TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS.

Picture 1,200 men, women, and children in the rain, at the foot of a bleak hillside where the Bosphorus joins the Black Sea. Try to imagine 1,000 more crammed into a single-storey, windowless, doorless building which, reckoned even on refugee standards, had been officially reported on as capable of holding a maximum of 400. Then you may form some faint idea of the conditions of life at the very latest dumping ground selected by the Turks for some of the thousands of Ottoman Greeks who are still pouring in from Black Sea ports, a “settlement” which was, when I visited it to-day, just four days old. Rain had fallen steadily all night, and the fourteen miles of the Bosphorus which I covered on my way from Constantinople were mist-shrouded. On the hills it hung as a pall. Damp but mild on my start from this sheltered city, the air grew colder as I neared the Black Sea, till, just I beyond Ketchili Pasha, on the Asiatic side, where the camp is situated, it was bleak indeed. There was not a tent or scrap of shelter for the 1,200 except what they could improvise from the clothes and bed-coverings they had managed to seize when they hurried from their homes.

It was wet, but not so bad as the soaked ground around on which the others had to spread their bedding. And to be just to the Turks, an old ammunition store housed a few more. Most had managed with bits of string and sticks to erect some sort of covering over their beds – which might have been all right in dry weather, but nothing they possessed could keep the wet out. Some wandered aimlessly about, but many still lay there, though it was noon, huddled together for warmth, whole families, fully clothed, on one bed, with everything else they possessed in the way of bedding or garments piled on top. Over the broken gear behind one of the guns I was spread a coverlet perhaps 2ft off the ground. Underneath it was a bed with a scrap of blanket over a cogwheel for a pillow. In the bed were an old couple, obviously very ill – too ill, indeed, to reply to a question, except that the man opened his eyes, pointed to the red pimples on his wife’s face and on his own, and then closed his eyes again. Behind, further in under the exploded gun, almost in the dark, I could see a family in another bed. On the second day of this camp there were nineteen small-pox cases; on the third day twenty-four more.

It is scarcely surprising that an unusually communicative member of the Turkish guard expressed the opinion that, unless the camp was soon moved, everybody, including the guard, would die.