I arrived at Constantinople in May 1909, on the same day that the Sultan Abdul Hamid left the city. A revolution had just occurred. The Young Turk party had dethroned the Sultan. The revolution was a military one.

When I arrived, the surface life of Constantinople was unchanged. The only traces of the crisis were a few marks, and some slight damage done by shells and bullets on the walls of the houses. The streets were crowded with soldiers. The tram-cars and the cabs were full of dusty men, stained with the marks of campaigning: Albanians with rifles slung across their shoulders, Macedonian gendarmes in light blue uniforms. The mosques were crowded with soldiers. Shots were sometimes heard, but none of the soldiery except the marines gave any trouble.

I lived at the Little Club at Pera. My bedroom looked out on to the Golden Horn. In the foreground were dark cypresses. Across the water I could see Stamboul, soft as a soap-bubble in the haze, milky-white and filmy with a hundred faint rainbow hues. The Club was a centre of gossip and mild gambling. Enver Pasha used to frequent it, and one evening a man called Assiz Bey walked in to play cards, with a piece of a rope which had just served to hang a man.

I attended the Selamlik of the new Sultan. It was a casual ceremony. Most of the troops were drawn up in places where it was impossible for the Sultan to pass, and up to the last all were in doubt as to what the Sultan’s route would be. At the last minute the whole cortège was stopped by a large hay wagon which leisurely took its way along the road which had been cleared for the Sultan. In Stamboul the brightest[398] of crowds swarmed—men and women of every colour, dressed in all colours, chirruping like sparrows, hanging out of wooden balconies beside broken Byzantine arches, where one caught sight of trailing wistaria and sometimes of a Judas tree in blossom. The Sultan had no military escort and only one sais, dressed in blue and gold, as an outrider. There was no pomp about the ceremony, which passed off well. The Turkish Parliament was sitting not a stone’s throw from St. Sophia, and not far from the site where Justinian’s Palace once stood. The crowd wandered and lolled about, smoking cigarettes by the gates of the Parliament; the fickle, opportunist, supple-minded, picturesque crowd of Stamboul, was, I think, akin to that which fought for the “Blues” or the “Greens” in the days of Justinian and Theodora.

One night, I was invited to meet the leading men of the Young Turk party, Talaat Bey and others. They all drank water at the meal, but before the meal began, we were all offered a stiff glass of whisky to show that the new Government had discarded the old-fashioned Mohammedan principles. But though the hosts drank the whisky they did not appear to enjoy it.

The heat at Constantinople, and the atmosphere of the place, sapped one’s energy. The manifold activities of the human machine seemed to exhaust themselves in the acts of drinking coffee and in having one’s boots cleaned. You had your boots finished off out of doors after they had been preliminarily cleaned indoors. You sat on a chair and a man in a shirt and a fez, rubbed them, waxed them, greased them, kneaded them with his bare hand, brushed them, dusted them, polished them with a silk handkerchief, and painted the edges of them with a spirit. And during this process you looked on at the shifting crowd, sipped your coffee, and thought long thoughts which led nowhere.

One morning streams of people were walking briskly from Pera to Stamboul, in the same direction. They were making for the Galata Bridge, for there was news in the air that they had been hanging some Turkish Danny Deevers in the morning. Nobody quite knew whether they had been hanged yet or not. Some people said they had been hanged at dawn; others, that they were about to be hanged; others, that they had just been hanged. They had, as a matter of fact, been hanged at[399] dawn: three of them at the end of the bridge, three of them opposite St. Sophia, four, I think, opposite the House of Parliament, and three somewhere else—making thirteen in all. They were soldiers, and one of them was an officer. They were hanged for having taken part in a recent mutiny in the cause of Abdul Hamid, and for having murdered some men.

As you walked farther along the bridge the crowd grew denser, and right at the end of the bridge it was a seething mass, kept back by soldiers from the actual spot where the victims were hanging—the crowd, not a London-like crowd, all drab and grey, but a living kaleidoscope of startling colours—the colours of tulips and Turkey carpets and poppy-fields, red, blue, and yellow. The gallows, which were in line along the side of the street beyond the bridge, were primitive tripods of wood. Each victim was strung up by a rope fixed to a pulley. The men were hanged by being made to stand on a low chair. The chair was kicked away and the sharp jerk killed them. They were hanging not far above the ground. They were each covered by a white gown, and to the breast of each one his sentence was affixed, written in Turkish letters. They looked neither like felons nor like murderers, but rather like happy martyrs (in a sacred picture), calm, with an inscrutable content. I had but a glimpse of them, and then I was carried away by the swaying crowd, which soldiers were prodding with the butts of their rifles. The dead soldiers were to hang there all day. I did not go any farther.

As I was trying to make my way back through the crowd, a Hodja (a Moslem priest) passed, and he was roughly handled by the soldiers, and given a few sharp blows in the back with their rifles. I heard fragments of conversation, English and French. Some people were saying that the exhibition would have a satisfactory effect on the populace. I saw a Kurd, a fierce-looking man who was gnashing his teeth—not at the victims, to be sure, but at the sight of three Moslems who had died for their faith, and for having defended it against those who they were told were its enemies, being made into a spectacle after their death for the unbeliever and the alien.

The following afternoon I was wandering about the streets of Stamboul when, amongst the indolent crowd, I noticed several men who were peculiar. Firstly, they were walking in a hurry. Secondly, they were dressed like Russians,[400] in long, grey, shabby redingotes, what the Russians call padevki, and their hair, allowed to grow long, was closely cropped at the ends just over the neck, where it hung in a bunch. They wore high boots. I knew they were Russians, and paid but little attention to them, since Constantinople is not a place, like London, where the appearance of an obvious foreigner is a remarkable sight. But I met an English friend, who said: “Have you seen the Russian pilgrims?” This led me to run after them. I soon caught them up, for they were delayed under an arch by some soldiers who were escorting some prisoners (soldiers also).

“Are you Russian?” I asked one of the pilgrims—a tall, fair man.

“Yes,” he answered; “I am from Russia.”

“You are a pilgrim?”

“Yes; I come from Jerusalem.”

The man was walking in a great hurry, and by this time we had reached the Galata Bridge.

“Who were those men the soldiers were leading?” the pilgrim asked me.

“Those were prisoners—soldiers who mutinied.”

Here two others, a grey-bearded man, and a little, dark man, joined in; the grey-bearded man had a medicine bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. I am certain it contained an intoxicating spirit.

“Some soldiers were hanged here,” I added.

“Where?” said the man.

“There,” I answered, showing him the exact spot. “They stayed there all day.”

“For all the people to see,” said the pilgrim, much impressed. “Why were they hanged?”

“They mutinied.”

“Ah, just like in our own country!” said the pilgrim.

“But,” joined in the dark man, “have not you sent away your Gosudar?” (Sovereign).

“I am not from here; I am an Englishman.”

“Ah, but did the people here send away their Gosudar?”

“They did.”

“And was it done,” asked the grey-haired pilgrim, “with God favouring and assisting (Po Bozhemu) or not?”

I hesitated. The brown man thought I did not understand.

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“Was it right or wrong?” he asked.

“They said,” I answered, “that their Sultan had not kept his word; that he had given a ‘Duma’ and was acting against it.”

“Ah!” said the brown-haired man. “So now they have a ‘Duma’!”

“Yes,” I said; “they have liberty now.”

“Ah! Liberty! Eh! Eh! Eh!” said the grey-haired man, and he chuckled to himself. Oh, the scepticism of that chuckle!—as much as to say, we know what that means.

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