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.  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