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

by Arthur Ruhl

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.