Antwerp to Gallipoli A Year of the War on Many Fronts-and Behind Them

re Of The F

ill 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 cup

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 peo

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

n a staff head-quarters 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, tha

n 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 wo

an capital, and never know when the one will fade out like a picture on a screen and leave

ou 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

nly 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 Fra

een 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 Consta

lds 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 univ

it; here, also the clergyman volunteer was presently permitted, and here too, thanks to passports vouch-sa

the great Bedri Bey himself- a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark, brooding eyes and ve

night aboard. Arrangements for the hostages and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just what they wo

st before noon, with deck-hands hanging life belts along the rail to be ready for possible English submari

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

r, 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

hat all concerned were only half awake, and we only half dressed, the interview, which included the exchange of ciga

ones. 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

or, 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 indivi

ter. 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 m

own 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 infantry-men, 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-

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 pocket-book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this proverb, but

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,

s were made perhaps even more comfortable on mattresses on the dining-room floor. We were all sleepy enough to drop on them at once, but another diplomatic dinner had been planned, it appeared, and Turkish politeness can no more be hurried nor overcome than can that curious impassive resistance which a Turk can maintain against something he does not wish done. It was nine o'clock

hes, and his complete impenetrability to new ideas was only equalled by the solemnity and touching willingness with which he received them. It was after he had served us in the i

in style, he always replied that so they were built by Pappadopoulos-Pappadopoulos being dead these twenty or thirty years. Dimitri, the secretary ventured, had been architect of the mosque on the water-front, and when he found that we w

... c'est

two intransigent kickers, and the aesthetic young Frenchman who spent his idle time drawing pictures of fashion-plate young ladies, had become so unstrung that he had regularly "thrown a fit" and been unconscious for half an hour until they could massage him back to life again. Humor was quite gone out of them, and when the clergyman suggested that it was a compliment to be sent out to be shot at-flattering, at any rate,

eve that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner man. Cigarettes-coffee-assurances to his excellency that the house is his, to Monsieur Le Directeur of our pleasure and profound consideration. Minutes pass, an hour-the bey knows no such thing as time, the other is as unhurried

iddles- the plight of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of being governor of a province close to Constantinople. One can h

much what Gallipoli must have been a few days before-sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with st

of blankets, but how many did they have, how long would it take them to make not one, but fifty mattresses! Greek traders, Jews from the Dardane

e face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster, had been burned at Gallipoli. Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth. In spite of it he took Philip's cigarette and smoked it. He was dead when we cam

t, but some of the Levantines let themselves go completely. A pale gentleman with a poetic beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent. It was not a jail, it was a mad-

pas d'argent!"-it was he who had no money and nothing to cover him, and what did they want him to do?

ary to stay for dinner, a repast for which Hassan, the embassy khavass who accompanied

the only place where young men were both civilized and properly "serieux." In the midst of these amiable speculations it was suggested that, in view of the difficulty of getting mattresses, the government might even requisit

hey streaked through the rooms like chain lightning, and in the dead of night went galloping over the piano keyboard with sounds so blood-curdling that Suydam put his mattress on the sofa and his sleeping-bag on top of that, and, shutting himself in, defied them. The incomparable Levy was Ita

. And it was Levy's gift to play up to this assumption, to hang on his employer's words with breathless anxiety, to relax into a paternal smile when safe, and to support his omelets and his delays with oat

e mattresses and the promise of the remainder. We found the hostages more cheerful. With the relief money Philip had distributed the day before, and the food they had been able to buy, t

ounced that to-morrow there would be enough for all. Nay, more-the government would allow each hostage four piasters a day for food, a cook would be brou

Constantinople cook as limiting their means of amusing themselves; the aesthetic young man recovered now, polished his shoes and put a lavender handkerchief in his breast pocket. The hosta

arifs secretary followed it, lamenting that we must go. A peacock reposing majestically i

for a drive. Toward the end of it we reached the flour-mill, the only modern edifice in this ancient town, and were ushered into the office to sit in a constrained circle, with the slightly ironical-looking young proprietor-accustomed, perhaps,

were his. The American protested that, much as the gift delighted his taste and rouse

is yours!" Scarcely had we returned, indeed, before a

e seated, the hospitable young men had actually procured several bottles of Gallipoli champagne. The barber with the poetic beard leaped to his feet, as fluent in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a

mountaineers, then a waltz from the cafes chantants: "Bi

should have had a G

at daylight, and after several hours' delay the mutessarif and his lieutenant came down to permit us to leave. There were cigarettes and salutes, the secretary scribbl

the tinned corned beef. And with hackmen yelling from the street and caique men shouting from the