Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them

by Arthur Ruhl

The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr—they might try to make another Gibraltar of it. Their aeroplanes came up every day. There was a French-man with a long tail—he only came to the edge of the camp, and as soon as the batteries opened up turned back, but the Englishman didn't stop for anything. He dropped a bomb or two every time he passed—one man must have been square under one, for they found pieces of him, but never did find his head. It wasn't so much the bomb that did the damage; it was the stones blown out by the explosion. If you were standing anywhere within sixty feet when it went off, you were likely to be killed. The captain had had trenches dug all over camp into which they could jump—had one for himself just outside the tent. All you hoped for when one of those fellows was overhead and the shrapnel chasing after him was that the next one would take him fair and square and bring him down. Yet that fellow took his life in his hands every time he flew over. "He's fighting for his country, too!" the captain sighed.

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.