BY DUNCAN TOVEY

Overhead, in a tranquil sky, out of the sunset glow,

The stately battle-planes go sailing east, against the foe,

And the quivering air is all a-drone,

like an organ, deep and low.

The sunset gleams on the old belltower and the roofs of the old French town:

Gleams and fades, and the shadows

fall, as the night comes creeping down,

some one 'Pray!'

What do they mean, their words that throng so loud?

This, dearest, that for us there will not be

Laughter and joy of living dwindling cold;

Ashes of words that dropped in flame first told;

Stale tenderness made foolish suddenly.

This only, heart's desire, for you and

me,

We who lived love will not see love grown old.

glooms distant and dark and brown.

o' the wave

As I came into Salmani

I felt the West wind lave me. Cool and clean from Carmarthen hills The West wind blew to save me As I came into Salmani.

OUR dear and more than ever beloved France is, I believe, of all countries in the world the one where people live in the most blissful ignorance of what is going on in neighboring countries; Turkey, for instance, although she was our ally for centuries, is as unknown to us as the wilds of Central Africa or of the moon. For instance, have I not seen at Constantinople, where the winter is colder than in Paris, tourists arrive from France in December dressed in linen suits! Have I not read in great Paris newspapers, while my storm-tossed craft was struggling for weeks on end amid snow squalls; How lucky M. Pierre Loti is, to be in the Bosphorus, the land of eternal spring!'

The fact is, you see, that Turkey is in the East, and to the average Frenchman the East means a blue sky, sun, palm trees, and camels. And in their amusing simplicity, they confuse Turk with Kurd, Osmanli with Levantine,

VOL. 13 - NO. 633

etc.; everybody who wears a red cap is, to their thinking, a Turk.

Try to open the eyes of some of our bourgeois at home who, from father to son, have been hypnotized- dare I say stupefied by the alleged ferocity of my poor friends, the Turks! At the beginning of the Balkan War, was I not scoffed at, insulted, threatened for having defended them, for having dared to say that the Bulgarians, on the contrary, were cruel brutes, and that their Ferdinand of Coburg (by whom all our women were infatuated, and whose colors they wore) was a vile monster?

On this Coburg, to be sure, I have my revenge to-day, for he has proved superabundantly what I asserted then: five times a traitor in ten years, and attacking his allies from behind without warning I do not see what more one could ask! As for his soldiers who are almost direct descendants of the Huns it was of no avail for me

to describe the atrocities which I have seen, or to quote the overwhelming reports of the international commissions, sent to the spot; nobody would listen to me. No, it was the Turks, always the Turks, against whom they persisted in raising the hue and cry; and they accepted as gospel the periodical petty dispatches about Ferdinand the paladin, with their constant repetition of the refrain: "The Turks are massacring, the Turks are still murdering and committing the most shocking crimes, etc., etc.'

For various reasons I say nothing of the performances of some of those who were the Christian allies of our good Bulgarians at that time. As for the Armenians, on whose account I have also been no little abused, they have fully justified one of the accusations which I made against them: At Baku, on September 14, several thousands of them, whom the English had fitted out so that they could help them to defend the city against the common enemy, fell back at the first attack; when they were forced to go back and fight, they fled a second time, in wild disorder, at the crisis of the battle. An old Turkish proverb says that Allah created the hare and the Armenian of the same substance.'

But my aim to-day is simply to state once more this truth, which is well known to all those among us who have taken the trouble to study the evidence: namely, that the Turks have never been our enemies. The enemies of the Russians, oh! that they unquestionably are; and how could it be otherwise in view of the continual and implacable threat of Russia, who did not even take the trouble to hide her obstinate purpose to destroy them? It was not on us that they declared war, but on Russia, and who would not have done the same thing in their place? Later, history will tell us how

this war was begun by some German barbarians, aboard small vessels flying the Sultan's flag, who, in order to make the thing irrevocable, did not hesitate to fire on the Russian coast towns, even before Enver, who was perhaps still hesitating, had been notified. And moreover what did the Turks owe to us? Since the Crimean expedition, we have not ceased to make common cause with their enemies, and lately, during the Balkan War, doubtless to show our gratitude for the generous hospitality they at all times extended to us in their country, we poured out on them an endless stream of insults, in almost all our newspapers which I know was to them the greatest and most painful surprise. Despairing of their cause, and to avoid being crushed by Russia, they threw themselves into the arms of hated Germany. I say hated, for, with the exception of a very small minority, they do abominate her. Why, then, harbor an implacable illwill against them because of a fatal error, which has so many extenuating circumstances, and for which they are ready to make amends?

Oh! what an injury it would have been to France if it had been necessary to give to Russia, Constantinople, which was at heart a so thoroughly French city, a city where we were, so to speak, at home, and from which we should gradually have been driven out by the Russians, on their arrival, as undesirable intruders! And what an assault on this principle of nationalities which is being invoked at the present time by all the nationsif it had been necessary to carry out a certain agreement signed in secrecy, which, besides Stamboul, would wrest from the Turkish fatherland the very cradle of its birth all these Asiatic. cities, Trebizond, Kharput, and the rest, which are essentially centres of pure Turkey.