The fish is good, but fish is a brain food and anyone taking about three good doses of a brain food would leave Constan at once—even if he had to swim to do it.
There are one hundred and sixty-eight legal holidays in Con-stan. Every Friday is a Mohammedan holiday, every Saturday is a Jewish holiday, and every Sunday is a Christian holiday. In addition there are Catholic, Mohammedan and Greek holidays during the week, not to mention Yom Kippur and other Jewish holidays. As a result, every young Constaner’s life ambition is to go to work for a bank.
No one who makes any pretense of conforming to custom dines in Constantinople before nine o’clock at night. The theaters open at ten. The nightclubs open at two—the more respectable night-clubs, that is. The disreputable nightclubs open at four in the morning.
All night hot sausage, fried potato and roast chestnut stands run their charcoal braziers on the sidewalk to cater to the long lines of cabmen who stay up all night to solicit fares from the revelers. Constantinople is doing a sort of dance of death before the entry of Kemal Pasha, who has sworn to stop all booze, gambling, dancing and nightclubs.
Galata, halfway up the hill from the port, has a district that is more unspeakably horrible than the foulest heyday of the old Barbary Coast. It festers there, trapping the soldiers and sailors of all the Allies and of all nations.
Turks sit in front of the little coffeehouses in the narrow blind-alley streets at all hours, puffing on their bubble-bubble pipes and drinking deusico, the tremendously poisonous, stomach-rotting drink that has a greater kick than absinthe and is so strong that it is never consumed except with a hors d’oeuvre of some sort.
Before the sun rises in the morning you can walk through the black, smooth-worn streets of Constan and rats will scuttle out of your way, a few stray dogs nose at the garbage in the gutters, and a bar of light comes through the rack in a shutter letting out a streak of light and the sound of drunken laughing. That drunken laughing is the contrast to the muezzin’s beautiful, minor, soaring, swaying call to prayer, and the black, slippery, smelly, offal-strewn streets of Constantinople in the early morning are the reality of the Magic of the East.
Afghans: Trouble for Britain
The Toronto Daily Star
October 31, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—Afghanistan is another weapon that is being forged against the British Empire by Kemal and his Pan-Eastern friends. For over a year Kemalist officers have been training Afghan troops, getting them ready for the moment to strike. Now they are ready.
I happen to know something about the inside history of contemporary Afghanistan with its aims and hatreds. It came to me from Shere Mohamet Khan, who lived in Rome for a while and is now Afghan minister for war.
Shere Mohamet—the Khan is the Afghan suffix meaning prince—was tall, dark-haired, hawk-faced, as straight as a lance, with the bird-of-prey eyes and the hooked nose that mark the Afghan. He looked like a man out of the Renaissance, though his breed are the original Semites and go back as an unconquered people to the days of the Medes and Persians.
The old Amir of Afghanistan was Abderahman Khan. All his life he hated the English, who were using Afghanistan as a buffer state between India and Russia, and who forbade them to have diplomatic relations with any country except England, runs Shere Mohamet’s story.
He was a great man, was Abderahman, a hard man, a farseeing man and an Afghan. He spent his life consolidating Afghanistan into a strong nation, and in training his son. His son was to carry on his work, to make war on the English.
The old man died. The son, Habibullah Khan, became Amir. The English invited him to come down to India, on a state visit, and he went to see what manner of people these English were. There the English got him. First they entertained him royally. They showed him many delights and they taught him to drink. I do not say he was not an apt learner. He was no longer a man and an Afghan.
He came back to Kabul, that was just after the armistice in 1918, and the Afghans killed him. He was assassinated. It was really an execution. Then there was a meeting of the Great Council in Kabul and Nasirullah Khan, the oldest grandson of the old Amir, was questioned.
“Will you defend Afghanistan if you are chosen king?” they asked him.
“I will defend Afghanistan,” he answered.
“Will you make war on the English?”
“I will try,” he answered.
They let him go out of the council room.
Aminullah, the next grandson, was brought in.
“What will you do if you are chosen king?” they asked him.
“I will do two things,” Aminullah answered. “I will defend Afghanistan and I will make war on the English.”
So they chose him king, and a few weeks later he led his troops over the pass into India.
That is Shere Mohamet’s story.
Very few people even remember that there was an Afghan war, just after the armistice. It was the Royal Air Force that won it by bombing out the Afghan cities back of the lines and destroying the mud forts where the hill men, having had no experience with planes before, congregated. At any rate it was a British victory and so announced.
But when they signed the treaty of peace, Great Britain gave up every right that she had always fought for in Afghanistan. Other countries were permitted by treaty to have diplomatic and consular representatives in Afghanistan, arms were permitted to be imported, arms were even permitted to be imported through India. The war may have been a British victory but the peace was certainly an Afghan victory. The Afghans had always hated England but now they felt contempt for her.
So now there are Soviet Russian consulates in all the Afghan cities, the Afghans are armed with modern arms and are trained by Kemalist officers. Aminullah, “my great king,” Shere Mohamet calls him, has not forsworn his oath to make war on the English—and he has not gone down to the fleshpots of India.
When Kemal attacks Mesopotamia, and sooner or later he will, there will be a well-equipped, well-trained Afghan army come down the Khyber Pass that will not be the ill-equipped, unschooled band of hill men that were defeated in 1919. They have an alliance with Mustapha Kemal now. They are elated over the Kemalist successes and even their existence is a perpetual threat against the British rule in India that prevents her from drawing a single regiment from there in case of trouble elsewhere.
The Afghans will fight. It is their métier. Shere Mohamet has a story that illustrates the Afghan spirit.
“When I came home to my house in Kabul from the council that decided on the last war, my wife and my daughter had my pistols and my sword and all my kit laid out for me.
“‘What is this?’ I said.
“‘Your things for the war. There is going to be a war, is there not?’ said my wife.
“‘Yes. But I am the minister of war. I do not go to this war. The minister of war does not go to the war itself.’
“My wife shook her head. ‘I do not understand it,’ she said very haughtily. ‘If you are this minister of war who cannot go to war, you must resign. That is all. We would be disgraced if you did not go.’”
That is the spirit the Kemalists trained, and armed by the Russians it makes another Eastern problem that does not look easy of solution.
The Greek Revolt
The Toronto Daily Star
November 3, 1922
MURADLI, EASTERN THRACE.—As I write, the Greek troops are commencing their evacuation of Eastern Thrace. In their ill-fitting U.S. uniforms, they are trekking across the country, cavalry patrols out ahead, the soldiers marching sullenly but occasionally grinning at us as we pass their strung-out, straggling columns. They have cut all the telegraph wires behind them; you see them dangling from the poles like Maypole ribbons. They have abandoned their thatched huts, their camouflaged gun positions, their machine-gun nests, and all the heavily wired, strung-out, fortified ridges where they had planned to make a last stand against the Turks.
Heavy wheeled baggage carts drawn by muddy-flanked buff
alo with slanted-back horns drag along the dusty road. Some soldiers lie on top of the mounds of baggage, while others goad the buffalo along. Ahead and behind the baggage carts are strung out the troops. This is the end of the great Greek military adventure.
Might-have-beens are a sad business and the end of Greek military power is sad enough as it is, but there is no blame for it to be given to the Greek common soldier. Even in the evacuation the Greek soldiers looked like good troops. There was a sturdy doggedness about them that would have meant a hard time for the Turk if Kemal’s army would have had to fight for Thrace instead of having it handed to them as a gift at Mudania.
Captain Wittal of the Indian cavalry, who was attached to the Greek army in Anatolia as an observer during the Greek war with Kemal, told me the inside story of the intrigue that led to the breakdown of the Greek army in Asia Minor.
“The Greek soldiers were first-class fighting men,” Captain Wittal said. “They were well officered by men who had served with the British and French at Salonika and they outclassed the Kemalist army. I believe they would have captured Angora and ended the war if they had not been betrayed.
“When Constantine came into power all the officers of the army in the field were suddenly scrapped, from the commander-in-chief down to platoon commanders. These officers had many of them been promoted from the ranks, were good soldiers and splendid leaders. They were removed and their places filled with new officers of the Tino [Constantine] party, most of whom had spent the war in Switzerland or Germany and had never heard a shot fired. That caused a complete breakdown of the army and was responsible for the Greek defeat.”
Captain Wittal told me how artillery officers who had no experience at all took over the command of batteries and massacred their own infantry. He told about infantry officers who used powder, face powder not gun-powder, and rouge, and about staff work which was criminal in its ignorance and negligence.
“In one show in Anatolia,” Wittal said, “the Greek infantry were doing an absolutely magnificent attack and their artillery was doing them in. Major Johnson [the other British observer who later acted as liaison officer with the press at Constantinople] is a gunner, you know. He’s a fine gunner too. Well, Major Johnson cried at what those gunners were doing to their infantry. He was wild to take over the artillery. But he couldn’t do a thing. We had orders to preserve strict neutrality—and he couldn’t do a thing.”
That is the story of the Greek army’s betrayal by King Constantine. And that is the reason the revolution in Athens was not just a fake as many people have claimed. It was the rising of an army that had been betrayed against the man who had betrayed it.
The old Venizelist officers came back after the revolution and reorganized the army in Eastern Thrace. Greece looked on Thrace as a Marne where she must fight and make a final stand or perish. Troops were rushed in. Everybody was at a white heat. Then the Allies at Mudania handed Eastern Thrace over to the Turk and gave the Greek army three days to start getting out.
The army waited, not believing that their government would sign the Mudania convention, but it did, and the army, being soldiers, are getting out.
All day I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers hiking along the trails across the brown, rolling, barren Thracian countryside. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.
Kemal’s One Submarine
The Toronto Daily Star
November 10, 1922
CONSTANTINOPLE.—Before the British fleet steamed into the Sea of Marmora, Constantinople was in a state of panic, the Turkish pound rocketing and falling, the European population panic-stricken, and ugly talk of massacres was blowing about everywhere.
Then the great, gray fleet came in one day and the town settled back in relief. There was no more massacre talk, for it was made known to Hamid Bey, Kemal’s Constantinople representative, that if there was any massacre of Christians started, Stamboul would be razed to the ground. It may have been a bluff but the Turks believed it.
Perhaps it is because of the navy’s treatment of war correspondents that it so effectively remains the Silent Service. It has a way with war correspondents, a most definite way. It divides them into friends and enemies.
Enemies receive the treatment the Daily Mail man got after Northcliffe’s attack on Admiral Jellicoe, the idol of the Navy. He shared every hardship with his men and was loved like a father. The Daily Mail came out with an attack on him and shortly after the man who wrote it was assigned to the Grand Fleet. The journalist arrived armed with a letter from the admiralty ordering the commanders of all ships to give him transportation wherever he desired to go. He presented himself to a certain admiral.
“You can’t come on board,” said the admiral.
The Daily Mail man produced his letter. The admiral read it.
“Good,” he growled. “This is a definite order. Where do you wish to go and when?”
The Daily Mail man told him.
“Good,” said the admiral. “Send for Lieutenant Wilson.”
Lieutenant Wilson arrived and saluted.
“This man has a letter from the admiralty ordering us to give him transportation. It is a definite order. But it says nothing about comfort, aid or anything else. You will take this man where he wishes to go on your destroyer but do not allow him off the deck or in the wardroom.”
Lieutenant Wilson saluted again.
When the journalist went aboard no one spoke to him except the destroyer commander. “Oh, by the way, Paddock, [that is not his name] “this letter doesn’t say anything about food. If you want to eat you’d better dig yourself up some grub ashore and bring it aboard.”
That is the way the navy has with enemies. Its friends it entertains so amply, completely, thoroughly and enthusiastically that they retain only a vague and idyllic picture of the visit.
Kemal’s only submarine was the principal problem and joy of the fleet at Constantinople. This submarine was given to Mustapha Kemal by Soviet Russia and sent out from Odessa. The captain was not enthusiastic about going and the Bolshevists told him he would be hanged if he came back to Odessa without having sunk a British warship.
British naval intelligence officers were advised of the undersea boat’s departure and orders were given to sink it on sight with no questions asked or answered as soon as it crossed an imaginary line drawn across the Black Sea entrance to the Bosporus. Destroyer commanders were also instructed that this line was to be fairly elastic and subject to a little stretching.
As soon as the submarine was sighted, two destroyers were to put out into the Black Sea and get behind him so he couldn’t go back. Four others were to proceed along the narrow channel of the Bosporus dropping depth charges at regular intervals.
Destroyers sighted the submarine on six different occasions, but he was always too far at sea for them to go after him, even allowing for extreme stretching of the imaginary deadline. Then the submarine disappeared.
He next turned up off Trebizond as a full-fledged pirate, halting ships, searching the passengers and crew and doing a very good business. He is still under the “Jolly Roger” and the captain is laying away plunder enough to enable him to retire if he escapes the gallows that are waiting for him at Odessa and the six lean gray destroyers cruise up and down the Bosporus waiting for him to appear.
The destroyer patrols have exciting times in the Bosporus. At one time, during the Mudania Conference, a destroyer was running a night patrol along the Asiatic side of the straits. No one knew whether there was going to be peace or war, and the destroyer had been picking up small boats with armed Turks in them who were making their way across to Constantinople.
Their searchlight showed something suspicious-looking in a cove near Belcos, not twelve miles from Constantinople, and a boat put ashore to investigate.
As the boat n
eared the beach, it was fired upon. It kept on going and after the first ragged volley there was no shooting. As the boat landed on the beach a horseman rode out of the black shadow at the side of the searchlight beam and spoke in French.
“We are a squadron of Kemalist cavalry,” he said, and the officer in charge of the boat could see the horses huddled back of the little hill. “We have come here to show we could if we want to. Now we are going back.”
There was nothing for the British officer to do. The cavalry were some thirty miles inside the neutral zone—but all the British army and navy’s efforts in those days were directed to avoiding war instead of accepting provocations for making it. The officer went back with his boat to his destroyer.
Another night a destroyer patrol near the suburb of Bebek stopped a boatload of Turkish women who were crossing from Asia Minor after the ferries were stopped. On being searched for arms or contraband it turned out all the women were men. They were all armed—and later proved to be Kemalist officers sent over to organize the Turkish population in the suburbs in case of an attack on Constantinople.
But whether they were checking the infiltration of Kemalist troops, seizing Russian gold rubles and propaganda tracts that were being brought up the straits in crazy old fishing smacks from Batum, or simply seeing that the Turkish boats kept their riding lights lit, the destroyer flotilla remained a part of the Silent Service. Now with the censorship off, this is the first account of their activities or of the sad career of Kemal’s Bolshevik submarine.
Refugees from Thrace
The Toronto Daily Star
November 14, 1922
SOFIA, BULGARIA.—In a comfortable train with the horror of the Thracian evacuation behind me, it is already beginning to seem unreal. That is the boon of our memories.
Dateline- Toronto Page 27