nights before--busy and blazing now in the afternoon sun, with gangs of
stevedores shuffling to and from the ships at the brand-new wharfs,
Turkish officers galloping about on their thick-necked, bobtailed, fiery
little stallions, and the dusty flat, half a mile across, perhaps,
between its encircling hills, crowded with ox and horse carts, camel
trains, and piles of ammunition-boxes and sacks of food.

The admiral and his aid were greeted by a smart young German officer
with a monocle, and galloped off into the hills, while we fell into the
hospitable hands of another German, a civilian volunteer in red fez and
the blue and brass buttons of the merchant marine, cast here by the
chance of war. He was a Hamburg-American captain, lately sailing
between Buenos Aires and Hamburg, and before that on an Atlas Line boat
between the Caribbean and New York. He talked English and seemed more
than half American, indeed, and when he spoke of the old Chelsea Hotel,
just across the street from the Y. M. C. A. gymnasium in which I had
played hand-ball, we were almost back in Twenty-third Street. He took
us up to his tent on the hill, overlooking the men and stores, and, he
explained, reasonably safe from the aeroplanes which flew over several
times a day. Over his cigarettes and tea and bottled beer we talked of
war and the world.

It was the captain's delicate and arduous duty to impose his tight
German habits of work and ship-shapeness on camel drivers, stevedores,
and officials used to the looser, more leisurely methods of the East.

He could not speak Turkish, was helpless without his interpreter, at
best a civilian among soldiers--men have got Iron Crosses for easier
jobs than that! He talked of the news--great news for his side--of the
Triumph, and, opening his navy list, made a pencil mark.