What could have scattered the glittering flotilla? They had gone out, led by the Golden Peacock and the Sublime Umbrella to do honor to the brave. They had fled in panic before something unexpected and appalling; for the retreat was most palpably a flight.
Even as the spectators wondered and questioned, a dark blue mist came down like a lowered curtain upon the scene that had been instinct a moment before with light and movement, and color. The wooded hills, the palaces, and mosques, and shops, and kiosks, the thronged terraces and quays, the vessels, with their manned yards and decks crowded with gayly dressed sightseers, were seen dimly as through a thick gauze veil. And the cold breeze brought with it an appalling stench—a cold and deadly exhalation as of the battle-field, the charnel-house, and the plague-pit—as the first of the three great transports came gliding into view.
They came! and from the flagships of the English, French, and Turkish Admirals anchored at Beshiktash the guns boomed out their welcome—the Three Ensigns dipped as in a royal salute. But the cheers and acclamations died in the throats of the thousands whose eyes were nailed upon those mighty argosies, deep-laden, deck-piled, with Death’s blackening harvest.... The shouts went up, quavered, and broke, and died....
The transports followed each other at an interval of a cable’s length. They moved slowly, laboriously, painfully, like living creatures enfeebled by famine and sick to death. Such canvas as they spread hung crookedly; their tangled cordage, hanging in neglected loops, gave to them a strange air of neglect and dishevelment. Their sails had proved useless; their auxiliary steam-power alone had proved available. For the wounded and the pestilence-smitten, the dead and the living, were herded and packed and crowded on those dreadful decks, as wantonly as though some giant child had been playing at soldiers with real men and real ships—and had wearied of the game half through, jumbled the men in anyhow—and given each ship a spiteful shake, and gone sulkily away.
Filth flowed from their scuppers and streaked their flanks as the three transports moved slowly towards their anchorage. Bevies of the pretty little Adriatic gull accompanied them, screaming and mewing as in derision; dropping upon the water that had become oily, dark, and malodorous, to feed eagerly; rising, wheeling, and dropping again. And flocks of the tiny blue-breasted gray shear-water that haunts the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles fluttered above them, twittering and piping: “See here! See here!”
Faces crowded at their ports, and beyond these you could see more and more faces.... The bulwarks were hedged with faces; the decks were heaped with them.... The bodies belonging to them were clad in discolored rags of uniforms, or thin, and torn, and tattered shreds of linen underwear, and shivered in the bitter wind unceasingly; with a chattering of the teeth that sounded like the rattle of hail upon wood or canvas—with a vibration that communicated itself to the timbers of the ship.
But you could think of nothing but those faces, haggard and worn with privation and suffering, gaunt and terrible with famine, disfigured with wounds, or hideous from the ravages of pestilence. There were faces lividly blue or greenish-yellow with the discoloration of cholera or dysentery, darkly spotted with typhus, fiercely flushed with rheumatic fever or pneumonia, black with the decomposition of gangrene. And, swathed in clotted rags of bandages; or nakedly exposed to the shuddering sight of men, were faces mutilated by loss of noses or lips; and blind faces, showing red, empty eye-sockets; or mere fragments of faces, shattered, and split, and mutilated by grape, and shrapnel, and shell-splinters; or cloven with great sword-strokes from the forehead to the chin. And among these were faces snow-white, or yellow as wax—upheld by the pressure of the living crowd about them—that showed in the glassy stare and the dropped jaw where Death had taken toll. For the Red Reaper was busy gathering in his harvest. Many of these men would not live to be carried up the hilly road that was to serve as England’s Calvary. They died even as you looked, inwardly crying.... What wanton wreck and waste of splendid life, what reckless spill of strength, and hope, and courage! Was it for this, O God! that Britain has sent forth her pride and flower?—her manly, gallant officers, her stark and sturdy men?
It is a sacred duty to fight for one’s country, a glorious fate to die for her, if need be. But to perish, gaunt with famine and rotten with gangrene, through the neglect and indifference of that same country; to become, living, the prey of flies and the food of maggots that little middlemen may grow fat and flourish—and great Contractors become multi-millionaires—and Nobs and Bigwigs build unto themselves palaces, and the secret animosities working in crowned heads be gratified and glutted—that is to be a martyr, not a hero! Surely the gulls and the little gray shearwaters were crying: “Betrayed! Betrayed! Betrayed!”