You can imagine the excitement over this mysterious stranger with an
unlimited supply of gold lire and big silver medjidies, asking not what
kind of blankets, but how many did they have, how long would it take
them to make not one, but fifty mattresses! Greek traders, Jews from the
Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths in fez and American clothes, with
recommendations from American Y. M. C. A.'s--it was a great afternoon
for Lapsaki!

A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town
by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her
hospital. It had been started only a fortnight before, there were no
beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on the floor. One man,
whose face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster,
had been burned at Gallipoli. Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a
hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth. In
spite of it he took Philip's cigarette and smoked it. He was dead when
we came back three days later. On another mattress was a poor little
brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in the spine and
paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gallipoli and now delirious. Philip
later took him back to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might
save his life.

It was sundown when we got back to the hostages with our spoils. The
thing had begun to get on their nerves. The English said little,
determined evidently to remain Britons to the last, but some of the
Levantines let themselves go completely. A pale gentleman with a poetic
beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent. It was not
a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried. Another declared that without
bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war,