CONSTANTINOPLE.—Kemalist forces were within a day’s march of Constantinople, on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus, as the Allied general met Ismet Pasha at Mudania in a renewed effort to untangle the Near Eastern problem today.
Turkish cavalry have reached Shileh and Yarmise, both places far within the neutral zone near the Bosporus at the right of the Sea of Marmora. Yarmise is within a day’s march of Constantinople. The cavalry is also nearing Karayakobi, which is in the same area.
It was reported during the night that Turkish irregulars had appeared yesterday afternoon a short distance from Beikos, in the hills on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus. Beikos is a suburb of Constantinople. The British are entrenching around Beikos.
Turkish irregulars and small bands of guerrillas and bandits, which frequently form the advance guard of a Turkish army, have appeared in small villages east of Constantinople. These villages include Tashkeupsu, Tavshanjik, Omarli, Afga and Armudli, all within the suburban limits of Constantinople on the Asiatic side.
The British yesterday made final preparations for defense, blowing up bridges and crossroads.
A British destroyer anchored Sunday at Shileh on the Black Sea coast. The commander went ashore, met the Nationalist officer there and requested him to withdraw his forces. The Turk replied that he has orders to remain, whereupon the British commander declared he also would remain, and kept to his anchorage close in shore.
It is reported that an entire Turkish division has entered the neutral zone and General Harington is said to have warned Ismet Pasha that unless the Kemalists withdraw he may be obliged to make a military demonstration on the Turkish flanks. The Kemalist representative is said to have promised that the advance shall cease, and that the incident will not be repeated.
As a measure of protection for Constantinople, General Harington ordered suspension of ferry service across the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmora. There are said to be 12,500 Christians now in the Ismid zone outside the British lines, while many thousands more are within the lines, having been removed to a camp at Moda, directly across from Constantinople.
The Turk concentration in the neutral zone in the vicinity of Chanak is also continuing. In this area, infantry have replaced cavalry, which is taken to mean that the Turks intend to dig in to hold their positions.
Balkans: A Picture of Peace, Not War
The Toronto Daily Star
October 16, 1922
SOFIA, BULGARIA.—There was only twenty minutes to catch the Simplon-Orient Express leaving the Gare de Lyon, at the other end of Paris, for Constantinople—and only one taxi to be had.
One taxi was plenty. But this taxi had a drawback. The driver was drunk.
As we lurched, swung and tore through the jammed, congested seven o’clock Paris traffic, I hung on to the side of the taxi, fixed my gaze on the back of the driver’s red neck and prayed that we wouldn’t hit anything.
Coming into the big square in front of the gare, the driver, with alcoholic accuracy, picked a hole in the stream of juggernauting green buses and honking taxis and we skidded up to the curb.
“Voilà!” the driver shouted, and craving more dramatic gestures, picked my big suitcase up from the seat beside him and flung it down on to the sidewalk.
I knew what the fictioneers mean by “dumb with horror.”
For in the suitcase was my typewriter, and a journalist cares only a little more for his typewriter than a mother does for her child, a Ford owner for his car, or a ball player for his right arm.
“Drunkard! My machine d’écrire is in there,” I said with all the futility of rage.
The driver’s heroic mood had passed, leaving him mellow. He tried to shake me by the hand.
“Monsieur can call me a thousand camels or pigs. I deserve it. But I was exalted!”
There was nothing to do but catch the train. I followed a porter into the long, dirty station with the driver still shouting, “I was not drunk. I was exalted!”
The results were the same. The typewriter carriage is bent; stuck tight, and will have to be freed in Constantinople.
So this is being scrawled in pencil while the long, brown Orient Express crawls its way across Europe, over imaginary borders, through mountains and across the level harvest fields toward Constantinople and Scutari, where a short, bronzed-faced, blond Turk with a seasoned army of 300,000 men and a united nation at his back dictates terms to the Allies who two years ago hunted him as a bandit.
Sharing my compartment is a young Serbian, who has been to school in Boston. His conversation runs about like this:
“Say. Wattaya think I paid for this coat in Paris? Hundertnfiftey francs. Pretty good? Huh? Wanta see picture my girl? Some girl? Huh? I got a better-looking girl but her picture’s in my trunk. Say look at that Italian officer. Don’t he look just like a woman? I bet he wears corsets. Don’t tell me a guy dresses like that can fight. Say ain’t he a scream?”
I note that the Italian officer, who wears a monocle, has three wound stripes and, in addition to decorations of his own country, a British M.C. [Military Cross].
“Say they ought to take birds like that out and shoot them,” says the Serb.
I reflect that is very nearly what they have done.
We pass through the flat, rich, green and brown plain of Lombardy. It is sentineled by Lombardy poplars and cut up by thick mulberry hedges. Off beyond the rice fields and dry riverbeds with pebbles as big and white as hen’s eggs, the clear, white shaft of a companile catches the sun. Oxen move along the dusty road and a lizard scuttles across the top of a wall as the train passes.
All of Europe is green and golden and ripe. The part of Serbia we are passing through looks like the Niagara peninsula. There is a blue, late-September haze over the fields and since we crossed the Croatian frontier early this morning we have been moving through country that looks like Eastern Ontario. It is hard to believe that this rich, pleasant farming country is the bleak-sounding Balkans. It is, though, and as you ride through it you can see how the love of the land can make men fight wars. It is a matter of land, of fields of corn and yellowing tobacco, of flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, of heaps of yellow pumpkins in the shocked corn, of beech groves and peat smoke from chimneys, a matter of mine and thine that is the cause of all just wars—and there can never be peace in the Balkans as long as one people holds the lands of another people—no matter what the political excuse may be.
Christians Leave Thrace to Turks
The Toronto Daily Star
October 16, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—Thousands of Christians, many hungry and with all their earthly belongings packed on their backs, trudged out of Thrace today as the cross made way for the crescent. Aged men and women, many carrying children, walked toward the Balkan peninsula, leaving forever the homes that they have occupied for years.
Some loaded their household goods in ox carts. Others left everything behind and fled in order to be out of Thrace in fifteen days, the time limit set by the Allied generals and Turkish representatives at the Mudania Conference.
Most of the trains in Thrace have been commandeered by the Greek government to carry soldiers, who will be loaded on transports when they reach the ports. The civilian population had to depend on the rickety carts or walk.
Rodosto, on the Balkan peninsula, was choked with refugees. The suffering and foodless Greeks and Armenians awaited some means to carry them into Greece.
Little relief, it is believed, will greet the refugees when they arrive in Greece. The food supplies there are very inadequate because of the thousands of refugees that are already dependent on the government and charitable agencies for food.
Four British and three French battalions were entering Thrace today on the heels of the departing Greeks.
Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and Sinister
The Toronto Daily Star
October 18, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—Constantinople doesn’t look like the movies. It does n
ot look like the pictures, or the paintings, or anything.
First your train comes winding like a snake down the sunbaked, tree-less, rolling plain to the sea. It rocks along the shore where kids are bathing and out across the blue water you see a big brown island and faintly beyond it bulks the brown coast of Asia. Then it roars in between high stone walls and when you come out you are passing crazy, ramshackle, wooden tenements.
“Stamboul,” the Frenchman who is standing looking out of the window with you, says.
From all I had ever seen in the movies Stamboul ought to have been white and glistening and sinister. Instead the houses look like Heath Robinson drawings, dry as tinder, the color of old weatherbeaten fence rails, and filled with little windows. Scattered through the town rise minarets. They look like dirty, white candles sticking up for no apparent reason.
The train passes the old, reddish Byzantine wall and goes into a culvert again. It comes out and you get flashes of squatting, mushroom-like mosques always with their dirty-white minarets rising from the corners. Everything white in Constantinople is dirty white. When you see the color a white shirt gets in twelve hours you appreciate the color a white minaret gets in four hundred years.
In the station are a jam of porters, hotel runners, and Anglo-Levantine gentlemen in slightly soiled collars, badly soiled white trousers, garlicized breaths and hopeful manners who hope to be hired as interpreters. There is a little something wrong with their passports, just enough to keep them from leaving Constantinople, and they turn their cuffs, clean their white shoes and hope that soon there will be tourists coming to town again. Meantime they will do anything for a price, and their price is very low.
I called a porter, gave him my bags, and told him, “Hotel de Londres,” a hotel the Frenchman had recommended. We started for the cab and the white-trousered one came up. He was contorted with a smile.
“Ah. You are going to the Hôtel de Londres. I am from there. I will ride up with you and take care of your baggage.”
“Get in,” I said.
We drove in a mass of traffic onto a long bridge. White Pants gave the Turkish gendarme a dirty, crumpled note, and we crossed a tangle of shipping on both sides. You can only see patches of the water because of the way the boats were packed.
“What’s that? The Golden Horn?” I asked. It looked more like the Chicago River.
“Yes,” White Pants answered. “Those boats on the left go to the Bosporus and the Black Sea, and those on the right are excursion boats for the Isle of Princes.”
We clattered up a steep street, past shop windows, banks, restaurants, saloons with their signs printed in four languages, scraped by jangling tramcars, were honked at by motorcars filled with British officers, were nearly run down by motors filled with French officers, passed a constant stream of men in business clothes, wearing either fezzes or straw hats, and climbed all the time.
We passed the square building of the American Embassy, looking like a Carnegie library, the square yellow building of the Allied police commission, also looking like a Carnegie library, and the square yellow building of the British Embassy, looking even more like a Carnegie library than the other. We were now in Pera.
Pera is the European quarter. It is higher on the hill than Galata, the business quarter, and is all strung along one narrow, dirty, steep, cobbled, tramcar-filled street. All the public buildings of Pera are uniform in their resemblance to the square, packingcase-shaped Carnegie library, and would make anybody from the States feel at home instantly as they are exact reproductions of the type of post office U.S. small-town congressmen get for their native city in order to assure their perpetual re-election.
The Rumanian and Armenian consulates can be distinguished from the others, however, by the long lines of their citizens, stretched out like the ticket line waiting to get into a big hockey match at the Arena, who are trying to get passports or visas. The Armenian Jews and Rumanians are clearing out of Constantinople. They are selling their property at any sacrifice and getting out. The government issues statements urging them not to be foolish, assuring them that all measures of protection for the inhabitants will be taken, that patrols are being reinforced, that there is no danger. But the Armenians and Jews and the Jewish Rumanians have heard all that before. It is probably all true, they reason, but we aren’t going to take chances. Sooner or later the Kemal troops are going to enter Constantinople, or else there is going to be war and the Armenians, Jews and Greeks cannot forget Smyrna. So they go. With a history of a thousand years of massacre behind them, it is hard for the racial fear to be quieted, no matter who makes the promises.
The Greeks are in a different position. They have a guilty national conscience. It is an uncontested fact that the Greek army in its retreat across Anatolia laid waste and burned the Turkish villages, burnt the crops in the fields, the grain on the threshing floors and committed atrocities. These facts are testified to by American relief workers and Christians who were in the country before, during and after the Greek retreat.
I will take up the question of Greek atrocities later when I have the evidence and testimony of both Christians and Turks and will try and give a complete presentation of the matter to the Star readers. That is not the point now. The fact is that atrocities are always followed by counter-atrocities in these countries and have been since the siege of Troy. And it is the innocent who suffer. The victim of the revenge is rarely the perpetrator of the original outrage. It is this that is emptying Constantinople of Greeks.
I stood on the dusty, rubbish-strewn hillside of Pera, after I had cleaned up at the hotel, and looked down at the harbor, forested with masts and grimy with smoky funnels and across at the dust-colored hills on the other side where the Turkish town sprawled in square mud-colored houses, ramshackle tenements with the dirty-white fingers of the minarets rising like gray-white, slim lighthouses out of the muddled houses. With my glasses I could see an Italian steamer leaving the port, crowded to the rails with Greek refugees seen curiously clearly through the powerful lenses.
It all looked unreal and impossible. But it was very real to the people who were looking back at the city where they were leaving their homes and businesses, all their associations and their livelihoods, because they were afraid to wait and see what would happen when the brown-faced men in fezzes, their carbines strapped on their backs, riding their shaggy, short, mountain horses should come ashore from the ferry from Scutari just across the narrow harbor.
Waiting for an Orgy
The Toronto Daily Star
October 19, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—There is a tight-drawn, electric tension in Constantinople such as only people who live in a city that has never been invaded can imagine.
Take the tension that comes when the pitcher steps into the box before the packed stands at the first game of the world series, multiply it by the tension that comes when the barrier snaps up, the gong clangs and they’re off at the King’s Plate at the Woodbine [Toronto racetrack], add to it the tension in your mind when you walk the floor downstairs as you wait frightened and cold for someone you love, while a doctor and a nurse are doing something in a room above that you cannot help in any way, and you have something comparable to the feeling in Constantinople now.
It is we correspondents who have nothing at stake that get the selfish world series thrill. Even at that, I never lay awake all night in October before a world series because it was too hot to sleep, nor fought mosquitoes and bedbugs in the best New York or Chicago hotels.
It is the collection of cutthroats, robbers, bandits, thugs and Levantine pirates who have gathered here from Batum to Bagdad, and from Singapore to Sicily, that are getting the Woodbine thrill. They are waiting for the looting to begin. And they are ready to begin it on their own account as soon as the triumphal entry of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s troops starts the riotous orgy of celebration that will permit them to fire the wooden tenement quarter which will burn like a gasoline-soaked matchbox.
If the A
llied and Turkish police prevent the orgy that has been planned for the celebration of the Kemal entry it will be one of the finest achievements in the world, because the tough element of all the Near East, of the Balkans, and of the Mediterranean are gathered in Constantinople like jackals waiting for the lion to make his kill.
The people who are getting the sickening, cold, crawling fear-thrill are the Armenians, Greeks and Macedonians, who cannot get away or who have elected to stay. Those who stay are arming themselves and talking desperately.
The landlord of my hotel is a Greek. He has bought the place with his life’s savings. Everything he has in the world is invested in it. I am now the only guest.
“I tell you, sir,” he said last night. “I’m going to fight. We are armed and there are plenty of Christians armed too. I am not going to leave all my life’s work here just because the French force the Allies to give Constantinople to that bandit Kemal. Why do they do it? Greece fought for the Allies in the war and now they desert us. We cannot understand it.”
There are many Greeks talking that way. And all those who are staying are arming. That, of course, increases the danger of trouble still further, because if some Greek in a nervous hysteria takes a potshot at some Turkish celebrators the whole pot will boil over in an instant.
Russian refugees are still another class that are tremendously affected by the coming entry of the Kemalist army. Up till now Constantinople has been the great place of refuge for those of the old regime in Russia who fled from the Soviets.
Many of them have death sentences pending which will be executed if they are handed over to the Soviet government. Kemal is hand in glove with the Soviets and his entry will wipe out the greatest Russian sanctuary.
Dateline- Toronto Page 25