With The Turks At The Dardanelles
The little side-wheeler--she had been built in Glasgow in 1892, and done
duty as a Bosporus ferry-boat until the war began--was supposed to sail
at four, but night shut down and she still lay at the wharf in Stamboul.
We contrived to get some black bread, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and
helva from one of the little hole-in-the-wall shops near by, watched
Pera and its ascending roofs turn to purple, and the purple to gray and
black, until Constantinople was but a string of lights across Galata
Bridge, and a lamp here and there on the hills. Then, toward midnight,
with lights doused and life-belts strung along the rail--for English
submarines were in the Marmora--we churned quietly round the corner of
Stamboul and into the cool sea.
The side-wheeler was bound for the Dardanelles with provisions for the
army--bread in bags, big hampers of green beans, and cigarettes--and
among them we were admitted by grace of the minister of war, and papers
covered with seals and Turkish characters, which neither of us could
read. We tried to curl up on top of the beans (for the Marmora is cold
at night, and the beans still held some of the warmth of the fields),
but in the end took to blankets and the bare decks.
All night we went chunking southward--it is well over a hundred miles
from Constantinople to the upper entrance to the straits--and shook
ourselves out of our blankets and the cinders into another of those
blue-and-gold mornings which belong to this part of the world. You must
imagine it behind all this strange fighting at the Dardanelles--sunshine
and blue water, a glare which makes the Westerner squint; moons that
shine like those in the tropics. One cannot send a photograph of it
home any more than I could photograph the view from my hotel window here
on Pera Hill of Stamboul and the Golden Horn. You would have the
silhouette, but you could not see the sunshine blazing on white mosques
and minarets, the white mosques blazing against terra-cotta roofs and
dusty green cedars and cypresses, the cypresses lifting dark and pensive
shafts against the blue--all that splendid, exquisite radiance which
bursts through one's window shutters every morning and makes it seem
enough to look and a waste of time to try to think.
It is the air the gods and heroes used to breathe; they fought and
played, indeed, over these very waters and wind-swept hills. Leander
swam the Dardanelles (or Hellespont) close to where the Irresistible and
Bouvet were sunk; the wind that blew in our faces that morning was the
same that rippled the drapery of the Winged Victory. As we went
chunking southward with our beans and cigarettes, we could see the snows
of Olympus--the Mysian Olympus, at any rate, if not the one where Jove,
the cloud-compelling, used to live, and white-armed Juno, and Pallas,
Blue-Eyed Maid. If only our passports had taken us to Troy we could
have looked down the plains of Ilium to the English and French ships,
and Australian and French colonials fighting up the hillside across the
bay. We got tea from the galley, and-with bread and helva (an
insinuating combination of sugar and oil of sesame, which tastes of
peanuts and is at once a candy and a sort of substitute for butter or
meat) made out a breakfast.
A Turkish soldier, the only other occupant of the deck, surveyed these
preparations impassively; then, taking off his boots, climbed on a
settee and stood there in his big bare feet, with folded hands, facing,
as he thought, toward Mecca. The boat was headed southwest, and he
looked to starboard, so that he faced, as a matter of fact, nearly due
west. He had knelt and touched his forehead twice to the bench, and was
going on with the Mussulman prayer when the captain, a rather elegant
young man who had served in the navy, murmured something as he passed.
The soldier looked round thoughtfully; without embarrassment, surprise,
or hurry stepped from the settee, pointed it toward the Asiatic shore,
and, stepping up again, resumed his devotions.
Five times that day, as the faithful are commanded, he said his prayer--
a sight that followed us everywhere that week. One evening after dusk,
on another boat, a fireman came up from below, climbed on a settee, and
began his prayer. Several passengers, who had not seen him in the dark,
walked in front of him. He broke off, reviled them in true fire-room
style, then with a wide gesture, as though sweeping the air clear ahead
of him all the way to the holy city, began at the beginning again.
Soldiers up in the Gallipoli hills, the captain on the bridge, a
stevedore working on a lighter in the blaze of noon with the winch
engines squealing round him--you turn round to find a man, busy the
moment before, standing like a statue, hands folded in front of him,
facing the east. Nothing stops him; no one seems to see him; he stands
invisible in the visible world--in a world apart, 'indeed, to which the
curious, self-conscious Westerner is not admitted, where, doubtless, he
is no more than the dust which the other shakes from his feet before he
is fit to address his God.
The Marmora narrowed, we passed Gallipoli on the European side, where
the English and French hostages had had their curious adventure the week
before, and on into the Dardanelles proper and the zone of war. It was
some forty miles down this salt-water river (four miles wide at its
widest, and between the forts of Chanak Kale and Kilid Bahr, near its
lower end, a fraction over a mile) from the Marmora gateway to the
Aegean. On the left were Lapsaki and the green hills of Asia,
cultivated to their very tops; on the right Europe and the brown hills
of the peninsula, now filled with guns and horses and men.
Over there, up that narrow strip of Europe, running down between the
Dardanelles and the Aegean, the Allies had been trying for weeks to
force their way to Constantinople. They had begun in February, you will
recall, when they bombarded the forts at the outer entrance to the
Dardanelles--Sedd ul Bahron the European side, at the tip of the
peninsula, and Kum Kale, across the bay on the Asiatic shore.. These
forts occupy somewhat the relation to Constantinople that Sandy Hook
does to New York, although much farther away--they face, that is to say,
the open sea, and the guns of the fleet, heavier than those of the old
forts, could stand off at a safe distance and demolish them.
When the ships pushed on up the strait toward Kilid Bahr and Chanak
Kale--somewhat like trying to run the Narrows at New York--there was a
different story. They were now within range of shore batteries and
there were anchored mines and mines sent down on the tide. On March 18
the Irresistible, Ocean, and Bouvet were sunk, and it began to be
apparent that the Dardanelles could not be forced without the help of a
powerful land force. So in April landing parties were sent ashore: at
Kum Kale and Sedd ul Bahr, at Kaba Tepe and Art Burnu, some twelve or
fourteen miles farther north on the Aegean side of the peninsula, and at
another point a few miles farther up. At Sedd ul Bahr and along the
beach between Kaba Tepe and Art Bumu the Allies made their landing good,
dug themselves in, and, reinforced by the fire of the ships, began a
trench warfare not unlike that which has dragged on in the west.
The peninsula is but ten or twelve miles wide at its widest, and the
Dardanelles side is within range of the fleet's great guns, firing clear
overland from the Aegean. It was by this indirect fire that Maidos was
destroyed and Gallipoli partly smashed and emptied of its people. There
were places toward the end of the peninsula where Turkish infantrymen
had to huddle in their trenches under fire of this sort coming from
three directions. Whenever the invaders had it behind they were
naturally at an advantage; whenever it ceased they were likely to be
driven back. The Turks, on the other hand, had the advantage of numbers,
of fighting on an "inside line," and of a country, one hill rising
behind another, on the defense of which depended their existence as a
nation in Europe.
Under these conditions the fighting had been going on for weeks, the
English and French holding their ground at Sedd ul Bahr and Ari Burnu,
but getting no nearer Constantinople. And as we went chunking down the
strait that night and into Ak-Bash in the dark, two new forces were
coming in. The next day a German submarine--come all the way round
through the Mediterranean--was to sink the Triumph and the Majestic,
while another American correspondent, who had intended to come with us
but took the transport Nagara instead, saw the head of an English
submarine poke through the Marmora. A blond young man in overalls and
white jersey climbed out of the conning-tower. "Will you give us time
to get off?" cried the American, the only one on board who could speak
English.
"Yes," said the young man, "and be damned quick about it." Ten minutes
later, from the boats into which they had tumbled, the passengers saw a
cloud of yellow smoke, and the Nagara simply disintegrated and sank, and
with her the heavy siege-gun she was taking to the Dardanelles.
Pleasantly unaware of what might as well have happened to the bread and
beans, we drew up to a hill-side speckled with lights, a wharf, and a
hospital boat smelling of iodoform, through a cabin window of which a
doctor was peacefully eating dinner. Boxes and sacks were piled near
the wharf, and from over behind the hills, with startling nearness, came
the nervous Crack... crack... crack-crack-crack! of rifle and
machine-gun fire.
We went to sleep to the tune of it, moved a few miles down the coast in
the night, and crawled out into a world of dusty brown--brown hillsides
and camels and soldiers and sacks of wheat piled on the flat, immersed
in an amber dawn. This was the destination of the side-wheeler, and by
sunup we were loaded into a machine with a horse, several goats, three or
four passengers, and four barefooted boatmen, who pushed us over the
strait to Chanak Kale.
We were now at the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, behind us, on the
European side, the old round tower of Kilid Bahr and Medjidie Fort, in
front Fort Hamidie, and on the horizon to the south, where the strait
opened into the sea, the tiny silhouettes of several of the Allies'
ships. Chanak was smashed like the towns in west Belgium, and, but for
the garrison and the Turkish and German commandants tucked away in the
trees, all but deserted, except by flies and half-starved cats. These
unhappy creatures, left behind in the flight, were everywhere, and in
front of the bake shop they crowded in literal scores--gaunt, mangy,
clawed and battered from constant fights. It was hot, there was little
to eat, and after hours of wrangling it appeared that our precious
scratches of Turkish took us to the Gallipoli instead of the Asiatic
side.
The two were under different jurisdictions; though the fault was not
ours, the local commandant had the right to ship us back to
Constantinople, and after a sort of delirium of flies, cats, gendarmes,
muggy heat, and debates, night descended to find us going to sleep in
the middle of a vegetable farm, in a house lately inhabited by whirling
dervishes, with two lynx-eyed police-men in gray lamb's-wool caps seated
at the gate. By them we were marched next day to the wharf and suddenly
there translated into the upper ether by the German admiral and his
thoughtful aid, who, on their way to the headquarters of the land forces
across the strait, whirled us over in style in a torpedo-boat.
We landed at the same place at which we had touched in the dark two
nights before--busy and blazing now in the afternoon sun, with gangs of
stevedores shuffling to and from the ships at the brand-new wharfs,
Turkish officers galloping about on their thick-necked, bobtailed, fiery
little stallions, and the dusty flat, half a mile across, perhaps,
between its encircling hills, crowded with ox and horse carts, camel
trains, and piles of ammunition-boxes and sacks of food.
The admiral and his aid were greeted by a smart young German officer
with a monocle, and galloped off into the hills, while we fell into the
hospitable hands of another German, a civilian volunteer in red fez and
the blue and brass buttons of the merchant marine, cast here by the
chance of war. He was a Hamburg-American captain, lately sailing
between Buenos Aires and Hamburg, and before that on an Atlas Line boat
between the Caribbean and New York. He talked English and seemed more
than half American, indeed, and when he spoke of the old Chelsea Hotel,
just across the street from the Y. M. C. A. gymnasium in which I had
played hand-ball, we were almost back in Twenty-third Street. He took
us up to his tent on the hill, overlooking the men and stores, and, he
explained, reasonably safe from the aeroplanes which flew over several
times a day. Over his cigarettes and tea and bottled beer we talked of
war and the world.
It was the captain's delicate and arduous duty to impose his tight
German habits of work and ship-shapeness on camel drivers, stevedores,
and officials used to the looser, more leisurely methods of the East.
He could not speak Turkish, was helpless without his interpreter, at
best a civilian among soldiers--men have got Iron Crosses for easier
jobs than that! He talked of the news--great news for his side--of the
Triumph, and, opening his navy list, made a pencil mark.
"She's off!" he said. The book was full of marks. In methodical sailor
fashion he had been crossing them off since the war began: British and
German--Blucher, Scharnhorst, Irresistible, Goliath, and the rest--
millions of dollars and hundreds of men at a stroke.
"Where's it going to end?" he demanded. "There's seven hundred good men
gone, maybe--how many did the Triumph carry? And we think it's good
news! If a man should invent something that would kill a hundred
thousand men at once, he'd be a great man... Now, what is that?"
The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr--they might try to make
another Gibraltar of it. Their aeroplanes came up every day. There was
a French-man with a long tail--he only came to the edge of the camp, and
as soon as the batteries opened up turned back, but the Englishman
didn't stop for anything. He dropped a bomb or two every time he
passed--one man must have been square under one, for they found pieces
of him, but never did find his head. It wasn't so much the bomb that
did the damage; it was the stones blown out by the explosion. If you
were standing anywhere within sixty feet when it went off, you were
likely to be killed. The captain had had trenches dug all over camp
into which they could jump--had one for himself just outside the tent.
All you hoped for when one of those fellows was overhead and the
shrapnel chasing after him was that the next one would take him fair and
square and bring him down. Yet that fellow took his life in his hands
every time he flew over. "He's fighting for his country, too!" the
captain sighed.
It was our first duty to present ourselves to the commandant of the
peninsular forces, Field-Marshal Liman von Sanders--Liman Pasha, as he
is generally called in Turkey--and the captain found a carriage,
presently, and sent us away with a soldier guard. Our carriage was a
talika, one of those little gondola-like covered wagons common in the
country. There is a seat for the driver; the occupants lie on the floor
and adjust themselves as best they can to the bumpings of the hilly
roads.
The country reminded one of parts of our own West--brown hills, with
sparse pines and scrub-oaks, meadows ablaze with scarlet poppies, and
over all blue sky, sunshine, and the breeze from the near-by sea. We
passed camel trains, mule trains, horses, and tents masked with brush.
Here evidently were the men we had seen marching day after day through
the Constantinople streets--marching away to war in the silent Eastern
fashion, without a waving handkerchief, a girl to say good-by to, or a
cheer. Here they were and yet here they weren't, for the brush and
tangled hills swallowed them up as thoroughly as armies are swallowed up
in the villages of Belgium and France.
We passed even these signs of war and came into pines and open meadows--
we might have been driving to somebody's trout preserve. The wagon
stopped near a sign tacked to a tree, and we walked down a winding path
into a thicket of pines. There were tents set in the bank and covered
with boughs, and out of one came a tall, square-jawed German officer,
buttoning his coat. He waved aside our passports with the air of one
not concerned with such details, asked if we spoke German--or perhaps we
would prefer French?--and, motioning down the path to a sort of
summer-house with a table and chairs, told an orderly to bring tea.
This was the headquarters of the Fifth Army, and this the commander-in-
chief. A bird-man might have flown over the neighborhood a dozen times
without guessing that they were there. We were hidden in the pines, and
only an occasional far-off Br-r-rum-m! from the cannons in the south
broke the stillness. Some one had brought up a cask of native claret
from Chanak, and the field-marshal's staff were helping to put it into
the bank in front of the arbor. A professor of chemistry--until the war
called him back to the colors--was shovelling and showing the Turkish
soldiers how the cask should be slanted; another of the superintendents
had lived for ten years in America, and was enthusiastic over the charms
and future of Davenport, Iowa. Presently tea came, and thin little
sandwiches and cigars, and over these the commander-in-chief spoke with
complete cheerfulness of the general situation.
The English and French could not force the Dardanelles; no more could
they advance on land, and now that the submarines had arrived, the
fleet, which had been bothersome, would be taken care of. He spoke with
becoming sorrow of the behavior of Italy, and did not mar this charming
little fete champetre with any remarks about American shipments of arms.
The ex-banker from Davenport also spoke of the Italians, and with a
rather disconcerting vigor, considering that they were recent allies.
The young aide-de-camp whom we had seen at the wharf declared that the
Turkish soldier was the best in the world. It was a very different army
from that which had been defeated in the Balkan War, and the endurance
and tenacity of the individual soldier were beyond anything he had ever
seen. A man would see a dozen of his comrades killed alongside him by a
high-explosive shell and only shrug his shoulders and say that now, at
any rate, they were all in paradise.
One continually hears similar comments, and there can be no doubt of the
Turkish soldier's bravery, and his unusual ability to endure hardship.
No one who has wrangled with a minor Turkish official, and experienced
the impassive resistance he is able to interpose to anything he doesn't
want to do, will underestimate what this quality might become,
translated into the rugged physique and impassivity of the common
soldier.
Westerners have heard so long of the Sick Man of Europe and his imminent
decease that they are likely to associate political with physical
weakness, and think that the pale, brooding, official type, familiar in
photographs, is the every-day Turk. As a matter of fact, the every-day
Turk is tough-bodied and tough-spirited, used to hard living and hard
work. The soldiers you see swinging up Pera Hill or in from a practice
march, dust-covered and sweating, and sending out through the dusty
cedars a wailing sort of chant as they come--these are as splendid-
looking fellows as you will see in any army in Europe.
They are dressed in businesslike fashion in dust-colored woollen tunics
and snug breeches with puttees, and wear a rather rakish-looking folded
cap--a sort of conventionalized turban not unlike the soldier hats
children make by folding newspapers. This protects the eyes and the
back of the neck from the sun. They are strong and well made, with
broad, high cheek-bones, a black mustache generally, and hawk eyes.
Some look as the Tartar warriors who swept over eastern Europe must have
looked; some, with their good-natured faces and vigorous compactness,
remind one of Japanese infantrymen.
During the early fighting on the peninsula the wounded came up to
Constantinople, after days on the way, in wagons, perhaps, over horrible
roads, in commandeered ferry-boats and freighters, yet one scarcely
heard a sound, a murmur of complaint. Gray and gaunt, with the mud of
the trenches still on them, they would be helped into ambulances and
driven off to the hospitals, silent themselves and through crowds as
silent as those which had watched them march away a few weeks before.
From that little oasis in the pines we drove with a pass, signed by the
field-marshal himself, taking us to the heights above Ari Burnu, to a
point near the south front, a hill in the centre of the peninsula, from
which we could see both the Dardanelles and the Aegean, and to a camp
beneath it, where we were to spend the night.
It was dark when our wagon lurched into this camp, and a full hour
passed before the baffled Turks could convince themselves that our pass
and we were all that they should be, and put us into a tent.
Nevertheless, an orderly poked his head in good-naturedly enough at
seven next morning with tea and goat's cheese and brown bread, and our
captain host, a rather wildish-looking young man from the Asiatic
interior, came to say he had telephoned for permission to take us to the
heights above Kaba Tepe and Ari Burnu.
The camp was the office, so to speak, of the division commander, with
his clerks, telephone operator, commissary machinery, and so on, the
commander himself living at the immediate front. It was like scores of
other camps hidden away in the hills--brush-covered tents dug into the
hillsides, looking like rather faded summer-houses; arbor-like
horse-sheds, covered with branches, hidden in ravines; every wagon, gun,
or piece of material that might offer a target to an aeroplane covered
with brush. They were even painting gray horses that morning with a
brown dye. A big 38-centimeter unexploded shell, dropped into a near-by
village by the Queen Elizabeth, and with difficulty pushed up on end now
by a dozen men, was shown us, and presently we climbed into the carriage
with the captain, and went rocking over the rough road toward the
Aegean.
The country reminded one of the California foot-hills in the dry season,
and me, particularly, of Honduras and the road from the Pacific up to
Tegucigalpa--gravelly brown hills and tangled valleys with sparse pines
and scrub-oaks; rocky slopes down which tinkled brown and white flocks
of sheep and goats; sunshine and scarlet poppies and fresh wind; and
over all a curious, quiet, busy web of war; a long shoulder, sharp
against the blue, with a brown camel train ambling down it; a ravine
with its arbor-like shelters for cavalry; wounded soldiers in carts, or
riding when they were able to ride; now and then an officer on his
cranky little stallion--the whole countryside bristling with defense.
Up one of the hot little valleys we climbed, left the carriage, and,
walking up a trail, cut into the bank, past men and horses hidden away
like bandits, and came at last to the top and several tents dug into the
rim of the hill. It was the headquarters of Essad Pasha, defender of
Janina in the last war, and division commander in this sector of the
front. He received us in his tent beside a table littered with maps and
papers--a grizzled, good-natured soldier, who addressed us in German,
and might indeed have passed for a German. He apologized for the
cramped quarters, explaining that they were likely at any time to be
bombarded, and had to live in what was practically a trench, and then at
once, in the Turkish fashion, appeared an orderly with tiny cups of
sweet coffee.
Things were quiet at the moment, he said. There was nothing but the
desultory crack-crack of snipers, coming from one knew not just where,
the every-day voice of the trenches--possibly the enemy were dismayed by
the loss of the Triumph. He had seen it all, he said, from this very
spot--a sight one was not likely to see more than once in a lifetime.
The great ship had rolled over like a stricken whale. Her torpedo-nets
were out, and as she turned over these nets closed down on the men
struggling in the water, and swept them under. He, too, expressed
entire confidence in the Turk's ability to stop any farther advance and,
calling an aid, sent us to the periscope, which poked its two eyes
through a screen of pine branches a few yards away, and looked over the
parapet and down on the first-line trenches and the sea.
We were high above the Aegean and opposite the island of Imbros, which
lifted its hazy blue on the western horizon, and was used as a base by
part of the fleet. To the south rose the promontory of Kaba Tepe,
cleared of the enemy now, our Turkish major said, and, stretching
northward from it past us and Ari Burnu, the curving rim of beach held
by the English.
More than a month had passed since the landing, and the heavy fighting
of the next few days, in which the Australians and New Zealanders, under
a hail of shrapnel churning up the water between ships and shore,
succeeded in getting a foothold; a month and more had passed, and,
though they still held their ground, apparently they could do no more.
The yellow line of their first trench twisted along the rim of the hill
below us, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and directly behind it lay
the blue sea. How much elbow-room they might have between their
trenches and the water one could not tell, so completely foreshortened
was the space between. Cliffs rise from a narrow strip of foreshore
here, however, and apparently they had pushed just over the cliff rim--
the first hill above the sea. Their tents, stores and landing-places
were out of sight.
Directly in front of the English trenches were the first-line Turkish
trenches, in some places not more than fifteen or twenty feet away, so
close, indeed, that when there was fighting they must have fought with
revolvers, hand-grenades, shovels, anything they could lay their hands
on. At the moment it was quiet but for the constant Crack...
crack-crack! of snipers.
We could look down on the backs and heads of the Turkish soldiers;
except for a wisp of smoke rising here and there from some hidden camp
cook-stove, there was not a sign of life in the English trenches.
Snipers were attending to that. Even here, in the second-line trenches
on top of the second hill, no one was allowed to show his head, and it
was all the more curious to see a squad of Turkish soldiers digging away
below as calmly as so many market-gardeners in a potato-field. They
were running another trench behind the several that already lined the
slope, and must have been hidden by a rise of ground, though looking
down from above they seemed to be out in the open.
The position of the English did not seem enviable. They had trenches
directly in front of them, and several hundred feet above them a second
line (from which we were looking) dominating the whole neighborhood. The
first-line Turkish trenches were too close to their own to be bombarded
from the ships, so that that preliminary advantage was cut off; the
second-line defenses, in the twisting gullies over the hill, could stand
bombardment about as well as could trenches anywhere--and behind them
was the water. They were very literally between the devil and the deep
sea.
With the periscope we worked from Kaba Tepe on the left clear across the
ground in front of us to the north. Over in the west, by hazy Imbros,
were five or six ships; there was another fleet in the north to-ward the
Gulf of Saros, and little black beetles of destroyers crawled here and
there across the blue sea floor. The major took us into his tent for
cigarettes and another thimbleful of the coffee. He, too, had been
educated in Germany, spoke German and French, and with his quick, bright
eyes and soft smile, would easily have passed for a Frenchman or
Italian.
They had just had a seven hours' armistice to bury the dead and bring in
the wounded, some of whom had been lying between the trenches for a
week. The English had proposed the armistice; an officer had come out
from each side, and they had had a long pow-wow and drawn up a written
agreement with meticulous care lest there should be a misunderstanding
or danger of breaking the truce. Everything, the major said, had been
most good-natured and correct. The English had sent a "diplomat" in
addition to their military delegate, a civilian whom he had known well
in Constantinople. It was altogether quaint and interesting, meeting
and talking with this man, with whom he might, so to speak, have been
playing bridge the night before--"Sehr nett! Sehr nett!" he said. With
his soft smile.
While he was waiting to receive the English delegate, five shrapnel-
shells had been fired at him, he said; but he understood that it was a
mistake and made no protest, and during the truce a wounded Turk had
refused to take the water an English officer had tried to give him,
firing at the Englishman instead. A little fanatical, perhaps, but
then--and again the major smiled in his charming way--"a little
fanaticism in one's soldiers is a good thing!"
No, one didn't care to be hanging on to that strip of beach with those
Australians and New Zealanders. We drove back to camp for lunch, which
we had in the captain's little brush-covered balcony, set into the hill.
He did not eat, but showed us his photograph, very smooth and dapper,
compared with his bristling service face, taken with his two children,
one a little girl and the other a grave little boy, with a face like a
miniature pasha. The captain came from the Asiatic side, near Broussa,
on the slopes of Olympus, and was all Turk, without any foreign frills
or a word of English, German, or French. He took no lunch, but ate some
of the helva left over from Stamboul, and then started with us up the
hill behind the camp.
This was about midway in the peninsula, and, facing south from the
summit, we looked down over the twisting hills, pockmarked with holes
from shells and aeroplane bombs, to the Marmora on the left, and on the
right to the Aegean and hazy Imbros, and, in front, almost to the end of
the peninsula. The sun was down in the west, and in its track a cruiser
steamed a mile or two out from the coast, while from under Ari Burnu,
where we had been that morning, a transport put out, rather recklessly
it seemed, and went straight across the open water. From the south and
west there was the continual Br-r-umr-m... br-r-um-m! of big guns, and
over Kaba Tepe way we could see shells bursting. We sat there for an
hour or so, waiting for one of the little specks out on the blue sea
floor to fire or sink, and then, as nothing happened, returned to camp.
An orderly brought us supper that night--mutton, bread and cheese,
haricots, stewed fruit, and coffee--and we dined on a little table
outside the tent, with the twilight turning to moonlight and the
sheep-bells tinkling against the opposite hill. Soldiers were carrying
their suppers from the cook tent--not at all the bread-and-cigarette
diet with which one is always being told the hardy Turk is content. He
may be content, but whenever I saw him eating he had meat and rice, and
often stewed fresh beans or fruit--certainly better food than most
Turkish peasants or artisans are accustomed to at home.
I sat outside watching the moon rise and listening to the distant
Crack... crack-crack! of rifle and machine-gun fire from over Ari Bumu
way. Evidently they were fighting in the trenches we had seen that
morning. The orderly who had served us, withdrawn a little way, was
standing like a statue in the dusk, hands folded in front of him, saying
his last prayer of the evening. Beyond, from a bush-covered tent, came
the jingle of a telephone and 'the singsong voice of the young Turkish
operator relaying messages in German--"Ja!... Ja!... Kaba Tepe...
Ousedom Pasha... Morgen frith... Hier Multepe!... Ja!... Ja!"
And to this and the distant rattle of battle we went to sleep.