Recollections by David Christie Murray

Author:David Christie Murray [David Christie Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub

At first I thought the Constantinople fare the most delightful I had ever encountered anywhere. At the first dinner at which I sat down we were served amongst other things with red mullet, stuffed tomatoes and quail—all excellent of their sort and admirably prepared. Red mullet, and quail appeared again for breakfast and were not to be despised, but red mullet, tomates farcies and quail for luncheon, began to be a trifle tiresome, and when all three appeared again at dinner and at the next day's breakfast and luncheon, there were some of us who began to hunger for a change. We made a little party and we went across to the Valori restaurant. Here we encountered a polyglot major-domo, who spoke all languages of Europe indifferently ill. “What can we have for dinner?” asked our spokesman. “Ret moiled, domades varcies, et qvail!” He smiled ineffably and evidently thought that he was offering us food for the gods. We ate tough beefsteak, fried in oil, and cursed the delicacies of the country. The diners at Valori's made up the first really polyglot assembly I had ever seen. There were Bulgarian notables—caring apparently to speak their own language only—Spanish Jews from Eski Zaghra, Greeks, Turks, Germans, Italians, Armenians, Englishmen, native volunteers for the Polish legion then forming, and a Croat gentleman with bejewelled handles to his private arsenal of lethal weapons, and starched expansive white petticoats. Our major-domo was somehow equal to them all, and when the rush of service was partly over, I found an opportunity to ask him how many languages he spoke. He answered in a tone of apology and regret: “Onily twelluv, ich habe vergessen les autres!”

A day or two later I encountered the official interpreter of the Persian Embassy who spoke English as perfectly as I did and apparently all the languages of the civilised world beside. I asked him seriously how many tongues he professed to have mastered, and his reply was this: “If you ask me in how many languages and dialects I can converse, I suppose I should have to say seventy or eighty, but if you confine me to those in which I can construct a grammar I should have to tell you fifteen at the outside. No man can really say he knows a language until he can construct a grammar for it.”

So much for a special detached faculty which I have found in the possession of people who are otherwise entirely stupid.

The utter lawlessness of the Asiatic troops, by whom Constantinople was supposed to be defended, gave me a fair foretaste of things to come.

It was certainly rather a curious thing that in a country about which I travelled freely, and which was overrun by the most murderous ravage, months passed before I heard a shot fired. It so fell out that I was the discoverer of the fields of massacre in the district of the Rose Gardens. I found twelve hundred unburied dead, all hacked and mutilated, in a vineyard near Kesanlyk.

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