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.