IV.—RECONNOITRING BY TAXI
The war correspondent had arrived from Pekin too late to go to the front. The front, however, seemed to be making its way as fast as it could to the war correspondent. It was near enough, at any rate, to make him feel a certain independence of permits, passes, and other pieces of paper of which the War Office was exceeding chary. What could have made the situation more patent than that a war correspondent should engage a taxicab, a common Pera taxi, striped red and black and presumably not infallible as to its mechanism, and should invite an amateur and a British resident to help him ascertain whether the Chatalja lines were as unapproachable as they were reported?
Stuck in the mud
Our first plan was to strike northwest in the hope of coming out somewhere between Hadem-kyöi, the headquarters of Nazîm Pasha, and the forest region of Derkos, which local rumour had lately peopled with Bulgarians. I may as well say first as last that this plan did not succeed. Before we were half-way to the lines our road petered out into a succession of quagmires and parallel ruts with heather growing so high between them that it threatened to scrape off the under works of the car. Into one of the quagmires we sank so deeply that only a pair of hairy black buffalo could haul us out. For an irresponsible amateur, however, the attempt had its impressions. The most abiding one was that of the Constantinople campagna. It undulated to the horizon so desolate in its autumn colour, so bare save for a few tawny clumps of wood, so empty and wild, that no one would suspect the vicinity of a great capital. We met almost no one. A few Greek peasants came or went to market, apparently oblivious to wars or rumours of them. Not so a convoy of Turkish refugees, toiling up a hill with all they had in the world piled under matting on ox-carts with huge ungainly wheels. We ran through one village inhabited by Greeks—Pyrgos is its name, and a famous panayíri is held there in August—who gave us anew a sense of the strange persistence of their type through so many vicissitudes. Among them were girls or women with big double-armed amphoræ on their shoulders that might have come out of a museum. As we rammed the furze a mile or two beyond we saw the minaret of a Turkish village, and heard a müezin call to noonday prayer. We heard a shot, too, crack suddenly out of the stillness. It had to do duty with us for an adventure—unless I mention a couple of deserters we met, one of whom drew his bayonet as we bore down upon him. But I must not forget the fine Byzantine aqueduct under which we stopped to lunch. As we stood admiring the two tiers of arches marching magnificently across the ravine we heard a sound of bells afar. The sound came nearer and nearer, until a string of camels wound into sight. They took the car as unconcernedly as the car took them, disappearing one by one through the tall gateway that Andronicus Comnenus built across that wild valley.
The aqueduct of Andronicus I
Our second attempt was more successful. It led us through Stamboul and the cemetery cypresses outside the walls, into a campagna flatter and more treeless than the one we had seen in the morning, but not so void of humanity. In the neighbourhood of the city the refugees made the dominant note, with their clumsy carts and their obstinate cattle and their veiled women and their own coats of many colours. Other refugees were camped on the bare downs. The children would run toward us when they caught sight of the car, laughing and shouting. For them war was a picnic. Farther out the soldiers were more numerous than the refugees. Every time we met one, at first, we expected to be stopped. Some of them were driving cattle and horses into the city. Others were going out with carts of supplies. Once we overtook a dark mass of redifs making in loose order for the isolated barracks of Daoud Pasha—where the Janissaries used to muster for a European campaign. We knew them by their blue uniforms, piped with red, of Abd ül Hamid’s time. They looked mildly at us as we charged them, and mildly made room. So did the officer who rode at their head. On the ascent beyond him we saw two men in khaki waiting for us. We concluded that our reconnaissance was at an end. But we presently perceived that the men in khaki wore red crescents on their sleeves and carried no rifles. They merely wanted to see us pass. It was the same at a gendarmerie station a little farther on, and at the aerodrome behind San Stefano.
Fleeing from the enemy
Photographed by Frederick Moore
We found the road unexpectedly good, after the heather and quagmires of the morning. There were bad bits in it, but they only gave us occasion to bless the French syndicate that had had time to make the good ones before the war broke out. After dipping through one wide hollow we came in sight of the Marmora. A battle-ship making for the city drew a long smudge of smoke across the vaporous blue—the German Goeben, we afterward learned she was. On the low shore the Russian war monument of 1878 lifted its syringe dome. Through all the region behind it a faint odour of carbolic hung in the air, a reminder of the place of horror that San Stefano had become since cholera broke out. We passed a few dead cattle. A huge dog was tearing at one carcass, a creature that twilight would have made a hyena. Some new-made graves, too, had their own story to tell.
Suddenly, on the brow of a hill, we came upon the sunset picture of Küchük Chekmejeh. Below us, at the left, was a bay into which the sun was dropping. To the right stretched a shining lake. And between them ran a long bridge with one fantastically high and rounded arch that looked at its own image in the painted water. I would like to believe that that arch is the one mentioned in the epitaph of the architect Sinan and romantically likened to the Milky Way; but I believe the true arch of the Milky Way is at Büyük Chekmejeh. The village of Küchük Chekmejeh—the Little Drawbridge—made a huddle of red-brown roofs at the right end of the bridge. As we ran down to it we encountered more soldiers guarding a railway line. In front of us a cart crossed the track with an empty stretcher. Near it two men were digging or filling a grave. The village itself was full of soldiers, who also guarded the bridge. We skimmed across it, no one saying a word to us, and up into another high bare rolling country bordered by the sea.
We decided to spend the night in Büyük Chekmejeh—the Great Drawbridge—which is the Marmora end of the Chatalja lines, and in front of which the Bulgarians were supposed to be massing for a battle that might be the end of all things. Soldiers grew thicker as we ran on. Presently we found ourselves in the midst of a camp. Fires were burning between the tents and soldiers went to and fro carrying food. Then we looked down on another picture, in composition very much like the first. The bay and the lake were bigger, however, and we saw no arch of the Milky Way as the bridge went lengthwise below us. The centre of interest this time was a man-of-war and half a dozen torpedo-boats. They, and the twilight in which we saw them, and the high black shores beyond, had an unexpectedly sinister air. Nevertheless, we began slowly picking our way down toward an invisible village. Soldiers were all about us. A line of them were carrying big round platters. Another line of them sat beside the road, in what I ingenuously took to be an unfinished gutter until the war correspondent called it a trench. We began to ask ourselves questions. We also asked them of a soldier, inquiring if we should find room in the village to spend the night. He assured us that we would find plenty of room: everybody had gone away. Oh! And where were the Bulgarians? He pointed over to the black line of hills on the other side of the bay.
We decided that we would not, after all, spend the night in Büyük Chekmejeh! Our taxi, that had behaved irreproachably all day, chose that inauspicious moment to balk. While the chauffeur was tinkering with it an officer rode up and recommended him to be off as quickly as possible. That officer was the first member of his army who had addressed a question or a remonstrance to us all day. The chauffeur stated our plight. “Never mind,” said the officer, as if a car were a mule that only had to be beaten a little harder to make it move, “you must go back. And you must be quick, for after six o’clock no one will be allowed on the roads.” It was then half past five. And we realised with extreme vividness that we were between the lines of the two armies, and that our lamps would make an excellent mark for some Bulgarian artilleryman if he took it into his head to begin the battle of Chatalja. As a matter of fact, he obligingly waited till the next night. In the meantime the car made up its mind to go on. We sputtered slowly up the long hill, passing lighted tents that looked cosy enough to an amateur bound for the rear. But once in open country a tire gave out and we lost our half-hour of grace.
As we coasted down the hill to the bridge which should have been of the Milky Way our lamps illuminated a hooded giant in front of us. He barred the road with his bayonet, saying pleasantly to the chauffeur:
“It is forbidden, my child.”
“What shall we do?” asked the chauffeur.
“In the name of God, I know not,” replied he of the hood. “But the bridge is forbidden.”
Personally, I did not much care. A southerly air warmed the November night, a half-moon lighted it, and while there was not too much room in the taxi for three people to sleep, still the thing could be done. The British resident, however, who had grey hairs and a family, asked to be taken to the officer in command. The gentleman in the hood did not object. The British resident was accordingly escorted across the bridge by another gentleman in a hood, who mysteriously materialised out of the moonlight, while we waited until our companion came back with his story. The point of it was that the officer in command happened to know the name and the face of the British resident, and agreed with him that, if stopping was to be done, it should have been done earlier in the day. The colonel, therefore, let us through his lines. But he gave strict orders that no one, thereafter, was to cross the bridge of Küchük Chekmejeh without a pass from the War Office.
I forbear to dwell too long upon the rest of our return. We fell once more into the hands of sentries, who were somehow softened by the eloquence of the chauffeur. We broke down again and hung so long on the side of a hill that we made up our minds to spend the night there. We fell foul of bits of road that made us think of a choppy sea; and, in turning off a temporary bridge into a temporary road, we stuck for a moment with one wheel spinning over eternity. We passed many military convoys, going both ways. Our lamps would flare for a moment on a grey hood, on a high pack-saddle, on a cart piled with boxes or sacks, and then the road would be ours again. Camp-fires flickered vaguely over the dark downs. Sometimes we would overtake a refugee cart, the head of the house leading the startled bullocks, the women and children walking behind. As we began to climb out of the last dip toward the cypresses and the city wall the road became one confusion of creaking wheels, of tossing horns, of figured turbans, of women clutching a black domino about their faces with one hand and with the other a tired child. Under the sombre trees fires burned murkily, lighting up strange groups of peasants and gravestones. And all the air was aromatic with burning cypress wood.
At the Top Kapou Gate, where Mehmed II made his triumphal entry in 1453, the press was so thick that we despaired of getting through. “It is no use,” said a peasant when we asked him to pull his cart to one side. “They are letting no one in.” It was true. The outbreak of cholera had made precautions necessary. A line of grey hoods stood outside the gate and kept back the carts that streamed townward more thickly than ever on the eve of Chatalja. But our infidel car was allowed to enter the city of the Caliph, although his true children, fleeing from an unknown terror, waited outside among the graves. Stamboul was almost deserted as we sped through the long silent streets, save for an occasional patrol or a watchman beating out the hour on the pavement with his club. Twice we met companies of firemen, pattering half naked after a white linen lantern, with their little hand-pumps on their shoulders. Then came the parallel lights of the new bridge, and dark Galata, and Pera that looked never so urban or so cheery after those desolate downs.
On the comfortable leather cushions of the club—somehow they made me think of the refugees among the cypresses—we told the story of our day.
“So,” said another war correspondent, who had been lucky enough to see the battle of Lüleh Bourgass through the eyes of a lost dragoman, “you saw nothing at all?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”