The Colorado statesman., 1912-11-30

ConStantinople.-It has been at
times difficult to think of this as a
doomed city, description which every
journalist in the world must by now
have applied to Constantinople. Here
one'can live through the exciting days
as though the war was the remotest of
horrors. One must go out and seek If
enc would touch the fringe of its river,
to see "the red laugh of war"
In Pera is peace. The restaurants,
cafes and music halls suffer scarcely
at all. One would think they are do
ing better business than ever.
The war which has advanced to the
last of the capitals defenses does not
cast a shadow. Downhill in Galata,
the money changer chats and does his
business as though the sick man"
had been promised long lease of life
once more. Every merchant, from the
rich vender of the antique down to the
seller of Halvas, the favorite sweet
meat-who also knits socks-every-
body seems bent on business. His on
ly thought is his next customer.
The boom of cannon might be any
other noise in the world for all anyone
seems to care; but If one goes out to
find the forward-thrown shadow of the
war it can be discovered soon enough.
Leave Pera and Galata behind, throw
a small coin to one of the crowd OF
toll gatherers who guard either side of
the gates across the Golden Horn and
you enter the war zone.
Across the bridge streams a train of
rough wagons drawn by oxen with
painful slowness. One by one these
carts, with those who accompany
them, are taken aboard ship to be sent
to Asia until the vessel is packed to
its utmost capacity; then in hopeless
calm the foremost of those left sit
down-people and animals = where
they stood to wait. 1t may mean to
them a cold night without food or
shelter.
Endlessly this caravan of misery,
bound no one knows where, stretches
over the bridge, through the narrow,
twisting, rank smelling streets of
Stamboul, past the gates, beyond the
walls of the city. From the horizon
IT pours strangely onward, hopelessly
looking not back, expecting only the
dawn of nothing.
In this pouring tide of war every
crazy wagon bears the wreck of a
homestead, the poor, miserable salvage
from a peasant home. Everything
which would not pack, and pack quick
ly, into the wagon, was left behind.
In the panic of those refugees who
fled before the rumor OF approaching
war there was not always time to
gather the whole family together.
Mothers and fathers had no idea where
their children were. There were child
ren hanging on despairingly to the
wagons of other families, their faith
ers and mothers miles away in the i'm
penetrable confusion. They have no
story to tell, these refugees. They
fled likely at night from their homes.
They mutter that they have been liv-
ing without food, tramping over roads
now hard, now deep in mud. Many
have been stricken down by swift and
merciful, one thinks, disease.
Now and then some poor wretch will
rush from cart trying to find the
nearest water. After short, erring
struggle, the victim will fall down and
writhe for time and then lie. still.
The war has claimed another victim.
BY the city walls. mostly at Adrian
ople. the gate of the historic entry
which. five centuries ago, saw the
Turk come in conquest to take posses
sion, these outcasts of war camp by
the hundreds and the city Turk comes
to look and curse the work of the
Christian