Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
About this time the newspapers were hailing the exploit of an English
submarine, which had sailed from England to the Dardanelles, passed
under the minefield, and torpedoed the Turkish warship _Mesudie_.
“That’s the torpedo that did it,” said Djevad. “You’ll see the wreck of
the ship when you go down.”
The first fortification I visited was that of Anadolu Hamidié (that is,
Asiatic Hamidié), located on the water’s edge just outside of Tchanak.
My first impression was that I was in Germany. The officers were
practically all Germans, and everywhere Germans were building up
buttresses with sacks of sand and in other ways strengthening the
emplacements. Here German, not Turkish, was the language heard on every
side. Oberst Wehrle, who conducted me over these batteries, took the
greatest delight in showing them. He had the simple pride of the artist
in his work, and told me of the happiness that had come into his days
when Germany had at last found herself at war. All his life, he said, he
had spent in military practices, and, like most Germans, he had become
tired of manœuvres, sham battles, and other forms of mimic
hostilities. Yet he was approaching fifty, he had become a colonel, and
he was fearful that his career would close without actual military
experience--and then the splendid thing had happened, and here he was,
fighting a real English enemy, firing real guns and shells! There was
nothing brutal about Wehrle’s manners; he was a “_gemütlich_” gentleman
from Baden, and thoroughly likeable; yet he was all aglow with the
spirit of “Der Tag.” His attitude was simply that of a man who had spent
his lifetime learning a trade and who now rejoiced at the chance of
exercising it. But he furnished an illuminating light on the German
military character and the forces that had really caused the war.
Feeling myself so completely in German country, I asked Colonel Wehrle
why there were so few Turks on this side of the straits. “You won’t ask
me that question this afternoon,” he said, smiling, “when you go over to
the other side.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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