bombarded towns are never interested in the rules of war. So a new and
particularly disturbing rumor went flying through the crowded streets of
Constantinople.

It is a city of rumors, this beautiful, bewildering Bagdad of the West,
where all the races of the world jostle each other in the narrow
streets, and you never know how the man who brushes past you lives--let
alone feels and thinks. The Constantinople trolley-cars are divided by
a curtain, on one side of which sit the men, on the other the veiled
women. When there are several women the conductor slides the curtain
along, so that half the car is a harem; when there are none he slides it
back, and there is no harem at all.

And life is like that. You are at once in a modern commercial city and
an ancient Mohammedan capital, and never know when the one will fade out
like a picture on a screen and leave you in the Orient, facing its
mystery, its fatalism, its vengeance that comes in a night.

You can imagine what it must become, walled in with war and censorship,
with the English and French banging away at the Dardanelles gate to the
south, the Russian bear growling at the door of the Bosporus, so close
that you can every now and then hear the rumble of cannon above the din
of Constantinople--just as you might hear them in Madison Square if an
enemy were bombarding the forts at Sandy Hook. You wake up one morning
to hear that all the influential Armenians have been gathered up and
shipped to the interior; you go down to the ordinary-looking hotel
breakfast-room and the three Germans taking coffee in the corner stop
talking at once; at lunch some one stoops to whisper to the man across
the table, there is a moment's silence until the waiter has gone, and
the man across the table mutters: "The G. V. says not to worry"--"G.