Thus might speak the Turk if he troubled himself to speak at all: but he is silent. All the talking there is done by the Germans.
A curiosity of the war is the way the street crowds have altered in composition in the different capitals.
In London there are the refugees, dressed in clothes of all shapes, colours, and dimensions, the special constables, and the crowds of recruits. In Paris--patriotic Paris--one meets many crippled people, for almost every other man not wearing a uniform has a physical deformity. In the Paris underground, at the Metropolitan Railway Station, a new figure, a sympathetic and admirable figure, has appeared: the woman who works while her husband is at the front. Often she has babies clinging to her skirt as she pierces your railway ticket.
Brussels is overrun by German uniforms; Vienna by refugees from Galicia; Rome by continuous pro-war demonstrations; Constantinople by any amount of Germans, and also by a curious class of Turco-German official who is, for the moment, the real master of the situation.
My journeys will be found in this book in their chronological order, but before I start the record of my war-time travels I should like to set down a conversation I had at Craig-Avon, near Belfast, in April, 1914.
One of the officers of the Ulster Army had just taken me round the camp and shown me everything: the new uniforms, the guns, the commissariat and sanitary arrangements, the men at drill and at play.
We were sitting in the lofty winter-garden of Craig-Avon, and beside our charming host--Captain Craig--Sir Edward Carson, the Archbishop of Belfast, and a few officers of H.M.S. _Pathfinder_, which was anchored off Carrickfergus, were present.
We talked about the situation, and about the organisation of the new troops, and I remember asking Sir Edward Carson the question, "Do you think all this preparation indispensable? Do you think there will ever be any actual fighting?"
"There will be, if we cannot obtain what we want without fighting," came the answer. "In any case, we are training here some jolly good troops, and it is always better for a nation to have trained than untrained men. England will know where to find a few thousand good soldiers in case of need," he concluded smiling.
