A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young
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One of their first duties on reaching Monastir was to call on Hussein Hilmi Pasha, the Inspector General: ‘He was supposed to be omnipotent in Macedonia, and he fondly believed the supposition,’ wrote Henry Nevinson, a journalist who had also been inspired by Noel Buxton. Nevinson rather fell for Hilmi Pasha.
His dark blue uniform was drawn tightly around his tall and graceful figure, his fez thrown rather back from his pale and weary face, relieved so effectively against the carpet of deep purples and crimsons that further darkened the wall behind. It is the face of a tired but unflinching eagle, worn with toil. On each side of the delicate eagle nose, the deep brown eyes looked into yours with a mournful but steady sincerity that would carry conviction of truth into the wildest tale of Arabian Nights. A grave charm hangs over his face, sometimes broken by a shadowy smile…
Kathleen was less impressed. They had been advised to call on Hilmi in the evening, it being Ramadan.
he would have broken his fast and regained his good humour. Therefore at 10pm we drove to his dwelling and were ushered along passages by countless flunkeys. The great man was sitting at his writing table … for a long and weary time we discussed trivialities in French. I thought we should never arrive at the point of our visit; the heat of the room was excessive [‘a genial warmth’, Nevinson called it] and tho’ he plied us with lemonade and tea I was scarcely able to control my impatience. Numerous servants were rung for, for various causes, each retiring backwards, never turning his back upon the Pasha.
When it came to talking business Hilmi told them that three or four thousand hamlets had already been rebuilt. He gave them permission to travel in a particularly dangerous district; he would organize a guard for them, with a French-speaking officer; he would send word ahead that they were coming and arrange for the hospitality of the local bey. ‘His affability and foresight were amazing, but in spite of it all I was in no way attracted to him. I in no way distrust his intelligence, but he inspires me with no confidence and very little interest,’ Kathleen wrote in her diary. Her reaction proved right. Hilmi was not ‘capable, just, and inspired with a benevolent zeal for reform’ as Nevinson had hoped. He was a bureaucrat, master of the gap between an order given and an order carried out. His specialty, as all the Macedonian relief workers were to find out, was allowing everybody everything they wanted—in theory. Nevinson, on further experience of him, reported how he would smile and say, ‘But all must be well, I gave the order!’ ‘Of all the incarnations of State that I have ever known in any land he was perhaps the most complete,’ Nevinson concluded.
Kathleen had not even started work yet, and she was riddled with impatience. In Monastir ‘The depot house is stocked with blankets, which makes me even more anxious to get to work, they seem to be wasting their warmth.’ As the winter set in women with hungry babies and men with gangrenous wounds were coming down from the mountains to which they had fled during the fighting. Their need was great, and so was the desire of the relief workers to get on with it.
Then arrived Henry Brailsford, agent of the Macedonia Relief Fund, and his wife Jane, a very fine couple by all accounts: ‘extraordinary mental energy … accurate mind … unfailing memory … sensitive and sympathetic temperament … unflagging industry,’ said Nevinson of Henry, and of Jane ‘… much the same qualities, beautified by the further touch of feminine delicacy and imagination; beautified also by Celtic blue-grey eyes, dark hair and a smile to soften the heart of any infidel.’ Kathleen too found Brailsford to have ‘enormous personal charm’, even though he changed plans at the last minute, and she thought Jane Brailsford extremely pretty. With the Brailsfords, Lady Thompson, a guard of Turkish cavalry and an officer (ostensibly to guide and protect them, but actually to report on them and hinder them if need be—Brailsford called them ‘spies in uniform’), in a party of twenty, Kathleen set off for Klissoura.
‘We set out … in a ramshackle carriage with three horses. Wonderful wild desert scenery, and a slight rather pleasant rain. After a long distance we began to rise and rise, and finally our horses could no more…’ For a while they walked, following a lamp as darkness overtook them. The cavalry, with whom they had left the carriage, could not follow. Brailsford went back to find them, taking the lamp. It was at least three miles to the village, and there were brigands in the neighbourhood, they all knew. Ankle deep in mud on a narrow, precipitous road, they lit cigarettes to frighten the wolves away. When the cavalry finally caught up, Kathleen was more than happy to ride: ‘astride a Turkish soldier’s saddle is quite a comfortable thing,’ she noted, despite ‘perilous precipices and streams, lit merely by a lantern, climbing over slippery rocks and boulders …’ She was even happier to arrive at the house of ‘a rich Wallachian’ (she doesn’t seem to have mentioned to him her descent from his former Grand Postleniks) where their boots were removed and their hands washed for them, and they were provided with a ‘wonderful completely Turkish room—half the floor covered with mattresses… we reclined by a roaring wood fire’.
At dusk they had passed a burnt out village; the next morning they went to the monastery to which its refugees had fled. Some of the thirty-three families had returned to the village to try to rebuild it, but the Bashi Bazouks had swept down in the night and stolen the wood they had prepared for building. Kathleen admired their babies, ‘all swaddled, they felt like brown paper parcels when one took them’, and arranged for wool to be provided so that the women could knit socks and jerseys, which the relief workers would then buy and distribute.
At Klissoura refugees were living two or three families to a room: ‘some were in excellent spirits, others wept and mourned, all were overjoyed to see us.’ They had thin mattresses, a blanket, a little maize or corn. Nothing else. Kathleen was much outraged at ‘a rascally doctor, a perfect brute who cheated hideously in distributing flour.’ Visiting villages, burnt-out or full of Komitadji, resulted in ‘considerable unpleasantness’ with their officer when Brailsford spoke to men who had been beaten to give up their arms. ‘I fear it may have sown an annoying seed, which may bear unpleasant fruits.’
Thence to Kastoria, where two nuns from Salonica had set up a ‘primitive but good’ hospital. The English ladies’ accommodation was a thousand times better than Kathleen had expected, with a view over the beautiful lake, and their work began in earnest.
Dec 21st: Today I saw an old woman with a very dreadful bleeding cancer on her left breast, but the majority are merely cases of starvation … One woman had died, another being in the worst plight [pregnant and unmarried—Kathleen always used this phrase] had gone mad with shame, and the doctor was undecided whether to kill the embryo with drugs or not. If the child is allowed to be born, the people will not allow it to live. The case is difficult but in this country his action would not be criminal. Another case was a little girl of ten, and many more, more or less horrible. Her grandmother locked one girl in a cellar to hide her from the soldiers, and there she went mad. Another was brought to the hospital, but sat looking out the window, crying. She wanted to go to her Turk.
Rape and seduction by soldiers were rife, and as well the Turks levied a tax on Christian marriages; if the tax was not paid, droit de seigneur was claimed. Kathleen had not been old enough to hear the tales her mother was bred on in Athens of the basic evil of the Turk, but Rosslyn, now working in England to raise money for Macedonia, may well have remembered and passed some on. He certainly remembered their mother’s visit to her brother George in a field hospital at Scutari after the Crimean War, the horrors she saw there, and the letter she wrote to her grandfather, who had sent it to The Times. Its publication had helped to stir up public feeling just before Florence Nightingale started to put together her troupe of nurses (three of whom were trained by Fifi Skene).
It was to Rosslyn that Kathleen wrote. Later he published her letters, along with his own from his trip to Macedonia in 1905.
Today there are 30 patients, mostly starvation [she wrote]. Last night the wife of a village priest was brought in; her eyes were fixed and staring. Her husband and his brothers had been missing for a long while, and they thought them imprisoned in Kastoria, but lately their bodies were found in the mountains, cut in pieces, and she is going mad. She wouldn’t stay, and went off this morning.
Kathleen did the accounts, listed requirements, distributed blankets, applied