In Eski-Chéir before the fire, however, art had been altogether put away for munitions. The factories worked day and night, cannons and lorries in readiness all the time. One day we shall learn something at least of the ceaseless efforts by which victory was snatched out of nothing.
We left the town at about ten o'clock in the evening. At last we are actually en route for Angora. "I cannot even yet quite believe," said I, "that I am really starting, that I shall really arrive." I heard that some American women (more enterprising, or less expensive, than their confrères) have reached Ismidt, but can get no further.
It was, indeed, "hard-going," and I believe that the colonel's "salon" only just came in time. I was told, four years ago, by the eminent Jean Louis Faure, that if I survived at all it would be as a permanent and complete invalid. Yet I have faced more since then than most "strong" people would care to attempt.
The Turks, remember, who could not obtain or afford a yaili (the native carriage) were driven to "walk" the eight hundred miles to Angora in a climate that more than doubles the strain on one's physique.
As soon as we meet new faces, the questions about Lloyd George all begin over again.
I told the story of Les Misérables. How the ambitious Welsh lad and his uncle, the village cobbler, "worked at the French" together in the old days, one looking out "what a word meant" in the dictionary, the other discovering how to pronounce it. Mr. Lloyd George had often declared that the policy of his whole career came straight from his first study of that immortal classic—"to devote his life to helping the 'under dog.'"
Perhaps he has lost the copy of Les Misérables he used always to carry with him, and so missed the road to that magnificent goal; so, at least, it seemed to my Turkish audience. "That is the man, a democrat
