Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind ThemRuhl, Arthur
History
Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them
Ruhl, Arthur
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread and ripe olives
and tea, and walked with him round the camp, through a hospital and into
an old farmhouse yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of
captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, while the bees left
behind in some clumsy old box hives buzzed away as of yore. Wiser than
men, the colonel observed. There were English Enfields and French
rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which the Turks had
fitted a new wooden base. There were rifles with smashed barrels, with
stocks bored through by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on
through the men who held them--live men like ourselves; quick choking
instants of terror the ghosts of ---- which we were poking and peering
into there in the warm sunshine!
We said good-by to the colonel, for our passes took us but to the
valley, and he had stretched a point in sending us down the plateau the
evening before, and I bumped back to Kilid Bahr. We did not want to
leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, and as we had duly
presented ourselves in Gallipoli, and were now by way of coming from it
rather than Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the orderly
took us wrote, without question, a permission to cross to Chanak Kale,
we sailed with no misgivings. Alas for Troy and looking down on a modern
battle from the heights of Ilium! A truculent major of gendarmes hurried
us from the Asiatic shore as if we had come to capture it. We might not
land, we might not write a note to the commandant to see if the
permission to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to Constantinople
the day before, had arrived; we might not telephone--we must go back to
Europe, and write or telephone from there.
So back to Europe, and after consultation and telephoning, back to Asia
again, and this time we succeeded in effecting a landing and an audience
with the commander of the defenses of the Dardanelles, Djevad Pasha. He
was sitting under a tree in a garden looking out over the sea gate,
which, with the aid of his two German colleagues, Ousedom Pasha and
Merten Pasha, it was his task to keep shut--a trim Young Turk, more
polished and "European" than the major of gendarmes, but no less firm.
An American's wish to see the Troy he might never be so near again bored
him excessively. We could not stay--we might not even spend the night.
There was a boat that evening, and on it we must go.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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