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[Page 59]
March 13th 1919
Marching orders came through and and they are that we embark for the Asiatic shore Friday 14th per lighter. This day I used up fairly fully by doing a solitary wander over on the other side of the Horn where the Palace and Mosques form the Baedeker attraction. Grey decay which like unto the ruins of Palestine does not suggest a Venerable old age but rather the remains of a grandiose and fleeting period of pomp & display too artificial to be permanent. It appears that I took risks in meandering through what corresponds in Constantinople to a London slum but it is so much better to do a thing and hear about the dangers after one comes through unscathed. Then too it is most difficult even with my studies of the human to discriminate between the gentle and the un-gentle Turk. They all carry the National expression on their faces, an expression that has something to do with rapine & sudden death and I argued that perhaps it, the expression, may have been established at a very early period of their History. Facts gathered later however seem to point to the fact out that the moral