Some months later I sat in a room of the big military hospital in the
Tatavla Quarter of Constantinople. On a bench against the wall opposite
me were sitting a number of men in Turkish uniform. They were blind.
Some of them had lost their eyes in hand-to-hand combat, more of them
had been robbed of their sight in hand-grenade encounters.
Doctor Eissen, the oculist-surgeon of the hospital, was about to fit
these men with glass eyes. In the neat little case on the table were
eyes of all colors, most of them brownish tints, a few of them were
blue.
One of the Turks was a blond--son of a Greek or Circassian, maybe.
"These things don't help any, of course," said Doctor Eissen, as he laid
a pair of blue eyes on a spoon and held them into the boiling water for
sterilization. "But they lessen the shock to the family when the man
comes home.
"Poor devils! I have treated them all. They are like a bunch of
children. They are going home to-day. They have been discharged.
"Well, they are going home. Some have wives and children they will never
see again--dependents they can no longer support. Some of them are
luckier. They have nobody. The one who is to get these blue eyes used to
be a silk-weaver in Brussa. He is optimistic enough to think that he can
still weave. Maybe he can. That will depend on his fingers, I suppose.
It takes often more courage to live after a battle than to live in it."
The dear government did not provide glass eyes. Doctor Eissen furnished
them himself, and yet the dear government insisted that a report be made
on each eye he donated. The ways of red tape are queer the world over.
"And when the blind come home the relatives weep a little and are glad
that at least so much of the man has been returned to them."
In the corridor there was waiting a Turkish woman. Her son was one of
those whom Doctor Eissen was just fitting with eyes. When he was through
with this, he called in the woman. The young blind _asker_ rose in the
darkness that surrounded him.
Out of that darkness came presently the embrace of two arms and the sob:
"_Kusum!_" ("My lamb!").
For a moment the woman stared into the fabricated eyes. They were not
those she had given her boy. They were glass, immobile. She closed her
own eyes and then wept on the broad chest of the son. The son, glad that
his _walideh_ was near him once more, found it easy to be the stronger
of the two. He kissed his mother and then caressed the hair under the
cap of the _yashmak_.
When the doctor had been thanked, the mother led her boy off.
Blind beggars are not unkindly treated in Constantinople. There is a
rule that one must never refuse them alms. The least that may be given
them are the words:
"_Inayet ola!_" ("God will care for you!").
Not long after that I sat on the shambles at Suvla Bay, the particular
spot in question being known as the Kiretch Tépé--Chalk Hill.
Sir Ian Hamilton had just thrown into the vast amphitheater to the east
of the bay some two hundred thousand men, many of them raw troops of the
Kitchener armies.
Some three thousand of these men had been left dead on the slopes of the
hill. As usual, somebody on Gallipoli had bungled and bungled badly. A
few days before I had seen how a British division ate itself up in
futile attacks against a Turkish position west of Kütchük Anafarta. The
thing was glorious to look at, but withal very foolish. Four times the
British assailed the trenches of the Turks, and each time they were
thrown back. When General Stopford finally decided that the thing was
foolish, he called it off. The division he could not call back, because
it was no more.
It was so on Chalk Hill.
A hot August night lay over the peninsula. The crescent of a waning moon
gave the dense vapors that had welled in from the Mediterranean an
opalescent quality. From that vapor came also, so it seemed, the stench
of a hundred battle-fields. In reality this was not so. The Turkish
advance position, which I had invaded that night for the purpose of
seeing an attack which was to be made by the Turks shortly before dawn,
ran close to the company graves in which the Turks had buried the dead
foe.
There is little soil on Gallipoli. It is hardly ever more than a foot
deep on any slope, and under it lies lime that is too hard to get out of
the way with pick and shovel. The company graves, therefore, were cairns
rather than ditches. The bodies had been walled in well enough, but
those walls were not airtight. The gases of decomposition escaped,
therefore, and filled the landscape with obnoxious odor.
I had been warned against this. The warning I had disregarded for the
reason that such things are not unfamiliar to me. But I will confess
that it took a good many cigarettes and considerable will-power to keep
me in that position--so long as was absolutely necessary.
When I returned to Constantinople everybody was speaking of the stench
in the Suvla Bay terrain. There were many such spots, and returning
soldiers were never slow in dwelling on the topic they suggested. The
war did not appear less awesome for that.
But the shambles that came closest to the general public was the
casualty lists published by the German government as a sort of
supplement to the Berlin _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_, the
semi-official organ of the German Imperial Government. At times this
list would contain as many as eight thousand names, each with a letter
or several after it--"t" for dead, "s v" for severely wounded, "l v" for
lightly wounded, and so on.
It was thought at first that the public would not be able to stand this
for long. But soon it was shown that literally there was no end to the
fortitude of the Germans.
I was to spend some time on the Somme front. I really was not anxious to
see that field of slaughter. But certain men in Berlin thought that I
ought to complete my list of fronts with their "own" front. Hospitals
and such no longer interested me. Wrecked churches I had seen by the
score--and a ruined building is a ruined building. I said that I would
visit the Somme front in case I was allowed to go wherever I wanted.
That was agreed to, after I had signed a paper relieving the German
government of all responsibility in case something should happen to me
"for myself and my heirs forever."
The front had been in eruption three weeks and murder had reached the
climax when one fine afternoon I put up at a very unpretentious
_auberge_ in Cambrai.
The interior of the Moloch of Carthage never was so hot as this front,
nor was Moloch ever so greedy for human life. Battalion after battalion,
division after division, was hurled into this furnace of barrage and
machine-gun fire. What was left of them trickled back in a thin stream
of wounded.
For nine days the "drum" fire never ceased. From Le Transloy to south of
Pozières the earth rocked. From the walls and ceilings of the old
citadel at Cambrai the plaster fell, though many miles lay between it
and the front.
Perhaps the best I could say of the Somme offensive is that none will
ever describe it adequately--as it was. The poor devils really able to
encompass its magnitude and terrors became insane. Those who later
regained their reason did so only because they had forgotten. The others
live in the Somme days yet, and there are thousands of them.
I could tell tales of horror such as have never before been heard--of a
British cavalry charge near Hebuterne that was "stifled" by the barbed
wire before it and the German machine-guns in its rear and flanks; of
wounded men that had crawled on all-fours for long distances, resting
occasionally to push back their entrails; of men cut into little pieces
by shells and perforated like sieves by the machine-guns; and again of
steel-nerved Bavarians who, coming out of the first trenches, gathered
for a beer-drinking in an apple orchard not far from Manancourt.
But that seems _de trop_. I will leave that to some modern Verestchagin
and his canvases.
There is a "still-life" of death that comes to my mind.
Not long after that I was in the Carpathians. General Brussilow was
trying out his mass tactics.
The slaughter of man reached there aspects and proportions never before
heard of. It was not the machine murder of the West Front--that is to
say, it was not so much a factory for the conversion of live men into
dead as it was a crude, old-fashioned abattoir.
On the slope of a massive mountain lies an old pine forest. In the
clearings stand birches, whose white trunks pierce the gloom under the
roof of dense, dark-green pine crowns. Where the clearings are, patches
of late-summer sky may be seen. Through the pale blue travel leisurely
the whitest of clouds, and into this background of soft blue and white
juts the somber pine and the autumn-tinged foliage of the birch.
The forest is more a temple of a thousand columns than a thing that has
risen from the little seeds in the pine cones. The trunks are straight
and seem more details of a monument than something which has just grown.
There is a formal decorum about the trees and their aggregate. But the
soft light under the crowns lessens that into something severely
mournful.
The forest is indeed a sepulcher. On its floor lie thousands of dead
Russians--first as close together as they can be packed, and then in
layers on top of one another. It would seem that these bodies had been
brought here for burial. That is not the case, however. The wounds in
the tree trunks, cut by the streams of machine-gun bullets from the red
trenches at the edge of the forest, indicate what happened. The first
wave of Russians entered the forest, was decimated, and retreated. The
second one met a similar fate. The third fared no better. The fourth
came. The fifth. The sixth--twice more the Russian artillery urged on
the Russian infantry.
Here they lie. Their bodies are distended by progressing dissolution.
Narrow slits in the bloated faces show where once the merry and dreamy
Slav eye laughed. Most mouths are open, still eager for another breath
of air. Distended nostrils tell the same tale. From one mouth hangs a
tongue almost bitten off. A face close by is but a mask--a shell
splinter has cut off the back of the head, which now rests on the
shoulder of the man.
To-morrow will come the Austro-Hungarian burial parties, dig holes and
bury these human relics. Meanwhile the pines sough sorrowfully, or maybe
they soughed like this before.
Still a little later I was standing at an ancient stone bridge in the
Vörös Torony defile in the Transylvanian Alps. It was a late afternoon
in the late fall. In the defile it was still, save for an occasional
artillery detonation near the Roumanian border, where the fight was
going on.
The red of the beeches and oaks fitted well into the narrative I heard,
and the song of the Alt River reminded that it, too, had played a part
in the drama--the complete rout of the Second Roumanian army, a few days
before. The breeze sweeping through the defile and along its wooded
flanks brought with it the odor of the dead. The underbrush on each side
of the road was still full of dead Roumanians. The gutter of the road
was strewn with dead horses. Scores of them hung in the tree forks below
the road. On a rock-ledge in the river dead men moved about under the
impulse of the current.
The narrative:
"Do you see that little clearing up there?"
"The one below the pines?"
"No. The one to the left of that--right above the rocks."
"Yes."
"I was stationed there with my machine-guns," continued the Bavarian
officer. "We had crept through the mountains almost on our bellies to
get there. It was hard work. But we did it.
"At that we came a day too soon. We were entirely out of reach of
Hermannstadt, and didn't know what was going on. For all we knew the
Roumanians might have turned a trick. They are not half-bad soldiers. We
were surprised, to say the least, when, on arriving here, we found that
the road was full of traffic that showed no excitement.
"We heard cannonading at the head of the gorge, but had no means of
learning what it was. We had been sent here to cut off the retreat of
the Roumanians, while the Ninth Army was to drive them into the defile.
"For twenty-four hours we waited, taking care that the Roumanians did
not see us. It was very careless of them, not to patrol these forests in
sufficient force, nor to scent that there was something wrong when their
small patrols did not return. At any rate, they had no notion of what
was in store for them.
"At last the thing started. The German artillery came nearer. We could
tell that by the fire. At noon the Roumanians began to crowd into the
defile. A little later they were here.
"We opened up on them with the machine-guns for all we were worth. The
men had been told to sweep this bridge. Not a Roumanian was to get over
that. We wanted to catch the whole lot of them.
"But the Roumanians couldn't see it that way, it seems. On they came in
a mad rush for safety. The artillery was shelling the road behind them,
and we were holding the bridge almost airtight. Soon the bridge was full
of dead and wounded. Others came and attempted to get over them. They
fell. Still others pressed on, driven ahead by the maddened crowd in
the rear.
"The machine-guns continued to work. Very soon this bridge was full of
dead and wounded as high as the parapet. And still those fools would not
surrender. Nor did they have sense enough to charge us. There were heaps
of dead in front of the bridge, as far as the house over there.
"That should have been a lesson to them. But it wasn't. On they came.
Some of them trampled over the dead and wounded. Those more considerate
tried to walk on the parapet. The machine-guns took care that they did
not get very far.
"By that time those shot on top of the heap began to slide into the
river. Those not under fire scrambled down to the river and swam
it--those who could swim; the others are in it yet. You can see them
down there and wherever there is sand-bank or rock-ledge. But those who
swam were the only ones that escaped us. That crowd was so panicky that
it didn't have sense enough even to surrender. That's my theory.
"It was an awful sight. Do you think this war will end soon?"
In private life the narrator is a school-teacher in a little village in
the Bavarian highlands.