“The Turks and Germans,” he added, “care nothing for each other. We are with them because it is our interest to be with them; they are with us because that is their interest. Germany will back Turkey just so long as that helps Germany; Turkey will back Germany just so long as that helps Turkey.”
Enver seemed much impressed at the close of our interview with the intimate personal relations which we had established with each other. He apparently believed that he, the great Enver, the Napoleon of the Turkish Revolution, had unbended in discussing his nation’s affairs with a mere Ambassador; colossal vanity, as I have before remarked, was one of his strong points.
“You know,” he said, “that there is no one in Germany with whom the Emperor talks as intimately as I have talked with you to-day.”
We reached Panderma about two o’clock. Here Enver and his auto were put ashore, and our party started again, our boat arriving at Gallipoli late in the afternoon. We anchored in the harbour and spent the night on board. All the evening we could hear the guns bombarding the fortifications, but these reminders of war and death did not affect the spirits of my Turkish hosts. The occasion was for them a great lark; they had spent several months in hard, exacting work, and now they behaved like boys suddenly let out for a vacation. They made jokes, told stories, sang the queerest kinds of songs, and played childish pranks upon each other. The venerable Fuad, despite his nearly ninety years, developed great qualities as an entertainer, and the fact that his associates made him the butt of most of their horse-play apparently only added to his enjoyment of the occasion. The amusement reached its height when one of his friends surreptitiously poured him a glass of eau-de-cologne. The old gentleman looked at the new drink a moment and then diluted it with water. I was told that the proper way of testing raki, the popular Turkish tipple, is by mixing it with water; if it turns white under this treatment it is the real thing, and may be safely drunk. Apparently water has the same effect upon eau-de-cologne, for the contents of Fuad’s glass, after this test, turned white. The old gentleman, therefore, poured the whole thing down his throat without a grimace—much to the hilarious entertainment of his tormentors.
In the morning we started again. We had now fairly arrived in the Dardanelles, and from Gallipoli we had a sail of nearly twenty-five miles to Tchanak Kalé. For the most part this section of the strait is uninteresting, and, from a military point of view, it is unimportant. The stream is about two miles wide, both sides are low-lying and marshy, and only a few scrambling villages show any signs of life. I was told that there were a few ancient fortifications, their rusty guns pointing toward the Marmora, the emplacements having been erected there in the early part of the nineteenth century for the purpose of preventing hostile ships entering from the north. These fortifications, however, were so inconspicuous that I could not see them. My hosts informed me that they had no fighting power, and that, indeed, there was nothing in the northern part of the straits, from Point Nagara to the Marmora, that could offer resistance to any modern fleet.
The chief interest which I found in this part of the Dardanelles was purely historic and legendary. The ancient town of Lampsacus appeared in the modern Lapsaki, just across from Gallipoli, and Nagara Point is the site of the ancient Abydos, from which village Leander used to swim nightly across the Hellespont to Hero—a feat which was repeated about one hundred years ago by Lord Byron. Here, also, Xerxes crossed from Asia to Greece on a bridge of boats, embarking on that famous expedition which was to make him master of the world. The tribe of Xerxes, I thought, as I passed the scene of his exploit, is not yet entirely extinct! The Germans and Turks had found a less romantic use for this, the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, for here they had stretched a cable and anti-submarine barrage of mines and nets—a device which, as I shall describe, did not keep the English and French underwater boats out of the Marmora and the Bosphorus. It was not until we rounded this historic point of Nagara that the dull monotony of flat shores gave place to a more diversified landscape. On the European side the cliffs now began to descend precipitously to the water, reminding me of our own Palisades along the Hudson, and I obtained glimpses of the hills and mountain ridges that afterward proved such tragical stumbling-blocks to the valiant Allied armies. The configuration of the land south of Nagara, with its many hills and ridges, made it plain why the military engineers had selected this stretch of the Dardanelles as the section best adapted to defence.
Our boat was now approaching what was perhaps the most commanding point in the whole strait, the city of Tchanak, or, to give it its modern European name, of Dardanelles. In normal times this was a thriving port of 16,000 people, its houses built of wood, the headquarters of a considerable trade in wool and other products, and for centuries it has been an important military station. Now, excepting for the soldiers, it was deserted, the large civilian population having been moved into Anatolia. The British fleet, we were told, had bombarded this city; yet this statement seemed hardly probable, for I saw only a single house that had been hit, evidently by a stray shell which had been aimed at the near-by fortifications.
Djevad Pasha, the Turkish Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, met us and escorted our party to headquarters. Djevad was a man of culture and of pleasing and cordial manners; as he spoke excellent German, I had no need of an interpreter. I was much impressed by the deference with which the German officers treated him. That he was the Commander-in-Chief in this theatre of war, and that the Generals of the Kaiser were his subordinates, was made plainly apparent. As we passed into his office, Djevad stopped in front of a piece of a torpedo, mounted in the middle of the hall, evidently as a souvenir.
“There is the great criminal!” he said, calling my attention to the relic.
About this time the newspapers were hailing the exploit of an English submarine, which had sailed from England to the Dardanelles, passed under the minefield, and torpedoed the Turkish warship Mesudie.