Antwerp to Gallipoli

Excerpt:

The Adventure of the Fifty Hostages

Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the Dardanelles. It is one of those crowded little Turkish towns set on a blazing hillside — tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weatherwarped frame houses, with overhanging latticed windows and roofs of red tiles; little walled-in gardens with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses; fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets fork and women come to fill their water-jars — a dreamy, smelly, sun-drenched little town, drowsing on as it has drowsed for hundreds of years.

Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli — I speak as if the war hadn’t happened ! The graceful Greek sloops, with their bellying sails and turned-up stems and sterns, come sailing in much as they must have come when the Persians, instead of the English and the French, were battering away at the Hellespont. The grave, long-nosed old Turks pull at their bubble pipes and sip their little cups of sweet, black coffee; the camel trains, dusty and tinkling, come winding down the narrow streets from the Thracian wheat country and go back with oversea merchandise done up in faded car pets and boxes of Standard Oil. The wind blows from the north, and it is cold, and the Marmora gray; it blows from the south, and all at once the world is warm and sea and sky are blue — so soft, so blue, so alive with lifting radiance that one does not wonder the Turk is content with a cup of coffee and a view.

Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli — then the war came, and everything happened at once. It was a still May morning, a Sunday morning, when the English and French sent some of their ships up into the Gulf of Saros, on the Aegean side of the peninsula, over behind Gallipoli. Eight or ten miles of rolling country shut away the Aegean, and made people feel safe enough. They might have been in the other wars which have touched Gallipoli, but a few miles of country were nothing at all to the guns of a modern battleship.

An observation-balloon looked up over the western horizon, there was a sudden thunder, and all at once the sky above Gallipoli rained screaming shells and death. You can imagine — at any rate remembering Antwerp, I could very well imagine — how that hurricane of fire, sweeping in without warning, from people knew not where, must have seemed like the end of the world. You can imagine the people — old men with turbans undone, veiled women, crying babies — tumbling out of the little bird-cage houses and down the narrow streets. Off went the minaret, as you would knock off an icicle, from the mosque on the hill. The mosque by the water-front went down in a cloud of  dust, and up from the dust, from a petrol shell, shot a geyser of fire. Stones came rumbling down from the old square tower, which had stood since the days of Bayazid; the faded gray houses squashed like eggs. It was all over in an hour — some say even twenty minutes — but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, to kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the rest into the caves under the cliffs by the water, or across the Marmora to Lapsaki.

Now, while the bombardment of Gallipoli may not appear, from a merely human point of view, a particularly sporting performance, yet, as most of those killed were soldiers, as Gallipoli had been a staff headquarters not long before, and always has been a natural base for the defense of the Dardanelles, the attack was doubtless justified by the rules of war. It happens, however, that people who five in defenseless, bombarded towns are never interested in the rules of war. So a new and particularly disturbing rumor went flying through the crowded streets of Constantinople.

It is a city of rumors, this beautiful, bewildering Bagdad of the West, where all the races of the world jostle each other in the narrow streets, and you never know how the man who brushes past you lives — let alone feels and thinks. The Constantinople trolley-cars are divided by a curtain, on one side of which sit the men, on the other the veiled women. When there are several women the conductor slides the curtain along, so that half the car is a harem; when there are none he slides it back, and there is no harem at all.

And life is like that. You are at once in a modern commercial city and an ancient Mohammedan capital, and never know when the one will fade out like a picture on a screen and leave you in the Orient, facing its mystery, its fatalism, its vengeance that comes in a night.

You can imagine what it must become, walled in with war and censorship, with the English and French banging away at the Dardanelles gate to the south, the Russian bear growling at the door of the Bosporus, so close that you can every now and then hear the rumble of cannon above the din of Constantinople — just as you might hear them in Madison Square if an enemy were bombarding the forts at Sandy Hook.

You wake up one morning to hear that all the influential Armenians have been gathered up and shipped to the interior; you go down to the ordinary-looking hotel breakfast-room, and the three Germans taking coffee in the corner stop talking at once; at lunch some one stoops to whisper to the man across the table, there is a moment’s silence until the waiter has gone, and the man across the table mutters: “The G. V. says not to worry” — “G. V.” meaning Grand Vizier. To-morrow the Goeben is to be blown up, or there will be a revolution, or a massacre — heaven knows what !

Into an atmosphere like this, with wounded pouring back in thousands from the Dardanelles, there came the news of the bombardment of Gallipoli. And with it went the rumor of reprisal — all the English and French left behind in Constantinople, and there were a good many who had been permitted to go about their business more or less as usual, were to be collected, men, women, and children, taken down to the peninsula and distributed in the “unfortified” towns. The American ambassador would notify England and France through Washington, and if then the Allies chose to bombard, theirs was the risk.

The American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau, set about to see what could be done. Presently the word went round that the women might stay behind, but the men, high and low, must go. They came flocking to the embassy, already besought for weeks by French Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in distress, some begging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere as their share of the war. The Turks were finally induced to include only those between twenty and forty, and at the last moment this was cut to an even fifty — twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French.

The plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known remnants of the French and English colonies, and disappointed the chief of police, who had not unreasonably hoped, as he wistfully put it, “to have some notables.” Of the fifty probably not more than a dozen had been born in England or France, the others being natives of Malta, Greece — the usual Levantines. Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were not “important,” according to newspaper standards, they were, presumably, important to themselves. They were very important, indeed, to the wives and mothers and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea wall that Thursday morning, weeping and wailing, and waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron fence.

The hostages, one or two of whom had been called to their doors during the night and marched away without time to take anything with them, had been put aboard a police boat, about the size of a New York revenue cutter, and herded below in two little cabins, with ten fierce-looking Constantinople policemen, in gray astrakhan caps, to guard them. It was from the water-line port-holes of these cabins that they waved their farewells.

With them was a sturdy, bearded man in black knickerbockers and clerical hat, the rector of the Crimean Chapel in Constantinople — a Cambridge and Church of England man, and a one-time dweller in the wilds of Kurdistan, who, though not called, had volunteered to go. The first secretary of the American embassy, Mr. Hoffman Philip, an adventurous humanitarian, whose experience includes an English university, the Rough Riders, and service as American minister to Abyssinia, also volunteered, not, of course, as hostage, but as friendly assistant both to the Turkish authorities and to their prisoners.

To him was given the little deck-cabin, large enough for a man to stretch out on the seat which ran round it; here, also, the clergyman volunteer was presently permitted, and here, too, thanks to passports vouchsafed by the chief of police, the chroniclers of the expedition, Mr. Suydam, of the Brooklyn Eagle, and myself.

The passports, mysterious scratches in Turkish, did not arrive until the last minute, and with them came the chief, the great Bedri Bey himself — a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark, brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to envelop even a cup of coffee and a couple of boiled eggs in an air of sinister romance.

The chief regretted that the craft was not “ a serious passenger boat,” for we should probably have to spend the night aboard. Arrangements for the hostages and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just what they would be it was difficult to say, as there were, he said, no hotels in the place and the houses were all destroyed.

With this cheerful prospect he bade us farewell, and, all being ready, we waited two hours, and finally, just before noon, with deck-hands hanging life belts along the rail to be ready for possible English submarines, churned through the crowded shipping of the Golden Horn, round Stamboul, and out into the blue Marmora.

The difficulties of the next few days — for which most of the hostages, city-bred and used to the bakeshop round the corner, were unprepared — promptly presented themselves. Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch. There was not even bread. Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon — so appallingly soon does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals — seemed an almost immoral luxury. But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done. Philip dug into his corned beef and what was left of the bread, and so we curled up for the night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest of us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we had, for one of the Black Sea winds was blowing down the Marmora and it was as cold as November.

The launch came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night, and not long after daylight we were shaken out of our blankets to receive the call of the mutessarif, or local governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in semi-riding clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, who spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few words of that. He was accompanied by a sort of secretary or political director — a plump little man, with glasses and a vague, slightly smiling, preoccupied manner, who acted as interpreter.

The governor and Philip were addressed as “Excellence,” the secretary as “Monsieur le Directeur” and, considering that all concerned were only half awake, and we only half dressed, the interview, which included the exchange of cigarettes and many salutes, was extremely polite. We joined the mutessarif and his secretary in a stroll about the town.

It was deserted — closed shutters, empty houses and shops, not so much as the chance to buy a round, flat loaf of black bread — a shell of a town, with a few ravenous cats prowling about and forgotten chickens pecking the bare cobblestones. We saw the shell hole in the little Mohammedan cemetery, where four people, “ come to visit the tombs of their fathers” had been killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, and dangling rafters, and there came over one an indescribable irony as one listened, in this Eastern world of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the same grievances and indignations one had read in London editorials and heard in the beet-fields of Flanders months ago.

The mutessarif took us to a little white villa on the cliff by the sea, with a walled garden, flat black cedar, and a view of the Marmora, and we breakfasted on tea, bread and butter, and eggs. Meanwhile the hostages had been marched to an empty frame house on the beach, from the upper windows of which, while gendarmes guarded the street-door, they were gloomily peering when we returned to the launch. Philip, uneasy at the emptiness of the town and leisurely fashion in which things were likely to move, started for Lapsaki, across the Marmora, for food and blankets, and Suydam and I strolled about the town. We had gone but a few steps when we observed an aimless-looking individual in fez and civilian clothes following us. We tramped up-hill, twisted through several of the hot little alley-like streets — he followed like our shadow. We led him all over town, he toiling devotedly behind, and when we returned to the beach, he sat himself down on a wood-pile behind us, as might some dismal buzzard awaiting our demise.

He, or some of his fellow sleuths, stuck to us all that day. Once, for exercise, I walked briskly out to the edge of the town and back again. The shadow toddled after. I went up to the basin beside the ruined mosque, a sort of sea-water plaza for the town, and, taking a stool outside a little cafe, which had awakened since morning, took coffee. The shadow blandly took coffee also, which he consumed silently, as we had no common tongue, rose as I rose, and followed me back to the beach.

Out in the Marmora, which is but little wider here than the Hudson at Tappan Zee, transports crammed with soldiers went steaming slowly southward, a black destroyer on the lookout for submarines hugging their flanks and breaking trail ahead of them. Over the hills to the south, toward Maidos and the Dardanelles, rolled the distant thunder — the cannon the hapless fifty, looking out of their house on the beach, had been sent down to stop — and all about us, in the dazzling Turkish sunshine, were soldiers and supply-trains, landing, disembarking, pushing toward the front. Fine-looking men they were, too, these infantrymen, bronzed, well-built fellows, with heavy, high cheek-bones, longish noses, black mustaches, and dark eyes, who, whatever their qualities of initiative might be, looked to have no end of endurance and ability to stay put. Bullock-carts dragged by big, black buffalo cattle, carrying their heads far back, as if their big horns were too heavy for them, crowded the street leading to the quay, and camels, strung in groups of five, came swinging in, or kneeling in the dust, waved their long, bird-like necks, and lifted up a mournful bellow, as if protesting in a bored, Oriental way, at a fate which compelled them to bear burdens for the nagging race of men.

It was to an accompaniment of these howls that a young Turkish officer came over to find out who these strangers might be. We spoke of the hostages, and he at once said that it was an excellent idea. The English and French were very cruel — if now they chose to bombard. ... “If a man throws a penny into the sea,” he said, “he loses the penny. It isn’t the pocketbook that’s hurt.” I did not quite grasp this proverb, but remarked that after all they were civilians and had done nothing. “That is true,” he said, “but the English and French have been very unjust to our civilians. They force us to another injustice — c’est la guerre.”

Toward the end of the afternoon the hostages, closely guarded, were marched up into the town and lodged in two empty houses — literally empty, for there was neither bed nor blanket, chair nor table — nothing but the four walls. A few had brought mattresses and blankets, but the greater number, city-bred young fellows, unused to looking after themselves out of doors, had only the clothes they stood in. The north wind held; directly the sun went down it was cold again, and, only half fed with the provisions Philip brought over from Lapsaki, they spent a dismal night, huddled on the bare floor, under their suitcases or whatever they could get to cover them, and expecting another bombardment at dawn . . .