Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
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.
Chapter XII
Soghan-Dere And The Flier Of Ak-Bash
Next morning, after news had been telephoned in that the submarines had
got another battleship, the Majestic, we climbed again into the covered
wagon and started for the south front. We drove down to the sea and
along the beach road through Maidos--bombarded several weeks before,
cross-country from the Aegean, and nothing now but bare, burnt walls--on
to Kilid Bahr, jammed with camels and ox-carts and soldiers, and then on
toward the end of the peninsula.
We were now beyond the Narrows and the Dardanelles. To the left, a bit
farther out, were the waters in which the Irresistible, Ocean, and
Bouvet were sunk, and even now, off the point, ten or twelve miles away,
hung the smoke of sister ships. We drove past the big guns of the
forts, past field-guns covering the shore, past masked batteries and
search-lights. Beside us, along the shore road, mule trains and ox-carts
and camel trains were toiling along in the blaze and dust with
provisions and ammunition for the front. Once we passed four soldiers
carrying a comrade, badly wounded, on a stretcher padded with leaves.
After an hour or so of bumping we turned into a transverse valley, as
level almost as if it had been made for a parade-ground.
High hills protected it north and south; a little stream ran down the
centre--it might have been made for a storage base and camp. More
brush-covered tents and arbors for horses were strung along the
hillside, one above the other sometimes, in half a dozen terraces.
We drove into the valley, got out and followed the orderly to a
brush-covered arbor, closed on every side but one, out of which came a
well set-up, bronzed, bright-eyed man of fifty or thereabout who
welcomed us like long-lost friends.
It was Colonel Shukri Bey, commander of the Fifteenth Division. We were
the first correspondents who had pushed thus far, and as novel to him
apparently as he was charming to us. He invited us into the little
arbor; coffee was brought and then tea, and, speaking German to Suydam
and French to me, he talked of the war in general and the operations at
the end of the peninsula with the greatest good humor and apparent
confidence in the ultimate result.
Our talk was continually punctuated by the rumble of the big guns over
the plateau to the south. "That's ours"... "That's theirs," he would
explain; and presently, with a young aide-de-camp as guide, we climbed
out of the valley and started down the plateau toward Sedd ul Bahr. The
Allies' foothold here was much wider than that at An Burnu. In the
general landing operations of April 25 and 26 (one force was sent ashore
in a large collier, from which, after she was beached, the men poured
across anchored lighters to the shore) the English and French had
established themselves in Sedd ul Bahr itself and along the cliffs on
either side. This position was strengthened during the weeks of
fighting which followed until they appeared to be pretty firmly fixed on
the end of the peninsula, with a front running clear across it in a
general northwest line, several kilometres in from the point. The
valley we had just left was Soghan-Dere, about seven miles from Sedd ul
Bahr, and the plateau across which we were walking led, on the right, up
to a ridge from which one could look down on the whole battle-field, or,
to the left, straight down into the battle itself.
The sun was getting down in the west by this time, down the road from
camp men were carrying kettles of soup and rice pilaf to their comrades
in the trenches, and from the end of the plateau came continuous
thundering and the Crack... crack... crack! of infantry fire. The road
was strewn with fragments of shells from previous bombardments, and our
solicitous young lieutenant, fearing we might draw fire, pulled us
behind a bush for a minute or two, whenever the aeroplane, flying back
and forth in the west, seemed to be squinting at us. The enemy could
see so little, he said, that whenever they saw anything at all they
fired twenty shots at it on principle.
For two miles, perhaps, we walked, until from the innocent-looking
chaparral behind us there was a roar, and a shell wailed away over our
heads out into the distance.
We could see the end of the peninsula, where the coast curves round from
Eski Hissariik toward Sedd ul Bahr, and two of the enemy's cruisers
steaming slowly back and forth under the cliffs, firing, presumably, as
they steamed. Now they were hidden under the shore, now they came in
view, and opposite Eski Hissarlik swung round and steamed west again. In
front of us, just over the edge of the plateau which there began to
slope downward, were the trenches of the Turks' left wing, now under
bombardment. The ridge just hid the shells as they struck, but we could
see the smoke from each, now a tall black column, like the "Jack
Johnsons" of the west, now a yellowish cloud that hung long afterward
like fog--and with it the continuous rattle of infantry fire. Several
fliers were creeping about far up against the 'blue, looking for just
such hidden batteries as that which kept barking behind us, and out in
front and to the right came the low Br--r--um--m! of heavy guns.
Fighting like this had been going on for weeks, the ships having the
advantage of their big guns by day, the Turks recovering themselves,
apparently, at night. They were on their own ground--a succession of
ridges, one behind the other--and they could not only always see, but
generally looked down on, an enemy who could not, generally, see them.
And the enemy's men, supplies, perhaps even his water--for this is a dry
country at all times, and after June there are almost no rains--must
come from his ships. If English submarines were in the Marmora, so,
too, were German submarines off the Dardanelles, and if the Turks were
losing transports the English were losing battleships.
The situation held too many possibilities to make prophecy safe--I
merely record the fact that on the afternoon of May 27 I stood on the
plateau above Sedd ul Bahr, and perhaps five miles from it in an air
line, and still found myself a regrettable distance from the Allies'
front.
The sun was shining level down the road as we returned to camp, and
soldiers were still tramping peacefully up to the front with their
kettles of food. Meanwhile the colonel had prepared a little exhibition
for us. Six or eight soldiers stood in line, each with a dish and
spoon, and in the dish a sample of the food for that night. We started
at the top and tasted each: soup, mutton, stewed green beans, new-baked
bread, stewed plums, and a particularly appetizing pilaf, made out of
boiled whole wheat and raisins. Everything was good, and the beaming
colonel declared that the first thing in war was to keep your soldiers
well fed. We dined with him in his tent: soup and several meat courses,
and cherry compote, and at the end various kinds of nuts, including the
cracked hazelnuts, commoner in Turkey than bananas and peanuts at home.
He hoped to come to America some day, and thought we must soon develop
the military strength to back our desires for peace, unless there were
to be continual wars. New York's climate, the cost of fruit in Germany,
and other peaceful subjects were touched on, and the colonel said that
it was an honor to have us with him--ours we brilliantly responded--and
a pleasant change from the constant talk and thought of war.
He had been six years in the field now, what with the Italian and Balkan
campaigns, and that was a good deal of war at a stretch.
After excusing ourselves, though the amiable Turk said that he was in no
hurry, we were led to a sort of tent de luxe, lined in scarlet with
snaky decorations in white, and when the young aid discovered that we
had brought no beds with us, he sent out and in a moment had not only
cots and blankets, but mattresses and sheets and pillows and
pillow-cases. He asked if we had fathers and mothers alive at home, and
brothers and sisters, and if we, too, had been soldiers. It surprised
and puzzled him that we had not, and that our army was so small. He was
only twenty-two and a lieutenant, and he had a brother and father also
in the army. With a great air of mystery he had his orderly dig a bottle
of cognac out from his camp chest, and after we had drunk each other's
health, he gave us his card with his name in Turkish and French. He
brought a table and put on it a night candle in a saucer of water, a
carafe of drinking water, and gave me a pair of slippers--in short, he
did for us in that brush-covered camp in the Gallipoli hills everything
that could be done for a guest in one's own house.