XIV
THE WHITE ISLAND
A STORY OF THE GALLIPOLI ADVENTURE
The aviation launch rolled slowly in the grip of the grounds well behind one of the desolate islands off Tenedos, southwest of the entrance to the Dardanelles. The afternoon was windless and humid. Warm, dripping fog covered the launch and hid from her the outlines of the rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she lay. Fog had sprinkled the deck as if with baptismal water, and the day was noiseless except for the lazy slapping of waves against the launch’s side.
A hydro-aeroplane alongside dipped and rose rhythmically with the launch’s motion, and the aviator, Lieutenant Douka, of the Royal Flying Corps, muffled in a British airman’s uniform, with thick wadded helmet on his head, goggles, and rubber gauntlets, bent over and tested the bomb-dropping mechanism. Those who had known Douka as a student in America or as an unambitious idler in Paris would hardly have recognized him in his new rôle. He had always been romantic, but he explained this amiable weakness as an inheritance from his Byzantine ancestors. “My grandparents were Greek, you know,” was his offhand explanation to college friends of his glowing fondness for the classics and things Hellenic. His two or three trips to Greece had been marred by the unpleasant contrast between the Greece he had imagined and the Greece of to-day. He could scarcely make himself understood in the modern tongue of Hellas; it irritated him, as modern English would doubtless irritate Chaucer. “A degenerate language and a degenerate people,” he told himself. Yet he had taken up aviation at Pau, not as a sport—although that is what he told his friends—but as one of the gifts he could offer modern Greece when the day of her final fight with the Turk should dawn.
The war came. He went hopefully to Athens. There came a day when King Constantine overrode his people, Venizelos retired, constitutional government in Greece ceased to be, and Douka went to London and volunteered in time for the Dardanelles expedition.
But he gave no sign of all this as he tested and retested the bomb-dropping mechanism hanging between the pontoons which supported the machine, and pushed and pulled the controls. He thrust his feet against the pedals and examined the petrol and oil throttles. “Right, lieutenant?” called the skipper of the launch. “Right, sir,” he answered. “Belay there! Lively!” the skipper shouted to two sailors who held the machine. A mechanician spun the propeller and dropped from sight; the motor churned nervously; Lieutenant Douka lifted his hand and signalled that all was satisfactory. The launch shot sidewise, and the ’plane skated swiftly forward, leaving a foaming wake. She tilted and shot forward faster, then up from the water and heavily into the mist. Douka swung her back and around the launch. Along the deck beneath him the sailors stood at attention, but a gust of gray smoke showed him that his escort was already in motion, off for the mother-ship and the flock of aeroplanes at Imbros, and he was alone, sailing away to bomb the Sultan Omar, the flagship of the Turkish fleet.
He looked at the clock—it read 3:17; then at the oil gauge—it was working properly. He climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Under him the mist lay like an Arctic snow-field, broken by pools of rotten ice through which the gray sea stared. The sea abruptly changed to gray land, and he mounted higher. He was flying at a height of four thousand feet over Asia, the ancestral enemy of his race and his continent. Somewhere down in the haze beneath lay Troy. Douka smiled bitterly as he thought again of the ten years’ warfare, and of how the Greeks had blotted her from the earth. The sullen roar of his motor seemed to stimulate his imagination. The mist thinned slightly, and he saw far away the narrow blue ribbon of the Dardanelles—the blood-thickened boundary between free Europe and the despotic East. Haughty Xerxes once sat on those cliffs and watched his Asiatic worms crossing to conquer the West. Twenty-eight centuries had battled on that blue line. Always it had been the same, age after age, century after century, always the Greek against the Asiatic, the Greek against the barbarian, and for five hundred years the disinherited Christian Greek against the Moslem Turk. Muffled in his helmet as he was, he began to sing an old Byzantine war song—a song his grandmother had taught him. His hate rose like a bird in a gale; his clutched hands bit into the rubber sheathing of the levers; he drove ahead at top speed, but his wrath seemed to leap out before him like a racer distancing the thing behind. To kill, to destroy, to blot out, utterly obsessed him.
High over the Sea of Marmora he flew toward Constantinople. Battles without end had been fought on the watery plains below. There the vast Greek Empire had struggled to the death with the hordes of Asia. The mist which had half hidden the land thinned and disappeared. The choppy air became cleaner and easier to fly through. He climbed to eight thousand feet. Far away he caught sight of the Golden Horn, the royal city of Constantine the Great, like a Grecian jewel set in Oriental gold, or like a Grecian body pierced by the bright spears of Turkish minarets. For five centuries she had been the spoil of the East. He cursed her conquerors and laughed to himself. What if he should bomb the mosque of Omar or the Sultan’s palace?... He shook his fist at Scutari as if the city were a person. Little flowers of dirty-white smoke bloomed in the air beside him and above him; once he seemed to fly through a shower where before all had been clear, and he felt small pieces of steel drumming like rain on the wings of his ’plane. It was a burst of shrapnel. He laughed and flew on.
Up the Bosphorus he drove, searching the sea with his eyes. The British Secret Service had reported the Sultan Omar at Bojukdere. He strained for a sight of her.