The Brummana Hospice is even more widely known as "Dr. Dray's Relief Work," for it was originated and maintained through the efforts of Dr. Arthur Dray, a member of the Faculty of the Syrian Protestant College and head of the Dental Department. Dr. Dray spent most of his early life in Syria; and although he was an Englishman, took his medical training in the United States. After completing his extensive education, he gave up the great career that lay before him in America to return to Syria, where he believed that he might be of even greater service. Not only was he pre-eminently the dental surgeon in the whole of the former Turkish Empire, but he is also licensed to practise in several other departments of the medical profession.

Dr. Dray's position in Turkey during the war was unique. He had won the respect and confidence of the two most influential Turks in Syria, largely through their gratitude for his professional services; and although he was an Englishman, and therefore an enemy, he was privileged above any other foreigner in the country. The Turk is not celebrated for his honesty, his patriotism, or his philanthropy, and his instinct is to punish with the utmost cruelty any one who possesses these qualities. He does, however, recognize an honest and fearless man, and respects him, when once he has satisfied himself that these qualities are inherent and are not to be overcome by intimidation or cruelty. There is much of the animal in the Turkish nature. Figuratively speaking, a bold and steady gaze will make him cringe, but the least sign of fear will arouse his brute instincts and his thirst for blood.

Dr. Dray was one of the trio of British doctors of the Faculty of the Syrian Protestant College who were deported with their fellow-countrymen in December, 1914, but who later were allowed to return in Beirut in order that the Medical School of the American College might continue to produce doctors who could, upon graduation, be drafted into the army. One midnight in the summer of 1915 Dr. Dray was visited by Turkish police who presented orders from Jemal Pasha commanding him to proceed immediately to Jerusalem. The police would furnish no explanation of this peremptory order, but Dr. Dray's natural assumption was that the intent was hostile. It was something of a relief, however, to be told that he must bring his surgical equipment.

That night he travelled to Damascus, and upon his arrival there he was told that in an hour or two there would be a special train to take him on to Jerusalem - a special train for a belligerent doctor, when the German Commander-in-Chief was practically the only personage in Syria who travelled in such style! Even Jemal Pasha himself preferred less conspicuous modes of conveyance. Arrived in Jerusalem, Dr. Dray was conducted immediately to Jemal Pasha's quarters in the German Stiftung on the Mount of Olives, where he was required to operate without a moment's delay on an influential Turkish guest of Jemal Pasha. The Pasha and his companion, who was a member of the royal family at the Capital, had been driving together when a shot was fired into their carriage. It had evidently been intended for the Commander of the Turkish Army, but it hit the other man, inflicting serious facial injuries. The wound had been neglected, and the patient was in a very grave state when Dr. Dray first saw him. The operation proved miraculously successful, and Jemal Pasha was delighted. He showered the doctor with attentions, and returned him to Beirut with a letter of highest recommendation to the Governor of that city. He dropped the warning, however, that if he ever had cause to suspect that the matter had gotten out through Dr. Dray, it would go hard with him. It was evident that the Turk was determined that no hint of the unpopularity which had resulted in an attempt on his life should reach his jealous colleagues in Constantinople. Needless to say, Dr., Dray guarded the secret as his own, and never mentioned it to anyone until after the British occupation of Syria, and the flight of the Pasha form Constantinople. The great Turk's gratitude reminds one of the story of Androcles and the Lion. Thenceforth he could not do too much for Dr. Dray, and there were even times when the Doctor was forced to remind his "grateful patient" that he was himself a British patriot, and therefore an enemy of the Turk. Even this defiance, however, only seemed to increase the Pasha's respect, and as long as he was in power he manifested consistent friendliness to the Doctor, and through him to the College.

The letter of recommendation brought by Dr. Dray from Jemal Pasha to Azmi Bey was not at all favourably received by the latter, and it was not until he himself was suffering from a ulcerated tooth that he too surrendered to necessity and sent for Dr. Dray. From that time onward he was very friendly toward the Doctor, and on several occasions even commanded him to dinner. Those much have been pleasant meals, for although the Governor entertained his guest graciously, he took no pains to hide the loaded revolvers which were to be found in every part of his house always within reach of the notorious assassin!

All this is by way of explanation how it came about that year later Dr. Dray, an enemy of the Turkish regime, but the friend of the Syrian people, was permitted to organize and carry on extensive relief-work in Lebanon. He had chosen for his summer-residence the village of Brummana, about fifteen miles from Beirut, one of the few summering places accessible from the city at that time when transport was unobtainable, and one had to depend upon one's own legs to carry one up and down the mountain. It so happened that Jemal Pasha was also summering in Brummana; and although Dr. Dray encountered him seldom, it later proved a fortunate thing for the poor in a great district that these two men visited in that locality at the same time.

Jemal Pasha's presence in the village rendered the work that Dr. Dray contemplated quite impossible until the former could be induced to give his sanction to such a charitable undertaking. On an appropriate occasion the Doctor sketched briefly the tragic conditions that obtained, and intimated his readiness to do what he could in the way of relief. The Pasha graciously gave his consent on condition that no males between twelve and sixty should benefit by the enterprise; but he brusquely states that, if Dr. Dray ever quoted him as having made that stipulation, the work would immediately be terminated, and the Doctor punished for his indiscretion.

In the beginning, Dr. Dray adopted the plan of giving to those few whose need he had investigated and found to be genuine small amounts of money, only sufficient for their daily needs. In a few days, however, large number who had heard of this relief thronged to the hotel, and Dr. Dray realized that he must, in fairness to the other guests, make other arrangements for his relief-work. Accordingly, he arranged with a woman in the village to prepare a simple meal of cooked vegetables and bread for the fifteen persons who he had accepted as his protégés. This experiment, however, did not prove a success; but a Syrian friend, Mrs. Cortass, offered her services for the preparation of the one meal a day which Dr. Dray had decided to give those he was helping. Fifteen partook of that first meal, but by the end of a year the Brummana Soup-Kitchen, as it subsequently became, was feeding fifteen hundred more.

Everyday from that time until the end of the war, new persons came with their stories of distress, each more heartrending than the last, and within a week there were fifty instead of fifteen to feed; and a few days later one hundred. Mrs. Cortass could no longer feed this crowd from her own door, and the kitchen was moved to a neighbouring French hotel which had been seized, occupied, and then abandoned by Turkish troops. During the remainder of the summer, the food was given out from this place. What this work subsequently became can best be described by a brief account of what it was when I visited it in October, 1917, about fifteen months later.

It was eight o'clock in the morning, a crisp autumn day with a tang in the air that gave one a keen appetite, and made one seek the sunshine. It was the hour for the morning distribution at the Brummana Soup-Kitchen, and the crowds was gathering in a small pine grove a stone's throw from the distribution shanty. It was sitting in this shack watching the preparations for the distribution. Men were hurrying from the oven carrying great basket trays heaped with fragrant loaves of bread, or staggering along with enormous cauldrons of steaming gruel. In a few moments a young man who was standing just outside the grove where the crowd was waiting began to read off the list of name of those regularly enrolled for help; and they came forward single-file, down a fenced pathway, and halted before the rail over which the food was served only long enough to present their tickets and received their allotment of gruel and bread. Each one brought his own receptacle, and the study of these vessels alone was ludicrously pathetic. One had an old battered enamel pitcher, another a rusty tin pail, another a biscuit box fitted up with a flimsy handle of wire, another earthenware crock or jar, and still others old tin cans. Some of these utensils were large enough to hold the portions for a family of four or five, others held only the one huge ladleful that represented a single portion.

As that tragic line filed past, one of the Syrian helpers deftly ladled out the gruel, and another handed out the bread, one loaf for each portion. Again and again a fresh kettle of soup or another tray of bread was brought up to replace the one which had just been emptied; the distribution lasted nearly an hour.

At the end of each distribution came to most trying ordeal for those in charge of the relief-work. There were never less than fifty stragglers who were not on the list, but who had assembled with the other in the hope that any left-overs might fall to their lot. At first, whatever remained was distributed as far as it would go, but in time the number who depended on sharing this small quantity of food became so great, and fights over it were so frequent that finally the distributor had to refuse to give even what was left to any that were not on the regular list. It was pitiful to see the disappointment of the unfortunate ones when they realized that there was not one drop or one crumb to spare, and that they could not immediately be enrolled among the lucky ones.

The food was cooked in enormous cauldrons, and it was inevitable in the preparation of such a quantity that residue should stick to the bottom of the vessel and char there. Although this was burned, it contained a certain amount of nutriment, and it was carefully scraped off and given to the two watch-dogs that guarded the premises. When the people discovered this fact they went down on their knees and begged that it be given to them instead of the dogs, a request which could not be refused, and they devoured it as ravenously as the dogs themselves would have done.

One day a poor woman visited him in his office in Beirut. She had five children with her, and all were manifestly starving. She told the Doctor that her husband was in the United States, but that she had not been able to communicate with him, or received any financial assistance from him. She stated the simple fact that they could not live more than a few days unless some one helped them, and having heard of Dr. Dray's hospice, she had come to implore him to take the children in. For herself she asked nothing. She was ready to die as soon as she knew they were provided for, and she only asked that after the war was over the Doctor would tell her husband that she had done her best for her children and his.The hospice was already full to overflowing, and the Doctor was turning away daily dozens of similar cases, but he finally told the mother that he would take two of the five children. He had no sooner spoken than he saw his mistake, for the poor mother had then to decide which of her darlings she should choose. She herself must appoint the two to live in the knowledge that the other three would certainly die with her. Her distress was more than Dr. Dray could bear, and he finally consented to take all five, although he did not know what he could do with them.

In another case, a mother with two children, the only survivors of a family of six or seven little ones, came to him with the same request. This father also was in America. The mother would die content, if only the hospice would take her children and Dr. Dray would promise to tell her husband that she had done her best for them. It was impossible, so it seemed to the Doctor then, to accept another child into the already crowded hospice, but he gave the mother a letter to Azmi Bey recommending her for enrolment in one of the municipal soup-kitchens in Beirut. It was a cold, rainy day in winter. The Doctor had walked up to Brummana to oversee the work, and was hurrying to start back to Beirut before night fell. About an hour after the woman had left he himself started on the long tramp through the rain. A short distance out of Brummana he came upon the mother lying dead by the roadside, her weeping babes shivering beside her. What could he do but turn back to Brummana taking the children with him?

Such cases as these are what might be called the fortunate ones, for at least certain members of these families were finally enrolled on the Soup-Kitchen list. What, though, of the others for whom there was no room? Some months later Dr. Dray took me down to a little pine grove on the edge of a precipice not more than thirty yards from the kitchen where the food for distribution was cooked. In that little clump of trees we found bones of three people, a woman and two children. They had died there of starvation with the odour of food in their nostrils, and the wild animals of the hills had eaten their bodies, leaving their bones to whiten on the ground. That tells the story of thousands.

The work of Dr. Dray was begun in the summer of 1916 and was continued for thirty months until the American Red Cross arrived in November, 1918, a month after the British occupation, to take over all the relief-work in Syria. The list of beneficiaries included not only residents of Brummana and adjacent villages, but also the inhabitants of more than fifty other small towns in the vicinity. Some of the pensioners came down the mountain; and the only survivors of that village to-day (about one-fifth of the original population) are those whom Dr. Dray saved either in the Brummana Soup-Kitchen or by the distribution of fund in the village. Later, as the representatives from outlying villages became more numerous, arrangement were made to send the portion for each to a centre in the village, thus saving the inhabitants of more distant places a daily tramp of several weary hours through the mountains. People came to Brummana from all over the country in the hope of obtaining assistance; and it there were any chance of being enrolled on the Soup-Kitchen list, they camped in this vicinity. The fame of the Muta'am, as the Syrians called it, was published throughout the land, and starving people came a great distance to petition for enrolment. Every pauper in Syria seemed to believe that, if only he were in Brummana, he too would be fed; and pilgrims from distant villages who could not be included in the already over-large list died on the hills.

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