Part 15 (1/2)
I awoke shortly after daylight, thinking I heard an aeroplane strumming in the distance, and was drowsily wondering whether or not it was fancy, when a crash echoed up the valley. We both hurried out. It was sunup, a delicious morning, and far up against the southern sky the little speck was sailing back toward the west. There was a flash of silver just under the flier--it was an English biplane--and a moment later another crash farther away. Neither did any damage. A few minutes later we were looking at the remains of the bomb and propeller-like wings, whose whirling, as it falls, opens a valve that permits it to explode on striking its mark. Until it had fallen a certain number of metres, we were told, mere striking the ground would not explode it--a device to protect the airman in case of accident to his machine or if he is forced to make a quick landing. In the fresh, still morning, with the camp just waking up and the curious Turkish currycombs clinking away over by the tethered horses, our aerial visitor added only a pleasant excitement to this life in the open, and we went on with our dressing with great satisfaction, little dreaming how soon we were to look at one of those little flying specks quite differently.
We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread and ripe olives and tea, and walked with him round the camp, through a hospital and into an old farmhouse yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, while the bees left behind in some clumsy old box hives buzzed away as of yore. Wiser than men, the colonel observed. There were English Enfields and French rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which the Turks had fitted a new wooden base. There were rifles with smashed barrels, with stocks bored through by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on through the men who held them--live men like ourselves; quick choking instants of terror the ghosts of ---- which we were poking and peering into there in the warm suns.h.i.+ne!
We said good-by to the colonel, for our pa.s.ses took us but to the valley, and he had stretched a point in sending us down the plateau the evening before, and I b.u.mped back to Kilid Bahr. We did not want to leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, and as we had duly presented ourselves in Gallipoli, and were now by way of coming from it rather than Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the orderly took us wrote, without question, a permission to cross to Chanak Kale, we sailed with no misgivings. Alas for Troy and looking down on a modern battle from the heights of Ilium! A truculent major of gendarmes hurried us from the Asiatic sh.o.r.e as if we had come to capture it. We might not land, we might not write a note to the commandant to see if the permission to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to Constantinople the day before, had arrived; we might not telephone--we must go back to Europe, and write or telephone from there.
So back to Europe, and after consultation and telephoning, back to Asia again, and this time we succeeded in effecting a landing and an audience with the commander of the defenses of the Dardanelles, Djevad Pasha. He was sitting under a tree in a garden looking out over the sea gate, which, with the aid of his two German colleagues, Ousedom Pasha and Merten Pasha, it was his task to keep shut--a trim Young Turk, more polished and ”European” than the major of gendarmes, but no less firm.
An American's wish to see the Troy he might never be so near again bored him excessively. We could not stay--we might not even spend the night.
There was a boat that evening, and on it we must go.
Gendarmes guarded us while we waited--we who the night before had slept in a scarlet-lined tent!--and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and three patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignominiously through Chanak Kale's ruined streets. The boat we went by was the same little side-wheeler we had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches across the water, with no place to lie but the bare deck. The stifling hold was packed with them; they curled up about the engine-room gratings--for it was cold that night--yet there was no complaint. A tired sigh now and then, a moan of weariness, and the soldier wrapped his army overcoat a little closer about him, curled up like a dog on a door-mat, and left the rest to fate. A big, round, yellow moon climbed up out of Asia and poured its silver down on them and on the black hills and water, still as some inland lake.
The side-wheeler tied up at Ak-Bash for the night, and it was not until the middle of the next morning that it was decided that she should cross and leave her wounded at Lapsaki instead of going on up to Constantinople. We lugged our baggage off and hunted up our old friend, the Hamburg-American captain, to see what might be done till some other craft appeared. He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which might be going up that afternoon or evening.
It was about midday. The sun blazing down on the crowded fiat; on boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up in all the variegated rags of the East shuffling in and out of the s.h.i.+ps; on gangs digging, piling lumber, boiling water, cooking soup; on officers in brown uniforms and brown lamb's-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, and a vast herd of sheep, which had just poured out of a transport and spread over the plain, when from the hill came two shots of warning. An enemy aeroplane was coming!
The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the water. They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water--all, as they ran, looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.
A hidden battery roared and--pop!--a little puff of cotton floated in the sky under the approaching flier. Another and another--all the nervous little batteries in the hills round about were coming to our rescue. The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without flinching. We had looked up at aeroplanes many times before and watched the pretty chase of the shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning to keep the thing in view. ”Look,” I said to Suydam; ”she's coming right over us!” And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat in front of us. Through the smoke I saw a horse with its pack undone and flopping under its belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored. Men were running, and, in a tangle of wagons, half a dozen oxen, on the ground, were giving a few spasmodic kicks.
Men streaked up from the engine-room and across the wharf--after all, the wharf would be the thing he'd try for--and I found myself out on the flat with them just as there came another crash, but this time over by the Barbarossa across the bay. Black smoke was pouring from the Turkish cruiser as she got under way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing hopelessly after, the flier swung to the southward and out of right.
Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the throats of the oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead. It appeared that two fliers had come from opposite directions and most of the crowd had seen but the one, while the other dropped the bomb. It had struck just outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very likely at the stores piled there. It had made a hole only five or six feet wide and two or three feet deep, but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out from it, as the captain had said. Holes you could put your fist in were torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying stones and chunks of metal, and the tires of some of the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been cut through like wax.
The ground was cleared, the men returned to work, and we even went in swimming, but at every unexpected noise one looked upward, and when about five o'clock the crowd scattered again, I will confess that I watched that little speck buzzing nearer, on a line that would bring him straight overhead, with an interest considerably less casual than any I had bestowed on these birds before. There we were, confined in our little amphitheatre; there was that diabolical bird peering down at us, and in another minute, somewhere in that s.p.a.ce, would come that earth-shaking explosion--a mingling of crash and vohou'! There was no escaping it, no dodging it, nothing to get under but empty air.
I had decided that the beach, about a hundred yards away from the wharfs, was the safest place and hurried there; but the speck overhead, as if antic.i.p.ating me, seemed to be aiming for the precise spot. It is difficult under such circ.u.mstances to sit tight, reasoning calmly that, after all, the chances of the bomb's not landing exactly there are a good many to one--you demand at least the ostrich-like satisfaction of having something overhead. So I scurried over to the left to get out from under what seemed his line of flight, when what should he do but begin to turn!
This was really rubbing it in a bit. To fly across as he had that morning was one thing, but to pen one up in a nice little pocket in the hills, and then on a vertical radius of three or four thousand feet, to circle round over one's head--anything yet devised by the human nightmare was crude and immature to this. But was it overhead? If behind, and travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would carry forward--just enough probably to bring it over; and if apparently over, still the bomb would have been several seconds in falling--it might be right on top of us now! Should we run backward or forward: Here was a place, in between some grain-bags. But the grain-bags were open toward the wharf, and the wharf was what he was aiming at, and a plank blown through you--No, the trench was the thing, but--Quick, he is overhead!
The beach, the bags, the ditch, all the way round the camp, and Suydam galloping after. Somewhere in the middle of it a hideous whiffling wail came down the sky: Trrou... trrou... trou!--and then a cras.h.!.+ The bomb had hit the water just off the end of the pier. I kept on running.
There was another Trrou... trrou! another geyser of water, and the bird had flown on.
I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that strange afternoon ended, when one of a gang of ditch-diggers, swathed in bright-colored rags, addressed me in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora, who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get, him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on board s.h.i.+p. There were crowds like him--Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not wanted as soldiers but impressed for this sort of work. They were unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our boat at last got under way. We paused till sunup at Lapsaki, crept close to sh.o.r.e through the Marmora, and once through floating wreckage--boards and a galvanized-iron gasolene tank--apparently from some transport sunk by a submarine, and after dark, with lights out as we had started, round the corner of Stamboul.
Chapter XIII
A War Correspondents' Village
The press department of the Foreign Office in Vienna duly presented the application to the press bureau of the Ministry of War; the latter conveyed it to the ”Kaiserliche und Konigliche Armee-Oberkommando Kriegs-Presse-Quartier,” a day's railroad journey nearer the front; the commandant made his recommendation to the chief of the General Staff.
The permission itself percolated back to Vienna presently, and early next morning I took the Teschen express.
It was one of those semi-military trains which run into this region behind the front--officers and couriers, civilians with military pa.s.ses, just before we started a young officer and his orderly saying good-by to their wives. He was one of those amiable, blue-eyed young Austrians who seem a sort of cross between German and French, and the orderly was much such another man, only less neatly made and sensitive, and there were the same differences in their wives and their good-bys.
The orderly saluted his officer, turned, clicked his heels, and saluted his officer's lady before he embraced his solid wife. The latter, rather proud to be in such company, beamed like a stove as the two men looked down from the car steps, but the girlish wife of the captain bit her lips, looked nervously from side to side, winked faster and faster until the tears began to roll down her cheeks. Then the train started, the orderly waving his hand, but the young officer, leaning quickly forward, drew his wife toward him and kissed her on one of the wet eyelids.
We crossed into Hungary, rolled northeastward for five or six hours into the Vag valley, with its green hills and vineyards and ruined castles, and finally came to a little place consisting almost entirely of consonants, in the Tatra foot-hills. Two blond soldiers in blue-gray saluted, took my luggage, showed me to a carriage, and drove to a village about a mile away--a little white village with a factory chimney for the new days, a dingy chateau for the old, and a brook running diagonally across the square, with geese quacking in it and women pounding clothes.