The Iron Ration Part 11

The man's lips moved. He wanted to say something. I bent over to catch the sibilant tones.

I had not caught them, and indicated that by a shake of the head. The man repeated. He spoke in Polish, a language I do not know. To a.s.sure the man that I would find means of understanding him, I patted his cheek, and then called an orderly.

"He says that he would like you to fetch his wife and his children,"

said the orderly-interpreter, as he righted himself. "He says he is going to die soon, and wants to see them. He says that you will have to hurry up. He says that he will say a good word to the Lord for you if you will do him this favor."

"Ask him where they live," I said to the orderly. If it were at all possible I would do the man this kindness.

It was some village near Cracow. That was a long way off. If the man lived for two days his wish could be met.

"Tell the man that I will telegraph his wife to come as quickly as possible, but that she can't be here for a day or so," I instructed the interpreter.

A shadow of disappointment swept over the patient's face.

"Ask him if he knows where he is," I said.

The man did not know. I told the orderly to make it clear to him that he was in Budapest, and that his home in Galicia was far away. He was to be patient. I would bring his wife and children to him, if it could be done at all. Did the wife have the money to pay the railroad fare?

The patient was not sure. I read in his eyes that he feared the woman would not have the money. I eased his mind by telling him that I would pay the fares.

Deeper grat.i.tude never spoke from any face. The poor fellow tried to lift his hands, but could not. To a.s.sure him that his wish would be granted I once more patted his cheeks and forehead and then left the room, followed by the orderly and the wash-basin.

"There is no use telegraphing," said Doctor MacDonald. "He won't live longer than another hour, at the most."

Ten minutes later the man was dead. The operation-table was being wheeled down the corridor by the orderly. I had just stepped out of a ward.

The orderly stopped.

"You won't have to bring the woman here," he said, as he lifted the end of the sheet that covered the face.

As reward for my readiness to help the poor man, I have still in my mind the expression of relief that lay on the dead face. He had pa.s.sed off in gladsome antic.i.p.ation of the meeting there was to be.

I covered up the face and the orderly trundled the body away.

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 gla.s.s 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 Circa.s.sian, 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 n.o.body. 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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!_" ("G.o.d 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 Tepe--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 Kutchuk Anafarta. The thing was glorious to look at, but withal very foolish. Four times the British a.s.sailed 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 fort.i.tude 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 Pozieres 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 encompa.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls 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.