At this point in the campaign, though the morale was excellent, depression began to grow. There was a great deal of sickness, from which practically no one escaped, though it was less virulent in its form than later in the summer. I had been ill for some time, and was very anxious to avoid being invalided to Egypt, and was grateful for the chance of going to the islands for a change of climate and light work, for the few days that were sufficient to give another lease of health.
The feeling that invades almost every side-show, sooner or later, that the home authorities cared nothing and knew nothing about the Dardanelles, was abroad. The policy and the strategy of the expedition were bitterly criticized. I remember a friend of mine saying to me: “All this expedition is like one of Walter Scott’s novels, upside down.” Walter Scott generally put his hero at the top of a winding stair, where he comfortably disposed, one by one, of a hundred of his enemies. “Now,” he said, “what we have done was, first of all to warn the Turks that we were going to attack by having a naval bombardment. That made them fortify the Dardanelles, but still they were not completely ready. We then send a small force to attack, to tell them that we really are in earnest, and to ask them if they are quite ready. In fact, we have put the man who ought to be, not the hero, but the villain of the piece, at the top of the corkscrew stair, and we have given him so much notice that when the hero attacks the villain has more men at the top of the circular stair than the hero has at the bottom. It’s like throwing pebbles at a stone wall,” he said, mixing his metaphors.
Diary. Sunday, July 25, 1915. On the Sea. I left for Tenedos; a most beautiful day. We have just been to Anzac, very burnt and wounded amongst the surrounding greenery. Pretty peaceful there, only a few bullets coming over.
Perhaps the record of a sojourn in the Greek Islands on what was really sick-leave, as the work was of the lightest, should not be included in a war diary, but the writer looks back with amusement and pleasure to days that were not uneventful. They were passed with friends who were playing a difficult and most arduous part, and whose services, in many cases, have not received the recognition that was their due.
It was pleasant once again to be lord of the horizon, to have space through which to roam, and lovely hills and valleys to ride across in the careless, scented air of the Mediterranean summer, with the sea shining a peacock-blue through the pines. It is this space and liberty that men cramped in a siege desire, more than the freedom from the shelling of the enemy’s guns. There was much, too, that was opéra bouffe in the Islands, that made a not unpleasant contrast to the general life at Anzac.
If there was spy mania on the Peninsula, it was multiplied tenfold, and quite reasonably, on the Islands, where part of the population were strongly pro-Ally, another part pro-German, while others were anti-British by an accidental kind of ricochet. These were the royalist followers of King Constantine, who hated Venizelos, and consequently the friends of Venizelos, Great Britain and France.
The situation on the Islands was one with which it was extremely hard to cope. We were very anxious to safeguard the lives of our men, and to prevent information going to the enemy, and, at the same time, not to pursue German methods. It was unceasing work, with a great strain of responsibility. There was an inevitable va et vient between the Peninsula and Imbros. From Imbros boats could slip across to Tenedos, Mytilene or the mainland. The native caïques would drop in at evening, report, be ordered to stay till further notice, and would drift away like ghosts in the night. Men, and women, performed remarkable feats, in appearing and disappearing. They were like pictures on a film in their coming and their going. Watchers and watched, they thrust and parried, discovered and concealed, glowed on the picture and darkened.
Anatasio, a Serbian by birth, was one of our workers, conspicuous for his quickness and intelligence. At the outbreak of the war he had already been five months in an Austrian prison at Cattaro, but the prospect of battle stimulated his faculties, and he escaped. One day at luncheon I asked him where it was that he had learned Italian, which he did not talk very well. “While I was in prison at Smyrna,” said he. “What for?” said I. “For stabbing a Cretan,” said he, and added that he would rather be five years in prison in Turkey than one in Austria. Then there was Avani, one of the most vivid personalities that I have ever met. He was a poet and a clairvoyant, a mesmerist and a masseur, a specialist in rheumatism and the science of detection, once a member of General Chermside’s gendarmerie in Crete, and ex-chief of the Smyrna fire brigade. The stories of him are too many, and too flamboyant, to tell.