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In the autumn of 1912, Turkey had been for a year at war with Italy; her finances had suffered a heavy drain, and the Italian command of the sea not only locked up her best troops in Tripoli, but interrupted such important lines of communication between her Asiatic and European provinces as the direct route by sea from Smyrna to Salonika, and the devious sea-passage thence round Greece to Scutari, which was the only alternative for Turkish troops to running the gauntlet of the Albanian mountaineers.
The situation had been embittered by rumours of religious dissensions, while the Crimean nurses were Roman Catholics, many of those at Scutari were suspected of a regrettable propensity towards the tenets of Dr. Pusey.
More than a year before the money order system was introduced at Scutari, Miss Nightingale took charge of the soldiers' savings. She found them most willing to abridge their own comforts or indulgences, for the sake of others dear to them, as well as for their own future well-being; and she devoted an afternoon in every week to receiving and forwarding their savings to England.
The warders of the Bucoleon, or what is now Point Serail, the home-returning mariner shipping oars off Scutari, the captain of the helmeted column entering the Golden Gate down by the Seven Towers, the insolent Genoese on the wharves of Galata, had only to look up, and lo! the perch of Isaac.
He offered to pass me on to Gusihje, Djakova, or any other district I wished, and to do all in his power to aid my travels But I had already far exceeded my usual holiday, and appeals to me to return to England were urgent. I had to tear myself away from the wilderness and I was soon once more steaming up the Lake of Scutari to Rijeka.
Their navy, closely blockaded by the Greek fleet within the Dardanelles, had to look on passively at the successive occupation of the Aegean Islands by Greek landing-parties. With the winter came negotiations, during which an armistice reigned at Adrianople and Scutari, while the Greeks pursued the siege of Yannina and the Dardanelles blockade.
Earnest protests were made against this by King Nicholas, but the despatch of an Austrian naval division on April 27th to occupy his ports and march upon Cettinje, his capital, obliged him reluctantly to yield and on May 5th Scutari was given up to Austria, to form part of a projected Albanian kingdom.
The action was one to which both the cavaliers and their horses were well accustomed, nor did it at first afford much surprise to the spectators; but when the same retrograde evolution was continued, and the body of crusaders seemed about to enter the town of Scutari in so extraordinary a fashion, some idea of the truth began to occupy the citizens.
I went to Scutari worn out with toil, responsibility, and the heat which stood at 104 in the shade. France was now represented by a Levantine Pole. Krajewsky, bitterly anti-Austrian, and very active. English sympathy for the Maltsors had been aroused, and Mr. Nevinson came out to report on the state of things and help me to organize relief work.
But from Scutari south there were other dangers. The Albanians were in a state of incipient revolt, and the country was unsafe for a Turkish escort, if even such protection were not to me a greater danger, and I found, not I confess without a little trepidation, that the only protection I could count on was the consular postman who rode with the mail-bag to San Giovanni di Budua, the first point at which the Austrian Lloyd steamers called.
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