visage of the mutessarif's secretary. It was the first of a series of
visits, which, before we left Gallipoli, were renewed almost every hour,
of dialogues deserving a better immortalization than can be given here.

You must imagine, on one side of the dining-room table, the plump little
bey, with his fez and glasses, quick little salutes each time he took a
match or cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffable
flannels or riding-clothes--for the embassy secretary is one of those
who believe that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner
man. Cigarettes--coffee--assurances to his excellency that the house is
his, to Monsieur Le Directeur of our pleasure and profound
consideration. Minutes pass, an hour--the bey knows no such thing as
time, the other is as unhurried as he. The talk, in somewhat halting
French, is of war, weather, French culture, marriage, those dreadful
Russians, punctuated by delicate but persistently recurring references,
on one side, to mattresses and food for the hostages, by the little
bey's deep sighs and his "Mais ... que fairef"

That "But what can be done?" like the Mexican's "Who knows?" fell like a
curtain on every pause, it was the bey's answer to all life's riddles--
the plight of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of being
governor of a province close to Constantinople. One can hear him now
through that cloud of cigarette smoke, "Mais--" with a pause and
scarcely perceptible lifting of the shoulders--"que faire..."

We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get blankets and buy or
order mattresses, and found it much what Gallipoli must have been a few
days before--sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretchers and
Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting streets, noisy with traders
and refugees.