Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 13

And now, with that curious subsequentness with which things sometimes happen in Turkey, the mutesarif discovered half a dozen mattresses himself, and announced that to-morrow there would be enough for all.

Nay, more--the government would allow each hostage four piasters a day for food, a cook would be brought down from Constantinople and meals served in a restaurant, that they might be saved, as his secretary observed, from the unlovely "odeurs de'cuisine."

Then it was discovered that the men might stroll about town, provided they were in groups. They went to the beach and discussed the feasibility of swimming, they even demurred against the Constantinople cook as limiting their means of amusing themselves; the aesthetic young man recovered now, polished his shoes and put a lavender handkerchief in his breast pocket. The hostages were in a fair way to annex the deserted village, when a bombsh.e.l.l burst in the shape of a despatch from the American amba.s.sador that permission had been obtained for all to come home.

The changing wind now swung full upon us. Scarcely had the message arrived ere the mutessarifs secretary followed it, lamenting that we must go. A peac.o.c.k reposing majestically in the arms of a patient hamal appeared at the front door, a souvenir for "his excellency."

Appeared also, out of thin air, a neat little horse and phaeton, and a trooper perched on a high Turkish saddle, with a rifle slung rakishly across his back, and the bey himself, gla.s.ses, fez, and all, astride an Arab steed. We were to be taken for a drive. Toward the end of it we reached the flour-mill, the only modern edifice in this ancient town, and were ushered into the office to sit in a constrained circle, with the slightly ironical-looking young proprietor--accustomed, perhaps, to such visits--and his a.s.sociates, while coffee and cigarettes were brought.

The engineer, an Italian, welcomed us in French; the proprietor, who spoke nothing but Turkish, smiled inscrutably, and overhead, in several bra.s.s cages, canaries sang.

Philip, gazing upward, admired their song, whereat the bey at once announced that they were his. The American protested that, much as the gift delighted his taste and roused his grat.i.tude, it was impossible to think of carrying a canary back to Constantinople.

"If you please..." insisted the imperturbable bey. "It is yours!"

Scarcely had we returned, indeed, before another patient hamal knocked, lugging the hapless bird.

The hostages, not to be outdone, invited Philip, the bey, and ourselves to lunch. There was chicken soup and chicken, and salad and native wine, and, for the corner of the improvised table, where the guests were seated, the hospitable young men had actually procured several bottles of Gallipoli champagne. The barber with the poetic beard leaped to his feet, as fluent in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a few evenings before, while the aesthetic young man smiled pensively down at a long-stemmed fleur-de-lis which he slowly twirled in his fingers. The cashier of a Constantinople department store sang from "Tosca."

With him as leader they all sang--a song of the Pyrenees mountaineers, then a waltz from the cafes chantants: "Bien gentiment l'on se balade.

C'est la premiere promenade--"

In another week we should have had a Gallipoli Glee Club.

And so ended the adventure of the fifty hostages, who went out to be shot at--the end of the comedy, which had its climax at the beginning.

The next morning we were up at daylight, and after several hours' delay the mutessarif and his lieutenant came down to permit us to leave. There were cigarettes and salutes, the secretary scribbled in Turkish characters on his knee, the governor signed the permit, and we said good-by to Gallipoli. Next morning we again threaded the shipping in the Golden Horn.

The ten policemen who had looked so formidable a week before, expressed a wish for what was left of the tinned corned beef. And with hackmen yelling from the street and caique men shouting from the water, the fifty hostages were swallowed up in the sunshine and smells and clatter of Constantinople.

Chapter XI

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 G.o.ds and heroes used to breathe; they fought and played, indeed, over these very waters and wind-swept hills. Leander swam the Dardanelles (or h.e.l.lespont) 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 pa.s.sports 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 subst.i.tute for b.u.t.ter or meat) made out a breakfast.

A Turkish soldier, the only other occupant of the deck, surveyed these preparations impa.s.sively; 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 pa.s.sed.

The soldier looked round thoughtfully; without embarra.s.sment, surprise, or hurry stepped from the settee, pointed it toward the Asiatic sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 G.o.d.

The Marmora narrowed, we pa.s.sed 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 k.u.m Kale, across the bay on the Asiatic sh.o.r.e.. 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 sh.o.r.e batteries and there were anch.o.r.ed 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 ash.o.r.e: at k.u.m 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 b.u.mu 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 d.a.m.ned quick about it." Ten minutes later, from the boats into which they had tumbled, the pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 bra.s.s b.u.t.tons 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 pa.s.sed--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 b.u.mpings of the hilly roads.

The country reminded one of parts of our own West--brown hills, with spa.r.s.e pines and scrub-oaks, meadows ablaze with scarlet poppies, and over all blue sky, sunshine, and the breeze from the near-by sea. We pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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, b.u.t.toning his coat. He waved aside our pa.s.sports 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 sh.e.l.l and only shrug his shoulders and say that now, at any rate, they were all in paradise.