I am by way of being a schoolman myself, and I blushed for my kind as I heard this tall mountaineer make our indictment. What could I answer him? I knew that in many ways he was right. The schoolmen did not understand the fighting men as the rankers had done. Then there were far too few of them—as there were too many fighting men of the kind first sent to the front, whom I saw being recruited with handcuffs. And there had not been time to establish the new order of things on a sound footing. III.—RED CROSS AND RED CRESCENT After the hordes of Asia that went so proudly away it was a very different horde that began very soon to trickle back. No bands accompanied them this time, and if any of them had had violins or shepherds’ pipes they had lost them in the fields of Thrace. It was pitiful to see how silently, almost how secretly, those broken men came back. One would occasionally meet companies of them on the Bridge or in the vicinity of a barracks, in their grey ulsters and pointed grey hoods, shuffling along so muddy, so ragged, so shoeless, so gaunt and bowed, that it was impossible to believe they were the same men. Most of them, however, came back in the night and were not able even to shuffle. Two or three pictures are stamped in my memory as characteristic of those melancholy days. The first of them I happened to see when I moved into town for the winter, a few days after Kîrk Kil’seh. When I landed at dusk from a Bosphorus steamer, with more luggage than would be convenient to carry, I found to my relief that the vicinity of the wharf was crowded with cabs—scores of them. But not one would take a fare. They had all been commandeered for ambulance service. Near the first ones stood a group of women, Turkish and Christian, silently waiting. Some of them were crying. Another time, coming home late from a dinner-party, I passed a barracks which had been turned into a hospital. At the entrance stood a quantity of cabs, all full of hooded figures that were strangely silent and strangely lax in their attitudes. No such thing as a stretcher was visible. Up the long flight of stone steps two soldiers were helping a third. His arms were on their shoulders and each of them had an arm around him. One foot he could not use. In the flare of a gas-jet at the top of the steps a sentry stood in his big grey coat, watching. The three slowly made their way up to him and disappeared into the archway. Again, a lady who lives in Stamboul told me her own impressions so vividly that I remember them almost better than my own—of trains whistling all night long as they came in from the front, of city rubbish carts rumbling without end through the dark, and of peering out to see one under the window, full of wounded, with refugee women and children trudging behind in the rain.