IN THE HILLS
In the hills of Gallipoli, between Uzundere and Biyuk Anafarta near the
Salt Lake, a platoon of Kurdish troops had just joined a half-company of
Anatolians. They were taking their midday meal on a level stretch of
turf some seven hundred feet above sea-level. It was the only clear
space of considerable size in a wilderness of scrub. Below them ran the
rough track from Biyuk Anafarta to Boghali. The hill of Sari Bair,
nearly three hundred feet above them, blocked the direct view to the
nearest part of the sea; but north and south of that eminence the blue
waters were clearly visible. The horizon was dotted with dark shapes,
no doubt warships and transports of the Allied fleet. To the south,
over the lower hills between them and Boghali, they looked down upon the
Narrows, with Kilid Bahr on the European shore and Chanak on the
Asiatic. To the north-east stretched the Dardanelles above the Narrows,
and here too vessels, but Turkish, were passing up and down.
It would have been apparent to the most casual observer that the arrival
of the Kurds was not welcome to their Anatolian brethren-in-arms. The
Kurd has a habit of assuming a swaggering air of superiority. The
Anatolians were in charge of a captain and a lieutenant, the Kurds of a
lieutenant only; but this latter officer, seated with the others a
little apart from the men, was treating the captain as though he were a
subaltern. Ignoring his inferiority in rank, he had questioned and
cross-questioned in a bumptious way that raised the captain's gall. As
the captain remarked in an undertone to his lieutenant, this barbarous
Kurd could not have been more insolent if he had been a German. And as
it was with the officers, so with the men. They ate their simple food
together, but the Anatolians maintained a sullen silence amid the loud
talking of the Kurds. When it was a question of fetching water from the
stream that flowed through the rocky bottom below, it was two of the
Anatolians who were told off to the job by the Kurdish sergeant, and
went sulkily to obey.
The Kurdish lieutenant was holding forth to the other officers.
"Wallahy!" he said. "Here I am, but it is not where I would wish to be.
The fight against odds is the breath of his nostrils to a Kurd. If
there had been a few squadrons of Kurds in Egypt the other day we should
have been in Cairo by now."
"But there were Kurds--many Kurds," the captain ventured to remark. "It
was told me by my cousin in a letter."
"Ahi! Are we in Cairo? In truth we are not. I repeat, if there had
been Kurds we should have been in Cairo. Therefore there were no Kurds.
Mashallah! Did not Liman Pasha whisper in my ear, the day after we set
foot in Gallipoli, 'With ten thousand Kurds, noble Abdi, we could
conquer the world. Therefore take me now twenty of your excellent men
and catch this Englishman. Have we not had for ten days half a company
of Anatolian asses on the trail?'"
This was more than even an Anatolian captain could stand.
"You wish to insult me?" he cried.
"Wallahy! What is this? Insult you? I do but repeat the Alman Pasha's
words. Mayhap I understood him wrongly; but it seemed to me that he
spoke of Anatolian asses. Who am I to correct him? But come now, tell
me what you have done and where you have been; what caves you have
searched, what woods you have beaten."
Unwillingly, sulkily, the captain gave particulars of his doings during
the past few days. He felt that though nominally in command as senior
officer, the Kurd was in reality superseding him. And he resented the
implication that he had failed in what was at best a thankless task.
Some ten days before, his information had been, an Englishman disguised
as an Armenian had been recognised in Gallipoli as a fugitive from
Erzerum. How he had contrived to reach Gallipoli was a mystery. Before
he could be arrested by the person who had discovered him, he had made a
violent attack on that person, and escaped to the hills. When the alarm
was given, the Anatolian captain had been sent in pursuit. About sunset
a peasant had seen an Armenian who answered to the description of the
fugitive crossing the Karaman river near the Bergas road. Darkness
prevented his being followed up, but the hunt was resumed at dawn next
morning. It had proved fruitless hitherto. The captain complained that
not a hundred, but ten thousand men would be required to beat thoroughly
those rugged brush-covered hills.
"Think of it!" he said. "Climbing up and down these almost
perpendicular hill-faces; through dense scrub; down one side of a
valley, across a stream or a swamp and up the other side; beating
bushes; exploring hill caves; searching secluded farms--and all the time
without proper food. We were sent away in a hurry. 'Hunt till you find
him,' was the order. We had two days' rations, and since then have had
to depend on what we could pick up at the farms, and they, as you know,
are in lonely places far apart. And we have not so much as caught sight
of this elusive Englishman, though we have heard of him often enough.
Wallahy! a farmer at Taifur Keui told me that a young Armenian had
walked uninvited into his house and demanded food, holding a revolver to
his head. Stricken with amazement and terror at this boldness on the
part of an Armenian dog--but in truth a famished dog is bold as a
lion--the farmer gave him bread and honey, and having satisfied himself,
he paid for his entertainment and went away composedly and without
haste, threatening to shoot any man that followed him. This being told
me, I hunted diligently for two days through the Taifur district, and
behold, it was then related that the fugitive had appeared at Kum Keui,
ten miles away on the high-road, and there he had waylaid a supply
wagon, and taken for himself a great quantity of the good things it
contained, and forced the driver to unyoke the mules, and when this was
done in fear and trembling because of the revolver, this bold brigand
caused the wagon to run down a sloping place and over a precipice into
the Ak Bashi river."
"Mashallah! These are marvels indeed," said the Kurd, "and there is no
truth in them. But say on, captain; let my ears feast on these fairy
tales."
"I speak what I have heard; as for the truth, Allah knows. It was told
me also that the dog was seen at Kachili and Kuchuk Anafarta, but when I
came to those places and was searching every nook and cranny, behold,
one brought me word that he had been seen elsewhere. Yesterday, as I
live, a major of artillery came wearily into Maidos, sick with shame at
the garments he wore, which in very truth were the rags of an Armenian.
And he told me that when he was riding without escort on the Gallipoli
road near Boghali yonder, a young giant that was Armenian in dress but a
very devil in mien and bearing leapt forth suddenly from the bushes of
the wayside, and laying a mighty hand upon him, dragged him from his
horse, and compelled him there and then to exchange his uniform for
those filthy tatters the Armenian wore. Yet did the major confess that
his ravisher was not without courtesy, for even as he put on the major's
heavy coat he prayed his pardon for the robbery, saying that he would
fain have left him the coat, but that he could not, because the nights
in these hills are bitter cold. And that this is truth I tell is sure,
for that same day--yesterday in the afternoon--an officer of artillery
was seen, alone, above Baghche Keui, the hamlet you see below us yonder.
And I came last night in haste to Biyuk Anafarta, and rose with the
dawn, and for six hours I have been scouring these hills, and not a
glimpse of that bold Englishman have I seen."
"Wallahy! Truly it was time I came," said the Kurd. "Know you that it
was I, Abdi, that found the Englishman searching for treasure in the
ruins of a house in Gallipoli which an English shell had smitten. It was
I, Abdi, whom the dog, taking me unawares--who can contend against
deceitfulness?--hurled fainting to the ground. To me should have been
given the task of hunting the dog; now to me it is given; and by the
beard of the Prophet I will catch him and flay him; I, Abdi, say it."
While the others were thus conversing, some of the men, having finished
their meal, had got up and begun to stroll about the hillside. Others
had gone down to fill their water-bottles at a spring that bubbled out
of the rock some two hundred yards from the spot where the officers were
sitting. Abdi, lighting a cigarette, watched them with a speculative
eye.
"Your Anatolians may stray too far," he said. "That will not my Kurds
do. Come now, let us make our plans. We must beat these hills as we
beat for bear in Kurdistan. See, here and there below us are clear
spaces in the scrub. Into the scrub between them I will send my own
men; them I can trust to let nothing pass, not a rabbit nor a stoat nor
any small creeping thing; they are not plainsmen, blind and deaf. Your
Anatolians shall move six paces apart towards the spot where my
mountaineers are posted: even they, surely, cannot let anything through
so small a mesh. You will form them up in a crescent line, the horns
pointing to where my men lurk in the scrub. So shall we beat a large
circle, and if our quarry is not started there, we will go on and do
likewise farther afield."
They flung away the ends of their cigarettes, rose to their feet, and
blew their whistles. From various directions the men hurried back, the
Anatolians lining up on one side of the open space, the Kurds on the
other. When the ranks were formed and numbered off, a Kurdish sergeant
called out:
"There is a man short. Where is Yusuf?"
The men looked up and down the line, as if seeking their missing
comrade; then one of them said:
"I saw him go down to fill his bottle."
The sergeant blew his whistle, and took a few paces in the direction of
the stream. A few minutes passed. The absentee did not appear. The
sergeant reported his absence to Abdi.
"Take a couple of men and look for him," said the Kurd, twirling his
moustache.
The three men went off and disappeared over the brow of the hill.
Presently there were shouts from below, and one of the men came back at
a run, saluted his officer, and cried excitedly:
"We have found Yusuf, effendim, lying on his back, with his hands and
feet tied with his own straps, and his cap thrust between his teeth."
Abdi scowled, and would not meet the Anatolian captain's eye. In
another moment the missing man appeared over the crest, led between the
sergeant and his comrade.
"What is this, Yusuf?" demanded Abdi roughly, going to meet the man,
whose bare head was streaming with water.
"Wallahy! I have been most grievously entreated. I was filling my
bottle at the stream there below when there came a step behind me, which
I heeded not, thinking one of my comrades had come to fill his bottle
likewise. And then, behold, a strong hand seized me, and thrust my head
under the water, and held it there until I well-nigh burst for want of
breath; and when all the strength was gone out of me I was cast upon the
ground, and my wet cap was thrust between my teeth, and my hands and
feet were tied, and I was left half dead."
"Who was it did this thing?" asked Abdi.
"Truly I know not, but he had the form of a major of our army, if in the
confusion of my senses I could see aright."
"Where is your rifle?"
"It was taken from me, together with my pouch and the hundred cartridges
therein."
Abdi spat and cursed, twirling his moustache more fiercely than ever.
His fury was increased by a look of amusement on the faces of the
Anatolian officers. Aggrieved that a Kurd should have been sent to make
good their deficiencies, and enraged by his insolent and overbearing
manner, they took no pains to conceal their delight in the discomfiture
of the boaster at the hands of the man whose rumoured exploits he had
derided and whom he had declared his intention of flaying. His chagrin
almost reconciled them to the escape of the fugitive whom they had been
vainly hunting for a week.
But the incident spurred them to activity. The fugitive could not be far
away. Here was an opportunity of proving whether Kurd or Anatolian was
the better man. Abdi's deliberate dispositions were forgotten or
ignored. While Abdi led his men at a furious pace in the direction of
the stream, the Anatolian captain ordered his party to extend and
advance methodically through the scrub. The hunt was up.
Some two hours later a young man in the uniform of a major of Turkish
artillery, but carrying a rifle, might have been seen threading his way
through the dense scrub on the northern slopes of Sari Bair. Reaching a
point where it was possible to obtain a good view to the north-east, he
looked cautiously around, halted and listened. There was no sound but
the whistling of the wind through the bushes. After a moment's hurried
survey of his surroundings, he discovered a spot where he could see
without being seen, unslung his field-glasses, and swept the opposite
slope of Karsilar. For some little time the glasses moved slowly from
left to right, then the watcher held them stationary and took a long and
steady gaze. A line of figures was moving like ants across a clear
space and disappearing into the scrub beyond. A little later they
reappeared in another break in the vegetation, working towards Baghche
Keui.
Apparently satisfied, he shut up the glasses, and returned them to their
case. The name of the maker caught his eye.
"Good English glasses!" he murmured, as men do who have lived for some
time alone. "I am uncommonly obliged to you, my dear major. I needed
something to equalise the odds."