V." meaning Grand Vizier. To-morrow the Goeben is to be blown up, or
there will be a revolution, or a massacre--heaven knows what! Into an
atmosphere like this, with wounded pouring back in thousands from the
Dardanelles, there came the news of the bombardment of Gallipoli. And
with it went the rumor of reprisal--all the English and French left
behind in Constantinople, and there were a good many who had been
permitted to go about their business more or less as usual, were to be
collected, men, women, and children, taken down to the peninsula and
distributed in the "unfortified" towns. The American ambassador would
notify England and France through Washington, and if then the Allies
chose to bombard, theirs was the risk.

The American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau, set about to see what could be
done. Presently the word went round that the women might stay behind,
but the men, high and low, must go. They came flocking to the embassy,
already besought for weeks by French Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in
distress, some begging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere
as their share of the war. The Turks were finally induced to include
only those between twenty and forty, and at the last moment this was cut
to an even fifty--twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French. The
plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known remnants of the French and
English colonies, and disappointed the chief of police, who had not
unreasonably hoped, as he wistfully put it, "to have some notables." Of
the fifty probably not more than a dozen had been born in England or
France, the others being natives of Malta, Greece--the usual Levantines.
Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were not "important,"
according to newspaper standards, they were, presumably, important to
themselves. They were very important, indeed, to the wives and mothers
and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea wall that Thursday morning,
weeping and wailing, and waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron