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
Gendarmes guarded us while we waited--we who the night before had slept
in a scarlet-lined tent!--and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and
three patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignominiously through
Chanak Kale's ruined streets. The boat we went by was the same little
side-wheeler we had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud-stained,
blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches across the water,
with no place to lie but the bare deck. The stifling hold was packed
with them; they curled up about the engine-room gratings--for it was
cold that night--yet there was no complaint. A tired sigh now and then,
a moan of weariness, and the soldier wrapped his army overcoat a little
closer about him, curled up like a dog on a door-mat, and left the rest
to fate. A big, round, yellow moon climbed up out of Asia and poured
its silver down on them and on the black hills and water, still as some
inland lake.
The side-wheeler tied up at Ak-Bash for the night, and it was not until
the middle of the next morning that it was decided that she should cross
and leave her wounded at Lapsaki instead of going on up to
Constantinople. We lugged our baggage off and hunted up our old friend,
the Hamburg-American captain, to see what might be done till some other
craft appeared. He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which
might be going up that afternoon or evening.
It was about midday. The sun blazing down on the crowded fiat; on
boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up in all the variegated rags of the
East shuffling in and out of the ships; on gangs digging, piling lumber,
boiling water, cooking soup; on officers in brown uniforms and brown
lamb's-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, and a vast herd of sheep, which
had just poured out of a transport and spread over the plain, when from
the hill came two shots of warning. An enemy aeroplane was coming!
The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the
water. They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and
threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water--all, as they ran,
looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily
nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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