houses only one hundred remain, and the women and children have been simply wiped out! Unfortunately, we had not time to visit the Hodja, who had found a quite comfortable lodging in the trunk of an oak tree—a philosopher and a man of letters. "I cannot live in a tub, like Diogenes, because I do not possess a tub; but there is nothing wrong with this oak, which I suspect will prove even warmer."
Everywhere, at Manissa and Kassaba—even at Salihli, with its houses reduced to four!—we were invited to stay and "put up for the night!" Here were about two hundred inhabitants surviving from two thousand five hundred, and from fifteen to twenty families sleeping in the mosque. Yet, they would "certainly arrange something," and it needed all my tact to refuse any more extended hospitality than tea and coffee, served on the roof of one of their four houses, from which we could look down upon the skeleton town. Apparently, these stricken people found some sort of comfort in the mere idea of my having seen their suffering, though often enough I could not even find words for the sympathy no one could fail to feel.
Once more lunch in the train. Pomegranate seeds should be eaten one by one, a slow process, but as the cheik says "it passes the hours!"
He apologised for the number of times I had been reminded of what in Turkey they call "the work of the British ex-Premier."
"I had to expect that," I replied, "when I came to Anatolia; and it gives me the chance of reminding the Turks what part was played by M. Venizelos!"
He tactfully turned the conversation to Oxford, paying a very high tribute to Mr. Asquith's brilliant son: "A noble character, highly intelligent and broad-*minded. A victim of war we could ill afford to lose!"
Association inevitably led to the question I must have been asked a hundred times during my journey, "Why does Lloyd George hate us so bitterly? How can he admire the Greeks?"
