Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
You can scarcely know what this meant without having known the
difficulties of mere existence once you left Constantinople and got into
the war zone, and Colonel Shukri Bey and Lieutenant Ahmed Akif will be
remembered by at least two Americans when any one talks of the terrible
Turk.
I awoke shortly after daylight, thinking I heard an aeroplane strumming
in the distance, and was drowsily wondering whether or not it was fancy,
when a crash echoed up the valley. We both hurried out. It was sunup,
a delicious morning, and far up against the southern sky the little
speck was sailing back toward the west. There was a flash of silver just
under the flier--it was an English biplane--and a moment later another
crash farther away. Neither did any damage. A few minutes later we
were looking at the remains of the bomb and propeller-like wings, whose
whirling, as it falls, opens a valve that permits it to explode on
striking its mark. Until it had fallen a certain number of metres, we
were told, mere striking the ground would not explode it--a device to
protect the airman in case of accident to his machine or if he is forced
to make a quick landing. In the fresh, still morning, with the camp
just waking up and the curious Turkish currycombs clinking away over by
the tethered horses, our aerial visitor added only a pleasant excitement
to this life in the open, and we went on with our dressing with great
satisfaction, little dreaming how soon we were to look at one of those
little flying specks quite differently.
We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread and ripe olives
and tea, and walked with him round the camp, through a hospital and into
an old farmhouse yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of
captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, while the bees left
behind in some clumsy old box hives buzzed away as of yore. Wiser than
men, the colonel observed. There were English Enfields and French
rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which the Turks had
fitted a new wooden base. There were rifles with smashed barrels, with
stocks bored through by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on
through the men who held them--live men like ourselves; quick choking
instants of terror the ghosts of ---- which we were poking and peering
into there in the warm sunshine!
We said good-by to the colonel, for our passes took us but to the
valley, and he had stretched a point in sending us down the plateau the
evening before, and I bumped back to Kilid Bahr. We did not want to
leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, and as we had duly
presented ourselves in Gallipoli, and were now by way of coming from it
rather than Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the orderly
took us wrote, without question, a permission to cross to Chanak Kale,
we sailed with no misgivings. Alas for Troy and looking down on a modern
battle from the heights of Ilium! A truculent major of gendarmes hurried
us from the Asiatic shore as if we had come to capture it. We might not
land, we might not write a note to the commandant to see if the
permission to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to Constantinople
the day before, had arrived; we might not telephone--we must go back to
Europe, and write or telephone from there.
So back to Europe, and after consultation and telephoning, back to Asia
again, and this time we succeeded in effecting a landing and an audience
with the commander of the defenses of the Dardanelles, Djevad Pasha. He
was sitting under a tree in a garden looking out over the sea gate,
which, with the aid of his two German colleagues, Ousedom Pasha and
Merten Pasha, it was his task to keep shut--a trim Young Turk, more
polished and "European" than the major of gendarmes, but no less firm.
An American's wish to see the Troy he might never be so near again bored
him excessively. We could not stay--we might not even spend the night.
There was a boat that evening, and on it we must go.
Gendarmes guarded us while we waited--we who the night before had slept
in a scarlet-lined tent!--and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and
three patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignominiously through
Chanak Kale's ruined streets. The boat we went by was the same little
side-wheeler we had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud-stained,
blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches across the water,
with no place to lie but the bare deck. The stifling hold was packed
with them; they curled up about the engine-room gratings--for it was
cold that night--yet there was no complaint. A tired sigh now and then,
a moan of weariness, and the soldier wrapped his army overcoat a little
closer about him, curled up like a dog on a door-mat, and left the rest
to fate. A big, round, yellow moon climbed up out of Asia and poured
its silver down on them and on the black hills and water, still as some
inland lake.
The side-wheeler tied up at Ak-Bash for the night, and it was not until
the middle of the next morning that it was decided that she should cross
and leave her wounded at Lapsaki instead of going on up to
Constantinople. We lugged our baggage off and hunted up our old friend,
the Hamburg-American captain, to see what might be done till some other
craft appeared. He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which
might be going up that afternoon or evening.
It was about midday. The sun blazing down on the crowded fiat; on
boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up in all the variegated rags of the
East shuffling in and out of the ships; on gangs digging, piling lumber,
boiling water, cooking soup; on officers in brown uniforms and brown
lamb's-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, and a vast herd of sheep, which
had just poured out of a transport and spread over the plain, when from
the hill came two shots of warning. An enemy aeroplane was coming!
The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the
water. They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and
threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water--all, as they ran,
looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily
nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.
A hidden battery roared and--pop!--a little puff of cotton floated in
the sky under the approaching flier. Another and another--all the
nervous little batteries in the hills round about were coming to our
rescue. The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without flinching. We
had looked up at aeroplanes many times before and watched the pretty
chase of the shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning to keep
the thing in view. "Look," I said to Suydam; "she's coming right over
us!" And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the
ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat
in front of us. Through the smoke I saw a horse with its pack undone and
flopping under its belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of
horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored. Men were running,
and, in a tangle of wagons, half a dozen oxen, on the ground, were
giving a few spasmodic kicks.
Men streaked up from the engine-room and across the wharf--after all,
the wharf would be the thing he'd try for--and I found myself out on the
flat with them just as there came another crash, but this time over by
the Barbarossa across the bay. Black smoke was pouring from the Turkish
cruiser as she got under way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing
hopelessly after, the flier swung to the southward and out of right.
Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the
bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the throats of the
oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in
camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded
men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he
had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead. It appeared that two
fliers had come from opposite directions and most of the crowd had seen
but the one, while the other dropped the bomb. It had struck just
outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very likely at the stores
piled there. It had made a hole only five or six feet wide and two or
three feet deep, but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out
from it, as the captain had said. Holes you could put your fist in were
torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying stones and chunks of metal, and
the tires of some of the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been
cut through like wax.
The ground was cleared, the men returned to work, and we even went in
swimming, but at every unexpected noise one looked upward, and when
about five o'clock the crowd scattered again, I will confess that I
watched that little speck buzzing nearer, on a line that would bring him
straight overhead, with an interest considerably less casual than any I
had bestowed on these birds before. There we were, confined in our
little amphitheatre; there was that diabolical bird peering down at us,
and in another minute, somewhere in that space, would come that
earth-shaking explosion--a mingling of crash and vohou'! There was no
escaping it, no dodging it, nothing to get under but empty air.
I had decided that the beach, about a hundred yards away from the
wharfs, was the safest place and hurried there; but the speck overhead,
as if anticipating me, seemed to be aiming for the precise spot. It is
difficult under such circumstances to sit tight, reasoning calmly that,
after all, the chances of the bomb's not landing exactly there are a
good many to one--you demand at least the ostrich-like satisfaction of
having something overhead. So I scurried over to the left to get out
from under what seemed his line of flight, when what should he do but
begin to turn!
This was really rubbing it in a bit. To fly across as he had that
morning was one thing, but to pen one up in a nice little pocket in the
hills, and then on a vertical radius of three or four thousand feet, to
circle round over one's head--anything yet devised by the human
nightmare was crude and immature to this. But was it overhead? If
behind, and travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would
carry forward--just enough probably to bring it over; and if apparently
over, still the bomb would have been several seconds in falling--it
might be right on top of us now! Should we run backward or forward: Here
was a place, in between some grain-bags. But the grain-bags were open
toward the wharf, and the wharf was what he was aiming at, and a plank
blown through you--No, the trench was the thing, but--Quick, he is
overhead!
The beach, the bags, the ditch, all the way round the camp, and Suydam
galloping after. Somewhere in the middle of it a hideous whiffling wail
came down the sky: Trrou... trrou... trou!--and then a crash! The bomb
had hit the water just off the end of the pier. I kept on running.
There was another Trrou... trrou! another geyser of water, and the bird
had flown on.
I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that strange afternoon
ended, when one of a gang of ditch-diggers, swathed in bright-colored
rags, addressed me in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora,
who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been
hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in
Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get,
him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on
board ship. There were crowds like him--Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not
wanted as soldiers but impressed for this sort of work. They were
unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our boat at last
got under way. We paused till sunup at Lapsaki, crept close to shore
through the Marmora, and once through floating wreckage--boards and a
galvanized-iron gasolene tank--apparently from some transport sunk by a
submarine, and after dark, with lights out as we had started, round the
corner of Stamboul.
Chapter XIII
A War Correspondents' Village
The press department of the Foreign Office in Vienna duly presented the
application to the press bureau of the Ministry of War; the latter
conveyed it to the "Kaiserliche und Konigliche Armee-Oberkommando
Kriegs-Presse-Quartier," a day's railroad journey nearer the front; the
commandant made his recommendation to the chief of the General Staff.
The permission itself percolated back to Vienna presently, and early
next morning I took the Teschen express.
It was one of those semi-military trains which run into this region
behind the front--officers and couriers, civilians with military passes,
just before we started a young officer and his orderly saying good-by to
their wives. He was one of those amiable, blue-eyed young Austrians who
seem a sort of cross between German and French, and the orderly was much
such another man, only less neatly made and sensitive, and there were
the same differences in their wives and their good-bys.
The orderly saluted his officer, turned, clicked his heels, and saluted
his officer's lady before he embraced his solid wife. The latter,
rather proud to be in such company, beamed like a stove as the two men
looked down from the car steps, but the girlish wife of the captain bit
her lips, looked nervously from side to side, winked faster and faster
until the tears began to roll down her cheeks. Then the train started,
the orderly waving his hand, but the young officer, leaning quickly
forward, drew his wife toward him and kissed her on one of the wet
eyelids.
We crossed into Hungary, rolled northeastward for five or six hours into
the Vag valley, with its green hills and vineyards and ruined castles,
and finally came to a little place consisting almost entirely of
consonants, in the Tatra foot-hills. Two blond soldiers in blue-gray
saluted, took my luggage, showed me to a carriage, and drove to a
village about a mile away--a little white village with a factory chimney
for the new days, a dingy chateau for the old, and a brook running
diagonally across the square, with geese quacking in it and women
pounding clothes.
It was mid-afternoon, yet lunch had been kept waiting, and the officer
who received me said he was sorry I had bothered to eat on the train. He
told me where lodgings had been made ready, and that an orderly would
take me there and look after my personal needs. They dined at eight,
and at five, if I felt like it, I would probably find some of them in
the coffee-house by the chateau. Meanwhile the first thing to do was to
take one's cholera vaccination--for no one could go to the Galician
front without being geimpft--and just as soon as I could take the
second, a week later, we should start for the Russian front. In this
fashion were strangers welcomed to the "Presse-Quartier," or rather to
that part of it--this little Hungarian village--in which correspondents
lived during the intervals of their trips to the front. The Austrians
have pleasant manners. Their court is, next to that of Spain, the most
formal in Europe, and ordinary life still retains many of the older
courtesies. Every time I came into my hotel in Vienna the two little
boys at the door jumped up and extended their caps at arm's length; an
assistant porter, farther in, did the same; the head porter behind the
desk often followed, and occasionally all four executed the manoeuvre at
once, so that it was like a musical comedy but for the music.
The ordinary salutation in Vienna, as common as our "hello!" is "I have
the honor" (Ich habe die Ehre!). In Hungary--of course one mustn't tell
a Hungarian that he is "Austrian"--people tell you that they are your
humble servants before they say good morning, and those who really are
humble servants not only say "Kiss the hands," but every now and then do
it. It was natural, therefore, perhaps, that the Austro-Hungarians
should treat war correspondents--often, in these days, supposed to be
extinct--not only seriously but with a certain air. They had not only
the air but indeed a more elaborate organization than any of the other
belligerents.
At the beginning of the war England permitted no correspondents at all
at the front. France was less rigid, yet it was months before groups of
observers began to be taken to the trenches.
Germany took correspondents to the front from the first, but these
excursions came at irregular intervals, and admission to them involved a
good deal of competitive wire-pulling between the correspondents
themselves. The Austro-Hungarians, on the other hand, prepared from the
first for a large number of civilian observers, including news and
special writers, photographers, illustrators, and painters, and, to
handle them satisfactorily, organized a special department of the army,
this Presse-Quartier, once admitted to which--the fakirs and
fly-by-nights were supposed to be weeded out by the preliminary red tape
--they were assumed to be serious workmen and treated as the army's
guests.
The Presse-Quartier was divided into two sections: an executive section,
with a commandant responsible for the arrangement of trips to the
various fronts, and the general business of censorship and publicity;
and an entertainment section, so to speak, also with its commandant,
whose business it was to board, lodge, and otherwise look after
correspondents when they were not on trips to the front. At the time I
visited the Presse-Quartier, the executive section was in Teschen; the
correspondents lived in Nagybiesce, two or three hours' railroad journey
away.
It was to this village--the most novel part of the scheme--that I had
come that afternoon, and here some thirty or forty correspondents were
living, writing past adventures, setting forth on new ones, or merely
inviting their souls for the moment under a regime which combined the
functions of tourists' bureau, rest-cure, and a sort of military club.
For the time being they were part of the army--fed, lodged, and
transported at the army's expense, and unable to leave without formal
military permission. They were supposed to "enlist for the whole war,"
so to speak, and most of the Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents
had so remained--some had even written books there--but observers from
neutral countries were permitted to leave when they felt they had seen
enough.
Isolated thus in the country, the only mail the military field post, the
only telegrams those that passed the military censor, correspondents
were as "safe" as in Siberia. They, on the other hand, had the
advantage of an established position, of living inexpensively in
pleasant surroundings, where their relations with the censor and the
army were less those of policemen and of suspicious character than of
host and guest. To be welcomed here, after the usual fretful dangling
and wire-pulling in War Office anterooms and city hotels--with hills and
ruined castles to walk to, a brook rippling under one's bedroom window,
and all the time in the world--seemed idyllic enough.
We were quartered in private houses, and as there was one man to a
family generally, he was put in the villager's room of honor, with a
tall porcelain stove in the corner, a feather bed under him, and another
on top. Each man had a soldier servant who looked after boots and
luggage, kept him supplied with cigars and cigarettes from the Quartier
commissariat--for a paternal government included even tobacco!--and
charmed the simple republican heart by whacking his heels together
whenever spoken to and flinging back "Jawohl!"
We breakfasted separately, whenever we felt like it, on the rolls with
the glass of whipped cream and coffee usual in this part of the world;
lunched and dined--officers and correspondents--together. There were
soldier waiters who with military precision told how many pieces one
might take, and on every table big carafes of Hungarian white wine,
drunk generally instead of water. For beer one paid extra.
The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, and the officer guides
not on excursions at the moment, sat at the head of the long U-shaped
table. Any one who came in or went out after the commandant was seated
was supposed to advance a bit into this "U," catch his eye, bow, and
receive his returning nod. The silver click of spurs, of course,
accompanied this salute when an officer left the room, and the
Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents generally snapped their heels
together in semi-military fashion. All our goings and comings, indeed,
were accompanied by a good deal of manner. People who had seen each
other at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later in the
village square, and one bowed and was bowed to and heard the singsong...
"'habe die Ehre!" a dozen times a day.
Nagybiesce is in northern Hungary, and the peasants round about were
Slovaks--sturdy, solid, blond people with legs the same size all the way
down. Many of them still reaped with scythes and thrashed on the barn
floor with old-fashioned flails, and one afternoon there was a curious
plaintive singing under my window--a party of harvesters, oldish men and
brown, barefooted peasant girls, who had finished their work on a
neighboring farm, and were crossing our village on their way to their
own.
The Quartier naturally stirred things up a good deal in Nagybiesce.
There was one week when we could not go into the street without being
surrounded by little girls with pencils and cards asking for our
"autogram." The candy shop kept by two girl wives whose husbands were at
the front did a vast business, and the young women had somebody to talk
to all day long. The evening the news came that Warsaw had fallen,
candles were lighted in all the windows on the square, and the band with
the villagers behind it came to serenade us as we were at dinner. The
commandant bowed from the window, but a young Hungarian journalist
leaned out and without a moment's hesitation poured forth a torrent for
fully fifteen minutes with scarce a pause for breath. I told him that
such impromptu oratory seemed marvellous, but he dismissed it as
nothing. "I'm politiker!" he explained, with a wave of his hand.
One day a man came into lunch with the news that he was off on the best
trip he'd had yet--he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down
into the Tyrol and work along the glaciers to the battery positions.
Another man, a Budapest painter, started off for an indefinite stay with
an army corps in Bessarabia. He was to be, indeed, part of the army for
the time being, and all his work belonged to the army first. As this is
being written a number of painters sent out on similar expeditions have
been giving an exhibition in Vienna--portraits and pencil sketches much
like those Frederic Remington used to make. Foreigners not intending to
remain in Austria-Hungary could not expect such privileges, naturally;
but if they were admitted to the Quartier at all they were sent on the
ordinary group excursions like the home correspondents themselves.
Indeed, the wonder was--in view of the comparative ease with which
neutral correspondents drifted about Europe: the naivete, to put it
mildly, with which the wildest romances had been printed in American
newspapers, that we were permitted to see as much as we did.
When a group started for the front, it left Nagybiesce in its own car,
which, except when the itinerary included some large city--Lemberg, for
instance--served as a little hotel until they came back again. The car
was a clean, second-class coach, of the usual European compartment kind,
two men to a compartment, and at night they bunked on the long
transverse seats comfortably enough. We took one long trip of a
thousand miles or so in this way, taking our own motor, on a separate
flat car, and even an orderly servant for each man. Each of these
groups was, of course, accompanied by an officer guide--several were
detailed at the Quartier for this special duty--whose complex and
nerve-racking task it was to answer all questions, make all
arrangements, report to each local commandant, pass sentries, and
comfortably waft his flock of civilians through the maze of barriers
which cover every foot, so to speak, of the region near the front.
The things correspondents were permitted to see differed from those seen
on the other fronts less in kind than in quantity. More trips were
made, but there is and can be little place for a civilian on a "front,"
any spot in which, over a strip several miles wide, from the heavy
artillery positions of one side to the heavy artillery of the other, may
be in absolute quiet one minute and the next the centre of fire. There
is no time to bother with civilians during an offensive, and, if a
retreat is likely, no commander wishes to have country described which
may presently be in the hands of the enemy. Hidden batteries in action,
reserves moving up, wounded coming back, fliers, trenches quiet for the
moment--this is about as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under
ordinary circumstances, can expect to get on any front. The difference
in Austria-Hungary was that correspondents saw these things, and the
battle-fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from
a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a
part of the army itself. They had their commandant to report to, their
"camp" and "uniform"--the gold-and-black Presse-Quartier arm band--and
when they had finished one excursion they returned to headquarters with
the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start
out again.