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first time. 4 A start had been made toward constructing a drainage system for the city’s narrow, filthy streets; and the packs of wild dogs that for centuries had patrolled the city were, by decision of the municipal council, shipped to a waterless island to die. 5 Some work had been done on the paving of roads, but not much; most streets still turned to mud in the frequent rainstorms, or coughed dry dust into the air as winds blew through the city.
    Violent alternating north and south winds dominated the city’s climate, bringing sudden changes of extreme heat or cold. The political climate, too, was subject to sudden and extreme changes at the beginning of the twentieth century; and for many years prior to 1914 British observers had shown that they had no idea where the winds were coming from or which way they were blowing. Political maneuverings at the Sublime Porte, the gate to the Grand Vizier’s offices from which the Ottoman government took its name, were conducted behind a veil of mystery that the British embassy time and again had failed to penetrate.
    III
    The British embassy, like those of the other Great Powers, was located in Pera, the European quarter of the city, which lay to the north of the Golden Horn. Foreign communities had grown up in proximity to their embassies, and lived their own lives, separately from that of the city. In Pera, French was the language of legation parties and entertainments; Greek, not Turkish, was the language of the streets. Three theaters offered revues and plays imported from Paris. The Pera Palace Hotel offered physical facilities comparable with those available in the palatial hotels of the major cities of Europe.
    Most Europeans succumbed to the temptation to live in the isolation of their own enclave. Few were at home in the narrow, dirty lanes of Stamboul, the old section of the city south of the Golden Horn, with its walls and fortifications crumbling into ruin. One of the few who felt at ease on either side of the Golden Horn was an Englishman named Wyndham Deedes, who had come to play an important role in the new Young Turkey administration.
    Deedes was from a county family of Kent: four centuries of English country gentlemen had preceded him. After Eton, he took a commission in the King’s Own Rifles, and for twenty-two years thereafter he remained a British officer. (When asked once about the horrors of the Boer War, he replied, “Well, anything was better than Eton.”) 6 Early in his military career, Deedes volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Gendarmerie, a newly created Turkish police force commanded by European officers. Its creation was a reform forced upon the Sultan by the European powers, for the old police force had become indistinguishable from the robber bands it was supposed to suppress. Deedes and his European colleagues were commissioned as officers of the new force while, at the same time, retaining their commissions in their respective national armies.
    As viewed in old photographs, Deedes looked an oddity in the oriental surroundings in which service in the Gendarmerie placed him. Small, painfully thin, and light-complexioned, he did not blend into the Ottoman landscape. Ascetic and deeply Christian, he had little use for sleep, rest, or food. He worked fifteen hours a day, indifferent to comfort and careless of danger; nobody could have been more unlike the Turkish officers who, if European accounts were to be believed, were in many cases corrupt and cowardly. He made a success of his challenging assignment, and won popularity with the Turks.
    Deedes was an unknown figure when he entered the Gendarmerie in 1910. Four years later he had achieved such high standing that he was co-opted by the leading figure in the new Ottoman government to help run the Ministry of the Interior. By the time of his thirty-first birthday in 1914, Deedes, who had learned to speak Turkish fluently, was one of the few Englishmen who understood Turkish affairs. Yet his