Waiting for an Orgy

The Toronto Daily Star

OCTOBER 19, 1922

CONSTANTINOPLE.—There is a tight-drawn, electric tension in Constantinople such as only people who live in a city that has never been invaded can imagine.

Take the tension that comes when the pitcher steps into the box before the packed stands at the first game of the world series, multiply it by the tension that comes when the barrier snaps up, the gong clangs and they’re off at the King’s Plate at the Woodbine [Toronto racetrack], add to it the tension in your mind when you walk the floor downstairs as you wait frightened and cold for someone you love, while a doctor and a nurse are doing something in a room above that you cannot help in any way, and you have something comparable to the feeling in Constantinople now.

It is we correspondents who have nothing at stake that get the selfish world series thrill. Even at that, I never lay awake all night in October before a world series because it was too hot to sleep, nor fought mosquitoes and bedbugs in the best New York or Chicago hotels.

It is the collection of cutthroats, robbers, bandits, thugs and Levantine pirates who have gathered here from Batum to Bagdad, and from Singapore to Sicily, that are getting the Woodbine thrill. They are waiting for the looting to begin. And they are ready to begin it on their own account as soon as the triumphal entry of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s troops starts the riotous orgy of celebration that will permit them to fire the wooden tenement quarter which will burn like a gasoline-soaked matchbox.

If the Allied and Turkish police prevent the orgy that has been planned for the celebration of the Kemal entry it will be one of the finest achievements in the world, because the tough element of all the Near East, of the Balkans, and of the Mediterranean are gathered in Constantinople like jackals waiting for the lion to make his kill.

The people who are getting the sickening, cold, crawling fear-thrill are the Armenians, Greeks and Macedonians, who cannot get away or who have elected to stay. Those who stay are arming themselves and talking desperately.

The landlord of my hotel is a Greek. He has bought the place with his life’s savings. Everything he has in the world is invested in it. I am now the only guest.

“I tell you, sir,” he said last night. “I’m going to fight. We are armed and there are plenty of Christians armed too. I am not going to leave all my life’s work here just because the French force the Allies to give Constantinople to that bandit Kemal. Why do they do it? Greece fought for the Allies in the war and now they desert us. We cannot understand it.”

There are many Greeks talking that way. And all those who are staying are arming. That, of course, increases the danger of trouble still further, because if some Greek in a nervous hysteria takes a potshot at some Turkish celebrators the whole pot will boil over in an instant.

Russian refugees are still another class that are tremendously affected by the coming entry of the Kemalist army. Up till now Constantinople has been the great place of refuge for those of the old regime in Russia who fled from the Soviets.

Many of them have death sentences pending which will be executed if they are handed over to the Soviet government. Kemal is hand in glove with the Soviets and his entry will wipe out the greatest Russian sanctuary.

Fully a fourth of the uniforms you see on the streets are Russian, either the old Imperial army or the troops of Wrangel, Denikin and Yudenitch. Their wearers fled to Constantinople or were evacuated with the remnants of the counterrevolutionary forces, and have not had enough money since to buy any other clothes. Just how Kemal, and his allies of the cheka, will dispose of these men in the high-booted, loosely bloused, worn old Russian uniforms who have been fighting against the Soviets and cannot disguise the fact, is not a pleasant problem.

I would hate to be Kemal with all the dangerous prestige of a great victory behind me and these problems ahead. All the East says that Mustapha Kemal Pasha is a great man. At least he is a successful man, but his entry into Constantinople will be the first indication of whether his fame is to be merely the bubble of military reputation, always burst by the first defeat, or the greatness of a man who can deal with the problems his victory has brought him.

The cards look stacked against him in Constantinople, but if he can accomplish a peaceful entry, keep his troops in hand, and see there is no reign of terror, it will be of greater permanent value to Turkey than many victories in Thrace.