Blind beggars are not unkindly treated in Constantinople. There is a rule that one must never refuse them alms. The least that may be given them are the words:
"Inayet ola!" ("God will care for you!").
Not long after that I sat on the shambles at Suvla Bay, the particular spot in question being known as the Kiretch Tépé—Chalk Hill.
Sir Ian Hamilton had just thrown into the vast amphitheater to the east of the bay some two hundred thousand men, many of them raw troops of the Kitchener armies.
Some three thousand of these men had been left dead on the slopes of the hill. As usual, somebody on Gallipoli had bungled and bungled badly. A few days before I had seen how a British division ate itself up in futile attacks against a Turkish position west of Kütchük Anafarta. The thing was glorious to look at, but withal very foolish. Four times the British assailed the trenches of the Turks, and each time they were thrown back. When General Stopford finally decided that the thing was foolish, he called it off. The division he could not call back, because it was no more.
It was so on Chalk Hill.
A hot August night lay over the peninsula. The crescent of a waning moon gave the dense vapors that had welled in from the Mediterranean an opalescent quality. From that vapor came also, so it seemed, the stench of a hundred battle-fields. In reality this was not so. The Turkish advance position, which I had invaded that night for the purpose of seeing an attack which was to be made by the Turks shortly before dawn, ran close to the company graves in which the Turks had buried the dead foe.
There is little soil on Gallipoli. It is hardly ever more than a foot deep on any slope, and under it lies lime that is too hard to get out of the way with pick and shovel. The company graves, therefore, were cairns rather than ditches. The bodies had been walled in well enough, but those walls were not airtight. The gases of decomposition escaped, therefore, and filled the landscape with obnoxious odor.
I had been warned against this. The warning I had disregarded for the reason that such things are not unfamiliar to me. But I will confess that it took a good many cigarettes and considerable will-power to keep me in that position—so long as was absolutely necessary.
When I returned to Constantinople everybody was speaking of the stench in the Suvla Bay terrain. There were many such spots, and returning soldiers were never slow in dwelling on the topic they suggested. The war did not appear less awesome for that.