Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
You will remember the Balkan War of 1912-3, and how the Bulgars fought
their way down almost to Constantinople and were everybody's heroes for
a time. Then came the quarrel between the Balkan allies, and presently
Bulgaria was fighting for her life--Serbia on the west, Greece on the
south, Turkey on the east--and then, when she was quite helpless, the
Rumanians coming down from the north to perform the coup de grace.
It was not a particularly sporting performance on the part of the
Rumanians, nor could the turning over to them of the Bulgarian part of
the province of Dobrudja greatly increase Bulgaria's trust in the powers
which permitted it in the treaty of Bucarest.
"It's our own fault," an Englishman said to me, speaking somewhat
sardonically of the failure of the Rumanians to go in with Italy in
spite of having accepted a timely loan from England. "We put our money
on the wrong horse! No, they'll keep on talking--they're the chaps who
want to get something for nothing. Think of the treaty of Bucarest and
the way we patted Rumania on the back--she was the gendarme of Europe
then. 'Gendarme of Europe!' ... I tell you that any army that would do
what the Rumanians did to Bulgaria has something wrong with its guts!"
An army goes where it is ordered, of course, but it is true,
nevertheless, that the Bulgarians are likely to think of their neighbors
on the north as people who want to get something for nothing, and that
they who had borne the brunt of the war with Turkey lost everything they
had gained. The Turks, "driven from Europe," calmly moved back to
Adrianople; Rumania took the whole of Dobrudja; Bulgarian Macedonia went
to Serbia and Greece. However much Bulgaria may have been to blame for
the break-up of the Balkan League--and she was stubborn and headstrong
to say the least--there is no denying that the treaty of Bucarest did
not give her a square deal. It was one of those treaties of peace (and
you might think that the men who sit around the green table and make
such treaties would learn it after a time) that are really treaties of
war.
No, Bulgaria was not looking for adventures, nor accepting promises
unless she had securities that they would be carried out. You could not
talk to any intelligent Bulgarian five minutes without feeling the
bitterness left by the treaty of Bucarest and the fixed idea that
Bulgarian Macedonia must come under the flag again. But though this was
true, and the army mobilized, and on a fine day every other man on the
streets of Sofia an officer, the stubborn Bulgars were still sitting
tight. If they got what they wanted without fighting for it, they were
not anxious to throw away another generation of young men as they had
thrown them away for nothing in the Balkan War.
By this negative policy--the pressure, that is to say, of not going to
war--Bulgaria had induced Turkey, by the time I came through Sofia again
three months later, to turn over enough territory on the east so that
the Bulgars could own the railroad down to Dedeagatch and reach the
Aegean without being obliged to go into Turkey and out again. It even
seemed that Bulgaria might be able to keep her neutrality to the end.
Her compromise with Turkey was not so odd as it seemed to many at first.
She had fought the Turks, to be sure, but now got what she wanted, and
when you come to think of it, it might well be more comfortable from the
Bulgars' point of view to have the invalid Ottomans in Constantinople
than the healthy and hungry Russians.
Both these small states, in their present hopes, fears, and, dangers,
are an instructive spectacle to those who fancy that in the crowded
arena of Europe a little nation can always do as it wants to, or that
its neutrality is always the simple open-and-shut matter it looked to
be, for instance, in the first weeks of August, 1914. We are likely, at
home, to look on all this cold-blooded weighing of the chances of war
with little patience, to think of all these "aspirations" as merely
somebody else's land. Fear or envy of our neighbors, international
hatred, is almost unknown with us. All that was left behind, three
thousand miles away, and the green water in between permits us to
indulge in the rare luxury of altruism. Yet these hatreds, these fears,
and ambitions, inherited and carefully nourished, are just as real--
particularly in little states like these--as the fact, odd and
apparently unreasonable as it may be, that in a bit of country, which
might be included in one of our larger States, one lot of people should
speak French and think like Latins, and another speak Slavic and think
another way, and that neither wants to be absorbed by the other any more
than we want to be compelled to speak Spanish or be absorbed by the
Mexicans.
The "aspirations" of both these little countries have realities behind
them. It is a fact that one gets a whiff of French clarity and verve in
Rumania, though it comes from a small minority educated in France, and
the Rumanian people may be no more "Latin" than we are. And it is an
interesting notion--though perhaps only a notion--that Rumania should be
the outpost or rear-guard of Latinism in this part of the world; a bit
of the restless West on the edge of the Orient.
For virility and earnestness like that of the Bulgars there is a place,
not only in the Balkans, but everywhere. The qualities they have shown
in their short life as an independent nation are those which deserve to
be encouraged and preserved. And if it were true that this war were
being fought to establish the right of little nations to live, one of
the tasks it ought to accomplish, it seemed then, was to give the
Bulgars back at least part of what was taken from them.
Chapter X
The Adventure Of The Fifty Hostages
Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the
green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the
Dardanelles. It is one of those crowded little Turkish towns set on a
blazing hillside--tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weather-warped frame
houses, with overhanging latticed windows and roofs of red tiles; little
walled-in gardens with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses;
fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets fork and women
come to fill their water-jars--a dreamy, smelly, sun-drenched little
town, drowsing on as it has drowsed for hundreds of years. Nothing ever
happens in Gallipoli--I speak as if the war hadn't happened! The
graceful Greek sloops, with their bellying sails and turned-up stems and
sterns, come sailing in much as they must have come when the Persians,
instead of the English and the French, were battering away at the
Hellespont. The grave, long-nosed old Turks pull at their bubble pipes
and sip their little cups of sweet, black coffee; the camel trains,
dusty and tinkling, come winding down the narrow streets from the
Thracian wheat country and go back with oversea merchandise done up in
faded carpets and boxes of Standard Oil. The wind blows from the north,
and it is cold, and the Marmora gray; it blows from the south, and all
at once the world is warm and sea and sky are blue--so soft, so blue, so
alive with lifting radiance that one does not wonder the Turk is content
with a cup of coffee and a view.
Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli--then the war came, and everything
happened at once. It was a still May morning, a Sunday morning, when
the English and French sent some of their ships up into the Gulf of
Saros, on the Aegean side of the peninsula, over behind Gallipoli.
Eight or ten miles of rolling country shut away the Aegean, and made
people feel safe enough. They might have been in the other wars which
have touched Gallipoli, but a few miles of country were nothing at all
to the guns of a modern battleship.
An observation-balloon looked up over the western horizon, there was a
sudden thunder, and all at once the sky above Gallipoli rained screaming
shells and death. You can imagine--at any rate remembering Antwerp, I
could very well imagine--how that hurricane of fire, sweeping in without
warning, from people knew not where, must have seemed like the end of
the world. You can imagine the people--old men with turbans undone,
veiled women, crying babies--tumbling out of the little bird-cage houses
and down the narrow streets. Off went the minaret, as you would knock
off an icicle, from the mosque on the hill. The mosque by the
water-front went down in a cloud of dust, and up from the dust, from a
petrol shell, shot a geyser of fire. Stones came rumbling down from the
old square tower, which had stood since the days of Bayazid; the faded
gray houses squashed like eggs. It was all over in an hour--some say
even twenty, minutes--but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, to
kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the rest into the caves
under the cliffs by the water, or across the Marmora to Lapsaki.
Now, while the bombardment of Gallipoli may not appear from a merely
human point of view, a particularly sporting performance, yet, as most
of those killed were soldiers, as Gallipoli had been a staff
head-quarters not long before and always has been a natural base for the
defense of the Dardanelles, the attack was doubtless justified by the
rules of war. It happens, however, that people who live in defenseless,
bombarded towns are never interested in the rules of war. So a new and
particularly disturbing rumor went flying through the crowded streets of
Constantinople.
It is a city of rumors, this beautiful, bewildering Bagdad of the West,
where all the races of the world jostle each other in the narrow
streets, and you never know how the man who brushes past you lives--let
alone feels and thinks. The Constantinople trolley-cars are divided by
a curtain, on one side of which sit the men, on the other the veiled
women. When there are several women the conductor slides the curtain
along, so that half the car is a harem; when there are none he slides it
back, and there is no harem at all.
And life is like that. You are at once in a modern commercial city and
an ancient Mohammedan capital, and never know when the one will fade out
like a picture on a screen and leave you in the Orient, facing its
mystery, its fatalism, its vengeance that comes in a night.
You can imagine what it must become, walled in with war and censorship,
with the English and French banging away at the Dardanelles gate to the
south, the Russian bear growling at the door of the Bosporus, so close
that you can every now and then hear the rumble of cannon above the din
of Constantinople--just as you might hear them in Madison Square if an
enemy were bombarding the forts at Sandy Hook. You wake up one morning
to hear that all the influential Armenians have been gathered up and
shipped to the interior; you go down to the ordinary-looking hotel
breakfast-room and the three Germans taking coffee in the corner stop
talking at once; at lunch some one stoops to whisper to the man across
the table, there is a moment's silence until the waiter has gone, and
the man across the table mutters: "The G. V. says not to worry"--"G.
V." meaning Grand Vizier. To-morrow the Goeben is to be blown up, or
there will be a revolution, or a massacre--heaven knows what! Into an
atmosphere like this, with wounded pouring back in thousands from the
Dardanelles, there came the news of the bombardment of Gallipoli. And
with it went the rumor of reprisal--all the English and French left
behind in Constantinople, and there were a good many who had been
permitted to go about their business more or less as usual, were to be
collected, men, women, and children, taken down to the peninsula and
distributed in the "unfortified" towns. The American ambassador would
notify England and France through Washington, and if then the Allies
chose to bombard, theirs was the risk.
The American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau, set about to see what could be
done. Presently the word went round that the women might stay behind,
but the men, high and low, must go. They came flocking to the embassy,
already besought for weeks by French Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in
distress, some begging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere
as their share of the war. The Turks were finally induced to include
only those between twenty and forty, and at the last moment this was cut
to an even fifty--twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French. The
plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known remnants of the French and
English colonies, and disappointed the chief of police, who had not
unreasonably hoped, as he wistfully put it, "to have some notables." Of
the fifty probably not more than a dozen had been born in England or
France, the others being natives of Malta, Greece--the usual Levantines.
Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were not "important,"
according to newspaper standards, they were, presumably, important to
themselves. They were very important, indeed, to the wives and mothers
and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea wall that Thursday morning,
weeping and wailing, and waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron
fence.
The hostages, one or two of whom had been called to their doors during
the night and marched away without time to take anything with them, had
been put aboard a police boat, about the size of a New York revenue
cutter, and herded below in two little cabins, with ten fierce-looking
Constantinople policemen, in gray astrakhan caps, to guard them. It was
from the water-line port-holes of these cabins that they waved their
farewells.
With them was a sturdy, bearded man in black knickerbockers and clerical
hat, the rector of the Crimean Chapel in Constantinople--a Cambridge and
Church of England man, and a one-time dweller in the wilds of Kurdistan,
who, though not called, had volunteered to go. The first secretary of
the American embassy, Mr. Hoffman Philip, an adventurous humanitarian,
whose experience includes an English university, the Rough Riders, and
service as American minister to Abyssinia, also volunteered, not, of
course, as hostage, but as friendly assistant both to the Turkish
authorities and to their prisoners.
To him was given the little deck-cabin, large enough for a man to
stretch out on the seat which ran round it; here, also the clergyman
volunteer was presently permitted, and here too, thanks to passports
vouch-safed by the chief of police, the chroniclers of the expedition,
Mr. Suydam of the Brooklyn Eagle, and myself.
The passports, mysterious scratches in Turkish, did not arrive until the
last minute, and with them came the chief, the great Bedri Bey himself--
a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark,
brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to envelop even a cup of
coffee and a couple of boiled eggs in an air of sinister romance.
The chief regretted that the craft was not "a serious passenger boat,"
for we should probably have to spend the night aboard. Arrangements for
the hostages and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just what
they would be it was difficult to say, as there were, he said, no hotels
in the place and the houses were all destroyed.
With this cheerful prospect he bade us farewell, and all being ready, we
waited two hours, and finally, just before noon, with deck-hands hanging
life belts along the rail to be ready for possible English submarines,
churned through the crowded shipping of the Golden Horn, round Stamboul,
and out into the blue Marmora.
The difficulties of the next few days--for which most of the hostages,
city-bred and used to the bake-shop round the corner, were unprepared--
promptly presented themselves. Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch.
There was not even bread. Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the
former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon--so appallingly soon
does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals--seemed an
almost immoral luxury. But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the
worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not
until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done.
Philip dug into his corned beef and what was left of the bread, and so
we curled up for the night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest
of us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we had, for one
of the Black Sea winds was blowing down the Marmora and it was as cold
as November.
The launch came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night and not long after
daylight we were shaken out of our blankets to receive the call of the
mutessarif, or local governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in
semi-riding-clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, who
spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few words of that. He was
accompanied by a sort of secretary or political director--a plump little
man, with glasses and a vague, slightly smiling, preoccupied manner, who
acted as interpreter.
The governor and Philip were addressed as "Excellence," the secretary as
"Monsieur Le Directeur," and, considering that all concerned were only
half awake, and we only half dressed, the interview, which included the
exchange of cigarettes and many salutes, was extremely polite. We
joined the mutessarif and his secretary in a stroll about the town.
It was deserted--closed shutters, empty houses and shops, not so much as
the chance to buy a round, flat loaf of black bread--a shell of a town,
with a few ravenous cats prowling about and forgotten chickens pecking
the bare cobblestones. We saw the shell hole in the little Mohammedan
cemetery, where four people, "come to visit the tombs of their fathers,"
had been killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, and dangling
rafters, and there came over one an indescribable irony as one listened,
in this Eastern world of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the
same grievances and indignations one had read in London editorials and
heard in the beet-fields of Flanders months ago.
The mutessarif took us to a little white villa on the cliff by the sea,
with a walled garden, flat black cedar, and a view of the Marmora, and
we breakfasted on tea, bread and butter, and eggs. Meanwhile the
hostages had been marched to an empty frame house on the beach, from the
upper windows of which, while gendarmes guarded the street-door, they
were gloomily peering when we returned to the launch. Philip, uneasy at
the emptiness of the town and leisurely fashion in which things were
likely to move, started for Lapsaki, across the Marmora, for food and
blankets, and Suydam and I strolled about the town. We had gone but a
few steps when we observed an aimless-looking individual in fez and
civilian clothes following us. We tramped up-hill, twisted through
several of the hot little alley-like streets--he followed like our
shadow. We led him all over town, he toiling devotedly behind, and when
we returned to the beach, he sat himself down on a wood-pile behind us,
as might some dismal buzzard awaiting our demise.
He, or some of his fellow sleuths, stuck to us all that day. Once, for
exercise, I walked briskly out to the edge of the town and back again.
The shadow toddled after. I went up to the basin beside the ruined
mosque, a sort of sea-water plaza for the town, and, taking a stool
outside a little cafe, which had awakened since morning, took coffee.
The shadow blandly took coffee also, which he consumed silently, as we
had no common tongue, rose as I rose, and followed me back to the beach.
Out in the Marmora, which is but little wider here than the Hudson at
Tappan Zee, transports crammed with soldiers went steaming slowly
southward, a black destroyer on the lookout for submarines hugging their
flanks and breaking trail ahead of them. Over the hills to the south,
toward Maidos and the Dardanelles, rolled the distant thunder--the
cannon the hapless fifty, looking out of their house on the beach, had
been sent down to stop--and all about us, in the dazzling Turkish
sunshine, were soldiers and supply-trains, landing, disembarking,
pushing toward the front. Fine-looking men they were, too, these
infantry-men, bronzed, well-built fellows, with heavy, high cheek-bones,
longish noses, black mustaches, and dark eyes, who, whatever their
qualities of initiative might be, looked to have no end of endurance and
ability to stay put. Bullock-carts dragged by big, black buffalo
cattle, carrying their heads far back, as if their big horns were too
heavy for them, crowded the street leading to the quay, and camels,
strung in groups of five, came swinging in, or kneeling in the dust,
waved their long, bird-like necks, and lifted up a mournful bellow, as
if protesting in a bored, Oriental way, at a fate which compelled them
to bear burdens for the nagging race of men.
It was to an accompaniment of these howls that a young Turkish officer
came over to find out who these strangers might be. We spoke of the
hostages, and he at once said that it was an excellent idea. The
English and French were very cruel--if now they chose to bombard. ...
"If a man throws a penny into the sea," he said, "he loses the penny.
It isn't the pocket-book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this
proverb, but remarked that after all they were civilians and had done
nothing. "That is true," he said, "but the English and French have been
very unjust to our civilians. They force us to another injustice--c'est
la guerre."
Toward the end of the afternoon the hostages, closely guarded, were
marched up into the town and lodged in two empty houses--literally
empty, for there was neither bed nor blanket, chair nor table--nothing
but the four walls. A few had brought mattresses and blankets, but the
greater number, city-bred young fellows, unused to looking after
themselves out of doors, had only the clothes they stood in. The north
wind held; directly the sun went down it was cold again, and, only half
fed with the provisions Philip brought over from Lapsaki, they spent a
dismal night,' huddled on the bare floor, under their suitcases or
whatever they could get to cover them, and expecting another bombardment
at dawn.
We, on the contrary--that is to say, Philip and his two guests--were
taken to a furnished house over-looking the Marmora--the house, as it
presently appeared, from the pictures of Waterloo on the walls and the
English novels in a bookcase up-stairs, lately occupied by the British
consular agent. To his excellency a room to himself up-stairs, with a
real bed, was given; the historians were made perhaps even more
comfortable on mattresses on the dining-room floor. We were all sleepy
enough to drop on them at once, but another diplomatic dinner had been
planned, it appeared, and Turkish politeness can no more be hurried nor
overcome than can that curious impassive resistance which a Turk can
maintain against something he does not wish done. It was nine o'clock
before we sat down with the mutessarif, his secretary, and the voluble
journalist to a whole roast kid, a rather terrifying but exceedingly
palatable dish, stuffed with nuts, rice, and currants, and accompanied
by some of the wine of Lapsaki, rice pudding, and a huge bowl of raw
eggs, which were eaten by cracking the shell, elevating one's head, and
tossing them down like oysters.
The dinner was served by one Dimitri, a brawny, slow-moving Greek.
Dimitri was dressed in a home-spun braided jacket and homespun Turkish
trousers, shaped like baggy riding-breeches, and his complete
impenetrability to new ideas was only equalled by the solemnity and
touching willingness with which he received them. It was after he had
served us in the ignoble capacity of dish-washer and burden-carrier for
several days that we were informed one evening by the governor's
secretary, in his vague way, that Dimitri was an "architect."
"Architecte naturel," suggested the urbane Philip, and the governor's
secretary assented. Slow Dimitri might be, but once he grasped an idea,
no power could drag it from him. When one asked him where he learned to
build houses of a certain style, he always replied that so they were
built by Pappadopoulos--Pappadopoulos being dead these twenty or thirty
years. Dimitri, the secretary ventured, had been architect of the
mosque on the water-front, and when he found that we were pleased with
this idea, everything else in Gallipoli became Dimitri's. The
lighthouse, the hospital, the three white houses by the quay--we had but
to mention a building and he would promptly murmur, in his dreamy,
half-quizzical way;
"Oui-i-i ... c'est Dimitri!"
Early next morning, just after we had discovered that under the cliff
was water like liquid lapis lazuli and flat-topped rocks rising just
above it on which you would not have been in the least surprised to find
mermaids combing their hair, or sirens sitting, and that it was a simple
matter to climb down and be mermen, the clergyman-volunteer arrived
with reports of the first night. It had been dismal, there were one or
two intransigent kickers, and the aesthetic young Frenchman who spent
his idle time drawing pictures of fashion-plate young ladies, had become
so unstrung that he had regularly "thrown a fit" and been unconscious
for half an hour until they could massage him back to life again. Humor
was quite gone out of them, and when the clergyman suggested that it was
a compliment to be sent out to be shot at--flattering, at any rate, to
the prowess of the Allies--a Frenchman emphatically denied it. "Pas du
tout!" he exploded. While we talked there was a knock at the front
door, and through the grating we saw the red fez and vaguely smiling
visage of the mutessarif's secretary. It was the first of a series of
visits, which, before we left Gallipoli, were renewed almost every hour,
of dialogues deserving a better immortalization than can be given here.