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[419] 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But so quick are the changes there, so chameleon-like is the place, that all this was already out of date two days later.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.[420] 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[421] 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[422] 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[423] 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............