IN CONSTANTINOPLE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 205, 18 January 1913, Page 2 (Supplement)

IN CONSTANTINOPLE

\Y AR-TIM E SNAPSHOTS. (Hy G. Ward Price, in the Daily Mail). Constantinople, November 24. It is a month to-morrow since the correspondents' train left Constantinople for the front—a month crowded with ama/.ing anil unexpected happenings and ending with the Bulgar army thirty miles'from the capital—where the simplest description of the situation is a chaos of terrible possibilities. The strain cannot go on like this. Even in Turkey there is a limit to human endurance. War, disease, and the added chances of riot and revolution are more than Constantinople, despite its many centuries of tumultuous history, can hear much longer. To look back on this last month, in which lighting and politics Imve been in turn of higher importance, is to see a long chain of vignettes of scenes and situations entirely separate from each other. PERA BY NIGHT. If rumor has a home, it is here. There is a big cafe in the Grande Rue, with broad, plate-glass windows. Look through them at the scene within and you grasp 6ome small idea of the human patchwork that makes up this city of no nation and all nationalities. Greek and Jew, Austrian and German, Turk and Armenian, Frenchman and Italian, Englishman and Levantine, which i s a mingling of all the rest, there they, sit in hundreds and do nothing but spread rumor from table to table. "Gibt's was neues?" "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a de neuf?" "What's the news?" Everyone puts the same question as soon as he comes in. Everyone obtains | the same abundant reply. They pass from table to table, to drink another absinthe with a friend, or a tenth cup of thick Tu«kish coffee, and as they go they spread their ever-growing stories. Start a rumor at one table and you can cross the cafe and wait for it to eatch you lip again developed almost beyond knowledge. Tokatlian's is more of a club than a cafe, and more still of & telepathic receiving station for every fantastic report that is floating round the city. Journalists call it the "marche aux canards," and you must not believe one single word you hear there. AT THE FRONT. The front is only nine hours' hilly riding from Tokatlian's now, and it womld be only three hours' motoring if th« roads marked as such on the maps <Kd not suddenly perish in a wilderness of ditches and rocks. At the front the scene is much the same, I suppose, as in every war—bursting shrapnel, tiny dots in the distance, which are men's heads appearing above the trenches, long, wide-spaced lines of men on one's own side moving slowly forward, and leaving now and then a grey figure to lie still behind. But it is just back of the front that the Turkish army makes a curious impression. There are so many men wandering apparently purposelessly about. Trains of ammunition and supplies one sees occasionally, and the men who are filling water-bottled and buckets at springs and trudging slowly back towards the firingline have an intelligible occupation, too, but there are hundreds of individual soldiers in addition tramping rearwards alone, or sleeping by the wayside, or living in little 'bivouacs of their own, two or three together, without seemingly any connection with a definite unit or corps. They are neither in the firing line nor with the reserves, nor at work on the line of communications. They are just private soldiers in the fullest sense of the term. , Do not look at the horses as you go up to the front. They rarely unsaddle even a cavalry horse, but if you do sec one with a bare back, it is invariably covered with festering sores six inches square. The Turks have no notion of horsemanship. I watched only yesterday a pair of horses trying to drag a cart heavily loaded with ammunition up a steep, deep-rutted road. There were twenty dismounted men and a mounted officer with them. A little shoving behind would have helped the cart up easily enough. Instead, the driver lashed his paid up the slope until one slipped and fell, half in a rut. It was obvious that he could not get up without being unharnessed, but the whole detachment was content to stand round while one of them beat the fallen horse for 'several minutes with a rope. The poor brute could do simply nothing as he lay. "Pig of a horse," was the most helpful remark that the officer could find to make. THE CHOLERA. Fresh heaps of earth by the wayside are some of the first signs of it as you get up to the reserves. But yon will not go long before you come upon the dead. One here; two a hundred yards oil; three another —the tally mounts, as you ride, to scores. They lie, some of them as if asleep; others contorted, or squatting with heads between knees. Over there is a tent blown down, leaving three more, .stiffened in the. midst of their la-l writhe. Hademkcni. lately the Turkish headquarters, is crowded with them. They lie undisturbed in the narrow streets, and the living step over them. Just outside the village there are horrible heaps of tlieni. waiting to he shuffled into a long, shallow grave. You pass the dying, too. sitting on the ground, with purple-colored faces, or staggering as they try to walk. Their ccmrades seem to pay 110 attention to them. nor. indeed, could they do anything to lielp. QUARTERS FOR THE NIGHT. It is twilight as one rides into the desolate little village of scattered low, untidy houses, clustered round a muddy fountain. A few soldiers have made their bivouac there for the night, but. the peasants who own the houses are gone and the doors stand open. Greater confusion could not be con- j trived. Litter of all sort* fills the. streets—a smashed pack-saddle, an odd slipper, scraps of el othing of all sorts, an ugly dead horse with big pieces of the hide stripped off to be made into shoe*—and there, among the rubbish, an old. jagged marble block catches the eye. for on it is plainly carved a cross. Doubtless it is pari of the pacital of a pillar from a Christian chapel-of-ease that stood there six centuries ago. For all lhat time it must have lain among the boulders of the village sctreet. Never was it nearer restoration to its former place than now. You tie your horse in the empty stall and choose a room in the cottage next floor for yourself. Then by the light, of a candle comes a supper of tinned meat from the saddle-bags, and so to sieep on the bare boards, with saddle for a pillow, till daybreak sees another day's ride begin. THE ENGLISH SAILORS. My bedroom window in Constantinople looks on to the British Embassy garden, through the streets of which you see the scattered lights of Stamboul set in the soft blackness of (he long hill across the Golden Horn. There is a crunch of feet 011 the gravel, and then—it startled me when I came back last night after dark from the battle —a sudden, "'Alt! Who goes there?" "Rounds," comes the answer, and then more words indistinguishable, with the clear voice of an

i officer eaying: "If anyone approaches, I remain at the charge till they've gone ( , by. You don't know who it might bo," and the rounds go on their way with crisp, firm tread, and more challenges ring out down the long wall of the Embassy garden, sharp and clear. How different from the slouching, careless sentries of the Turkish lines out there! How comfortably and unmistakeably English! One sleeps quietly with those familial- voices below the window.