There seems no way of coping with the emergency, since they had no tools for even the most primitive building. Except for those lucky enough to secure one of the few booths in the town, the shopkeepers had to set out their stock upon the cobblestones! I dare not ask how many babies had died of cold. Anatolia has been bled white through twelve years of war! Whatever the nation’s quarrel, it was from hence were taken father, or brother, or son. Yet still, beside these shivering women, you see long train-loads of more soldiers, cattle-trucks full of human beings, called to some new “front.” How is it these women can, even now, tenderly hush “the cry of the children,” and give their men? Theirs is a “willing” sacrifice for an ideal, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland. * * * * * I had been “protected” in advance, I found, by the authorities, who had announced by telegram the arrival of “an American lady.” It was, perhaps, perverse, even ungrateful, but I persisted in contradicting the news at every stage. I would far sooner take all risks under my own flag than falsely accept shelter beneath the “Stars and Stripes.” “I have no dislike for America,” I assured those who assumed that explanation of my obstinacy, “it simply does not happen to be my country, any more than India is yours.... I have nothing but good to say of individual Americans; the most charming people on the face of the earth.” Nevertheless “I keenly resent the clamour of Mr. Morgenthau for ‘an ideal republic of his own making on the banks of the Bosphorus, to be backed by all that “Tammany” means in the U.S.A.’ I am for asking him, then, to start by making an ‘ideal’ republic on the banks of the Hudson.” American oil-hunters are always boasting that _they_ never declared war on Turkey. “You did not,” I have admitted, “but you urged, nay begged and almost ordered, us to do it for you.... Your _Literary Digest_ printed at least one eloquent appeal to Great Britain for a ‘holy’ war against the ‘unspeakable Turk’!” And if they resent my protest at being called “an American,” I am convinced they would have done the same in my place. They, too, have the virtue of national pride. * * * * * The train was held up once more for a little excursion to what had been the prosperous town of Alaşehir, a well-wooded district with abundance of fresh water. Here out of four thousand eight hundred houses only one hundred remain, and the women and children have been simply wiped out! Unfortunately, we had not time to visit the Hodja, who had found a quite comfortable lodging in the trunk of an oak tree—a philosopher and a man of letters. “I cannot live in a tub, like Diogenes, because I do not possess a tub; but there is nothing wrong with this oak, which I suspect will prove even warmer.” * * * * *