Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them by Arthur Ruhl
page 175 of 258 (67%)
page 175 of 258 (67%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
|
sunup we were loaded into a machine with a horse, several goats, three or
four passengers, and four barefooted boatmen, who pushed us over the strait to Chanak Kale. We were now at the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, behind us, on the European side, the old round tower of Kilid Bahr and Medjidie Fort, in front Fort Hamidie, and on the horizon to the south, where the strait opened into the sea, the tiny silhouettes of several of the Allies' ships. Chanak was smashed like the towns in west Belgium, and, but for the garrison and the Turkish and German commandants tucked away in the trees, all but deserted, except by flies and half-starved cats. These unhappy creatures, left behind in the flight, were everywhere, and in front of the bake shop they crowded in literal scores--gaunt, mangy, clawed and battered from constant fights. It was hot, there was little to eat, and after hours of wrangling it appeared that our precious scratches of Turkish took us to the Gallipoli instead of the Asiatic side. The two were under different jurisdictions; though the fault was not ours, the local commandant had the right to ship us back to Constantinople, and after a sort of delirium of flies, cats, gendarmes, muggy heat, and debates, night descended to find us going to sleep in the middle of a vegetable farm, in a house lately inhabited by whirling dervishes, with two lynx-eyed police-men in gray lamb's-wool caps seated at the gate. By them we were marched next day to the wharf and suddenly there translated into the upper ether by the German admiral and his thoughtful aid, who, on their way to the headquarters of the land forces across the strait, whirled us over in style in a torpedo-boat. We landed at the same place at which we had touched in the dark two |
|


