A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her hospital.  It had been started only a fortnight before, there were no beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on the floor.  One man, whose face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster, had been burned at Gallipoli.  Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth.  In spite of it he took Philip’s cigarette and smoked it.  He was dead when we came back three days later.  On another mattress was a poor little brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in the spine and paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gallipoli and now delirious.  Philip later took him back to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might save his life.

It was sundown when we got back to the hostages with our spoils.  The thing had begun to get on their nerves.  The English said little, determined evidently to remain Britons to the last, but some of the Levantines let themselves go completely.  A pale gentleman with a poetic beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent.  It was not a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried.  Another declared that without bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war, probably, they must at least have food—­that was a need “primordial!”

Another stood apart, whacking his chest and addressing the empty air, “C’est moi, c’est moi, qui n’a pas d’argent!”—­it was he who had no money and nothing to cover him, and what did they want him to do?  If he had come down to be shot at, well and good, but if he was to be frozen and starved by inches...

Philip smoothed them down as best he could and returned to invite the governor’s secretary to stay for dinner, a repast for which Hassan, the embassy khavass who accompanied the expedition, had procured, as he put it, “some fresh eggies from a nice little man.”

The bey, who, that morning, had leaned toward the French, now warmed to America.  The French were enlightened, he said, but without morals, the English civilized but jealous; if he had any sons he would send them to America, the only place where young men were both civilized and properly “serieux.”  In the midst of these amiable speculations it was suggested that, in view of the difficulty of getting mattresses, the government might even requisition them.  The suggestion drew a regretful sigh from the bey, for Turkey was a constitutional country, he said, the shops and houses were closed and their owners gone, and there was no way in which such a thing could be done.