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

by Arthur Ruhl

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.

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.