And at every hour of the night and day these trenches are reddened with
blood, with the blood of our sons of France, of our English friends,
and even of those gentle giants of New Zealand, who have followed them
into this furnace. The earth is abundantly drenched with their blood,
the blood of all these Allies, so dissimilar, but so firmly united
against the monstrous knavery of Germany. Opposite, very close, there
flows the blood of those Turks, who are nothing but the unhappy victims
of hateful plots, yet who are so freely insulted in France by people who
understand nothing of the underlying cause. They fall in thousands,
these Turks, more exposed to shrapnel fire than our own men;
nevertheless they fight reluctantly; they fight because they have been
deceived and because insolent foreigners drive them on with their
revolvers. If on the whole they fight none the less superbly, it is
merely a question of race. And the simplest of them, who have been
persuaded that they had to do with only their Russian enemies, are
unaware that it is we who are there.
On this peninsula we occupy a position won and retained by force of
heroism. The formation of the ground continues to render our situation
one of difficulty and our tenacity still more worthy of admiration. Our
position, indeed, is dominated by the low hills of Asia, where the forts
have not yet all been silenced; there is therefore no nook or corner, no
tent, no single one of our field hospitals, where doctors can attend to
the wounded in perfect security, absolutely certain that no shell will
come and interrupt them.
This terrible void France desires to fill with all possible dispatch.
With the utmost haste, she is fitting out a great hospital ship, which
the Red Cross Society has offered to provide at its own expense with
three hundred beds, with linen, nurses, drugs and dressings. This
life-saving ship will be moored in front of an island close to the
scene of battle, but completely sheltered; steam and motor launches will
be attached to it to fetch those who are seriously wounded and bring
them on board day by day, so that they may be operated upon and tended
in peace before infection and gangrene set in. How many precious lives
of our soldiers will thus be saved!
It must be understood that the stretcher-bearers of the ship will bring
back likewise wounded Turks, if there are any lying in the zone
accessible to them; and this is only fair give and take, for they do the
same for us. Some Zouaves who are fighting there wrote to me yesterday:
"The Turks are resisting with unequalled bravery; this all the
newspapers of Europe admit. But our wounded and our prisoners receive
excellent treatment from them, as General Gouraud himself announced in
an Order of the Day; they nurse them, feed them, and tend them better
than their own soldiers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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