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 started off finally on foot through streets silent as the grave--not
a person, not a lamp, not so much as a barking dog, as queer and as
creepy as some made-up thing in a theatre. Once we stumbled past a
naked and dismembered trunk set up beside a doorway--a physician's
manikin that chance or some sinister clown had left there. Once--and
one of the strangest sounds I ever heard--behind the closed up-stair
shutters of an apothecary's shop, whose powders and poisons were strewn
over the sidewalk, a piano haltingly played with one finger.
At last a light, an open door, a sentry--and this was, indeed,
theatrical--a lighted room and a long table set with candles, flowers,
and wine. The commander of the Sixth Corps had just been decorated with
the order "Pour le mérite" and he and his officers were dining before
taking up the march. He welcomed us in the true Hungarian style,
grabbed me by the arms and asked if I was hungry, apologized for their
frugal war-time fare, told how splendidly his men had behaved, had a
word and a place for every-body, as if we were all old friends.
There were three rooms full of officers, and every-one half rose and
bowed in military fashion as we made our way between the tables to our
seats at the end of the third. An amiable young signal-officer who had
been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away when the city was
taken and was off at three next morning, sat opposite me and told with
great spirit how the only common language between him and some of his
polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they had
picked up in America.
We slept on commandeered mattresses that night on the floor of a vacant
house, with a few Hungarian hussars still singing over the victory in
the back yard, and got up to find the crowded town of the night before
as empty as the old camp-ground the day after the circus.
We strolled through some of the empty streets and into the citadel,
where a handful of German soldiers were guarding a placid, tan-colored
little herd of Russian prisoners; recrossed the pontoon bridge, as
crowded as it had been the afternoon before, and then stopped at
Kobilany fort on the way back to Ivangorod.
The brief Austrian fire had been accurate. There were shell holes
inside the fort, along the parapet, and one frightful bull's-eye, which
had struck square on the inner concrete rim and blown chunks of
concrete, as well as its own steel, all over the place. The rifle-men
left in this embrasure were killed at a stroke, and their blood remained
freshly dried on the stones. Of various uncomfortable places I have
seen in the war this was one--left behind in an open concrete fort to
cover the retreat of artillery, and wait with a pop-gun rifle until the
enemy decided that his artillery had "silenced" you and that it was time
to storm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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