I cannot say that they received me too civilly. Grace, however, was given me to appreciate that the moment was not one for civilities, especially from men who had been under action for twelve hours. I also appreciated the opportunity, urged without forms upon me, of studying their picturesque rear. Tired soldiers smoked or slept on a steep grass slope, and a mule battery lurked in the gully below. Wondering if it might not yet be possible to see what was going on, I approached a young man who stood at the door of a house behind the artillery stables and asked him in my best French if he objected to my ascending to a balcony I saw on the top story of his house. He, being a Greek, replied in his best English that he would be happy to accompany me thither. On the way up he pointed out to me, at a broken window of the opposite stable, the figure of an artilleryman, his rifle across his knees, sitting dead and ghastly against a wall. And he told me about the engagement of which he had been an uncomfortably close witness: how the Macedonians marched in from the valley of the Golden Horn early in the morning; how the first of them were allowed to pass the artillery barracks, and were even cheered; how another lot, who scrambled up the gully from Kassîm Pasha, saw a white flag flying from the artillery stables, advanced more confidently, and were met by a treacherous fire; how they then retired for reinforcements, brought up machine guns and field-pieces, and took stable, barracks, and guard-house after a nasty little fight of five hours. [Illustration: They were, in fact, reserves posted for the afternoon attack on Tash Kîshla] From the balcony we had a perfect view of the last operations around Tash Kîshla. That great yellow barracks will be memorable in the annals of the Turkish revolution. Many an officer is said to have been tortured there on suspicion of being connected with the Young Turks. It was there that a detachment of the imperial guard fired on the first sharpshooters brought up from Salonica to replace them. And there a battalion of those same sharpshooters, who had been corrupted into fomenting the late revolt and who knew how little quarter they might expect from their old comrades, held out desperately, long after the other barracks had given in. The last act of the tragedy looked less real than a stage tragedy on that divine spring afternoon while we watched, as from a box at the play, the white-legged figures crouching behind their wall, the farther figures stealing up the side of a sunny road, the sortie of the last handful of sharpshooters from their shot-riddled stronghold. They took refuge in a garden before the barracks, where rifles blazed and men dropped until a desperate white handkerchief fluttered among the trees.