such things.
There were no beds; there were mattresses on the dusty and dirty floors.
The rooms were crowded to overflowing. There was no means of washing
or dressing the patients. It is difficult to convey to those who never
saw it the impression made by the first sight of the rooms in the Greek
school where the sick were lying. Some of the details are too horrible to
write. It is enough to say that during the first few days after the sick
were put into the Greek school, the rooms were packed and crowded with
human beings, some of them in agony and all of them in extreme distress.
They lay on the floor in rows along the walls, with flies buzzing round
them; and between these rows of men there was a third row along the
middle of the room. They lay across the doors, so that anybody opening a
door in a hurry and walking carelessly into the room trod on a sick man.
They were weak from starvation. They were one and all of them parched,
groaning and moaning, with a torturing and unquenchable thirst. They
were suffering from many other diseases besides cholera. One man had got
mumps. Many of the soldiers had gangrened feet and legs, all blue, stiff
and rotten, as if they had been frost-bitten. These soldiers had either
to have their limbs amputated or to die—and there is no future for an
amputated Turk. There is nothing for him to do save to beg. Some of them
had swellings and sores and holes in their limbs and in their faces, and
although most of them were wounded, all of them were unwashed and many of
them covered with vermin. Most of them besides their overcoats and their
puttees had practically no clothes at all. Their underclothes were in
rags, and caked with dirt. The sick were all soldiers; most of them were
Turks; some of them were Greeks.
In such a place any complicated nursing was out of the question. The main
duties of those who attempted to relieve the sick consisted in bringing
warm clothes and covering to those who were in rags and shivering; soup
to those who were faint and exhausted, and water to those who were crying
for it; and during the first few days at San Stefano all the sick were
crying for water, and crying for it all day and all night long. You
could not go into any of the rooms without hearing a piteous chorus of
“Doctor Effendi, Doctor Bey, sou, sou” (_sou_ is the Turkish for water).
Luckily the water supply was good. There was a clean spring not far from
the school, and water mixed with disinfectant could be given to the
sick. The sick and the well at first were crowded together absolutely
indiscriminately. A man who had nothing the matter with him besides
hunger and faintness would be next to a man who was already rigid and
turning grey in the last comatose stage of cholera.
During the first week of this desperate state of things Miss Alt and
Madame Schneider worked like slaves. They spent the whole day, and
very often the whole night, in bringing clothes to the ragged, food
to the hungry, and water to the thirsty. Mr. Frew managed the whole
commissariat and the food supply, and he managed it with positive
genius. He smoothed over difficulties, he razed obstacles, and in all
the creaking joints of the difficult machinery he poured the inestimable
oil of his cheerfulness, his good-humour, and his kindness. Major Ford
acted with an equal energy in taking over the medical side of the school
and in sorting from the heaped-up sick those who were less ill, and
separating them from those who were dangerously ill; and in this task
he had the help of Mr. Philip. This sounds a simple thing to say. It
was in practice and in fact incredibly difficult. During the first days
there were scarcely any orderlies at all and few soldiers, and it was a
desperately slow and difficult task to get people carried from one place
to another. One afternoon, which I shall never forget as long as I live,
Major Ford undertook in one of the crowded rooms to shift temporarily all
the sick from one side of the room to the other side of it, and while
they were there to lay down a clean piece of oilcloth. This was immensely
difficult. The patients, of course, were unwilling to move. First of
all it had to be explained to them that the thing was not a game, and
that it would be to their ultimate advantage; and then they had to be
bribed from one side of the room to the other with baits of lemons and
cigarettes. Nevertheless, Major Ford managed to do it and get down a
clean piece of oilcloth. When one had spent the whole day in this place,
and one had seen people like Miss Alt, Madame Schneider, Major Ford, and
Mr. Frew working like slaves from morning till night, one still had the
feeling nothing had been done at all compared with what remained undone,
so overwhelming were the odds. And yet at the end of one week there was a
vast change for the better in the whole situation.
Great as was the distress of the wretched victims, they were sublime
in their resignation. They consented, like Job, in what was worse than
dust and ashes, to the working of the Divine will. They most of them
had military water-bottles; they used to implore to have these bottles
filled; and when they were filled—thirsty as they were—they would not
drink all the water, but they kept a little back in order to perform
the ablutions which the Mohammedan religion ordains should accompany
the prayers of the faithful. Even in their agony the Turks never lost
one particle of their dignity, and never for one moment forgot their
perfect manners. They died as they lived—like the Nature’s noblemen they
are—always acknowledging every assistance; and when they refused a gift
or an offer they put into the refusal the graciousness of an acceptance.
Only those who have been to Turkey can have any idea of the politeness,
the innate _politesse du cœur_, of the Turk. One day when I was coming
back from San Stefano on board a Turkish Government launch, and together
with an English officer I was talking to the Turkish naval officer who
was in command of the launch, the Englishman offered a cigarette to
the Turkish officer. He accepted it and lit it. The Englishman then
offered one to the officer’s younger brother, who was there also. “He
does not smoke,” said the officer. Then he added, after a pause, “I do
not either.” “He has lit and smoked the cigarette so as not to offend
me,” said the Englishman aside to me. This is typical of the kind of
politeness the Turks show. Equally polite were the soldiers who were
dying of a horrible disease amidst awful conditions. They never forgot
their manners. They were childlike and infinitely pathetic in their
wants. One man in a tent where some of the convalescent were assembled
cried out in Turkish his need—which was interpreted to me by a Greek.
He wanted a candle, by which a man, he said, might tell stories to
the others; for, he added, it was impossible for a story-teller to
tell stories in the dark; the audience could not see his face. There
was no candle in the place, but I am not ashamed to say that I stole
a small lamp and gave it to this man to afford illumination to that
story-telling. Another man wanted a lemon. There were then no lemons.
The man produced a five-piastre piece (a franc, nearly a shilling). This
was a large fortune to him, but he offered it to me if I could get him a
lemon. One soldier refused either to eat or to drink. He would not touch
either soup or milk or water or sour milk, which was the favourite dish
of the soldiers there, and which, being a national dish of Turkey, could
be supplied to them in great quantities. He kept on reiterating one word.
It turned out to mean prune soup. He was hankering after prune soup. He
wanted prune soup and nothing else. Another man wanted a pencil above all
things, which was duly given him.
The gratitude of these poor people to anyone who did any little thing for
them was immense. “Allah will restore to you everything you have done for
us a hundredfold,” they would say. Or again: “You are more than a doctor
to us; you are a friend.” One day Mr. Philip brought some flowers to the
sick soldiers. Their delight knew no bounds. The Turks love flowers. They
treasured them. They even sacrificed their water-bottles—and every drop
of water was precious to them—to keep the flowers fresh a little longer.
The curious resignation of the Turkish character used often to be
manifest in a striking way, in little matters. Here is an instance
which struck me. When lemons or cigarettes, or indeed anything else,
were distributed to the patients, one cigarette or one lemon, as the
case might be, was given to each man all round the room. Sometimes a
patient would ask for two, and his demand used to arouse the indignation
of his fellow-patients, which they often expressed in violent terms.
Nevertheless, he would persist in his demand, and would keep on saying:
“Give me two, Doctor, give me two”; and finally one of the Turkish
orderlies present would nod his head and say: “Yes, give him two”; and
then he would be given two, and the other patients, instead of grumbling,
would acquiesce in the _fait accompli_ and say: “Yes, yes, give him two.”
It was curious that they never dreamt of all of them asking for two of
any one thing; but the importunate were acknowledged to be privileged, if
they were sufficiently importunate. One morning, when lemons were being
distributed to the soldiers, each man receiving a lemon apiece, one, who
like the rest wore a fez, said in a whisper to the distributor: “δῶσέ
μοι δύο εἶμαι Χριστιανός” (“Give me two. I am a Christian”). There were
several Greeks among the sick, and I regret to say that when they were
given shirts they frequently sold them to their neighbours, and then
appeared naked the next day and asked for another.
Miss Alt’s plan was to give to all who asked—the undeserving as well as
the deserving—and the plan worked out quite well in the long run, for, as
she said, they were none of them too well off.
After the first few days the Turkish medical authorities took steps in
the matter of the Greek school. During the first week of the work there,
a British unit of the Turkish Red Crescent arrived from England under the
sound direction of Dr. Baines, and a further recruit joined the helpers
in the person of Lady Westmacott, who brought with her an energetic,
clever and untiring Russian doctor. Although it was impossible to
persuade any of the owners of the houses at San Stefano to allow them to
be used as hospitals, a house was found for Dr. Baines’ unit. He soon set
up a lot of tents, withdrew from the overcrowded school a number of the
patients, and was able to do excellent work. But he received this house
for himself and his staff on the express condition that no sick of any
kind whatsoever, and not even the owner’s father, should be allowed to go
into it. Later on, a unit of the Egyptian Red Crescent arrived, with a
staff of German doctors and an Englishman. Wooden barracks were built for
them in the plain outside the Greek school, fronting the sea.
Hard words were said about the Turkish medical authorities with regard
to this matter; and it is, of course, easy for people who know nothing
about the local conditions and the local difficulties to pass sweeping
judgments. On the whole, I was told by competent authorities, the Turkish
Red Crescent did exceedingly well in dealing with the wounded and the
sick in the large field of their operations. But an epidemic of cholera
such as that which I have described seemed to paralyse them. It took the
Turks unprepared. Steps were taken, but tardily; and to Western minds the
procedure seemed incredibly and criminally slow; yet in the East it is
impossible to do things in a hurry, and if you try to hustle, you will
find that there will be less speed in the long run. If you consider all
these things, the Turkish medical authorities, and especially the Turkish
doctor in charge at San Stefano, did their best when once they started
to work. But when the appalling situation arose at San Stefano, when the
cholera victims were lying like flies on the railway embankment, they
took no steps to face the situation until they were stimulated to do
so by the example of Miss Alt and Madame Schneider and the pressure of
foreign opinion. This was partly due to the fatalism of their outlook, to
the resignation of their temperament, and partly to the disorder which
was rife throughout their military organisation. As to San Stefano, which
is the small area I had the opportunity of observing personally, had it
not been for the spontaneous efforts of Miss Alt, Madame Schneider, and
Mr. Frew, the Turkish and Greek soldiers who were shut up in the cholera
camp, without any possibility of egress, would have died of hunger and
thirst. It must be remembered, as I have said before, that among the
cholera patients there were a great number of soldiers who were suffering
simply and solely from exhaustion and starvation.
After the arrival of the British unit of the Red Crescent, and that of
the Egyptian Red Crescent, matters were got into shape at San Stefano,
and there was no longer need of volunteers. The worst cases had died.
Those who had been suffering from exhaustion and starvation recovered
and were sent home. Those who had mild attacks of cholera and dysentery
became convalescent, and were moved into the tents. Rooms were cleared
out for the worst cases, and it was possible to introduce beds, and to
clear up matters. What was at the beginning an ante-chamber to Hell was
later, I believe, converted into a clean hospital with all the necessary
appliances and attendants.
That this was done was due to the initial enterprise of Miss Alt and
Madame Schneider. They were the leading spirits and the soul of this
undertaking. Their work was untiring and incessant. To have seen Miss
Alt at work was a rare privilege. Impervious to disgust, but saturated
with pity, overflowing with love and radiating charity, she threaded
her way, bowed with age and with silvered hair, like a good angel or
a kind fairy, from tent to tent, from room to room, laden with gifts;
unconscious of the filth, disdainful of the stench, blind to the hideous
sights, she went her way, giving with both hands, helping with her arms,
cheering with her speech, and healing with her smile. Miss Alt came to
San Stefano like an angel to Hell, and she could have said, like Beatrice:
“Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale,
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange,
Nè fiamma d’ esto incendio non m’ assale.”