Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
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 cracked jokes,
told stories, sang the queerest kinds of songs, and played childish
pranks upon one another. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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