unreasonably, Kathleen thought that her Rabelaisian painter, with all his mistresses, might be the person to clear up the mystery. ‘Oh, ne demandes pas ça h un français’ (Oh, don’t ask that of a Frenchman), he replied, with a ‘furious gesture’, and she was none the wiser.
Kathleen was to spend the rest of her time in Paris in the studio with the roof and the mackintosh, but that is not to say that she was always there. She had already acquired a taste for ‘vagabonding’: putting some hard-boiled eggs in a bag and going off for a long walk—preferably one lasting several weeks. Given the choice between sleeping indoors or out she would take out any time, and travel and adventure were next only to sculpting as her pleasures.
Late in 1903 a new adventure, a major one, opened to her. Noel Buxton, a young and fervent English politician (later a Labour MP and Lord Noel-Buxton), a friend of Rosslyn, visited her in Paris and made her feel that her existence there was something of a waste of time. He talked to her of the troubles in Macedonia.
In the first years of the twentieth century Macedonia was under Turkish rule, and armed bands known as Komitadjis had been supporting Bulgarian nationalist priests and teachers in Slav Macedonia. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, formed in 1896 for all Macedonians ‘regardless of sex, nationality or personal beliefs’ was loosely pro-Bulgarian and anti-Turkish. On the night of 2 August 1903, 750 of these rebels took over the small town of Krusevo, fighting under the skull and crossbones, the symbol of the uprising. When the Turkish garrison fled, the red flag was raised instead and Krusevo, population 15,000, was declared a socialist republic, the first in the Balkans. The republic lasted nine days: on 11 August 15,000 Turkish soldiers, plus the Bashi Bazouks (irregulars), moved in to put a stop to it. Despite deeds of heroism, the red flag gave way to the white.
The whole uprising was suppressed within three months, and a bitter vengeance taken: according to conservative Bulgarian figures, 9,830 houses in Macedonia were burned down and 60,953 people were left homeless. Whatever the true complexity of the political situation, to the West Turkey had put itself deeply in the wrong and the Bulgarians were innocent victims. And winter was drawing in.
Buxton told Kathleen of disease and starvation, torture and cold. He told ‘how the Turks were massacring the Bulgarians, how direly they were in need of help, how good was the organization in London to collect necessities for them but how there was nobody on the spot to see to the distribution of food, money and clothes.’ He told her that ‘the plight of the people there is unspeakable. Babies are being born, quite untended, that nobody wants, and quite unprovided for; terrible cases …’
Well, to Kathleen that was it. Babies, untended, unprovided for, unwanted? She would tend and provide for them. She wanted them. ‘My heart beating loudly against my chest, I said, “Couldn’t I go?” And so it came about that the very next day my work was again discarded, the key turned in the studio door, and off I went to England to see the austere lady who was looking for an assistant to undertake on-the-spot relief.’
Lady Thompson was ‘more than twice my age, and very sad’—her husband had dropped dead a year before. She engaged Kathleen ‘as if she were engaging a kitchen maid’, and on 4 December they were on their way to Salonica, Kathleen teaching herself Turkish and writing to Rosslyn: ‘Lady Thompson is fagged out… but I could face a massacring Turk with a cheerful rebuff.’
Dec 12: Set off about daybreak with Mr. Hazkell, the American missionary, to Monastir. All the way from Uskub the line was guarded by poor miserable-looking soldiers in tents surrounded by mud and water, they had been there some eight or nine months. Trains are not to run at night, as frequent attempts are made to blow them up. The day before we crossed the frontier 2 Servians (sic) being searched in the customs were found to be stuffed with dynamite. There is much smallpox in various districts. Dined excellently in a corner of the bar room at the Hotel Constantinople, where quantities of Turks were smoking, playing billiards and backgammon, and drinking. A Mussulman, mark you, may not drink wine, but he may drink spirits, for that was not mentioned in the letter of the law, not then being known. Much nonsense is talked of the dirt of these places. The cabinet is truly not pleasant but in no way worse than the Paris studio ones, and the rooms are perfectly clean and fresh. Doubtless my opinion might undergo a change in the warmer weather.
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
