The Turks had made three attacks on Velestinos on three different days,
and each time had been repulsed. A week later, on the 4th of May, they
came back again, to the number of ten thousand, and brought four
batteries with them, and the fighting continued for two more days. This
was called the second battle of Velestinos. In the afternoon of the 5th
the Crown Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take up a stronger position at
Domokos, and the Greeks under General Smolenski, the military hero of the
campaign, were forced to retreat, and the Turks came in, and, according
to their quaint custom, burned the village and marched on to Volo. John
Bass, the American correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the
village, in the home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had
nearly all the villagers; and as we liked the appearance of his house, I
gave Bass a leg up over the wall around his garden, and Bass opened the
gate, and we climbed in through his front window. It was like the
invasion of the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,
and, like them, we were constantly making discoveries of fresh
treasure-trove. Sometimes it was in the form of a cake of soap or a tin
of coffee, and once it was the mayor's fluted petticoats, which we tried
on, and found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets.
All of these things, and the house itself, were burned to ashes, we were
told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled now at
having made such free use of them.
On the morning of the 4th we were awakened by the firing of cannon from a
hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room and
solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the only
correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London _Times_, Bass
was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw this fight
from its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines of
men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills. If you
had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they would have
been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from one another.
In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys, and the beds of
streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These valleys were filled with
high grass that waved about in the breeze and was occasionally torn up
and tossed in the air by a shell. The position of the Greek forces was
very simple. On the top of each hill was a trench two or three feet deep
and some hundred yards long. The earth that had been scooped out to make
the trench was packed on the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of
that some of the men had piled stones, through which they poked their
rifles. When a shell struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter these
stones in among the men, and they did quite as much damage as the shells.
Back of these trenches, and down that side of the hill which was farther
from the enemy, were the reserves, who sprawled at length in the long
grass, and smoked and talked and watched the shells dropping into the
gully at their feet.
The battle, which lasted two days, opened in a sudden and terrific storm
of hail. But the storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving the
trenches running with water, like the gutters of a city street after a
spring shower; and the men soon sopped them up with their overcoats and
blankets, and in half an hour the sun had dried the wet uniforms, and the
field-birds had begun to chirp again, and the grass was warm and
fragrant. The sun was terribly hot. There was no other day during that
entire brief campaign when its glare was so intense or the heat so
suffocating. The men curled up in the trenches, with their heads pressed
against the damp earth, panting and breathing heavily, and the heat-waves
danced and quivered about them, making the plain below flicker like a
picture in a cinematograph.
From time to time an officer would rise and peer down into the great
plain, shading his eyes with his hands, and shout something at them, and
they would turn quickly in the trench and rise on one knee. And at the
shout that followed they would fire four or five rounds rapidly and
evenly, and then, at a sound from the officer's whistle, would drop back
again and pick up the cigarettes they had placed in the grass and begin
leisurely to swab out their rifles with a piece of dirty rag on a
cleaning rod. Down in the plain below there was apparently nothing at
which they could shoot except the great shadows of the clouds drifting
across the vast checker-board of green and yellow fields, and
disappearing finally between the mountain passes beyond. In some places
there were square dark patches that might have been bushes, and nearer to
us than these were long lines of fresh earth, from which steam seemed to
be escaping in little wisps. What impressed us most of what we could see
of the battle then was the remarkable number of cartridges the Greek
soldiers wasted in firing into space, and the fact that they had begun to
fire at such long range that, in order to get the elevation, they had
placed the rifle butt under the armpit instead of against the shoulder.
Their sights were at the top notch. The cartridges reminded one of
corn-cobs jumping out of a corn-sheller, and it was interesting when the
bolts were shot back to see a hundred of them pop up into the air at the
same time, flashing in the sun as though they were glad to have done
their work and to get out again. They rolled by the dozens underfoot,
and twinkled in the grass, and when one shifted his position in the
narrow trench, or stretched his cramped legs, they tinkled musically. It
was like wading in a gutter filled with thimbles.
Then there began a concert which came from just overhead--a concert of
jarring sounds and little whispers. The "shrieking shrapnel," of which
one reads in the description of every battle, did not seem so much like a
shriek as it did like the jarring sound of telegraph wires when some one
strikes the pole from which they hang, and when they came very close the
noise was like the rushing sound that rises between two railroad trains
when they pass each other in opposite directions and at great speed.
After a few hours we learned by observation that when a shell sang
overhead it had already struck somewhere else, which was comforting, and
which was explained, of course, by the fact that the speed of the shell
is so much greater than the rate at which sound travels. The bullets
were much more disturbing; they seemed to be less open in their warfare,
and to steal up and sneak by, leaving no sign, and only to whisper as
they passed. They moved under a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel
as though he were the blind man in a game of blind-man's-buff, where
every one tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as to
whither they had gone and from what point they would come next. The
bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like humming-birds on a warm
summer's day, or like the wind as it is imitated on the stage of a
theatre. Any one who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little wheel wound with silk that
brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the whistling
effect of the wind. At Velestinos, when the firing was very heavy, it
was exactly as though some one were turning one of these silk wheels, and
so rapidly as to make the whistling continuous.
When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and each
of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he fired
again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder. The huge
green blotches on the plain had turned blue, and now we could distinguish
that they moved, and that they were moving steadily forward. Then they
would cease to move, and a little later would be hidden behind great
puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a flash of flame; and still
later there would come a dull report. At the same instant something
would hurl itself jarring through the air above our heads, and by turning
on one elbow we could see a sudden upheaval in the sunny landscape behind
us, a spurt of earth and stones like a miniature geyser, which was filled
with broken branches and tufts of grass and pieces of rock. As the
Turkish aim grew better these volcanoes appeared higher up the hill,
creeping nearer and nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the second
trench until the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it
away and cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of
men caught up and hurled to one side, and others flinging themselves face
downward as though they were diving into water; and at the same instant
in our own trench the men would gasp as though they had been struck too,
and then becoming conscious of having done this would turn and smile
sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the burrows they had made
in the earth.
[Picture: A mountain battery at Velestinos]
From where we sat on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the
cartridges, we could, by leaning forward, look over the piled-up earth
into the plain below, and soon, without any aid from field-glasses, we
saw the blocks of blue break up into groups of men. These men came
across the ploughed fields in long, widely opened lines, walking easily
and leisurely, as though they were playing golf or sowing seed in the
furrows.
The Greek rifles crackled and flashed at the lines, but the men below
came on quite steadily, picking their way over the furrows and appearing
utterly unconscious of the seven thousand rifles that were calling on
them to halt. They were advancing directly toward a little sugar-loaf
hill, on the top of which was a mountain battery perched like a tiara on
a woman's head. It was throwing one shell after another in the very path
of the men below, but the Turks still continued to pick their way across
the field, without showing any regard for the mountain battery. It was
worse than threatening; it seemed almost as though they meant to insult
us. If they had come up on a run they would not have appeared so
contemptuous, for it would have looked then as though they were trying to
escape the Greek fire, or that they were at least interested in what was
going forward. But the steady advance of so many men, each plodding
along by himself, with his head bowed and his gun on his shoulder, was
aggravating.
There was a little village at the foot of the hill. It was so small that
no one had considered it. It was more like a collection of stables
gathered round a residence than a town, and there was a wall completely
encircling it, with a gate in the wall that faced us. Suddenly the doors
of this gate were burst open from the inside, and a man in a fez ran
through them, followed by many more. The first man was waving a sword,
and a peasant in petticoats ran at his side and pointed up with his hand
at our trench. Until that moment the battle had lacked all human
interest; we might have been watching a fight against the stars or the
man in the moon, and, in spite of the noise and clatter of the Greek
rifles, and the ghostlike whispers and the rushing sounds in the air,
there was nothing to remind us of any other battle of which we had heard
or read. But we had seen pictures of officers waving swords, and we knew
that the fez was the sign of the Turk--of the enemy--of the men who were
invading Thessaly, who were at that moment planning to come up a steep
hill on which we happened to be sitting and attack the people on top of
it. And the spectacle at once became comprehensible, and took on the
human interest it had lacked. The men seemed to feel this, for they
sprang up and began cheering and shouting, and fired in an upright
position, and by so doing exposed themselves at full length to the fire
from the men below. The Turks in front of the village ran back into it
again, and those in the fields beyond turned and began to move away, but
in that same plodding, aggravating fashion. They moved so leisurely that
there was a pause in the noise along the line, while the men watched them
to make sure that they were really retreating. And then there was a long
cheer, after which they all sat down, breathing deeply, and wiping the
sweat and dust across their faces, and took long pulls at their canteens.
The different trenches were not all engaged at the same time. They acted
according to the individual judgment of their commanding officer, but
always for the general good. Sometimes the fire of the enemy would be
directed on one particular trench, and it would be impossible for the men
in that trench to rise and reply without haying their heads carried away;
so they would lie hidden, and the men in the trenches flanking them would
act in their behalf, and rake the enemy from the front and from every
side, until the fire on that trench was silenced, or turned upon some
other point. The trenches stretched for over half a mile in a
semicircle, and the little hills over which they ran lay at so many
different angles, and rose to such different heights, that sometimes the
men in one trench fired directly over the heads of their own men. From
many trenches in the first line it was impossible to see any of the Greek
soldiers except those immediately beside you. If you looked back or
beyond on either hand there was nothing to be seen but high hills topped
with fresh earth, and the waving yellow grass, and the glaring blue sky.
General Smolenski directed the Greeks from the plain to the far right of
the town; and his presence there, although none of the men saw nor heard
of him directly throughout the entire day, was more potent for good than
would have been the presence of five thousand other men held in reserve.
He was a mile or two miles away from the trenches, but the fact that he
was there, and that it was Smolenski who was giving the orders, was
enough. Few had ever seen Smolenski, but his name was sufficient; it was
as effective as is Mr. Bowen's name on a Bank of England note. It gave
one a pleasant feeling to know that he was somewhere within call; you
felt there would be no "routs" nor stampedes while he was there. And so
for two days those seven thousand men lay in the trenches, repulsing
attack after attack of the Turkish troops, suffocated with the heat and
chilled with sudden showers, and swept unceasingly by shells and
bullets--partly because they happened to be good men and brave men, but
largely because they knew that somewhere behind them a stout, bull-necked
soldier was sitting on a camp-stool, watching them through a pair of
field-glasses.
Toward mid-day you would see a man leave the trench with a comrade's arm
around him, and start on the long walk to the town where the hospital
corps were waiting for him. These men did not wear their wounds with
either pride or braggadocio, but regarded the wet sleeves and shapeless
arms in a sort of wondering surprise. There was much more of surprise
than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be puzzling as to what
they had done in the past to deserve such a punishment.
[Picture: Firing from the trenches at Velestinos]
Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on the
high grass, staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, and with their limbs
fallen into unfamiliar poses. They lay so still, and they were so
utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and the anxious energy around
them that one grew rather afraid of them and of their superiority to
their surroundings. The sun beat on them, and the insects in the grass
waving above them buzzed and hummed, or burrowed in the warm moist earth
upon which they lay; over their heads the invisible carriers of death
jarred the air with shrill crescendoes, and near them a comrade sat
hacking with his bayonet at a lump of hard bread. He sprawled
contentedly in the hot sun, with humped shoulders and legs far apart, and
with his cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now and again he would
pause, with a piece of cheese balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and
look at the twisted figures by him on the grass, or he would dodge
involuntarily as a shell swung low above his head, and smile nervously at
the still forms on either side of him that had not moved. Then he
brushed the crumbs from his jacket and took a drink out of his hot
canteen, and looking again at the sleeping figures pressing down the long
grass beside him, crawled back on his hands and knees to the trench and
picked up his waiting rifle.
The dead gave dignity to what the other men were doing, and made it
noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless. For their dying
had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared than
they, were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but through
mere dumb chance. There was no selection of the unfittest; it seemed to
be ruled by unreasoning luck. A certain number of shells and bullets
passed through a certain area of space, and men of different bulks
blocked that space in different places. If a man happened to be standing
in the line of a bullet he was killed and passed into eternity, leaving a
wife and children, perhaps, to mourn him. "Father died," these children
will say, "doing his duty." As a matter of fact, father died because he
happened to stand up at the wrong moment, or because he turned to ask the
man on his right for a match, instead of leaning toward the left, and he
projected his bulk of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired by a man
who did not know him and who had not aimed at him, happened to want the
right of way. One of the two had to give it, and as the bullet would
not, the soldier had his heart torn out. The man who sat next to me
happened to stoop to fill his cartridge-box just as the bullet that
wanted the space he had occupied passed over his bent shoulder; and so he
was not killed, but will live for sixty years, perhaps, and will do much
good or much evil. Another man in the same trench sat up to clean his
rifle, and had his arm in the air driving the cleaning rod down the
barrel, when a bullet passed through his lungs, and the gun fell across
his face, with the rod sticking in it, and he pitched forward on his
shoulder quite dead. If he had not cleaned his gun at that moment he
would probably be alive in Athens now, sitting in front of a cafe and
fighting the war over again. Viewed from that point, and leaving out the
fact that God ordered it all, the fortunes of the game of war seemed as
capricious as matching pennies, and as impersonal as the wheel at Monte
Carlo. In it the brave man did not win because he was brave, but because
he was lucky. A fool and a philosopher are equal at a game of dice. And
these men who threw dice with death were interesting to watch, because,
though they gambled for so great a stake, they did so unconcernedly and
without flinching, and without apparently appreciating the seriousness of
the game.
There was a red-headed, freckled peasant boy, in dirty petticoats, who
guided Bass and myself to the trenches. He was one of the few peasants
who had not run away, and as he had driven sheep over every foot of the
hills, he was able to guide the soldiers through those places where they
were best protected from the bullets of the enemy. He did this all day,
and was always, whether coming or going, under a heavy fire; but he
enjoyed that fact, and he seemed to regard the battle only as a
delightful change in the quiet routine of his life, as one of our own
country boys at home would regard the coming of the spring circus or the
burning of a neighbor's barn. He ran dancing ahead of us, pointing to
where a ledge of rock offered a natural shelter, or showing us a steep
gully where the bullets could not fall. When they came very near him he
would jump high in the air, not because he was startled, but out of pure
animal joy in the excitement of it, and he would frown importantly and
shake his red curls at us, as though to say: "I told you to be careful.
Now, you see. Don't let that happen again." We met him many times
during the two days, escorting different companies of soldiers from one
point to another, as though they were visitors to his estate. When a
shell broke, he would pick up a piece and present it to the officer in
charge, as though it were a flower he had plucked from his own garden,
and which he wanted his guest to carry away with him as a souvenir of his
visit. Some one asked the boy if his father and mother knew where he
was, and he replied, with amusement, that they had run away and deserted
him, and that he had remained because he wished to see what a Turkish
army looked like. He was a much more plucky boy than the overrated
Casabianca, who may have stood on the burning deck whence all but him had
fled because he could not swim, and because it was with him a choice of
being either burned or drowned. This boy stuck to the burning deck when
it was possible for him at any time to have walked away and left it
burning. But he stayed on because he was amused, and because he was able
to help the soldiers from the city in safety across his native heath. He
was much the best part of the show, and one of the bravest Greeks on the
field. He will grow up to be something fine, no doubt, and his spirit
will rebel against having to spend his life watching his father's sheep.
He may even win the race from Marathon.
Another Greek who was a most interesting figure to us was a Lieutenant
Ambroise Frantzis. He was in command of the mountain battery on the
flat, round top of the high hill. On account of its height the place
seemed much nearer to the sun than any other part of the world, and the
heat there was three times as fierce as in the trenches below. When you
had climbed to the top of this hill it was like standing on a
roof-garden, or as though you were watching a naval battle from a
fighting top of one of the battleships. The top of the hill was not
unlike an immense circus ring in appearance. The piled-up earth around
its circular edge gave that impression, and the glaring yellow wheat that
was tramped into glaring yellow soil, and the blue ammunition-boxes
scattered about, helped out the illusion. It was an exceedingly busy
place, and the smoke drifted across it continually, hiding us from one
another in a curtain of flying yellow dust, while over our heads the
Turkish shells raced after each other so rapidly that they beat out the
air like the branches of a tree in a storm. On account of its height,
and the glaring heat, and the shells passing, and the Greek guns going
off and then turning somersaults, it was not a place suited for
meditation; but Ambroise Frantzis meditated there as though he were in
his own study. He was a very young man and very shy, and he was too busy
to consider his own safety, or to take time, as the others did, to show
that he was not considering it. Some of the other officers stood up on
the breastworks and called the attention of the men to what they were
doing; but as they did not wish the men to follow their example in this,
it was difficult to see what they expected to gain by their braggadocio.
Frantzis was as unconcerned as an artist painting a big picture in his
studio. The battle plain below him was his canvas, and his nine mountain
guns were his paint brushes. And he painted out Turks and Turkish cannon
with the same concentrated, serious expression of countenance that you
see on the face of an artist when he bites one brush between his lips and
with another wipes out a false line or a touch of the wrong color. You
have seen an artist cock his head on one side, and shut one eye and frown
at his canvas, and then select several brushes and mix different colors
and hit the canvas a bold stroke, and then lean back to note the effect.
Frantzis acted in just that way. He would stand with his legs apart and
his head on one side, pulling meditatively at his pointed beard, and then
taking a closer look through his field-glasses, would select the three
guns he had decided would give him the effect he wanted to produce, and
he would produce that effect. When the shot struck plump in the Turkish
lines, and we could see the earth leap up into the air like geysers of
muddy water, and each gunner would wave his cap and cheer, Frantzis would
only smile uncertainly, and begin again, with the aid of his
field-glasses, to puzzle out fresh combinations.
The battle that had begun in a storm of hail ended on the first day in a
storm of bullets that had been held in reserve by the Turks, and which
let off just after sundown. They came from a natural trench, formed by
the dried-up bed of a stream which lay just below the hill on which the
first Greek trench was situated. There were bushes growing on the bank
of the stream nearest to the Greek lines, and these hid the men who
occupied it. Throughout the day there had been an irritating fire from
this trench from what appeared to be not more than a dozen rifles, but we
could see that it was fed from time to time with many boxes of
ammunition, which were carried to it on the backs of mules from the
Turkish position a half mile farther to the rear. Bass and a corporal
took a great aversion to this little group of Turks, not because there
were too many of them to be disregarded, but because they were so near;
and Bass kept the corporal's services engaged in firing into it, and in
discouraging the ammunition mules when they were being driven in that
direction. Our corporal was a sharp-shooter, and, accordingly, felt his
superiority to his comrades; and he had that cheerful contempt for his
officers that all true Greek soldiers enjoy; and so he never joined in
the volley-firing, but kept his ammunition exclusively for the dozen men
behind the bushes and for the mules. He waged, as it were, a little
battle on his own account. The other men rose as commanded and fired
regular volleys, and sank back again, but he fixed his sights to suit his
own idea of the range, and he rose when he was ready to do so, and fired
whenever he thought best. When his officer, who kept curled up in the
hollow of the trench, commanded him to lie down, he would frown and shake
his head at the interruption, and paid no further attention to the order.
He was as much alone as a hunter on a mountain peak stalking deer, and
whenever he fired at the men in the bushes he would swear softly, and
when he fired at the mules he would chuckle and laugh with delight and
content. The mules had to cross a ploughed field in order to reach the
bushes, and so we were able to mark where his bullets struck, and we
could see them skip across the field, kicking up the dirt as they
advanced, until they stopped the mule altogether, or frightened the man
who was leading it into a disorderly retreat.
It appeared later that instead of there being but twelve men in these
bushes there were six hundred, and that they were hiding there until the
sun set in order to make a final attack on the first trench. They had
probably argued that at sunset the strain of the day's work would have
told on the Greek _morale_, that the men's nerves would be jerking and
their stomachs aching for food, and that they would be ready for darkness
and sleep, and in no condition to repulse a fresh and vigorous attack.
So, just as the sun sank, and the officers were counting the cost in dead
and wounded, and the men were gathering up blankets and overcoats, and
the firing from the Greek lines had almost ceased, there came a fierce
rattle from the trench to the right of us, like a watch-dog barking the
alarm, and the others took it up from all over the hill, and when we
looked down into the plain below to learn what it meant, we saw it blue
with men, who seemed to have sprung from the earth. They were clambering
from the bed of the stream, breaking through the bushes, and forming into
a long line, which, as soon as formed, was at once hidden at regular
intervals by flashes of flame that seemed to leap from one gun-barrel to
the next, as you have seen a current of electricity run along a line of
gas-jets. In the dim twilight these flashes were much more blinding than
they had been in the glare of the sun, and the crash of the artillery
coming on top of the silence was the more fierce and terrible by the
contrast. The Turks were so close on us that the first trench could do
little to help itself, and the men huddled against it while their
comrades on the surrounding hills fought for them, their volleys passing
close above our heads, and meeting the rush of the Turkish bullets on the
way, so that there was now one continuous whistling shriek, like the roar
of the wind through the rigging of a ship in a storm. If a man had
raised his arm above his head his hand would have been torn off. It had
come up so suddenly that it was like two dogs, each springing at the
throat of the other, and in a greater degree it had something of the
sound of two wild animals struggling for life. Volley answered volley as
though with personal hate--one crashing in upon the roll of the other, or
beating it out of recognition with the bursting roar of heavy cannon. At
the same instant all of the Turkish batteries opened with great,
ponderous, booming explosions, and the little mountain guns barked and
snarled and shrieked back at them, and the rifle volleys crackled and
shot out blistering flames, while the air was filled with invisible
express trains that shook and jarred it and crashed into one another,
bursting and shrieking and groaning. It seemed as though you were lying
in a burning forest, with giant tree trunks that had withstood the storms
of centuries crashing and falling around your ears, and sending up great
showers of sparks and flame. This lasted for five minutes or less, and
then the death-grip seemed to relax, the volleys came brokenly, like a
man panting for breath, the bullets ceased to sound with the hiss of
escaping steam, and rustled aimlessly by, and from hill-top to hill-top
the officers' whistles sounded as though a sportsman were calling off his
dogs. The Turks withdrew into the coming night, and the Greeks lay back,
panting and sweating, and stared open-eyed at one another, like men who
had looked for a moment into hell, and had come back to the world again.
The next day was like the first, except that by five o'clock in the
afternoon the Turks appeared on our left flank, crawling across the hills
like an invasion of great ants, and the Greek army that at Velestinos had
made the two best and most dignified stands of the war withdrew upon
Halmyros, and the Turks poured into the village and burned it, leaving
nothing standing save two tall Turkish minarets that many years before,
when Thessaly belonged to the Sultan, the Turks themselves had placed
there.