Few wars have ever been so obviously forced by a determined marauder upon a helpless victim.  Italy wanted to show her strength, both to her own people and to assembled Europe.  Hence she prepared her armies and then delivered to Turkey, the nominal suzerain of Tripoli, a sudden ultimatum.  The Turks must do exactly what Italy demanded, and immediately, or Italy would seize Tripoli.  The “Young Turks” offered every possible concession; but Italy, hurriedly rejecting every proposition, made the seizure she had planned.

The strife that followed had its opera-bouffe aspect in the utter helplessness of far-off Turkey, incapable of reaching the seat of war; but it had also its tragic scandal in the accusation of cruelty made against the Italian troops.  It had also, in the Balkan wars and other changes which sprang more or less directly from it, a permanent effect upon the political affairs of Europe as well as upon those of Africa.

WILLIAM T. ELLIS[1]

[Footnote 1:  Reprinted by permission from Lippincott’s Magazine.]

There are conversational compensations for life in the Orient.  Talk does not grow stale when there are always the latest phases of “the great game” of international politics to gossip about.  Men do not discuss baseball performances in the cafes of Constantinople; but the latest story of how Von Bieberstein, the German Ambassador, bulldozed Haaki Pasha, the Grand Vizier, and sent the latter whining among his friends for sympathy, is far more piquant.  The older residents among the ladies of the diplomatic corps, whose visiting list extends “beyond the curtain,” have their own well-spiced tales to tell of “the great game” as it is played behind the latticed windows of the harem.  It is not only in London and Berlin and Washington and Paris that wives and daughters of diplomats boost the business of their men-folk.  In this mysterious, women’s world of Turkey there are curious complications; as when a Young Turk, with a Paris veneer, has taken as second or third wife a European woman.  One wonders which of these heavily veiled figures on the Galata Bridge, clad in hideous ezars, is an Englishwoman or a Frenchwoman or a Jewess.

Night and day, year in and year out, with all kinds of chessmen, and with an infinite variety of byplays, “the great game” is played in Constantinople.  The fortunes of the players vary, and there are occasional—­very occasional—­open rumpuses; but the players and the stakes remain the same.  Nobody can read the newspaper telegrams from Tripoli and Constantinople intelligently who has not some understanding of the real game that is being carried on; and in which an occasional war is only a move.