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Title: Gallipoli memories
Author: Compton MacKenzie
Release date: October 30, 2026 [eBook #79882]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1929
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GALLIPOLI MEMORIES ***
GALLIPOLI MEMORIES
BY COMPTON MACKENZIE
GALLIPOLI MEMORIES
THE THREE COURIERS
EXTREMES MEET
VESTAL FIRE
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
FAIRY GOLD
CORAL
SANTA CLAUS IN SUMMER
THE HEAVENLY LADDER
THE OLD MEN OF THE SEA
THE ALTAR STEPS
PARSON’S PROGRESS
RICH RELATIVES
THE SEVEN AGES OF WOMEN
SYLVIA SCARLETT
POOR RELATIONS
SYLVIA AND MICHAEL
THE VANITY GIRL
CARNIVAL
THE PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT
YOUTH’S ENCOUNTER
SINISTER STREET
PLASHERS MEAD
GALLIPOLI MEMORIES
BY COMPTON MACKENZIE
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY 1930 NEW YORK
[Illustration: colophon]
COPYRIGHT, 1929, 1930,
BY COMPTON MACKENZIE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
FIRST EDITION
TO
ORLO WILLIAMS
WHO IN MARCH, 1915, BEGAN THIS BOOK
PREFACE
The _title of this book strictly expresses what it is. I kept no
journal, and the few letters I wrote while I was at Gallipoli, though
useful for fixing dates, were too much taken up with the domestic
problems at home of money, clothes, books, gardens, and domicile,
together with requests for what were called comforts for the troops to
spend much time over life on the peninsula. On the whole I do not regret
my failure to keep a journal, for by not doing so I have been compelled
to retain impressions, conversations, voyages, and actions in my head,
which means that they are as fresh now as fourteen years ago. Moreover,
continuous pondering over them during that period has enabled me, I
hope, to achieve a measure of selection. At the same time, this is so
entirely a personal record that it inevitably possesses many of the
faults of a diary, and I fear that nowhere does my narrative succeed in
transcending the particular or escaping from egoism. It remains a
peculiar, not a general, experience and as such I beg that it may be
read._
_This first volume adds nothing of the least historical value to the
literature of the war, though in succeeding volumes I hope to shed some
light on the situation in Greece during 1916 and 1917, which obscure
enough in any case, has been still further obscured by a mass of
partisan writing on both sides._
_I should have liked to squeeze my memories of Athens into one volume,
but I fear that will be impossible if I preserve, as I am anxious to
preserve, the human aspect of an extraordinary state of politics. So_
Gallipoli Memories _will be followed by_ Earlier Athenian Memories,
_covering the period from the end of August, 1915, to the resignation of
the Skouloudis Cabinet at the end of June, 1916. The third volume_,
Later Athenian Memories, _will close with the tragic farce of December,
1916. The final volume_, Ægean Memories, _will be chiefly concerned with
life and adventure in the Greek Islands during 1917, but it will also
include a certain amount of political history_.
_Ever since the war I have been meditating over a war novel. Indeed, I
have long had an immense affair in seven volumes mapped out; but have
finally come to the conclusion that my experiences in Athens and the
Cyclades will make a better novel if related as fact. I cannot invent a
better story than what actually happened. I cannot imagine more richly
tragical, comical, and farcical characters than I actually met. Even the
time I spent at Gallipoli seems to compose itself into a tale. The
conversations I record may not achieve the accuracy of the dictaphone;
but that is only because I have selected what was necessary to convey
the spirit of them. Were I to have printed in italics the actual words
used, most of them would have appeared in that type. Here and there I
have used invented names instead of real ones, for reasons which will be
obvious; but such discretion is rare. I may add that I have resisted the
temptation to refresh my own memory by drawing upon that of others. For
any minor inaccuracies which might have been avoided by less
independence, I apologize; but personal responsibility was essential to
the form of narrative I have chosen, and I wish to make it clear that I
fully accept that responsibility._
_My object has been to recapture the spirit in which I passed through a
memorable experience. This must be my excuse for not displaying as much
moral indignation as the mood of the moment expects from a writer about
the war._
ISLE OF JETHOU,
_August 31st, 1929_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Beginning of the War 1
II Off to Alexandria 7
III Getting a Uniform 18
IV Looking for G. H. Q. 29
V The Arcadian 44
VI Helles 63
VII Life at G. H. Q. 82
VIII The Battle of the Fourth of June 108
IX More Life at G. H. Q. 124
X Army Corps Headquarters 146
XI Tenedos for the Second Time 172
XII Shells 192
XIII Tenedos for the Third Time 206
XIV Off to Mytilene 232
XV Days and Nights in Lesbos 251
XVI The Vassilaki Family 288
XVII The New Army 317
XVIII Back at G. H. Q. 337
XIX The Dark Night of the Suvla Landing 354
XX After Suvla 363
XXI Hellas 377
GALLIPOLI MEMORIES
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR
Toward the end of July, 1914, my wife and I were hurrying back from
Capri, partly because the European situation looked unpropitious for the
task of finishing the second part of _Sinister Street_, which Martin
Secker wanted to bring out in the autumn, but chiefly because I hoped
that the Serbian crisis would be solved and that as soon as my book was
written I should be able to volunteer for service against Ulster.
Secker had asked us to stay with him at Iver, and we were there when the
midnight ultimatum expired amid the silence of that August countryside
through which the dusty road wound glimmering. Secker’s sedate house,
built in the reign of Queen Anne, wore an air of having lived through
too many famous events to be any longer capable of responding to the
excitement of its inmates. I leaned out of a bedroom window, my thoughts
losing themselves like moths in the darkness when I tried to catch them
and pin them down to the problem of the part I should play in this
convulsion. And then abruptly the hush of that warm leafy night was
disturbed by the remote rumbling of trains, one after another of them
rolling and rumbling southward; guns themselves would not have muttered
a heavier menace of change. I fell asleep to that endless sound of
trains, and in the morning I went up to London to see what could be done
about getting myself into the thick of events. I interviewed a soldier
friend at the War Office who was frankly contemptuous of my plan to join
a territorial battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders.
“You’d be no earthly good to us,” he assured me.
“I was an officer in the First Hertfords when I was seventeen. It’s not
as if I had never had any military experience.”
“Go back to your work. You’ll be doing more good by keeping us cheerful
with your novels. We really do not want married subalterns of
thirty-one.”
So back I went to Iver, crestfallen; and there I sat up all night and
every night for two months writing the last three hundred pages of
_Sinister Street_. I used to have my breakfast when the rest of the
household was having tea, and about six o’clock Secker used to get home
from John Street with the evening papers and all the garnered rumours of
the day. No wonder the left-hand pages of the manuscript are scrabbled
over with names like Louvain and Ypres and Valenciennes. They must have
been written down almost automatically while my conscious mind on the
right-hand page struggled with those reputedly mellifluous sentences,
which were at any rate as sticky as honey to clarify. The book was being
printed as I wrote it so that it might be ready for publication within a
month of penning the last word.
In October I decided to try again for a commission, but this time
doctors were the discouragement. I shall never pass a medical
examination I was assured, and the only climate where I was likely to be
of any use would be somewhere like Egypt. An admiring and hopeful friend
told me that Sir John Maxwell would welcome my services on his staff,
and one afternoon at the Savile another friend offered to introduce me
to Mr. H. J. Tennant, who was having tea in the club. A personal
interview with the Under Secretary of State for War seemed in my mood at
this date the kind of magical good fortune that happened to poor
fishermen in _The Arabian Nights_. Alas, the under secretary was not so
powerful as I had supposed he must be. All he could do for me was to
tell me that the Forty-second Division consisting of Lancashire
Territorial battalions was in Egypt, and that if I wanted to reach Egypt
the only way it could be managed was by applying for a commission in one
of those battalions through the lord lieutenant or some such
Lancastrian dignitary. As a child I had supported the Red Rose against
the White; but my personal interest in Lancashire did not extend beyond
that. Besides, what doctor in England was going to pass me fit for
general service abroad? The interview with the Under Secretary of State
for War came to an end. I see him now in our faded old smoking room at
107 Piccadilly. We were not as a club famous for dandyism, and whether
it was the comfortable shabbiness of the room or the equally comfortable
bagginess of the members’ trousers I do not know, but certainly as I try
to recapture the details of that interview I seem to fancy the
impression of a slightly excessive elegance in Mr. H. J. Tennant, a
certain statesmanlike unreality about his high glossy collar. Perhaps I
thought that an under secretary of state for war had no business to
resemble so closely a _Vanity Fair_ cartoon of the ’nineties unless he
could do something more useful and _affairé_ than tell me what I knew
already, unless he could, in fact, obtain for me a job on the staff of
Sir John Maxwell. We were most of us in a condition of elated credulity
at that early stage of the war, and this was my first disillusionment.
When I was a small boy I was once bidden to observe the Empress of
Austria walking up from the beach at Cromer. The usual exhortation of my
nurse was not to stare at people, so I naturally expected a vision of
the utmost magnificence. I saw instead a woman in a gray alpaca dust
cloak who was carrying a straw-coloured parasol to shield herself from
curious eyes. The Empress of Austria! In that wan, withering moment
empresses, whether of Austria, of Byzantium or Rome, went the way of
fauns and fairies. Now twenty-five years later an under secretary of
state for war took the same prosaic road.
I have often thought how lucky it was that no influential star did draw
me toward Sir John Maxwell, for a job on his staff in Egypt might have
led to a job on his staff in Ireland, which would probably have ended in
my getting shot myself. I do not know how far Maxwell himself was
responsible for the shooting of those young Irish patriots; but I thank
God I was never on his staff, for I should either have deserted or lost
my reason.
I waited in London for a while, trying to find some way of getting to
the war without a medical examination. None presented itself, and at the
end of October, while the desperate battle of Ypres was at its height,
my wife and I went back to Italy. If I was meant to take any active part
in the war fate would arrange matters. It did not seem profitable to
postpone any longer the writing of my next book. On the boat crossing
the Channel I saw my friend of the War Office in khaki and told him I
was going back to Capri to write.
“The best thing you could do. We don’t want all these amateurs.”
“Still, I thought that as I had already held a commission in the old
Volunteers I might have got some kind of obscure staff job in Egypt.”
“Staff job? Ha-ha! How very comic! My dear man, the last people we want
on the staff are charming amateurs like yourself. And, anyway, this
business of diverting to Egypt troops we require in France will have to
stop. The only place where anybody is any use at all just now is over
there.” He pointed to the misty outline of the French coast beyond that
ashen autumnal sea.
A few minutes after this I heard myself accosted by my Christian name,
and looking up from the deck chair in which I was concentrating upon not
being seasick I recognized in an Army Service Corps major a friend of
boyhood. The turbid waters of the Channel vanished. I was in Hampshire
again, playing hide-and-seek in a house whose dry aroma of age came
stealing back through memory, more potent than the salty damp of our
actual surroundings. I was once more in that high-walled garden full of
gnarled apple trees and the flutter of blackbirds’ wings. I was once
more beating the hazel hedges for nuts along that dusky, dewy Hampshire
lane, honeysuckle scented. A lanky youth my friend had been, as lanky
as one of the hollyhocks in that old garden and with cheeks as red and
round. Now he was a tall major in the Army Service Corps, and the
steamer was entering the harbour of Boulogne. I felt wretchedly
superfluous among that crowd of mixed uniforms on the quay. Even the
funny little fellow with a face like a provincial comedian in a uniform
between the Salvation Army and the Church Lads’ Brigade, who was going
to hand out tracts and toffee somewhere or other behind the lines, was
living life as it ought to be lived, not as I proposed to live it
presently in southern Italy writing one more unnecessary novel. I waved
my War Office friend good-bye in the blusterous chill of late October
and enviously watched him like a senior schoolboy greeting other
important seniors at the beginning of a new term. No, he was not killed
a few weeks later. On the contrary, he passed through half the letters
of the alphabet to become a K.B.E. and a general.
It seemed wrong to be enjoying the wonderful November weather we found
in Capri when things were so desperate in France and Flanders, and I was
thankful when I was asked to write an article on behalf of the
Commission for Relief in Belgium. I have no copy of what I wrote, but I
remember that at least it managed to avoid any self-righteousness over
the responsibility for the war. One is so apt nowadays to regard even
one’s own motives and actions during the war with a contemptuous
cynicism that it is as well to remind one’s self of emotions which were
profoundly and sincerely felt. I only print the two letters below to
illustrate the generosity of men who, engaged upon as noble a task as
men ever undertook, found time to make an author feel that he had been
of some use.
3, London Wall Buildings, London.
January 7th, 1915.
DEAR SIR:
I have had the great pleasure to-day of reading the article which
you have prepared for us on the subject of Belgium.
The ordinary commercial person may feel all that you have set
forth, but the gift of expressing it comes to but few. You have
described the work of this Commission in a manner which reaches our
absolute ideal and I wish to convey to you our individual thanks
for your interest and work. I am certain it will be the most
fruitful of the statements which we have yet been able to put
before the American people.
Yours faithfully,
H. C. HOOVER.[1]
3, London Wall Buildings, London.
January 5th, 1915.
DEAR SIR:
On behalf of the Belgian Minister and the Commission please allow
me to express our sincere gratitude for the magnificent article
which you were kind enough to write. It could not have been better.
Yours gratefully,
W. A. M. GOODE.[2]
CHAPTER II
OFF TO ALEXANDRIA
On the fourth of April, when I was within sight of the end of _Guy and
Pauline_, a letter from my old friend Orlo Williams reached me at Capri:
On board the Cunard R. M. S. _Franconia_.
March 23rd, 1915.
I don’t know when this will get to you, but I am writing you by
order of Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force. I’m cipher officer on his Staff with the rank
of Captain, having left London at twenty-eight hours’ notice. Well,
I noticed a day or two ago that he had brought Vol. II of _Sinister
Street_ to read. So when I was in conversation with him I told him
I knew you, etc., and that you had tried for a commission in Egypt.
So he said at once, “Write to him and tell him to get into
communication with Eddie Marsh[3] and get sent out to me as a
Marine or anything, and I will find him a job of some kind,
sub-cipher officer or something like that.” He says that if I write
to you, he will write to Marsh. So there you are. He told me to
write to you again to-day, so I am doing it. Our mail went the day
before yesterday and when the next will go I can’t say. But if you
take the opportunity and feel up to it do come. The General Staff
are a charming set of people, and the possibilities of this show
are romantic to a degree.
In a copy of the _Concise Oxford Dictionary_, which has never been a
full arm’s length away from my desk since I bought it in 1911 there is a
torn half sheet of notepaper. On one side is written:
MARSH,
Admiralty, London.
Am applying for commission Mediterranean Expedition. Think Sir Ian
Hamilton has written you. He promises a Staff job if I’m sent out
as Marine or anything. Letter follows.
COMPTON MACKENZIE.
_Capri._
On the other side is written:
Guy and Worrall about poems.
Guy and Richard about Margaret.
The Birthday: the poems.
Working at journalism.
May love; May dawns.
Arrival of Michael.
Night Meetings.
June Pauline at tea with Richard.
Jealousy.
Guy to go up to town.
July ?
This shows that when the stirring letter arrived from Egypt with the
Alexandria postmark I had reached page 270 of my book. I have never
worked with such concentration in my life as I worked at the last
hundred and twenty-five pages of _Guy and Pauline_. The telegram, of
which the draft was scrawled on the back of some notes for the
construction of the last third of the book, would warn Eddie Marsh, and
I might hope to hear of my commission in not less than a fortnight. I
had not counted on the vigilance of Italian neutrality. On the very next
day I was informed by the Naples post office that my telegram addressed
“Marsh, Admiralty, London,” had been stopped by the political
censorship.
However, on the fourteenth of April this telegram arrived:
Lieutenant Marines await instructions for Hamilton
MARSH.
And some days afterward this welcome reply to an excited letter of mine
reached Capri:
Admiralty, Whitehall.
April 14th, ’15.
I hope you will have got my telegram. Your letter came to-day, and
I got you made a Lt. R. M. in record time! Sir Ian had written to
me about you. I thought the only possible plan was to telegraph to
him to send you instructions, and to you to await them, as I didn’t
know where to tell you to report yourself. As for uniform, God
knows where you will get one, but I suppose you can scratch up
something that will do when you get there.
I hope you will have started before this arrives, so I won’t write
a long letter, but I must say how much I enjoyed your 2nd volume.
Yours,
E. MARSH.
What between trying to finish the book and grow a military moustache,
suffering agonies from neuritis and imagining all the various obstacles
that might prevent my helping to force the Dardanelles (our intention to
do which was by now a topic of the Italian papers), I wonder I did not
go permanently off my head. I was actually delirious with pain for the
whole of a night and a day and, being under the impression that the
Turks had landed and attacked some property of mine in Capri, I was with
some difficulty restrained by my wife and an old friend from sallying
forth in my pajamas to deal with them.
I was duly gazetted on April 23d; but no orders came. Perhaps it was
just as well, for I was finishing _Guy and Pauline_ in bed and if I had
set out then, as I certainly should, I might never have got nearer to
Gallipoli than Naples. To add to my agony of mind and body came the news
of the landing. I can see the headlines in the _Mattino_ now. _GALLIPOLI
SAREBBE GIA OCCUPATO?_ “Good heavens!” I groaned, “we shall be in
Constantinople before I get my orders.”
In answer to a despairing telegram from me Eddie Marsh replied:
Advise waiting have wired Hamilton.
I learned afterward that Sir Ian Hamilton had made every effort to get
me sent out in time to sail with him to Mudros. Alas, my unimportant
self was as hard to extract out of the authorities as those precious
munitions of which he was in such urgent need.
The problem of a uniform and equipment which had seemed to Eddie Marsh
insoluble except by God was solved by what to my then overheated fancy
did appear to be a divine intervention. There came to Capri an English
officer who had been invalided out of a battalion of Kitchener’s army.
He had brought with him a Wolseley valise with Jaeger sleeping blanket
and waterproof sheet, a Webley pistol and fifty cartridges, six khaki
shirts, a pair of puttees, and a pair of Bedford cord breeches. He was
hoping to get back into the army after a winter in the South, but he
sympathetically sold me what was left of his kit, and my adventure
seemed a little nearer attainment in spite of the breeches’ losing their
exquisite cut by being just too big for me and so making it impossible
to give the puttees a soldierly trimness. I finished _Guy and Pauline_
on the last day of April; but owing to my infernal sciatica we could not
have a dinner party to celebrate the event until the fourth of May. It
is difficult in the light of later knowledge not to invest such an
occasion with an undue significance, not to fancy that the mind misgave
some consequence, yet, hanging in the stars, really did bitterly begin
his fearful date with that night’s revels. But I could not honestly
claim that when the guests bade me good-bye that night I had the least
premonition they were saying good-bye to somebody whom they would never
see again. Looking back at that party from the present, I can recognize
that it marked the end of a period in my life, but at the time it
seemed to be just the end of another jolly evening. By now our friends
in Capri had begun to think that my commission in the Marines was a
fiction, my departure to the Dardanelles a dream; and I was nearly
beginning to think so myself. But the next morning the longed-for
telegram arrived. I was to proceed immediately to Alexandria and there
report to the base commandant for orders. Turning over some old papers
the other day, I came across a sheet of notepaper on which was written:
May 5. ’15.
MY DEAR MARTIN:
My orders have come.
Nothing else. I suppose I was unable to write Secker my news on account
of the urgency of packing at once when the telephone message came from
Naples that a steamer was leaving for Alexandria the following
afternoon. That meant I should have to be away from the house by four
o’clock next morning to catch the boat to Naples.
Casa Solitaria, where we had lived since our return to Capri the
previous autumn, is a white house built among fantastic limestone crags
halfway up an almost sheer cliff eight hundred feet above the sea. It
will seem a magical abode to the passer-by even upon a day of drenching
_scirocco_; how magical it seemed to me upon the azurous May dawn I
could never hope to tell. Drifts of snow-white cistus in the hollows of
that stupendous cliff; wreaths of snow-white cloud round Monte
Sant’Angelo on the mainland opposite, snow white at first but gradually
assuming the carnation of living flesh; towering wraiths of the remote
Apennine miles away across the Salernian gulf; the spurge, on the slopes
above that narrow path cut along the side of the precipice, already
dying in dolphin hues at the first hint of the summer sun; no sign of
humanity except that white house and those empty, columned terraces
against the pale blue sea of the morning, and framed in one of those
windows my wife waving to me as I limped round the corner and reached
the comparative sophistication of the Via Tragara ... but this is all as
incommunicable as sleep.
On the piazza, though it was not yet five o’clock, there was a good deal
of kissing of my hand and cheeks by Caprese friends of every age and
station, some of whom had walked all the way from Anacapri to bid me
“_Buon viaggio e presto ritorno!_” Being mercifully free from the least
embarrassment under such demonstrations of Southern kindliness, I was
able to disappear into the funicular with the bouquets I had been given
by those dear people as coolly as a prima donna into the wings. My
friend Domenico Ruggiero, or Mimi as he is generally called, came with
me to Naples. He was, and he still is, the chief gardener of Capri. I
wish everyone could have a companion like Mimi for such occasions.
Intelligence beamed from his eyes; sympathy flowed from the tips of his
expressive fingers. With the manners of a diplomat, the appearance of a
genial brigand in an opera, and the gestures of an orator, he could
manage malmaisons as less gifted gardeners might be able to manage
dandelions. He was a raconteur of the first order: he was as good a
judge of character as he was of plants: he could cook a plate of
_maccheroni_ with anybody: he was--but one day I shall write a whole
book about him.
We found when we reached Naples that the steamer for Alexandria was to
leave at five o’clock the following afternoon, which allowed me plenty
of time for limping round the shops to buy the various things I fancied
might be useful adjuncts to the siege of Constantinople. I have a note
that the fare to Alexandria was two hundred and sixty-six liras and
sixty centesimi, or about ten guineas, and I have another note that when
I sailed from Naples there were only six hundred and thirty-seven liras
left in the bank. It was as well I had finished _Guy and Pauline_. Among
other tasks I had to perform during those two sweltering days was
getting photographed for my passport. The result was ghastly, and the
self-conscious alarm I began to feel at the prospect of appearing before
General Headquarters of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force became
painful. The Capri barber’s attempt to cut my hair to a shortness that
might propitiate the natural prejudice of the military against novelists
had merely produced a capital imitation of a German tourist on his Capri
honeymoon, and the moustache, which had been grown as a kind of earnest
of that uniform whose whereabouts according to Eddie Marsh only God
knew, was obviously the moustache of one who had never had any previous
experience of moustaches.
“Do I really look like this?” I asked Sidney Churchill, our consul
general, who looked like an ancient Assyrian himself. And he who was not
prone to respect appearances, even he shook his head doubtfully. Poor
Sidney Churchill! The Anglo-Neapolitan bourgeoisie succeeded in
persuading the Foreign Office to transfer him to Lisbon a year or two
later, and after losing his eyesight he died of a broken heart. I wish
the English old maids whose gossip ruined his end such an ignominious
poverty as will match their own mean imaginations. Churchill was a man
who did not suffer fools with the gladness that is expected of a British
consul, and he despised too obviously the disloyalty and envy of some of
his subordinates. It was Norman Douglas who introduced me to him as he
has introduced me to many of the good things of this world, and
Churchill was like a savoury dish such as you only get in countries
where the sun is really hot.
The _Roma_ was sailing on a Friday, but Mimi discovered some
compensation for the bad omen in the fact that it was the Feast of Our
Lady of Pompeii. So he secured two of her medals, hung them on fine
silver chains, gave me one for an amulet, and took the other home to my
wife. He also brought on board a large bunch of deep crimson carnations
which he divided into half. “_Per voi e per la signora_,” he told me. He
had to leave Naples at half-past three in the hope of reaching Casa
Solitaria in time to see the steamer go through the _bocca_--the three
miles of sea, that is, which divides Capri from the mainland of the
Sorrentine peninsula. In case Mimi should not arrive in time I sent a
telegram to say that the _Roma_ would pass about half-past six o’clock
and that she would be recognized by her black, blue, and white funnel.
However, Mimi had been watching up on the terrace of Casa Solitaria for
a long time before the _Roma_ did actually pass. Indeed, it was already
dusk when after crossing the Bay of Naples in a scarlet sunset we sailed
between the Cape of Campanella and the thousand-foot cliffs of Capri;
but though it was already too dark to distinguish the figures that were
waving from the terrace I could see the flag. No doubt that the old flag
was committing a breach of etiquette by flying after sundown, but I was
glad to see the lion rampant on his field of gold glimmering against the
empty eggshell whiteness of the house.
I went forward and waved my hat to the moth-dim figures on the terrace;
but the light was dying as swiftly as the _Roma_ was gliding past, and
Casa Solitaria faded like a ghost upon the battlements of Elsinore. The
lamps in the clustered houses on the south side came into view, with the
island soaring in jagged pinnacle on pinnacle against the last embers of
the sunset. Nobody who has not approached Capri from the south can have
the least idea of the island’s architectural magnificence. The view of
it from the Bay of Naples is comparatively tame. I sat on a coil of rope
in the bows and watched that great Gothic shape turn to a dark cloud
along the horizon. The _faro_ on the point of Campanella shone out
across the calm sea. I was remembering the sunny March day when we had
first explored that promontory and the wild sweet peas we gathered there
and the little votive heads of Minerva in _terra cotta_ which may still
be found among the rubbish of centuries. I was wondering how the great
Temple of Minerva had looked to sailors coming with the corn ships from
Alexandria to feed Rome and how I would look on the way to
Constantinople unless I was delayed long enough in Alexandria to be able
to get hold of some kind of uniform. And then a twinge in the sciatic
nerve reminded me that the last place I ought to be sitting, if I wanted
to be cured of my limp before I landed, was on a coil of rope in the
bows of a steamer an hour after sunset. So I went below and studied my
fellow passengers in the saloon. There were very few of them in the
first class and not many more in the second. The only British subject
was an Austrian Jew from Alexandria who was bringing back a French wife
he had just married. The woman was all lipstick and white kid boots,
with eyelashes like baskets. The man related, in the same tone of
malicious glee as the petty gentry in a provincial town will give you a
scandal about some county family which has ignored them, how the Turks
had actually crossed the canal once and had only been driven back with a
good deal more difficulty than people outside Egypt had been allowed to
know. Personally he did not think Alex was at all a healthy place just
now, and as soon as he had seen through some business he had on hand he
intended to take his wife back to France.
“And what about the Dardanelles?” I asked a little contemptuously. “I
fancy you’ll be able to sleep soundly enough in Alexandria.”
He turned on me a pair of lacklustre protruding eyes and tittered. “You
don’t think they’ll ever force the Dardanelles, do you?”
“My only fear is they’ll be through before I get there.”
He tittered again.
“Well, if that’s your only fear,” he sneered, “you can sleep soundly
anywhere in the world.”
I had no more conversation with him all the time we were on board except
to inquire the name of the best tailor in Alexandria, and in justice to
the objectionable fellow I am bound to admit that he did give me the
right answer.
Besides this young married couple there were two Italian merchants who
ate a great deal of _maccheroni_ and talked about money, a young
Spaniard from Barcelona, and a young Greek from Geneva. The Spaniard was
travelling for his firm, but what he was buying or selling or what his
name was I cannot remember. He was a personable young man of about
twenty-two with a slim waist set off by a matador’s trousers and very
small feet of which he was evidently proud, for he had encased them in
patent-leather shoes with white canvas uppers. He used to sit back in a
deck chair and make those two feet of his bob and curtsy to one another
by the hour, himself regarding them the while with unending interest.
The Greek, whose name I also forget, was a pleasant and intelligent
young man. He was in partnership with his father as a watchmaker and was
visiting relatives in Alexandria.
The Spaniard, the Greek, and myself played dominoes that first night,
while the Spaniard in husky French related his triumphs in the _casas de
putas_ of Barcelona. I woke next morning, being Saturday, the eighth of
May, to the sight of Stromboli rising from a dancing blue sea in the
round frame of the cabin port. Why that picture should be as clear
to-day as on that morning I saw it for a brief minute I do not know. But
so it is, and whenever I read Homer it springs to my inner vision and
sums up within the brass circumference of a port the whole of the
Odyssey. The cabin was full of cockroaches, but they seemed so
intelligent that I was able to watch their busy peregrinations without
disgust. They were curiously polite creatures, seldom passing one
another without an exchange of courtesies. I fed them with crumbs in the
farthest corner of the cabin to ward off any possible inclination on
their part to explore my bunk, and they seemed to appreciate such
consideration, for I was not disturbed by them. We only stayed at
Messina an hour and after leaving it in glorious blue weather ran into a
_scirocco_ which took all the colour out of the water and made such a
nasty swell that I regarded Etna with jaundiced eyes and thought how
wise it had been to choose Capri for a home instead of Taormina.
Catania, which we reached about five o’clock, was full of dust and wind
and men in black suits. I was glad to leave it. We did not call at
Syracuse, but I read Thucydides until I found the swell of the
_scirocco_ too much for my powers of construing. However, on Sunday the
_scirocco_ vanished, and we sailed eastward through sparkling weather.
The Spaniard, the Greek, and myself played deck quoits, at which the
Spaniard in spite of the tightness of his shoes excelled. Chess and
dominoes passed away the evening. The next day we came in sight of Crete
and steamed along some forty miles of savage and desolate coast. Later
on two turtledoves picked us up, blown out to sea from the island, and a
swallow clung twittering to the stays for a little while. During our
games on deck the Spaniard’s prowess had attracted the attention of a
decayed Neapolitan cocotte in the second class. The effect of her warm
glances and the photographs he had bought in Catania was too much for
him, and that night he set out to an assignation, from which we welcomed
him back with whatever snatches of _Don Giovanni_ the musical Greek
could play on a mandolin he had bought in Catania for eight francs.
In Sicily the rumour of the sinking of the _Lusitania_ had reached us,
and the two Italian merchants were convinced that this would mean the
entrance of their country into the war. The desire was so strong in me
for Italy to come in that I remember with what respect I listened to
their estimate of the political situation, and with what eagerness I was
willing to believe them to be the possessors of exceptional knowledge.
CHAPTER III
GETTING A UNIFORM
We dropped anchor in the harbour of Alexandria early on Wednesday
morning, the twelfth of May. Just before the examination of passports
took place on board the Spaniard asked me if I would mind taking charge
of his pistol as he was afraid it would be seized by the authorities. He
said he would call for it later at the Hotel Majestic, where I was going
to put up. I had fondly imagined, when Sidney Churchill stated on my
passport that the purpose of my travelling to Alexandria was to join up
with the Dardanelles expedition, that I should be hurried through the
customs not merely with dispatch but perhaps even with a certain
enthusiastic courtesy. However, the typical English fiction that the
Egyptians were really ruling themselves meant that all those great
customs sheds, stretching it seemed almost indefinitely along the quays,
were entirely in the hands of a number of maddening middle-aged
Egyptians, on whom my explanation of the reason for carrying a large
pistol in my kit bag evidently made a most unfavourable impression. A
huge black-faced ruffian seemed much inclined to drag me off to jail
forthwith. The argument went on for three solid hours, the sun getting
hotter and hotter every moment. Finally an English official was
unearthed somewhere, and this So-and-so Bey (I forget his name), instead
of kicking these fat, insolent, inefficient brutes, as I had hoped he
would, must palaver with them for another hour before they would give up
the pistol and another half hour before they would surrender the rest of
my kit. It was eleven o’clock before a fat man who looked like Emil
Jannings in a film of the Arabian Nights signed my release from this
stupid farce and I was able to drive away from the quay to the Hotel
Majestic, more firmly convinced than ever that some of the English
really must be descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. I began to be
less indignant with the muddle at the customs when I discovered that
nobody in Alexandria knew where the base of the Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force was to be found, though a consensus of rumour agreed
that if it existed at all it might be found in the Mustapha Barracks. So
I boarded a train and went charging along a glittering garish boulevard
in search of the M.E.F. and its commandant. There was a middle-aged
Australian on the seat in front, who after hearing me ask the conductor
several times if I got off here for the Mustapha Barracks, turned round
and said:
“I’m going there myself, mate. You come along with me, I’ll show you.”
I noticed that his foot was bandaged, and he told me that he had been
wounded on some bloody beach of which he didn’t know the bloody name any
more than anybody else as far as he could see.
My own blood warmed to this middle-aged Australian who was the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. He confided in me
that he was probably “for it” when he met the doctor. He had been given
an hour’s leave from hospital and had extended it to twenty-four.
“You know? I couldn’t bring myself to go back, and then I met ... oh,
well, it doesn’t always do, does it, to go into details? Anyway, I’ve
had a night of it, and now I’ll have to report to the doctor. I expect
there’ll be trouble, but he’s a good sort.”
I asked him about landing at Gallipoli, but he could tell me nothing
about it. All he knew was that he had jumped out of a bloody boat in the
dark and before he had walked five bloody yards he had had a bloody
bullet in his foot and had been pushed back to bloody Alexandria almost
before he bloody well knew he had left it. I told him I was on my way
to join Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff and explained why I had no uniform at
present.
“Why don’t you put in for me as your batman?” he suggested. “You haven’t
got one yet, have you? I’m fifty-three years old, but when this bloody
foot of mine’s all right again I’ll be able to look after you well.”
I told him I should be delighted to have his services if the authorities
would grant them to me and asked him to try to come along and see me at
the Majestic.
Then we got off the tram and walked up the dusty road to the barracks,
outside which we shook hands affectionately before he hobbled away to
report to the doctor and explain his night out as best he could. I never
saw him again. I dare say he was confined to barracks till they sent him
back to Anzac. When I finally reached G.H.Q. I made several attempts to
get hold of him, but I never succeeded in tracing his whereabouts. It
has always been a regret that he never became my batman, for he had
knocked about all over the Pacific and would have been a splendid
companion.
Even in the Mustapha Barracks, it took a long time to find the office of
the base commandant, for none of the khaki figures I tackled seemed to
believe that the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force existed. However, I
found it at last, and inside was a disagreeable little major sitting
like a spider in a dim corner.
“What do you want?” he growled.
I explained that Sir Ian Hamilton had ordered me to report to him for
the purpose of reaching General Headquarters of the Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force as soon as possible.
As he seemed to think I was an itinerant impostor, I produced Eddie
Marsh’s telegram, which with an expression of profound disgust he read
through.
“Who is this fellow who signs this?”
“Mr. Winston Churchill’s private secretary.”
The major snorted impatiently.
“I never heard of him. I don’t recognize an irregular document like
this. What is it?”
“It’s an Italian telegram.”
“It may or may not be. Anyway, I can’t do anything about it.”
I began to get a little irritated.
“Well, perhaps you will be good enough to telegraph to G.H.Q. and get
them to confirm these orders?”
“Why should I communicate with G.H.Q.? I don’t recognize this telegram
as orders from anybody. I don’t know who you are.”
“Well, can I telegraph to Sir Ian Hamilton myself?”
“No, you can’t.”
“Then am I to remain indefinitely in Alexandria?”
“I don’t care where you remain.”
The dread of missing the fall of Constantinople made me try to
propitiate this discouraging little fellow.
“Well, can you give me any idea how long I am likely to remain here?”
“I can’t give you the least idea of anything. It may be for two months.
It may be forever.”
“Well, do you think I am justified in ordering a uniform?”
“That is for you to decide,” he told me. “But you won’t get one if you
do order it.”
There was evidently nothing more to be learned from the major, and I
debated with myself the question of how to take leave of him. Let it be
remembered that I was wearing a blue flannel suit and a panama hat. In
such an attire I certainly ought not to have saluted him; but by this
time I was so thoroughly depressed about my future that, when I half put
out my hand to shake hands without getting any response from the major,
I fancy in my embarrassment I did give a kind of indeterminate military
salute. There seems to come to my mind as I look back on the scene a
grim smile on the major’s face as I left him in his dusty little
solitude in the heart of the Mustapha Barracks. A few pages back I was
congratulating myself on being able to deal with Southern
demonstrativeness without the slightest embarrassment; in dealing with
English undemonstrativeness I have never been so successful. At the time
I considered the major a churlish fellow and would willingly have seen
him kicked from one end of Alexandria to the other; but no doubt there
was much to be said from his point of view. Probably he resented being
left behind at the base, especially the base of an expedition which was
openly spoken of with contempt all over Egypt and for an amateur with a
moustache like mine to be so sure that his services were required by Sir
Ian Hamilton may well have been galling to the professional soldier.
My next task was to find the tailor recommended by the pop-eyed
Levantine on board the _Roma_. I entered his shop in much the same mood
as I entered the shop of my first Oxford tailor to buy a gown. I made no
pretense of being anything else but a freshman and I tried to suggest my
conviction that as a tailor of repute he would not betray my innocence.
Mr. Phillips smiled with a weary courtesy when I suggested the
possibility of being fitted out within a week. He could not promise
anything under a month, such an amount of work had he on hand. However,
I pleaded with him so eloquently that at last he agreed to give me a
fitting the following morning at eleven o’clock. I ordered two light
khaki tunics, two pairs of breeches, and two pairs of slacks. He told me
the address of a shop where I might possibly get a Sam Browne belt, and
he was actually able himself to supply me with a cap and a helmet,
thanks to the arrival of a consignment that morning. He did not think,
however, that I should be able to obtain badges of my corps anywhere in
Alexandria, which took the gilt off the gingerbread of my new cap.
After this I went back to the Hotel Majestic and decided that of all
the God-forsaken garish holes on earth the Hotel Majestic was the worst.
I spent a depressed afternoon and evening wondering how long I should
have to sit in that lobby and watch wounded soldiers limp slowly past in
the square, wondering whether the trees were _Jacaranda mimosifolia_,
listening to the exasperating syncopation of the clatter outside by the
swing doors, and eying the antics of a trio of monkey-faced musicians as
they played “Get Out or Get Under” from a dais at the end of the dining
room. Yeomanry officers, all beautifully equipped, kept arriving to dine
at the hotel, and I began to hope that I might see one or two old Oxford
friends, but nobody I knew appeared. At last a young officer in the
Australian Light Horse who was evidently feeling as much out of it as I
was myself spoke to me, and we agreed to dine together. He confided that
he simply could not stand the sight of English officers and added that
if he had the choice of fighting the English or the Turks he was in two
minds whether he would not choose to fight against the English. He had
not been up at the Dardanelles yet, but his brigade was expecting to go
at any moment. Every exquisite young Yeomanry subaltern who passed our
table stared at my new acquaintance as if to demand by what right this
colonial fellow was venturing to sit down to dine in an hotel patronized
by him. Presently, however, four Australian troopers, each of them
carrying a penny in his right eye like a monocle, swaggered into the
room and ordered four bottles of champagne, after disposing of which
they ordered four more and then proceeded in loud voices to give their
impressions of the manners, customs, and speech of the Yeomanry. The
performance lacked some of the restraint of modern acting and erred
occasionally on the side of exaggeration, but it cheered my companion,
and he talked to me happily about life at home.
Next morning at nine o’clock I went round to the tailor’s and stayed in
his shop till one o’clock when I actually got a fitting. In the
afternoon my friends of the _Roma_ turned up.
The Spaniard’s shoes were too much altogether for the Yeomanry
subalterns. So the Australian officer and I took him and the Greek out
to dinner at a café, after which we visited a cinema and variety show
where a young woman leaped about the stage and sang “Get Out or Get
Under,” being encored till her voice was nothing but a husky squeak. I
got back to the hotel about midnight and found waiting for me in my
bedroom a letter in a buff envelope inscribed “On His Majesty’s Service”
and addressed in red pencil to:
LIEUTENANT COMPTON MACKENZIE, R. M.:
Please arrange to embark on the _Franconia_, Berth 46 [_it read_].
She is due to sail at 8 A.M. to-morrow, May 14th. Please report to
General Braithwaite C. G. S. on arrival.
The signature at the bottom was that of my discouraging little major. I
found that an orderly had brought this letter round to the Majestic half
an hour earlier.
I was now in a pretty state of anxiety to know how I was possibly going
to induce any Alexandria tradespeople before eight o’clock in the
morning to part with the minimum still necessary to my equipment. The
half-made uniforms I should obviously have to leave behind and I might
never see them again. Could I persuade my friend the tailor to part with
somebody else’s service jacket to me? To add to my gloom the damp night
air of Alexandria had brought on a good deal of pain in my leg, and the
dark, hot little bedroom was full of mosquitoes. The situation demanded
desperate measures. I went downstairs and, seeing in the lobby a captain
of the Gyppy army with a pleasant oblong face, I gulped down my
embarrassment and asked him to tell me whether he thought I could count
on the transport’s not leaving before ten o’clock. That would give me an
hour to drive round Alexandria after the shops opened at eight. The
captain said that, while he had never heard of a transport’s leaving at
the hour fixed, he would not advise me to trust to that and urged me to
be down on the quay at the time given. I went back to my bedroom so
profoundly depressed that when a cockroach flew across the room and hit
me on the ear I felt like bursting into tears. Finally I went downstairs
again and interviewed the porter. Did he think if I started telephoning
to the shops at six o’clock in the morning I should get any reply? He
seemed doubtful, but on my producing a ten-shilling note he agreed to
help me in every way he could to rouse them. I had decided, if I could
not get a service jacket anywhere, to buy a burberry and hide my blue
coat and waistcoat with that. Then by dint of winding and unwinding my
puttees about twenty times over I managed to make the Bedford cord
breeches I had bought in Capri look less as if I had stolen them from a
heavy-weight. Having once fixed those puttees, I thought it would be
imprudent to risk undressing again. So I lay down in my clothes and
tried to sleep for an hour or two.
At five o’clock I was up again without having had a wink, and by six I
was telephoning. It was a hopeless business. Not a shop in Alexandria
would answer. Seven o’clock found me in a carriage outside the chief
military emporium waiting for the shutters to be taken down. My driver,
a tall black fellow, who evidently enjoyed making a nuisance of himself,
banged on the shutters with the butt of his whip until finally a
shrivelled little man with a sharp nose, on whose dyspeptic cockneyism
the sun of Egypt had beaten down impotently, opened the door at a
quarter to eight and asked in an aggrieved voice what I thought I was
playing at. I did not argue but rushed inside and bought a flaccid
shop-soiled burberry which I at once put on, though even at that early
hour of the morning the sun was hot. Then I asked for a Sam Browne belt
and was assured that there was not one to be had, but he added that if I
would give him my name he would do his best to obtain one for me in the
course of the next few weeks. I snatched up a belt from the counter and
sternly asked him the price of it.
“But that is one we have had on order for over a month for General
Blank,” he whined apprehensively.
My answer was to fling down three sovereigns on the counter, rush out of
the shop with the Sam Browne, leap into the carriage, and drive off at
full speed to my friend the tailor. After we had banged for ten minutes
on his door he opened it. My entreaties were vain; he had no service
jacket of any size finished. However, he did promise to send my own
things up to G. H. Q. in ten days’ time, and with that I had to be
content. I found it was going to take at least twenty minutes to drive
to the quay where the _Franconia_ was lying; and as I write these words
a fat drum-shaped clock overhanging the pavement, the hands at ten
minutes past eight already, still stares at me in the lucid relentless
air.
I have had one or two hair-raising drives in nightmares, but no
nightmare ever exceeded in horror my drive to the docks of Alexandria on
that May morning. The endless line of funnels and masts along the quays
gave an impression that, however furiously the horse galloped, the
carriage itself was not moving at all. We passed warehouse after
warehouse, shed after shed, but each was so exactly like its predecessor
that again one had an impression of movement without progress. Every
hoot I heard seemed to be the signal for the _Franconia’s_ departure. I
began to imagine that my driver had no idea at which dock the
_Franconia_ was to be found and that he was merely driving about at
random, hoping to come on it by some happy accident. I stood up and
surveyed the fearful hugger-mugger of funnels, which was apparently
infinite. Then, catching sight of a clock which marked five and twenty
minutes to nine, I sat down again in despair, closed my eyes against
that cat’s cradle of masts, and began to compose in fancy another
interview with my discouraging little major in the Mustapha Barracks, in
which I explained to him how I had failed to embark on the _Franconia_
and implored him to tell me when the next transport was leaving.
Five minutes later we drew up alongside the great Cunarder, which looked
like a Gulliver over whom Lilliputians in khaki were wandering
aimlessly. She might not have been leaving Alexandria for another month
for any signs of immediate departure apparent, and then as I stood on
the quayside, the burberry buttoned close to hide my blue coat and
waistcoat, a private in the First Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers came up
to me and saluting asked if I wanted a servant.
“I’m helping Captain Kenny,” he said, “but I could give you a hand in my
spare time.”
“I suppose you can’t get hold of a service jacket?” I asked. “I feel a
bit awkward in this blue coat and waistcoat.”
“I could get you a service jacket from army stores for ten shillings.
Lots of officers prefer to wear them instead of their own so as to dodge
the snipers.”
How easy it all seemed now that a professional had taken the matter in
hand.
“Were you by any chance in Crete with the Inniskillings--in 1909, I
think it was?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir, I was in Crete.”
“You don’t remember a brother of mine by any chance who was a subaltern
in the regiment? F. S. Mackenzie was his name.”
“Yes, sir, I remember him well. In fact, I was his servant for a short
time. Ginger hair, hadn’t he?”
The coincidence of this cheered me up. Ten minutes afterward he came
back with a Tommy’s service jacket and superintended the transfer of my
kit from the carriage to the cabin, where I doffed the blue flannel coat
and waistcoat. My appearance in uniform was not exactly my own idea of
what a smart officer’s should be, but I decided it would make a better
impression on G. H. Q. than the circus proprietor’s get-up in which I
had arrived to go on board the _Franconia_. All this preoccupation with
my outward appearance at such an hour must sound petty, but from the
moment I landed in Alexandria I became what I was supposed to be--a
subaltern of nineteen joining his regiment for the first time. That
somebody called Compton Mackenzie had written two or three successful
books was no help to my present self at all. I regarded that
pre-commission self as an uncle with whom I might claim kinship when I
was sure of my company, not as a matter of pride but as an excuse for
any eccentricity still discernible in his nephew. I fancy that this
reversion to a younger self was more common among temporary officers
than the reminiscences and novels of the ward would lead one to suppose.
For the last ten years I have been on the verge of writing about
Gallipoli and continually laying aside my pen because I have never
seemed able to achieve the necessary detachment. Now I have come to the
conclusion that I never shall achieve such detachment, and that I must
be content with the less ambitious task of recapturing the emotions and
excitements and embarrassments of one insignificant individual against
the background of that heroic tragedy.
CHAPTER IV
LOOKING FOR G. H. Q.
After that nerve-racking drive to catch the transport it is perhaps
unnecessary to add that she did not actually sail until three o’clock in
the afternoon. The _Franconia_ was one of the large Cunarders, eighteen
or twenty thousand tons, I think, and so far, at any rate, as the food
was concerned life aboard her in time of war was very much what it had
been in time of peace. I have a menu card before me, as I write, of
luncheon on board that Saturday, May 15, 1915. These menus were printed
on postcards in old days to allow travellers to let their friends and
relations know how well they were faring in a Cunard liner, and war
seemed to have touched with a light hand the routine on board. I found
myself seated at table in the dining saloon with a trio of doctors, two
of whom were R. A. M. C. regulars and the third a distinguished
specialist in temporary uniform. They had all been at the landing on the
twenty-fifth of April. I happened to ask why we had been given
second-class cabins.
“I’ll show you why after lunch,” said one of them.
Getting hold of a key from the steward, he took me along and opened the
door of what looked exactly like a Bluebeard’s chamber. From floor to
ceiling the white cabin was splashed with blood.
“We brought back five thousand wounded in this ship, and they haven’t
had time to clear up the relics. The worst cases were in the first-class
cabins and there were only three of us to attend to them.”
I began to understand why my three messmates had talked of everything at
meals except the landing.
We steamed north at full speed, for a wireless message had been received
that two German submarines of the latest pattern had passed the Straits
of Gibraltar some time since and might be met at any moment. In
consequence of this warning we had lifebelt and boat drill. After three
false alarms for practice hardly anybody on board found himself in the
same boat twice, and there would have been a glorious muddle if we had
been hit by a torpedo.
I felt less ashamed of my service jacket when a young subaltern in the
Essex Regiment congratulated me on my prudence and told me he was going
to get one for himself as soon as he went ashore. I tried to look as if
it had been the cunning of a seasoned warrior which had prompted my
choice, but Kenny, with whom unknown as yet to himself, I believe, I was
sharing a servant, shook his head gravely over my appearance. Kenny had
been A. D. C. to the new sultan of Egypt, and his royal master, desiring
to pay Sir Ian Hamilton a compliment, had put him at Sir Ian’s disposal
for the rest of the campaign. I think it was just a slight doubt in
Kenny’s own mind whether Sir Ian would welcome his services or send him
back to Cairo at the first opportunity which at this date made him
tolerate my company at all. But on hearing that I was, like himself,
bound for G. H. Q., and finding nobody else on board who was bound
thither, he decided to make the best of my disgraceful get-up, and
though evidently still a little puzzled about my social status he did
manage to be fairly cordial. I found that he had not done any regimental
service with the Inniskilling Fusiliers for a long time and that he had
not been at Crete or Malta when my brother was there with the First
Battalion.
On Saturday evening the Army Service Corps colonel who was commanding
officer on board handed me a packet of the men’s letters to read through
and censor. From them the following, which was sprawled in pencil over
several sheets of toilet paper, has remained in my memory since the
evening I first read it in the fern-filled ladies’ saloon of the
_Franconia_:
DEAR PERCE, FLO AND SUSIE:
We have now been in the trenches under shot and shell for ten days,
and it’s something terrible I give you my word and no mistake. The
noise is absalutely deafning. Enough to make your hair curl. We do
not get a moment’s sleep all night. We are now well in for it with
the Terrible Turk, who by all accounts is a proper Bugar and no
mistake. No more bloody armies for me. The next bloody army I join
is the Salvation bloody army and don’t you forget it.
Kind regards to Ma.
Yours sincerely,
FATHER.
We heard later that night that we should be off Cape Helles the
following morning by six o’clock, and the three doctors with whom I
messed began to speculate whether Krithia would be found to have fallen
or whether Achi Baba would still be frowning defiance at our troops.
They were the only officers on board who had seen the peninsula yet; the
others were all going out for the first time, some of them in charge of
small drafts, some joining units to which they had been transferred from
other regiments. One of the latter, a captain in the Indian army, told
me that after twelve years’ dull service he was looking forward to
excitement at Gallipoli. He went ashore with the first boat next morning
and had not moved fifty yards from the pier when a high-explosive shell
burst close to him and the next day he was carried back on board from a
field hospital insensible and suffering from severe concussion, the
first of the new lot of wounded to be evacuated and taken back to
Alexandria in the _Franconia_. A small man he was, with a little round
head like a button and a neat moustache as glossy as jet.
We all crowded forward in the bows to stare through our glasses at that
astonishing sight which has been so often and so eloquently described. I
felt that I was watching some arrangement of a martial scene in the
window of a toy shop, some artful method for displaying all the toy
soldiers and toy boats, all the toy tents and trees and forts in stock,
to their best advantage; and just as the colours of toys are always a
little brighter than nature, so were they here. The very puffs of smoke
from the shrapnel bursts seemed much more like the cottonwool with which
the crafty salesman had imitated the real thing than the real thing
itself; and we who were gathered up there in the bows were like
passengers on the top of a halted omnibus who were gazing down at that
shop window, the polychromatic toyland in which was irradiating the dull
pavement of commonplace existence.
The only glasses I had were a feeble pair I had bought at a pawnbroker’s
two or three years before on my way to the races at Alexandra Park, at
which I was grumbling to myself, when the R. A. M. C. lieutenant
murmured over my shoulder: “You’ll be able to pick up a better pair on
the beach. There were plenty of them lying about after the landing.”
“Surely that must be one of our howitzers?” some officer ejaculated,
whereat the rest of us turned our glasses on a jerky spiral of smoke
that fumed up from time to time on the east side of the peninsula and
agreed without much conviction that it must be.
“Well, damn it, that’s shrapnel bursting over the beach, anyway. We
don’t seem to have advanced quite as far as they think we have in
Alexandria.”
Several of the present company had been supposing on the voyage up that
they should be kept kicking their heels for a week at the base without
arriving anywhere near the scene of action.
“They were expecting to get Krithia the night we came away,” said the R.
A. M. C. lieutenant. “I can’t make it out.”
“Achi Baba looks a nasty bit of work,” somebody observed.
We turned our glasses on the hill which stood between us and
Constantinople. From here Achi Baba suggested on a much diminished scale
the view of Etna from the deck of the _Roma_ as I had seen it just a
week ago. There was the same effect of shoulders upheaving and set in
grim defiance; but, whereas Etna worthily embodied a Titan, this fellow
embodied nothing more sublime than a crafty Oriental wizard. His very
name was an insult to Troy hidden over there in the blue haze along the
Asiatic shore. What was this anachronism doing in Europe? Let Disraeli
answer. What is he doing in Europe now? Let the contemptible and
pusillanimous coalition of 1922 answer. Three quarters of the way up
those gradual gray-green slopes there was a large patch of poppies like
a lustrous sash of scarlet, an effect which sent my mind spinning back
for a moment to a field day at Aldershot in the month of August, 1901,
and to the scarlet of the Home Counties Brigade moving across Laffan’s
Plain.
In the foreground to right of us huddled the village and forts of
Sedd-el-Bahr. The gun-slashed cypresses had from here the look of palms,
and the whole space with its cracked domes and crumbled walls was not
unlike an old-fashioned print of Paradise in a tattered family Bible.
Kenny and I, being both bound for G. H. Q., decided to land together. In
boatload after boatload our companions of the swift voyage from
Alexandria went ashore to disappear in the confusion and tawny dust of
Lancashire Landing. To my mind’s eye returns the picture of a grave-eyed
subaltern of the South Wales Borderers leading his small draft in heavy
marching order up the slope beyond the beach. When they vanished over
the brow one by one in single file, northward bound for the trenches, it
gave a sudden poignant emptiness to the swarming landscape as if the
echo of a solemn chord had died away into silence. Kenny and I must have
been ashore ourselves when I was watching these pilgrims depart into the
unknown, and presently we were asking the way to G. H. Q., expecting
it, of course, to be rather easier to find than the front-line trenches.
We were advised to consult the advanced base commandant who invited us
to tea, but had no idea at all where G. H. Q. was. Colonel Hawker[4] was
courteous, charming, and hospitable; but at the time he struck me as the
most inconsequent human being I had ever met outside the pages of Lewis
Carroll. The tea party of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare was more
fruitful of solid information than the tea party that afternoon in the
headquarters of the advanced base commandant. I must not accuse Kenny of
trying to “shake” me, but when he found himself in the company of
several officers whom he knew already he was inclined--how shall I put
it?--to disclaim all responsibility for my untoward appearance. I sat on
a packing case in a corner of the tent and ate bread and jam with what I
feel sure was the air of a fourth-form boy in a prefect’s study,
listening to a long conversation about the whereabouts of every officer
on earth, it seemed, except the commander-in-chief to whom we had to
report.
Then somebody came in and said that the ammunition for six Japanese
field mortars had arrived, but that the mortars themselves were
undiscoverable. I plucked up courage to say that I had noticed those
mortars in the hold of some ship together with a lot of unsorted mail.
At the mention of mail everybody got very much worked up, and several
officers dashed down to the pier. But it was too late. The mortars and
mail had already started back to Alexandria. I can see those Japanese
field mortars now, looking like large expensive fireworks among a lot of
loose envelopes. They had been travelling backward and forward between
Helles and Alexandria for nearly a month. After my knowledgableness on
the subject of the mortars I felt justified in pressing Colonel Hawker
to find out something definite for us about G. H. Q. He kindly
dispatched a search party for an aide of his who was reputed to know
where G. H. Q. was. This officer on being interrogated stated positively
that G. H. Q. was at Tenedos.
“Well, how shall we get there?” I asked.
“Ah, how will you get there?” Colonel Hawker repeated ambiguously. Then
he called out to another of his aides: “How will they get there?”
The aide replied that he had no idea.
“Do you think if they tried the N. T. O.[5]?” the commandant pressed.
“He’s not in a very good mood, sir. He was rather fed up about that
mail.”
“Well, look here, I tell you what,” said the colonel enthusiastically.
“You take a stroll up to the top of the slope and have a look around. I
think there’s probably a battle going on. You ought to see something of
it while you’re here, and then we’ll try and manage something for you
when you come back.”
When I got Kenny outside the tent I told him that if we wanted to reach
G. H. Q. before dark we should do well to make a move on our own behalf
and not bother our heads about battles. So we went down to the landing
stage and interviewed various people who were ordering boats about with
an air of authority. None of them had any idea where G. H. Q. was, but
they all agreed that, wherever it was, there was no chance of our
reaching it that night. Just then, a marine on the landing stage who had
overheard our appeals for transport came up and said that somehow or
other he had to find a destroyer to take him to the flagship that night
and suggested that we should stick to him. I was in favour of this, but
Kenny did not feel quite so sure of his ability to deal with an admiral.
However, I was firm and insisted on our following the marine into a
pinnace with our batman and our kit. The destroyer would have nothing to
do even with the marine and back we all came to the beach, where he
declared in an injured voice that he had done his best and that if the
admiral went off the deep end about his not getting back the admiral
would have to go off the deep end and that was all about it.
By now the problem was no longer how to reach G. H. Q. but how to get
back on board the _Franconia_. We had to hang about for another couple
of hours before we found a pinnace willing to take us out to her, by
which time it was pitch dark. Then we had to get on board by climbing up
a rope ladder swinging from the stern. This was a beastly experience and
frightened me much more than the chance of shells falling on the beach.
It must have been at least sixty feet from the water to the deck of that
eighteen-thousand-ton liner, and the ladder had a most horrible trick of
becoming horizontal when one tried to relieve the strain on the wrist by
pressing harder with the feet. I was sweating and shaking when we
reached the deck, and how our kit was ever hauled on board I never dared
ask. Kenny and I were the only two left of those who had gone on board
at Alexandria the day before yesterday. We felt like a couple of ghosts
wandering about that huge dim ship. I confided to Kenny how abominably
shy I had felt in Colonel Hawker’s tent this afternoon. He was
sympathetic and said he knew exactly how I felt. He had felt just the
same when he had joined his battalion in South Africa, travelling all
the way from Sandhurst and after tremendous difficulties reaching it at
last in the field.
“It was dark when I arrived, and they were all in the mess. I never felt
such an ass in my life.”
The next day we went ashore again, and on our way to the advanced base
tent a party of stretcher bearers with several dead men passed us. They
had been killed a few minutes before by a big shell. The advanced base
was just recovering from this bombardment when we arrived, but in spite
of that Colonel Hawker was more cheerful and hospitable than ever. He
had just invited us to be sure and come back for lunch, when he suddenly
remembered why we kept wandering into his tent.
“Of course, you’re the two people who want G. H. Q. Well, you’d better
hurry down to the landing stage as quickly as possible because there’s a
trawler starting immediately for the aërodrome at Tenedos to tow a
broken biplane in a lighter.”
We managed to get safely aboard with our kit and found Major Fiennes,[6]
the intelligence officer of the Naval Division, who with the help of two
interpreters was examining a bunch of Turkish prisoners. The
interpreters were both marine lieutenants in this dream, but in real
life they were English business men from Constantinople. I looked
enviously at their laurel-wreathed globes and felt half inclined to ask
if either of them had any spares for a badgeless member of their own
corps.
The most cheerful people on board were the prisoners, who were anxious
to give all the information they could with the air of men enjoying a
jolly talk after a long and tiring day. About halfway to Tenedos the
wretched lighter broke loose, and an hour went by before it was made
fast again. We were hot. We were hungry. There was a slow swell. The
plates of the trawler were like oven doors. The two dogs kept as pets by
the crew were messy brutes. The aërodrome was at the farther end of the
island, and another hour sweltered by before our signals woke anybody up
on shore. At last, however, we got rid of the prisoners and the broken
biplane and turned back to the harbour, by which time it was late
afternoon. Here we were met by Lieutenant Thompson, R. N. V. R., another
member of the British colony in Constantinople, who was the naval
intelligence officer on Tenedos. How cool and comfortable he looked in
his whites, so cool and comfortable that it helped Kenny and me, hungry
and hot and queasy as we were, to stand the shock of hearing that G. H.
Q. had arrived on Tenedos last Friday in the Arcadian, unloaded all
their gear, packed it all up again the following day, and left for
Imbros. Admiral de Robeck had warned Sir Ian Hamilton that Tenedos was a
bad berth for ships and that without the protection of the navy a band
of ruffians might land one night from Bezika Bay on the mainland
opposite and cut the throats of the general staff one by one.
Kenny thought we should be wise to return with the trawler to Helles,
but I opposed this. A small fleet of caïques in the port had given me an
idea, and I asked what there was to prevent our hiring a motor boat and
going to Imbros in it. Thompson looked doubtful for a moment, but
finally he agreed that we might do that to-morrow morning provided we
made an early start, Imbros being twenty-one miles from here. Kenny was
still inclined to argue. The notion of arriving at G. H. Q. in a motor
boat somewhat shocked his sense of military decorum, but I was firm and
told him that he could go back to W beach if he liked but that nothing
would induce me to move from where I was. He surrendered to the peace of
that golden afternoon and fussed no more about the trawler’s return to
Helles with Major Fiennes and the two interpreters. Here there was no
sound but the chattering of the jackdaws on the red roofs. Tenedos dear
of old to Apollo was Elysian after the hellish racket of W beach and the
heat and stench of that trawler in the slow swell. We left our batman to
deal with the kit and walked away with Thompson, past the great
Fifteenth Century Frankish castle, half of which was occupied by British
marines and the other half by the Greek garrison. Apparently the Turks
had never formally accepted that clause of the treaty which handed over
various Ægean islands to Greece after the Balkan war of 1912. So by
occupying Tenedos we were not violating the neutrality of Greece--an
example of that English devotion to nominalism which more realistic
feminine nations like the French find so difficult to understand.
Thompson told us that the governor was very ill with pneumonia.
“The Greek governor?”
But it appeared that the Greek governor had been dispossessed of his
official residence by Major Temple,[7] a Blue Marine, who had ruled here
ever since his ship was sunk on the luckless eighteenth of March.
We fed with Thompson and a Red Marine captain who had been saved from
the _Irresistible_, but the thought of poor Temple lying so seriously
ill upstairs made that barrack of a house depressing, and we were glad
to turn in early.
By seven o’clock next morning, being Tuesday, May 18th, we were down at
the quay and bargaining with one of the caïque owners for a passage to
Imbros. The owner was a plump and cheerful little Greek who said he was
willing to take us for nothing to Kephalo Harbour, where the _Arcadian_
was lying with the general staff on board, if in return we would do our
best to secure him a license to hawk foodstuffs on the peninsula.
However, we insisted that he must name a definite price or not take us
at all. Finally the bargain was struck. At this moment three military
field police came up and asked if we would take them with us. Major
Bigham,[8] the provost marshal, was expecting them anxiously, but when
they had reached Tenedos they had found like us that G. H. Q. had
departed.
“And I’m in a similar predicament,” said the staff sergeant major coming
up at this moment with a ponderous salute. This was a grave sententious
fellow who gave me a good deal of amusement on our voyage. Soon after we
started he produced a circlet of those fat amber beads with which the
inhabitants of the Levant fiddle perpetually.
“I understand that these beads, sir, do not possess any religious
significance,” he observed to me.
“I believe none at all.”
“It is highly remarkable, sir, is it not, the strange customs with
which travel makes one familiar? I find that since I left England my
mind has broadened considerably. I was thinking of sending these beads
as a present to my married daughter in Balham, and I just wanted to be
sure that they did not possess any religious significance because,
though my married daughter in Balham is not by any means superstitious,
she might feel uneasy if she had any religious ornaments about the
house.”
“I hope _you_ are not superstitious, Sergeant Major?”
“No, sir, I’ve never had any leanings that way. But why do you ask the
question, sir?”
“Well, I’ve just noticed that the number of this boat is thirteen and
that there are exactly thirteen people on board.”
The skipper had promised to put us alongside the _Arcadian_ by two
o’clock. About noon when we were in sight of our destination the engine
broke down, and with the wind freshening from the north we did not look
like reaching Kephalo or even anywhere in Imbros that night. It was
useless to put the caïque about and run for Tenedos because we should
have got into the Dardanelles current, which flowing at four knots with
the wind would have swept us south of the island and possibly wrecked us
on the coast of Asia Minor, not a pleasant notion. The only thing for it
was to keep beating up toward Imbros and trust to making land somewhere.
The wind got worse, until soon it was blowing a gale. Kenny felt sick
and lay down in utter misery. The skipper would keep persuading him to
drink some fizzy lemonade from a bottle, and when he turned away from it
in loathing the little man produced a box of Turkish delight.
“Take this bloody fellow away from me,” Kenny groaned.
I was sitting up in the prow, trying to swallow all the wind I could in
order to ward off sickness. Kenny was prostrate on a heap of kit bags
amidships. He looked like a corpse waiting for the torches to be applied
to the pyre. I beckoned to one of the military field police, who
staggered forward.
“Don’t let Captain Kenny be offered any more lemonade or Turkish
delight,” I ordered.
The idea of anybody’s being offered such nourishment in this sea was too
much for the poor chap, who rushed to the side of the boat, where I
should soon have followed him if at that moment I had not perceived that
we were tossing about right in the course of a huge French transport. I
forgot to feel sick and began to wonder how long it was before
unconsciousness came to a drowning man. She missed us by not more than
half a dozen yards, and as I looked up at the towering shape I saw the
white teeth and jet-black faces of numerous Senegalese soldiers grinning
down at us. The churning of her screws as we went astern flung a
quantity of water over the caïque. Kenny must have thought the genial
Greek in command was still trying to force fizzy lemonade down his
throat, for in desperation he felt for his pistol and above the drumming
of the wind in the stays I heard him threatening the skipper with death.
For six hours we were flung about in that caïque, and it began to look
as if we should never reach Imbros. We had by now drifted the whole
length of the island. Unless we could make the last promontory thirteen
miles west of our original destination there would be nothing for it but
to run for Lemnos with the chance of being driven on to a dead lee shore
in the darkness or being shot by an excitable French patrol for trying
to enter the harbour of Mudros after sunset.
The excitement of watching that westerly promontory of Imbros slip
ominously to starboard and then slip back safely to port as the
steersman took the caïque a point or two nearer the wind kept me from
even feeling sick. The long wave line of Imbros which we had watched far
away and misty blue in the morning, which we had seen turn to a rich
brown and green when we drew near it at noon, was now a neutral gray.
And then mercifully the wind abated.
“We will now to be in Purgos,” the skipper announced gleefully.
Even Kenny was able to raise a bitter smile at such a name, while the
staff sergeant major who had been yawning uncomfortably for the last six
hours observed:
“Nature can be very beautiful, can it not, sir?”
“Feeling better, Sergeant-Major?”
“Oh, I was not feeling seasick, sir,” he insisted with reproachful
gravity. “I’ve only been slightly troubled with the returns which I get
from my indigestion, sir, and from which I have suffered on and off ever
since I was a tiny tot.”
Half an hour later we glided into the calm emerald water of a sheltered
cove round which the sand lay in a golden crescent, the rich light of
the fast westering sun shining upon a blaze of wild hollyhocks and
poppies in the grass beyond. We saw two or three houses on the easterly
horn of the cove, but what filled us with apprehension were a number of
barrels of oil and sacks of coal on the beach. We asked ourselves if we
had hit upon some secret base for supplying a German submarine. However,
a closer inspection showed that it was only olive oil. The proprietor of
the largest house supplied a delicious meal of eggs, and our skipper
persuaded a baggy-breeched fellow to set off on a pony over the hills to
Kephalo with a message to G. H. Q. to ask if a trawler or any other kind
of craft could be spared to rescue us. Kenny was quite himself again
after a good meal and determined now to think that the barrels of oil
were as nefarious as our first impression of them had made them out to
be. As soon as our camp beds had been put up on the beach he lowered the
spirits of the military field police and his own servant by arranging to
have two sentries posted all night. I suggested that he was being
somewhat excessively professional and told him that if I were one of his
sentries I would fire at the first winkle that put out its horns at me,
merely for the pleasure of waking him up, but he said he had no
intention of being taken prisoner by a German submarine through
neglecting a few elementary precautions. So seeing that Kenny wanted
this to be a real adventure I argued no more. Then we got into our
sleeping blankets and lay staring up at the stars until we fell asleep
to the sound of water lapping on the sand and the distant croaking of
frogs. In the morning we ate a lot more eggs and drank a great deal of
excellent coffee, after which we strolled up the grassy brae which
formed the eastern extremity of the cove, and here we sat waiting to be
rescued like the shipwrecked mariners of convention.
A flat marshy expanse of tall reeds stretched inland to a line of rugged
hills. We speculated on the shooting in the interior, which Kenny
thought looked a promising country for partridges. I was more interested
in the flowers that were a-blow in myriads on this green brae,
particularly in a small cranesbill which was new to me. It must have
been about nine o’clock when a torpedo boat came round the nearest
headland seeming most unnaturally dark against the silver dazzle of the
sea. After another two hours of roughish weather we were alongside the
_Arcadian_.
Before we left Purgos the skipper of the caïque presented me with four
boxes of Turkish delight to mark what he called his appreciation of my
coolness yesterday, but I fear it was only a bribe to enlist my sympathy
for his sweetmeats and recommend him to the good will of the military
authorities with a view to unloading on the peninsula his cargo of
Turkish delight and fizzy lemonade. Still it was jolly good Turkish
delight and much appreciated aboard the _Arcadian_, the sort of tuck, in
fact, with which a new boy ought to arrive well provided.
CHAPTER V
THE ARCADIAN
Welcome indeed was the sight of Orlo Williams, looking larger than ever
in khaki, when I stepped on to the deck of the _Arcadian_. It was due to
him in the first place that I was here at all. Now he deepened my
obligation by the trouble he took to introduce me to everybody on board,
and for the kindness with which everybody made me feel at home I knew
that I was also in his debt. It was typical of Orlo that he should
almost immediately lead me round the ship and analyze for my benefit the
composition of the staff. His accurate mind dreaded the least delay in
my education because any false quantity, as it were, from my lips would
have pained him. He is incapable of letting the most cocksure man make a
mistake if he can prevent him, and knowing as he does exactly how much
he knows he comes as near to being infallible as anyone I have met.
“This is O,” he said, showing me ... what was it, the drawing room or
the smoking room of the ship at peace? I fancy the former. “O stands for
Operations and is immediately under General Braithwaite, the chief of
the general staff or C. G. S. Here is A, which is the adjutant general’s
branch and deals with all matters of routine, discipline, and
administration. Here is Q or the quartermaster general’s branch, which
deals with supplies. And here,” he concluded as he showed me the ship’s
gymnasium, “is I or Intelligence. I is subdivided into I-a, which
obtains information about the enemy, and I-b, which prevents the enemy
from obtaining information about us. I should think you’ll probably be
in I yourself.”
“I’s the ichneumon, a wonderful beast,” I quoted to myself from an
alphabet of early childhood.
After this we talked about the ultimate future of the expedition and of
the dreams that might yet be fulfilled. The possibilities were endless
according to my old friend. After Constantinople an advance across the
plains of Hungary ... an invasion of Germany from the southeast where
she would find it hardest to resist such pressure ... once Breslau fell
... but meanwhile they did not seem to comprehend at home the importance
of our stroke here. Then I heard the tale of the landing. After that
nothing was impossible if we but could conquer what, alas, was to be a
thousand thousand times more inexpugnable than Istambol--the obstinacy
of unimaginative men.
It would have been soon after this talk that Sir Ian Hamilton came
striding round the deck and that I was presented to him. He must have
said something which allowed me without impertinence to ask him why Lord
Kitchener did not grasp the difficulties of the enterprise and the full
implications of its success, for his next words are cut with a chisel on
my heart.
“Lord Kitchener is a great genius, but like every great genius he has
blind spots.”
As he spoke his eyes turned eastward to the long line of cliffs beyond
that dancing deep blue sea, and in one illuminated instant I divined
with absolute certainty that we should never take Constantinople. It may
be that Sir Ian’s own brave hope had been shaken and that the doubt in
his mind was conveyed to me. I had no reasonable grounds at that date
for pessimism. I had not yet experienced that _insurmountable mental
barrier_ of which Mr. Winston Churchill was one day to write:
A wall of crystal utterly immovable, began to tower up in the
Narrows, and against this wall of inhibition no weapon could be
employed. The “No” principle had become established in men’s minds,
and nothing could ever eradicate it.
It would not be Gallipoli that would reveal to me the fearful profundity
of Mr. Churchill’s words. I should not learn to appreciate them until I
had played my part in the Greek tragedy, on which the curtain had even
then already risen. I should be at Gallipoli a mere butterfly in a
graveyard.
“I shall expect you at dinner to-night,” Sir Ian rapped out, and that
thin, eager form was off again on its restless promenading. North and
east the tawny line of cliffs along a blue horizon. Southward the
rolling dunes on which presently the tents of G. H. Q. would be pitched.
Westward the soft sandy beach of Kephalo flounced with seaweed for the
whole of a weary mile. Northwest the rugged hills of Imbros still green
with the colour of hope. All around that multiform flotilla in diverse
shades of gray. And a man in khaki striding round this deck like a
squirrel in a cage.
I did not know that two days ago he had sent a cable to Lord Kitchener
which owing to the political situation at home would not be discussed
for another three weeks, though upon the answer to it depended the
success or failure of this enterprise. I did not know that he had
received this very day a private and personal cable from Lord Kitchener,
in which the word “withdrawal” had been mentioned for the first time. I
did not know that Sir Henry Wilson had perhaps at this very moment
overcome the difficulty of persuading Sir John French to laugh at
Hazebrouck, and since God knows there was little enough to laugh about
in France that day, it may have been the problem of the Ægean which
coaxed reluctant mirth from the commander-in-chief. I did not know that
Major John Churchill had just received a cable from his brother to say
that he was to be driven from the Admiralty, but that he hoped to be in
a position to help the expedition indirectly. I did not know that an
intriguing chatterbox like Colonel Repington would be bragging round
London this afternoon how he (with the help of Captain Stanley Wilson,
M. P.!) had overthrown the Liberal government. I did not know that the
leaders of the Unionist party, barren of policy yet greedy of place and
patronage, had taken advantage of this grave hour in their country’s
destiny to blackmail their rivals into surrendering to them an equal
share of the responsibilities and emoluments of office. I did not know
that Lord Bertie would write in his diary to-night:
How disgusting and disgraceful are all these intrigues and
squabbles in the midst of our life and death struggle.
My own apprehension of failure might not have been so swiftly fanned
away by those Ægean winds had I been able to know these things. As it
was, even before Sir Ian’s thin, eager form was out of sight to
starboard, the malaise of impending disaster had already vanished in the
excitement of my own trivial reactions to this strange new life. Once
again before I left Gallipoli I was to see him at the mercy of the
Furies, and having seen him twice thus tormented I can understand how he
has been able to suffer gadflies with such indifference.
General Gouraud, who had just taken General d’Amade’s place on the
peninsular, was lunching with Sir Ian that day. I remember Eddie
Keeling’s saying to me in that exquisite Foreign Office voice of his, as
the bearded hero passed along the gangway:
“I wonder why they call him the lion of the Ardennes, I should have said
he was so much more like a bear.”
I had not seen Eddie Keeling since he and I had acted together in _The
Clouds_ at Oxford. He had recently been a secretary at the residency in
Cairo, but had contrived to escape for a while from diplomacy into a
temporary lieutenancy, and he was now the cipher officer in I. Our sense
of the ridiculous was almost identical, which was lucky, for we were
destined to share a small tent when we all went ashore at the end of
May, and if either of us had been inclined to laugh more or less than
the other mutual assassination would have been inevitable under the
conditions we were to experience. It was not easy to upset Eddie. With
his wide, lofty forehead and baby’s mouth he was like a benign infant
Jupiter, and his serene detachment from the petty humdrum of mortal
existence was hardly less Olympian. “These soldiers” among whom he found
himself represented a more primitive society than any he had hitherto
encountered, but his diplomatic training enabled him to deal with their
taboos and totems without the least suggestion of superiority. He
humoured their sense of their own importance as he would have humoured
at the Foreign Office the dignity of a deputation of Fiji Islanders. He
was formal and even ceremonious in his manner toward them; but
throughout his brief military career, which he regarded as an experiment
to wile away the tedium of a world at war, in the same spirit as
grown-ups might sit down on the floor and play hunt-the-slipper to avoid
being stared at by the critical guests of a children’s party, they
remained as much a source of amusement to him as he was a source of
amusement and sometimes of perplexity to them.
Far different was the attitude of Captain George Lloyd.[9] To him they
were, these soldiers, as much barbarians as they were to Eddie Keeling,
but to Lloyd their primitiveness was not a matter even for one wry smile
so much as an urgent call to the mission field. I began for the first
time in my life to appreciate that imperialism could touch a man’s soul
as deeply as religion.
“Maps! Maps!” he would cry passionately, his dark eyes ablaze with
fanaticism, his ivory cheeks flushed with the ardour of faith. “I always
use large maps when I talk to my constituents.”
“Yes, but you’re not talking to your constituents here,” I might answer.
And he would flash suspiciously at me those bright dark eyes of his,
for he was sensitive, like the perfect Celt he was, to the faintest hint
of ridicule. Then I might ask him how with his faith in the divine right
of the British Empire he could excuse the stupidity of those in charge
of its fortunes.
“Ah, but they’re not necessary. We must get rid of them. They’re in the
way! They’re in the way!”
“They always have been in the way,” I would argue. “If I look back over
the history of British imperialism, it is a history of Saxon stupidity’s
always being helped out by Celtic imagination of the mess it has made.
Why not break up the empire and build it all over again from our point
of view? It makes me sad to see people like you, and more important
people than you out here, at the mercy of the muddling and jealousy of
those who inherit an inferior racial tradition.”
Lloyd would not listen to this kind of talk. The missionary spirit was
too fervid in him to tolerate even a hint of profanity. I fancy it must
have seized him first when he was cox of that great Cambridge crew of
1900. He would have tasted then the elation of controlling muscle with
mind, and gradually he would have become convinced that given enough
large maps he could conquer the world. I once pointed out what a pity it
was he had not tried the effect of maps on the Committee of Imperial
Defense as well as on his constituents in West Staffordshire.
“Who knows?” I said. “If you had, they might have found out where the
Dardanelles were before the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ vanished so
unaccountably from the Mediterranean, and we might have had some good
maps of our own for this part of the world instead of having to wait
till we could capture one from the Turks.”
Perhaps Lloyd did succeed in demonstrating to others beside his
constituents the importance and excitement of large maps, for in 1917
Mark Sykes[10] took me into one of the rooms of the War Cabinet at
Montagu House and showed me a huge map of Asia Minor after we had won
the war, in which a large triangle of French influence found its apex at
Erzerum. It looked like another Ararat on which the Arc de Triomphe was
to rest when the deluge of blood should begin to subside.
At the time I first met him, Lloyd was much concerned over the
pigheadedness of his immediate chief, Colonel M. C. P. Ward, who would
not pay as much attention as his Number Two thought he should to the
reports that were continually coming in from Athens and elsewhere of
contraband of copper entering Turkey through Bulgaria and of the
refueling of those German submarines which had just arrived in the
Ægean. Colonel Ward’s qualifications to be head of the Intelligence of
an expedition to reduce Constantinople were not immediately obvious. He
was a gunner who had spent most of his military career as a specialist
on home defense, and the only time he had ever been out of England
before this was when he had been sent over to France to bring back the
body of Lord Roberts. He was a methodical, lethargic, apparently
slow-witted man well into middle-age who suffered almost incessantly
from hemorrhoids, which made him seem glum and unresponsive when he was
really concentrating on a fight with physical pain. He was naturally
inclined to skepticism and, lacking the impulse to sympathize with the
difficulties of the hastily improvised espionage organization in Athens,
he considered half the telegrams they sent through the legation a waste
of time and money. Somehow among the odds and ends of my papers one of
these telegrams from Athens has survived. It gives the name of a man at
Tenedos who has information about the existence of land mines near
Krithia. Underneath is a note in Colonel Ward’s handwriting:
CAPTAIN DEEDES
Ib
Please arrange for this man to be interviewed as to truth of this
statement and obtain all evidence you can concerning these mines if
they do exist.
M. C. P. W.
The last four words are characteristic. At the time I dare say I thought
Colonel Ward too ready to disbelieve everybody and everything; but by
the end of 1917 when I had interviewed some hundreds of men with
information like this I should have been entirely on his side. I should
have understood much better two years hence that when Eddie Keeling had
just brought him two of those Athenian telegrams in which a pair of
“reliable agents” flatly contradicted one another about the whereabouts
of the Nth Regiment of the Umpteenth Turkish Division and when in
addition to that those whereabouts as deciphered differed irreconcilably
from the names of any places on the maps provided for him by the War
Office, it was not the moment to demand what he intended to do about
this report of a submarine getting oil from a Greek collier off
Dedeagatch. And this would so often be the kind of moment that George
Lloyd would choose for approaching his chief.
Colonel Ward’s point was that, if he handed what was probably worthless
information to the naval adviser attached to G. H. Q., so that the
admiral could take any action he considered useful, he had done all he
could, George Lloyd’s point was that the navy was if possible even more
incompetent than the army and the Foreign Office and that it must be
badgered into a definite statement of what action it did intend to take.
“That’s not our business, Lloyd.”
“I disagree with you, Colonel.”
And then perhaps Lloyd would elaborate his point of view in a speech,
partly because for several years he had been accustomed to believe that
speeches played an important part in the political life of a nation and
partly because the sight of Colonel Ward sitting hunched and sullen at
his desk under the flow of his rhetoric always fanned the glowing embers
of his missionary ardour to a fierce flame. I have often thought that on
such occasions his own chief must have presented himself to Lloyd as a
refractory native chief who was standing in the way of imperial
development.
“I wish you’d go away, Lloyd, and let me get on with what I’m doing,”
Colonel Ward would mutter sulkily.
“Then no action is to be taken?” Lloyd would rasp out, his voice
acquiring a kind of harshness and a higher pitch, and even becoming
slightly nasal in his indignation at such supine obstructiveness.
“I don’t want to be taught my business by you.”
At which Lloyd would shrug his shoulders, like the emotional Celt he
was, and retire to his own desk, his eyes sometimes bright with what
might almost have been unshed tears of chagrin, for to thwart Lloyd’s
driving efficiency was to pierce his very soul. Looking back on the
expedition after fourteen years I may wish that George Lloyd himself had
been head of the Intelligence, but I wonder if he would have actually
effected anything more with his energy and quick mind than Colonel Ward
with his slow skepticism. What Mr. Winston Churchill, Sir Ian Hamilton,
and Sir Roger Keys failed to move could hardly have been moved by Lloyd
at that date. He was just as much up against that “insurmountable mental
barrier” as they were; but perhaps he was luckier than they, because he
was directly face to face with the “No” principle, and instead of
breaking his heart against a wall of crystal he could lose his temper
with the personification of it in a gunner colonel who regarded his
knowledge of the East as the showy and superficial results of advantages
in youth which poorer men had missed, and even his presence here at G.
H. Q. as a mere piece of political jobbery.
So with Colonel Ward standing like a heathen image between him and the
practical results of his incessant energy, George Lloyd worked harder
and harder. When I look back at the many long talks I had with him,
apart from a few arguments about imperialism as a political theory, I
cannot recall a single frivolous or even irrelevant conversation. He
was obsessed by his work, and yet for several weeks it used to look as
if the only tangible result of his devoted labours would be the
banishment of the Royal Army Pay Corps major from the Intelligence room,
Major Delacombe[11] was a dear old boy of illimitable good nature who,
because there was nowhere else for him to sit in the _Arcadian_, had
been pushed into a corner of the ship’s gymnasium, there to deal with
the financial affairs of the staff. To Lloyd this presence of an
outsider in the Intelligence was a perpetual outrage: a chorus girl in a
Carthusian refectory would hardly have shocked St. Bruno more than the
sight of Delacombe totting up figures behind the vaulting horse in a
corner of that disused gymnasium. When we all went ashore at the end of
the month, Lloyd’s first business, long before he bothered about his own
comfort, about which indeed, as a matter of fact, he never did bother,
being utterly ascetic, was to see Major Delacombe safely banished to the
seclusion of a small office tent of his own. I wrote a number of
doggerel rhymes about the various members of G. H. Q.; but the only one
that remains in my memory is the verse I wrote about the Royal Army Pay
Corps major:
_Where is Major Delacombe?_
_He’s no longer in this room._
_In a windy tent he sits,_
_Issuing financial chits._
_Lloyd sent Delacombe away_
_On the thirty-first of May._
But gradually that “insurmountable mental barrier” began to wear down
even George Lloyd’s resolution. He began to think that he was useless in
the position he was filling, and like some ardent monk he began to long
for greater rigours of self-mortification. He had already spent as much
time as possible at Anzac in the first few weeks of the campaign, which
meant death waiting for you round every corner all day and all night; by
the end of July he was wanting to rejoin his regiment--the Warwickshire
Yeomanry--in order to share with them the dangers and hardships of
Suvla. And let it be clear that he was not merely anxious to avoid the
appearance of escaping from the miseries of that campaign; he genuinely
desired the squalid discomfort and peril of life on the peninsula for a
spiritual value he discerned in it. Yet he was personally, as I have
insisted, the most fastidious and sensitive of men. I remember walking
with him one dark night in late summer about the camp in Kephalo, Lloyd
talking incessantly and somehow managing to avoid the tent ropes, myself
lantern in hand listening sympathetically, for there was indeed a most
endearing simplicity and singleness of heart in him. Suddenly he
screamed out in horror and began to tear down his slacks, until the
lantern light revealed one of those great centipedes like a clockwork
train which was crawling slowly over his thigh. He tore the loathsome
insect from him with a shudder, and for a minute or two he was really
gibbering with the remembrance of it.
Dear, delightful George Lloyd, if anyone could have converted me to
imperialism, it would have been you with your passionate sincerity and
high purpose and infinite seriousness. No man whose career I have been
privileged to study when only half carved has given me so much personal
satisfaction in his ultimate achievement.
But in trying to do justice to George Lloyd it will not do to leave
Colonel Ward in the reader’s mind as a merely negative personality. He
was far from being that, and for Eddie Keeling to be able usually to
refer to him as “Wardie” will perhaps indicate that in some of us he
inspired a great deal of affection.
There were moments, while he and Lloyd were arguing with one another,
the colonel in a khaki that resembled brown paper and Lloyd in a uniform
the colour of _eau de nil_ when our sympathies were strongly with the
colonel, for sometimes we felt that Lloyd’s speeches about efficiency
were too much of a good thing in that sweltering tent full of flies and
blown sand. Keeling and I enjoyed the colonel’s rich sense of the
ridiculous, and perhaps it was the lack of this in Lloyd which really
created the chasm between them. I have seen Colonel Ward so completely
overcome by the laughter to which he was as incapable of giving full
vent as to any other emotion that the tears would pour down his cheeks
in rivulets, and he would seem on the verge of an apoplexy. An allusion
to Lloyd’s relentless pursuit of Major Delacombe from his nook behind
the vaulting horse to that small wind-swept, sand-ridden tent all by
itself at the top of the Kephalo camp would lighten Colonel Ward’s gloom
in the contemplation of the most insoluble ubiquity of Turkish regiments
and set him off gurgling and choking with mirth. No doubt some of his
slowness was due to a lifelong association with heavy pieces of
ordnance: you may notice the same slowness among herdsmen. Lloyd’s
machine-gun manner affected the old artilleryman’s dignity. And let me
repeat that what Colonel Ward sometimes lost by first-hand knowledge of
the Near East he often made up for by his patient disentanglement of
fact from rumour. Moreover, his constitutional incredulity and
hesitating response to the marvellous was on occasions a valuable drag,
even on the gallant optimism of his commander-in-chief, whom, I fancy,
he irritated only a little less acutely than he irritated George Lloyd,
though for quite different reasons. When the time comes to write of 1916
and 1917 I shall probably fail to be just to a type of mind like Colonel
Ward’s, because, at whatever distance of time they may be related, the
bitterness of mistakes that need not have been made may return with as
sharp a savour as of old. But of 1915 I am writing as the mere observer
and from an angle completely unvexed by responsibility. To me Colonel
Ward was always the most considerate of chiefs, and I owe him gratitude
for too much kindness to be able to write without prejudice. Still, he
certainly was obstinate. I did try once or twice to make him regard
George Lloyd with more sympathy; but it was hopeless.
“His voice gets on my nerves, Mackenzie. I simply can’t stand it.” Thus
the colonel, glowering at his desk and swatting a fly with his horsehair
whisk.
“Yes, but, after all, Colonel, he is your Number Two in I-a, and where
would you find a more efficient one?”
“He’s a damned politician, and I hate politicians. This isn’t the place
for Members of Parliament. He treats me as if I was a bloody idiot.”
And then with that puckering of his face and slight thickening of an
already thickish enunciation he would growl that if _I_ had nothing to
do _he_ had, and that anyway he had heard enough quacking this morning
to last him for some time.
“You go and talk to Captain George Lloyd, M. P. He likes talking better
than I do.”
But when George Lloyd was working he wanted to talk as little as the
colonel. One might as well have tried to interrupt a poet’s frenzy. I
shall never forget the expression of pale, immeasurable contempt on
Lloyd’s face when he found that Eddie Keeling and I had instituted cups
of thick, sweet Turkish coffee in the tent at eleven o’clock every
morning: we might both have been sitting there with rubber teats in our
mouths. But my pen is running ahead too fast. These incidents of life in
that hot, windy, fly-blown camp on the rolling links of Kephalo must
wait awhile.
The first two or three days in the _Arcadian_ were spent in getting to
know people. This may sound an odd way to spend one’s time on active
service, but it must be remembered that I was not taken seriously as an
officer. No job had as yet been found for me. I hoped to be able to
imagine that I was being useful in due course. Meanwhile, if I could
avoid being a positive nuisance I might count myself lucky. There was
another in the _Arcadian_ who was bemoaning the absence of a job, and
this was “Bob” Graves.[12] He was bemoaning even more bitterly the fact
that he lacked a commission. Graves was a tall, slim, straight, hale,
and very athletic man of fifty-seven, a distinguished member of a
distinguished family, who after being consul general in Crete and
Salonica had been adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Finance and then
adviser and inspector general to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior.
He had been fetched in a great hurry from Egypt, where he had been
occupying some important position, in order to give advice about the way
to manage Constantinople when it fell to our arms. Constantinople not
having fallen and at the moment looking some way off falling, Graves was
at a loose end. They could not very well send him back to Egypt from G.
H. Q. because that would have been an admission of pessimism, but
neither could they find any employment for him here that seemed worthy
of his position. So there he was, walking round and round the _Arcadian_
all day long in a khaki uniform without badges or stars or buttons and
only the saxe-blue and crimson ribbon of St. Michael and St. George to
lighten the drabness of its aspect, for in the circumstances he was
debarred from sporting his Grand Cordon of the Medjidie. Naturally, as
one would to a man of his seniority and service, I addressed him the
first time as “Mr. Graves.” And then he let fly. He did not wish to be
known as “Mr. Graves.” He hated at this moment to be loafing about here
and doing nothing and being called “Mr. Graves.” He wanted some kind of
military rank and status, however humble, so that if no job could be
found for him at G. H. Q. he could find a job for himself on the
peninsula. He objected to being treated as an old gentleman. They seemed
to think that because they could not make him a colonel or a general and
give him the military equivalent of his position in real life, they were
doing him a kindness by giving him no military rank at all.
As soon as I had sufficient status at G. H. Q. I spoke to several people
about the unnecessary suffering they were causing poor Graves by cooping
him up here in the _Arcadian_ without making him even a second
lieutenant. I said I believed he would rather be a temporary lance
corporal than go on walking round and round the deck of the _Arcadian_
at four miles an hour without a stripe or a star and always referred to
as “Mr. Graves.” People listened sympathetically, but they all agreed
that nothing could be done about it and that Graves would have to go on
as he was until Constantinople fell and he could become the Grand
Vizier. It seemed to me an awful thing that a man who knew as much as
anybody about the Near East should be eating his heart out in idleness
merely because the military authorities were too shy to offer him any
smaller job than the administration of Constantinople, for which they
had engaged his services. And then on top of his other thwarted
ambitions Graves was seized with a longing to play squash rackets, and
though he began to make a habit of walking round the _Arcadian_ at five
miles an hour, this did not allay his unsatisfied desire for a really
violent game of ball. I am glad to remember that it was myself who, for
purely selfish reasons, found a job for Graves in the end, and since
about the same time he was made a staff captain he soon had only the
absence of a racket court to lament.
There were several good stories of Lord Kitchener told in the dining
saloon those first two or three days after my arrival, of which memory
has preserved one fairly intact. It was told, I think, by Major Fuller,
R. E.,[13] a great K man, sharp featured, intelligent, with a quick
incisive voice, who being married to a Russian was convinced that the
chief mess we had made of the war so far was our complete failure to
appreciate what Russia was doing and still might do.
Once upon a time the civic dignitaries of some town wanted to make a
presentation to Lord Kitchener as a mark of their regard for his
genius. They were told that the best thing they could give him would be
a piece of china. So a piece of china was bought, but being aware of the
great man’s expert knowledge of china the donors were anxious to know if
the piece they proposed to give him was likely to meet with his
approval. Without saying a word to him, it was put on the table at a
civic lunch in the hope that his favourable opinion of it would reassure
their anxiety about its acceptableness to a connoisseur. Now it really
was a very fine and rare piece, and as soon as the great man sat down at
table he cocked an appraising eye upon it. While the dignitaries were
waiting for the verdict Lord Kitchener, who knew nothing about the
presentation, had been deciding that he must somehow secure that piece
for his own collection, and also that he must buy it cheap. So with this
object in view he observed in his gruffest voice that the piece was not
genuine, at which the poor dignitaries were so much depressed that they
said not a word about the intended gift and took the china back to the
dealers! I have just been rereading Sir Ian Hamilton’s _Gallipoli
Diary_, and it is remarkable how often in Lord Kitchener’s
correspondence the spirit which led him to cheapen that piece of china
betrays itself.
Though this chapter is already so much more full of people than of
scenes and events, I must chronicle the appearance of one whom I had
last met near midnight in the top digs of a house in King Edward Street,
Oxford, when on opening the window to a loud tap Aubrey Herbert[14] came
peering in, on his way back from Christ Church to Balliol by roofs,
gutters, parapets, pipes, and window sills. Everybody who knew Aubrey
Herbert will understand how one’s heart would leap to see him come
peering up the side of the _Arcadian_ on that blue May day in 1915. He
had arrived from Anzac to ask Sir Ian’s permission to arrange a truce to
bury the dead. I had the chance of a long gossip with him as we walked
round and round the deck in a series of rapid diagonals, for Aubrey was
so shortsighted that he really could not see even well enough to walk
straight. I think he was holding forth passionately about the woes of
the Turks and the beauty of their characters, gripping my arm from time
to time and exclaiming “My dear, we _must_ do this,” or “My dear, we
_must_ do that.” As we zigzagged along I suddenly became aware that a
shape was following our course, though what that shape was I did not
dare for a moment to look round and ascertain, so acutely was I aware of
a menace, an almost diabolical menace in its shadowing. At last I
plucked up courage to turn my head. Imagine my dismay when I saw the
commander of the _Arcadian_, his cheeks an angry crimson, stalking along
the deck after us with the air of one who is tracking a pair of
assassins. The faintness of despair came over me. His eyes protruding
like a Bateman admiral’s were fixed upon a meandering line of ink stains
that stretched from one end of the deck to the other. I looked at
Aubrey. Yes, there in the pocket of his service jacket, or rather fixed
to the outside of it, was a fountain pen that was dripping with every
step he took. I played a coward’s part.
“Aubrey,” I said, “I must run now. And, by the way, I think your pen’s
leaking or something.”
I cannot remember what steps were taken to restore the commander of the
_Arcadian_ to consciousness, but I do remember that those ink spots were
still traceable when we went ashore ten days later.
Two years afterward on Easter morning (old style) the _Arcadian_ was
torpedoed off the island of Sikinos[15] in full sight of horrified
people walking on the cliffs after Mass to greet one another with the
joyful salutation Χριστὸς ἀνἐστη--Christ is risen. My representative in
Sikinos telegraphed to me in Syra that she sank in two minutes and that
many lives had been lost. The _Arcadian_ lies fathoms down in the blue
Ægean with those ink stains on her deck, and now he whose pen made them
has gone too.
Sir Ian Hamilton said that before any job could be found for me in the
Intelligence at G. H. Q. my position would have to be regularized by
formally requesting the loan of my services from the general commanding
the Royal Naval Division. This must be done in writing through the
adjutant general and I could take over the letter myself to Divisional
Headquarters, which would give me an opportunity to see something of
conditions on the peninsula. So Colonel Beynon wrote out:
To G. O. C.
R. N. D.
The services of Lieut. E. M. C. Mackenzie, R. M., H. M. S.
_Victory_, can be usefully employed in G. H. Q. (I) if you have no
need for them.
It struck me, while Colonel Beynon[16] was making this statement in
black and white, that General Woodward[17] the A. G. seemed to think all
this excess of courtesy a waste of his A. A. G.’s time. Some days after
this I was told that he had not yet received any recognition of the part
he had played in the dispatch of the expeditionary force to France in
August, 1914, for the success of which he had been chiefly responsible.
Moreover, I have gathered since that Sir Ian Hamilton had found in him
one of those “insurmountable mental barriers” on several occasions out
here. So perhaps the wintry glance with which he seemed to freeze that
testimonial to my utility was less personal than I supposed. I can see
him now, a lonely, somewhat shrivelled little man to my fancy, nearly
always taking his exercise by himself up and down between the rows of
tents at Kephalo. So many individual judgments at variance out there,
so many separate prisons of the mind and small islands of thwarted
hopes! But what was I imagining of them with the excitement of going to
Helles in a trawler to-morrow? And how much would I have bothered about
them if I had, deliciously swirling as I was in the miniature whirlpool
of my own adventures? My position was going to be “regularized” as the
jargon put it. This time I should not be straying about in the confusion
of that beach like a nervous child, and hanging on to the impeccable
Kenny’s slightly, but only very slightly, impatient hand.
CHAPTER VI
HELLES
The harbour of Kephalo was, in fact, little better than an open
roadstead, and sheltered only from the south and west. It was a safer
anchorage than any water round Tenedos, being as conveniently placed for
Helles, from which it was twelve miles away, as for Anzac, from which it
was fifteen; but that was the most that could be said in its favour.
Virgil’s line about Tenedos in the Second Æneid, “_nunc tantum sinus et
statio male fida carinis_,” (a mere bay and a treacherous berth for
ships.), applied equally well to Kephalo in Imbros. It was on Saturday,
the twenty-second of May, that I set out from here in a trawler for
Helles in order to get my position at G. H. Q. “regularized.”
The long line of the tawny peninsula cliffs on our port side looked so
harmless that morning. It seemed impossible to fancy that the vessel
could not swing lazily in toward them over that limpid blue water and
land us in some jolly cove where we might bathe and picnic at our
leisure and afterward explore those green summits and verdurous chines.
The voyage between Imbros and Helles would too soon become as hackneyed
and monotonous as the road to the railway station, but that morning the
beauty of it was all a dream and a surprise. The island mountain of
Samothrace came into view, towering beyond Imbros six thousand feet into
an azure serenity. I remembered how Poseidon once sat upon its wooded
peak to watch by Troy the Battle of the Ships, and how he had stabled
his horses in a cavern of the sea between Imbros and Tenedos when he
descended to the Greek camp in the form of Calchas the Herald and
roused the Greater and the Lesser Ajax to resist with new valour the
onslaught of Hector. Gradually, as the trawler held on her calm course,
Imbros assumed its long wave of line and the cone of Mount Elias on
Tenedos stood out sharply from the southern horizon. Now Ida and the
mountains beyond the Asiatic shore came more clearly into view, and I
thought of Hera winging her way with Sleep, the twin brother of Death,
from Lemnos and Imbros over this same sea to many-fountained Ida that
there she might lull Zeus by excess of love to sleep, and thus allow his
brother, the Earth Shaker, to harass the Trojans harder and still harder
until even his favourite Hector fell, smitten on the neck by that mighty
stone which Telamonian Ajax hurled, so that he lay gasping and vomiting
blood....
“You write, don’t you?” a bland voice broke in, dispelling these Homeric
evocations.
I looked up to see a tall thin elderly man with a gray moustache and the
black velvet tabs of a general in the Indian Medical Service. This was
Surgeon-General W. E. Birrell, the Director of Medical Services at G. H.
Q. I fancied for a moment that he was going to feel my pulse when I
admitted that I did, so much concern was written on his countenance.
“But tell me,” he went on. “Do you really make a living by it?”
“Yes.”
“By writing novels, I mean?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Extraordinary!” he ejaculated in bewilderment. “But do you seriously
mean to tell me that people buy enough of your books to support you?”
“So far, they have, General.”
“Well, it’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard. I couldn’t
believe it when somebody told me about you on the _Arcadian_. I never
had the least idea that people ever dreamed of buying books to that
extent. Why, I never bought a book in my life! Ah, yes ... I may have
bought a magazine occasionally.... You know, at some railway station
perhaps on my way to Ireland to go fishing. But never a book. It’s most
interesting to learn that you can sell enough books to live on. Most
interesting and most extraordinary! I would never have believed it if
you hadn’t told me so yourself. How do you think of a book? Do you just
sit down and think?... I don’t want to seem inquisitive, but I’ve never
come into contact with this kind of thing before.”
My attempt to explain the process of writing a book failed to interest
General Birrell as much as he fancied it might, for he soon turned away
and presently he was wagging his head gravely at the other end of the
trawler over this queer business of earning a living out of books.
The letter to General Paris[18] had been addressed to G. O. C. R. N. D.,
Lancashire Landing; but when I inquired on the beach for the
headquarters of the Naval Division most people seemed to doubt the
existence of such a corps, and as for General Paris, I might have been
asking the way to the address of somebody residing in the moon. However,
after wandering about like a schoolboy who has gone to the wrong
terminus on an August bank holiday I managed at last to get directed to
my destination, and leaving behind me the noise and confusion of that
dusty amphitheatre by the sea I found myself on a road that led toward a
gray-green expanse of flat, empty country in which the only sound was
the singing of the larks overhead and the faint music of the telephone
wires that glittered here and there in the sunlight like strands of
gossamer. Presently I reached a field ambulance station by the edge of a
gulley running westward. These clustered white tents with their Red
Cross flags fluttering looked fresh and neat and cheerful. Here I
inquired again for the headquarters of the R. N. D., and was told to
keep on in the direction of what looked like factory chimneys emerging
from groves of trees on the easterly side of the peninsula, but which
were actually the remains of a Roman aqueduct. The road came to an end
somewhere at this point, and I walked on for a while over stunted scrub
until I noticed on the ground a lark’s nest with four or five eggs in it
which seemed to make me suddenly aware of my own loneliness. I stopped
to look round for the sight of another human being, but some trick of
the level here evoked an illusion that I was the only creature left to
wander about this tongue of land, and that the ships upon that sheen of
silver water beyond were dreaming there at rest forever in unimaginable
remoteness. The aspect of Achi Baba from here gave it a much more
gradual elevation, and the lustrous live scarlet of all those poppies
had within a week dulled into the dingy brownish crimson of an old
bloodstain.
At this moment the empty air suddenly became full of whispers. I walked
on, wondering what they were. The whispers turned to attenuated Æolian
whinnyings, a haunting half-melodious sound rising and falling. I
stopped again and listened anxiously. The question I had to ask set my
heart thudding. Was this.... Could this actually be the noise of shells?
Or was it not the singing of the light May breeze along the telephone
wires? Was it that which made these will-o’-the-wisp sighs? No, it was
never the light May breeze, and therefore it could only be the noise of
shells. Yes, but whose shells? I should look such a duffer if I were to
start running or even walking faster than usual to avoid shells intended
to burst four miles away on Achi Baba. I tried to determine from which
direction the whinnying came, but it was circumambient, ubiquitous,
inestimable. The most encouraging part about it was that nowhere could I
perceive the least material disturbance of the landscape. The larks went
on singing away overhead: the telephone wires now running along near the
ground hummed as peacefully as a kettle on the hob. And then, as if to
add a final touch to the atmosphere of tranquillity and leisure all
around, a tortoise came crawling clumsily through the dwarf scrub at my
feet. I told myself that if this tortoise had been crawling about here
for the last month at that pace without suffering any harm, it would be
deliberate cowardice on my part to start running, however much I might
feel inclined to do so. I also reminded myself that if destiny intended
me to be killed at Gallipoli, it would mean that I had done the work
required of me in this world and that for me to desire to prolong my
stay here a moment after that consummation would be ignoble. I decided
then that nothing would ever shake my conviction that no human being’s
existence depended upon blind chance. And nothing since ever has shaken
it.
Meanwhile, my immediate business was to reach Divisional Headquarters,
and feeling curiously invulnerable (for the self-confidence or vanity of
the artist had by now decided he had not outlived his capacity for
valuable work) I walked on at the same pace I had used since I first
started to ascend from the confused and noisy beach and found myself in
this sage-green solitude. The shells continued to whinny past. Now and
then one that was presumably travelling nearer to myself seemed
positively to neigh, while others much farther off seemed to ... seemed
to make what kind of a sound, I asked myself ... well, really, almost to
give the same kind of sibilant chirrup that goldfinches utter in their
dipping flight toward some distant paradise of thistledown. I had paused
to achieve this comparison, and in the very instant of its achievement
the hell of a bang went off quite close and made me jump a yard into the
air.
After this I ran for about a hundred yards and, in spite of my
philosophical reflections on destiny, might have continued running all
the rest of the way to Divisional Headquarters had I not sighted a long
double line of mules, with men in shirt sleeves moving about their
business. Like a figure in a dream I recognized the Army Service Corps
colonel who had been senior officer on board the _Franconia_ coming from
Alexandria. He was wearing the same shade of _eau de nil_ khaki as
George Lloyd’s, and had stopped to stare over his shoulder at myself. I
waved to him rather excitably with a vague hope he might attribute that
hundred yard sprint of mine to the intense pleasure the sight of his
face had given me. However, while he was still trying to make out who I
was, there was another bang, at which all the mules started to fling
their hind legs in the air and the colonel himself to run. I only did
not run in the same direction as he did because I thought I would rather
be hit by a shell than by the hoof of a mule. After another quarter of a
mile of walking in a style that would certainly have disqualified me in
a walking race I reached the outskirts of a small olive grove, and
seeing a man in shirt sleeves strolling along with two buckets, as if he
were on his way to feed some pigs round the corner, I called out and
asked him where exactly Divisional Headquarters were. For answer he sat
down abruptly in a bush. I thought he had tripped over something till I
came up to him and found he had been hit in the forearm by a shrapnel
bullet.
“These Turks are proper blighters, sir,” he observed, clicking his
tongue reproachfully at the wound.
I was ignorant of the etiquette for such an occasion, and the good chap
seemed to realize my embarrassment, for he advised me to hurry on and
get under cover. General Paris’s dugout was only a few yards beyond the
trees, and as for himself the doctor was handy.
“But this don’t mean Alex,” he said with a rueful shake of the head. “Or
I don’t think so,” he added, yet with a note of optimism in his voice as
the blood gushed encouragingly.
A minute or two later I was saluting in the entrance of General Paris’s
dugout.
“You’d better come inside,” said a burly, florid man with a white
moustache who was sitting at a camp table some two yards into the earth.
“A fellow was hit in the foot yesterday just where you’re standing
now.”
I never had the fortune to serve directly under General Paris, nor even
to see much more of him than I saw for perhaps ten minutes that May
morning: but from that brief acquaintance he left on my mind a clear-cut
impression of sensitiveness, high courage, prudence, and great human
sympathy. He took the piece of paper on which so polite an application
had been made for my services, and wrote: “Certainly. There is no work
for another Intelligence Officer with the Division.” Then he scratched
out G. O. C., R. N. D. on the envelope, substituted A. A. G., G. H. Q.,
put the piece of paper inside, and handed it back to me. It all reminded
me very much of the Dodo’s solemn presentation to Alice of her own
thimble as a prize for the Caucus race which everybody won. I could not
feel that my visit here for the loan of my services had any more
importance in actuality than the winning of that race nor that the buff
envelope, which almost as soon as I had taken it from my pocket was
handed back to me, had any more significance than the thimble.
After this visit to the general I interviewed the paymaster about my pay
and field-service allowance. He made what seemed to me the sensible
suggestion that I should get my money from Major Delacombe at G. H. Q.,
who would be able to recover it from him. Little did I think, when I
lightly assented to this plan, that over two years would elapse and a
pile of correspondence nearly two feet high rear itself on my desk
before I got that pay or those allowances, owing to the fact that no
system had ever been discovered or could ever be contrived by which an
army paymaster like Major Delacombe might be authorized to hand over
money to an officer on the books of the Royal Navy. Thus the only means
by which I could get my money was by taking a trawler to Helles and
walking over to the headquarters of my division. This always meant
getting heavily shelled, and finally, having decided that life was worth
more than thirteen shillings and sixpence a day, I gave up trying to
draw my pay or allowances at Gallipoli and built the ground floor of
that tower of correspondence.
The paymaster at D. H. Q. hospitably invited me to stop and have lunch
with the divisional staff, and seeing a table laid with metal plates on
each of which was a rissole like a small cannon ball, I had no
hesitation in accepting. It looked so jolly in the dappled shade of the
trees, that long wooden table set about three feet below the level of
the ground in a narrow shed open along one side and roofed with
corrugated iron under a thatch of brushwood, such a real Arcadia,
compared with the G. H. Q. ship. I cannot remember whom of the R. N. D.
staff I met, because at the moment I was being introduced to them a most
damnable racket began, which lasted for five minutes, and I gathered
that this devil’s dinner gong was being sounded by the enemy. In the
middle of it one of the marine interpreters I had met in the trawler
going to Tenedos last Monday came hurtling round the corner and
exclaiming as he leaped down into the mess that the last one had damn
nearly got him. I saw no valid reason why the next one should not damn
nearly get him also, or me either, or any of us if it came to that. But
as it was evidently the use to pretend that we were quite safe in this
rustic henhouse I toyed with my rissole, which not only looked like a
cannon ball but tasted like one too, owing to my dislike of high
explosive as an _apèritif_ and the drought in my mouth. I think we were
all glad when the noise stopped, for while we went on wondering when
Italy would really come in (though personally I was wondering much more
anxiously when one of those confounded shells would really come in)
there was in our behaviour a hint of the forced cheerfulness with which
a picnic party watches a heavy thunderstorm from an inadequate shelter;
nor could we even pretend that this particular storm would freshen up
the herbaceous border.
After lunch I was directed back to the beach by a quicker and a quieter
road than the one I came by. There was only one shrapnel burst on my way
along, but that was near enough for some of the bullets to kick the
dust up round my feet. Nothing else unpleasant happened till I passed
the body of a mule, on which a small whizz-bang must have registered a
direct hit, for it looked like a heap of pink toy balloons.
I was sustained during this walk back by the hope of obtaining some
Royal Marine buttons and badges at the R. N. D. Ordnance Stores, but
though there were neither buttons nor badges, I found in charge, Bernard
Wallis, an Oxford contemporary of mine, which more than made up for the
disappointment. Of all the dugouts I was to enter on the peninsula none
ever surpassed his for absolute dreariness. There were dugouts built in
the side of the cliff just above the pier at Lancashire Landing, such a
row, for instance, as the one known as Sea View Terrace, which would
have delighted children by what Americans call “cunningness.” There were
dugouts at Anzac which by reason of their owners’ having had to dig
deeper and yet deeper to dodge the incessant shells which came ferreting
through their burrows had achieved enough romantic mystery to be an
imaginable abode for trolls or gnomes. But the dugout of Bernard Wallis
was repulsive in its dank symmetry. An oblong about nine feet in length,
three feet wide, and three feet deep had been excavated in some fairly
level ground between the aërodrome and W beach. The last three feet had
then been covered over with planks and soil and prolonged round the
corner at right angles for another six feet to give a shelter for the
occupant’s bed from everything except such fragments of shell as chose
to attack his ankles by entering along the open ditch in front. Yet the
dismal geometry was not the worst part of this dugout. Dust tormented
though they were, the refuges nearer the beach had a sun-tanned healthy
look, but the soil here was a kind of grayish clay exuding a cadaverous
moisture like sweat on the forehead of a seasick man. Fat flies seemed
to find the sides of this dugout refreshing, for they would return again
and again to bask on them in the slanting rays of the sun. The real
plague of flies had hardly begun yet, but there were enough of them
here already because mules were picketed close by. Bernard Wallis
himself was looking jaded, as his preoccupation with stores in this
squalid grave amid dust and flies and rattling wheels and gunfire was
enough to make a man who had left Balliol to enter the Board of
Education. No doubt we talked of old friends. I dare say he gave me tea,
but I do not remember that. I only remember a piece of crumpled silver
paper lying in the corner, which somehow added the final touch of
squalor to that wretched ditch. Just before I left to walk down to the
beach and board the trawler for Imbros, I was standing by the edge of
that slug-coloured grave, chatting to a trim-bearded chief petty officer
when he suddenly gripped my arm and dragged me down into it, yelling:
“Look out, here comes a Black Maria!” We all three flung ourselves on
our faces; but there was no explosion. It had been the whinnying of a
mule which had made the chief petty officer anticipate a big shell. This
was satisfactory because it proved that my comparison on the way to
Divisional Headquarters had been a good one. I often noticed after that
the way men would jump and listen over their shoulders when suddenly a
horse whinnied somewhere in the neighbourhood. Yet I often found the
accuracy of the comparison doubted. That’s the trouble with English
nowadays. The language has caked into phrases, and the shape of the
individual word grows daily less distinguishable. Shells whine for
nineteen listeners out of twenty, but though I have listened to nearly
every kind of shell I have never heard one of the brutes utter a genuine
whine. The most terrifying noise was that of big bombs being dropped
from a Taube over the aërodrome. This was an appallingly exultant
ooooh-ah-ooooh-ah--oooh-ah--oooh-ah--oooh-ah--ooh-ah--ooh-ah--ooh-ah--ooh-ah
quicker and quicker until the blinding bang at the end left the heart
twitching and gasping like a flatfish on the floor of a boat.
Frightening, too, were the steel arrows which were sometimes used by the
enemy at that date and which sounded like the prolonged infinitely
attenuated scream of a swooping hawk.
I wrote a few pages back about the ships at rest upon a sheen of silver
water. They were not to rest there much longer. The fatal periscope had
been sighted that very afternoon. A signal was made to quit the
anchorage off Helles and fly to Mudros fifty miles away. Before I
embarked on the Kephalo trawler I saw them in full flight, transports
and battleships, the _Agamemnon_ seeming to lead the van. The air was
heavy that evening and, what wind there was being in the south, the
smoke of every ship was driven down astern, which gave the effect of a
number of dogs running away with their tails between their legs. The
sense of abandonment was acute. There was a sudden lull in the noise of
the beach, as if every man had paused to stare at the unfamiliar
emptiness of the water and then turned to his neighbour with a question
in his eyes about their future here. It is certain that the Royal Navy
never executed a more demoralizing manœuvre in the whole of its history.
The morning after this being Whitsunday, I asked leave to go to Helles
again on the chance of getting a Mass in the French lines. This pious
hope was frustrated by the lateness of the trawler in reaching the
peninsula. I think I must have been with one of the G. H. Q. liaison
officers with French Headquarters, for I was invited to lunch with
General Gouraud and his staff in the big fort at Sedd-el-Bahr. I
wandered about by myself on V beach for the rest of the morning, looked
with awe at the rusted bulk of the _River Clyde_, and knelt for a few
moments by those two long graves, at the head of which a painted board
commemorated: “Gallant dead of the Dublins and Munsters and others.”
Reading _Lyra Graeca_ the other day with the help of Mr. Edmonds’s
translation I came across a wonderful elegiac couplet from Simonides,
which written nearly two thousand five hundred years ago might have
served for all who fell at Gallipoli:
... ἀμφί τε βυξάντειαν ὃσοι θάνον ἰχθυόεσσαν
ῥυόμενοι πορέαν, ἄνδρες ἀρηιθόοι.
[ ... _and those who died before Byzantium, to save the fishy
straits of the sea, men swift in the work of war_.]
On the sandy slope up from the beach were some burrows of a French
Colonial regiment. The faces of these men in their light blue uniforms
with golden anchors for a badge horrified me in some way. I cannot
explain why. They seemed to have no business to be cooking their midday
meal with such red, greedy faces and with such an obviously sensual
enjoyment of their squalor. They seemed to have no business to be alive
at all. Again I ponder over that scene which is still so vivid and I ask
myself if the disgust I felt was that which makes one turn from a
bedraggled cat. The cat is not meant to be bedraggled; it requires
luxury to maintain its personality. So, too, with the Frenchman. From
the moment he is degraded below the level of his sleek normal existence
he becomes much more completely brutalized than any other national.
Those light-blue animals with human eyes, scratching themselves and
wolfing their food in the entrances of their sandy burrows, remain most
horribly in my fancy, they and the stale smell of death above them in
the crystalline air.
It was a relief to search for and find the grave of Doughty-Wylie higher
up. Had a telegram from Sir Ian Hamilton which was sent on the eleventh
of April reached me I should have met that hero. He had stood here,
waving the Dublins and Munsters on with a cane until he was killed. They
had followed him, and the village of Sedd-el-Bahr fell.
That mediæval village was a picturesque place, and though the cypresses
round the mosque had been shorn and pollarded by the guns of the _Queen
Elizabeth_, there were still many fruit trees untouched, figs and
pomegranates in high-walled Turkish gardens which cast their shade over
narrow entries and winding secluded ways. General Gouraud and his staff
were lodged in the castellated fort, and the bearded general himself
presided like a patriarch seated at the big circular mess table in that
shadowy dome, which was bricked, as I seem to remember, like a Byzantine
apse. Farther round was General Bailloud, the liveliest old man on the
peninsula, a bald-headed veteran of seventy who commanded one of the
French divisions and who, with his antics and his jokes, with his apple
cheeks and shining Roman nose, his many medals and bright uniform,
suggested the presence there of a punchinello in a light-blue satin
doublet hung with jingling bells. The news of Italy’s entry into the war
was drunk in red wine. _Vive l’Italie!_ It was the first and last time I
heard that salutation from the lips of Frenchmen throughout the war.
This was France at France’s most magical best, this gaiety and
ceremoniousness and wit and deep-throated bubbling conversation. There
were no windows in the dome; the light entered through the door--a
single azurous and dazzling aperture for the whole of that great shadowy
interior.
Soon after the coffee and cognac, a shell from a big gun on the Asiatic
shore struck V beach, and those of us who had to get back to Lancashire
Landing were advised to start on our way before they began to shell the
road. So off we set with only one pause to look back from the top of the
rise and receive a benevolent wave from the general standing in the
entrance of his patriarchal hall. Then we dipped down the soft dusty
road out of sight of Sedd-el-Bahr. Another shell crashed on the beach
behind us on the left, and we hurried a little faster. But the enemy was
in a quiet lazy mood. Nothing else disturbed our walk back to Lancashire
Landing. It was very hot; too hot really to shoot much. Even the French
75’s only had one spasm of violent barking, and they were ready to bark
at a mouse if the forward observation officer told them to. But this
afternoon it was so hot that he had probably laid his glasses down on
the sill of the observation post to sit back for an hour and let his
spirit wander along the shady side of his favourite boulevard, or
beneath the chestnut blossom in the Bois de Boulogne.
On Whitmonday in the company of several officers from G. H. Q. I went
over to Anzac, where there was a truce of eight hours for the Turks to
bury their dead. It has never been perfectly clear who really did ask
for this truce. Liman Von Sanders says we did; Sir Ian Hamilton says
they did. My own opinion is that Aubrey Herbert alone was responsible
for it. A ludicrous incident occurred when the preliminaries were being
discussed by various officers of high rank on both sides. They were
gathered in a tent on the beach at Anzac, those brass hats and beys, all
of them probably feeling a little more anxious than usual to uphold the
dignity of their respective nations, when suddenly the flap was lifted
at the back and a New Zealander or Australian batman put his head
through to call out in a voice of indignant contempt:
“Heh! Have any of you muckers pinched my kettle?”
There was heavy rain that morning for most of the fifteen miles to
Anzac; but it cleared away before we went ashore from the torpedo boat
and it left behind a hotter, damper, more airless day than I could match
in all my experience of the Italian _scirocco_. As we turned the corner
of that famous narrow beach running along the base of the steep tawny
cliffs and started to walk up the Valley of Death, a stretcher came
rapidly past, on which I was horrified to recognize, with head thrown
back and mouth agape, stertorously breathing, the prostrate body of my
old friend, Harry Pirie-Gordon, with whom I had shared rooms at 43 High
Street, Oxford, in 1903-1904. He was not desperately wounded, I was
relieved to find, but suffering from acute ptomaine poisoning and was
being hurried away as quickly as possible to a hospital ship. It was a
tremendous shock to meet like this a man whom I had known intimately
since we were seventeen, but of whose presence out here I was completely
unaware until I saw his body sweep past me in the swirl of that crowded
narrow beach. Bits of scenes from our past together kept intruding even
upon that most fantastic scene of the actual moment.... Pirie-Gordon
riding back in Moorish dress from Tetuan to Tangier ... being attacked
by dogs as we rode through a village at dusk and Pirie-Gordon’s mount
shying into a hedge of prickly pears and his Moorish costume getting
ripped open.... Pirie-Gordon’s face when he was told in the hotel at
Tangier that our porter had fallen into a river with all his European
clothes, so that for some hours he was faced by the prospect of having
to cross to Spain in a costume split open from the waist downward like
the dress of a _merveilleuse_ ... myself lying prostrate with
seasickness in the gaudy packet to Algeciras ... being hurried by the
police out of Barcelona where the barricades were up in the streets and
left stranded on a cold January midnight in Toulouse ... running out of
money ... intense hunger on the journey home because we could not afford
to buy ourselves anything to eat after Barcelona ... snatching in
desperation at two sweets with soft chocolate insides which a fellow
passenger had left in his dinner basket when he got out of the train to
buy himself a paper at Limoges ... we were eighteen years old then ...
and now at thirty-two this incredible place!
It had been hot enough down by the water’s edge but the farther we
penetrated up the Valley of Death the hotter it became. The sun had
broken through the silver mist above, and the wet verdure from the
arbutus bushes all the way along the gradually narrowing ravine was
exhaled in steam. Almost to the very top the steep slopes were riddled
with dugouts, some as apparently inaccessible as sand martins’ holes in
the face of a quarry. Outside a dugout beside the path a couple of tall
Australians were sitting with nothing on but shorts. One of them was
holding up the pannikin that held his restricted allowance of water.
“Now, if I was a mucking canary,” he was murmuring pensively, “I might
have a bath in this.”
Much has been written about the splendid appearance of those Australian
troops; but a splendid appearance seems to introduce somehow an
atmosphere of the parade ground. Such litheness and powerful grace did
not want the parade ground; that was to take it from the jungle to the
circus. Their beauty, for it really was heroic, should have been
celebrated in hexameters not headlines. As a child I used to pore for
hours over those illustrations of Flaxman for Homer and Virgil which
simulated the effect of ancient pottery. There was not one of those
glorious young men I saw that day who might not himself have been Ajax
or Diomed, Hector or Achilles. Their almost complete nudity, their
tallness and majestic simplicity of line, their rose-browned flesh
burned by the sun and purged of all grossness by the ordeal through
which they were passing, all these united to create something as near to
absolute beauty as I shall hope ever to see in this world. The dark
glossy green of the arbutus leaves made an incomparable background for
these shapes of heroes, and the very soil here had taken on the same
tawny rose as that living flesh; one might have fancied that the dead
had stained it to this rich warmth of apricot.
On and on we walked. Major Jack Churchill was setting a cracker of a
pace. He was a beefy man, and by now his round cheeks were as wet and
crimson as the cistus flowers in the scrub. I caught sight of a bush
with deep, orange-buff blossoms among the undergrowth on the left, and
after scrambling up to identify it found a phlomis of Jerusalem sage I
had never seen before. When I came back to the sticky path between the
now fast-closing sides of the ravine I overtook Pollen[19], Sir Ian
Hamilton’s military secretary, talking to three Australians, not one of
whom was less than six feet four inches tall. Pollen, who had a soft,
somewhat ecclesiastical, voice, was saying:
“Have you chaps heard that they’ve given General Bridges[20] a
posthumous K. C. M. G.?”
“Have they?” one of the giants replied. “Well, that won’t do him much
good where he is now, will it, mate?”
Poor Pollen, who was longing to be sympathetic and not to mind the way
these Australians would stare at his red tabs without saluting, walked
on a little depressed by the reception of his effort at making
conversation, perhaps on the very spot where General Bridges had been
mortally wounded. He looked carefully at the ground when he met the next
lot, whereupon they all gave him an elaborate salute, and then because
he had looked up too late to acknowledge it one of them turned to the
others and said:
“I suppose that’s what they call breeding?”
They really were rather difficult; and so, no doubt, was Achilles.
At last dripping with sweat--I merely emphasize our discomfort in
walking up this valley during a truce to suggest what it was like for
the men who had to walk backward and forward here every day under fire
from three directions--dripping with sweat, we reached an almost
perpendicular cliff, up which it was difficult enough to scramble by
that narrow zigzag of sticky mud with only a cane and a burberry. What
it must have been for men in full equipment to storm the face of that
cliff at the bayonet’s point ... or for wounded men and stretcher
bearers to descend....
Somebody turned round to offer me a cigar.
“You’d better light up this.”
And as I paused for a moment in perplexity to wonder why I should
exhaust by smoking what wind I had left, the smell of death floated over
the ridge above and settled down upon us, tangible, it seemed, and
clammy as the membrane of a bat’s wing.
Immediately along the top of the ridge were the trenches of Quinn’s Post
with the Turkish trenches hardly twenty yards beyond. I clambered up on
the parapet and stood there staring at the forbidden land which rolled
away in gray-green bosky undulations as far as the eye could reach, and
I remember thinking how much it reminded me of some serene estate over
which brooded that immemorial hush of the game preserve. In the
foreground was a narrow stretch of level scrub along which flags were
stuck at intervals and a line of sentries, Australians and Turks, faced
one another. Staff officers of both sides were standing around in little
groups, and there was an atmosphere about the scene of local magnates at
the annual sports making suggestions about the start of the obstacle
race. Aubrey Herbert looked so like the indispensable bachelor that
every country neighbourhood retains to take complete control of the
proceedings on such occasions. Here he was, shuffling about, loose
gaited, his neck out-thrust and swinging from side to side as he went
peering up into people’s faces to see whether they were the enemy or
not, so that, if they were, he could offer them cigarettes and exchange
a few courtesies with them in their own language ... and everywhere
Turks digging and digging graves for some four thousand of their
countrymen who had been putrefying in heaps along this narrow front for
nearly a month of warm May air.
“I must trouble you to get off my parapet, Major. It’s rather delicate,”
said one of the men in the front trench to Orlo Williams, who had been
surveying the scene through his glasses and by doing so nearly created
an incident.
“And you’ve got your foot in an awkward place,” he called up to me.
Looking down I saw squelching up from the ground on either side of my
boot like a rotten mangold the deliquescent green and black flesh of a
Turk’s head.
“This parapet’s pretty well made up of dead bodies,” said our friend
below, putting out his hand to help me jump back into the trench, for he
saw that I had had enough of it up there.
The impression which that scene from the ridge by Quinn’s Post made on
my mind has obliterated all the rest of the time at Anzac. I cannot
recall a single incident on the way back down the valley. I only know
that nothing could cleanse the smell of death from the nostrils for a
fortnight afterward. There was no herb so aromatic but it reeked of
carrion, not thyme nor lavender, nor even rosemary.
CHAPTER VII
LIFE AT G. H. Q.
Colonel Ward was doubtful of being able to invent any work for me when I
presented myself in the ship’s gymnasium to serve my country. The only
hope he offered was that Deedes, on his return from Helles, might find
something for me to do. Deedes was the head of I-b and, as such,
overlord of all the interpreters, responsible for the organization of
contre-espionage and the chief intermediary with the agents of
espionage. Employment under him sounded an attractive occupation, but
nobody knew when he was likely to be back from the peninsula, and I did
not want to spend my time walking round the deck of the _Arcadian_ with
Graves, lamenting our enforced idleness. Then Eddie Keeling suggested I
might take down the telegrams for him as he deciphered them. This was
too much for George Lloyd, to whom the amount of leisure Keeling already
had in which to tilt back in a chair and read novels seemed disgraceful.
“Yes,” said Lloyd grimly, “I knew they’d push you into this room. All
the odds and ends get pushed in here.”
I was aware that this remark was not intended so much for myself as for
dear old Major Delacombe away there in the corner behind the vaulting
horse, because when Lloyd spoke he lanced in the direction of the
paymaster what is called in a society far removed from the one in which
I now found myself a “perishing” look. But Major Delacombe paid no
attention to Lloyd’s ungraciousness. He just sat totting up his figures,
as quiet and unobtrusive as a well behaved bobtail sheepdog.
“However,” Lloyd continued, “if you really want to try to make yourself
useful you can take on the Intelligence Summary. I’ve not had time to
keep it up to date since the beginning of the month.”
For the benefit of those as ignorant as I was when Lloyd put down on the
desk in front of me a volume like a large diary, I must explain that an
Intelligence Summary is an abstract of all the information about the
enemy which reaches the Intelligence of the general staff during a
campaign. This is supposed to be entered up every day, and the result is
sent back at the end of the campaign to go into the archives of the War
Office for the benefit of the official historian who will one day write
the official history of that campaign. There were various sources from
which this information was bottled for drinking again in peace, among
others the reports of divisional Intelligence officers sent in to G. H.
Q. after such an examination of prisoners as I had watched Major Fiennes
conduct on the trawler going to Tenedos. The main source, however, was
provided by a number of telegrams which, though apparently emanating
from a mysterious initial in Athens I will call V, were signed with the
name of the British minister, Sir Francis Elliot. I was too shy to ask
who or what V was, which was lucky, because the portrait of him fancy
painted helped by its romantic implications to make my task seem a
little less dull than it most undoubtedly was.
Athens
May 5, 1915
Following from V
Agent Number 444 reports:
The Umpteenth Division Redif is being moved to Panderma.
The Turks are suffering from the scarcity of coffee and indignation
against the Germans increases daily.
I hear from a fairly reliable source that several large (group
undecipherable) have been placed in the windows of the Ministry of
(group undecipherable) to guard against the attacks of the allied
submarines which have created consternation in Constantinople.
ELLIOT.
This is the kind of telegram that used to come in from Athens at the
rate of ten or so a day. For obvious reasons I have merely given the
parody of an original. Many of them were two or three pages long and
full of really valuable information about the movements of the enemy’s
troops. There were telegrams, too, from various military attachés in the
Balkans, few of which were of any value. We often used to get the same
information from French G. Q. G., thus creating an impression that the
military attachés in the Balkans lived by taking in each other’s
washing. This is not intended to be a sneer at military attachés, whose
position in time of war is difficult. They are really War Office spies
on the embassies and legations to which they are posted; but few of them
have the courage to admit this to themselves, and in the struggle
between the vested interests of government departments, which war
quickens as it quickens everything, the poor military attaché usually
comes off worst of anybody.
The information from V used to be sent in a special Secret Service
cipher which would have furrowed the protuberant forehead of a senior
wrangler. Eddie Keeling used to sit muttering curses, with a small ruler
marked in millimetres in one hand and in the other the minute pocket
dictionary in which after some linear arithmetic the ruler found the
hidden word. I was inclined to accuse him of making unnecessarily heavy
weather over these telegrams from V. A few months later I was to have a
first-hand acquaintance with the infernal ingenuity of that Secret
Service cipher, and I then realized how deeply I had wronged poor
Keeling. To compromise that cipher it would have been necessary for the
enemy to get hold of the right pocket dictionary, then to secure the
right ruler, and finally to discover on what system the ruler and the
dictionary were used. Later on, to make the cipher doubly safe, this
system was changed every month.
“You’ll see the way to keep the Summary by the few days I did at the
beginning,” Lloyd told me.
“All right, but what does ‘redif’ mean, Lloyd?”
He shook his head in despair.
“Do you mean to say you don’t even know that? Well, you’d better read
through this book, which will tell you something about the Turkish
army.”
He gave me a small volume published by the War Office, armed with which
any British officer was presumed to be capable of going to war against
the Turks without making an ass of himself. Here I discovered the
difference between the Nizam or first line of troops and the Redif or
troops of the first and second reserve. I also learned to count up to a
hundred in Turkish, and the Turkish for everything military from a
regiment to a latrine. Thus mentally equipped and with a japanned tin
box to contain my paper, pencils, pens, and ink I settled down to do my
bit in the great war for civilization.
Meanwhile, on May 25th, the _Triumph_ had been torpedoed off Gaba Tepé
by the newly arrived German submarine. We saw from the _Arcadian_
survivors being taken on board the _Lord Nelson_, which was lying in
Kephalo harbour. Some were stark naked, some had boots and nothing else,
while a few more were wrapped in signal flags. Most of the drowned might
have been saved if they had not succumbed to cerebral congestion brought
on by swallowing so much salt water immediately after their midday meal.
Admiral de Robeck came on board looking very glum, and as a result of
his visit a cargo boat was moored close up on either side of the
_Arcadian_. Later that afternoon the admiral himself in the _Lord
Nelson_, accompanied by three French battleships, went zigzagging out of
Kephalo for the safety of Mudros. We were inclined to think in the
_Arcadian_ that the admiral had moored these confounded ships alongside
as a kind of grim joke to teach us soldiers to appreciate some of the
literally darker shades of a life on the ocean wave. At that time we
were under the impression that the boom stretched across the entrance of
the roadstead was genuine, with such meticulous solemnity had the
ceremony of opening and closing it every time a vessel entered or left
the roadstead always been performed. Not until we had taken ourselves
ashore did we learn that the boom had consisted of nothing more
formidable than a line of old fishing nets attached to floating corks.
Existence below decks in the _Arcadian_ was now a misery, for there was
no light in any of the cabins, and while one of our protecting craft
smelt strongly of cheese, the other, being loaded with sheep and mules,
pumped into us a steady stream of those accursed flies from which
hitherto we had been mercifully free. That night some destroyers tried
to imagine they had seen a submarine, and there was a great deal of
dashing about and firing of rockets. About two in the morning I was
awakened by an orderly’s coming into my cabin and handing me a signal to
announce that two aëroplanes had been observed going south from the
peninsula. How he had contrived to fancy that I was a suitable recipient
for such information was a mystery, but that first day of equipping
myself with the necessary vocabulary to go to war with Turkey had
exhausted me too much to sit up in my bunk and wait for their arrival.
The next day I had my first sight of Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett. The official
war correspondent, a slim man in khaki with a soft felt hat the colour
of verdigris, a camera slung round his shoulders, and an unrelaxing
expression of nervous exasperation, walked along the deck with the air
of one convinced that his presence there annoyed everybody, and that we
all wanted a jolly good dose of physic. Presently he came away from an
interview with Sir Ian Hamilton, looking the way Cassandra must have
often looked some three thousand years before. After telling me that
the whole expedition was doomed to failure and that he expected to be
torpedoed in the _Majestic_ he left the ship. I have learned since from
his book, _The Uncensored Dardanelles_, that he had just been refused
permission to send in to the press an article in which he had set forth
clearly the many reasons why the expedition could never possibly
succeed. The next day his prophecy about the _Majestic_ came true, for
she was torpedoed off Cape Helles, after which he left for Malta and
London, his slim exasperated form inhabited, one could fancy, by some
god hostile to the expedition. Yet probably the amount of harm
Ashmead-Bartlett’s pessimism wrought at home has been overestimated. He
was, after all, only one extra sack of coal unloaded on a Newcastle of
ill will.
It was impossible for us to remain indefinitely in the fly-haunted,
heavy-smelling, airless abode which the _Arcadian_ had now become. So
arrangements were made to pitch a camp temporarily for G. H. Q. on the
promontory of Kephalo in a country of rolling dunes edged by low cliffs
which crumbled like dry biscuit at a touch. It was not a good site to
choose because it was obvious that with the summer heats the
shallow-rooted herbage would wither and the place become a desert of
whirling sand. Closer at hand and sheltered from the worst of the heat
by fig trees and olives and the afternoon shadow of the hills was a
level stretch of ground cultivated by the inhabitants of a squalid
little hamlet. This would have made an excellent site for our camp, but
it was natural that the heads of G. H. Q. should dislike giving an
impression that they were making themselves too comfortable, and there
was an equally intelligible dread of suggesting that our chosen quarters
were likely to be anything but temporary. We were not to think what the
Kephalo dunes would be in July. We were to think “Yes” and thus try by
thinking “Yes” to beat down the “No” principle which mocked us from
Whitehall. Sir Ian Hamilton has been sneered at for his optimism, but
what other attitude could he have taken up? He was in the position of a
man who has to coax jibbing mules along by holding carrots in front of
them. Mr. Churchill having tried rougher methods had been badly kicked
in the process, and the one man who could have seen the Dardanelles
expedition through to a triumphant end was now Chancellor of the Duchy
of Lancaster, occupying that armchair in the cabinet which used to be
reserved for octogenarian politicians to lean back and dream of their
maiden speeches fifty years. After the treatment accorded to the First
Lord of the Admiralty Sir Ian Hamilton may be forgiven for supposing
that the only chance he had to overcome the mulish prejudice against the
expedition in England, France, and Egypt was to humour it. We who now
sit at ease, able to contemplate that tragedy from a remote tranquillity
or to peruse it in the pages of a book, in pages that are so quickly
turned over to ascertain what is coming, so easily turned back to find
out what should have been done, we shall perhaps be wisest after the
event if we bow before the ineluctable purpose of Destiny. It is in such
a mood of humility that one who was there when that tragedy was being
written day by day in blood sets it on record that for him with every
diminishing year the figure of his commander-in-chief grows larger, not
less.
And now let the trivial intervene once more, which (D.G.) the trivial
has a way of doing even in tragedies.
There were just not enough tents to go round, so Eddie Keeling and I,
being the juniors of G. H. Q., were given the last one to share. This
was lucky for me because I was still without a batman, though I was
hoping to get one from my division presently, and I was now able to
share Keeling’s sprightly, if somewhat volatile, attendant. Such was the
splendour of my companion’s toilet equipment that our tent became a
regular place of pilgrimage for “these soldiers” to visit and inhale as
it were an authentic whiff of Bond Street air. Keeling possessed three
shaving brushes, the least of which was quite three times as large as
the largest any of us had ever seen in actual use. They used to stand
up like three bushy silvery-gray shrubs, and not even the wretched
cock-eyed shelf of packing-case wood on which they grew could destroy
the lushness of their appearance. He wielded, too, the largest
india-rubber sponges we had ever seen, great honeycombs fit for the
spoiled bees of Hybla or Hymettus. At that time, I fancy, his patent
sleeping tent had not arrived, or perhaps it was that he and his batman
had not yet solved the secret of its erection. This was an affair of
green canvas which was mounted on a camp bed and inside which, visible
through a window of green gauze, the sleeper looking like a large wax
doll in a Noah’s Ark dreamed the night away unvexed by insects. When the
weather became too damnably hot this bed was pitched outside, and there,
his ciphers beside him on the pillow like a child’s toys, Eddie slept in
the glimmering starshine. We used to go and gaze at him as one goes on
tiptoe to gaze at an infant in his cot. But nothing disturbed his
perfect sleep, neither we nor the croaking of the frogs nor the distant
booming of the Helles guns. Once when an urgent telegram arrived about
midnight I remember accompanying an excited officer to wake Eddie for
its solution. There we saw him by the light of our lantern, breathing
placidly.
“An urgent telegram, Keeling!”
The Infant Jupiter stirred drowsily.
“Undo the curtains,” he murmured from the cave where he was hidden from
the ruthless jaws of Chronos.
“But aren’t you going to get up, Keeling?”
“Why should I get up? Hold the lantern still.”
And while we held it he raised himself upon his elbow and rapidly
deciphered the groups of figures.
“It was hardly worth waking me up for,” he said with a hint of bland
severity. “Fasten the curtain properly.”
And I vow before we had done so he was fast asleep again.
But I must not make it appear as if Keeling’s breaches of the
conventions of active service were the only ones to make our tent
famous. My own silk pajamas caused a certain amount of surprise.
“You can’t wear silk pajamas on active service.”
“Why not?”
“Well, they look ridiculous.”
“Damn what they look like. It’s much easier to wash silk in cold water
than those braided affairs you all wear, looking like Hungarian bandsmen
in flannelette.”
And then there was the question of my having breakfast in bed.
“You can’t have breakfast in bed on active service!”
“Why not?”
“Well, it looks ridiculous.”
“It would not only look, it would actually be, ridiculous if I ate that
horrible tinned bacon which provides you with an illusion that you have
eaten an English breakfast, with the sound of the lawn mower coming in
through the windows of the dining room. But all I eat is one boiled egg.
I eat it under my mosquito net, having been almost the only one out here
who had the sense to provide himself with a mosquito net. The result is
that as soon as I have shelled it and removed the marks of my servant’s
fingers I am able to eat the only definitely clean piece of food I
obtain throughout the day. Hundreds of thwarted flies sit on the roof of
my mosquito net and glare down at me, or scratch one hind leg against
the other in despair at not getting a taste of my egg. I then dress at
leisure and arrive in the I tent sometimes five minutes even before
George Lloyd and usually in a much better temper than anybody else
except Eddie Keeling. What is the objection to breakfast in bed?”
“Well, I don’t know, but nobody else does it.”
“That, my dear Val, must be one of those Winchester notions of yours
which you will do well to rid yourself of.”
This particular discussion of the etiquette of life on active service
would have been with Valentine Braithwaite, the son and A. D. C. of
General Braithwaite,[21] the Chief of the General Staff.
He could hardly have been more than nineteen, a subaltern in the
Somerset Light Infantry, who had fought through the Mons retreat. He had
been awarded one of the first military crosses in the war, and they were
not given in those days for anything except very conspicuous gallantry.
The comparative worldliness of Keeling and myself attracted him, for he
could make friends with us in a way that he could not have done with men
of the same age in his own profession, where all sorts of conventions of
seniority would have interfered. So he was always completely at his ease
with us, and therefore as simple and candid as if we had all three gone
through the world of school together. I have many beautiful memories of
that time, but few more beautiful than the walks with Eddie Keeling and
Val Braithwaite across those rolling flowery links during the first two
or three weeks after we went ashore. In that rich light of afternoon I
still see the crimson of the Cretan bugloss, the vivid stars of a
diminutive rock pink, wild hollyhocks, anchusas, saxifrages, and here
and there in the damp hollows of the creamy dunes thickets of rosy
oleanders. I still watch that lark’s nest we once found with the henbird
sitting close, and I still hear across the pale golden blue of the
afternoon sea the thunder of the Helles guns.
A desolate tract preserving in its endless peaks and ridges the
last fantastic glissades and diversely elevated cones into which
the wind had gathered and swept the sand. Mostly, these towans
presented to the beach a long line of serrated cliffs perhaps forty
feet high; but from time to time they would break away to gullies
full of fine drifted sand, whose small cavities hoarded
snail-shells wind-dried to an ethereal lightness.
I wrote those words in _Carnival_ to describe a scene in Cornwall, and
they will serve so exactly for the landscape of Cape Kephalo that I
hesitate eighteen years later to attempt a second description of such
country. In the Cornish scene the Atlantic tides gave the beach a
difference from hour to hour. Here the almost tideless Ægean left the
same narrow beach of soft sand at the foot of the low biscuit-coloured
cliffs; and walking along this beach we made the most absurd plans for
the time after the war, which always in the end came back to one
particular plan. It was a perpetual source of wonder to Val Braithwaite
that I should know so many of what to him were still those mythical
creatures called “actresses,” and this particular plan was that I should
give a dinner party at the earliest possible moment after the war to
several of these lovely semi-divine beings, at which he was to be a
guest. That dinner party became for the boy a favourite fairy tale; and
I had to tell it over and over again, walking along that narrow beach of
soft sand within sound of the guns and the sudden bursts of distant
rifle fire, which as it came to us here across that pale golden-blue sea
was hardly more menacing than the musketry of gorse pods exploding in
the summer sun. That dinner party has remained a fairy tale. After the
Dardanelles were abandoned Val Braithwaite went back to his regiment and
was killed in France; but I think that were I ever to walk again along
that narrow sandy beach I should find myself telling that fairy tale yet
once more to a tall sunburnt young Wykehamist beside me, though the
Helles guns should be silent as his voice forevermore, and only the
larks should be singing above those rolling dunes of Kephalo where so
many hopes withered that summer like the grass, but never like the grass
grew green again in spring.
For the first few weeks we were ashore the O mess and the I mess were
joined in a sociable diphthong, which was pleasant, for a society of men
like G. H. Q. under the conditions of camp life breaks up too easily
into mutually hostile cliques. The strain of responsibility, the
monotony, the discomfort, to which in our case was added the perpetual
gnawing doubt inside every one of us whether we should ever advance
another couple of miles on the road to Constantinople, combined to make
life difficult for most of the staff. However, for the first month that
joint mess in spite of the intolerable cooking and the myriads of flies
was a jolly place. I had by now lost my self-consciousness and felt
perfectly at home. I believe, if I were to try to fix the exact
beginning of that sudden sense of ease which had so delightfully
arrived, it would have been when I heard one officer say to another
officer considerably senior to himself:
“I hear, sir, that Birdie[22] has got his K. C. S. I.”
“Well, I’m not surprised,” snapped the senior. “He’s been writing home
for it ever since he came out here.”
For a moment I half expected to look up and see the lean sardonic ghost
of Henry Irving at the head of the table, for it was just such a remark
as Irving might have made. “These soldiers are human,” I said to myself,
“of like jealousies with authors, actors, painters, prize fighters,
ballet girls, and barmaids.” And as I looked down the long trestle table
and saw how intensely and completely human they all were, a delicious
relief came over me and my self-consciousness fled never to return again
at G. H. Q.
Another source of relief was getting rid of that detestable moustache,
which had become as unmanageable as a badly trained Airedale terrier. As
soon as I saw that Guy Dawnay[23] was clean shaven I had it off, for
what was good enough for Guy Dawnay in the way of appearance was good
enough for anybody. Dawnay was on the peninsula when I first reached the
_Arcadian_, and I had been awaiting his arrival with some eagerness, for
though I had never met him, he was the brother-in-law of an old friend
of mine, Robin Buxton, and he was like myself a Magdalen man. We most of
us conjure people to the mind’s eye as they appeared on some particular
occasion, and the picture Guy Dawnay always makes first in mine is of
standing on the beach by the landing stage when a group of less severely
wounded officers from the Royal Naval Division were slowly coming down
the slope on the evening of the fourth of June to embark in a lighter
and go aboard a hospital ship. Dawnay stood there, a fragile figure,
with something of exquisitely fashioned porcelain in the finely
chiselled features of his small face. His red tabs, his red and blue
brassard, and the red panache of the Coldstream in his helmet glowed in
the evening sun. He stood for a moment still as a faïence statuette.
Then he turned to me, a look in his eyes not of pain exactly, nor of
pity, nor of grief entirely, nor of wistfulness, nor yet quite of
apology, but somehow compounded of all five:
“Let’s get out of their way,” he said, pulling me aside in the opposite
direction from that procession of wounded men, who with blood-stained
bandages round their heads or arms or hands were coming mutely and
slowly and wearily down the dusty slope. “They won’t want to see us just
now,” he murmured more to himself than to me.
This may give an aspect of Guy Dawnay which has evidently escaped some
people, for he had a dry, sometimes, indeed, a wry, wit, and he did not
bother to spare those he disliked or, it might be more accurate to say,
those he despised. Lord Sackville told me once that when he was a
lecturer at the Staff College he always used to watch Guy Dawnay’s face,
and when his lip began to curl he took that as a danger signal and began
to draw toward the close of his discourse. Anyway, perhaps I have said
enough to justify myself for believing that if Guy Dawnay could do
without a moustache there was no need for me to encumber myself any
longer with mine.
And as I read through what I have written about Dawnay I realize that I
have been trying to find an illustration from a more remote antiquity to
convey the picture of him standing there with the evening sun aglow
upon the panache in his helmet; but his prototype must be sought in a
Trojan scene of the Middle Ages and found at last perhaps in the corner
of a picture by Crivelli, where one of those small figures of warriors
in the foreground seems to have detached itself from the crowded scene
of chivalry behind and to have stepped forward from the past to commune
with ourselves.
The chief associate of Guy Dawnay in the O tent was Cecil Aspinall.[24]
Nothing outwardly mediæval or subtle or elusive here. This would be the
fair and handsome fusilier, monocle in eye, who might serve as a
frontispiece to any novel of military life. This is surely something
very like the “masher” of an earlier period, and one listens to hear if
he will begin to talk about “huntin’ and fishin’, don’t you know?” so
that one may note how a social type one had supposed extinct will linger
on when a suitably conservative milieu like the army is provided for it.
But I had not talked for two minutes to Cecil Aspinall before I found
that brain was his god, not brawn. It would be impertinence for me to
attempt to estimate his ability as a staff officer; but I can affirm
that he was a remarkable judge of character, and that when I heard he
was to be the official historian of the Dardanelles campaign I said to
myself, “That is the best man they could have chosen.” The idea of
writing fascinated him. I believe he began to write on military subjects
after the Ashanti campaign of 1900, to which he somehow succeeded in
getting out on a staff job almost as soon as he left Sandhurst, and the
black and emerald ribbon of which shone out on his breast like a
green-hairstreak butterfly beside the two South African ribbons which
were as common at G. H. Q. as small tortoise shells in summer and orange
tips in spring. I am glad to say that Aspinall did not always fail to
play up to his dashing exterior by being too coldly intellectual. His
pleasure in the shining oak leaves that wreathed the glossy peak of his
new cap, which must have been cabled for as soon as he heard he was to
be recommended for a brevet majority, so quickly did it arrive, was
unabashed; and my own personal vanity is so regrettably marked that if
Aspinall had cabled at the same time for a cheval glass to take the
place of the small hand mirror that swung from his tent pole and gave so
inadequate a reflection of his new splendour, I should probably have
made as much use of it as the owner, for just about the time his new cap
came my uniform arrived from Alexandria.
And now having tried to sketch in two of those three captains at G. H.
Q. who are now generals, let me try to give an impression of the third.
Wyndham Deedes[25] was a rifleman who before the war had held an
appointment in the Turkish Gendarmery. He spoke Turkish perfectly, and
nobody more entirely fitted for the position he occupied as head of I-b
could have been found anywhere. I had heard so much talk about “Dedez
Bey” when I arrived that I looked forward with something like excitement
to my first sight of this mysterious omniscient figure to whom
ultimately it seemed that every question of Intelligence would have to
be referred, even the suitable employment of my humble self. I must have
dreamed of him in as many shapes and sizes as Jim Hawkins dreamed of
that one-legged mariner who, according to Billy Bones, was the most
dangerous of Flint’s unemployed pirates. I saw a small man with high
cheek bones and a long upper lip, on which grew the ghostly semblance of
a very fair moustache, so faint and fine, indeed, that only when it
caught the sun’s rays did one suspect that it was intended to be a
moustache at all. His countenance wore almost continuously that
expression combined of asceticism, determination, and illimitable
efficiency which you may often see on the superior of an Anglican
sisterhood, and this conventual look was somehow emphasized by his habit
of never wearing a sun helmet but always a cap with a puggaree which on
Deedes managed to look not unlike a nun’s wimple. He was just as
indifferent as George Lloyd to anything that savoured of luxury; but
whereas Lloyd’s tent had a kind of dreary discomfort that made one wish
his batman could do something about it, Deedes’s tent had the trim
sparseness of a church helper’s room at the top of a clergy house. Lloyd
would never have made himself morning tea. Deedes always did, moving
quickly and nattily about his tent in a sobor-coloured practical
dressing gown, while the kettle sang on the spirit lamp a genial song of
home. And I think, when I have mentioned that cup of tea and the
dressing gown, I have mentioned the extent of Deedes’s self-indulgence.
Of him several pictures spring to my mind’s eye as I try to recapture
the impression of his austere yet always delightfully humorous and
somehow curiously reassuring personality; but perhaps the one most
persistent is that of Deedes sitting in a tent on W beach and writing
away at some report of a prisoner’s examination, regardless of flies and
dust and rattling wheels and the perpetual chance of high-explosive
shells. He raises his hand for a moment from the paper to hush my
proposed interruption, and I feel while I wait there until he has
finished that I have no business to be wishing that Deedes would hurry
up and let me get away from the chance of a shell’s blowing him and me
to pieces, until gradually his own equanimity is communicated to myself
and I am only aware of a blessed atmosphere in which _laborare est
orare_, and the din of Helles dies away into a kind of cloistral calm.
It was Deedes who invited me to take on the business of collecting and
indexing all the contre-espionage stuff which had been accumulating for
some time and thereby gave me an opportunity to pass on the Intelligence
Summary to Graves, who seized it with as much avidity as a dog a bone. I
fear that the few pages of it I wrote will not have given much pleasure
to Cecil Aspinall in his capacity as official historian; but my
conscience is not disturbed, for I know that Graves’s well prepared
galantine will more than compensate for the amateurishly chopped and
somewhat stringy dish of mincemeat I offered. Besides, it really did
one’s heart good to see the gusto with which Graves sat down in that
broiling tent to get to work on the Intelligence Summary. Eddie
Keeling’s eyebrows went rippling up across the smooth expanse of his
forehead in ever widening arches of amazement.
“This consular enthusiasm is most touching,” he murmured. “I think I’ll
get him to take down some telegrams for me. I rather want to bathe
earlier.”
On the second of June Orlo Williams and I walked to Panaghia, the chief
village of Imbros, about fifteen miles from Kephalo along a rough bridle
track that wound through flowery valleys between sage-green stony hills.
About halfway there we came upon a couple of tents pitched on a level
sward in the shade of primeval holm oaks, and there, seeming as far
removed from the cares of office as Saturn himself, Clive Bigham, the
provost marshal, with some of those military field police Kenny and I
had rescued for him from Tenedos. He was busy taking the necessary
measures to put Imbros under proper surveillance with a view to
investigating cases of alleged signalling to the enemy with bonfires on
the hilltops. As an old campaigner in this part of the world he knew how
to make himself comfortable, and sometimes on the dust-maddened
peninsula for a cool thought, I would fancy that glade in the heart of
Imbros and the sound of his horse feeding and the rustling pages of his
pocket editions of Homer and Virgil, to read which in that pastoral land
where life had changed so little in many hundreds of years was to be
keeping one’s self up to date.
Was it in Bigham’s camp I first met John Thomson? Or was it under the
vine-wreathed portico of the café at Panaghia in whose trellised shade
we sat and ate our hard-boiled eggs, with not so much as a child in the
empty, sunny street to stare at us? Or was it not to-day at all that I
first met Thomson? It does not matter. Thomson is associated in my mind
with Panaghia, and to-day will serve as well as any for that first
meeting.
Of all the thousands who, whether in the thick of it or merely on the
fringe, went through the Dardanelles campaign, John Thomson was perhaps
the only man who enjoyed every moment of it. What would in the jargon of
the regimental sergeant major be called Thomson’s military history--and
at this point I really must allow myself the luxury of a digression in
which to set on record a story that Edmund Gwenn once told me. Gwenn,
who had enlisted at the beginning of the war in the Royal Artillery, was
horrified one day to hear the harsh voice of an orderly shout in the
barrack room:
“Bombardier Gwenn to see the sergeant major at once!”
He entered the presence, wondering nervously what military misdeed was
responsible for the summons.
“Bombardier Gwenn,” said the great man, who was twisting his waxed
moustache and turning over some papers without vouchsafing a glance at
the insignificant atom quaking before his desk, “Bombardier Gwenn, I
have been looking through your military history. I find that before you
joined His Majesty’s Forces you were an actor. The sports will be held
next Thursday afternoon. You will dress up as a woman and amuse the
women and children between the events. Right about!”
And now to return to Thomson’s military history which indicated that he
was a business man in Constantinople, and incidentally the
brother-in-law of Graves, who had married his sister; but that was only
what Thomson appeared to the world. The real Thomson was galloping over
the prairies with the last of the Mohicans, or rolling out wicked old
buccaneering ditties on the Dry Tortugas or saying, “Dr. Livingstone, I
presume,” at the back of the Congo, or standing beside stout Cortez
(though never silent) upon a peak in Darien. For years Thomson had gone
to bed after a long day in the office with a couple of pistols under his
pillow, hoping against hope that something would happen one night to
give him an excuse to fire them off. For years Thomson had been
collecting every kind of tool, implement, gadget, cooking appliance,
explorer’s vade mecum, tent, snake-proof boots, sleeping blanket,
hurricane lamp, helmet, and Heaven knows what else that the most
exacting maroon might dream of to turn a desert island into a Sybaris.
Just when Thomson must have been beginning to find it difficult to get
hold of anything new in the way of equipment for an adventure the war
came. And now here was Lieutenant Thomson ruling the interior of Imbros
with more satisfaction than Alexander the Great got out of ruling half
the world. Here was Thomson armed with three pistols, not to mention
half a dozen compendiums of knives of such versatility that after three
or four eager flurried clickings and unclickings he could offer you a
blade that was fine enough to extract a bee sting from your thumb or one
fierce enough to amputate your whole arm should you feel in the mood for
drastic measures. In addition to his pistols and these colonies of
knives he had two or three patent knapsacks, one of which, I believe,
could either be used as a fly-proof meat safe or a collapsible boat. And
then I seem to remember a lot of pots and pans and patent stoves
clanking round his waist; but of course I may be exaggerating a little
because Thomson was always so enthusiastic about his gadgets and so
eager to bring them into action that he may have bewildered me with some
of his _multa in parvis_, and out of one small saucepan created for my
fancy a whole ironmonger’s shop. How Thomson was enjoying himself!
Burned to a colour to which boiled lobsters, tan-yards, brickdust,
chestnuts, umber, and cardinals’ hats had all contributed their quota of
ripe hues, he came clanking down the empty, sunny street of Panaghia
without an ounce of spare flesh and with all that weight of spare parts.
He spoke Turkish and Greek fluently, so that he was invaluable to Clive
Bigham, whose Number Two and more violent executive he was.
Later on, when I had taken over the documentation of our suspects, I
grew rather tired of Thomson’s generosity in the matter of spies which
he used to offer me at thirteen for twelve. He was a man of incessant
energy, and his native helpers were so tirelessly hustled about by him
that they went ranging over the countryside like foxhounds, for of
course Thomson had several patent whistles to call them to heel when
necessary. He was the kindest creature imaginable, and if you wanted to
make him your friend for life you had only to ask him some simple
traveller’s question like this:
“Thomson, where do you think it’s best to keep one’s pistols at night?”
And then his bright enthusiastic eyes would glitter like the Ancient
Mariner’s and he would go into the whole question so thoroughly that you
had satisfactorily winged half the blackguards in Europe before he had
finished with giving you tips about looking after yourself in a country
where brigands were at all thick or where Red Indians still went on the
warpath. I cannot remember what happened to Thomson when Gallipoli was
evacuated; but in 1917 he came, now a captain, within my orbit in the
Ægean, and I appointed him to administer for a while the island of Zea;
but there for some reason or other he developed an extraordinary passion
for jam, which was about the only thing with which Zea could not provide
him, and which happened to be equally difficult to obtain on Syra in the
quantity and variety Thomson craved. In the end I had to write him an
admonitory sonnet which ended:
_But cease to ask us any more for jams,_
_In undecipherable telegrams._
Well, I hope I have not exaggerated about the place where I met Thomson
as much as I am afraid I have exaggerated a little, but only a very
little, about dear Thomson himself. I can see him now covered with dust
and armed to the teeth, standing at the most rigid attention in the I
tent and trying to make Deedes’s flesh creep about a spy--Deedes looking
as calm and judicial as a youthful mother superior to whom one of the
older sisters is relating a vision she has just been granted of some
holy saint among the pea sticks in the convent garden, and Eddie Keeling
sitting within earshot looking ridiculously bland, but as I, who knew
his habits, can see, swelling rapidly with invisible and inaudible
laughter. It was very lucky I unloaded the Intelligence Summary onto
Graves when I did because there is no doubt that his brother-in-law had
an eye on him as a useful Whip. Fond though Graves was of exercise, I
think even he might have grown tired of rushing about over the rugged
hills of Imbros and when he was out of breath perpetually blowing one of
Thomson’s patent whistles to bring his coast watchers to heel.
We were sorry to say good-bye to Thomson that hot afternoon (if we
really did meet him that afternoon) and start off on those blazing
fifteen miles back to Kephalo. Like an ass I had taken off my jacket on
the walk out and turned up my sleeves, so that my arms were raw where
the sun had blistered them. I really begin to think that Thomson could
not have been in Panaghia that day because if he had been I am sure he
would have had the very ointment for my sunburn, a pot of which like
D’Artagnan’s mother he would have straitly enjoined on me never to be
without. The thought of that last mile of soft, sandy, seaweed-matted
beach before we reached camp makes my legs ache to this day. Somebody
else was with us, but the memory of that walk back is dim with the heat
of it and I can only remember the long legs of Orlo Williams keeping
doggedly on and on just in front of me and the tired flies that would
keep trying to get a lift on my neck.
It was the day after this grilling thirty-mile walk that
Sir Ian Hamilton sent for me to ask if I would like to take on
Ashmead-Bartlett’s job. I replied that if I were going to write out here
I would sooner act as official eyewitness and keep my commission, but
that I had not come out with the idea of writing and should prefer to
stay as I was. I believe that I was speaking quite sincerely, but one is
never secure against the prompting of petty vanity, and that may have
made my reply sound a little pompous. Sir Ian evidently thought I was
talking rubbish and asked me if I realized that Bartlett was getting
£2,000 a year for his job. I answered that I would rather have less and
keep my commission. He said that there was no question of giving up my
commission. Finally he telegraphed to Lord Kitchener to tell him that
Bartlett was on his way home and that meanwhile he was appointing me in
his place pending the decision of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association
whether they would keep me on or send out another correspondent. Then he
told me to go and have a talk with Maxwell,[26] the censor, and find out
from him the technique of sending a dispatch to the press. Feeling
doubtful of my ability to do this job well, I left Sir Ian’s tent to
tackle Maxwell. Even in those days there was a much sharper line of
demarcation between journalists and novelists than there is now, and I
fully expected that Maxwell would resent what he with his own long
experience as a war correspondent would consider the pushing forward of
a mere “literary gent” at his expense. Maxwell was a self-important
little man rather more like Tweedledum than anybody I have seen except
the pictures of Tweedledee. As soon as he heard my news his wattles
reddened.
“Sir Ian should realize,” said Maxwell, “that he cannot behave in this
high-handed way. The Newspaper Proprietors will not be dictated to by
him. They will strongly resent having an amateur foisted upon them in
this way. Why did not Sir Ian consult me before he took this
extraordinary step? This will do him a great deal of harm with the
press. And I’m afraid it may be rather unpleasant for you.”
“Are you suggesting that I have manœuvred myself into this job,
Maxwell?”
“That may be the impression in Fleet Street, where they have a horror of
the amateur.”
“Well, why don’t you go and explain that to Sir Ian, Maxwell? Perhaps
he’ll ask you to act as correspondent. Only don’t suggest that I should
edit your Dardanelles Driveller.”
Maxwell, in addition to acting as official censor and running the OI
mess, was editing a daily sheet called _The Peninsula Press_ which was
served out to the troops as a tonic and even translated into French.
This was the apple of Maxwell’s eye.
“If Sir Ian requires my services he has only to ask for them,” said
Maxwell, wagging his head as gloomily as some old actor over an upstart
Hamlet. “If he chooses to ignore my presence here and involve himself
with the press, that is his own lookout.”
“The press can refuse to print anything from me if they feel offended.
After all, Sir Ian did not send Bartlett home. He asked to go in order
to get together a fresh kit. It is true that Sir Ian has cabled he does
not want him back. But he has left it to the Newspaper Proprietors to
send out somebody else.”
I saw it would be useless to try to convince Maxwell that my sending
dispatches to the press, until Bartlett came back or somebody else was
sent to replace him, was not a plot to push me into a post to which I
was not entitled, so I soothed his smarting dignity by asking what the
red and white ribbon on his breast signified.
“The Rising Sun of Japan,” he proclaimed with some unction.
“You were out in the Russian-Japanese War, of course.”
“I was with General Kuroki until the battle of the Shaho and I was with
General Nogi at Port Arthur.”
I listened for a while to a few solemn reminiscences.
“Well, I hope you won’t have to use the blue pencil too hard on my
dispatches, Maxwell.”
“I shall treat your stuff exactly as I should treat that of any other
correspondent,” he replied with a stately gesture of pardon and
conscious equity.
The whole question of a military censorship has been raised again by Mr.
Ashmead-Bartlett in his book, _The Uncensored Dardanelles_, in order to
voice a resentment which apparently has been rankling all these years at
the way his dispatches were treated. He was longing to publish his
conviction that Sir Ian Hamilton was making a mess of the Dardanelles
campaign by not listening to his advice and landing at Bulair, but it
was not until 1928 that we were privileged to learn what he wanted to
tell England in 1915. Whether he was right or not, he must have known
that he could hardly persuade Sir Ian Hamilton to change his mind, and
if he wished to remain as the only war correspondent with the
expedition, it was his duty to sacrifice his opinions with as much
self-abnegation as others were sacrificing their lives.
On the third of June Ashmead-Bartlett wrote in his diary: “At sea in
Caledonia. Nothing to record.”
They were just as much at sea on that sandy promontory of Kephalo,
where no answer had yet been received to that vital telegram of the
seventeenth of May.[27]
They were just as much at sea in Paris where Lord Bertie would write in
his diary that night: “It is really expected that the Dardanelles will
be taken by land operations in a month from now! Let us hope that this
is not another false prophecy added to the many.” They were just as much
at sea on the Western Front where Sir John French and General Joffre
were impressing on Mr. Asquith the necessity of sending all the
available troops to them for an offensive which was to prove
immeasurably more costly than any launched at Gallipoli and not a little
bit more fruitful. They were just as much at sea on the Eastern Front
where the Austrians were marching into Przemysl to-day and the Russians
were retreating out of Galicia. The only place where they need not have
been quite as hopelessly at sea was in London where the ministers of the
new administration had just received from Mr. Winston Churchill a lucid
note on the general situation written on the first of June. None of us
is at sea now; but when from the safety of land we look back at that
campaign, does it not seem as if we had veritably stirred up the old
gods to fight for and against us as once they fought for and against the
Trojans and the Greeks?
If Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett had had his _Iliad_ with him in the _Caledonia_
he might have studied the Second Book with profit on that idle third of
June at sea.
οἴκαδέ περ σὺν νηυσὶ νεώμεθα,
said one.
And to him replied Odysseus:
Θερσῖτ’ ἀκριτόμυθε λιγύς περ ἐὼν ἀγορητής
ἵσχεο, μήδ’ ἔθελ’ οἷος ἐριζέμεναι βασιλεῦσιν.
Or as one might paraphrase for the occasion without straying far from a
literal translation:
Thersites: “We ought to get our ships home before any more are sunk, and
go home with them.”
Any member of the G. S.: “Thersites, you ill-informed though brilliant
chatterbox, shut up, and don’t try to ram your private opinions down the
throats of the general staff.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE BATTLE OF THE FOURTH OF JUNE
About ten o’clock on the morning of the fourth of June the destroyer
_Wolverine_, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Adrian Keyes, the younger
brother of the commodore, took us from Kephalo to Helles. Besides Sir
Ian Hamilton himself there were General Braithwaite, Colonel Ward,
Aspinall, Dawnay, and several others of the general staff. We steamed
for nearly an hour toward the sound of guns that was coming down through
a gray and indeterminate kind of day which very gradually changed to a
clearer atmosphere. A northerly wind was blowing, such a wind as might
shatter the chestnut blossom in England “on some tempestuous morn of
early June,” and most of us found the ward room a pleasanter place than
the deck. Keyes was full of stories about his experiences in Canada at
the very beginning of the war, when he manned a submarine with a crew of
local business men. I wish I could remember the details of the good
stories he told us; but they have passed from my recollection
irretrievably, and I can only remember the gold watch that was presented
to him by his amateur crew. One of those Canadian business men ought to
give us the tale of that submarine’s adventures: _Blackwood’s Magazine_
would be the proper medium. Keyes himself is no longer alive, and the
little epic ought not to be lost eternally. If I had not been so much
worried at the time by the prospect of having to send the press a
dispatch about the imminent battle, I might have remembered the stories
myself.
When we drew near to Helles and went on deck a fog of dust was blowing
off the shore and the gun crews were going to their stations, for the
_Wolverine_ intended to bring her guns to bear on the Turkish trenches.
The men, stripped to the waist for action, sent my thoughts whirring
back to the big engraving of the Death of Nelson which used to hang in
our hall at home, and which in childhood I had studied many a time for
an hour at a stretch, in fancy a powder monkey of the _Victory_ myself,
on whose books I was now borne as a marine. Then among the transports
and trawlers and various craft at anchor we saw all that was now visible
of the _Majestic_ like a small green whale motionless upon the water.
She was subsiding rapidly, they said; and already in this watery
sunlight she gave the illusion of slowly assuming to herself the nature
of the waves that splashed against her still rigid sides. Such a dream
of a ship’s transmutation into her own element soon vanished in the
billows of dust ashore, vanished in that queer heartlessness of war that
is really the desperate occupation of the mind with something to do and
therefore no time to dream. And yet there were still left a few moments
to dream while we waited for the lighter to come alongside, and I was
saying to myself that Lancashire Landing, the glorious name the
Lancashire Fusiliers won for W beach, was the climax of all the castles
in the sand that were ever built. No children at Blackpool or at
Southport could ever have imagined in their most ambitious schemes this
effect of grown-up industry. The comparison with a seaside resort on a
fine bank holiday arrived so inevitably as really to seem rather trite.
Yet all the time the comparison was justifying itself. Even the
aëroplanes on the top of the low cliff eastward had the look of an
“amusement” to provide a threepenny or sixpenny thrill: the tents might
so easily conceal phrenologists or fortune tellers: the signal station
might well be a camera obscura: the very carts of the Indian transport,
seen through the driven sand, had an air of waiting goat carriages.
General Gouraud was on the sandbagged pier expecting Sir Ian Hamilton,
as grave as one of those bearded French maîtres d’hôtel who has prepared
a marvellous banquet for an important personage. We walked up the slope
from the beach, blinded by the dust, choking, thinking of nothing except
this dust, until there broke upon me the realization that all this time
the guns had been thundering. Suddenly an empty stretch of desiccated
scrub rolled away before us: the homely clatter of the beach was
forgotten: there was nothing now but a noise of wind rising above the
battery we were leaving behind us; and for the eye nothing but the black
and white telegraph poles, their wires winking in the sun, and the
imperturbable larks rising and falling. This empty stretch began on the
skyline, and it was soon necessary to enter a trench originally dug by
the Turks, good enough, it seemed, to withstand any but the heroes of
that imperishable assault upon the twenty-fifth of April. We hurried on,
here and there, almost sticking in the rank clay that was sometimes even
wet enough to require a mattress of boughs for its passage. Finally we
reached the “shelter” which was considerately labelled “Low Doorway”
upon the lintel: there always seems something a little pathetic in these
minor courtesies of war. The shelter consisted of four or five
compartments hollowed out of the clay and covered with sandbags over a
ceiling of corrugated iron. The walls were hung with canvas, and each of
the low oblong windows, as we leaned upon their high sills, provided a
new aspect, framed in branches, of the battle three miles away.
Somewhere behind us a sixty pounder crashed at intervals, and we could
hear the moan and rattle of the shell go forward on its way.
In front of the shelter the country dipped gradually down to rise again
more steeply beyond a wide and partially wooded hollow. Here, through
the glasses, could be seen a quantity of mules tranquil enough,
notwithstanding the concentration of shell fire that was sweeping and
shrieking and buzzing over their heads to explode halfway up the
opposite slope. Every shell burst with its own shape of smoke; and so
substantial was the vapour that the wind could only carry it away
bodily, unable for a long time to disperse it. The shrapnel puffs
materialized from the air at first as small and white wads of cotton
wool; then they grew swiftly larger and turned to a vivid gray; then
they became fainter again and travelled across the view like tadpoles of
cloud, until at last they trailed their tails in a kind of fatigue
before they dissolved against the sky. Heavy shells evoked volcanoes
right along the line, and from the sea, like drums solemnly beaten, came
the sound of the ships firing.
The calm within the shelter was oppressive, though the wind was fretting
the grass and fluttering two magenta cistus flowers immediately outside
the window. It seemed calm as we looked at the maps pegged out upon the
trestle tables; but it was ten minutes to twelve, and at twelve o’clock
the advance would begin. A tortoise crawled laboriously past our
straining binoculars. The gunfire lessened, and from the whole line the
noise of musketry and maxims came sharply, a noise that was tenser than
the guns, and more portentous. It was as though one had been listening
to a change of orchestration in a symphony, as though after a heavy and
almost dull opening the strings were leading to a breathless finale of
the first movement.
Yet as we stared through our glasses at twelve o’clock there was
scarcely any sign of action. Once, indeed, a large body of men were
visible as they climbed the green slope; but they were soon lost to
view, and notwithstanding the incessant scolding of the angry rifle fire
we had nothing at which we could look except the mules standing
motionless in the hollow, and once down a ribbon of road an orderly
galloping. Yet all the time messages were coming in along the wires; all
the time it was possible to mark with green and red and blue pencils a
redoubt gained, a trench occupied, or at some point a check.
One of those fatal checks was to the Sixth Gurkhas, who had found the
barbed wire to the left of the Saghir Deré untouched by the bombardment.
The Saghir Deré was a ravine west of Krithia which began in the sandy
cliffs to the southwest of the peninsula, where the headquarters of the
Twenty-ninth Division were now established. The sides were covered with
a thick tangle of brushwood and ran down, sometimes sheer from a height
of fifty feet, into a narrow bottom full of arbutus and the stones of a
dried-up watercourse.
On the morning of the battle the Eighty-eighth Brigade held the country
to the right; on the left was the Indian Brigade which included the
Lancashire Fusiliers. The fourteenth Sikhs were astride the ravine
linking their own brigade, the Sixth Gurkhas on their left, with the
Worcesters, who formed the left of the Eighty-eighth Brigade, by a line
of trenches about one hundred and fifty yards wide.
On the west above the ravine the ground, matted with heather, cistuses,
and various stunted shrubs, sloped upward toward two lines of Turkish
trenches which confronted us from a distance of two hundred yards and
three hundred and fifty yards. On the east beyond our trenches the
ground sloped downward to the edge of the ravine from a crest line about
two hundred yards away, the distance between the two lines of trenches
being two hundred and fifty yards. Both the Turks and our men had been
using the ravine itself as a communicating trench with the rear. This
piece of ground was unfortunately exposed by its aspect to the fire not
only of the trenches in front, but more dangerously to that of the
powerful trenches on the other side of the Saghir Deré, which dominated
not only the ravine itself but also the open ground eastward up to the
crest line.
This morning the Sikhs had been ordered to advance in two lines. The
front line was to link the attack of the Indian Brigade with that of the
Eighty-eighth Brigade by moving forward along the sides of the ravine,
and so by a flank attack help the assault upon the trenches opposed to
the Indian Brigade. The second line was to advance along the ravine to
attack the second line of the enemy’s trenches. The Turks had placed
several small trenches across the bottom of the ravine, and there were
probably several machine guns well hidden on the steep slopes.
After that bombardment which ran from sea to sea the Allied line
advanced at noon. On the right of the Saghir Deré the Eighty-eighth
Brigade went forward with complete success, and the Worcesters, who were
in touch with the Sikhs, actually charged through four lines of Turkish
trenches as easily as Aspinall and Dawnay were marking down with
coloured pencils their achievement on the map. The Sikhs, however, came
full into the cross fire of rifles and machine guns as they moved over
the exposed slope. Nevertheless, the two companies did not falter in
their determination but kept pace with the advance of the brigade.
Notwithstanding their losses on the slope downward to the edge of the
Saghir Deré they reached the Turkish trenches, carried them, and
bayoneted the occupants, who tried to escape into the ravine. All day
and night these two companies held the left of the trenches taken by the
Eighty-eighth Brigade, and in the morning when they were relieved there
remained one British officer, one Indian officer, and fourteen men.
Down in the ravine the day went badly for the Sikhs. The Sixth Gurkhas
on their left had failed to carry the first line of Turkish trenches and
their web of barbed wire which the guns from the ship had left
untouched. Relieved from anxiety from the Gurkhas the enemy was free to
concentrate a violent fire on the attack up the Saghir Deré. Machine
guns opened on them from both sides at the moment they came out of their
trenches. Four British officers and a quarter of the rank and file fell
at once. A few groups gloriously led managed to clamber to the point at
which they hoped to see the two companies of their first line in hot
assault upon the enemy’s trenches. But when with tremendous effort they
arrived they saw that the frontal attack on their left had failed. Some
dead ground gave them time to muster the survivors: a scar in the ravine
was stormed: two machine guns were dragged up: entrenchments were
desperately dug: and thus they perched upon the side of the Saghir
Deré--the colonel, the doctor, and forty-seven men. There all through
the night they held on, but in the morning the Turks from above bombed
them back into the ravine. The crews of the guns had been killed, and
though the guns had to be abandoned all that was left of the second line
retired in good order. A bomb destroyed one gun: the other was afterward
recovered.
The other two companies of the first line had advanced with the rest of
their own brigade against the trenches in front of them, but when the
main attack had failed they would not go back. All day by the edge of
the Saghir Deré did they cling to their position, and when at last they
retired they left three quarters of their strength and every British
officer behind.
That morning the Fourteenth (King George’s Own) Sikhs moved out to the
attack with fifteen British officers, fourteen Indian officers, and five
hundred and fourteen men. On the morning after three British officers,
three Indian officers, and one hundred and thirty-four men were left. No
ground was given, no man turned his back, no man lingered on the way.
The trenches of the enemy that ran down into the ravine were choked with
the bodies of Turks and Sikhs, lying there forever at rest from that
hell of hand to hand encounters. On the slope beyond, the bodies of
those tall and grave warriors, all face downward where they fell
indomitably advancing, lay thickly among the stunted aromatic scrub.
Achi Baba was before them, and eastward the sun was rising out of Asia.
Standing there in the shelter, I saw Aspinall’s face gnawed by anxiety
as he pored over that check on the pegged-out map, knowing no more then
of the history of it which I have just related than I did myself.
Probably I felt awkwardly superfluous in the presence of his anxiety,
for I know that soon after this I found myself in another compartment of
the shelter with a naval officer beside me, who explained a little
apologetically that he had come ashore as A. D. C. to the commodore and
had been given leave to look at the battle from the shelter. We chatted
for a while, and presently he asked me if I had come out here from
Flanders. I was gratified by the implication that I looked such a
veteran but admitted that I had, as a matter of fact, only come out here
from Italy a few weeks ago.
“Oh, really? I’m frightfully keen on Italy,” he avowed with enthusiasm.
“I wonder if you know Capri by any chance?”
“That’s where I live.”
“I wonder if you know an uncle of mine, Colonel Palmes? I stayed with
him in Capri two years ago. And now I want to get back there again to
meet a man called Mackenzie. Do you know him?”
“Well, I think I must be the Mackenzie you mean.”
“The man who wrote _Sinister Street_? Well, that’s absolutely
extraordinary! Do you know, I’ve had the two volumes of _Sinister
Street_ with me ever since February. I’ve read them both through at
least three times, and some parts a good deal more than three times. I
saved them from going down in a torpedo boat which was sunk under me,
and I’ve saved them from going down in a trawler which was sunk under
me. The t. b. was on the canal.”
I remembered the tale of the exploits of T. B. 043 on the Suez Canal,
for the uncle of its gallant commander[28] had told me about that nephew
of his who had just been given the D. S. O. We stood in that shelter and
gazed at one another with frank admiration while the sixty pounder
crashed and moaned away behind and the magenta cistus flowers fluttered
by the sill in the wind outside. I asked him what he was doing in these
waters.
“Oh, I’m in charge of the mine sweepers out here. But I thought this was
a good chance to get ashore for a day. So I asked the commodore to trot
me along as his A. D. C.”
Just then Colonel Ward looked in to say that fifty prisoners were coming
in on our left and asked me if I would like to walk along with him to
meet them. I never saw Palmes again while I was at Gallipoli, and I have
never met him since in Capri or anywhere else, but the memory of that
ten minutes’ talk fourteen years ago is still perfectly fresh.
The grayness of the morning had vanished by now, and the air outside was
brilliant after the damp and gloom of the shelter when Colonel Ward and
I started off along the road which ran by the cliff’s edge toward the
line of battle. Out at sea, escorted by destroyers, _Albion_ and
_Implacable_, their guns spurting vivid yellow from turrets that stood
in blackest silhouette against the dazzle of the sea and the silver fume
of the horizon, were steaming up and down at their slow and stately
business and their solemn firing.
We met the escort of Worcesters just where a Red Cross flag was flying
above the cliff burrows of the field ambulance. Some of the prisoners
were badly wounded; these were at once taken off for medical attention.
The rest were halted, and several of the Worcesters came literally
dancing round us, not yet free from that first wild elation of their
charge. The dust and sweat caked upon their faces made it almost
impossible to see where the khaki ended and the flesh began: they seemed
like the clay models of a sculptor: and their bayonets lacked even so
much lustre as tarnished foil. They were like children drunk with the
thrills of some unusual adventure as they skipped round us in their
shorts, laughing and chattering of the deeds of their regiment; and the
plaster of dust obliterating all lines, all hair, all signs of age, made
them appear more than ever like children. In contrast to their
jubilation I see a tall ungainly Turk in his ill-fitting khaki uniform
who looks at me in despair. I realize that he wants to step out of the
ranks to make water. I nod assent, and whether he has hurt himself
internally or whether too long retention is the cause, the business is
an agony, for he stands twisted in a fearful cramp, his face showing
what he is suffering not by any contortions but by such dumb pain as you
may see in the eyes of an animal. I turn away sick at heart for him, and
then one of the merry Worcesters dances round me and babbles once more
his excited tale of a few minutes’ madness.
“My Gawd, sir, we went through them like paper. Four trenches, sir. Like
paper. With the bayonet. Right through, sir! At the double. Like paper.
Four trenches, sir, you wouldn’t believe! At twelve to the tick. Like
paper. Four trenches! Well, I can’t say I hardly knew what I was doing,
or where I was going, and that’s a fact. And then we found we’d took
four trenches! That’s right, ain’t it, Nobby? Four trenches, sir. Coo!
It was a treat the way we got into ’em. You know, sir? It was as good as
a football match. Four trenches! Well, nothing couldn’t stop us.”
“I say, Mackenzie,” broke in the slow voice of Colonel Ward, “do you
think you can make out what regiment these fellows belong to?”
I produced the War Office’s handbook for fighting against Turkey, and
after examining the numerals I felt fairly sure that it was a “15” on
their collars. I decided to risk it, and going up to the prisoners who
were all squatting down by the roadside now I inquired, “_Umbesh alai?_”
Ali Baba could not have felt more astonished when he said “Open Sesame”
and the door of the Forty Thieves’ cave actually did open, for I had no
sooner spoken than all the prisoners leaped to their feet and saluted.
They were beaming with excitement and evidently most anxious to go on
with the conversation. But to say “Fifteenth Regiment” in Turkish was as
much as I could manage, and the conversation had to stop there, leaving
the prisoners and myself smiling at one another until Deedes, his
puggaree fluttering behind him, came hurrying up to examine them. The
Turks were evidently delighted to have been taken, and they answered
Deedes’s questions with enthusiasm, squatting there in the dusty scrub,
many of them wounded, but none complaining, and all of them grinning and
nodding at the cigarettes their escort kept handing to them. It was
impossible to examine the prisoners here more than cursorily because a
group so large might have drawn the enemy’s fire: so they were presently
marched down toward Lancashire Landing and the accommodation of the
assistant provost marshal, their delightful captors dancing along beside
them like children bringing home some stray cows to the farm where they
belonged.
When we went back in the shelter, there was still nothing visible of the
battle’s progress, and it was Aspinall, I think, whom I accompanied down
to the headquarters of the Twenty-ninth Division. Here, heralded by the
telephone’s petulant and gnatlike buzz, more details of the battle were
coming in. The Worcesters were holding fast to those trenches they had
captured. Thinking of the men in that escort who had danced about in the
road by the cliff’s edge and chattered all together like children about
their exploits, I took a ridiculous personal pride in the red lines that
marked their achievement. Here I first heard definite news of the losses
that the Indian Brigade had suffered by the Saghir Deré, though the full
story of their desperate fight was of course still to be told. I heard,
too, for the first time how the French had failed to hold the Haricot
Redoubt on the right of the Naval Division, which had suffered a bloody
enfilade in consequence from three tiers of trenches banked one above
the other on the slope of the Kereves Deré. And it was here I first
heard a whisper that the Collingwood Battalion had been obliterated as a
ship is sunk with all hands. At four o’clock General Gouraud sent word
that an attempt would be made to retake the Haricot. My companion looked
graver and graver. Unless the French succeeded it would be necessary to
order back the Manchester Brigade, which was halfway up to the top of
Achi Baba, but alas, with its right flank exposed, for the Naval
Division had been unable to advance and establish contact with these
Lancashire Territorials owing to the failure of the French which had
left another right flank exposed. Sir Ian Hamilton has been sneered at
for claiming that we were within an ace of victory. Yet if a small
entanglement of barbed wire on the left of our line had not escaped the
ships’ guns and if troops more reliable than the Senegalese had been on
the right of it, Achi Baba would have fallen a few days later and the
casualties of the fourth of June would not have been a quarter of what
they were.
Yes, it was Aspinall whom I had accompanied to Divisional Headquarters,
for as I strain to recapture that afternoon fourteen years later the
very expression on his face comes back to me as we emerged from the
dugouts to walk gloomily back along the paths winding among the tents
and cavities, paths that the Irishmen of the Dublins and Munsters had
found time to decorate with carefully chosen white stones. Once more
returned that sensation of being near the seaside and of all this noise
of battle being but a dream.
The rifles and maxims had begun again when we reached the shelter. That
second advance timed to begin at four o’clock was already in full swing.
Again we tried to see the figures of men in their bayonet charges up the
slope: and still there was nothing visible except the mules, and an
ambulance wagon galloping up that ribbon of road. The sun was by now
westering fast, and the shelter was lighted up with a nimbus of pale
gold.
The second advance had not achieved what was hoped for. The Manchester
Brigade must be ordered to retire. A black depression fell. I stood
aside for Sir Ian Hamilton to pass back along the trench. Then with one
glance over my shoulder at that accursed hill of Achi Baba which still
stood with hunched defiant shoulders between us and Constantinople, I
followed the single file procession down the trench. Nobody spoke a
word. Birds were twittering in their flight through the radiant air, and
beyond them three biplanes went winging homeward to Tenedos, one behind
the other, as birds fly across the sunset to roost. The sixty pounder
was still moaning on its way to the enemy’s lines, but neither gunshot
nor gloomy thoughts could quite destroy the amber peace of that evening
of the fourth of June.
It was when we were waiting near the pier that Guy Dawnay and I saw
those wounded men of the Naval Division coming down tired and silent to
the beach to embark in a lighter and go on board a hospital ship. And
when, as I have already related, he told me to move along out of their
way because they would not want to be seeing us, I knew how bitterly he
was thinking of those green and red and blue lines on the maps pegged
down to those trestle tables in the shelter up there behind us. I think
that we talked about Eton on the voyage back, and I seem to remember
that Aspinall joined us in some quiet corner and that he and Dawnay
looked at one another without speaking. Anyway, I know that when we
stepped ashore on the soft beach of Kephalo I felt that a long century
lay between the flushed twilight in which we came back and the gray
morning when we started.
On Monday, the seventh of June, there was a chance of crossing again to
Helles in a destroyer. I welcomed an excuse to escape from the stifling
atmosphere of the I tent which had been full of blood-stained Turkish
notebooks for the last two days, and asked leave to visit my divisional
paymaster to discuss the problem of my pay and at the same time try for
a batman. The atmosphere at Divisional Headquarters was gloomy in the
extreme. I was not astonished when I heard details of what the division
had been through last Friday. The casualties had been very heavy. They
thought that the French had let them down completely on the right.
Patrick Shaw-Stewart was seen running along, waving his cane and
shouting, “_Avancez Avancez!_” The Senegalese came out of their
trenches, advanced seventeen yards, and then bolted back into them like
so many gigantic black rabbits, after which nothing would persuade them
to show themselves again. I suppose this was after the Colonial troops
and Senegalese had been bombed out of the Haricot Redoubt which they had
held for a time. There was no disposition to put any blame for the
failure of the fourth of June on the general staff. Any gibing was
mostly directed at Maxwell’s _Peninsula Press_ which had come out with a
rosified account of our “success,” though of course it was recognized
that a daily sheet of unmitigated gloom would hardly be worth printing
and circulating. I was promised a batman; but the problem of my pay
looked like being forever insoluble, and I started to walk back. Small
shells kept dropping all round me, and it seemed inevitable that I
should be hit presently. There is no doubt that the sensation of being
shelled when alone is most infernally unpleasant. After walking about
three quarters of a mile I felt inclined to sit down and cry with
exasperation because those Turkish gunners would not realize that I
really was not worth so much expensive ammunition. I wanted to argue
with them personally about the futility of war. It seemed so maddeningly
stupid that men should behave as impersonally and unreasonably as
nature. Over to the right I saw a clump of trees and, feeling I simply
must somehow get a sensation of cover, I hurried across toward them at a
diagonal jog trot. I could not have made a more foolish move, because
apparently there was a well by them at which mules were watered, and at
regular intervals the enemy used to spray the clump with shrapnel. I
must have come in for one of those antiseptic douches, for the air was
alive. I began to worry about the proofs of _Guy and Pauline_, thinking
to myself that the printer’s reader would be sure to change “tralucent”
to “translucent” and that Secker, in the depression caused by the news
of my death, would never remember how much importance I attached to
getting rid of that unnecessary sibilant. Why couldn’t those blasted
Turks up on Achi Baba shut up? And I would have turned a gerund into a
participle here and there ... and probably there would be a vile
_nominativus pendens_ ... at this moment I heard a burst of laughter
and, looking round angrily, for I thought this laughter must be meant
for the way I was definitely running by now, I saw a couple of men
digging opposite to one another like the gravediggers in _Hamlet_ and
roaring with laughter every time one of the small shells either exploded
or as often happened hit the ground with a thud and nothing else. Then
one of the pair dropped. The other looked first at his pal and then at
me who was hurrying past with haversack, water bottle, pistol, and
glasses jogging up and down in a most undignified way.
“Beg pardon, sir! Beg pardon!” he called out.
“You can’t do anything,” I snapped. “You’d better get into cover
yourself as quickly as you can.”
“No, sir, it’s not that,” he whimpered as he cut across my path and
forced me to stop while he saluted. “But would you mind telling me if my
friend’s dead, sir, because I’m new at this job.”
“Of course I’m not bloody well dead, you silly little cod,” shouted the
friend, who was sitting up by now and rubbing his head. And I left them,
remembering another occasion when the friend actually had been killed
and when the survivor’s comment was, “Beg pardon, sir, you think it’s
funny at first, but it’s very serious, really.”
By the time I reached the beach, the big gun on the Asiatic side of the
Straits had started to shell the shipping. There were three preliminary
fountains, after which a shell hit a French transport loaded with hay.
The crew at once jumped overboard, and the transport caught fire. Then
two destroyers rushed up and bundled all the men back on to their ship
in order to extinguish the fire, which they succeeded in doing without
being shelled any more.
I think it must have been that evening I met the last surviving officer
of the Collingwood Battalion. He was very young, hardly more than
eighteen, and after the horror of that experience to which he had gone
almost within forty-eight hours of landing at Helles he was being sent
to do some work at Imbros in connection with the rest camp which was to
be formed there. We did not talk about the battle, either then or at any
other time. Oldfield was his name, and I hope he survived the battles in
France later. I can hear now the tone of his voice as he said to me with
a nervous little laugh:
“I’m the only officer left of the Collingwood.”
CHAPTER IX
MORE LIFE AT G. H. Q.
On the ninth of June George Brodrick,[29] who was A. D. C. to Sir Ian
Hamilton, brought me the good news that a large package in brown paper
of the most promising shape covered with Egyptian stamps and addressed
to me was waiting in one of the Q tents.
“It must be your uniform at last,” he said encouragingly.
We hurried over to the Q tent, and there, sure enough, was the parcel
covered with Egyptian stamps. It was grabbed up, and my keenness to know
what kind of a job Mr. Phillips had made of it led me to stop at George
Brodrick’s tent and cut the string. Appeared a service jacket of almost
as exquisite a shade of _eau de nil_ as George Lloyd’s; but when it was
unfolded rapture was succeeded by dismay at the tailor’s mistake in
having affixed the red tabs of a staff officer, to which, of course, I
was not entitled, being merely attached to G. H. Q.
“I say, look what the ass has done!”
“Never mind,” said George Brodrick, “we can soon rip them off.”
It took us some time, however, before we managed with a pair of
sand-blunted scissors to rip the tabs from a pair of jackets, for the
thread was tough and the sewing was close. However, we managed at last
to pluck the uniforms of their borrowed plumes, and divesting myself of
that Tommy’s jacket which had been fretting my vanity for nearly a month
I donned the new arrival.
“It bags a bit behind,” said Brodrick in those accents of carefully
considered and sage gloom which were always so unanswerable.
“And it’s about a couple of inches too big around the waist,” I groaned.
“What the deuce has the damn fellow been playing at? There isn’t a
tailor among the Guard, is there?” I asked hopefully, for the Guard
consisted of West Surrey Yeomanry, of which George Brodrick was a
lieutenant.
“I doubt it,” he said, shaking his head, for he would never surrender to
an easy optimism.
All my peacock hopes vanished. I might have exclaimed with the wretched
Moor:
_Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war,_
_Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone._
I saw myself doomed for the rest of the campaign to pace the sandy cape
of Kephalo with an accordion-pleated back, the mere anatomy of a Royal
Marine. And then an idea struck me.
“I suppose these _are_ my things?”
George Brodrick looked at the brown paper.
“My God,” he exclaimed, “it’s the wrong parcel! This is addressed to
Colonel Beynon!”
The first emotion of relief faded rapidly in the murk of a new problem.
“I don’t know where on earth he’ll find anyone here to sew his tabs on
again,” Broderick muttered hopelessly as he stooped to pick up from the
sandy bottom of the tent those little scarlet tabs disfigured by loose
ends of thread which belonged to the mutilated uniform of the assistant
adjutant general.
At this moment Pollen put his head round the flap of the tent.
“Hullo! The new uniform at last?” he asked with quick and courteous
sympathy.
“Well, not exactly, Pollen,” I replied, and I think I must have given
the kind of smile that is called sickly.
“We made a little mistake,” George Brodrick put in. “There were several
parcels in the Q tent, and, as a matter of fact, in a hurry we opened
the wrong parcel. This is Colonel Beynon’s uniform. I don’t quite know
what we’d better do about it.”
“Why, you’d better take it round to his tent and explain the mistake,”
Pollen advised.
“Yes, but we’ve cut off his tabs,” said Brodrick.
Even Pollen’s urbanity was not proof again the shock of this
announcement.
“Well, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for something,” he declared fervidly.
“Yes, I’m afraid he may be rather annoyed,” I suggested in a vague hope
that Pollen would laugh at such a preposterous notion.
“I should think he’ll be absolutely furious,” said Pollen with an accent
as near to brutality as it was possible for that soft, somewhat
ecclesiastical, voice to achieve.
I am glad to take this opportunity of paying a tribute to George
Brodrick’s conspicuous gallantry by setting it on record that he
actually volunteered to come with me to Colonel Beynon’s tent and help
me to explain how the mistake had occurred.
It was like a nightmare walking through the lines with these violated
uniforms over our arms, for everybody we passed greeted us with “Hullo,
the new uniform at last? How splendid!” And we had to call back
cheerfully, “Yes, isn’t it topping?”
Outside Colonel Beynon’s tent we paused and looked at one another.
“I wonder if I could get Eddie Keeling to take them back. He’s had a
diplomatic training and he has no reverence for----”
“Come on,” Brodrick interrupted firmly, “we’d better get it over.”
The assistant adjutant general was writing letters at a camp table when
we entered, and he gave that day one of the noblest exhibitions of
self-restraint I have beheld. The only thing he could not quite manage
was a smile.
“Shall I put the things down here, sir?” I asked with an exaggerated
solicitude as if by laying them down gently enough on the camp bed the
wounded uniforms might recover.
“Anywhere,” said the colonel coldly.
I do not recall that to express our penitence we actually went out
backward from the tent; but I am sure that we retired on tiptoe as one
retires from an invalid’s room, and I can still see the expression of
Colonel Beynon’s face, and deposited by George Brodrick in a neat little
packet on his pillow, those outraged scarlet tabs. We found my own
uniform in my tent and, except for the leather buttons which Mr.
Phillips had supplied instead of the unobtainable buttons of my own
corps, it was perfect. The first person I met when I walked through the
lines in my new splendour and spruceness was Kenny.
“By Jove, you’re looking very smart. I hardly recognized you.”
Kenny and I had had many a walk and talk together since we reached the
_Arcadian_ in that torpedo boat; but, good friends though we were, that
old service jacket of mine and those imperfectly fitting breeches of
Bedford cord had always been a barrier to real intimacy. We were always,
as it were, shouting to one another from the opposite banks of a river,
discussing such topics as the way the fish were running or the prospects
of a cloudy morning. But, first in my exquisite _eau de nil_ uniform and
then in an even more exquisite uniform of _café au lait_, I crossed the
severing stream and Kenny could really expand in a way that he had never
been able to expand while I remained on the opposite bank. Some days
after this a third or fourth British “warm” arrived for Eddie Keeling,
inside which I found the name of my own tailor in Grafton Street. It
fitted me perfectly.
“You surely don’t want another British warm, Eddie?”
“Not in the least. I wish you’d take it off me.”
“The simplest thing in the world! I’ll write to Forster’s and tell them
to transfer it to my account.”
It was a marvellous British warm as one would expect from a combination
of Keeling’s eye with Forster and Son’s fingers. What sheep gave their
wool for it we could not know, but they must have shunned, as Virgil
advised, the _pabula laeta_, and they deserved a fifth book of Georgics
to themselves. It looked as soft and luscious as a _mousse_, and the
plump leather buttons might have tempted a child to eat them for
_marrons glacés_.
_Munere sic niveo lanae, si credere dignum est,_
_Pan deus Arcadiae captam te, Luna, fefellit._
My appearance in this vestment gave Kenny a pleasure that was really
delightful to witness. He was like a man who had been trying to convince
himself against his better judgment that a piece of furniture he rather
liked was genuine and who had suddenly discovered that his taste had all
along been more reliable than his expert judgment. I happened to inquire
after the servant we had shared those first few days and was distressed
to hear that he had just been given field punishment for hitting another
man on the head with a spade. I took the first opportunity to visit the
culprit in his affliction and found him tied to a post in that hellish
whirl of sand and flies and wind and blazing sun. He was indignant over
the punishment, which he said was unjust, because the other man had
called him a bastard before he hit him on the head with a spade. If I
had not acquired that new uniform I might have argued with Kenny about
sending his servant back to the trenches when the punishment was over,
but I had not the heart to shock Kenny by expressing opinions at
variance with the lines a good tailor had laid down for me, and besides
I had to admit to myself that his servant, apart from the accuracy and
energy required to hit a man on the head with a spade, had always been
careless and lazy. I salved my conscience, as so many consciences have
been salved, with a farewell tip.
“Thank you, sir,” said my first batman before he set out philosophically
for Helles, “I wouldn’t have paid so much attention as what I did if
he’d have called me anything else. But nobody likes a fellow to up and
call him a bastard, do they, and which is why I hit him like I did.”
The night after my uniform came from Alexandria there was a strange
display of orange sheet lightning in the brooding firmament and a sudden
silence of the frogs that seemed to presage a thunderstorm, but the
omens ended in a tearing northerly gale which drove Keeling and myself
out about three in the morning to tighten the ropes and hammer down the
pegs of our tent. Either that chilly and laborious task, throughout
which the Infant Jupiter muttered the most blood-curdling oaths, or the
thin khaki in which I had been strutting about the day before brought on
a chill which sent my temperature up to one hundred and three degrees. I
felt as if cohorts of Turks were sticking knives into me while one
particularly fierce and ingenious fellow raked the sciatic nerve with an
iron hook. The worst of it was the Gallipoli Gallop chose this moment to
get me for the first time, and to gallop three hundred yards through the
wind and sun with that temperature was not pleasant. However, luckily my
new servant from the Howe Battalion arrived, and supported by him and
Eddie Keeling’s man I toiled up and down that dusty slope all day
without making myself any worse. Indeed, I was so much better in four
days that the threat of a hospital ship was mercifully averted, and on
the fifth day I was back in the I tent working on that index of
suspects. People were most kind to me while I was ill, coming to sit and
chat in my tent instead of getting their afternoon walk. Thus all the
gossip of the camp reached me, which was very tonic, for out there
without any papers under a month old, and they not too plentiful, gossip
was the breath of one’s leisure. I fancy it was about this time that we
secured a new cook for the OI mess, and, if it was, it would have been
exciting to hear the tale of his prowess from day to day. There had
always been one faction that cried out for the importation of a cook
from Malta, which used to make Maxwell, the mess president, very angry,
because he felt it was a criticism of the two local cooks he had already
engaged. I have an idea that a Maltese cook did finally arrive; but if
he did he was no better than any of the others, and the food remained
filthy all the time. I remember finding one cook at work behind a
shelter of old privy seats he had built round his field oven to keep off
the wind. I can see him now grinning at us through the hole in one of
them, like a driver in the cab of a railway engine. Some of the members
of the mess were shocked by the notion of such a kitchen and protested
to Maxwell, who talked darkly of finding somebody else to run the mess,
for the trouble of doing which he got no gratitude from anybody. The
people in OI, Q, and A were convinced that the other two messes were
better than theirs; but I fancy that they were all much of a bad
muchness, and though Maxwell was more pompous over the food he provided
it was no worse than the rest.
Tea was the most squalid meal because at tea the flies reached their
maximum of numbers and offensiveness. One was lucky to get a sip that
only included a couple of flies, and for those who did not like sugar in
their tea the foul sweetness of biting a fly was not enjoyable. At this
hour the sun had moved round far enough to shine in through the opening
of the big marquee where we messed, and the beams lighted up the stains
and spills on the long trestle table, every one of which was the centre
of attraction for a quarrelsome mob of these flies which merely used our
table for a light dessert after the solid filth they had been gorging
all day. They used to alight in threes and fours at a time on one’s lips
and sometimes had to be actually pulled away, so greedy were they of the
moisture; they were loathsome, too, when they clung sizzling to the rim
of one’s cup. Fortunately these foul Harpies slept at night, and every
evening when dinner was over Val Braithwaite and I used to make torches
of old newspapers and burn slowly and voluptuously up the tent ropes
which looked like cords of deep indigo velvet, so thickly on them slept
the flies. Unfortunately we could not reach the roof, which was a dark
solid canopy of them. One night we tied our torch to a long pole; but
the effect of wingless flies falling down to crawl about on our heads
and get netted in our hair was too much for us, and after that we only
burned them on the ropes.
For some time after we went ashore we had no bread, and it was worth
while learning by experience how detestable a meal can be without bread,
for which biscuit is no sort of substitute. Yet after a couple of meals
accompanied by bread the novelty wore off, and we were once again gazing
distastefully at our plates. And then somebody who knew what he was
talking about said that _yorghti_ was what we should be having every
night. _Yorghti_ is sour sheep’s milk served in a bowl like junket, and
the man who invented it should have as much respect as humanity has
accorded to Prometheus. It may be discovered one day that Prometheus did
invent it, and no doubt the gods were too much taken up with their own
ambrosia to be jealous. _Yorghti!_ And as I write the name of that
substance I fain would sing with golden eloquence, I am conscious,
remorsefully conscious, that I am probably not spelling it as it should
be spelled. Somewhere on my shelves the orthography of that word must be
hidden, but I cannot find it; and what does it matter? _Yorghti_,
whatever way it may be spelled, is a ridiculous name for this
life-giving stuff. At first, in the approved English fashion, the
uninitiated members of the mess turned up their noses at it. No doubt
several sand-dried Israelites made an equivalent grimace of contempt
over the first plate of manna put before them. Presently, however,
everybody overcame his insular prejudice first against milking sheep at
all and then against the deliberate turning of such unnatural milk sour,
overcame his prejudice, indeed, so successfully that we at the junior
end of the table began to look a little anxious as the bowl dallied
unduly in the hands of our seniors. There was one older member of the
mess whose eyes used to glow like a lover’s with real passion when the
bowl reached him. This particular member was something of a puritan. I
had often heard him speak in terms of unmeasured reprobation of men who
had been willing to sacrifice their careers for women or wine or cards,
and I was maliciously quick to note his own carnal weakness and point it
out to others. Val Braithwaite and I used to bet with each other on the
number of spoonfuls he would scoop on to his plate when the _yorghti_
reached him; and once when X---- helped himself to nine generous
spoonfuls, his eyes goggling in the candlelight, we derived so much
enjoyment from the spectacle that we hardly minded having to scrape the
bowl to find ourselves a meagre spoonful apiece. The whole case of X----
and his greed over food interested me because apart from that he was
obviously a man of singularly ascetic habits, and his puritanism if
betraying a little too much spiritual pride was unmistakably sincere and
due to a real hatred of fleshly indulgence. Yet one might have fancied
that he for a bowl of _yorghti_ would have lapped away kingdoms and
provinces even as once upon a time for Cleopatra Anthony kissed them
away.
By the middle of June the flowers had mostly faded from the dunes of
Kephalo. The pink oleanders still bloomed in the damp hollows, the
topmost blossoms of the pink hollyhocks were still opening; but of all
those myriad many-coloured stars among the herbage none now remained
except a little St. John’s wort with gray leaves. There was, indeed, one
more floral excitement, which was when Orlo Williams discovered a bosket
of _Vitex agnus castus_, that shrub whose sacred twigs the Vestal
Virgins carried. The flowers are like small verbenas of every pastel
shade of fawn and mauve and cloudy pink. Monk’s Pepper it is sometimes
called, for its fruits, spiced though they be, are a powerful opponent
of Aphrodite as becomes a shrub beneath whose scanty shade Hera was
born.
To compensate for the diminution of the flora, insect life increased in
multitude and variety every day. There were flies, blue-bottles,
green-bottles, a big gray-striped cleg of most undaunted pertinacity and
savagery, scorpions, ticks, grasshoppers of every size and shape, some
with wings that glittered in the sun like garnets, some that sparkled
like mica or lapis lazuli. There were spiders, beetles, ants,
mosquitoes, sand flies, digger wasps, praying mantises, and those
ghastly centipedes which moved slowly like a toy clockwork train, some
of them six inches long and half an inch wide. There was one large
spider which we used to call a tarantula, but which belonged, I fancy,
to another branch of the Lycosa family. This brute was a couple of
inches long with a soft and loathsome puce-coloured body hairless or
seemingly hairless. We tried several contests between these spiders and
the clockwork centipedes under inverted tumblers, but such prize fights
were usually a failure because the centipede continued to promenade
round and round with that curiously cold and cynical expression which
all centipedes affect, while the spider became either hysterical or
sulky.
Far better sport was provided by the ant lion. This is quite the most
entertaining larva I have had the luck to meet. I cannot find out much
about the habits of the perfect insect, which is a kind of nocturnal
dragon fly believed to be carnivorous. If _Myrmeleon formicarius_ half
as artful as its earlier wingless self it must be a nasty customer for a
tipsy moth to meet on the way home. In appearance the larva somewhat
resembles a much flattened, slightly triangular, grayish woodlouse with
a flat square head from which project a couple of grim incurving
mandibles. This clumsy-looking creature, which on hard ground can only
walk very slowly backward, excavates for itself a conical pit in sand
about two inches deep and three inches wide at the top. First of all, it
marks out a circular furrow, and then, working round the inside of this
boundary, it shovels sand with a foreleg on to its square head, which in
turn flings the sand outside the furrow. In order not to overtire one
leg it traces every alternate furrow in an opposite direction so as to
use the right and left foreleg in turn. If it finds a small stone, this
is placed on its head and jerked over the side. Sometimes, however, when
the ant lion gets near the bottom of the narrowing pit, it finds a stone
too big to be jerked out. This stone is somehow lifted on to its back
and there kept balanced by moving the segments of which it is composed,
rather in the way that a juggler like Cinquevalli will balance a cannon
ball on his shoulder by the play of the muscles. Time after time I have
seen the persevering ant lion get a stone almost to the top only for it
to roll off at the last moment, but the miniature Sisyphus goes back for
it undaunted and to achieve its purpose cleverly makes use of the tiny
groove which the stone had cut in falling. I watched one ant lion do
this eight times before it succeeded in unloading the stone over the
brow of the pit. When all is finished the ant lion returns to the bottom
and buries itself in the sand, except for the points of the open forceps
made by its mandibles. Then the fun begins. An inquisitive ant walking
along decides to explore the pit. The moment it steps over the edge the
ant lion down at the bottom starts throwing sand over it or else if more
effective shovels the sand away from underneath the ant, which
gradually slides down the fatal precipice until it is seized, sucked
partially dry, and flicked outside. The ugly little epicure would not
accept dead flies or ants and ejected them with contempt when offered to
it. Then I tried pushing one of those large soldier ants over the side.
This time the ant lion got more than it counted on, for the soldier ant
with an expression of contemptuous indignation turned round sharply and
bit one of the mandibles with such ferocity that the ant lion left the
soldier ants alone after that, though I kept flicking them down into the
pit for the whole of a sunny half hour. Two years later, on the island
of Samos, I tried the experiment of putting an ant lion down outside the
entrance to a colony of small black ants, its easy victims when alone.
The ground was too hard for the ant lion to dig itself in, though a
gallant effort was made, and then began a great battle which did not end
in the death of the ant lion and the triumphant dragging of the carcass
within until it had left twenty-six devoted ants lying dead round their
threshold. Feeding the ant lions became a recognized pastime during our
walks at Kephalo. The absence of golf and bridge turned many people into
observers of nature, and it became clear that an Englishman’s mind need
not necessarily become a desert when he has no ball to knock about. It
certainly was an unusual and enjoyable experience to spend all those
weeks in masculine society without once finding a good conversation
butchered to make a bridge player’s holiday.
The arrival of the proofs of _Guy and Pauline_ provided some amusement,
and if ever a book of mine deserved to escape the reproach of a single
misprint that one did. Intruding commas were dealt with as ruthlessly as
the flies; there was not an epithet that did not face the verdict of a
dozen critical if always kindly commentators before it was allowed to
remain. I remember Val Braithwaite’s being much concerned to find Guy
addressing Pauline as “my burning rose,” which he found exaggerated. He
spoke to Guy Dawnay about it and suggested that he should tactfully
propose the elimination of this apostrophe. We had a long discussion
over it, in which, while I admitted that Val himself would never be
likely to address a young woman so floridly, I held fast to my opinion
that Guy would.
“Not Guy Dawnay?” Val exclaimed in horror.
“No, no, not Guy Dawnay, of course. But this fellow I’m writing about is
supposed to be half off his head with love.”
“My God, I should think he was,” Val agreed warmly. “Of course I don’t
know anything about writing or that sort of thing, but ‘my burning rose’
... well, I think it sounds idiotic. You mustn’t be offended, old thing.
But suppose I suddenly sang out to a girl ‘my burning rose’? Damn it,
she’d think I was blotto. I mean to say, making allowance for this chap
Guy and all that, I think ‘my burning rose’ is going a bit too far.”
“Yes, but he wasn’t at Winchester, Val.”
“Where was he?”
“I think he was at Westminster and Balliol.”
“Well, of course, you know best, I suppose. But if I’d written this book
I should take out all this about ‘my burning rose.’ I mean to say, as
soon as I read he said that, it prejudiced me against him. Well, look
here, did you ever call a girl a burning rose?”
“No, I don’t suppose I ever did.”
“There you are!”
“Yes, but the point is that Guy and Pauline are walking about in a
crimson sunset.”
“Well, what of it? That’s no excuse for this chap making an ass of
himself like that.”
“Wait a minute. If I were very much in love with a girl and I saw her
cheeks flushed and I was trying to express some of the----”
But Val shook his head gravely.
“I don’t think you’d call her a burning rose.”
The tide ran strongly against “my burning rose” for a while at G. H. Q.;
but I won Aspinall over to my side, and in the end the expression was
allowed to pass as just admissible in the circumstances with a strong
recommendation that Guy must never say such a thing again. Possibly
Powell’s[30] opinion was asked about the behaviour of poets because his
sister had married one of the most distinguished poets of the day in
Laurence Binyon. Powell admitted that it had been a great shock to the
family when they heard his sister was going to marry a poet. I dare say
my dear old father-in-law, E. D. Stone, who was a friend of hers, had
had some of the blame at first for putting ideas into her head by
encouraging her to suppose that she was clever, which would make a girl
look at poets from another angle.
“We were awfully relieved,” said Powell with a reminiscent sigh, “when
we found out that he was quite an ordinary chap.”
“But surely an extraordinary poet, Powell?”
“Yes, I know. That’s what we were afraid of until we met him. By Jove,”
the rifleman declared, twirling his dark moustache with a gesture which
recalled that outlived perplexity. “By Jove, what a relief it was when
we saw him! We simply hadn’t known _what_ to imagine beforehand.”
So I fancy that if Powell’s opinion was ever asked about calling young
women burning roses he would, whatever the colour of the sunset, have
condemned it as unequivocally as Val Braithwaite had.
It was to Powell that I owe one of those flashes that illuminate
essentiality. Walking with him one night in conversation up and down the
lines, he turned to me and said abruptly:
“This is exactly like South Africa.”
And by that single remark he revealed to me the South African War and
gave me at the same time the clue to this campaign. He had a deceptive
slowness of comment, a heaviness it would have seemed to many, which
concealed a ripe dry wit. A walk with Powell was like a glass of
excellent old dry sherry, to be sipped deliberately with relish.
In the middle of correcting the proofs of _Guy and Pauline_ somebody
suggested that the least return I could make for the trouble the general
staff had taken over my punctuation was to dedicate the book to them. I
went to Sir Ian Hamilton, feeling a little nervous beforehand about the
way he might receive this proposal, and asked his leave to inscribe the
book to him and the general staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary
Force. He accepted the dedication in the kindest way and contrived to
make me fancy, whatever were his own vexed thoughts at that time of
endless anxiety, that the suggestion pleased him. So what Orlo Williams
called that “luscious pastoral” went back for press inscribed with all
sincerity to a number of people to whom I felt a deep gratitude and for
whom I had a real affection.[31]
Just about the time I was sending off the corrected proofs of _Guy and
Pauline_, Henry James wrote me the following letter:
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 18th, 1915.
MY DEAR MONTY:
All this while I have remained shamefully in your debt for
interesting news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by
your admirable report from the Dardanelles in this A.M.’s _Times_.
I am a backward being, alas, in these days when so much is forward;
our public anxieties somehow strike for me at the roots of
letter-writing, and I remain too often dumb, not because I am not
thinking and feeling a thousand things, but exactly because I am
doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks ago that you had
finished your new novel--which information took my breath away (I
mean by its windlike rush)--and now has come thus much of the
remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you
and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your
splendid sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous
pleasure in the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate in your
imagination, your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and
terrible things. What impressions you are getting, verily--and what
a breach must it all not make with the course of history you are
practising up to the very eve. I rejoice that you finished and
snipped off, or tucked in and wound up, something self-contained
there--for how could you ever go back to it if you hadn’t?--under
that violence of rupture with the past which makes me ask myself
what will have become of all that material we were taking for
granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged
cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or
consumption. I seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your
recently concluded novel as through a glass darkly--which, however,
will not prevent my immediately falling upon it when it appears; as
I assume, however, that it is not now likely to do before the
summer’s end--by which time God knows what other monstrous chapters
of history won’t have been perpetuated! What I most want to say to
you, I think, is that I rejoice for you with all my heart in that
assurance of health which has enabled you to gird yourself and go
forth. If the torrid south has always been good for you there must
be no amount of it that you are now not getting--though I am
naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly helpless and
incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with all
sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn’t make remarks
about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying
that I believe with all my heart in the final power of your push.
As for our news here the gist of that is that we are living with
our eyes on you and more and more materially backing you. My
comment on you is feeble, but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear
Monty, your more than ever faithful old
HENRY JAMES.
P. S. I have your address, of many integuments, from your mother,
but feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to
a livelier mouse![32]
At this date I thought Henry James was overestimating the ruin that the
war was likely to make of “all that material we were taking for
granted.” I was still supposing that I should emerge from it presently
with a useful little hoard of experience on which I should draw when a
suitable occasion for expenditure presented itself. I did not know then
with what intensity I was going to live for the next two years, nor
that, having lived more richly than I could ever hope to write, writing
would come more and more to seem sometimes an almost intolerable
interruption of living. I look along my shelf at the eighteen books I
have written during the last eleven years; and then, turning to the five
books written before I took an active part in the war, I ask myself in
amazement how I once imagined that from the spendthrift existence of war
I should put one farthing worth of experience into the bank. For years
now I have been pursuing that elusive phantom of the great war novel,
and this first volume of my memories marks a complete surrender to the
overwhelming fact, or, if you will a meek acceptance of Byron’s
statement, that truth is stranger than fiction. To have taken that
society on the promontory of Kephalo and extracted from it the juice to
feed my own imaginary creations came finally to seem quite
unjustifiable. If the ultimate effect of this volume should have no more
value than an album of faded snapshots I am content. Somehow the solid
fact of Achi Baba stands as doggedly between me and my dreams of a great
war novel as it stood between us and our dreams of Constantinople.
Neither my dreams nor those of the general staff were yet dispelled that
June. The silence of the government over three weeks was abruptly
broken. Three new divisions would soon be on their way. At G. H. Q. we
heard of two horses and a groom for every member of the staff. I confess
that the prospect of having to ride onward in the wake of a victorious
army filled me with alarm. It is not that I cannot sit on a horse, but
that I do not understand them. Their language is to me incommunicable.
When a dog growls I know what it wants. No dog would get its way with me
by just growling in the hope that I should be put off by a menacing
noise because I should back myself to know how far it was prepared to
follow up speech by action. But when a horse puts down its head and
makes a noise through its admired nostrils like a railway engine in a
station, I have not the least idea whether it is asking for a handful of
oats or signifying its intention of galloping off with me in exactly the
opposite direction from my destination.
The mere fact that the Greeks call the horse ὁ ἄλογος or “the
unreasonable one” revives in me the Philhellene more potently than
Byron’s most impassioned verse.
“What makes him go sideways?” said Mr. Snodgrass in the bin to Mr.
Winkle in the saddle.
“I can’t imagine,” replied Mr. Winkle.
And no answer ever given by a character in literature has struck quite
such a sympathetic chord in my innermost being.
As soon as I heard of these horses waiting to bear me to Constantinople
I had a vision of myself lolloping along sideways on them all the way
from Helles to the Golden Horn. They would probably both be chestnuts
with all that temperamental inclination to go off at a tangent about
nothing which they share with red-haired human beings.
“Can you ride?” I inquired of my new batman, whom I will call Darwin.
“No, sir.”
“Well, you’d better learn,” I said severely.
I was determined that somebody else should feel as much worried by the
prospect of dealing with those horses as I was.
Darwin was a grave youth who in real life was a clerk in a municipality
somewhere along the south coast. He made no secret of his pleasure at
being out of the trenches where with the Howe he had been in the very
thick of things. But he would have been still better pleased to be out
of the war altogether. One day I found him sitting on my camp chair, his
hands on his knees, and a remote, wistful look in the dark eyes.
“Hullo, Darwin, dreaming?” I asked.
He rose with an apology.
“I was just thinking it was on the stroke of two, sir. And I was just
thinking that if I was at home, sir, I’d just be about halfway up the
stairs to the office. There are sixty-four steps, sir, up to the
municipal assessment offices, and I was just thinking I’d have been on
the thirty-second step where I always stopped to have a look back at the
clock on the esplanade and see I wasn’t late. There was a window just
where the thirty-second step was, and after that you turned the corner
and went on up.”
“And you’ll be glad to be walking up those stairs again, Darwin?”
“Oh, I shall be glad, sir,” he declared with a sigh. Not glen nor ben
could have called more poignantly to the heart of a Gael than the steps
up to the municipal assessment offices in a south-coast town called to
Darwin; Jacob’s ladder was not thronged by a brighter multitude of
angels.
“You don’t feel that this experience of war will make you disinclined to
settle down when it’s over?”
“No, sir, the only thing I really think about _is_ settling down again.”
“And you really enjoy office work?”
“Oh, I do, sir. I’m really what you might call passionately fond of it.
Well, it’s always just about the same, and I think that’s what makes it
so enjoyable.”
Soon after this Darwin brought some letters he had been writing home for
me to censor.
“Long letters, Darwin,” I commented, glancing with some dismay at the
closely written sheets I should have to wade through if I did my work
honestly.
“I think, sir, if you read through one of them, it will be quite
sufficient. The others are all word for word the same. Just the names
different at the beginning, that’s all.”
And sure enough the five long letters addressed as far as I can remember
to a father, three brothers, and a sister all living in the same house
were word for word the same except for such abbreviated names as Hube
and Herb at the beginning.
“Are you going to send them all in one envelope?”
“No, sir,” he replied with that gentle deprecatory expression of his.
“Well, that would hardly be quite the same thing, would it? Though we’re
a very united family.”
I stamped the envelopes with the censor’s scarlet seal, wondering if
these letters would be passed round the little sitting room in that neat
terrace somewhere on the south coast and be read, each one in turn, as
solemnly as they had been written.
Darwin remained with me as long as I remained a member of the
Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. A quiet, grave, dreamy youth, he
would sit forward in the trawler we were voyaging in at the moment and
gaze for hours at the horizon as if to conjure along it amid those
classic scenes the prosperous esplanade of his native town. How
different from the sober study in sepia wash that might have illustrated
Darwin’s life was the crude and gaudy colouring of the little
biographies I was compiling for the index of suspects in the Area of
Operations.
_“Captain” H---- H---- _ ... I wish I could print his name in full, for
it had the authentic tang of robust villainy and in the annals of piracy
could have stood beside such names as Captain Want or Captain Yellows,
Captain Fly or Captain Crackers.
‘Captain’ H---- H---- Left Birmingham in 18--where he was employed
as a clerk at Messrs.----, brass founders. Suspected of I. D. B. in
the Transvaal. Expelled from Pretoria. Smuggled ivory from
Abyssinia. Arrested for an unnatural offense at Durban. Involved
in several frauds in the U. K. Served sentence of three years’
penal servitude. Served sentence in Queensland for stealing opals.
Expelled from Tripoli by Italians during Turko-Italian War for
suspected espionage. Ran a Seamen’s Rest House in Smyrna. Arrived
in Anzac as interpreter. Arrested and sent to Malta for the
remainder of the war.
Not every suspect arrested in the Area of Operations had had quite such
a twopence-coloured career as Captain H---- H---- There were many
wearisome files to toil through where only enough evidence had been
gathered to write at the end of the suspect’s record “Excluded from the
A. of O.” with the date. Later on when I was in Athens many of these
merely tainted names came under observation for the second time, and in
almost every case I satisfied myself that the suspicious conduct had
been due to their owners’ attempt to carry through trading deals and
that the denunciation of them to the military authorities had been the
work of a jealous rival. Spy fever was endemic on the peninsula, and
seldom a day passed without an excitable brigadier’s telephoning that he
had caught some ruffian red handed, the ruffian always turning out on
investigation either to be a Greek cook who had wandered from a brigade
near by or an interpreter with a long and honourable career of service
behind him. Few nights went by that were not enlivened by the most
circumstantial reports of signalling, all of which proved susceptible of
a common-sense explanation.
Ultimately I should come to consider that the careers of suspects were
as much lacking in variety as the career of the clerk who was looking
after me; but the glamour of Intelligence work long outlasted the time I
spent at G. H. Q., and these files from which I was now compiling a
coherent index were as stimulating to the fancy as plans of buried
treasure.
Breakfast in bed at seven. Up at half-past seven. Work from eight till
half-past twelve. A siesta or a gossip or a walk in the afternoon. Tea
at four. Work from five till half-past seven. Sometimes a walk at
half-past six. Dinner at eight. Work from nine till ten or half past,
and then bed. That was the time-table; and my suspect list was almost in
order when Sir Ian Hamilton sent for me on the evening of the eighteenth
of June and told me that he wished me to go back with General
Hunter-Weston,[33] who had invited me to be his guest at Army Corps
Headquarters on the peninsula. Sir Ian was anxious for me to get round a
bit in case I should be called upon to act as official eyewitness.
From the moment that General Hunter-Weston turned his hawk’s countenance
on me and said to the accompaniment of his own humming: “So you’re
coming back with us for a blow at Helles! Splendid! Capital! You’ll
enjoy yourself. Tra-la-tra-lira-lira-la!” I knew I was in for a good
time.
CHAPTER X
ARMY CORPS HEADQUARTERS
The enemy had celebrated the centenary of the battle of Waterloo by
driving the Hundred and Twenty-fifth Brigade out of the salient they had
captured on the fourth of June. The brigade was unable to recover it;
but the Fifth Royal Scots with one company of the Fourth Worcesters had
come to its help led by Lieutenant Colonel J. T. R. Wilson, who was
reputed to be in real life a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh. The
battalion of Edinburgh Territorials he commanded had been brigaded with
the Fourth Worcesters, the Second Hampshires, and the First Essex to
take the place of a missing battalion and complete the Eighty-eighth
Brigade of the immortal Twenty-ninth Division. The Royal Scots had
already proved their mettle on several occasions, and now General
Hunter-Weston was bubbling over to get back to Helles and find out the
details of this latest gallant action of theirs, which had happened
while he was celebrating the centenary of Waterloo with Sir Ian Hamilton
over a dish of crayfish. He was bubbling with so much energy and
enthusiasm that I expected him every minute to bubble right overboard
from the destroyer and aërate the whole Ægean.
We reached Lancashire Landing at the close of a hot bombardment with
high explosive shells from Asia and walked along to Army Corps
Headquarters which were next door to the aërodrome. Here we were met by
the general’s A. D. C., Captain Carter of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light
Infantry, such a plump and genial figure as one might invent to steer a
fairy tale to a happy ending.
“Eighty-seven big ones, sir, in thirty-five minutes,” said Carter with a
grave salute and a twinkle in his eyes.
“Any damage?”
“Killed one man, sir.” The twinkle vanished. “And slightly damaged one
biplane.” The twinkle returned.
The general gazed at the ploughed-up earth round his headquarters.
“Wasteful rascals! Wasteful rascals!” he ejaculated, and then went off,
humming gaily, to look at the Baronial Hall, which was his name for the
new dugout finished that very morning and designed to shelter his mess
when a bombardment became too fierce even for him to sit talking at the
top of his voice or singing to himself in the mess tent.
“Well, isn’t this great and noble!” he declared. “You’ve nothing like
this on Imbros, Mackenzie. Look at that magnificent old carved oak
ceiling,” he went on, pointing to the rough pine trunks which supported
the roof.
“Shall we have tea in here, sir?” Carter asked with a note of pride in
his voice.
“Tea in here? Good God, no! Why, it’s a perfectly superb afternoon. We
don’t want to sit stuffing in here. The flowers that bloom in the
spring, tra-la! The flowers that bloom tra-la, tra-la, tra-la!”
Humming and singing he led the way to the mess tent, which was open on
one side with an awning in front like a veranda, as I seem to remember,
and a glorious view of the towering coast of Asia away to the left, and
on the right islands like great blue birds floating on the sparkling
sea.
“You haven’t got a better view than this in Italy, Mackenzie.”
“No, sir.”
After tea I sat on in the mess tent with Major Plunket, who had just
arrived to join General Hunter-Weston’s staff, but who had unluckily
been thrown from his horse when riding up to the fire trenches and
broken his collar bone. “Plunks” was a most lovable sandy-haired man
who had been military attaché to the British legations in Greece and
Serbia when war broke out. At Belgrade he had been standing on the
heights above the Danube watching some action between the Austrians and
Serbians and had just turned round to go home when a bullet got him in
what is not considered the most dignified place to receive a bullet; and
now within twenty-four hours of arriving here to take up his new post
the fortune of war had played him another trick.
He and I had not been chatting very long when shells began to fall
again. Presently one of them burst about ten yards from Plunket’s chair.
On this he rose and declared that sitting here was not good enough,
which I had been thinking for the last five minutes. Poor “Plunks” with
his broken collar bone was none too nippy in his movements, and since he
was also still a bit vague about the topography of the headquarters camp
we had about a dozen more shells round us before we finally went to
earth. The shelling stopped just before eight, much to the general’s
relief, for he enjoyed his dinner in the sunset. And a very good dinner
it was. I would not take my oath that we did not have champagne, though
my recollection of the brilliant sunset and the general’s equally
brilliant conversation may be responsible for thinking that there was
champagne as well. It would be unfair after fourteen years to try to
reproduce that talk, which was a most lucid exposition of the theory of
war and gave an insight into the mind of the good soldier such as I had
never had before.
Some time after this General Paris visited Army Corps Headquarters, and
to him General Hunter-Weston spoke enthusiastically of some successful
action on a portion of the front.
“Many casualties?” asked General Paris in a voice that could not hide
the bitterness he felt over the losses of his own splendid division. And
as I think of General Hunter-Weston’s reply I fancy I see a falcon
strike angrily at some grizzled trusty old dog.
“Casualties?” he cried, eyes flashing, aquiline nose quivering. “What do
I care for casualties?”
The other rose from his chair.
“I must be getting back,” he growled.
“You’ll stay to tea?”
“No, thanks.”
And as that burly florid man went slowly out, who might not have felt
that there was between him and General Hunter-Weston as wide a chasm in
nature as if he were a dog indeed and the other a falcon?
Now, it would be easy to deduce from this brief exchange of words that
General Hunter-Weston was a mere butcher, and there is no doubt that,
because he never did hesitate to talk in this ruthless strain, he did
achieve such a reputation on the peninsula. Actually no man I have met
brimmed over more richly with human sympathy. He was a logician of war,
and as a logician he believed and was always ready to contend in open
debate that, provided the objective was gained, casualties were of no
importance. Did a more compassionate spirit animate the conduct of the
war on the Western Front?
At Gallipoli the casualties of the Royal Naval Division commanded by
General Paris were 332 officers and 7,198 other ranks killed and
wounded. On the Western Front afterward their casualties were 1,603
officers and 32,242 other ranks killed and wounded. Their total
casualties throughout the war were over six times as heavy as they were
at Gallipoli. It is true that they did not gain their objective at
Gallipoli, but it would be equally true to claim that they never gained
their objective on the Western Front, for unless America had come in on
our side we should never have beaten the Germans in the West. At the
time of the Dardanelles campaign the entry of America was a far less
likely contingency than the entry of Greece, Roumania, and Bulgaria on
our side, and that quite soon, could we but demonstrate that we really
were determined to take Constantinople. There is no doubt that, with
more guns or even with more ammunition for the guns we had, we should
have swept up the peninsula, and there is equally no doubt that, if we
had achieved such a sweeping advance, the war could have been and
probably would have been over by the end of 1915. Fortune turns those
she would ruin into fools first. We remember the ruin, but we are apt to
forget that preliminary folly. The more admirals and generals that try
to answer the indictment of them which Mr. Churchill’s volumes provide,
the more completely unanswerable those volumes remain. Nearly every one
of those whom posterity will blame for the failure of the Dardanelles
expedition is now dead. Those whom their contemporaries of fourteen
years ago blamed are nearly all still alive. Slowly opinion has veered
round, and to the value of that expedition which was sometime a paradox
time has given proof.
General Hunter-Weston was one of those who grasped how profoundly
success at Gallipoli would influence the course of the war. If he had
been ordered by Sir Ian Hamilton to ride forward alone against Achi Baba
he would have jumped on his horse and done so, humming and singing to
himself while he rode up that defiant slope. As a military logician he
would have recognized that the capture of Achi Baba with only himself as
a casualty would have been indeed a famous victory. When he pounced like
a hawk on General Paris’s grizzled head that hot afternoon, screaming,
“What do I care for casualties?” he spoke from conviction; and I look
back with regard to a man who was not prepared to sacrifice the logic I
had heard him so brilliantly and so persuasively demonstrate while the
last crimson glow of the sunset was fading into a deep velvety night. I
can still see his bright eyes flashing in the candlelight where at the
head of the table in his mess tent he holds forth with such
irrefragable logic on the conduct of war.
That night Plunket had offered me the hospitality of his tent. The staff
of the Eighth Army Corps had compromised so far with those Asiatic guns
as to have scraped out for themselves in the corners of their tents
shallow excavations hardly as big as a generous grave in which they
slept. Plunket was worried that there was only one excavation and it
much too narrow to share with me even had his collar bone been whole. He
did not at all like the notion of my bed’s being fully exposed but
consoled himself with the thought that I could always get up and go to
the general’s dugout if the shelling became too unpleasant. It was about
half-past ten when I tucked in my host and got into bed myself. For ten
minutes I read Hilaire Belloc on the military position in an old copy of
_Land and Water_ stippled all over with dead flies. Then I blew out the
candle in the lantern and fell into a sound sleep, from which I was
awakened by a terrific crash that seemed to be reverberating on and on
through the thick black silence, though indeed the reverberation was my
own thudding heart. I struck a match and lighted the lantern just as
Plunket in his pajamas raised himself anxiously and painfully. It was
exactly half-past eleven.
“They’ve started again. You’d better hurry along and find the general’s
dugout,” he told me.
I got out of bed and stood for a minute in the entrance of the tent. The
moon, then in her first quarter, had already set. Not a star was
visible. The blackness was absolute, and as I looked out it seemed to
push its way past me into our tent, which was the only one that showed a
light. The silence was as deep as the darkness. It was all very well for
Plunket to tell me to go and find the general’s dugout, but I should not
make myself popular by wandering round the camp and tripping over other
people’s tent ropes in this blackness. And even were I successful in
reaching the general’s dugout, I could not fancy myself waking him up
and explaining that I had come to him for protection. I turned back into
the tent, blew out the light, and retired to bed again.
“What on earth are you doing?” Plunket complained fretfully from his
pit.
“Well, I think I’d rather stay here. There probably won’t be another.”
“Don’t be such an ass. It isn’t being brave to make an ass of yourself.”
“I’m not being brave. But I’d really rather stay here.”
I shirked trying to explain to Plunket that I felt more nervous at the
prospect of waking up the whole camp by setting out in the dark to look
for the general’s dugout than I should be if I remained where I was. To
arrive here as a guest from G. H. Q. and at the first sound of a shell
to go careering round the camp for shelter appeared to me as a monstrous
breach of good manners, and the longer I contemplated it the worse it
appeared. Plunket grumbled on at me for a while, but I pretended to be
asleep. The next explosion came at midnight, for I struck a match
quickly to note the time.
“Go and get into cover, Mackenzie.”
“It’s all right. I don’t expect there’ll be another. I don’t think that
one was quite so near as the first.”
“My God,” poor Plunket groaned, “if I could use my arm I’d get up and
push you out of the tent.”
The third crash came at half-past twelve, and having by now decided that
these cursed shells would arrive every half hour, I made up my mind to
sleep. In this I was mercifully successful, and I only heard the rest of
the half-hourly explosions as all through the night one hears from a
Pullman car the train stop at one station after another through the
night’s journey. I was so eager to justify myself for feeling so
ridiculously self-conscious about waking up the general or tripping over
tent ropes on my way to find him that I compelled sleep to come to the
rescue of my vanity. I knew that I was worrying poor Plunket by my
obstinacy because I could vaguely hear his voice sounding attenuated as
a ghost’s when it floated toward me across a gulf of utter darkness and
querulously kept urging me to get under cover. I felt ashamed of myself
for adding to the worry of his rotten night when he was already in such
pain from his shoulder, but I just lacked the courage to commit what
might be thought a breach of etiquette. This moral cowardice of mine has
always seemed to me a capital example of the effect of an English
public-school education, which provides its victim with the necessary
physical courage either to sit down on a football under the feet of
eight ferocious muddy forwards or to sleep on a camp bed with nothing
except a piece of canvas between him and the chance of being blown to
nothing by a shell punctually at one of the hours or half hours of a
mercifully short June night, but which at the same time leaves him such
a moral coward as to be afraid to fasten the bottom button of his
waistcoat or to wake up his host at midnight and ask leave to put his
bed where it will be safe from the terrifying shells of an eight-inch
gun.
No sooner had that too energetic gunner in Asia turned in for a morning
doze than the flies became lively, and I hope the fellow had as little
chance of sleeping with them as I had, for Darwin had worked out in his
head somehow that I should not want my mosquito net on the peninsula and
so had left it behind at Imbros. I got up and strolled about the
aërodrome in pajamas, drinking deep of the wine-gold morning air as I
watched a swarm of winged ants rise and fall in rainbow undulations
about nine or ten feet above the ground. I found no sign of damage from
the nocturnal bombardment except some fragments of boot, which I
afterward learned were the remains of a new pair that Carter was looking
forward to putting on this morning for the first time. We had breakfast
in the mess tent without being disturbed by shells; but just when we had
lighted our pipes and were setting out for a certain place a real
thumper came over from Asia and knocked a French biplane out, a useful
first shot. It is bad enough to interfere with the night’s repose or the
morning bath, but man has a first duty more intimate than sleep,
oblations to make as well as ablutions, which to postpone or disturb
touches sacrilege. We rushed to earth and telephoned the air people to
take their supernal toys back to Tenedos so that we could make these
oblations at leisure and with dignity. This, alas, we were not able to
do, for nobody came to remove the aëroplanes till two hours had passed,
and meanwhile the big Asiatic gun had been joined by a small one from
Achi Baba. To add to the complication of our morning arrangements by
shells, myriads of disappointed bachelors from that wedding party of
winged ants were now crawling about in the one place we least wanted
them just then.
I had expected to get up to the fire trenches that morning, but instead
I accompanied Colonel Street, the G. S. O. (1) to the other side of the
peninsula to see if more healthy headquarters could be found for the
Army Corps in that direction. Shells were coming over all the time, but
none burst nearer to us than a hundred yards away. We kept meeting dead
men sewn up in their blankets who were being carried down on stretchers
to the cemetery. My companion had a grave, almost a sorrowful, face, and
notwithstanding his thickset figure and the apparent vigour with which
he moved he conveyed somehow an impression of profound inward fatigue as
if in spite of all his effort he could not hide the strain of the past
two months. An eeriness crept across that gray-green landscape, for each
time we met one of these dead men I had an intuition that Street himself
was fey, and once or twice when he raised his hand in that last solemn
salute to the passing dead I could have fancied that he was already a
dead man himself, so far from here were his eyes looking. And then
somewhere on the road above the cliff on the west side he stopped a man
on some fatigue duty to ask a question, which was answered casually and
without a salute. Street at once turned on him in a rage and cursed him
up and down for his lack of discipline. A moment later he passed on,
becoming immediately his pensive, grave, half-immaterial self again. It
was a queer incident, and I can still see the expression of injured and
disgusted amazement on the offender’s face and the gray fury in
Street’s, and I can recall the sensation of suddenly passing back out of
the real world of dust and din to the quietness of a gray-green land
between life and death with which Street’s quiet level voice this
morning was in such concord and to which his personality was so
appropriate. On the way back he explained much about the campaign and
clarified for me some of my hazy notions about military operations. When
he spoke of the way the expedition had been treated at home there was an
echo in his tones of that savage outburst against the fellow who had
neglected to salute him, and I comprehended that he had not really lost
his temper with an individual but had used him to vent all his rage
against the whole sorry scheme of things, all his grief and
disappointment over what might have been out here.
Soon we were back at Army Corps Headquarters where we found that with
the shelling so active it had been decided to use the Baronial Hall for
lunch. When we entered with due ceremony, for this was the first meal to
be taken in it, the mess orderly came up to the general with a small
spent shell.
“Hullo, hullo!” shouted Hunter-Bunter at the top of his form. “What’s
this little woofer? What a nice little chap! How did he get in?”
“Come in through the side, sir,” the orderly replied indignantly,
pointing to the narrow slit below the roof that let in the light.
“How jolly! Dear little chap! Came to give us a house warming. What is
there for lunch? Ham! Beef! Capital.”
Then singing to himself Hunter-Bunter took his seat at table and after
sniffing the shell affectionately stood it up in front of his place
like a loaf of bread. He was in even more boisterous good humour than
usual because, having secured the D. S. O. for Colonel Wilson after the
gallant affair of the night before last, he was anxious that we should
all ride up with him to the firing line and watch him present it in
state. The French occasionally held ceremonious decorations at
Sedd-el-Bahr. Hollow square: rolling drums: bayonets flashing in the
moonlight: the Legion pinned on the warrior’s breast and kisses pinned
on his cheeks by his general’s prickly moustache.
“That’s the kind of thing the French do so much better than we do,”
Hunter-Bunter declared, throwing back his head and defying any of us to
contradict him.
“But you can’t kiss Colonel Wilson, sir,” somebody objected.
“And we can’t form a hollow square in the firing line, sir,” somebody
else put in.
But Hunter-Bunter, with flashing eyes, spoke of the exhilaration of
riding up to the trenches in the moonlight. As for me, I began to think
I stood a chance of reaching Constantinople before anybody else if my
horse took it into his unreasonable head to do so. I felt it was time to
offer my mite of dissuasion.
“It won’t be full moon for three or four days yet, sir. Last night at
half-past eleven it was as black as ink.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, sir,” said Plunket, whose broken
collar bone had been the result of a ride up to the fire trenches.
“I never knew such an unenterprising set,” Hunter-Bunter declared.
“Well, Carter, you and I will have to ride up by ourselves and give this
dear old boy the D. S. O. I hear he’s nearly sixty.”
“They strafed my new boots last night, sir,” said Carter. “And there’s
this French show beginning at five o’clock to-morrow morning.”
So in the end the expedition by moonlight was abandoned, for that night
anyway. I may take this opportunity to set on record that Colonel
Wilson’s age, which by the time I got back to G. H. Q. had almost
reached the allotted span, was actually at the date of his splendid feat
still a week or so on the right side of forty.
After lunch I retired to a deck chair in the general’s office where it
had been settled I should spend the night. Here, after a couple of hours
of playing hide-and-seek with the flies in and out of sleep, I was
finally summoned to tea from a really secure doze by the crash of a
shell overhead which shook half the contents of a sand bag down over my
face. Deedes arrived for tea, and about five o’clock he and I went out
for a long walk.
“I want to get right away from the war for a couple of hours,” he told
me.
So we did not talk of the present, nor even much of the past. Instead,
we reconstructed the British Empire after the war was over. Deedes was
going to stand for Parliament, and Guy Dawnay was going to stand for
Parliament, and I ought to stand for Parliament, and of course George
Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert were in Parliament already.
“This sort of thing must never happen again in this kind of way,” said
Deedes firmly.
“No, it certainly must not,” I agreed.
“More to the right, old thing,” Deedes murmured. “We want to make for
that clump of trees.”
I hardly liked to point out to Deedes that the one place for which I
felt we did not want to make at that moment was that very clump of trees
because it must have been quite as clear to Deedes as it was to myself
that the clump of trees was at this moment being heavily sprayed by
shrapnel.
“We’ve got to build up a new world,” Deedes affirmed.
I thought that if we kept walking on at this pace toward that blasted
shrapnel Deedes would be working on the housing problem in another world
altogether, but I only said:
“Although I am in sympathy with lots of things you and George and Aubrey
and Guy want, I don’t quite see how I could fight a constituency for the
Conservatives. I’m not really a great believer in Tory Democracy,
Deedes. I think we’re getting a little too much to the right, aren’t we?
You know best, of course; I’m apt to lose my bearings.” And unless we
moved over a bit to the left fairly soon, I thought, I should be most
unlikely ever to find them again. “Well, as I was saying, Deedes, when I
thought we were getting a little too much to the right, the trouble for
me over Tory Democrats has always been that like so many gentleman
farmers they are neither Tories nor Democrats.”
“Yes, I know what you mean,” Deedes admitted gravely.
But I felt that Deedes had no idea at all what I meant, which was to
engage him in such a tremendous argument over Tory Democracy that he
would not notice how much harder I was steadily pressing with my left
leg in order to obtain an offing from that clump of trees.
“I was up at Oxford, Deedes, when one wet afternoon Maurice Woods had to
read a Disraeli novel because he could find nothing else to preach Tory
Democracy. I watched the rebirth of it in Oxford. They used to conspire
even in my rooms, he and Henry Lygon and half the Canning Club. They
simply could not stop conspiring. They would walk up and down, muttering
“B. M. G.” which meant “Balfour Must Go,”[34] and after that they used
to go down in a troop to meet F. E. Smith at the railway station just as
if it were William of Orange landing in Torbay. I really can’t be a
Conservative. I can’t belong to a party which pretends to take Ulster
seriously.”
Deedes was now walking briskly to the left, and I was wondering what had
changed his mind when I saw ahead of us an Army Service Corps wagon
galloping at full speed down the Krithia road, with shells bursting all
round it.
“This is going to be a new party altogether,” he said. “The old
political divisions will no longer have any meaning for people who have
been through this kind of thing.”
“You mean like that driver who’s galloping his wagon along the road just
ahead of us?”
I felt I had just managed rather cleverly to draw Deedes’s attention to
the state of mind of that driver, but he went on talking just as
earnestly about the future. Feeling at last that the present had some
claim on his consideration, I asked lightly what he thought was the
calibre of the gun which was shelling the Krithia road.
“What gun?” Deedes asked vaguely.
“The one that damned nearly got that A. S. C. wagon exactly where we’re
going.”
“I didn’t notice a wagon.”
“Well, it got over the brow all right without being hit.”
Though Deedes was actually a month or two younger than myself, I felt
like a child being led by its parent down a long beach to be taught to
swim in a rough and cold sea, so rapidly were we drawing nearer to the
exact spot where the last shell had burst.
“We’ll go round by the Twenty-ninth Headquarters,” he announced.
The lower part of the notorious Gully Ravine or Saghir Deré, on the
slopes of which stood Divisional Headquarters, was singing with spent
bullets. I saw General de Lisle on the opposite slope and, as in a
dream, walking with him the pleasant officer with the oblong face whose
advice I had asked about the sailing of the _Franconia_ in the Hotel
Majestic at Alexandria just over a month ago. I sat down to rest while
Deedes went across and chatted with them for a few minutes.
“All very cheerful,” he proclaimed when he rejoined me. “But the flies
are pretty bad.”
“They don’t mind the spent bullets?”
“Bullets?” repeated Deedes in mild astonishment.
“Well, I’ve seen four men knocked over while I’ve been sitting here, and
I don’t suppose they were knocked over by flies.”
We turned down now to walk back by the road which had been built along
the undercliff by Turkish prisoners and Egyptians. The sea was thronged
with bathers in spite of the shrapnel which was continually bursting
over them. Sitting with their backs to the cliff were men brewing tea
and eating away at bread and jam exactly as they would have done at
Margate. The road itself was thronged with promenaders of every
kind--tall grave Sikhs, charming dapper little Gurkhas, button-headed
Egyptians, Zionist muleteers, Greek hawkers, Scottish Borderers, Irish
Fusiliers, Welshmen, men from Lancashire, Hampshire, Essex, and
Worcestershire, Cockney Royals, Gunners, Sappers, and as many more
different types besides. The laughter and shouting and babble rendered
it impossible even for Deedes to make himself clear on the subject of
the future. The heat from the westering sun full on the tawny cliffs was
intense. The dazzle of the water was blinding. Occasionally stretcher
bearers would pass with a man who had been hit, as you may see
stretchers bearers jostle through the crowds at Margate with a woman who
has fainted on a torrid August bank holiday. One fellow who was testing
the water with his foot before he plunged in gave a loud yell.
“Come on in, Bill, it ain’t cold,” shouted a small cockney pal who was
splashing about in four feet of water.
“Cold be----d,” shouted Bill, “I’ve got a bloody bullet in my bloody
toe.”
And back he hopped across the dusty undercliff road like a paddling
child who has cut its foot on a piece of glass.
At last we rounded the corner and reached Lancashire Landing, where
Deedes was living in a tent and working away at his reports of
interrogated prisoners as oblivious of the discomfort and danger in
which he was living as the Sister of Mercy, of whom he always reminded
me, would have been of the seething externals of the slum where her
mission lay.
“Well, so long, old thing,” he said to me. “It’s been a wonderful walk
and such a tremendous relief to get absolutely right away from the war
for a couple of hours.”
I gasped for a moment and stared at him. But no, the figure standing
there in the amber light of the evening was not joking; it was indeed of
candour and sincerity compact.
I slept soundly in the general’s office that night, thanks to that quiet
country walk with Deedes, and glad I was to do so, for at half-past four
I was to be up and watching from a forward observation post the attempt
that was going to be made by the French to strengthen our line on the
extreme right, I was woken by a loud noise which, as I opened my eyes
and sat up in bed, I thought must be a shell which had somehow entered
the dugout. However, it proved on investigation to be Major General
Egerton and his staff who had just landed.
“Major General Egerton and the staff of the Fifty-second Lowland
Division!” somebody proclaimed.
There was a good deal of stamping and saluting to which I could not
respond with any bravura owing to my being barefooted and in pajamas.
However, I told them that a battle was going to begin presently and that
if they cared to come up to General Hunter-Weston’s observation post
after they had had some breakfast I thought they might enjoy it. There
was more clanking and stamping and clicking, and we parted to meet
later. It was a most exquisite morning. The heavy bombardbent of the
Turkish left, as I sat peacefully by myself and watched it, my elbows on
the sill of the observation post which had been dug out of what looked
like a rounded chalky hump of the South Downs, provided a pageantry of
mist more wonderful than was ever beheld by Shelley’s autumnal stream.
The dawn had been clear; but presently a curtain of silver, through
which gleamed the ghost of the rising sun, hung in ethereal loveliness
of texture over the Kereves Deré. This was the smoke of bursting shells.
Gradually as the sun climbed higher the curtain became more substantial.
Then it seemed to droop and sweep along the hollows like a defeated
river mist by Windrush or by Evenlode when the spears of the sun come
flashing over the bald Oxfordshire hills. For a brief space there was a
respite from the bombardment while I sat entranced watching the delicate
stems of wood smoke twirl tremulously up from the bivouac fires of the
French camp among the trees, to drift as blue as hyacinths upon the
still air. Presently my glasses caught a long row of extraordinary
objects. What were they? A row of pumpkins? No. I looked again. A row of
Frenchmen squatting on their haunches. Even that sight the alchemy of
this morning air transumed with opalescent loveliness, as mangel-wurzels
in a field at sunset will sometimes glow like amethysts.
The respite did not last long. The bombardment was renewed with greater
fierceness than before. The 75’s drummed unceasingly. The reverberation
of the 125’s and of the howitzers shook the observation post. As the sun
mounted higher, all that first mirage of beauty gradually faded. Over
the Kereves Deré and beyond, upon Achi Baba himself, what had been a
shimmering curtain was now a pall. Presently that pall was lifted to
reveal the monstrous shapes of bursting shells, fierce jinn of livid
green and black and foul yellow smoke that kept appearing one after
another along the Turkish lines.
It must have been after breakfast that I took General Egerton and his
staff to view the bombardment for a while, after which we sat on the
sun-burnished turf of the chalky knoll--I write chalky, but it was
probably a light marl--and looked back to where the _St. Louis_ at the
entrance of the Straits was lending her aid in the bombardment.
Surrounded by fidgety destroyers and trawlers, she might have been a fat
gray goose with her goslings, but that they were protecting her, not she
them. General Egerton was a man of much charm and a fine courtliness.
We were talking about gardens, I think, when one of those big shells
from Asia came rattling overhead like the last motor bus going home to
burst somewhere above W beach. At the sound of the shell he and his
staff flung themselves down flat so quickly that I could not get down in
time to keep them company. We were all very apologetic because General
Egerton was anxious to explain why they had flung themselves down and I
was equally anxious to explain why I had not.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said indulgently. “But one of them might fall
short. It’s foolish to take unnecessary risks.”
I was determined not to be caught sitting up again, and when the next
one came rattling over I plunged down with such vigour that I bumped my
nose against an old earthwork and got my mouth full of marl. By the time
two or three more shells had gone over we were all as dusty as millers,
and the staff were beginning to look a bit ruefully at their uniforms
and beautifully polished belts. Gradually as shell after shell passed
over to explode far beyond our position we came from throwing ourselves
down like tragic actresses to swaying like dervishes, and then to
nodding like mandarins, and then to raising our eyebrows and watching
where the shell burst, and finally not to looking at them at all. That
big Asiatic gun was extraordinary. From where we were sitting we could
see the white flash on the other side of the Straits when it was fired.
Then the shell about fifteen seconds later would roar past overhead and
explode away over on the other side of the peninsula, and finally, as a
ridiculous anticlimax, the original noise it had made when it was fired
would reach us like a muffled bark. The gallant staff of the splendid
Lowland Division did not have to concern themselves for long about the
spickness and spanness of their appearance, for within another
thirty-six hours of that sunny morning of the year’s longest day they
would have been looking back on those big shells rumbling and rattling
overhead from Asia as the mere noise of London traffic compared with
what they were so instantly to learn of war. General Egerton himself was
to fall gravely ill in July and be invalided home; but not before he,
too, may have asked himself if the march to Kandahar when he had been
severely wounded or the battles of Tel-el-Kebir, Atbara, and Omdurman,
at all of which he had been present, had revealed to him anything
compared with Gallipoli of the reality of war.
By noon the Second Division of the French had on the left of our right
flank stormed and captured all the Turkish trenches of the first two
lines. Even the Haricot Redoubt, with its damnable entanglements and its
maze of communicating trenches, was in French hands. On the extreme
right, however, the First Division, after reaching their objective, had
been counter-attacked so effectively that they had fallen back. Again
they advanced; again they took the trenches; again they were driven out.
It began to look as if the victory upon the left would be as fruitless
as the victory of the Naval Division still farther to the left had been
upon the fourth of June. But this time there would be no Collingwood
almost to obliterate if the Second French Division should once again
find the Haricot Redoubt an untenable salient and let it revert to the
enemy. About half-past three General Gouraud sent a message to the
divisional commander to say that the trenches must be recaptured and
when recaptured held. There were still five hours of daylight, the
general pointed out, for this battle of the longest day. There need be
no hurry. There would be another preliminary bombardment at half-past
five. And then the trenches must be recaptured.
Captain Churchill of the Twelfth Bengal Cavalry had arrived about lunch
to be extra A. D. C. to General Hunter-Weston, and I was told off to
take him round and show him the lie of the country before he began his
duties. Churchill was most anxious to see a shell burst somewhere near
him. It worried him to think that he had been in the army for thirteen
years and that he had never seen a shot fired in anger yet. So, feeling
that it was up to me to fill in this gap in his professional experience
as soon as possible, I decided to take him for the walk Deedes had taken
me the evening before. We found a meadow-pipit’s nest with four or five
eggs in it quite close to that shrapnel-sprayed clump of trees, but
unfortunately not a shell came near it this afternoon.
“It’s most extraordinary,” I said, feeling a little nettled. “You can
nearly always count on a shell here.”
“Perhaps there’ll be one in a minute or two,” Churchill suggested
hopefully.
We hung about for a while on the chance of a shell; but it was no use,
so I cheered him up by telling him he might see one presently, and with
that I took him up to the road which they had been plastering the
evening before with 4.7’s. Not a shell here either. Even our bombardment
had stopped, though the rifles were crackling like a bonfire of dry
faggots far away on the right.
“I can’t think why there aren’t any shells here,” I grumbled. “There
were plenty of them yesterday.” And I pointed to some of the
spoon-shaped depressions they had scooped out of the ground. Churchill
looked at them as a sportsman at the end of a blank day might look at a
hare’s form without the hare.
I suggested going down to the Gully Ravine past the Twenty-ninth’s
Headquarters. I said I could at any rate guarantee him plenty of spent
bullets and probably some shrapnel, which Churchill politely made the
best of in the way a sportsman will make the best of his host’s rabbits
after the poor behaviour of the pheasants. But when we reached the gully
there was not a bullet within earshot. Their song might have vanished
with the Sirens’ for all we could hear of it. So we sat down and waited
for them to begin. Churchill told me how disappointed he was not to have
got out here in time to see the flowers in their glory, and we went on
to talk about an extraordinary black iris which grew like a weed in his
father’s garden at Broadstairs.
“The Great Turkey or Spotted Flower de Luce!” I cried.
“Where?” he said, looking round. “I don’t see it.”
“No, no, Churchill, not a shell. That’s the name Parkinson gives to that
iris in your father’s garden. _Iris susiana._”
“That’s it,” he exclaimed in surprise. “But how on earth did you know
about it?”
“It was planted in the garden at Stone House by Archbishop Tait. You can
read about it in Robinson.”
“But that house is my father’s school.”
“Of course, now I know who you are. Why, your father took on Stone House
from my father-in-law, E. D. Stone.”
In the excitement of this discovery Churchill forgot all about his
desire to see a shell burst near him and I forgot to pick up my
kangaroo-skin tobacco pouch when we walked on. This was the third pouch
I had lost since I came out, and I was reduced for a week or two to
carrying my tobacco about in quarter-pound tins until I managed to buy a
large purse for it in Tenedos. Churchill and I agreed how much my dear
old father-in-law, who was then about eighty, would have enjoyed being
out here, for he thrived on noise, being extremely deaf, and he would
have heard everything that was said to him if a sixty pounder had been
crashing away close at hand. In his old age he could only gratify that
love of noise by slamming every door in the house behind him one after
another more loudly than I ever heard anybody slam doors. I had only
just had a letter from him, a typical letter in his exquisite scholar’s
hand, throughout which he had not said one word about the Dardanelles
campaign, but had discussed at great length the attitude of the Catholic
Church over Modernism. Dear E. D. S., whose Latin verses in the lamented
_Saturday Westminster_ were at once the despair and the delight of rival
scholars, his venerable head was beside us that June day while we were
walking back over the dusty scrub toward Army Corps Headquarters, with
never a shell to amuse Churchill the whole of the way.
Indeed, Churchill was so much struck by the peace of Gallipoli that
presently when we were standing by the aërodrome he looked up and began
to rhapsodize after the style of Mr. Pickwick from his bedroom window
that fine May morning at Dingley Dell just before the rook shooting.
“It’s all so calm,” he said. “Who could imagine a shell falling here?
What’s that ripping-looking island over there? Imbros? My gad, how
topping! And that’s really Asia over there? The peace of it is really
... hullo ... what are those grooms ducking for?”
I watched his eyes follow the course of a shell as it came roaring over
from peaceful Asia and passed only a few feet above our heads--I could
actually see the brute sailing along--to bury its nose with a grunt in
the earth just behind us.
“What was that?” he asked in bewilderment.
“A dud.”
“A dud what?”
“A dud shell.”
“Good Lord, I thought it was an aëroplane. Well, I’m glad I’ve seen one
at last, even though it was only a dud.”
Just after this we heard the crash of our renewed bombardment on the
right and hurried up to the observation post. It seemed when we got
there, a few minutes after half-past five, as if every gun on earth was
pouring shells on the Turkish lines. It must be remembered that the
French were far better supplied with guns and ammunition than we were,
and this afternoon we were contributing some of our precious high
explosives as well.
At six o’clock the third assault was delivered. In one trench there was
a temporary shortage of ammunition, but the enemy fought even with
stones and sticks and fists. A battalion that came hurrying up from the
Turkish right to reinforce it was caught on the open ground by the 75’s
and melted away. Six hundred yards of Turkish trenches were taken, and
still the bombardment was continued in order to ward off the
counter-attack that was anticipated. The smoke of the shells, which at
dawn had been ethereal, almost tralucent, was now in the sunset turbid
and sinister. Yet the sunset itself was of a splendour unusual even in
that land of splendid sunsets. It flamed in crimson streamers over
Imbros; it tinted the east with rosy reflections; it turned the peaks of
Asia to sapphires; and it had a peculiar significance on this longest
day of the year, crowning as it did those precious five hours of
daylight that for the French had been fraught with such achievement.
Slowly the colour faded out; now, minute by minute, the flashes of the
guns became more distinct, the smoke was merged in the gathering dusk;
and away over the more distant Turkish lines the bursts of shrapnel came
out like stars against the brief twilight.
I slept very soundly that night, and only woke once to hear an aëroplane
pass overhead at 1:30 A.M. I was told next morning that it was
Samson[35] flying northward on his way to bomb Constantinople. We had
good news at breakfast from French Headquarters to say that in spite of
counter-attacks the Haricot Redoubt was safe in our possession.
Perhaps Samson’s journey to Constantinople put the notion into the
enemy’s head of bombing G. H. Q. at Imbros, for a Taube started off to
do so but was headed off by two of our ’planes, and we had a thrilling
show to watch up in the air, which ended in the Taube’s being driven
down into bad country on the other side of Achi Baba. He dropped three
whacking bombs over us before he fled, one of which killed a poor chap
and nine horses. The other two came down close to where I was standing.
I saw the bombs start on their infernal way and heard those terrible
ooh-ahs of which I have already written quickening till the final
detonating crash, which left me feeling rather sick with fright for a
minute or two. However, I was only lightly dusted and suffered no
damage but a crick in the neck through watching the out-manœuvring of
the black devil afterward. Our airmen returned full of excitement, and
one of them came hurrying out of a shed with a hundred-pound bomb in
each hand, looking like a gymnastic instructor with a pair of Indian
clubs. He was going back at once to drop them on the disabled Taube
where it lay. After he had gone I picked up from the rust a pink oval of
cardboard on which was printed, REMOVE THIS PIN BEFORE DROPPING, which
seemed somehow as remote from the deadly business he had in hand as a
cloak-room ticket.
That morning I had my third floral talk since my arrival at Army Corps
Headquarters. This time it was with Carter, who was much excited about a
wonderful plant which he said was growing in the cliff just this side of
V beach. I could not identify it from his description, which sounded
like something between a giant campanula, a cattleya, and a pansy. I
racked my head for what it could be, but the more carefully Carter tried
to describe it the more remote from any known flower it gradually came
to seem. Finally we agreed to go down after lunch to look for it.
“Though we shall have a bit of a scramble over the rocks,” the genial
Carter warned me.
But the spirit that animated the orchid hunters of Borneo, whose
adventures in the _Boy’s Own Paper_ thrilled my youthful ambition, urged
me on; and I needed it, for in addition to scrambling over the slimy
rocks in the stagnant heat under the cliff we had to negotiate four dead
horses whose united stench might have made even a bomb bounce back from
it like a tennis ball. It was impossible to hurry over these rocks; and
the horses were lying at intervals, so that as soon as the stench from
one had begun to grow a little less the next one took it up in canon as
it were. When we reached a point midway between the four of them I
thought that the combination of dead horse and sun-staled seaweed was
beyond anything imaginable in beastliness. Actually the smell of death
at Anzac was worse because it lasted longer. One had whiffs of that in
the nostrils for nearly a fortnight afterward. But for sheer violence of
immediate discomfort this smell was worse, and it was not until I
savoured the stench of a whaling station years later that I found
anything to compete with it. However, fired by Carter’s description, I
was beginning to dream of a floral novelty that would send a murmur
round St. Vincent’s Hall and perhaps jolt even the omniscience of Kew.
“There you are,” Carter exclaimed as triumphantly as if to reward my
perseverance in climbing over dead horses and slimy rocks and pools
blear with the sun’s rays he were offering me a vision of the Golden
Rose itself. He pointed to where a compact shrub was growing in a
crevice halfway up the cliff, each snow-white blossom of which was
wearing an aigrette of purple stamens.
“Why, that’s a caper. You’ve tasted the flower buds often enough with
boiled mutton.”
Carter looked disappointed. I think he had dreamed of _Carteria
gallipolitana_ and of being congratulated by Reginald Farrar on a
valuable addition to the sunny sides of rock gardens.
“You told me that the blossoms were a little like pansies,” I said
reproachfully. “If you had said they were like a white and purple St.
John’s wort or even a passion flower, I might have----”
“By Jove, I’m sorry I lugged you all the way over those stinking horses
for nothing,” Carter broke in, his own chubby face nearly as purple as
the stamens of the caper with the exertion of the scramble.
In a moment I was ashamed of myself, for, after all, I had not seen
_Capparis spinosa_ anywhere else out here, and who seeing it for the
first time would not suppose that none had ever beheld it before him, so
strange and beautiful would it be seeming?
“I wouldn’t have missed seeing it for anything,” I said with complete
sincerity.
And then the good A. D. C. in Carter drove out for a moment the
gardener.
“Capers? I wonder if there are any flower buds left on. We might pickle
a few for the general.”
“Too late in the season,” I replied.
The gardener retook the trench from the A. D. C.
“If we’re still here when it seeds I shall send some home and have a
shot at growing it,” Carter announced.
But next month General Hunter-Weston was to fall ill, and I do not think
that Carter stayed long enough to gather the seeds of that caper. But
the caper itself will still be growing in that cliff, for it is a
long-lived plant; and every year those snowy blossoms with fragile
filaments stained seemingly by wine will flutter in the wind above a
stretch of hallowed sea which was once stained in very fact by Irish and
by English blood. They took away the _River Clyde_ and sold her to tramp
the Mediterranean with coals. For the sake of a few hundred pounds they
were not willing that her plates should slowly rust away in memory of
that April morning, rust away in red flakes and like the blood of the
men she carried be mingled at last with the sea. And maybe those white
and purple caper flowers will again have nodded to her in the June
breeze when she has steamed past Sedd-el-Bahr, carrying coals for her
Greek owner up the Dardanelles to Constantinople, she who once anchored
off here with a cargo of heroes, they, too, bound for Constantinople.
But they sold her, and I would that the man who signed the order might
carry in his nose till death the stench of those four horses.
CHAPTER XI
TENEDOS FOR THE SECOND TIME
I returned to G. H. Q. immediately after the battle of the twenty-first
of June in order to write my dispatch for the papers, and what a relief
it was to hear that Ashmead-Bartlett would be out here again within a
few days. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was a war
correspondent, for I knew I should never make even a moderately good
one, and I dreaded being tied down to the routine such a job would
involve. I was feeling resentful, too, against the Newspaper Proprietors
who, though they had never suggested paying me a penny for my work, had
announced me to the public as their special correspondent. Maxwell with
his pompous quacking about Fleet Street sensitiveness had been
exasperating me, and I told him once that I wished the Newspaper
Proprietors could have a taste of the Kephalo flies and latrine poles
and the shells of that eight-inch gun on the Asiatic side of the
Straits. The _Daily Mail_ took care to explain the circumstances in
which I was writing for it, and there was no reason why the other papers
should not have done the same. I finally received a telegram of grudging
thanks for my work; but presumably in order to avoid including Sir Ian
Hamilton in this belated courtesy the telegram was addressed to me, c/o
Chief Naval Officer, Mudros, whatever that ambiguous person might be. It
is only since reading _The Uncensored Dardanelles_ that I have realized
what a petty motive was attributed to Sir Ian Hamilton’s offer of my
services during Ashmead-Bartlett’s absence. Yet no man was more alive
than Sir Ian himself to the value and might of the press and no man was
less likely to try to injure its dignity. Bartlett praises Maxwell’s
loyalty. He may have been loyal to Bartlett; but he was not so loyal to
his commander-in-chief, and he undoubtedly seconded Bartlett’s efforts
to convey an impression at home that an attempt was being made by the
general staff to cover up their misdeeds at the expense of the
accredited representative of the press.
I extract the following from the Official History of the Gallipoli
Operations:[36]
In Gallipoli on the 6th, 7th, and 8th May Sir Ian Hamilton attacked
with 20,000 troops on a three-mile front. He was supported during
the course of those three days with a total of some 18,500 rounds
of ammunition, including those fired by the ships and the French
artillery, or an average of about 6,000 rounds a day, principally
field-gun shrapnel. His force advanced 600 yards at the expense of
6,500 casualties. The enemy’s trench system was not yet complete,
and was nowhere protected by wire, and the main obstacle to
progress had been unlocated machine guns concealed in natural
cover.
On the following day, at Aubers Ridge in France, three divisions of
Sir Douglas Haig’s First Army (30,000 infantry) with eight more
brigades (25,000 infantry) waiting in reserve, attacked two sectors
of the German heavily-wired and fortified line on a frontage of two
miles. They were supported by 500 guns, which fired 80,000 rounds
in the course of the day, mostly in a forty-minute preliminary
bombardment. These three divisions suffered 11,000 casualties. They
were unable to gain a yard of ground. They did not attract a single
company from the German reserves to the British battle front; and
at nightfall the attack was abandoned on the score that its
continuance would be useless waste of life.
The 18,500 rounds of all calibres expended during the three
previous days in Gallipoli could not have made the difference
between success and failure on this French battlefield. But the
fired 80,000 rounds against Aubers Ridge, and even two out of the
three divisions launched that day against the German trenches, had
they been available for the Second Battle of Krithia, might well
have carried Sir Ian Hamilton to the Narrows and the fleet to
Constantinople.
On May 14th a leading article in _The Times_ declared:
British soldiers died in vain on the Aubers Ridge on Sunday because
more shells were needed. The Government, who have so seriously
failed to organize adequately our national resources, must bear
their share of the grave responsibility. Even now they will not
fully face the situation.
On May 14th Ashmead-Bartlett wrote in his diary:
The _Queen Elizabeth_ has disappeared ... what a moral loss to the
Army! No more will the weary infantry ashore listen to the sound of
those huge shells ... or watch the gigantic explosions as they
strike the enemy’s line. No more will the Turks advancing to the
attack suddenly find fifteen thousand shrapnel bullets sprayed over
their heads, sweeping their lines away like corn beneath the
scythe--so some claim.
Although from those last three words Ashmead-Bartlett did not presumably
believe in the effective value of the _Queen Elizabeth_, he must have
been aware of the deficiency of shells at Gallipoli. Why, then, was
there no leading article on that deficiency in _The Times_ of June 10th?
He was received by the Newspaper Proprietors in conclave on June 9th,
and thousands of British soldiers had died in vain on the slopes of Achi
Baba because more shells were needed. Apparently the new government was
every bit as unwilling to face the situation fully as the old one had
been. It is perhaps unfair to suggest that Ashmead-Bartlett could have
prevailed on the authorities at home to face facts; but if instead of
dangling a map of the Dardanelles before Mr. Asquith and convincing him
that by the seizure of Bulair the peninsula of Gallipoli could be wrung
as easily as the neck of a goose, he had said over and over again the
three words “Guns and shells,” his visit to Downing Street might have
been more fruitful.
When Sir Ian heard of Ashmead-Bartlett’s imminent return he told me to
get appointed special correspondent to some paper like _The Manchester
Guardian_. I felt that if I tried to do this it would only lead to more
misunderstandings, but it would have been difficult for me to suggest
this to him without suggesting at the same time that I was shirking. I
saw clearly enough that from his point of view the only possible use I
could be out here was as a writer, and what could have been more galling
to the vanity of a writer who fancied he was on active service than such
an obvious truth? Of course, as matters stood at home, there was not a
chance of any newspaper’s employing my services; but I could not tell
Sir Ian that without appearing ungrateful, and I confided to Deedes my
depression over the prospect. We are all so anxious nowadays to
repudiate our intellectual surrender to the war that it will sound like
an outmoded affectation to say that I was obsessed by the desire to take
an active part in it. When Maxwell said to me that he supposed I had
been fetched out here to write up Sir Ian’s triumphal entry into
Constantinople I could have knocked him down, not, I regret to add, for
the sneer at Sir Ian but because he was implying that my pen was so
obviously mightier than my sword. This may appear very silly and
snobbish, but it does not mean that I despised the pen. It only means
that my writing, which I had originally regarded as a pleasant little
accomplishment, was by the accident of success already beginning to show
signs of becoming a drudgery. The war was providing me with the first
holiday I had enjoyed since I was up at Oxford, and I hated its being
interfered with. Happy the man who dips his pen into the ink pot with as
much gusto as an epicure sticks his fork into an oyster.
Deedes was most sympathetic, and out of compassion he at once improvised
for me an active job. He told me that he badly required my services to
move about among the islands and keep him in touch with our espionage
and contre-espionage agents. He said Ian Smith[37] was kept so busy
moving round between Helles, Anzac, and G. H. Q. that there was never a
chance for him to visit the islands. Ian Smith had been appointed
military consul at Van just when the war broke out. He was a delightful
fellow, whose pronunciation of Turkish was probably the most acute
hardship that Deedes had to endure at Gallipoli. While “Jan” Smith was
interrogating prisoners, I have watched Deedes sitting in a corner of
the tent with an expression on his face such as you may see on a musical
aunt listening to a piano solo being played by an unmusical niece. My
own memories of Jan Smith are chiefly connected with his picture of Van,
which for one who was not ordinarily eloquent was so vivid that to this
day Van towers in my imagination above its cold lake like some citadel
before the gates of which Roland had once sounded his olifant. He also
told me the regimental legend of a major who was reputed to use black
silk sheets, such a connoiseur was he of feminine line. So with these
two tales I see Jan Smith standing between an engraving after Doré and a
pen and ink sketch of Aubrey Beardsley.
“I want you to go over to Tenedos as soon as possible and see what can
be done about getting hold of a motor boat for us. We really cannot go
on being dependent on the casual help of the ‘nivy.’”
When things went wrong with the transport of our agents or interpreters
Deedes was wont to console himself by quoting the first line of a faded
patriotic ditty with cockney vowels, “It’s the nivy, the Royal Nivy!”
“Then you can consult with Harold Thompson and find out the
possibilities of landing a gang of desperadoes in Bezika Bay either to
knock out that Asiatic gun or bring us back information for the navy
about its exact whereabouts. And then I want you to go into the question
with Thompson of our contre-espionage people on Tenedos. V has been
sending more alarmist telegrams recently from Athens about their
trustworthiness.”
And finally, which to my mind sounded the best job of all, a suspected
traitor was to be lured to Tenedos and I was to have the pleasure of
bringing him back with me to Imbros where he was to be examined about
his alleged misdeeds. I felt through her holster the thrill of my virgin
pistol; even war had its Freudian moments.
On Friday, the twenty-fifth of June, I set out early in the morning for
that island dearly loved by Apollo, and if the god had as nice an eye
for maidens, then Daphne must have been a peach before ever she was a
laurel. To digress for a moment into an aside for island lovers who will
be understanding me when I assert that Tenedos immediately takes its
place as an island in the grand style. I have not yet actually left a
footprint on every island in the world, and I am already too old now
ever to achieve such an ambition. But I have done what I venture to
think few other people have done; I have visited in spirit every
salt-water island known to geographers. In other words I have read right
through the seventy-four volumes of the _Admiralty Sailing Directions_,
and when I have discovered among them an island that struck me as worthy
of a more careful exploration I have tried to reinforce my knowledge of
it. Flamingoes on the shores of Formentera! This is not a line from
Milton but a prosaic statement about one of the smaller Balearic Islands
in the first volume of the _Mediterranean Pilot_; yet notwithstanding
that hint of myriads of rosy plumes in the sunrise I do not believe
that, were I to land on Formentera, I should hail it as the true, the
blushful, Hippocrene. I have an uneasy suspicion that I may be missing
something by refusing to visit Majorca, but the more I read about it the
more deeply I suspect it of being only _faux bon_. I would liefer spend
long weeks of deep-sea sailing to Tematangi Island in the Low
Archipelago, whose inhabitants are stated in the third volume of the
_Pacific Islands Pilot_ to have been strongly suspected of eating the
shipwrecked crew of the _Sarah Anne_ in 1858. I am curious to know if
the present inhabitants really are as friendly as they are said to be
in the last edition. I firmly believe that when a philonese who has had
a wide practical experience and a very wide theoretical experience of
islands steps ashore on a fresh strand he knows immediately whether or
not he has fed on honeydew or held infinity in the palm of his hand or
done any of the things with which poets have sought to flash truth upon
the inward eye. That is always the problem of the new island. Is it a
world within a world within infinity, or but the empty shell of a
perfect world? Land upon Capri, upon Iona, upon Samos, upon Tenedos,
upon my own Shiant Islands, and you are aware of completeness, however
dissimilar the externals of that completeness may appear. Land upon
Corfu, upon Syra, upon Chios, upon Madeira, and you are aware of
something lacking. I know with absolute certitude that I shall declare
when I land upon Eriskay “_hos erat in votis_.”[38] I believe I should
declare the same upon Lord Howe Island, and certainly upon Pitcairn. I
feel equally positive that I should say it of none of the Spice Islands,
nor of Rarotonga, nor even of the green Azores, though these I sailed by
once on a witching gusty twilight of March when if ever Sirens sang to a
passing ship they should have sung then.
We were greeted off Anzac by a shower of shrapnel when we called there
on our way to Tenedos that morning, the bullets sounding a tattoo on the
iron deck of the trawler.
“I’m blest if I know what I’ll do when I get back to Lowestoft,” the old
skipper muttered. “I’m getting so used to shot an’ shell that I’m going
to miss it when this is all over. You’d better hop up here on the bridge
beside me.”
Before I joined him in the shelter of the chart room I stooped to pick
up some of the bullets which were rolling about on the deck.
“Collecting souvenirs?” he inquired with a hoarse indulgent guffaw.
“You’re fresh out here, I reckon. Like a kid with marbles.”
While he was still chuckling to himself over the comparison, the mail
bags came on board. On the beach high explosive shells were bursting. We
could see men hurrying hither and thither like disturbed ants.
“Life on shore there?” observed the skipper, taking his pipe out of his
mouth and spitting solemnly. “Well, poor b----rs, that’s all I can
say.”
After which comment on the situation at Anzac he slung the wheel round,
and we headed south.
It must have been about lunch time when we reached Tenedos. The jackdaws
were hopping and cawing about on the red roofs: the narrow streets
overhung by trellised vines offered coolness to the voyager: the
clustered windmills on the low hill behind the town shimmered against
the azure: in the shade of the huge walls of the Genoese castle children
were playing their immemorial games by the quayside of the outer
harbour: the fishing boats in the inner harbour rested idly upon water
of such a clear and luminous aquamarine and so profoundly still that the
lightest straw upon the surface seemed embedded in glass: in the near
distance the green cone of Mount Elias rose abruptly out of that
fruitful flowery countryside, and away eastward, mountain behind
mountain proclaimed the majesty of Asia. There was Harold Thompson (who
must not be confused with John Thomson, that Pentapolin of the Naked
Arm) standing on the quay to see what the trawler was bringing from the
noisy world of action to vex this quiet island loved by Apollo.
“Captain Loring is just coming down,” he announced.
“Captain Loring?”[39]
“The military governor. He succeeded Major Temple.”
Just then I was welcomed by a small man, whose white naval uniform
seemed to be as much a part of this delicious landscape as the fantail
pigeons whirling overhead; and I was aware of the perfect governor for
this perfect little island.
Behind Captain Loring was the thin form of Surgeon Higgins, R. N., who
had been saved from the _Ocean_ on the fatal eighteenth of March. He had
those soft light-blue Irish eyes which can turn in a moment to flames
when temper is required, a brogue as gentle as a mild moist wind from
the west, and a nature to match it. He was an elder brother of Kevin
O’Higgin, and strange it is now to look back on those two brothers
through the red mist of later tragedy. Their father, a much beloved
doctor, was to be shot by the Irregulars before the eyes of the family
upon his own lawn, and Kevin himself was to be assassinated at a street
corner on the way to Mass. I met that younger brother in 1924. The
garden walls on either side of the road leading to his house in Dublin
were covered with menacing inscriptions such as DEATH TO KEVIN O’HIGGIN
AND THE MURDER GANG. It was like driving in a nightmare to pass those
threats sprawling across the mildewed walls in giant letters of green
paint, and at the end of it to reach the quiet house of the Minister of
Justice. In the large room where we had tea a faint mustiness of damp
westerly airs was exhaled from the faded covers of the ugly late
Victorian furniture, and through the French windows opening on to an
oblong garden full of lank grass and gawky shrubs the light of the late
August afternoon seemed to float in tempered by the prevailing leafiness
without to the green-veiled air of an aquarium. Kevin O’Higgin himself,
a dark man with the face of a Peter Martyr or Savonarola, moved
restlessly about the aqueous shades, his fingers yellow with incessant
cigarette smoking, his neck craning nervously, his eyes set narrowly in
a lean face and burning with fanatic zeal. He had been arrested during
the troubles through the mistake of some stupid Englishman, and like
Parnell, whose uniform as a subaltern in the Wicklow Rifles was mistaken
by the police for Fenian regimentals, he required but that to make him
an active enemy of Anglo-Saxon domination....
But back to the lucid air of Tenedos and the gentle brogue of Jack
Higgins as he whispered to me of Captain Loring:
“The finest little fellow God ever made!”
The governor’s house was no longer the gloomy barrack it had seemed when
Kenny and I spent the night there during our search for G. H. Q. No
house could have been gloomy with Captain Loring presiding over its
hearth. He had been Naval Transport Officer at Anzac, and to me who had
come to regard Pintos and Pamelos[40] as types of human discontent
Captain Loring seemed a miracle of geniality. Orlo Williams’s ballad of
the Pinto and the Pamelo in the metre of the Walrus and the Carpenter
had expressed what most of us felt about beach officers of either
service. It is noticeable that many sea birds have disagreeable
expressions, but there are exceptions like the kittiwake, of which
engaging little bird the Governor of Tenedos reminded me. Like most men
who love laughter he kept a good table, and his sparsely furnished
establishment managed wonderfully to achieve the atmosphere of the
captain’s quarters in a battleship. Even Darwin smiled when he was
unpacking my kit and volunteered the remark that this _was_ a _little_
bit more like home.
That afternoon Captain Loring suggested a ride over to the aërodrome. He
had an amenable pony called Tino, and he produced another equally
amenable for his guest. We might have been riding in Devonshire, through
such a rich countryside did the road meander; and when from the top of a
high green bank starred yellow and blue with hawksweed and scabious a
huddle of Turkish tombstones peeped over at us abruptly, it came as a
shock to see such unfamiliar objects in what was seeming such familiar
country. Any graveyard will beguile my fancy, but Turkish graveyards
most of all. It is the way those tall thin tombstones with their round
heads lean over to one another in eternal colloquy. Little magic would
the moon need to cast for me to suppose, should I pass beneath her beams
a Turkish graveyard at midnight, that I was watching a feast of ghouls;
and if I linger in memory over those rolling grassy mounds above the
roadside and recall too long those tall thin, round-headed tombstones of
dead Turks, it is because I am dismayed by the prospect of trying to
evoke the atmosphere of the Royal Naval Air Service camp on the other
side of the island.
The Air Service had been hastily improvised, and, it is scarcely
necessary to add, it had been as much starved of material as everything
else out there. There was not even a good camera, and the very observers
were mostly untrained midshipmen chosen like jockeys or coxes for their
lack of weight. So it was not surprising to find a mess in which one
felt the absence of any tradition except a dauntless gallantry and the
consciousness of sudden death at the elbow. A small hot marquee. Two
dozen men in various oddments of uniform or shirt sleeves sitting along
a trestle table eating bread and jam and drinking large cups of very
much sweetened tea. A great deal of laughter but always a suppressed
nervous tension. Plenty of flies but not so many as elsewhere, not more
than you would find in a village grocer’s toward the end of a hot
August, and perhaps the comparison to a village grocer’s is suggested by
my recollection of the smell of the dry packing cases on which we sat.
At the head of the table Samson himself, a thickset man with a trim
brown beard. The conversation is almost entirely about aëroplane parts,
or so it seems to me as I listen back to it fourteen years later,
aëroplane parts and a few schoolboy jokes.
It was about this time that Colonel Sykes[41] came out from England to
take in hand and bring into line with the latest developments of aërial
discipline the air force operating at Gallipoli. The struggle between
the navy and the army for control was being fiercely waged, and Colonel
Sykes, who had raised and commanded the military wing of the Royal
Flying Corps, had to suffer a sea change from a hussar to become at the
same time a colonel of the Royal Marines and a wing captain of the Royal
Naval Air Service, in order to command the air force out here. I met him
in a trawler and was much impressed by his uniform, which was the first
I had seen of that fencer’s jacket of the Royal Flying Corps. He was
under no illusion about the difficulty of the task before him. I
remember thinking that his appearance in that Tenedos mess tent would be
like the appearance of an academician in the middle of a party at a
Chelsea studio. I only spent a few hours with Colonel Sykes; but the
memory of our talk remains with me like the memory of talks with
distinguished scholars whom one has caught in a happy moment of
expansiveness, and the figure of that grave and courtly hussar sitting
opposite to me in the rolling trawler remains one of the most impressive
I met during the war. In hardly three years he had created a tradition
for the Royal Flying Corps, and I wondered if he would be able to impose
it on his new command. Or would he seem already too much a creature of
the conventional past to influence the wayward gallantry of those young
men to whom the present was everything, hedged round so securely, as
they must have fancied themselves, by death from the past or future?
Captain Loring and I stayed on to dinner at the aërodrome. There was a
crimson sunset, into the dying hues of which behind the long wave line
of Imbros, twenty miles away across a pigeon-throated sea, the light of
the full moon came streaming in a crystalline flood from Asia through
the violet dusk. Then we turned to watch a volcanic tree of smoke rise
to obliterate the last turbid stains in the northern sky. It was the
smoke of Chanak which had been set on fire by the bombardment of the
_Lord Nelson_, the first battleship to venture so far since the
submarine had arrived. By now the men working inside the hangars had
lighted their lamps, and the great emerald tents were glowing like the
luminous eyes of giant cats. We turned northward again and saw through
the deepening dusk the lustreless flames of Chanak shrink and swell
beneath that ever spreading tree of smoke. On the level ground which ran
down before us to the beach two French aëroplanes were quivering like
newly emerged moths before they made a short trial flight; and a little
white dog, looking so very little in all that grandeur of colour and
line and atmosphere, was growling excitably to himself as he worried a
ball of cotton wool.
“The last inhabitant of Nieuport,” said Samson, pointing to him. “I
brought the little beggar out with me when we had to clear.”
I must have been bewitched by the fancy of that small dog’s adventure,
for I asked Samson if he would take me with him on his next bombing raid
over Constantinople, though I cannot pretend that I was much
disappointed when he refused.
We enjoyed a good dinner with all those delightful Ariels of this
enchanted island, and indeed to me they really were like beings of
another world, so remote did they seem, thus beheld in a company, from
even the topsy-turvy humanity of war, so much nearer to the mythical
humanity a poet might dream of to inhabit the distant future. It was
close on eleven o’clock when we started for home in the fragrant
moonlight. Captain Loring proposed a race over the last mile, and a
wonderful race it was with the dogs barking at our ponies’ heels and the
grillos shrilling far and wide across that moon-drenched island. The
most wonderful thing about the race was that I, being full of port and
wine of the country, actually won it.
The next day Thompson and I rowed round to the side of Tenedos which
looked over Troy and discussed the possibility of landing irregulars to
knock out that pestilential gun. It appeared so easy to row across and
wander freely anywhere among those lush plains of sedge and iris and
tall plumed grasses, so remote from any thought of modern war was that
classic scene, so calm was it with summer. As for me I forgot for a few
moments all about the gun and fell to weaving shapes out of the haze
that flickered over the wide green hollow land of Troy. I was thinking
that Diomed and Odysseus might have stared across the water like this
and discussed the kind of expedition that Thompson and I were planning.
One could not get away from the past out here; even from a trench
somebody had turned up a small marble Aphrodite a week or two since. But
one could not get away from the present any more easily, and it was
agreed that Thompson should try to recruit a band of ruffians and that
next week I should return with the necessary authorization and cash to
proceed.
When we got back to the town I met one of the greater comic characters I
have encountered in my life, a man not unworthy to stand even beside
Panurge, could I but draw him with the master’s hand. Aubrey Herbert in
_Mons, Anzac and Kut_, which from some incomprehensible dullness of
perception has never been acclaimed as one of the very best books about
the war in any language, thus summarizes, under the pseudonym of Avani,
the career of Vedova:
He was a poet and a clairvoyant, a mesmerist and a masseur, a
specialist in rheumatism and the science of detection, once a
member of General Chermside’s gendarmerie in Crete, and ex-chief of
the Smyrna Fire Brigade.
My own first impression of Vedova[42] was that a Chinese conjurer had
disguised himself in a soiled white uniform of the Royal Navy to give an
entertainment.
“Can I speak to you, Major?” he asked in his fluent Levantine English,
at the same time saluting obsequiously and evidently trying to mesmerize
me with his globular protruding, oddly lighted pale blue eyes.
“You can, though I’m not a major.”
“No, Major!”
I noticed that Thompson was showing signs of impatience at Vedova’s
obtrusiveness.
“If you please, Lieutenant Thompson,” the conjurer insisted, conveying
somehow, as outwardly obsequious he stood there with his long thin
drooping moustaches, his high Mongolian cheek bones and sallow
countenance, that he had only to make a few passes and Thompson himself
would prove to be on this globe as temporary as the lieutenancy he held
in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. “It is about this spying in
Tenedos, Major,” he said fiercely, his pupils dilating and contracting
as he gabbled on.
“I’m not a major.”
“No, Major, but this spying is terrible. I’ve found out so much here
that I’m quite sick with worrying which I must arrest first.”
“It’s not your place to arrest anybody,” Thompson put in gruffly.
“That’s all right, Mr. Thompson, I don’t forget I was a friend for your
father. Well, Major----”
“I’m not....”
“No, Major. As I am telling you, first there is this damn’ German spy
hidden in the house of Hamdi Bey. Near the old baths they call it. το
πάλαιον λουτρὀν in the Greek. I think you speak Greek very well?”
“Look here, Vedova----” Thompson tried again.
“If you please, Mr. Thompson,” Vedova insisted, pushing him aside with
the gesture of a conjurer who cannot afford to have his best trick
spoiled by a stupid interruption, “we are now in this bloody war, I
think. Then please to be serious. This damn’ German spy, Major----”
“I’m----”
“No, Major. This damn’ German spy is dressed like a Turkish woman. So
what must I do? If I break the house he can fly to the harem. Now,
Major, I want your authority to put my pistol to the heads of all the
lot.”
“Look here, Vedova,” said Thompson with considerable heat, “do you mind
keeping your suggestions to yourself until they’re asked for?”
“Mr. Thompson, when I was head of the fire brigade in Smyrna, who was
always the first to every fire? I do not want to blow myself out to be
big. I want no more than common justice, Mr. Thompson. You say to me,
‘Vedova, the Germans are landing in Tenedos,’ who will be the first, I
bet you, to push them away? You know as well as I am knowing myself.”
Thompson’s naval uniform was comfortably loose, but he was swelling so
much with indignation at Vedova that I began to fear for his buttons,
and telling the ex-chief of the Smyrna fire brigade that I would see him
later I relaxed the tension.
“I can’t stand that fellow,” Thompson growled.
“But what’s he doing in naval uniform?”
“I don’t know. He apparently got hold of it when he was acting as a
naval interpreter for a while. He’s a perfect nuisance here. Only last
week he broke into the mufti’s house, chased a man inside with a pistol
until he collapsed in terror, then sat on his head, and had the
impudence to tell me afterward that the man must have been guilty or his
heart would not have been beating so fast.”
At this moment a big swarthy fellow strolled up and said something in a
low voice to Thompson.
“This is Manoli,” he told me.
I looked with interest at the newcomer, for in my notebook I had the
copy of the telegram from Athens denouncing him as untrustworthy.
Manoli[43] was a Serbian whose real name ending in “wich” does not
matter. We knew him as Manoli; and Aubrey Herbert calls him Anatasio. He
had been involved, I fancy, in the anti-Austrian plotting that was
continually going on before the war. He was innocent, however, of any
connection with the Sarajevo assassination, for when that happened he
was in prison in Cattaro, whence he had escaped in the autumn of 1914.
As soon as Thompson and I were alone again I asked him if he was sure of
Manoli’s good faith and loyalty. He flushed.
“As sure as I am of my own,” he declared fervently.
I did not think it fair to leave Thompson in ignorance of Manoli’s
denunciation, which, of course, was as vague as most of the
denunciations which reached us. Thompson would hear nothing against his
right-hand man, and I agreed with him that unless something more
definite in the way of an accusation came along there was no reason why
he should. I have read a great deal of priggish and ill-informed comment
on spies, behind which there was always the suggestion that every
Intelligence officer in the war was a credulous ass. I should like to
confront some of these superior gentlemen with even such a minor problem
as Manoli. To continue to give him one’s trust after a denunciation,
however vague, was to gamble on one’s own ability to read human
character. At that date I did not realize to how much misrepresentation
one might expose one’s self by doing that. I was to learn my lesson
before the war came to an end, and I look back now with some admiration
at Thompson’s outspoken faith in his man, which, I may add, was
completely justified.
When the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force was launched a hasty
contre-espionage organization had been raked together under a man whom I
will refer to as X----. He was to run a series of canteens as a cover
for his activities and he had been highly recommended to Deedes by V in
Athens. No sooner was the organization in full working order than a
telegram arrived to say that X---- was suspect. There was nothing to do
but arrest him and intern him in Malta for the duration of the war. It
was an unsatisfactory business because if X---- was suspect, then
equally suspect were all his sub-agents, some of whom had been at once
expelled from the Area of Operations. X---- was deported before my
arrival, so I never had an opportunity of seeing him; but the echoes of
his case resounded through the months ahead, and when I was in Athens I
was continually being faced by problems arising from it. My own opinion
is that he was denounced by a jealous rival who hoped if not to supplant
him in the lucrative business of running canteens, at any rate to
prevent X---- himself from enjoying it. One of his associates was the
man whom I had been told to bring back with me to Imbros for
examination. As a matter of fact, he did not turn up while I was in
Tenedos; but if he had my adventure would have been a dull one, for he
was only too anxious to have his character cleared by a visit to G. H.
Q. Unfortunately that was just what it was impossible to get done under
these vague denunciations, and it ended in poor A----, who was a naval
interpreter of many years’ standing, being expelled from the Area of
Operations.
Amid all this backwash from the X---- business, further details of which
it would be tedious to inflict on the reader, there came from Athens a
denunciation of the Vassilaki family now resident on Tenedos. Their case
is typical of many, and as it kept several of us amused for a month I
shall treat it in some detail. Chapter One begins to-day with the
signalling on to Tenedos of a telegram from Athens to G. H. Q.:
Agent reports that Vassilaki Xenaki, his two sons and three
daughters now at Tenedos (group undecipherable) are German agents.
No absolute proof is forthcoming here.
Thompson’s eyes sparkled when he heard this. He had already noted the
existence of a Vassilaki family which was obviously to be identified
with the people mentioned in the telegram, and he had already
contemplated that existence with a question at the back of his mind. It
was agreed that he should pursue inquiries and report the results to me
when I came back to Tenedos next week.
That afternoon one of the new drifters came into the harbour, and after
inspecting her equipment we began to feel that submarines would not have
much longer to live out here. Among other things she carried a
hydrophone through which she listened as in a stethoscope to noises
under the sea, so sensitive an apparatus that the listener might hear a
lobster cough. The only thing against it was that, though it could
detect a submarine at a distance of several miles, it detected at the
same time the screws of every vessel within radius, so that hunting a
submarine with a hydrophone would be like hunting a taxicab by the sound
of its wheels among the motor buses of Piccadilly. Besides the
hydrophone I was to see on that drifter for the first time the green
glass balls that supported the anti-submarine nets. And to this day
those green glass balls are washed ashore almost every week on my
islands in the Minch, while even on Jethou we often find them. We saw,
too, on the drifter the Mark One type of depth charge which was, I have
always understood, considerably more dangerous to the hunter than his
prey. Soon after this Mark One depth charges went into cold storage at
Mudros, and they were not disturbed until the spring of 1917, when I was
presented with a couple to protect us on the armed yacht, _Aulis_.
Remembering what I had been told about their behaviour, I at once locked
them up in the cellaret of the deck smoking cabin together with some
hammer bombs loaded with T. N. T. which were considered a quick and
certain death for anybody who tried to throw them at a submarine. Then I
put the key of the cellaret in my pocket for the remainder of the war
and slept comfortably again.
That afternoon I left Tenedos in a trawler to return to Imbros, carrying
away with me as spoils a sack of potatoes and fifty pounds of honey
which I intended to offer the mess at Army Corps Headquarters, whose
hospitality I had so greatly enjoyed.
Of the journey back I have no memories except of sitting on a hot deck
while we rolled in the tarnished silver swell off Helles and listening
to one of the crew at rest in the fo’c’sle as he chanted lugubriously
over and over again the following ditty:
“_I’ll meet you, I’ll meet you_
_On a dark and stormy night,_
_Yes, I’ll meet you, I’ll meet you_
_On a dark and stormy night._
_There’ll be damson jam_
_And hot cross buns_
_When I meet you on a dark and stormy night._”
Then tiring of this solemn Gregorian he sang “Tipperary” which he ended:
“_Good-bye, pickled onions!_
_Farewell, cheese and beer!_
_It’s a long long way to Tipperary,_
_But we’re not downhearted yet._”
“He’s quite happy, Darwin,” I observed to my batman.
“Yes, sir, but it’s a pity he can’t seem to get hold of the right words,
somehow,” said Darwin with a puzzled sigh.
CHAPTER XII
SHELLS
I was on board the Helles trawler by half-past six next morning, for I
had secured the job of carrying some dispatches to the Royal Naval
Division and also to Army Corps Headquarters where I was anxious to
present those potatoes and honey to the mess.
Ashmead-Bartlett was on board, full of the site he had chosen for his
tent on Imbros, where he boasted that he could command shade at any hour
of the day. He spoke with acidulous scorn of the site the general staff
had chosen for themselves on that sandy promontory. There is no doubt
that his own position was far more comfortable and convenient, but I
have already indicated the motives which led to the choice of the less
suitable site. Anyway, the level ground on the outskirts of the squalid
little village on the inland side of the soft seaweed-matted two miles
of sand that was called K beach was now being used as a much-needed rest
camp for the weary fighting men, so that there would have been no room
there for G. H. Q. A couple of steamers had been sunk to make a pier,
and there was now a cosy little harbour where men could be landed even
when the wind was blowing into the roadstead of Kephalo.
While I was listening to Bartlett talking about his tent and gloating
over the probable dissolution of G. H. Q. by the July and August heats,
I could not help likening this survivor of the _Majestic_ to the
original Jonah who went and sat on the east side of Ninevah, and there
made him a booth and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what
became of the city. And I fear I hoped that God would prepare another
worm to smite Bartlett’s shady gourd of which he was so cocky. I ran
into him again after we landed, and he offered, if we could find a
couple of horses, to accompany me to Divisional Headquarters with my
dispatches. I told him nothing would induce me to ride while I could
possibly walk. So he walked along beside me, grumbling at the heat. He
had been much gratified by his reception in London, where the Newspaper
Proprietors had received him in conclave presided over by Lorn Burnham
and solemnly thanked him for his services to Fleet Street at the
Dardanelles.
“I was rather taken aback at first when I walked into the room at the
_Daily Telegraph_ editorial offices and found a large number of grave
gentlemen sitting round a table. But they were very kind to me.”
“Were they really?”
“Yes, it was rather a change from the way I’m treated out here by the
staff.”
He went on to say that he hoped his visit to London would have convinced
the authorities what a set of incompetent jealous self-seekers were in
control at Gallipoli.
“I’m sure you did you best to convince them.”
“Well, I think I managed to open their eyes a bit to what’s going on.”
And then, of course, he produced his King Charles’s head, which was the
landing at Bulair. He rasped on and on about Bulair until I began to
feel that it would almost be worth landing at Bulair merely to stop
Bartlett’s talking about it any more. Mr. Dick was upward of ten years
endeavouring to keep King Charles I out of his memorial to the Lord
Chancellor, and Bartlett was upward of fourteen years trying to keep
Bulair out of his memorial to Gallipoli. But by the end of _The
Uncensored Dardanelles_ Bulair seems more like King Charles’s head than
ever, so neatly does Bartlett sever the neck of the peninsula with a
paper knife.
I think I must have begun to wilt under the strain of listening to
Bartlett’s dash for Constantinople by way of Bulair, for he looked at me
a moment and then said I must not be upset by his coming back. He
assured me that so far as he was concerned I was welcome to his job
provided I could square matters with the Newspaper Proprietors, who were
feeling a little sore at Hamilton’s treatment of them. Here I broke in
hastily to insist that only on Sir Ian’s orders would I have ventured to
take his place, since I was too well aware how little I knew about
strategy or tactics. I added I had done my best to avoid being appointed
official eyewitness.
“I shouldn’t have minded,” Bartlett interposed contemptuously.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t bothering about you, Bartlett, I was only thinking
about myself.”
“In any case,” he continued with a suggestion that he was putting me on
to a good thing, did I care to avail myself of the tip, “I don’t think I
shall stay out here much longer. It’s pretty clear that the whole show
is a washout. I saw Hughes Massie, my agent, when I was in town, and
he’s sure he can get me an offer from America for a book about the
Dardanelles. A thousand pounds advance on a straight twenty-five per
cent. Not too bad, eh? Hamilton and Braithwaite can stop my book in
England, of course, but they won’t be able to stop it in America, and
I’ll go over there to write it if necessary.”
I do not guarantee every preposition and conjunction in the above speech
to have been actually uttered by Ashmead-Bartlett; but I do guarantee
the substantives and verbs. However, he must have thought better of it,
for the world had to wait until 1928 for _The Uncensored Dardanelles_.
Presently Bartlett decided that it was too hot to walk any farther and
turned back toward the beach in the hope of convincing somebody else
that we must land at Bulair. I walked on toward Divisional Headquarters
alone, but I could not stay to lunch because I still had my dispatches
to deliver at Army Corps Headquarters. On my way there the shrapnel
started, but I was not in the mood to be frightened by it, and it was
only when I reached General Hunter-Weston’s camp that I began to feel
some qualms. There was not a living creature in sight. Evidently a
bombardment by that infernal Asiatic gun was expected. I waited,
embarrassed by the silence and emptiness, and wondered, with a
perceptibly increasing woolliness about my knees, which way to turn for
cover. I resolved that it should not be for want of trying on my part if
I failed to organize that cutting-out expedition by irregulars, were I
spared to return to Tenedos. And then, just as I was preparing to dive
into the first hole I could find and escape from those big shells, the
head of Carter rose very slowly and very cautiously from the ground
almost at my feet. Save that his countenance was as always cheerful and
ruddy he might have been a figure in Dante’s _Inferno_.
“Oh, it’s you, Mackenzie!” he exclaimed. “We thought it was
Ashmead-Bartlett, and we didn’t want to ask him to lunch.”
He shouted jovially, and from other dugouts all round emerged the
relieved faces of the Army Corps staff.
That day I ate the best lunch I had eaten since I left Capri. General
Bailloud, commanding the First French Division, was the guest of honour.
The bald-headed old veteran was in splendid form and more like a
punchinello than ever. He was wearing a white tunic with rows of medals
hanging from blue and green ribbons and the Grand Cross of the Legion of
Honour. Hunter-Bunter blew across the table at him boisterous gusts of
Anglo-French, and we even had iced cocktails.
“_Mais il est merveilleux, ce bon Cartair_,” General Bailloud declared,
raising his glass to the beaming A. D. C.
“Where did you get the ice, Carter?” asked the general, who was as proud
of his A. D. C.’s exploits in the way of catering as a sportsman of a
clever retriever.
“From a hospital ship, sir,” said Carter.
“Splendid! Capital!” Hunter-Bunter shouted. “_Vous avez compris, mon
général?_”
“_Oui, oui_,” cried the rosy old punchinello, rubbing his shiny nose and
shaking his medals like bells.
It was a good lunch.
Alas, it had to be paid for, for when we got up from the table Colonel
Street drew me aside.
“I’ve just the right little job for you,” he said. “You know there’s
going to be a show on the left to-morrow? Well, we want an encouraging
sheet for the troops to-night.” He led me away to a secluded dugout and
set me down at a table with paper, pen, ink, and a quantity of
undigested small talk about Turkey.
“Just enough to fill a page of the multigraph,” he murmured. And God
forgive me, this is what I wrote:
HOW THE TURKS ARE GETTING ON
All prisoners taken recently tell the same story, that the Turks
are getting more and more depressed. The peninsula is now known
amongst them as “The Slaughter House” as all their finest regiments
have been brought against us one after another and have had to go
back with heavy losses.
The other day, twenty Turkish officers refused to go forward. They
were arrested and sent to Constantinople where they were paraded
through the streets in handcuffs. One of them shouted out to some
soldiers passing, “Don’t go, it’s hell.” They put a muzzle on him
and led him on--to be shot.
One young Turk who was captured told us that when he was saying
good-bye to his grandfather, the old man said to him: “My grandson,
you will never come back. We are fighting against the English, and
the English are the whales of the sea. I fought side by side with
them in the Crimea and I know them. You will never come back.” The
fellows that come out and snipe in front of their trenches are
Bashi-Bazouks--wild devils who don’t mind if they get killed or
not. This is lucky for them as they mostly do. The other day, a
Bisley King’s Prizeman was in one of our trenches in which men were
getting sniped from a flank and no one could see where the shots
came from. At last he spotted the head of the fellow just showing
and shot him between the eyes, which was a better bull’s-eye than
he ever made at Bisley.
A large number of the Turks in the trenches now are villagers and
refugees who have had about a month’s training. Quite lately a
young Turkish recruit shot two men in his trench. They took his
rifle away, but he meant no harm--just didn’t know the proper use
of the trigger.
Early this month, when one of our submarines blew up a transport
about where Westminster Bridge would be if Constantinople were
London, there was a tremendous scare, and the harbour guards fired
at bubbles in the water, but our submarine came out and another has
now taken its place.
The Turks sent us a proclamation the other day, by a German
aëroplane, saying that all our efforts to advance had come to
failure and that we are exposed to certain perdition by starvation
and thirst. Yet we still take their trenches and they demand that
their supply officers shall be court-martialled.
A short time ago, we captured a letter addressed to “The Deserter
Doctors of the 56th Regiment” who apparently refused to come to the
front and had made away with all the medical stores. The troops in
front sent an armed guard to fetch them up at the point of the
bayonet.
Every trench we take off them now means a blow at Germany, for
already they are beginning to curse the German officer and the day
that they started to fight us for the sake of Germany. Every yard
we gain here is worth a hundred in France where our fellows are
fighting so magnificently, and the Germans know it, but they can’t
prevent it here, and the gain of ACHI BABA to us would be like the
gain of CALAIS to them, only we are going to get there--and they
aren’t.
27. 6. 15.
It is difficult to believe that any troops could derive the least
encouragement from such twaddle as this, and to me almost the saddest
thing about this lamentable sheet is that many of the troops probably
did find it a tonic. It affords an insight into the state of mind set up
by modern war, and for that reason I reproduce the drivel exactly as it
was distributed later that evening from the multigraph machine. It does
not differ in kind from the balderdash which all over the world was
served out to the public by the leaders of every combatant nation from
the day war was declared. Yet the author of what seems such a pitiable
exhibition of _fausse bonhomie_ must protest, even at the risk of being
set down as a fool rather than a knave, that, when he toiled away in a
fly-cursed dugout through a hot June afternoon to evolve this sheet from
the reports of prisoners, he honestly believed he was being useful and,
what is more, he sincerely hoped that his lucubrations were not far from
the truth.
After reading that “encouraging sheet” the reader may well ask what
right I have to imply a condemnation of Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett’s attitude
toward the Gallipoli operations. I can only reply I believed from the
beginning of the war that it was our best policy to attack
Constantinople, that it was necessary for the future peace and decency
of Europe to drive every Turk back into Asia, and that if we could but
hang on at Gallipoli long enough the people at home would be converted
to a comprehension of the supreme importance of our enterprise. The
troops were already beginning to murmur because they did not grasp what
success at Gallipoli would mean. Troops in the field are not in a fit
state of mind to absorb lectures on politics. It would have been twenty
times easier and more amusing to prepare a brief exposition of our aims
in attacking Constantinople; but nobody would have read it, whereas the
wretched drug I dispensed that afternoon was swallowed without
difficulty.
I was much struck the other day when George Blake[44] asked me
indignantly why the Fifty-second Division was sent almost straight into
action after their landing, without a month’s preliminary training at
Gallipoli. If a very intelligent man like George Blake is capable of
asking such a question about that campaign in which he took an active
and gallant part, I may be forgiven for supposing that the potted
nonsense I groaned out that stifling afternoon was as much as could be
digested by the troops. The best cure for mental superiority about the
war is to cast our minds back to the first week of it and try to
remember with shame the rubbish we all at that early date gobbled up
like greedy ducks. The quicker the mind, the more rapid the assimilation
of fact and the excretion of waste matter; but in the first mad rush of
credulity our philosophers stuffed themselves just as full of garbage as
the man in the street. Emotional hunger has always to be satisfied
before reason begins to function normally again.
I am reading at night as I write this chapter the first volume of Cecil
Aspinall’s Official History of the Military Operations at Gallipoli, and
my mind turns to that indomitable commander-in-chief sitting in his
little tent at Kephalo and writing in a letter that afternoon of the
twenty-seventh of June:
From my individual point of view a hideous mistake has been made on
the correspondence side of the whole of this Dardanelles business.
Had we a dozen good newspaper correspondents here, the vital
life-giving interest of these stupendous proceedings would have
been brought right into the hearths and homes of the humblest
people in Britain....
As for information to the enemy, this is too puerile altogether.
The things these fellows produce are all read and checked by
competent General Staff Officers. To think that it matters to the
Turks whether a certain trench was taken by the 7th Royal Scots or
the 3rd Warwicks is just really like children playing at secrets.
The Censors who are by way of keeping everyone in England in
darkness allow extremely accurate panoramas of the Australian
position from the back trenches, communication tracks, etc., all to
scale; a true military sketch, to appear in the Illustrated London
News of 5th June. The wildest indiscretion in words could not equal
this.[45]
Could we indeed have had these correspondents! half a dozen Nevinsons
for example, who would have apprehended the meaning of the drama that
was being played and each linked action of which is so lucidly set out
in Aspinall’s pages fourteen years later. And had we had them, could
they but have been granted the eloquence to persuade government, press,
and public to regard the success of the military operations at Gallipoli
as vital to the ending of the war in the right way!
* * * * *
The battle on the left which ended in the capture of the Boomerang
Redoubt was the high-water mark of our success at Gallipoli; but the
only memory I have of it is the sight of our men going forward, the
metal disks which had been fixed on their backs to guide the gunfire
flashing and winking like the summer sea at noontide. The big guns on
the Asiatic side put over thirty-five shells in an attempt to knock out
one of our sixty pounders. I read in an old letter that two poor chaps
and about thirty horses were blown to pieces and that when the shells
began to fall among us we went down to a jolly good lunch; but the
memory of where I ate it or who our hosts were has completely faded.
There are moments when I wish that I had kept a proper diary, and yet if
I had I should probably have been tempted to overload this book. Some
days have remained clear in my mind from dawn to eve; others, often
filled with events instead of trivial incidents, have passed like a
brief landscape beheld from the windows of a train.
I was over again at Helles two days later on the thirtieth of June and
lunched with General Gouraud in the old fort at Sedd-el-Bahr. That was
the last time I was to see the general at Gallipoli, for the next day
one of those shells from Asia threw him over a seven-foot wall and
smashed his arm and thigh. He had just strolled out to speak to somebody
outside G. Q. G. A piece of the shell fell on the table of the mess.
The picture of him waving good-bye to us after lunch two days earlier
from the door of G. Q. G. is curiously associated in my mind with
another picture of many years earlier. In the summer of 1900 I was
staying with an aunt at her house in France, and I found myself walking
after dinner in a peach orchard with a French artillery captain. It was
the time of the Dreyfus affair, and after we had discussed for a while
the equivalents in French slang of various English slang words--I
remember we speculated whether “_rupin_” and “ripping” could be
connected etymologically--I declared my belief in the guilt of Dreyfus,
probably, as a seventeen-year-old boy might, in the hope of impressing a
foreigner with his Continental outlook. The young artillery officer
turned sharply round on me, glared at me through his pince-nez, and told
me I did not know what I was talking about. He declared that the Dreyfus
affair would be the ruin of his country.
“Look at me,” he declared passionately. “Because I am known to
sympathize with the Dreyfusards my military career is ruined. I have
been ordered to Cochin-China. That will be the end of me.”
I see him now staring eastward across the peach trees all rosy in the
sunset, an expression of utter despair in his eyes.
But he was too pessimistic, for that young artillery officer’s career
was not ruined. He became General Dégoutte and commanded the Army of the
Rhine eighteen years later.
But to return to General Gouraud, the picture of whom standing in the
doorway of the old fort at Sedd-el-Bahr is coupled in my fancy with
General Dégoutte in that peach orchard of the Lyonnais. He survived the
loss of his arm; but it was a bad day for the Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force when he became a casualty, and a bad day for Europe.
General Bailloud succeeded him in command for the time being, and good
company though that bald-headed old punchinello was at lunch, he was
turning into a pessimist over the military situation, or perhaps he
hoped from the appointment of General Sarrail to succeed General
Gouraud, a relatively greater importance for the French part in Near
Eastern operations. We might consider General Bailloud to be the first
performer in what King Constantine called the Salonica Circus.
It was partly due to signs of a growing desire on the French side to
take independent action out here that I was sent back to Tenedos on the
first of July. We had received news that they were fitting out a corps
of irregulars to attack the Asiatic guns, and it was my business to urge
as tactfully as possible coöperation in any such enterprise. There were
several other questions which required discussion with Thompson, and so
with a delightful prospect ahead I found myself on board the trawler
which left early in the morning for Tenedos, calling at Anzac and Helles
on the way. It was quiet off Anzac, for there was no shrapnel as usual.
However, when we had ploughed along through the southerly swell for
about a mile a gun opened on the trawler from an olive grove that ran
down between a wide break in the cliffs to a yellow beach. The first
fountain spurted up about three hundred yards away on our port beam. I
was up on the bridge with the old Lowestoft skipper who turned to me and
said:
“They’ve seen your helmet, sir. It’s a game of theirs to have a shot
like that when they think we’re taking anybody important to Helles.”
Before I had time to blush, there was a sharp sigh somewhere overhead
and another fountain appeared about a hundred yards nearer. I tried to
convey my lack of concern and carefully examined the olive grove through
my glasses. Five more fountains spouted, each one a few yards nearer to
the trawler and finally a shell plumped into the sea with a great splash
scarcely twenty yards away. I found that the view of the olive grove
through my glasses was beginning to jump up and down and that I was
whistling to myself a silly tune through my teeth.
“The next one gets us,” the skipper muttered, and he spat with slow
precision on a match stump between his toes as if to show how easy it
was to hit a much smaller object than we were.
“Why not go hard a-port?” I suggested. “They’ll be sure to calculate on
our going to starboard.”
The skipper put the helm hard down. A shell screamed over, and burst ten
yards to starboard, the spray of its fountain blown back over us by the
south wind.
“I wonder how much each of those shells costs?” I asked.
“Couldn’t say at all,” said the skipper.
“About ten pounds at least, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Well, they’ve wasted ninety pounds on me so far.”
Perhaps the same thought struck the Turkish gunners in the olive grove,
for no more shells were fired, and we rolled on to Helles without
further disturbance.
The sensation of being shelled in a small vessel is definitely
unpleasant. The deck of a trawler is not as sympathetic as the earth,
and this particular deck was less sympathetic than most, being the
promenade of four dogs and two cats. I simply could not have thrown
myself down upon it, as I could throw myself down on Mother Earth and
seize her by the hair for comfort. Moreover, in this case the knowledge
that the enemy was deliberately concentrating upon the extinction of
myself had made it seem as certain that I should be hit as it was
certain that the skipper could hit that match stump whenever he spat.
But here is a strange thing. On an occasion later on in the war when I
had an opportunity of being fired at in my armed yacht _Aulis_, between
Chios and the mainland, I deliberately took advantage of it and enjoyed
the experience as one enjoys riding on a switchback.
It was a sweltering day of sticky south wind, and when we anchored off
Helles to wait for the mails the oily swell made me feel sick. Presently
the Asiatic guns opened on the beach. I saw four tents by the signal
station blown to pieces, and then a shell burst in the middle of the
field ambulance.
“Why the deuce don’t they send a picket boat out with the mail?” I
grumbled, for by now the shells had begun to fall among the shipping. I
wondered if I had escaped the gun in the olive grove only to succumb
here because Fate had decided that I was to be killed to-day in a
trawler. The air was full of screams, as shell after shell burst all
round us, the smaller craft bucking at anchor in the swell like scared
mules.
“Make a signal to the beach that unless a picket boat comes out with the
mail at once you are going on to Tenedos without taking it.”
“Well, but where’s my authority?” the old skipper demurred.
“I’ll take the responsibility.”
The skipper shook his head doubtfully, but he made the signal, and an
evidently infuriated mail officer signalled back that we were to stay
where we were until the mail was ready. More shells fell.
“Signal,” I told the skipper firmly, “that an officer from G. H. Q. is
on board, who has important business in Tenedos and that he cannot wait
while they finish writing their letters on the beach.”
My bluff succeeded. A picket boat came out to us, from the stern of
which an indignant sub-lieutenant started to inquire what the hell the
skipper meant by trying to tell Captain Somebody what time the mail was
to come off.
“Let me answer,” I said to the equally indignant, yet withal nervous,
skipper. And with this I looked out from the bridge and shouted down to
know what the hell Captain Somebody meant by not having the mail ready
at the scheduled time.
“Who the hell are you, sir?” came up from the picket boat.
“Never mind who the hell I am. Why the hell don’t you get those blasted
mail bags on board? This trawler isn’t Captain Somebody’s private
yacht.”
A fountain near the picket boat put an end to the argument. The mail
bags were flung on board, and the trawler got under way.
“I hope there won’t be trouble about this little barney,” the skipper
muttered to himself.
I wrote him a chit to say I accepted full responsibility for insisting
that the mail bags should be brought out at the scheduled time. However,
I heard no more about the brief fuss. It was one of those acutely
irritating mornings of south wind when everybody’s nerves are on edge
and when heavy shelling from big guns does not tend to soothe them.
CHAPTER XIII
TENEDOS FOR THE THIRD TIME
With affectionate gratitude to the genius of the place I stepped ashore
on the island of Tenedos for the third time. In a moment the war was
miles away, though when I looked up to the shimmering windmills on the
slope behind the red-roofed town there were shadows of it here, for I
could see beside them Moslem women in black sitting with bowed heads and
pondering a hopeless future.
That afternoon the governor and I rode over to the marines’ camp on the
Asiatic side of the island where trenches had been dug to resist a
sudden foray by the enemy. And here to my immense gratification I
managed at last to secure some badges of my corps, though, alas, none of
the coveted buttons, for there was not a spare button in the camp. We
had a jolly tea with the doctor and then rode inland to visit the mayor,
who lived in a delightful ancient house surrounded by a large garden
full of flowers. We sat in an arbour of myrtle and honeysuckle and drank
a very old sweet wine of the country, while the mayor’s pretty niece
brought us bunches of damask roses crimson pied and rapturously
fragrant. She brought us musk roses, too, the colour of old ivory, and
scattered aromatic herbs on the ground for our feet. To loiter there in
the honied calm of early evening and look back from that perfumed arbour
to the adventure of the morning with shells and the hot stale deck of a
trawler in a rolling southerly sea was to believe either that I was
dreaming now or that I had been dreaming then, but that not both
experiences could be real. We sat there laughing and joking with the
mayor for a long time, and it was not until the first orange streamers
of the sunset began to float across the tender evening sky that we said
farewell. Then we rode off home into the spangled air through which high
overhead a monoplane was thrumming round and round in lazy circles, its
wings glittering like a buzzard’s. While we were trotting along between
high green banks a motor bicycle swept round a corner in front with one
of the French aërodrome mechanics in the saddle. My pony shot sideways
into a ditch, stood on his hindlegs, pawed the bank for a moment or two,
and then made an attempt to climb it. I can hear the echoes of my
companion’s laughter now. However, I managed to keep my seat and induce
the absurd animal to believe that it was less likely to be damaged on
four legs than if it remained on two. Soon afterward we reached the
starting point of our mile race and galloped past green banks and
Turkish tombstones to reach the outskirts of the town in a dead heat.
The wake of our course was marked by a trail of rose leaves scattered
from the bunches we had tied to our saddles.
After dinner I sat downstairs and by the light of one guttering candle
tried to reach an arrangement about the proposed expedition to cut out
the Asiatic guns. On one side of the table sat a Franco-Polish
_sous-lieutenant_ of the Eleventh Regiment, his uniform glowing richly
in the dim light. I had tilted my chair back into the shadows on the
other side, while Thompson leaned forward on his elbows at the end of
the table, his clear-cut features and square chin flickering behind the
wavy candle flame as he harangued in Greek five black-avised cutthroats
sitting in a row on a bench along the cracked plaster of the wall
opposite.
“They won’t move for less than ten pounds a head payable in advance,”
Thompson announced.
“They shall not have more than five pounds a head and only that when
they come back; but,” I added with a bow to the Frenchman as the five
cutthroats rose together in excited indignation at the lowness of my
offer, “I suggest to our friend that if these men bring back
information that will enable our ships to knock out the gun nearest here
we will give them a hundred pounds, half to be paid by us and half by
the French.”
The _sous-lieutenant_ accepted this proposal on behalf of our allies;
and then the argument began again with the cutthroats. Finally after an
hour or more of bargaining I dismissed them and said that I could find
plenty of starving Turks on Tenedos to do the job more efficiently. The
fact was Thompson had warned me before the interview that from inquiries
he had been making the men were no use, and since it would do more harm
than good to employ untrustworthy men in such an enterprise I was
anxious to be quit of them. The _sous-lieutenant_, however, assured me
that the five men were absolutely reliable, and so in the end I drew up
the following conditions, a copy of which is still in my old japanned
tin box, wretchedly typed out on a scrap of paper much blurred by salt
water.
1. He was to use the five men.
2. The men were to get one pound a head before starting.
3. In the event of their giving us information which would lead to
the knocking out of the Asiatic gun, the men were to receive one
hundred pounds to be shared by the English and French Intelligence
funds. But this hundred pounds was not to be paid over until the
gun had been successfully knocked out.
4. That if the men failed to get any information they should
receive when they came back not more than five pounds a head. But
that the expense of this was to be borne by the French alone and
also the preliminary pound a head.
5. The expenses of the boat to land them was to be shared by the
English and French Intelligence funds.
6. That we agreed to share in the expenses of this expedition up to
a certain point only if we had an agreement that for the future all
“pushes” should be referred to us for our co-operation and advice.
The French representative accepted this arrangement, and some time
afterward the attempt was made. The men hid all day among the great
Trojan irises about fifty yards from the sea and brought back no
information whatever about the gun, so I was justified of what must have
seemed to the little Franco-Polish _sous-lieutenant_ a hard bargain.
Later on the French tried to launch a real cutting-out expedition on a
much larger scale. They imported a number of Cretan and Anatolian
irregulars and trained them in a pine wood, but this expedition was no
more successful than the first. Two or three hundred men instead of five
spent two days and a night hiding among the irises a few yards from the
shore and then were reëmbarked. So the Asiatic guns continued to
function until the final abandonment of our effort to open the
Dardanelles.
Two nights after this Thompson and I decided to test our patrols and
coast watchers on Tenedos. We rowed around in a boat and had the dismal
satisfaction of landing wherever we chose without encountering so much
as a “Bo!” from regular or irregular. However, in a secluded cove we
found a caïque which had been smuggling; so she was brought round to the
inner harbour, there to remain in disgrace until the war was over.
Next day Captain Loring and I visited the aërodrome where I met my old
friend “Bill” Samson, an elder brother of the commander, who had been up
with me at Magdalen. He had been pitched out of a ’plane into the sea at
Mytilene and broken his ankle. So now he was to go to Malta in the
_Lynn_ which was expected at Tenedos to-morrow. Bill Samson and I had a
good talk about the past, but I do not believe we said a word about the
present. We might have been sitting in Addison’s Walk, so placid was the
afternoon. Old wines, old rags, old friends, they were what we talked
about, sitting under the shade of a fig tree with boughs contorted like
the two snakes which came out of the sea and killed Laocoön and his
sons, perhaps on that very stretch of beach just beyond our camp chairs.
Such was Pallas Athene’s method of dealing with espionage, for Laocoön
had tried to warn the Trojans about the Wooden Horse. Three thousand
years later Athene’s Athens sent us submarine cables instead of snakes.
Commander Samson invited the governor and myself to stay to dinner, and
on our protesting that he was just starting off on a raid he said
casually:
“Oh, I shall be back in twenty minutes. I’m only going to drop this bomb
on Yeni Keui.”
Off he went with one of those hundred pounders like an Indian club to
leave his mark on the southern shore of the Asiatic side of the Straits.
However, I had a candlelight conspiracy to attend that evening, and so
we galloped back to Tenedos town for dinner.
Besides Thompson and Jack Higgins the governor’s mess now included
Lieutenant Y----, who in real life was one of His Britannic Majesty’s
vice consuls in the Levant. Y---- was a source of irritation to Captain
Loring, for he was suffering from an acute attack of the disease known
as consulitis. The symptoms of consulitis are touchiness, swollen
dignity, and an angry rash of red tape, all of which are intensely
aggravated by the presence of members of the diplomatic corps, and to a
lesser degree by officers of the fighting forces. Y---- was annoyed that
the Governor of Tenedos could not grasp that as a vice consul he ranked
with, but after, lieutenant commanders and majors, although for this
campaign he had only been given the miserable rank of a lieutenant in
the army. The Governor of Tenedos on his side did not care a damn what
Y----’s rank was, theoretical or otherwise, because in his opinion
Y---- himself was a pompous and aggressive little worm. It is remarkable
how rude a genial man can be when he is rude, and I have seldom heard
anybody quite so rude as Captain Loring was to Y----. The result of this
was that Y----’s consulitis grew more and more violent and took the
uncomfortable form of self-assertion at dinner. Later on I was to come
across much more severe cases of consulitis. In fact, I have seen men so
thickly covered from head to foot with confluent red tape as hardly to
be recognizable as human beings. I doubt if there be any cure once
consulitis grips a man, but a sense of the ridiculous is always a
reliable prophylactic.
Thompson thought that the governor was unfair to Y----. Jack Higgins, on
the other hand, who got on excellently with Thompson, thought that he
was not nearly severe enough and used to utter dark threats in which the
phrase “toe of my boot” was prominent. However, Y----’s presence did
not interfere with the governor’s determination to give a dinner to the
French flying people, one or two of whom were so well filled up with
champagne and brandy that they were unable to sit on their ponies and
had to be sent back to their aërodrome balanced face downward across
them like sacks of grain. They got home all right, thanks to the
sagacity of their mounts, though we were a little anxious about them for
a while because soon after their departure the stars were blotted out by
cloud and a tremendous thunderstorm burst over the island.
Meanwhile, amid a quantity of minor problems of behaviour, the behaviour
of the Vassilaki family became of absorbing interest. Here was what
Thompson had to tell me. About April 25th a man called Stavro Vassilaki
had arrived in Tenedos from America. Soon afterward he had gone to see
Major Temple, who was then military governor of the island, and had
asked for a permit to bring his father, his mother, three sisters, and a
brother from Volo, which is a port on the mainland of Greece, the modern
name for Iolchos of the Argonauts. The request had been granted, and
soon afterward the rest of his family arrived. Stavro Vassilaki at once
began to travel backward and forward between Tenedos, Mytilene, and
Athens. Thompson had already warned him that he could not go on doing
this and that if he were the merchant he pretended to be the telegraph
and the post office were at his service. He had applied for a pass to
travel some three weeks ago, and he was then warned that this was the
last time a pass would be granted, and that if he came back from
Mytilene to Tenedos he would not be allowed to leave Tenedos again. He
went, however, and was presumably still there. The day after Thompson
had been given the warning telegram from Athens, Stavro Vassilaki’s
brother, Yanni, had asked for a permit to go to Mytilene, which had been
refused. On June 27th, however, Yanni had obtained a permit to send his
mother and one sister to Mytilene. I asked Thompson why this had been
granted, and he suggested that if we were going to establish a case
against the Vassilakis they would have to be given some rope. With this
I agreed. It struck me that neither Thompson nor his confidential agent,
Manoli, would stand a chance of finding out much below the surface of
the Vassilaki family, and I decided to employ the services of Vedova,
who had been skipping about after me like an eager gray and white goat
ever since I arrived. It was well known on the island that Thompson
could not stand the sight of Vedova. By the way I have not mentioned
that Vedova’s first name was Wilfred, though I could never extract from
him how he came by it. I decided that, if Vedova was a tenth as clever
as he considered himself, he ought to be able to win a measure of
confidence from Yanni Vassilaki on the strength of Thompson’s known
dislike of him. I relied on the warmth of my feelings for eccentric and
flamboyant characters like Vedova to secure his devotion to myself.
So I sent for the ex-chief of the Smyrna fire brigade, who came to see
me at the governor’s house, more like an emaciated Chinese conjurer than
ever, although he was still wearing a white uniform of the Royal Naval
Reserve. I was in a small room, the windows of which looked down on the
narrow street crowded with noisy children at play.
“I want to speak to you about a confidential matter, Vedova.”
His unexpected reply was to go down on all fours, run rapidly across the
bare boards of the room in that attitude, and then raise himself to peer
over the window sill with as much caution as if an enemy were waiting
for him with a revolver on the other side of the street.
“What on earth----” I began.
“That’s all right, Major. I only look to see there is nobody to hear
what we are saying.”
“Well, don’t play the clown, and don’t call me Major. I am not a major.
It is more than improbable that I ever shall be one.”
“You ought to be a general,” Vedova declared enthusiastically. “My God,
the moment I see you come ashore I have said to myself, ‘that is the
cleverest man I have seen since I am working here for Great Britain.’”
“Silly talk like that does not impress me.”
“No, sir, I do not wish to speak for impressions. I wish to speak for
truths, so help me God!” He paused to cross himself with much
devoutness, and then gabbled faster than ever to make up for lost time.
“But when I must be ignorated and degraded by a man like Mr. Thompson,
who is stupid like a pig and like----”
“Keep quiet! If I ever hear you talking like that again, I’ll have
nothing to do with you.”
“Excuse me, sir, but sometimes my heart is so much swelling with the
insults I am having put upon me here that I cannot help myself. This
island is full of spies. Captain Mackenzie, it is alive with them like a
blanket. But when I go to take them for the risk of my life, and which
for Great Britain I will always be glad to risk, Mr. Thompson treats me
with high inconvenience. When I bring to him a man I have arrested and
on whose head I have risked my life to sit for half an hour, Mr.
Thompson treats me like I am bringing to him a bad watermelon.”
“Would you mind keeping quiet and hearing what I have to tell you?”
The ex-chief of the Smyrna fire brigade at once came rigidly to
attention.
“First of all,” I began, “I want you to get into conversation with Yanni
Vassilaki. Try to find out why he has brought those three sisters of his
to Tenedos. They are said to be good-looking, well dressed girls, and
they used to walk about freely in public, lately they have taken to
remaining indoors. Why?”
“I shall mesmerize them to-morrow and tell you, Captain.”
“Mesmerize them?”
Vedova, still standing rigidly to attention, began to roll his pale,
protruding, globular eyes.
“If you go and stare at them like that,” I said, “they’ll probably never
come out of the house again. Listen to me. You will get into
conversation with Yanni Vassilaki and drop a hint that you have
influence with me and that, if he ever wants a permit to travel, he has
only to ask you and you will make it your business to pull strings in
his favour. Do you understand?”
Vedova let his eyelids droop like the adventuress in a melodrama and
gazed at me from the slits that remained uncovered with an expression
that suggested the existence between us henceforth of a secret too
deadly even to be whispered. Then he left me, and I sat by the window,
wondering about the Vassilakis and, I suppose, hoping that they really
were spies. Down in the street the noise of children at play had
abruptly ceased. Instead I heard a queer, wailing sound and looked out
to see a funeral procession approaching--the crowd of mourners, the
thurifer, two long-haired, bearded priests, and there lying in a lidless
coffin the waxen face of the dead man among a jumble of flowers. The
sight of the dead man’s face gave me a shock, for I did not know then
of the Greek custom of carrying the dead to burial in an open coffin,
which I believe dates back to the time of the Turkish domination and the
suspicion of any receptacle that might carry arms. It was strange that
the funeral of one Greek who had died in his bed should be able to make
such an impression on one who had seen so many dead men on the
peninsula. Yet so it was, and the waxen face of that man emerging from
those flowers haunts my memory more clearly than any dead man I saw upon
the field of action.
The funeral passed. The moaning and wailing died away round a corner of
the narrow street. Presently there was but the sound of a bell tolling,
the chattering of the jackdaws on the sunlit red roofs, and the merry
noise of children who had gone back to their games. How much every place
out there has its own peculiar set of sounds associated with it in my
memory! From Cape Helles I can always hear the neighing of the mules,
the whinnying of the shells, and lark song everywhere. From Tenedos I
hear the jackdaws, the cries of children in the vine-trellised streets,
the eternal quarrelling of dogs, and the clock striking every hour twice
over. From Imbros comes back to me the croaking of the frogs, the
flap-flap of the tents day and night, and the distant growls of guns;
from Anzac the silence of the morning sun over a murmur of men like
bees.
The long immunity I had enjoyed from pain (for I had only been laid out
for four days since I left Capri) was broken at Tenedos by a violent
attack of sciatica which kept me on a bed of agony for three or four
days. Vedova forgot about his investigations into the past and present
of the Vassilakis in the excitement of trying to persuade me to let him
cure me by massage. It was useless to assure him that massage is the
worst treatment possible for sciatica. I would drive him down from the
room with curses, but a minute or two afterward he would be peeping
round the door like the clown in a Punch and Judy show. Even when Jack
Higgins in his wrath rose from my bedside and kicked him downstairs, he
came back soon afterward with an enormous purple bottle of liniment
which he had prepared from herbs gathered for him by the inhabitants of
Tenedos, many of whom he had driven out over the countryside to perform
this task, threatening them with his pistol.
“I’ll break that damned bottle on your head,” Higgins threatened
wrathfully.
“Mr. Higgins, I am telling to you that if I give my massage to Captain
Mackenzie he can be riding to-morrow. Captain Mackenzie, I only ask one
thing. You smell this bottle which I have made for you myself, and if
you don’t like the smell I am nothing.”
“But massage is fatal to sciatica,” I groaned.
Vedova, still bobbing about in the doorway with that purple bottle,
smiled his conviction of knowing better.
“Massage by some peoples? Yes. Massage by me ... why, Captain Mackenzie,
sir, in Smyrna there is always a crowd waiting for me in the street to
massage them, and my wife must look from the window and curse those
stupids because they will not go away.”
At this point Jack Higgins picked up the chair on which he had been
sitting by my bed to watch with sympathetic forget-me-not blue eyes my
contortions and advanced against Vedova.
“Go and put out one of your bloody fires with that blasted bottle of
yours,” he said truculently.
“If you really want to be of use to my pain, Vedova,” I told him, “go
and get into touch with Vassilaki.”
He saluted with a fantastic extravagance of gesture.
“I know my duty to Great Britain,” he declared, and went off at once,
skipping down the stairs like a docile gray and white goat.
My delightful doctor came back with his chair to my bedside and, taking
his seat again, gazed at me compassionately. Then he tried an injection
of a reputed analgesic called “sedol,” which had no effect.
“It’s morphia you’ll have to have,” he said, shaking his head. “But will
you just try drinking the sedol first like a good chap? Sometimes these
things work better when they’re drunk than when they’re put in with the
syringe.”
So I tried sipping the sedol from a wineglass while Jack Higgins sat
with his fingers on my wrist.
“Begod, you’ve got a damn fine pulse for a man suffering in the way you
are. It would take a pretty go of pneumonia to put you out forever.”
The spasms of pain were increasing in violence and frequency, and at
last my doctor decided on morphia, for by now in spite of a steady pulse
I was sweating with agony. It took nearly a grain before the anger of
the nerve was allayed.
Much has been written of the joys of morphia, and I have to suppose that
it gives positive pleasure to many. It takes me by the throat with one
hand and with the other it forks up my ganglia like a Neapolitan eating
spaghetti. It drives my eyes back into my brain and gives me an
overpowering nausea for many hours afterward. It performs indeed none of
those miracles of pleasure which are attributed to its magic potency
save only one, and that is its sure paralysis of the most atrocious
pain. I have been given a great deal of it; but I have never had even a
momentary desire to take it for its own sake, and I have come coldly to
the conclusion that most of the so-called morphia fiends who attribute
their moral decline to the drug are liars, weaklings, and degenerates
who would have been liars, weaklings, and degenerates whether they had
taken morphia or not. If I were set in a position to judge and condemn a
fellow man and that man pleaded addiction to drugs as an excuse for his
crime I would double his sentence because I should remember the many
sufferers who have been denied alleviation of their sufferings through
the beastly feebleness of brutes like him.
Jack Higgins satisfied himself that analgesics like sedol, pyramidon,
phenacetin, caffeine, aspirin, and suchlike were useless to allay even
for a moment the extreme violence of my pain, and he wrote out a note on
my case for the benefit of other doctors out there who might find
themselves called upon to treat me.
Vedova was reproachful when two or three days later I was about again
with nothing more than a limp to mark the attack. I wonder why so many
people believe in the efficacy of massage for already exacerbated
nerves. However, he was not offended by my refusal to accept his
services, and most people who believe in massage are mortally offended
by the least dubiety over its efficacy. They seem to attribute to it a
kind of sacramental value, and I believe would sooner hear baptism
derided.
Vedova had not found out much about Yanni Vassilaki. Perhaps because
Thompson had cast upon him a suspicious eye he was prejudiced in his
favour. Anyway, he told me that the fellow seemed harmless, that he had
come to Tenedos in the hope of doing business during the campaign, but
that having been disappointed he had announced his intention of going
back to America. I decided to interview Yanni Vassilaki myself and found
him a typical American-Greek, full of raucous brag about life on the
other side of the Atlantic and a profound contempt for the slowness of
everything and everybody in his own country. I began to talk about the
situation on the peninsula and indulged in a few harmless indiscretions
of gossip, but the complacent dago showed not a glimmer of interest in
what was happening a few miles away across the water. Either I had
played my part badly or Yanni Vassilaki was playing his well, for he
certainly gave no sort of impression that he was acting. However, the
next day Vedova came prancing round to tell me that Yanni Vassilaki had
just applied for a pass to allow him and his two young brothers, aged
sixteen and fourteen, to peddle wares round the aërodrome. This sounded
as if my apparent gullibleness had impressed him, after all. I decided
to encourage him in that notion, and sending for him I told him that if
he could give satisfactory references I was ready to support his
request. He seemed pleased and told me that he was anxious to sell some
wood at the aërodrome. So I procured him a pass and asked the paymaster
to buy wood from him when he presented himself.
Besides the Vassilaki business, the dust from the unfortunate collapse
of our contre-espionage canteens was lying more and more thickly on
Tenedos, deposited by every boat that called there. There must have been
at least half a dozen men who had been hurriedly pushed out of what they
were finding such lucrative jobs on the peninsula, not suspected of
anything definite and in most cases with characters vouched for by
reputable English merchants. None of them knew anything about the
deportation of X---- himself, and since that was being kept a secret
they could not be told. I pointed out to Deedes that such men left to
their own devices in the islands might easily become dangerous: with the
grievance they had and the loss of money consequent upon their
dismissal; but Deedes, though fully recognizing this, was not in a
position to have any more of them deported to Malta.
One of these fellows was particularly pertinacious, and I could not put
my head outside the front door without being buttonholed by him.
Pascalides was not a bad-looking little fellow with curly hair and a big
nose, the kind of little fellow who would always have been at the top of
his class at school and who had kept in maturity the manner of a
consciously and somewhat complacently industrious scholar. At the same
time with all his pertinacity he was shy and nervous, blushing painfully
when the simplest question was put to him and thereby exposing himself
to the suspicion of being thoroughly dishonest and surreptitious, so
hardly do we learn the lesson that rogues usually simulate the
traditional demeanour of honesty. Pascalides spoke and wrote English
extremely well, and being impressed by his sincerity I thought it was
ridiculous to get rid of him merely because the man who had originally
engaged him was doubtfully suspect. So when in an interview he suggested
being employed to try to penetrate the truth about X----’s loyalty. I
was convinced that he meant to act straightly and promised to do my best
to obtain him an interview with Captain Deedes, at which he could make
his position clear. I learned from Pascalides something which was useful
on several occasions during my later career, and this was that, if you
showed a man who had been wrongly suspected that you really did believe
in his honesty, you afterward had him as securely devoted to you as if
you had actually intervened between him and the firing squad. To accept
a man at his own valuation when the rest of the world is inclined to
regard him as a fraud is for once to be able to feel sure of human
gratitude, for, whereas to lend a man money is to run the risk of making
him feel inferior, to believe in a man when the world is against him is
to restore his sense of equality with one’s self.
The day before I left Tenedos the _Hussar_ was signalled approaching, so
the governor and I walked down to the harbour to find out what her
arrival at full speed portended. Captain Heneage[46] hurried ashore, a
tall lanky man on wires, his hair as long, that morning at any rate, as
a painter’s or a veteran politician’s.
“Come to take you away,” he shouted to Captain Loring.
“Where to?”
“You’ve been given the _Albion_. I’ve brought a new governor with me,
and I can give you exactly one hour to pack.”
My heart sank; though I knew how glad Captain Loring himself would be
to have a ship again, the announcement meant the end of a perfect little
kingdom. His successor, a kindly but somewhat massive marine colonel
would be too heavy for Tino’s back. It was true that I was myself
returning to Imbros on the morrow; but if my present job lasted I should
be visiting Tenedos again at intervals, and without Captain Loring it
would never seem quite so perfect a little island.
Colonel Mullins[47] walked back with the departing governor to learn
about the cares of office while his predecessor’s kit was being packed.
Meanwhile, I entertained Captain Heneage, or to be accurate I was
entertained by him. He was the commodore in command of all the small
vessels in these waters, and was known as Captain K in the same way as
the commodore of the destroyer flotilla was known as Captain D.
“Can you guess why I call them ketches instead of trawlers?” Captain K
asked me. “Why, I’ll tell you. I call them ketches so that when I’m
asked for a trawler I can always reply with perfect truth that I haven’t
got a single one to spare.”
At this he walked rapidly up and down the quay, shouting with laughter
at such an ingenious device for sidetracking exigent admirals.
Poor Jack Higgins was almost in tears when he saw the _Hussar_ vanish at
full speed round the point headed for Mudros.
“The greatest little gentleman God ever made,” he sighed with all
Ireland in his brogue. “I wish I were going to be surgeon in his ship.
And now you’ll be off to-morrow, and I’ll have to sit and listen to that
blasted Y---- trying to impress on Colonel Mullins that he ranks with,
but after, a lieutenant commander and a major.”
Soon after this Higgins himself was appointed to the _Ark Royal_ and
thus spared any further effusions of dignity from Y----’s wounded
rank. And if I could be given over again any one week during the war I
would choose (sciatica and all) that week on Tenedos in July, 1915.
The next day, while I was waiting on the quay for the trawler to take me
to Imbros, Vedova came up and asked if I would speak to Yanni Vassilaki
for a minute. I was surprised when it turned out to be a request to work
for us because this was the first sign he had given of realizing that
conditions were even at all unusual on Tenedos. I told Vedova to explain
to him what the work of an agent might entail, but Vassilaki interrupted
him to say that he needed no explanation of that because he had already
been employed as an agent by the American police. I promised I would
think over his offer and held out the possibility of sending him to
Salonica to recruit agents for Turkey, by which he was obviously so much
pleased that he at once began to brag of his prowess in New York, Vedova
watching him all the while like a conjurer who has just planted the
missing card in the pocket of a dupe from the audience. Thompson came
along presently with the news that Stavro, the elder brother, the
sister, and the mother had returned last night in the boat from
Mytilene. We went over once more the hundred and one things and people I
had to discuss with Deedes, and then with half a gale blowing I left
Tenedos on the ninth of July.
The trawler was as lively as a dustbin in the sea that was running, and
not much cleaner. I went forward and made myself as snug as I could, for
the water was lolloping over amidships. On the way to Helles I studied a
long letter from Pascalides which had been handed to me before I went
away. I felt sure that my instinct to trust him had been right, though
there was another communication from an Intelligence officer at Mudros,
on whom his nervous blushes had evidently made a most unfavourable
impression. Anyway, I made up my mind to persuade Deedes to have him
sent over to Imbros at the first opportunity. He was certainly as likely
as anybody to solve the great problem of X---- and his canteens. I gave
up thinking about Vassilaki and the rest of them and tried to read first
of all Ford Madox Hueffer’s _Good Soldier_ and then H. G. Wells’s
_Boon_, which a friend had sent me. I read in the latter that Compton
Mackenzie seemed in trouble about his excess luggage, and that’s all I
ever did read of _Boon_, for when I put the volume down beside me for a
moment the ship’s retriever thought it a suitable target, after which it
had to be thrown overboard. Nor did I find _The Good Soldier_ readable,
but for that I blame the lively motion of the trawler more than the
author. As a matter of fact, I found all reading out there rather a bore
except _Blackwood’s Magazine_, with a page or two of Homer or Virgil or
Thucydides before going to sleep, Homer and Thucydides, alas, with the
help of a crib, though I could still construe Virgil without much
difficulty.
We reached the peninsula, and while we were waiting off the beach I saw
about twenty mules blown to pieces by a shell from Asia. Then we toiled
on past the tawny cliffs, over which a monitor was putting 9.2 shells to
land somewhere near the village of Krithia. The shipping off Cape Helles
gradually faded out of sight, except the two hospital ships whose
whiteness caught the westering sunshine. A destroyer went tearing past
on my right, for I was sitting facing the stern, and I watched the coast
of Asia through the haze of rust driving out to sea from a parched land.
A depressed puppy like a Teddy bear was whimpering round the deck in a
vain attempt to avoid the dollops of water which kept coming over the
sides. Poor Darwin had succumbed to a bad go of dysentery, and I got up
to help him rearrange the shelter he had managed to scrape together to
keep the sun and sea water from his prostrate form. The effort made me
feel sick, but just as I was thinking I should have to hang over the
side I was cured by the excitement of hearing the crew of a drifter
shout that they had caught a submarine in their nets. There was such a
blowing of sirens, and such tearing round and round that we slowed down
to get some authentic news of the capture, which I thought I might have
the luck to offer Sir Ian Hamilton as an evening _apéritif_. Alas, the
submarine was hauled up presently and turned out to be a dead horse. I
wondered if the Vassilaki family would prove the same kind of
disappointment.
I found when I reached Imbros again that the shadow of Suvla was already
impending over G. H. Q.; but it was still a kindly shadow at the
beginning of July, one that promised rest and refreshment with victory
beyond. Suvla! The very word rippled on the ear like the sound of
running water heard by travellers at the end of a long dusty day.
It was Guy Dawnay who first told me about the proposed new landing, and
it was he who first mentioned the scheme to spread a rumour in Mytilene
that we were going to make an attack on Smyrna.
“That ought to be rather good fun,” I exclaimed perhaps a little
complacently, for I remember perfectly the expression on Guy Dawnay’s
face as he raised his eyebrows and turned round to Deedes to murmur with
a half-mocking smile:
“I wonder why he should think _he_ is earmarked for this rather
important job?”
“But who else have you got to send?” I countered.
“Well, I suppose we shall have to entrust the success of the new landing
to you,” he said.
Later on, when we had gone through the many minor problems raised by
Tenedos, Deedes asked me if I had any ideas about the best way to create
an impression that we intended to attack Smyrna. I had a number of
ideas, but I did not think it would help my chance of getting to
Mytilene if I appeared too full of them, so I shook my head discreetly.
“Well, this is more or less roughly my scheme,” said Deedes. “You will
go to Mytilene in the Thursday morning trawler and start looking about
rather obviously for possible camping sites, say for three
divisions--about forty thousand troops that means. Of course, water
will be the first thing you will look for. Then you might make cautious
inquiries about the prospect of obtaining food locally. You might also
try to engage guides for the Smyrna district, say from Menemen to
Cheshme. You could go into the question of fuel also. Meanwhile, I’ll
tell V in Athens to send some fellows round to buy maps of the Smyrna
district.”
I looked a little doubtful over this last proposal.
“Deedes, I know if we really did intend to attack Smyrna we should send
off in a hurry two or three weeks beforehand to buy maps of the
surrounding district, and I know the Germans think we are awful fools;
but I cannot believe even now they would believe us capable of being
quite so foolish and casual as that. I vote against the maps.”
“Very well,” said Deedes in that prim way of his, “we’ll rely on your
powers of deception at Mytilene.”
“And there’s another thing,” I went on. “Won’t it look rather odd for a
subaltern to be entrusted with the important job of choosing sites for
so large a camp?”
“You can mount another pip while you’re in Mytilene and call yourself a
captain.”
“And don’t you think I ought to get hold of some R. E. badges? A sapper
certainly would be sent if this landing were a genuine operation.”
“Now I think you’re getting a little subtle and elaborate,” said Deedes,
as if he were a novice-mistress checking the raptures of a novice. “No,
I don’t think you need change from a marine into an engineer. I’ll give
you fifty pounds in gold. Try not to spend more than that, though if it
were absolutely necessary I might be able to squeeze out a few more
sovereigns.”
“I think I’ve got more or less the hang of what to do. I suppose you’ll
leave the way I do it to my judgment? I mean, you don’t want me to ask
your authorization for every little detail?”
“No, no, no,” said Deedes hastily. “I’ll give you a simple cipher in
which when absolutely necessary you can communicate with me. But I shall
be most fearfully busy and----”
“The less you hear from me the better?”
“Quite.”
This was satisfactory.
Instructions had been sent to Thompson at Tenedos that Pascalides was to
leave there at once by the mail trawler for Imbros. I had filled Deedes
with hope that an examination of him might lead to some light being
thrown on the mystery of X---- and his contre-espionage canteens. On
Monday, July 12th, a telegram came from Thompson to say that our man had
left in the mail trawler and would arrive at Kephalo in the evening. I
toiled the weary length of K beach to meet him at the rest camp landing
stage and arrange for his bestowal that night. But when the Tenedos
trawler came in there was no sign of Pascalides. I hurried back to G. H.
Q., and to hurry along these two miles and more of soft seaweed-matted
beach was purgatory.
Deedes frowned when I brought him the news.
“I hope you haven’t made a mistake about this fellow. He sounds a bit of
a shyster.”
“Much more likely they’ve made a mistake at Helles,” I said.
We never did find out exactly what happened to Pascalides; but he was
apparently pushed ashore at Lancashire Landing and spent a miserable
twenty-four hours being pushed about from one place to another on the
beach until at last some brighter spirit pushed him on to the trawler
for Imbros the following afternoon. Anyway, we heard of his proposed
dispatch, and Deedes sent this signal to the camp commandant at K beach:
One visitor class five who missed mail trawler yesterday will
arrive K beach from Helles to-day. Please meet and arrange to send
over to G. H. Q. at nine A.M. to-morrow.
I had a lot of business to get through myself at the rest camp in
connection with our detective work, and it was settled that I should
spend the night over there and come back in the morning to G. H. Q. to
help at the extrication of facts about X---- from Pascalides.
I was busy when the Helles trawler came in, and it was dark before I
could get an opportunity to find out where they had put our class-five
visitor for the night. I may explain that suspects, friends, agents,
interpreters, and guides made up the classes of our visitors, and that a
visitor of class five meant a suspected spy. I told Deedes at the time
he sent a signal that it was rather bad luck on the wretched Pascalides
to have him signalled as a suspect; but he replied that it was better to
err on the right side and that as far as his night’s board and lodging
were concerned it would make no difference to his comfort. The point of
signalling him as a suspect was that he would be watched carefully and
not allowed to go wandering about the camp. Knowing that the assistant
provost marshal would have the chief say in the bestowal of Pascalides
that night, I went up to his office and asked whether I could see our
visitor. The assistant provost marshal declared that he had never heard
of Pascalides and that nobody answering to his description had been
handed over to him.
“But look here,” I protested, “this may be rather serious. We had a
signal from Helles to say he was aboard the trawler.”
“Well, I know nothing about him. You’d better go and ask the N. T. O.”
I hurried along the landing stage where one of the Pinto’s assistants
told me that a bird answering exactly to my description had arrived from
Helles and, after wandering about on the landing stage and getting in
everybody’s way and making a general nuisance of himself until dark, had
been told about five minutes ago to hire a sailing boat and go over to
G. H. Q. himself if he was so anxious to get there.
“But, good God,” I exclaimed, “he’s a suspect!”
“Well, I wasn’t to know that.”
“But a signal was sent to the camp commandant.”
“I know nothing about any signal. The fellow was a nuisance, and I want
some grub. I’m not going to stand on this damn’ pier all night and sit
chatting to dagoes.”
“Well, will you give me a picket boat to go after him?”
“No, I won’t. My men aren’t going to be sent out at this ungodly hour.
They’re tired if you aren’t.”
I stood on the landing stage and looked out across the choppy water of
the roadstead at the lighted tents of G. H. Q. on the other side. I
fancied I could see the boat with our fifth-class visitor halfway there.
“But look here,” I exclaimed in vexation of spirit, “I simply must get
hold of this fellow. He may be all right, but he may not. He may have a
couple of bombs in his pocket for all we know.”
“Good job if he has,” the sub-lieutenant declared fervidly. “And I hope
he blows something up with them over there.” With this he left me on the
pier, refusing to listen to another word.
I felt fairly confident that Pascalides would not blow up Sir Ian, and I
hoped that the sentries would stop his even getting as far as the camp,
but still....
I hurried back to the assistant provost marshal and asked him to
authorize me to hire a sailing boat, in which even if I did not catch
the visitor I should at any rate reach G. H. Q. soon after him. He
authorized this move, and I jumped on board the first available craft.
The wind was rising all the time and blowing from the southwest, so I
was worried when I found that the baggy-breeched ruffian in the caïque I
had picked was either drunk or a most incompetent mariner. We fouled two
hawsers and crashed into a buoy, and then it began to look as if we
should be driven out to sea, the way he was handling the caïque. I
thumped him on the back and pointed to the lights of G. H. Q. He
jabbered something in answer; but the caïque leaped forward with the
wind dead aft, and the dim outline of the sand dunes, which should have
been on our bow, began to sweep past us on our starboard beam. I tried
to snatch the tiller from the rascal and put the caïque into the wind;
but he clung on to it, chattering at me like a gorilla, and we swept on
toward the open sea. At the rate we were going we should soon foul the
boom. There was no sign of the boat with Pascalides, and I looked
anxiously back at the lights of G. H. Q. fast receding astern. By this
time I had made up my mind that our fifth-class visitor had fooled me
and was bent on executing a desperate revenge for all that he and X----
and the rest of them had suffered at our hands. Then I made a vow to
devote at least one hour a day at Mytilene to the study of modern Greek,
so that in future I might avoid finding myself in a caïque on a dark and
stormy night with a mariner to whom I was as incapable of communicating
my opinion of his seamanship as if he were, in fact, the gorilla he so
strongly resembled. I made another attempt to wrest the tiller from him,
at which he showed his teeth at me with such viciousness that inspired
by fright and anger I knocked him down. Then leaving him to pull himself
together and take the tiller again, I lowered the big sail myself. This
infuriated him. He took out a knife, to which I responded by taking out
my pistol and pointing to the oars. He obeyed sullenly, and while he
growled and groaned away over his task I sat at the helm with the tiller
in one hand and my pistol in the other. Now I received another shock,
for when I looked at the lights of G. H. Q. they had vanished, and then
suddenly they all flashed up again. My heart was in my mouth for a
moment until I realized that it was not the explosion of a bomb but a
temporary failure of the electric light. I decided that whatever harm
Pascalides could do would be done by the time I arrived on the scene and
I headed the caïque back for the pier of K beach. Next morning when I
woke up I had the biggest shock of all, for I found my pajamas soaked in
blood. I suppose I strained a blood vessel when I was pulling at the
sail, and during the night it must have broken.
I found Deedes in a fume when I got back to G. H. Q. about ten o’clock
after a weary walk along the beach, sharing the weight of my Wolseley
valise with Darwin whose dysentery had made his legs groggy. Pascalides
had landed the night before, walked up through the tents unchallenged by
a single sentry, and after making inquiries had finally discovered
Deedes at work in the I tent. Deedes was inclined to blame me at first
for this invasion; but as soon as he heard my story we had the
satisfaction of sending out various tart memorandums from G. H. Q. (I-b)
M. E. F. which trickled back some days later scrawled over in blue or
red pencil with “Nothing known of this man here.” “Pass to N. T. O. K
beach.” “From M. L. O. Lancashire Landing to A. P. M. K beach. This is
your pigeon, I think,” and other similar graffiti. As for Pascalides
himself we found that he was unable to add anything to our knowledge of
the X---- business. So he was sent back to Athens where some months
later he was employed by me in an unimportant capacity under the
pseudonym of Charles Lamb.
It was the morning after my adventure in the caïque that the new press
correspondents arrived at Imbros for the first time, or at any event it
was the first time I saw them. It is hardly necessary to say that by far
the most remarkable figure among them was H. W. Nevinson, who had been
sent out to represent the Provincial press. He looked and was a paladin.
I dip my pen to salute him with a sense of privilege in having seen the
man in action. I happened to be the one chosen to administer the oath to
these correspondents. I forget the exact wording of the document, but it
was to the effect that they should consider themselves bound by various
military rules and regulations and among other things that they should
undertake not to communicate with the enemy. One after another signed
his name at the foot, Nevinson with a courtliness of gesture that seemed
to express his sense of the slight embarrassment I might be feeling at
having to proffer such a superfluous document and at the same time his
immediate acknowledgment of the fact that the position of a
correspondent had somehow to be clearly set down in black and white.
Ashmead-Bartlett was the last to sign, and when he came to the clause
about communicating with the enemy he paused.
“I’m hardly likely to do that, am I?” he exclaimed, flinging down his
pen with contemptuous petulance.
“Well, I can’t help the phrasing, Bartlett,” I replied just as
fretfully, for I was feeling tired that morning. “I didn’t draw up this
document. If you object to signing it, you’d better go and argue the
matter with Sir Ian or the C. G. S. It’s nothing to do with me. I’m
merely carrying out orders in asking for your signature.”
So Bartlett signed his name at the foot, murmuring something about its
being on a par with the rest of the idiotic behaviour of G. H. Q.
There was once an eccentric individual on the island of Capri who got it
into his head that the other inhabitants of the island were leagued
together to annoy him. This belief preyed upon his mind to such an
extent that he could not look out of the window at the neighbours
walking by without fancying that they were conspiring against him. So in
order to break up their plots he used to set fire to newspapers and drop
them down on their heads as they passed beneath his balcony. I have
often wondered why Ashmead-Bartlett did not try this method of defending
himself against the persecution of his opinions by G. H. Q. It might
have become famous as an _auto de fè_ or act of faith in the power of
the press.
CHAPTER XIV
OFF TO MYTILENE
I had been slaving away at the files in I-b ever since I had returned
from Tenedos, trying to bring my Newgate Calendar of suspects up to
date; but it was a long job, and it was after three o’clock before I was
able to get to bed the night before my Mytilene adventure. I had only a
couple of hours’ sleep, for I was determined to be in good time for the
trawler, which was due to leave Kephalo at six o’clock sharp, and I was
down at the water’s edge with Darwin and the kit by half-past five of
that fine calm morning. The prospect of seeing Sappho’s Lesbos filled me
with an elation of spirit of which the sparkling golden air and
temperate rays of the early sun streaming down across the quiet tents
behind seemed the perfect expression. The trawler for Mytilene was
anchored in the middle of the roadstead, and every gray ship lying out
there at anchor caught from the slanting beams of the morning sun the
livelier gray of a gull’s wing. A spinney of opalescent blue smoke from
freshly lighted fires was hanging over the rest camp at the far end of K
beach, and the rugged hills of Imbros took on a new richness of spring
from the radiant air. Nothing happened for a while to disturb the
blessed calm that brooded over the island. I sat there on the beach,
letting the gentle warmth caress my closed eyelids and the quick lap of
the sea half lull me to sleep again. Then I looked at my watch and,
seeing that it was now a quarter to six, but that the pinnace on which I
was counting to take me out to the trawler was still fussing about on
the other side of the roadstead, I decided that we should have to hail
it if we wanted to be put on board in time. So I bellowed “Pinnace,
ahoy!” for a while without effect. Five minutes passed, and then I tried
bellowing “Trawler, ahoy!” So many signs of activity were now visible on
her deck that I was afraid she might start before her time. To my relief
the pinnace came fussing across the water in our direction, but just as
we thought it was hurrying across for us at last it turned aside and
went fussing up to some ship. Smoke began to pour from the trawler’s
funnel. I was by now thoroughly alarmed. Five minutes to six, four
minutes to six, three minutes to six, two minutes to six! I could hear
the rattle of the trawler’s chain coming up, and I let out a despairing
yell loud enough to wake Eddie Keeling fast asleep outside our tent
nearly half a mile behind. Darwin was not good at shouting, for he was
too well behaved; but even he with the prospect of Mytilene fading
managed to emit a kind of muffled roar, and at last the pinnace after
circling round uncertainly for a minute did come puffing in our
direction. When it was about forty yards from the beach, the officer in
charge, a disgruntled lieutenant commander with a bad-tempered bilious
face, shouted to know what the hell I wanted.
“What the hell do you suppose I want? What the hell do you suppose I’m
doing down here on the beach at six o’clock? Paddling? I want to be put
on board the Mytilene trawler.”
“It’s not my bloody business to fetch and carry you soldiers all over
this blasted harbour.”
“Well, what is your bloody business?” I demanded.
“I’ve got enough to do without being fetched over here to----”
“Damn it all,” I shouted in exasperation, “a signal was sent last night
to say that an officer and his servant were going to Mytilene in the
trawler this morning, and if you know nothing about it, your N. T. show
at K beach is responsible. It’s not my fault.”
Growling ferociously, the disgruntled lieutenant commander came inshore,
and with the help of the crew we got our kit on board and ourselves as
well. However, by this time the trawler’s anchor was up and she was
already moving. I could have wept with rage and disappointment. There
would not be another trawler to Mytilene for a week, and by that time
the plan outlined for me might have been changed.
“Well, now I’m afraid you’ll have a little extra trouble,” I said
bitterly to my liverish friend. “Either you put me on board that
trawler, or if I miss it you’ll come back and explain to Captain
Mitchell[48] the principle on which his signals are disregarded.”
Captain Mitchell was the naval adviser to the commander-in-chief.
By this time the disgruntled lieutenant commander was either beginning
to feel a little ashamed of his bad temper or a little nervous about the
effects of it. Anyway, he chased after the trawler and caught her up
just as she was about to head round the point of Kephalo. The kit was
flung aboard. Darwin and I scrambled up the side ourselves; and then as
the climax to the outraged calm of the morning, a slim young man with a
clear-cut profile and blazing eyes of the brightest blue I ever saw
glared down at me from the cabin on the bridge, his striped pajamas
adding a last tigerish touch to his cold fury.
“You’re late, sir,” he snarled. “Why the hell can’t you soldiers be on
board at the time for sailing?”
This was too much, yes, this was too much; and I told Strange, who was
an R. N. R. lieutenant and in time of peace an officer in one of the big
mail steamships, what I thought about him, about his trawler, about the
pinnace, about the disgruntled lieutenant commander, and about the Royal
Navy.
Strange laughed.
“All right, I’m sorry. Come along up and have some breakfast.”
And in his cabin on the bridge, with the morning sun streaming in upon
the bacon and eggs and coffee, we ate and were at peace with one another
and with all the world.
“Sorry I was so ratty when you came aboard,” he said. “But I like to
sail absolutely to schedule, and I’m rather proud of this ship.”
He had reason to be. There was nothing of the dustbin about this
trawler, where things went man-o’-war fashion and the captain of it had
a pretty notion of making things comfortable both for himself and his
passengers.
We called at Tenedos on the way southward to Mytilene. Thompson was down
at the quay and handed me his report on the movements of the Vassilaki
family since I had left. This I studied in the bows of the trawler,
where Darwin, whose dysentery was better again for the moment, sat
gazing with wistful eyes at the sublime panorama of the Asiatic shore,
saying no doubt to himself how much it would be improved by two piers
and an esplanade.
Stavro Vassilaki had taken advantage of the permission I gave his
younger brother Yanni to sell a cargo of firewood to the paymaster at
the aërodrome and had lost no time in sailing round there, inscribed on
the Greek bill of health as one of the crew of a small caïque. Thompson
had made a signal to the commanding officer at the aërodrome to warn him
of Stavro’s arrival on July 12th, so that his movements might be
carefully watched and noted. He had heard indirectly that Stavro had
landed his cargo and spent most of the day roaming about the aërodrome,
but up to the time of writing the report his message to the aërodrome
had not been acknowledged by the authorities there and no word had been
sent him about Stavro Vassilaki’s behaviour.
I leaned back against a coil of rope and asked mighty Zeus, the father
of gods and men, who seemed to be brooding calm and sagacious upon this
immemorial scene, why it was that, if with due warning we dispatched an
interpreter to some Brigade Headquarters and if with all his papers in
order he arrived at the notified hour, the betting was ten to one in
favour of his being immediately arrested and with difficulty rescued
from being shot out of hand, but that, if one sent along a suspected spy
of whose behaviour in the trap set for him it was vital to have some
information, the betting was ten to one against the least attention’s
being accorded to him beyond a friendly invitation to wander round where
he felt inclined. No answering thunderclap was heard in the clear sky to
tell me what Zeus thought about it. Probably even the father of gods and
men found the puzzle insoluble.
I turned back to the report to read that on July 13th a friend of the
Vassilakis had asked for a pass for Mytilene. This man whom I will call
Vassili Zervaki (he _would_ confuse the issue by having a Christian name
so similar to the surname of the suspected family) was a naturalized
American citizen who had been on Tenedos for about five months without
any employment. Thompson’s suspicion had been roused by this
application, coming as it had on the very day after Stavro Vassilaki’s
long and apparently disregarded exploration of the aërodrome. So under
various pretexts he had three times during the day refused a pass to
Zervaki. The steamer for Mytilene had been due at 6 P.M. At four that
afternoon Stavro Vassilaki had come along in a stew and asked for a pass
for himself to go to Mytilene and buy wood. Thompson had raised
difficulties and demanded to see his papers as an American citizen.
Stravo Vassilaki had returned with a kind of a pass uttered by a
government department in Athens and addressed to the British consul
general at the Piræus, asking that Yanni Vassilaki Xanthaki might be
allowed to proceed to Tenedos. His photograph was on this document,
which appeared quite genuine.
I leaned back once more against that coil of rope and asked the
unresponsive azure how one was ever to arrive at the real name of
anybody out here. According to the original telegram of denunciation
from Athens Vassilaki Xenaki was our man; according to the Greek
government it was Yanni Vassilaki Xanthaki; according to the man
himself it was Stavro Vassilaki, to whom had been added a younger
brother, Yanni Vassilaki; and then just to confuse things a little more
a friend had come into it called Vassili Zervaki not to mention another
brother with the same Christian name as the friend.
I turned back to the report. Thompson had finally given a pass to both
men and had arranged for the pair of them to be watched on the journey
and for Stavro Vassilaki to be shadowed in Mytilene. In the end it was
only Zervaki who embarked, and Thompson had noted as his assumption that
when Stavro Vassilaki had found his friend had been successful in
obtaining a pass it had been unnecessary to leave Tenedos himself. On
the following day (which was yesterday, July 14th) Thompson had told
Manoli, his confidential agent, to get into touch with Stavro Vassilaki
and find out why he had not gone to Mytilene. Stavro’s explanation was
that another brother, Vassili, had become involved in a quarrel with
some youngsters who had used degrading language about the whole
Vassilaki family, for which Stavro had remained on Tenedos to obtain an
apology. Later on that morning, when Thompson was censoring letters and
telegrams in the post office, Stavro Vassilaki had come in and handed
back his pass for Mytilene. On Thompson’s asking him why he had not
left, he had replied that his sister had been taken ill suddenly and
that his father had asked him not to go away, but that he hoped to go to
Mytilene next week. In support of this excuse, Thompson wrote, two of
his sisters had been walking about in the square that evening, but the
third had not been seen. He had entrusted Vedova with the job of finding
out whether either and if so which of the two stories was true. In a
postscript to the report Thompson noted that when Stavro Vassilaki had
asked for his pass to go to Mytilene the day before yesterday he had
spoken of his conversation with me and had wanted to know whether
Thompson thought he had any chance of being employed by me as a secret
agent. I leaned back against the coil of rope and sighed to myself that
it had been Yanni Vassilaki who had had those detective ambitions, not
Stavro....
“Well, Darwin,” I asked, “enjoying the view?”
“Yes, sir, though it’s a little bit monotonous. That’s one thing I’ll
always say for----” he named his native watering place. “You’ve only got
to look out of the window, as they say, and there’s always something
going on. But it’s very dead and alive all round these parts.”
Green hill after green hill swept down to the velvety sea; blue mountain
after blue mountain swept up behind those green hills to the sky. I
suppose the sight of the French coast from the Bay of Biscay or the
English Channel should thrill the fancy with a thought of Pekin beyond;
but somehow the thought of Pekin is swallowed up by so many European
cities in between. Here, where Asia towered from the Ægean, land
overwhelmed the imagination more than sea. Partly, of course, it was the
consciousness that this land was hostile which produced such an effect
on the mind; but I think that if I were to make that voyage from Imbros
to Lesbos over again in time of peace I should still be overwhelmed by
the landscape on our port beam, by those green hills sweeping down to
that calm and crystalline sea, and by those blue heights beyond.
Hitherto I had only beheld many-fountained Ida from afar; but to-day in
the trawler we voyaged, as it seemed, along her very base, and how ever
to recapture with the pen the magic that was over me when we passed the
ancient promontory of Lectum and glided between the fairylands of Asia
Minor and Lesbos baffles my desire.
“Shall we have a shot at the lighthouse over there?” Strange asked.
I looked across to where he was pointing and saw a white building high
up on a spur of that majestic coast. I begged him not to train his three
pounder on the lighthouse. In my present mood such a proposal seemed
like the wanton destruction of a butterfly in one’s path merely to
indulge the superfluous energy of the moment.
“As a matter of fact, it has already been abandoned,” Strange continued.
“One of our ships knocked it to pieces long ago. I just thought it would
be rather fun to see if we could hit it.”
But the forsaken Turkish lighthouse, looking hardly bigger than a white
butterfly perched up there, had made such an appeal to my sentiment that
I pleaded for its life as if it were in very fact a sentiment creature
and as if with our ridiculous little three pounder we could have done it
any further harm.
“No, it isn’t really worth wasting time on to-day,” Strange agreed. “We
should have to go in considerably closer to the Asiatic shore if we
wanted to make any good shooting, and as I want to be in Port Iero at
the scheduled time I think we’ll jog on.”
So we jogged on, though the verb does not quite convey the tranquil
splendour of our blue voyage between the continent of Asia and
olive-silvery Lesbos. We passed the city of Mytilene tumbling down in
orchards and villas and gardens and minarets to its twin ports on either
side of a peninsula, bare and rugged where it fronted Asia and crowned
by a great Frankish castle.
Soon after this the trawler turned into a narrow channel, as narrow as a
railway cutting, which ran for over three miles between wooded banks
until it widened to form an expanse of water some six miles long and
four miles wide surrounded by olive woods with stark mountains beyond.
This was Port Iero where the _Canopus_, the _Euryalus_, and various
smaller craft lay safe from the most enterprising submarine. The effect
of gliding up what seemed a green river to reach this great sheet of
silver water at the end was like emerging from the back of some tidal
creek in the West Country to behold warships anchored in the Hamoaze.
Captain Heathcoat Grant,[49] the senior naval officer at Port Iero, was
the very host to set the seal on such an exquisite voyage. He gave us
champagne for dinner, God bless him; and when the lungs are full of
radiant air, when the mind has been drinking life-giving draughts of
beauty all day, when the body has ripened like a grape in the sun, why,
then champagne will have the natural dignity of an element, will indeed
seem to have bubbled up from the depths of earth itself. I recanted
every oath I had sworn that morning when the disgruntled lieutenant
commander and I had been having the little argument over our passage
across Kephalo Bay to catch Strange’s precise trawler. Captain Grant had
many other virtues besides knowing that champagne was the only drink for
dinner that evening, and not the least of them for a Jacobite like
myself was that he was a cadet of Glenmoriston. His spacious cabin in
the old _Canopus_ was a comfortable sight, the evening sun streaming in
through the ports to dye the chintz covers of the chairs with richer
hues of red and rose, the doors leading to the gold-washed stern walk
open wide. His wife had just presented him with a daughter, and he
picked up a framed photograph of her with the baby in her arms to show
me. A memory of the way he looked down at it for a silent moment or two
before he put it back in its place comes back to me from a day already
deeply enough impressed with beauty.
During dinner, we heard tales of the Falkland Islands. I remember
Captain Grant’s description of the feelings of himself and the ship’s
company when halfway to Montevideo they were ordered back to Port
Stanley, there to mount guard over the entrance and be prepared for
bombardment by Von Spee’s victorious squadron. When he could not get
into communication with the wireless station at Port Stanley, Captain
Grant decided that the Germans had been before him and were now in
possession. I thrill again as I write this to think of hearing from the
lips of her captain the tale of that old ship cleared for action and
steaming into Port Stanley to fight by herself the whole of Von Spee’s
squadron. And as she steamed in, with the crews standing by their guns,
the inhabitants of Port Stanley thought she was the first of the German
ships. Church bells and dockyard bells clanged an alarm and the gallant
volunteers paraded to man the land defenses until signals were made and
she was recognized. Captain Grant did not know that Sir Doveton Sturdee
with _Inflexible_ and _Invincible_ was steaming hard across the South
Atlantic. So he took Canopus into the inner harbour, grounded her on the
mud out of sight of the sea, and sat tight to defend the wireless
station. For the rest of November and the first week of December great
efforts were made to put Port Stanley into some kind of defensive
condition; but though it was known that Von Spee had rounded Cape Horn
he and his squadron did not approach. Instead of the German the British
squadron arrived on the morning of the seventh of December. And the next
morning before eight o’clock _Canopus_ signalled to the flagship that
the lookout on land reported smoke visible southward.
“We had some shots at the _Gneisenau_,” said Captain Grant. “Gave him
the shock of his life, for of course he couldn’t see us, and he must
have wondered how the wireless station had managed to mount twelve-inch
guns.”
But those shots at the _Gneisenau_ were all that the _Canopus_ could
manage, for she was fast on the mud, and it had been hard to watch all
the others steam out of the harbour in pursuit of Von Spee, steam out
with their escort of albatrosses while she remained fast on the mud.
And now here was the old _Canopus_ drowsing in this lotus haven, with
never a snotty on board who had not heard the guns of the _Gneisenau_.
Nor was that memorable day to come to an end with a champagne dinner and
the tales of a delightful host, for Heathcote-Smith[50] was another
guest, and he invited me to accompany him on a nocturnal expedition in
the _Omala_ to take off a messenger from the Asiatic shore who was
expected to-night with news from the interior.
Heathcote-Smith had been vice consul in Smyrna when war broke out, and
he was now, though nominally vice consul at Salonica, running the
Intelligence in Mytilene which he did superlatively well. Testimony to
the efficiency of his organization may be read in Liman Von Sanders’s
book, _Five Years in Turkey_. Unfortunately his work for a time was much
hampered by the ill-informed opposition of an amateur yachtsman who was
in command of the flotilla of motor launches in the Ægean and wanted to
exercise parental authority over the motor boat of the Intelligence
organization.
Heathcote-Smith was, as I remember, the son of an English country
parson, and he had had no kind of connection with the Levant before he
became a student interpreter; but his darkness and litheness, his
fluency in Greek and Turkish, his soft voice and large moustache and big
nose and somewhat exotic manner combined to suggest some ancestral link
with this part of the world. Whenever it fell to my lot to have to
defend him against the outrageous and completely baseless insinuations
of ingenuous young naval officers who had picked up some odds and ends
from the wild stories that were being circulated in ward rooms, the
first statement I always had to rebut was Heathcote-Smith’s Levantine
origin. James Elroy Flecker, the poet, who was a contemporary of
Heathcote-Smith in the same service and like him the son of an English
parson, made a similarly exotic impression. Had Flecker lived, he would
probably have been serving his country in the same kind of job as
Heathcote-Smith on those Ægean shores, and no doubt he would have
incurred the same kind of hostility. Luckily for our work
Heathcote-Smith had more loyal friends among naval officers than
enemies, and in January, 1918, he was himself made a Commander, R. N. V.
R. No Intelligence officer grumbles to find a good deal of mud adhering
to his clothes. He expects it as part of his job; he has, however, some
reason to resent its being flung by his own side. Perhaps it was the
fellow feeling which made them kind; but certainly my own experience was
to lead me to regard the Intelligence agents of the enemy with respect
for the gentlemanly way in which they fought. And so, as the Italian
prayer has it, “God protect me against my friends; I will protect myself
against my enemies.”
I had already met Heathcote-Smith at G. H. Q., where he had arrived one
dusk in a white flannel suit with gray lines to collogue with Deedes.
His silky voice (and when I write silky I am remembering that silk will
almost scream if a frayed finger nail be run across it), his deep
lustrous brown yet faintly mocking eyes, his habit of walking always on
his toes (not in the least so as to suggest furtiveness, but rather
because he always seemed on tiptoe for a fight like Keats’s sweet peas),
the dreamy earnestness of his gaze when he was expounding his scheme for
the organization and equipment of ten thousand Anatolian Greek
irregulars to be turned loose on the Turks in Asia Minor, his childish
sense of fun, his sudden rapid denunciations of stupidity, his _enfant
terrible_ questions, and the way he somehow suggested one of the
attractive heroes of the Arabian Nights like Prince Camaralzaman, all
these aspects of him had combined to make me most anxious to meet him
again and on his own territory. To supplement my attempt at a portrait
of him I extract from a letter written to me from G. H. Q., when I was
ill that autumn in Athens, the following:
Heathcote-Smith turned up here last night and as luck would have it
“tiptoed at top speed” (in a white suit much shrunk owing to it
and, he inside it, having been precipitated into the sea two hours
previously) into C. G. S.’s tent by mistake. Seeing C. G. S.
commenced his oration at maximum speed before the latter could
brings his guns and A. D. C. into action! Result Pan-Hellenic
shares gone up considerably. [This refers to Heathcote-Smith’s
scheme to land irregulars at Aivali]. He was more like himself than
ever. Clothes as described. Eyes typical and very “expressive of”
the situation (which he considers acute). On his toes practically
the whole time, thus putting “Dolly, what’s her name” of the Gaiety
to shame. Remained in undried clothes the whole day and even
insisted while out walking with us on _paddling!_ the wherewith to
_insure_ the evening chill which came on sure enough about 10 P.M.
when he was last seen in the company of Jan Smith having brandy
poured down his throat. Nevertheless he was up betimes this morning
and bathed (the weather is _decidedly_ colder now early), then had
a bath (which my servant thought “redundant”), and finally ate two
_bad_ eggs (all eggs under the new régime are bad) without turning
a hair (having no kit with him _no_ hair, I may mention, had been
turned either on head _or_ chin!)
Thus our Heathcote, bless him!
The moon had set when we went on board the _Omala_. This craft which
belonged to the Intelligence organization run by V in Athens was a motor
boat about forty feet overall, and with an ample beam of ten or perhaps
twelve feet. I felt deliciously excited when I paced her dewy deck in
the gray starshine and was carried up the narrow channel between dark
wooded banks until near the entrance the _Omala_ was challenged by the
sentries of the lookout post on a rocky islet in the entrance, where
guns had been mounted. We stopped to explain who we were by the rays of
the searchlight, the guns eying us like open-mouthed wondering children
on the outskirts of a street argument. We were allowed to pass out and
were soon heading northeast in the slight swell that was running.
Presently we shut down our engines and signalled with an electric torch
to our consort, a gasoline caïque, which was to have joined us about
here. We waited five or ten minutes without getting any reply, and then
started off again for Asia. I went below and found the cabin full of
shadowy figures in the blurred lamplight, full, too, of melons rolling
about and a smell of cheese that was so material as almost to be
describable as rolling about, too. I decided my only chance of reaching
Asia without being sick was to stay on deck, however damp the night air,
and I made myself comfortable forward, there to lie back against some
gear and watch a continent slowly take shape dim and vast in the
starshine. On and on we rolled until we were within a couple of miles of
our rendezvous when smoking was forbidden and the engines were put to
half speed while we crept in close to the hostile shore.
The messenger we were expecting from the interior was to strike two
matches in succession to warn us of his presence in answer to a single
flash from our torch. We gave the signal. There was no reply from the
beach. It would have been more than imprudent to flash our torch a
second time, so the tiny skiff was launched, and Heathcote-Smith was
rowed ashore by one of the crew. I was anxious to set foot on Turkish
territory myself; and when the skiff came back I joined Heathcote-Smith
on the soft beach overhung by olive trees where we stood peering
anxiously inland. Once in the distance a dog howled, but that and the
low gurgle of the water sucking at the base of a rock thrust out from
the shore or the gentle splash of it right along the glimmering crescent
of starlit sand were all the sounds we heard. We waited, motionless and
silent, listening for the crackle of a twig under a hurried footstep,
for the whisper of the undergrowth at the passage of a stealthy form. My
fancy went racing away up through the olive groves and across the dim
foothills to spring from mountain top to mountain top, to sweep across
the deserts of Persia, to battle with the winds of Tibet, to leap the
Great Wall of China, to swirl down the Yangtse-Kiang, to stand upon the
shores of the Yellow Sea and watch the sun rise from the ultimate east.
Thus for an hour was my fancy occupied, and then we rowed back to the
_Omala_ without our messenger. It was decided to lie under the lee of a
small island off the coast until dawn, and by this time neither the
smell of the melons nor of the cheese could keep me from falling asleep
in one of the bunks along the side of the cabin. Moreover, what slight
swell there had been when we left Port Iero was not perceptible in this
bay. So I dozed, to be wakened an hour or two later by the noise of feet
tramping overhead and cries of “Submarine! Submarine!” I rushed on deck.
The sun was not yet up, and looking through my glasses in the deceitful
light of dawn I persuaded myself that the object some six miles away
over the lavender water really was a submarine. Heathcote-Smith, his
trousers turned up to the knees was running backward and forward along
the deck, and waving a grenade in each hand. Rifles were being served
out to the Greek crew. Then Heathcote-Smith shouted to me, “Hold these
grenades, I must put on my overcoat,” though whether he felt he had to
put it on to keep off the spray from the submarine’s shells or the cool
breezes of dawn I never knew. I held the grenades while Heathcote-Smith
wrapped himself up for the approaching engagement; after which he
snatched the grenades from me again and rushed about the deck more
wildly than ever, crying that our best chance was to ram the submarine,
until in his excitement he dropped a grenade on Ben Hodder’s toes. O
rare Ben Hodder! All he said was: “That little bit of Turkish delight is
better overboard,” as he stooped down to pick up the grenade and drop it
over the side of the boat.
Ben Hodder in times of peace had been a licorice grower. He was now a
lieutenant in the R. N. V. R. and the representative of our Intelligence
organization in Samos, somewhere on the mainland opposite which island
was the estate he cultivated. He was a stocky little man in the mid
forties, perhaps a year or two past them, and in his white uniform he
had the appearance of a warrant officer of many years’ standing. He was
a square-headed, grave, dependable little man who believed in deeds
rather than in words. He had been much impressed by the practical
methods of the French Intelligence Service under Commandant La Mouche,
who wishing to eliminate a man they found a hindrance to their work in
the islands had pushed him off the quay at Vathy into the water of the
harbour, whence he had been rescued by a French gunboat, taken on board,
and sent to Marseilles. To a remonstrance from the Greek authorities in
Samos the French replied that the man had been arrested on the high seas
and that they were strictly within their international rights.
“That’s the way to serve them,” Ben Hodder said to me, rubbing his hands
appreciatively. “Now if you could have a talk over it with Captain
Deedes ... a fine fellow that, sir,” and I felt that to the rare Ben
Hodder Deedes’s mere name was an earnest of merit. “Yes,” he went on, “I
reckon that you and I could dear up this coast between us.”
“You mean by pushing into the harbours all the people we didn’t approve
of, and then getting them arrested on the high seas?”
“That’s it, that’s it,” Ben Hodder agreed, giving my ribs a confidential
poke. “That’s the only treatment they’ll ever understand. We’ve got to
take the gloves off out here. Yes, you come along down to Chios and
Samos, sir, and we’ll make a clean sweep of all the gentlemen in my
quarter.”
It was a cordial invitation, and I was sorry that I could not avail
myself of it then. Many months of war were to elapse before I ate with
Ben Hodder the dishes or drank with Ben Hodder the Samian wine to which
he invited me that morning. That very afternoon he left Mytilene for
Vathy, a snug little port to which my heart is often turning, and we
shall not meet him again until halfway through the last volume of these
memories.
“Do you think that really is a submarine?” Ben Hodder asked, turning
round sharply and looking up over his shoulder to fix me with those
honest eyes of his.
“Well, really, I don’t believe it is, Hodder.”
“No more do I,” said Ben Hodder. Then he called to Heathcote-Smith. “Mr.
Heathcote, that’s no submarine.”
But Heathcote-Smith was as much offended by the rare Ben Hodder’s want
of faith as a spiritualistic hostess on the rapping of whose table some
visitor has ventured to cast a doubt.
“Of course it’s a submarine,” he cried. “Now then, stand by, all. Full
speed ahead! We’ve got to ram him. That’s our only chance.”
With this he dashed up into the bows of the _Omala_ and stood there like
a distracted figurehead, waving his grenades menacingly at what even he
had to admit two minutes later was our own missing consort, the gasoline
caïque, on which the great bland morning sun was winking over the
mountain tops.
We put into a channel between two diminutive islands and rowed ashore to
bathe and breakfast. The splendour of that dawn with fairy coasts rising
all around from the limpid sea, the exhilarating wash of wine-gold air,
the mild warmth of the early sun on the gray pebbles of the beach where
we lay after our bath to gaze up at the eggshell blue of the morning
sky, listening the while to the sizzle of the fish being cooked on a
fire of driftwood and to Hadkinson singing some old folk song of
Macedonia light as the morning breeze.... Hadkinson! I have not
mentioned Hadkinson yet, which is doubly remiss, for besides being the
skipper of the _Omala_, he was also a European personality, a rosy
apple-cheeked man of about fifty-five who with his white hair and clear,
vivid blue eyes might have been a Yorkshire farmer. He was, as a matter
of fact, a farmer; but his farm was in Macedonia where for twenty-four
years he had lived through all the Balkan troubles and had scarcely lost
a head of stock, though one of the battles between the Serbians and the
Bulgarians was fought over his land, indeed, as far as I could gather,
in and out of his very front door. Nothing more English in outward
appearance was imaginable. Yet he spoke his own language with a foreign
accent and less fluently than many others, among which were French,
German, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Albanian. He
had a beautiful voice and was very musical, so that to hear him singing
the folk songs of the various countries he knew so intimately was an
exquisite delight. When war broke out he had been staying with Aubrey
Herbert in Somerset, and now here he was, Lieutenant, R. N. V. R.,
manager rather than skipper of the _Omala_, with a band of devoted
Anatolian Greeks who longed to be led by him against the Turks. I never
heard him speak against any Balkan nation except the Serbian; but it
seems a law of nature that no man can love both the Serbs and the
Bulgars, and Hadkinson loved the Bulgars. I said to him once after he
had been spinning me a long yarn of fantastic adventure that he was like
a character in one of Bernard Shaw’s early plays, and he told me that,
as a matter of fact, he had been a friend of Shaw’s twenty-seven years
ago. He called the desperadoes under his command by the name of Robin
Hood’s men--Little John, Will Scarlett, Alan o’Dale, Friar Tuck, and the
rest of them. He worshipped beauty whether it took the form of music,
poetry, scenery, or good food.
The channel between those two small islands flowed across a level bottom
of silver sand. To swim ashore through that limpid current and lie on
the gray sun-warmed pebbles while Hadkinson sang softly his old songs to
the accompaniment of a flute played by one of his men, in the distance
somewhere a tinkle of goat bells, close at hand the crackle of the
breakfast fire, that was an experience which touched rapture. And then
there was the breakfast itself with lots of oil and garlic and thyme and
rosemary, so much that the bony little fishes in the middle of the
savoury mess hardly got in one’s way. Darwin, whose dysentery had begun
again, was still longing for the esplanade clock, and I noticed that he
was not making much headway with his fish.
“Well, sir,” he said apologetically, “I should like a slice of good old
roast beef. This food tastes a bit too strong for my fancy.”
Hadkinson, who was concerned about Darwin’s melancholy, whispered to me
that he was afraid he was lousy, and that it was consciousness of that
which made him mope.
“But don’t you worry if he is,” he said consolingly when I gasped. “I’ll
take him round to the Turkish bath and get his clothes put right while
he’s inside.”
I think Hadkinson was wrong about Darwin’s condition, but anyway we were
both of us to encounter more ferocious creatures in the bugs of the
Mytilene hotel where we stayed.
“I wish you could cure him of his dysentery,” I said.
Hadkinson thought this would be easy enough. He was an amateur of
doctoring and had for years been curing the Macedonian peasants of
maladies more serious than dysentery.
It was nine o’clock when we left the little island and went on board the
_Omala_. Just as I stepped into the skiff Hadkinson presented me with an
enormous sponge which one of his men had found.
“Here’s a souvenir of your first trip with us,” he said.
And for many years I tried loyally to use that sponge, though it was
nearly as unyielding as a football and seldom failed to scratch me
severely in my bath.
It was a great moment when I landed in uniform on the quay of the
southerly part of Mytilene. We had hitherto preserved the convention of
respecting the neutrality of the island itself. The officers of the
ships in Port Iero were only allowed ashore in mufti; but I stepped
boldly on to the crowded quay with Darwin in solemn attendance, and by
my pistol I proclaimed myself a combatant. The Greek officers that hated
Venizelos glared when I gave them the courtesy of a salute; those that
loved him responded warmly.
I was completely fagged out when I reached the Hotel Grande Bretagne,
where I was to stay, and flinging myself down on the bed I fell asleep
almost at once to the ceaseless ratcheting of the cicalas in a
pomegranate tree aflame with blossom in the small high-walled garden
just below the window of my room.
CHAPTER XV
DAYS AND NIGHTS IN LESBOS
The Hotel Grande Bretagne or Xenodocheion Megalé Bretania stood back
from a quiet by-street that wound up in a gradual slope from one of the
crowded business thoroughfares of Mytilene. The front door was reached
by a steep flight of dazzling stone steps with a hedge of aromatic
shrubs on either side of them for parapet. A terrace with pots of
sun-baked flowers and a few blistered and rickety chairs intervened
between the steps and the actual door, over which hung the rusty
apparatus for an awning; but the linen to supply the shade had perished,
so that the guests of the hotel could not enjoy any _al fresco_
conversation until the cool of the evening. The façade of two stories
was painted over in bold letters with the name of the hostelry in French
and Greek, and really it was not at all a bad place. My room was the
corner one of an unusually wide corridor, which with windows at both
ends of it divided the bedrooms on the first floor. Heathcote-Smith,
whose wife and children had not long gone back to England, was installed
in the corner room at the other end. We did not take our meals in the
small, floridly furnished dining room on the ground floor, so I cannot
testify to the quality of the cuisine except as regards the coffee which
was excellent provided you liked Turkish coffee, which I did. The other
guests were mostly well-to-do refugees from the mainland with a
sprinkling of commercial travellers whose salesmanship had been sadly
damped by the ever encroaching tide of war. These guests always sounded
as if they were enjoying their food, which they ate in an atmosphere of
lavish hair oil and rice powder to the accompaniment of shrill
chattering. I fancy that the only positive discomforts were the squalor
of the sanitary arrangements and the presence, in my bedroom at any
rate, of innumerable juvenile bugs, partially tralucent creatures as
bright as rubies which scurried about over the sheets like animated
cayenne pepper. My arms and legs and shoulders and neck looked every
morning as if they had been rubbed with a nutmeg grater. Full-grown bugs
may be more repulsive than these minute creatures, but they provide
their victim with the satisfaction of laying them out with a hammer,
sometimes half a dozen at a blow, when he opens on them in close
formation after a carefully planned surprise with an electric torch.
These infant buglets would never have provoked the use of a hammer on
them, even had the walls of the bedroom been stout enough to invite such
violence. A single blow might have obliterated a hundred, but such
vicious and esurient atoms could have incarnadined the multitudinous
seas, and against their myriads what was a hammer? They percolated the
mosquito net as easily as claret; they seemed to rise from the mattress
like a crimson dew. At the booths of French fairs one used to be able to
buy a packet of “Russian fleas” for two sous. These “fleas” were
actually the dried interior of the wild-rose fruits called hips, and
they were guaranteed to give the person in whose bed they were scattered
a night of misery. Compared with those minikin bugs of Mytilene that
penny practical joke was a soothing lanolin. However, the little beasts
were not fond of daylight, and so I slept fast that sixteenth of July
until late afternoon.
The problem I had to face when I woke up was what to tell
Heathcote-Smith about my mission to Mytilene. Ostensibly I was here in
my capacity as liaison officer between G. H. Q. and the islands to have
a look at the Intelligence work which was being carried on with such
conspicuous ability and success. Should I tell Heathcote-Smith that I
was here to spread a rumour? By giving him my full confidence I knew I
should gain the advantage of his help and advice. But after considering
the position I decided I should be able to avail myself better of his
experience if he were not committed to sharing the secret. However good
an actor he might be, he would play the part I wanted him to play better
if he did not know he was acting. I went along the corridor to his room
and found him seated at a table, clothed in nothing but a sheet.
“I’ve got a touch of this beastly dysentery again,” he explained.
I did not at the time perceive the connection between dysentery and
dressing one’s self in a sheet, and looking back at that costume of his
after many years I do not feel convinced that even now I have quite
grasped the causality.
“Can I speak to you for a moment, Heathcote, on rather a private
matter?”
He dismissed Mr. Zecchini, his secretary, and put himself at my
disposal.
“This is such an important matter, Heathcote,” I murmured, “that even
the people waiting outside to see you----”
Heathcote-Smith jumped up and, rushing out into the corridor, he hustled
out of it like intruding poultry half a dozen huge patient Anatolians
who had been waiting all the afternoon to be given whatever desperate
job he had in view for them. I had been half hoping that one of them
would have lingered to put an inquisitive ear to the keyhole, but the
apparition of that strenuous ghost inspired too much awe. A minute after
his irruption the corridor was empty of every living thing except the
flies.
“Look here, Heathcote,” I said with a simulation of embarrassment, “I’m
feeling rather badly about this visit of mine to Mytilene. The fact
is--” I hesitated before I went on with a gravity that touched
portentousness--“look here, I know I can trust you never to give me away
if I tell you why I’ve really come here.”
“Of course.”
“No, but it would finish me off completely if anybody ever knew that I’d
told you what I’m going to tell you.”
Heathcote-Smith gathered his sheet round him as Julius Cæsar his toga
after Brutus had stabbed him.
“I don’t think I require a lesson from you on holding my tongue.”
I bowed in acceptation of the rebuke.
“Well, the fact is, Heathcote, they’ve decided to land here and attack
Smyrna, and they want me to get information about possible camping sites
for troops.”
I have often thought how fortunate it was for me that Heathcote-Smith
was wearing nothing except a sheet when I made this revelation. If he
had been fully dressed he might have resorted to physical violence, so
indignant was he for a while. But the need of keeping that sheet round
him handicapped his striking power, and he contented himself with
throwing back his head, flashing his lustrous deep eyes, and laughing
bitterly:
“These soldiers are mad! They’re even stupider than I thought they were.
Though I expected something better of Deedes. I can’t understand it. Why
on earth have they this rooted objection to consulting the men on the
spot? It’s really incredible. Here are you, knowing nothing about this
part of the world, unable even to speak the language, sent out to find
camping sites for ... for how many troops?” he broke off his tirade to
ask abruptly.
“For about forty thousand, Heathcote,” I said humbly.
“It’s like Alice in Wonderland!”
“Well, but, Heathcote, the damage is done now. It’s no use getting
annoyed with me. The only thing is to make the best of it and try to
arrange for these camping sites as secretly as possible.”
“Secretly!” Heathcote-Smith scoffed. “You can’t find camping sites for
forty thousand troops in secret, my dear man.”
“But you would have been able to....”
“I should have done my best.”
“Well, then, I’m sure you’ll help me to do my best.”
Heathcote-Smith walked up and down the room for a while, his sheet
sweeping the boards behind him as majestically as the cloak of the ghost
when he bids Hamlet follow him to a more secluded part of the Elsinore
battlements.
“No wonder we don’t get through the Straits,” he declared in an aside to
the Muse of History. “This is typical of our methods. Here we are at a
crisis--though nobody at G. H. Q. realizes what an appalling crisis it
is--here we are with another major operation before us, and a man
without any qualifications of any kind is sent to prepare for it. You’re
not an engineer. You know nothing about the people or the country. You
can’t speak the language. It’s incredible! Still I suppose I must do my
best to get them out of this mess. But I shall write a very strong
letter to Deedes and put before him the folly of this....”
“But, Heathcote,” I interrupted, “you can’t do that without getting me
into trouble. Deedes made a special point that you were not to be told.”
Heathcote-Smith began to flap his sheet like an angry white wyandotte.
“Only because he felt that you had so much responsibility already on
your shoulders,” I added hastily, for strong emotion is bad for
dysentery. “He thought that a stunt like this might interfere with your
other work. I really believe his only motive for not telling you was
that he did not want to worry you.”
Heathcote-Smith was always inclined to resent the suggestion that he was
incapable of doing twenty-six hours’ work in the twenty-four; but
somehow I managed to allay his indignation by pointing out that he had
nothing to be angry about now, because I had disobeyed orders by taking
him fully into my confidence.
“When are these troops coming?” he demanded.
“Well, I cannot say exactly when. I suppose it will depend to some
extent on the kind of report I am able to make.”
“But this sort of surveying requires an expert, and what do you know
about water?” he asked presently.
“Very little,” I admitted.
“It’s fantastic!” he declared for the twentieth time.
“Yes, it does seem rather ridiculous. But there was nobody else who
could be spared, and then the idea was that I would convey the
impression of being a practical engineer. The last thing I resemble is a
military dowser. I think that Deedes attached a good deal of importance
to my poetic appearance. I think he remembered about Sappho and fancied
I might be taken for an archæologist or something if I started digging
or whatever you do to find water.”
“Yes, yes,” said Heathcote-Smith peevishly. “But that sort of thing can
be overdone. After all, the solid fact remains that forty thousand
troops are going to be landed here and that suitable camping sites must
be found for them.”
“It is rather a large order, isn’t it?”
“If I had been consulted,” Heathcote-Smith went on, “I should have
suggested taking Aristarchi Bey into our confidence.”
“Aristarchi Bey?”
“Aristarchi is a delightful fellow who lives here with his brother, his
brother’s wife, and Mrs. Koumpas, his widowed sister. He is an engineer
and practised for years in Glasgow. He is a devoted friend of ours,
talks English perfectly, and his father was Prince of Samos under the
Turks.”
I demurred at first to the notion of taking anybody, however dependable,
into our confidence over such a grave matter as this; but in the end I
admitted that there seemed nothing else to be done if the sites were to
be chosen suitably.
“And I’ll pretend that I’m looking for a sanatorium for our invalided
troops,” I suggested.
Heathcote-Smith looked at me as scornfully as the long gamekeeper may
have looked at Mr. Winkle when he suggested putting a stuffed partridge
on a post and shooting at it for practice.
“If you think a story like that will take in these people ... but of
course you don’t know these people, that’s the trouble.”
“Well, if Aristarchi Bey and I go all over the place searching for
water, we must give some sort of explanation.”
“The whole business is so utterly preposterous that I don’t think it
matters what you say,” Heathcote-Smith assured me contemptuously.
“However, I’ll send a message to Aristarchi Bey, and we might lunch
there to-morrow. To-night we shall have to go over again for our
messenger. Would you like to come with us in the _Omala_?”
We dined that evening in a little restaurant by the quayside. Hadkinson
had ordered cockles which were hauled up by the waiter in a bucket from
the harbour where they had been keeping fresh. And what marvellous
cockles they were! I have read a Latin poem somewhere--is it quoted by
Aulus Gellius?--which gives a list of Mediterranean delicacies and the
places where they can be tasted in perfection. I remember that the
inspired epicure mentions the little green-spined garfish of Sorrento
and the cockles of Mytilene as among the supreme delights of the palate.
In my opinion the _verde spina_ whether it be caught off Sorrento or
elsewhere is not a particularly succulent affair, but the cockles of
Mytilene ... there the poet uttered his profoundest wisdom. To take
one’s seat in that narrow quayside restaurant, to clap the hands and
call for cockles from the eager waiter who bustles up to serve such wise
customers; then to watch him dodge his way across the road through the
continuous procession of mules dragging big-wheeled carts laden with
jars of oil, kneel down by the water’s edge, and haul up a bucket full
of cockles; and finally to hear the bivalves come clattering down on the
big empty dish that awaits them, these are among the sharpest joys of
anticipation the human appetite may know. Nor is it merely the
anticipation which is so delicious. The tongue that savours the cockles
of Mytilene and hesitates to acclaim them as one of the most significant
contributions made by shellfish to human happiness deserves to be
forever tied. The cockle in perfection definitely competes with the
cherrystone clam, and there are occasions when even the Whitstable
native might be passed over in its favour. Such an occasion was that
purple evening of July when the lights of Mytilene were reflected in
quivering runnels of gold across the calm waters of the little port,
when Hadkinson was telling his magical old tales of Macedonian adventure
or singing _mezzo voce_ his magical old songs of mountainy love,
interrupting both to lean across the table and point out a specially
dapper cockle my eye had missed, and when Heathcote-Smith, his eyes
lustrous as the opulent night, was silkily murmuring remote and
fantastically tricked-out sarcasms like some vague being to be met with
in the pages of Lewis Carroll. Yet when after dinner we strolled
comfortably along toward the public gardens, the great dark expanse of
northern sky behind us was threaded at intervals by zigzags of dull
silver, and this was not summer lightning but the flashes of shell fire
over the peninsula a hundred and twenty miles away.
The band was playing in the small summer pavilion when we reached the
gardens. The ladies of Mytilene and the officers of the Greek garrison
were circling round and round its music on the gravel promenade that
divided the bandstand from several rows of seats for the audience. The
illuminated area was not large, and at a distance of a few yards it was
enclosed by thick groves of laurel, pine, and ilex which crowded
impenetrable to the eye beyond. Hadkinson and Heathcote-Smith went off
to make the final arrangements about the _Omala_, and I was left alone
to circle round the music until the expedition was ready to start. In
spite of long absence from the sight of women, the ladies of Mytilene
made no impression on me of reality. They were like a rice-powdered
chorus in the background of a scene from _Carmen_; and the officers in
their white uniforms who saluted one another so solemnly every time they
met in that slow circumambulation were not more real. If the sight of my
khaki-clad self promenading round that music caused them any surprise it
was imperceptible: like goldfish in a bowl they seemed entirely
preoccupied with their own leisurely revolutions.
After wandering round for about half an hour until I was nearly bemused
by the tinkling old operatic tunes, the swish of paper fans, the odour
of musk and chypre, the jingling of swords, the clicking of fat beads,
and the strangely vacuous movement, I saw a shadow beckoning from a dark
leafy alley, and turning away to follow the messenger I faded from the
scene. Five minutes later I was tasting the sharp salty air of the
harbour as we rowed out to the _Omala_. The rich yellow crescent of the
moon had set. We were off again to Asia.
The night was calm. I slept all the way over in spite of Hadkinson’s
melons which still took up most of the cabin space. I suppose that
Hadkinson himself did sleep sometimes, though it was hard to find out
when he did. Anyway, he was always as fresh and rosy as an apple in the
dews of a fine September morning. There was no answering match from the
messenger when the engines of the _Omala_ were stopped at the same
anchorage as the previous night. We hung about in the silence, wondering
what could have happened. Even Hadkinson was nervy, for his brother was
in Smyrna, and though Rahmi Bey, the Vali, disliked the Germans and was
well disposed toward the English (for which he has since paid with
lifelong banishment at the hands of Mustapha Kemal) he might not be able
to save him from the firing squad should our organization be broken up
through some accident. We told ourselves that the agent in
Constantinople had been late in getting his message through to the agent
in Broussa, that the agent in Broussa had found communication with
Smyrna temporarily interrupted by troop movements, and finally that the
messenger from Smyrna had chosen another route for some reason. We
waited until the gray dawn glimmered above the mountain tops and began
to lave the star-drenched sky. Then with reluctance we decided it was
time to get away from this hostile coast. However, we had already stayed
too long. The Ægean tide does not offer a conspicuous motion, but while
we had been waiting for our belated messenger it had dropped a foot or
so and left the _Omala_ wedged upon a bank of sand. This was not a
comfortable position with the sky lightening so rapidly and ourselves
within fifty yards of the shore. Half a dozen of the crew jumped
overboard and tried to push the boat off, but for all their efforts and
groans she would not budge. By this time the vain churning of her
engines in the inadequate water and the efforts to float her had roused
the dogs in a small village behind the olive grove that fringed the
curve of the beach.
“W’ell never get her off till the tide makes,” said Hadkinson. “She is
lying like a dead ting on the sand, Hetcot.”
So sacks of flour were brought up from below and put round the rail
forward to serve as a parapet. Then much to the delight of the crew
rifles were served out, though with no ammunition as yet, for the
pleasure of lying on their bellies behind a parapet of flour sacks to
snipe their Turkish enemies would have been too keen for our warriors to
have avoided the temptation of blazing off at the first thing that
moved. Morning was not far away beyond the mountain tops. From those
high ramparts drooped a cluster of warm-hued clouds like apricots
hanging down over a garden wall, and here and there trails of
rosy-tinted mist like bands of wandering nymphs glided away up the
craggy glens. As the first beams of the sun came winking over the
mountain tops, somebody pointed to what looked very like the winking of
bayonets among the trees. A Turkish patrol? I tried to remember the tune
of that favourite musical composition; but I could only remember
another one called the “Turkish Retreat,” which I learned to play on the
piano in early youth. The air was so clear and lucid that we could fancy
we actually heard the tramp of feet marching down through the olives.
“Turkish soldier he is not good,” said one of the irregulars to me,
spitting contemptuously.
I wondered whether he alluded to the morale or the morality of his
hereditary foe. And then, just as Heathcote-Smith was tiptoeing into the
bows with half a dozen bandoliers of cartridges for the men by the flour
bags, the _Omala_ floated. Two minutes later we were chugging along
toward the luminous green and gray shades of islands along the horizon,
among which we should find good anchorage and bath and breakfast and
sun-dyed beaches. In the diamonded dancing wake of our course the baying
of the village dogs turned gradually to a sound remote and incredible as
fairy horns. Presently I became aware of a melodious sound near at hand
and looking up saw that our Anatolian irregulars, cheated of their
fight, had laid down their rifles and, squatting round in a semicircle,
were singing low to the accompaniment of a flute, a dream in their eyes
of Aivalik where their wives were, and their children, and the olives of
home.
When we got back to Mytilene, Heathcote-Smith and I interviewed
Aristarchi Bey, in whom I found another friend. He was a tall
loose-limbed man of tremendous energy with a small moustache, a hooked
nose in a long face, and crisp dark hair streaked with gray. His villa
was on the outskirts of the town, and he used to ride backward and
forward to business on a bicycle along a dusty sun-shattered stretch of
road which ran for a mile or so between fields of maize and vegetables
with no more shade than what was grudgingly cast by the few isolated
pomegranate trees that stood up as lank as hop poles along the wire
fence. I can see him now, his coat tails flapping behind him in the hot
wind, his wheels looping the dust as he rode up the last quivering slope
in a desperate corkscrew of almost exhausted energy to vault from his
bicycle and come swinging in through the garden gate, the bell above
which would go on tinkling for a couple of minutes after he was indoors,
such a vigorous slam would he have given it behind him. I have called
Aristarchi’s house a villa, but he himself would have scorned such an
appellation. To him it was a house such as you might see on the
outskirts of an English town and, whatever the sublimity of the view
from those windows looking down across a gradual green declivity over
the lustrous Ægean to the mighty façade of Asia towering along the
horizon, as such a more wonderful phenomenon than the radiant beauty of
its setting.
“We have tried to get a really British house here,” he told me proudly
in fluent English that had but a touch of foreign inflection.
And when I looked at its 1890 Gothic, its shrubberies and, alas, its
sadly wilted herbaceous borders of old-fashioned English flowers, I was
able to assure him quite sincerely that he had succeeded.
“Homeliness and comfort,” he barked, for, as I recall it, his voice
reminded me of the welcome that a large trusty curly haired retriever
accords the household guest. “That’s what we try to get. Now, please,
Captain Mackenzie, my sister, Mrs. Koumpas, my brother John, and my
sister-in-law wish you to consider this your own house while you are
remaining in Mytilene. For us to be able to entertain a British officer
at this moment is such a tremendous privilege that we hardly know how to
make enough of it.”
Inside this ivy-covered vicarage was full of comfortable furniture; and
with maids in caps and aprons bringing in a prodigal English tea, with
sleek cats and plump dogs wandering about, with that cage of canaries in
the big bay window, with those bowls of pot-pourri, and deep
chintz-covered chairs, I began to ask myself if I was really in the Isle
of Lesbos still, or if I had not been transported by sorcery to the
Isle of Wight.
Mrs. Koumpas was a bright-eyed woman who must have been a great beauty
and had that air of being used to men’s falling in love with her which
is so attractive in a woman whose wisdom and wit have ripened like
lovely fruits, though the blossom of her spring may long have fallen.
She was the Mary of the household, sitting back and entertaining the
guest with tales of a cosmopolitan life and a romantic ancestry, the
illustrations of which latter might be seen in various portraits on the
walls. I remember one in particular--an exquisite miniature of a slim
young man in a tight-waisted, many-buttoned, brilliant uniform, wearing
a high stock and a tall scarlet fez. This was a great-grandfather, I
think, who had held a position at the Sultan’s court and had been made
Prince of Samos, ruling there in practical independence. I remember that
this bright miniature hung beside the mantelpiece and that while I was
gazing at it Aristarchi, indifferent to his ancestor’s Byronic grace,
leaned forward to point out with pride the open English fireplace. I
believe if the cicalas had not been ratcheting outside in defiance of
the English air within he would actually have lighted the fire in order
to gratify a quite imaginary homesickness on my part. And at the same
time Mrs. Koumpas--Betsy she was called--thought I was admiring the
ivory handle and golden filigree of an Egyptian horsehair fly whisk
which hung below the miniature. At once she unhooked it and insisted on
my accepting it as a present. I was already wearing a commonplace fly
whisk attached to my Sam Browne.
“Now you must still have one more,” she told me with her attractive
laugh. “And then you will be a pasha with three tails.”
The Martha of this delightful household was Mrs. John Aristarchi, a
grave woman with a pale oval face, who poured out tea and eyed the
movements of the maids. She and her sister-in-law ruled John sternly.
“John will do this.” “John will do that.” “John can bicycle into
Mytilene after tea and fetch it.” John was a little deaf, but whether it
was on account of that or because he did not speak English so fluently
and therefore preferred to speak French that he was sometimes alluded to
as “Poor John” I do not know. However, John himself, though he might be
ordered about by his wife and sister and occasionally be treated by his
brother with a somewhat boisterous patronage, was indubitably one of the
leading citizens of Mytilene, and when it came to getting an opinion on
any matter of real importance it was always John who was asked; and it
was John, as I remember, who sat at the head of the table when we had
one of those wonderful Sunday lunches and when Aristarchi Bey himself,
full of smiles, sat inhaling the authentic whiff of English air that the
entry of a great sirloin of roast beef brought into that dining room, on
the walls of which I would not swear that there did not hang steel
engravings after Landseer.
Aristarchi’s pleasure when Heathcote-Smith and I confided in him the
secret of our proposed attack on Smyrna was of course intense, and he
gave me about the most exhausting two days I have ever spent in
surveying possible sites for camps.
I still have the original draft of my letter to Deedes on the subject,
which I took care to leave about several times on the table of my room
after having taken equal care to cover it up hurriedly whenever anybody
came in. I print it now, partly because it gives some idea of the
topography of Mytilene, and partly out of vanity.
C/O.
C. E. HEATHCOTE-SMITH, ESQ.,
Mytilene.
July 20th, 1915.
Sir:
I have the honour to report to you the preliminary observations I
have made of ground suitable for a camp for two or even three
Divisions of troops.
Bearing in mind the ultimate objective of such a camp, I find that
the only feasible site lies south of the town of Mytilene (Castro).
It begins on the map you have of the Aivalik section of Asia Minor
at a point just below Varia, and finishes just below Agrilia. The
map, however, is futile and inaccurate.
The frontage is roughly 6 kilometres with an average depth of 300
metres. Of course this depth by cutting down the olive-groves at
the back could be indefinitely extended. The ground available
mostly consists of rough pasturage, here and there cultivated for
maize, marrows, and various vegetables. It is backed by a range of
hills and faced by a road (Boulevard Venizelos) which runs by the
sea’s edge. This road, I understand, could for an expenditure of
£1,000 be made first class. At present it is passable for a
motorcar, but would not stand heavy transport.
I have tried all the available water and have found existing
springs of the finest quality. At NEAPOLIS, the point at which the
suggested camp would begin, there is a spring which gives 18 cubic
metres daily. Here was lately the Aerodrome[51] used by the Royal
Naval Flying Section.
At ARGALA is a spring of 30 cubic metres daily. At MANONI’S
CHIFTLIK rented by Margoni is a spring of 70 cubic metres daily. At
RIZA PASHA’S CAFE one of 40 cubic metres daily, and at SKAMPAVIA
one of 50 cubic metres daily.
This gives without digging fresh wells a total of 208 cubic metres
daily. All these estimates are based on the lowest possible flow.
In reality they will probably yield much more.
Besides these, at KRATIGOS there is water which belongs to the town
of Mytilene and to Riza Pasha, but which has not been brought into
use. Here one can count on a supply of 200 metres daily. Lack of
pipes prevented its canalization and there would be no objection to
our using this water, particularly if we used six-inch pipes and
bequeathed them afterwards to the town. The distance to canalize is
roughly one mile and a quarter. Three-inch pipes would on account
of the head be useless to the town. The land about KRATIGOS belongs
to Riza Pasha, ex-Minister of War in Turkey. There are several good
houses upon it including the Pasha’s summer villa now partially let
to the Austrian Consul, a Greek called Andreas, who is a very
malevolent enemy of ours. Fuel and wood will be found in the
greatest abundance immediately behind, and the climate is very
healthy.
The main objection to the site is the disembarkation and the
embarkation of the troops. The water is very shallow for from
100-200 metres out, and there are no piers or jetties. At 50 metres
out 5 or 6 feet of water can generally be reckoned upon. I
understand that piers could be built from local wood, but of course
they would be useless after September when the weather changes.
The Gulf of Iero now in our occupation is ideal for embarkations,
but the flat lands possible for a camp are all malarial, and the
rest is very steep. The difficulty might be solved by prolonging
the road, which comes to an end just by the proposed southern
boundary of the camp, round Malea Point to where the metalled road
comes down from the town of Mytilene. Or it might be considered
feasible to march the troops over a distance of about 8 miles by
the existing road. There is also an obsolete road of about 3 or 4
miles in length leading directly from the camp over the hills to
where the ships lie. This could be made passable for heavy
transport with three weeks’ work at an expenditure of not more than
£2,000. The question of these roads would be one for an N. T. O.
and an engineer to decide after consultations on the spot.
The matter of the contracts and tenders for supplies is being
satisfactorily dealt with.
Other camping places on the island are all too small, and the
position I have indicated appears to be not only the best, but also
the only one possible.
I will add that all my observations have been corroborated by an
engineer who has himself carried out all water works and road
contracts done in this island for the last twenty-five years.
I have the honour to be, sir
Your obedient servant,
COMPTON MACKENZIE,
Capt. R. M.
Yes, it was an exhausting business to obtain in a couple of days all the
information set down in that letter; but there was one spot whither
Aristarchi and I came in our search for possible camping sites which was
as near my notion of Paradise as any I have seen. We reached it after
walking along a series of narrow paths through immense fields of maize.
The water for which we were looking was gathered in a big open cistern
over which dragon flies were darting and hovering, some blue, some gray
and green, and some orange scarlet of the same hue as the goldfish
swimming in the tank and the blossom of a gnarled pomegranate tree whose
boughs swept over the mossy sides. Half a dozen delightfully courteous
children brought us bunches of sweet basil, and after our business was
done we were invited to rest in the family courtyard beneath the shade
of a trellised vine. We sat on the gay pillows that were carried out for
us from the dim interior of the cottage, and while we watched the wife
at her loom the husband broke open for us a large watermelon; and as I
buried my teeth in its taut rosy flesh or brushed away the cool ebony
seeds that clung to my lips I dreamed that there was no war. Indeed, one
could have dreamed here of more incredible things than peace, as, for
example, that time had stood still in this blessed spot where the
unbroken murmur of gurgling water created a perpetual present, so
changeless was the rhythm of its music upon that warm fig-tree-scented
air about which those brilliant insects darting achieved an equally
changeless pattern of jewelled motion. Nor did the more distant scene
betray this illusion of escape from time, for two miles beyond a green
level of lush-growing maize the Ægean lay like marble and the coast of
Asia floated in ethereal mists above another changeless pattern of
fantastic white sails.
Fortunately I was not called upon to desecrate this spot by inflicting a
camp upon it; and I like to think that as I write these words the water
there is still playing a timeless melody, that the orange-scarlet dragon
flies still dart and hover above their mossy cistern, that the goldfish
still seem to be swimming among the orange-scarlet blossoms of the
pomegranate mirrored therein, that the Ægean still lies like marble
beyond those fields of maize, that the children have never grown up, and
that the pattern on the housewife’s loom is not yet woven and complete.
After the way Aristarchi and I had been seen scouring the countryside
for water it would have been strange if rumour had not kilted her
skirts and careered round Mytilene at high speed. There was no need for
me to inquire cautiously about the prospect of obtaining supplies for
these mythical divisions. Wherever I went I was met by obsequious
gentlemen anxious to be given contracts. I remember one in particular
who wanted to obtain a monopoly for the supply of wood.
“I wish no more than your promise, Capitaine, that you will speak with
favour of my name if tenders are asked for.”
“But even supposing these troops are coming, which I can assure you they
are not,” I said, “it would be useless for me to promise you anything in
the way of a contract. These matters are not arranged by me.”
We were sitting opposite to one another over the table in my bedroom,
and I was aware beneath it of an insinuating crackle of paper. Presently
a hand appeared with a couple of thousand-drachma notes, and played
“Jenkins Up” with them on the table for a few minutes.
“I would not be so ignorant for bribe you, Capitaine,” the petitioner
said at last. “But I would like for give you one present. It is for me
quite the same. You take it, and if you can speak good words for me when
the soldiers will come I am content.”
I shook my head, and a third note, this time for five hundred drachmas
was added to the others.
“I beg you must take this,” the petitioner pressed. “And if I may not
have the contract it will be because you cannot make it for me. But you
will say good words, and I am so glad you can have this little present.”
An hour afterward a baker was in my room on the same mission. He offered
up to five thousand drachmas for nothing but a promise to say that he
was known in Mytilene as a good baker. And there were several others. I
shall never again have such a field for working the confidence trick
with profit and impunity. The more earnestly I insisted to my suitors
that no troops were coming to Mytilene, the more earnestly they begged
me to take their money. They were even ready to sign statements to the
effect that they had forced the money on me in spite of my unwillingness
to accept it. I believe that, had I been inclined, I could have gone
away from the island with as much as a couple of thousand pounds.
Heathcote-Smith was bitterly scornful when I told him about these
overtures.
“You and your sanatorium! Why, the news of our landing is in Smyrna by
now,” he jeered.
“No, I don’t think so, Heathcote. I think that by not accepting any
bribes I have convinced these fellows that there really is nothing in
it.”
“I thought novelists were supposed to be judges of character?”
“Ah, that’s where _your_ simplicity begins, Heathcote. But even if our
proposed landing were being talked about in Mytilene, it would not mean
that information of it had reached the Turks. Your contre-espionage
organization will see to stopping that.”
“It would if I were given an opportunity,” said Heathcote-Smith. “But
I’m not. I have asked repeatedly for the expulsion of the Müller gang;
but no attention is paid to my warnings, and with the funds at my
disposal I can do nothing.”
Müller was the German consul in Mytilene and as such he was doing for
his country, comparatively restricted though the sphere of his activity,
the same work as Heathcote-Smith was doing for his. The long catalogue
of his alleged misdeeds have passed from my recollection; but I know
that he was supposed to finance one of the local papers to print
tendencious news, and that he and his son and an individual called Fraz
lived with two female typists in a house close to the quay and next door
to the police station. Andreas, the malevolent Austrian consul, spent
most of his time with them, and one or two other pro-German Levantines
whose names I have forgotten. They owned a motor boat and we considered
it highly suspicious that they should often be going for ostensible
pleasure trips in it all together. I may seem to be treating their
nefarious activities somewhat lightly after fourteen years; but at the
time I was as deeply impressed as Heathcote-Smith by their sinister
existence with two female typists next door to the police station and by
those ostensible pleasure trips all together in that motor boat of
theirs.
“There goes the Müller gang,” Heathcote-Smith used to mutter.
And I would stand by his side and gaze ferociously out to sea at that
overloaded craft. Indeed, Heathcote-Smith and I used to stand at the
window and chatter at them like a couple of cats at half a dozen
sparrows out of reach. Their presence in Mytilene was a continual sneer
at Britannia’s nautical rule, we felt; and on my return to G. H. Q. I
drew up a memorandum on the possible methods of eliminating enemy agents
from the islands off the coast of Asia Minor. Here it is:
MÜLLER GANG AT MYTILENE
Submit that the gang at Mytilene known as the Müller gang is a serious
menace to our Intelligence.
The gang consists of Heinrich Müller, the German vice consul; his son
Henri, a Belgian subject; Andreas, a Greek, the Austrian consul; Arturo
Esposito, an Italian subject, Commissionaire of the Italian Consulate;
Franz Fraz, a Hungarian photographer; and two German female typists.
They have probably bought two of our consulate officials. They are in
touch with the civil governor through the paper called “L E S B O S,”
which receives within a few hours all the governor’s confidential
information. They are also in touch with the telegraph office and posts.
Submit further that there is probably a wireless installation.
Submit finally that an attempt should be made to break up this gang,
suggestions for doing which are appended:
THE ELIMINATION OF ENEMY AGENTS FROM THE ISLANDS
_A. Müller Gang at Mytilene._
The two Müllers, Fraz, and two typists live in a house close to the
quay, but next to the police station. Andreas spends most of his time
there, sometimes sleeping. Esposito (who will probably leave immediately
for the Italian front) is often there.
They have a motor boat in which from time to time they make pleasure
trips _all together_. Formerly various members of the organization used
to travel often to CHIOS, SAMOS, CAVALLA, SALONICA, etc. This has not
been observed lately.
THERE ARE FOUR WAYS OF DEALING WITH THIS GANG:
1. BY CONTRE-ESPIONAGE.
PROS.
(1) The advantage of gleaning German news.
(2) The avoidance of international complications owing to the
consular status of the objects.
CONS.
(1) The difficulty of guaranteeing a genuine service from our
contre-espionage owing to the prodigality of German finance for
their Secret Service.
(2) The difficulty of communicating the information in time to make
it of any use.
(3) The extra work entailed in organization.
2. BY KIDNAPPING FROM MYTILENE ITSELF.
PROS.
(1) The absolute certainty of securing all the gang.
(2) The sudden paralysis of the central bureau.
CON.
(1) The danger of international complications.
3. BY LURING THE GANG FROM MYTILENE, ARRESTING THEM AT SEA, AND
INTERNING THEM.
PRO.
(1) The avoidance of international complications.
CONS.
(1) The grave difficulty of securing all the gang.
(2) The guarantee even of partial success.
(3) The length of time possibly involved.
4. BY LURING THE GANG FROM MYTILENE AND RUNNING THEM DOWN WITH A
PATROL BOAT.
PRO.
(1) The avoidance of complications by taking refuge in the plea of
accidental death.
CONS.
(1) The difficulty of making the above plea plausible.
(2) The objections that are given above to plan 3.
_B. With regard to Chios and Samos the probability is that kidnapping
from the islands themselves will be the only possible way, as the
various agents are more scattered._
PROPOSAL
Submit that with the help of a ketch specially allotted to this service,
and by the expenditure of the sum of 10,000 francs it would be possible
to kidnap everybody who threatens our interests. Ketch should be placed
at the disposal of G. H. Q. (I) for one month, but submit it could be
used for ordinary patrol work until the critical moment.
Gangs will be brought to K Beach and afterward interned for the rest of
the war.
ADVANTAGES
(1) The paralysis of the hostile organization while the heads are
still comparatively concentrated and within reach.
(2) The value of this to our S. S. work in the event of moving
forward from Gallipoli.
(3) The destruction of the hostile submarine organization.
(4) The lightening of the contraband work.
(5) The greater security of our information.
COMPTON MACKENZIE,
Lt. R. M.
G. H. Q. (I-b)
_6th August, 1915_.
This brief memorandum had in its way a kind of Edgar Wallace success at
G. H. Q. People used to ask me if they could borrow it to read in bed,
such rumours of its bloodthirsty nature had run round the camp. Months
later, when whatever damage the Müller gang and other similar
organizations could do had long been done, measures not unlike these
which so much amused my brother officers were actually adopted by the
navy; and I believe that when in 1917 I incorporated Mytilene in my
system of Ægean port control we actually used the sinister house of the
Müller gang for our harbour office. I may call attention to the variety
of nationalities involved. Out in the Levant one was as likely to
discover a friend owning nominal allegiance to Austria as an enemy who
might be technically a Belgian. The passport problem there was four
times as difficult as anywhere else in the world.
In spite of Heathcote-Smith’s conviction that the Müllers were a menace
to Allied interests I did not feel that the quality of their espionage
was good enough to convince General Liman von Sanders of our serious
intention to land a large force in Asia Minor; another plan to impress
him was forming in my mind. Meanwhile, I told Heathcote-Smith that I
intended to do what I could to close the channels of information by
applying a particularly rigid censorship to the telegrams of _The Times_
correspondent in Mytilene.
“You can hardly do that without violating neutrality,” he objected, the
consul in him suddenly getting the better of the ruthless Intelligence
officer.
“We’ll see,” I muttered darkly.
Few readers of _The Times_ to-day will remember those four or five line
contributions from Our Special Correspondent in Mytilene which
throughout the spring of 1915 supplied an intermittent stream of rumour
about the offensive in the Ægean. And that is a pity, because they had
the charm of a well run children’s corner in their fairylike remoteness
from actuality. Our Special Correspondent was a small man with a sallow
face that seemed the sallower for the vivid pink cotton wool he
habitually wore in his ears, and his voice always gave the impression
that he had just finished eating an exceptionally dry cracknel biscuit.
Hot though it was in Mytilene that July, he was dressed in a Norfolk
suit of brown tweed, and he existed in a state of sartorial doubt about
the way to wear stockings with knickerbockers. In the pre-plus-fours
period the disposal of the tops often worried the scholar dressed as a
sportsman, and Our Special Correspondent favoured wearing them inside
the tight box-cloth prolongation. He owned a not less romantic past than
many others in that exciting part of the world; but of late years he had
cultivated a farm near the ruins of Troy, where he had entertained the
many distinguished scholars and archæologists who had come to
contemplate and explore the few fragments of the epic scenes that were
still discernible. To see him as I saw him first at dinner with his wife
in the dining room of the rival hotel to the Grande Bretagne, one would
never have guessed that his home was hard by what few stones remained of
the towers of Ilion. The wife was fulgid and tremendous. Beside her he
looked like a rather small cigar in a broad and brilliantly gilded paper
band. I fancy she was a Greek. Before the war he must have been the
special correspondent of _The Times_ for Troy, and indeed I seem to
remember a series of well written and interesting articles by him about
the birds and beasts of that enchanted neighbourhood. When war broke out
he had to leave his farm, and instead of writing a column about the
latest excavations he was driven to telegraphing snippets of rumour from
Mytilene. He took the responsibility of these telegrams most seriously,
but they were of course so entirely devoid of importance as not to
perplex even the muddle-headed censors of 1915. And this was to be the
next victim of the military machine.
I asked him round to my hotel, where I broke to him the news that in
future any telegrams he proposed to send to his paper must first be
submitted to me for censorship.
“There are reasons for this action by the military authorities,” I
assured him. “I cannot tell you those reasons, but I must ask you to
accept my word that we should not take such a drastic step unless we
considered it of vital importance to the military situation.”
“Mytilene, of course, is a neutral island,” he suggested tentatively.
“You are implying that I have no right to put your press telegrams under
censorship?”
“Well, it does seem a little high-handed.”
“Does not the very high-handedness of my action indicate to you the
grave necessity for it at this juncture?” I asked solemnly.
He bowed his head. I could see that a sharp struggle was being waged
within that little man’s brown Norfolk suit. I could see that not for
the first time patriotism and the press were in conflict. I could see
that for all his pastoral existence of many years on the plains of Troy,
his study of the Homeric flora and fauna, his gentle companionship with
famous scholars, he was at this moment the prey to an almost
overwhelming temptation to bring off a journalistic scoop.
“You mean to say you desire to see every telegram I may send to _The
Times_?”
“And delete anything I may think advisable.”
“Oh, well,” he said at last as he figuratively sat down in Britannia’s
lap and sent the editor of _The Times_ at the other end of the seesaw
ignominiously up into the air: “Oh, well, I’ll show you any telegrams I
wish to send.” And then with a deep romantic sigh he added reverently:
“I suppose we all have to do our bit.”
His voice was always full of crumbs, but never before had he had to
swallow quite such a large or quite such a dry cracknel biscuit as just
before he decided on that sunny Lesbian morning to do his bit in the
Great War by submitting to my blue pencil those snippets of rumour, the
dispatch of which I realized he must be supposing of more importance
than the discovery of lost hexameters from the Iliad.
And now, having as I hoped planted in the mind of _The Times_
correspondent a belief that great events were toward, which belief I
trusted his manner would convey by a consciousness of being almost the
only receptacle of a solemn secret, I decided to take a step that in my
opinion would be more likely than any to sow uneasiness in the German
mind about our intentions with regard to Asia Minor.
So on Monday morning, the nineteenth of July, I asked Heathcote-Smith if
he would take me up to the castle that afternoon in order that I might
pay a formal call on the nomarch, or civil governor.
“You see, Heathcote, I’m beginning to feel just a little uncomfortable,
walking about here in uniform like this. I should like to leave cards on
the military commandant and the officers of the garrison; but I can’t
very well do that unless I leave a card on the civil governor first.”
“I don’t see why you want to do that. He hates us. He’s a fierce
Gounarist and pro-German. I have been agitating in Athens to have him
recalled. It’s ridiculous for Venizelos to leave a man like that as
nomarch of an island as much devoted to himself as Mytilene is.”
I tried to look taken aback by the news of the nomarch’s political
sympathies, though of course I knew already all about them and was
counting on him as a Gounarist for the success of my plan. Need I
mention that Gounaris was the leader of the party opposed to Venizelos?
I want to steer clear of the complications of Greek politics in this
volume. We shall have so much of them later on.
“The fact is, Heathcote, I’ve been thinking matters over since
Aristarchi and I went sampling the waters of Mytilene, and I’ve decided
to take the nomarch into our confidence.”
“To do what?” Heathcote-Smith gasped. “You’re even more idiotically
unsuited for this job than I thought you were. Don’t you understand he’s
a Gounarist and that anything you tell him will immediately be
communicated to the German legation in Athens?”
“Oh, I hardly think if I pay him the compliment of treating him as an
honourable man he’ll play a dirty trick like that.”
“Won’t he?”
“Well, I must risk it. I don’t feel comfortable here. The consular side
of you, Heathcote, ought to tell you how uncomfortable I must feel,
wandering about here armed to the teeth and drinking water all over the
place with Aristarchi.”
“I think you’re mad.”
“Look here, Heathcote,” I said, pretending to be a little annoyed by his
obstruction, “I’m sure you won’t object to my reminding you that I was
entrusted with this job of finding out about camping sites. You’ll do me
the kindness to remember that I felt the same qualms about deceiving
you.”
“That’s different.”
“In a way, but the principle is the same. If I was justified in using my
discretion about taking you into my confidence over this business, I am
justified in using my discretion over the nomarch. Anyway, I’m going to
tell him, whatever you may say, so if you won’t come with me this
afternoon I’ll go up to the castle myself.”
“Oh, I’ll come with you,” said Heathcote-Smith quickly. “I may be able
to prevent some of the harm that is likely to come from this fantastic
idea of yours. But I wish I could persuade you that this kind of
public-teacher behaviour is lost on these people out here.”
So that afternoon we walked up to the great Frankish castle on the rocky
promontory that separated the two harbours of Mytilene. I say two
harbours, but nowadays it is only the southern one which is at all
serviceable, and this was formerly included within the walls of the
city. It was here that the Athenian fleet under Conon sailing from the
north, with the Spartan fleet under Callicratidas in pursuit, took
refuge, for in those days there was a channel through the isthmus on
which the business portion of the city now stands.
The castle itself is an abstract history, and I noticed when we passed
through the old iron door of the main entrance a Byzantine eagle and
beyond that the coat of arms of the noble Genoese family of Gatilusio
who held Lesbos for a century as merchant princes, and beyond that again
a Turkish inscription dating perhaps from the year 1462 when the island
lamentably fell to Mohammed II. The old castle was an impressive place
with its inner and outer walls, its great bastions and angular towers
and battlements. It was large enough to house the whole of the garrison
and the civil administration, besides providing the nomarch with a noble
residence and magic casements opening on the Ægean foam.
“Once more,” said Heathcote-Smith, when we had walked round a sweep of
gravel drive, with a round bed of pastel-pale zinnias in the middle of
it, and had rung the bell of the nomarch’s front door, “once more I beg
you will take my advice and not trust to the honour of a government
official.”
The nomarch was an insignificant little man with a pasty porous face,
and the room in which we sat was crowded with heavy and gloomy bourgeois
furniture quite out of keeping with that magical view from the
stone-mullioned windows.
Mytilene is a city in Lesbos, and by ancient titles of honour it is
the great and fair Mytilene. For it is distinguished and divided
(the sea flowing in) by a various euripus, and is adorned with
bridges built of white polished marble. You would not think you saw
a city but an island. From this Mytilene some two hundred furlongs
there lay a manor of a certain rich lord, the most sweet and
pleasant prospect under all the eyes of heaven. There were
mountains stored with wild beasts for game; there were hills and
banks that were spread with vines; the fields abounded with all
sorts of corn; the valleys with orchards and gardens and purls from
the hills; the pastures with sheep and goats and kine; the sea
billows, swelling and gushing upon a shore which lay extended along
in an open horizon, made a soft magic and enchantment.
Thus the lovely opening paragraph of Longus, though the original Greek
is even more entrancing than the Seventeenth Century English prose of
George Thornley, Gent., who wrote _Daphnis and Chloe_ as a most sweet
and pleasant pastoral romance for young ladies, without a word of
acknowledgment to the Second Century Lesbian author.
The nomarch was inviting us to drink the formal cup of coffee, and
fetching my soul back from that outer radiance whither it was being led
away, I settled down to talk the commonplaces of the moment in official
French. Heathcote-Smith’s eyes grew larger and more dreamily liquid as
in his silkiest voice he kept teasing the political opinions of our host
with those little sarcasms which sounded as innocent as the observations
of a child.
“_Excellence_,” I said at last, “you must have sometimes asked yourself
what I was doing in Mytilene.”
The nomarch bowed greasily as if to disown an impertinence, while the
lips of Heathcote-Smith began to curl under his heavy dark moustache.
“And it has occurred to me,” I went on, “that you may have felt some
resentment at my presence here in uniform without offering any
explanation of it to yourself. I understand that there has been a leader
on the subject in one of the anti-Entente papers in Athens.”
This was true. My landing with Darwin in Mytilene had been compared to
the German invasion of Belgium in 1914.
The nomarch gave a sickly smile.
“We are growing accustomed to the rather scant courtesy with which we
are treated by our friends.”
“The Germans would be more polite,” Heathcote-Smith murmured
languorously, and the nomarch darted at him a vicious glance.
“I quite appreciate what his Excellency feels,” I interposed soothingly.
“I quite appreciate that our casual way of taking everything for granted
must occasionally jar on the susceptibilities of our friends, and it is
just because I know what a friend his Excellency could be that I am so
anxious to remove the slightest cause for misunderstanding.”
Then I turned to the nomarch and said with as much solemnity as I could
manage:
“I am going to prove my sincerity by giving you my confidence on a very
serious matter. I feel it is unfair you should be left in the dark about
a matter of great importance to your nomarchy. I only ask that you will
treat my communication as confidential. _Excellence_, I am here looking
for camping sites. Within a short while we are preparing to land forty
thousand troops on Mytilene for a purpose which I am not at liberty to
divulge, but which I have no doubt a man of your intelligence will find
it perfectly easy to guess.”
We often hear of people turning pea green. Well, the nomarch did not
turn exactly pea green, but his porous face glistened with emotional
perspiration and the colour of it was that yellowy greenish gray you see
where the yolk of a hard-boiled egg mingles with the white.
“Forty thousand troops?” he gasped. “_Mais c’est inouï!_”
“Yes, I was afraid the information might come as rather a shock,” I said
sympathetically.
“Forty thousand troops? Why, I never heard anything so outrageous in my
life. _C’est épouvantable!_ I must consult with Monsieur Venizelos at
once.”
“But, _Excellence_,” I protested with every appearance of dismay, “you
cannot do that. Monsieur Venizelos knows nothing about this plan. The
whole thing is a secret. We cannot afford to risk a repetition of what
happened when we used the harbour of Mudros. This will be one of the
major operations of the war. _Excellence_, I entreat you to respect the
confidence I have given you.”
“I shall go to Athens to-morrow,” the nomarch cried excitably. “There is
a steamer leaving for the Piræus in the morning.”
“But you’ll get me into terrible trouble,” I exclaimed, trying to turn
as pale as the nomarch himself. “My military career will be ruined.”
“I regret, _monsieur le capitaine_, that I must put my country before
your career. I shall go to Athens to-morrow and ask Monsieur Venizelos
if this abominable violation of our sovereign rights is to be made by
his authority.”
Gounarist venom oozed with his perspiration from the little man’s porous
face.
“But I tell you Monsieur Venizelos knows nothing about this project. I
have no doubt the British minister in Athens will advise him of our
intended action when all further secrecy is impossible, but meanwhile
...” I broke off with a sob in my voice. “_Excellence_, I really beg you
not to go to Athens.”
The nomarch drew himself up.
“I regret, monsieur, that what you ask is outside my favour to grant. I
must remember my duty to my country.”
“And your political party,” added Heathcote-Smith silkily.
“There are some of us who think that the two are not distinguishable,”
the nomarch spat forth.
We drank our coffee in an atmosphere of embarrassment, and soon
afterward our host ushered us out into his dark entrance hall. At the
front door I made a final appeal to his unofficial and better nature not
to reveal the secret I had so rashly entrusted to him. He was full of
apologies, but firm. Nothing should prevent his going to Athens
to-morrow morning.
“Now you’ve done it,” said Heathcote-Smith when the door closed behind
us and we stood on that sweep of gravel drive, contemplating the lanky
zinnias in the big round bed deprived of sunlight by a great clump of
evergreen trees beyond.
“Do you really think he means to do what he says?” I asked nervously.
“Of course he will. You don’t suppose a Gounarist official is going to
neglect such a chance of a political score? Well, I warned you.”
“I know you did, Heathcote. You were right and I was wrong. My God, it’s
pretty awful.”
“There’s only one chance,” said Heathcote-Smith. “We’ll signal him to
the navy as a suspect and get him taken off the boat and detained at
Mudros.”
I shook my head.
“That would only delay matters for a few hours and involve us in a
worse row ultimately. Damn it, Heathcote, I wish I’d taken your advice.
I never dreamed the fellow would not appreciate my good manners. Well,
anyway, luckily Venizelos is still in power, and he’ll stand by us.”
“I dare say he will, but meanwhile the news of our intention to land in
Asia Minor will be all over Athens the day after to-morrow.”
“Do you really think so? I say, it is rather awful, isn’t it?”
“Well, I warned you.”
We walked gloomily down through the castle precincts.
“I hope that the amount of saluting you are now getting from the
garrison is some compensation for your _gaffe_,” said Heathcote-Smith
sarcastically.
A few days later two guides from the Cheshme district arrived from the
peninsula, and with them a letter from Deedes to ask what on earth I was
doing in Mytilene. He had had rather a job to soothe Sir Ian, he wrote.
But everything was now all right. In fact, Sir Ian was so pleased with
this business that a brigade was going to be diverted to Port Iero to
support the rumour of an Asiatic landing, and Sir Ian himself was
probably coming over to Mytilene to add a final touch of colourful
probability to the tale.
I never found out what actually did happen after the nomarch arrived in
Athens; but I gathered from Deedes that he had called on Monsieur
Venizelos with his horrifying story, whereupon Monsieur Venizelos had
put on his hat and walked round to interview Sir Francis Elliot at the
British legation. Later on in the autumn I saw Sir Francis the prey of
strong diplomatic emotion when our consul general in Salonica
telegraphed to Athens that General Hamilton had landed and occupied the
harbour, though of any such military intention to do which he was in
complete ignorance. At the time it was naturally supposed in the
legation that General Hamilton was Sir Ian himself, not the R. E.
general it turned out to be. I imagine that when Monsieur Venizelos
asked him what he knew about the proposed disembarkation of forty
thousand troops at Mytilene he suffered a similar shock. The story
gathered volume. Legend said that Sir Francis Elliot immediately
telegraphed to the Foreign Office to know what was happening, that Sir
Edward Grey invited Lord Kitchener to explain the military proposal,
that Lord Kitchener dispatched one of those telegrams signed “Troopers”
to invite Sir Ian Hamilton to explain, that Sir Ian Hamilton in a fume
sent for Deedes to invite _him_ to explain, and that Deedes was able to
demonstrate to his commander-in-chief the true inwardness and subtlety
of the matter.
On July 22d, Von Falkenhayn telegraphed from General Headquarters to the
German military attaché in Constantinople:
From reports received here it seems probable that at the beginning
of August a strong attack will be made on the Dardanelles, perhaps
in connection with a landing in the Gulf of Saros or on the coast
of Asia Minor. It will be well to economize ammunition.
Presumably the possibility of this Asia Minor landing was telegraphed to
Berlin from Athens the day after the nomarch arrived from Mytilene.
General Liman von Sanders, too, in _Five Years in Turkey_, mentions the
rumours about this time from various sources of landings at Smyrna or
Aivalik; it is clear from his book what a state of perplexity he was in
about the impending attack. Napoleon said we always saw our own mistakes
but not the mistakes of the enemy. This was the critical moment when
that so efficient German High Command decided to recall General Liman
von Sanders and replace him by Field Marshal von der Goltz with the
military attaché, Colonel von Lossow, as his chief of staff. However,
the gods hostile to our victory intervened, and Liman von Sanders
remained at his post.
Heathcote-Smith was very good about what he supposed to be my _gaffe_;
but I could feel he now regarded me as a hopelessly unpractical and
tiresomely obstinate creature. Moreover, he had a personal reason for
being angry with me because he thought his own scheme for arming a
division of refugee irregulars and turning them loose on the Turks in
Asia Minor had been imperilled by my headstrong behaviour. My own belief
is that, if Heathcote-Smith could have been given a free hand to put his
plan into execution, he might have done a great deal more damage to the
Turks than ever Lawrence did with his Arabs. However, this would be a
barren controversy on which to enter. But these refugees were a terrible
problem and a perpetual headache. There were eighty thousand of them in
Mytilene, and the civic resources were incapable of dealing with such a
multitude. Ten thousand had come over from Aivalik alone, and when one
thought of the fate with which those who remained were threatened by the
bloody Turk, even the misery of their present lot seemed preferable.
I have perhaps written enough in a vain endeavour to convey the beauty
of Mytilene, of the encircling orchards and wooded hills, of the public
gardens pine scented, of the quiet byways behind the noisy quayside and
prosperous business quarter, quiet orderly rows of yellow or tawny
houses with green jalousies and profuse morning glory flowing across the
brown-tiled roofs and over the sun-coloured walls like a stream of
sapphires, of the Turkish quarter with its minarets and fountains and
market of globed fruits, of the disused northern harbour where
Callicratidas and his Spartan sailors lay and where the old sea mole
mentioned by Strabo was crumbling into final ruin, of that serene
marriage between earth and sea here so perfectly consummated. But round
every corner, in every small open space, by the roadside, in the fields,
beneath the olive trees, even on the beach by the water’s edge there
were the refugees. They were not allowed inside the public gardens, but
they clung to the rails all round them or sat huddled on the pavement at
their base in such swarms that they somehow lost their humanity and
turned into the semblance of locusts. There was nowhere one could walk
but a small emaciated hand would pluck at one’s sleeve and point mutely
to an empty hungry mouth. Once a woman dropped dead on the pavement in
front of me from starvation, and once a child. No street was hot enough
to dispel that chill of death. There were, of course, many organized
camps, but it was impossible to cope with this ever increasing influx of
pale fugitives. The odour of persecuted humanity hung upon the air in a
miasma; white exhausted women suckled their babies in the dust; withered
crones dragged from their beds and taken across that radiant sea to
escape the brutish Turk sat nursing their ulcers; broken-hearted old men
bowed their heads between their knees; the wailing of hungry children
never ceased. I saw one child sucking the raw head of a hen and another
on all fours scraping its fingers along the cracks of the paving stones
for nourishment. But it was those emaciated little hands which touched
one timidly in passing that harrowed the mind most of all. Small wonder
Heathcote-Smith should desire to arm the fathers of these children and
turn them loose upon the Turks. But it was not to be. The “no” principle
was growing stronger all the time. And every day from Aivalik and other
towns along the coast came the rumour that next week the inhabitants
were to be driven far into the interior, some to die by the wayside,
some to be spitted by Turkish bayonets, some to drag out their lives in
remote Turkish harems, with the mountains until death rising between
them and the sea.
Yet the arrival of one more refugee to swell that haggard multitude
could be touched by romance. Two days after our visit to the nomarch the
_Omala_ picked up a woman with a baby at her breast floating in a
wash-tub far out on the moonlit water. Her husband had been taken by
the Turks, and she had risked her life in this queer craft to escape
from the horror of the inland. I thought of Danaë with the baby Perseus
floating away from Argos in that chest, and of Dictys, the royal
fisherman, greeting them upon the strand of Seriphos.
CHAPTER XVI
THE VASSILAKI FAMILY
The sufferings of the refugees, the departure of the nomarch to Athens,
the censorship imposed upon the _Times_ correspondent, Heathcote-Smith’s
conviction of my incompetence were presently subordinated to the great
Vassilaki mystery, the curtain for the second act of which was rung up
by the receipt of this telegram from Thompson, who had been asked to
send along Yanni Vassilaki at the first opportunity:
Following arriving by Goudi steamer. Vassilaki the elder with three
sisters. Have failed induce Vassilaki but young girl going to you.
Further passenger is Evangelist Aladdin alias Caradlsia agent of
Andreas. Vedova brings letter by same steamer.
At least this was the way Darwin, who was acting as my secretary,
deciphered it; but the sentence with the pleasant news of the young
girl’s arrival turned out when I examined it to read: “Have failed to
induce Vassilaki the younger to join you.”
But who the Evangelist Aladdin was we never found out. If the work he
had to do in Mytilene was fell, he did it without hindrance from us
under some alias more impenetrable than the two provided for him by the
code. Of course, like every other name in connection with my work the
Evangelist Aladdin had to be entered up in the Newgate Calendar. These
black lists of suspects like the address book of a commercial business
were an important item in the assets of an Intelligence Bureau, and
there was much rivalry between the chief centres all round the world
over which of them could publish the largest and most carefully
documented black lists. So when I was providing material for them in
Athens during 1916 and in the Cyclades during 1917, wistful inquiries
would come from Malta or Alexandria or London for further details about
the Evangelist Aladdin of whom so little had been found out since he
entered my G. H. Q. (1) list in July, 1915. An intriguing personality
the Evangelist Aladdin, who thus flits for a moment across the backyard
of history. There was another good character of the same kind--one
Edward Dear, who was reported as a suspect by a French agent in Crete.
The evidence against him was that a lady with several pro-German lovers
had been overheard to address him as “Teddy dear” in a café at Canea. We
grew rather tired in Athens of inquiries about Edward or Edwin or Edmund
Dear, especially when we found out that his real name was Theodore
Ascarides, Teddy being a diminutive and “dear” a term of affection. But
though other centres were willing to add Ascarides to their lists, they
were not going to expunge Edward or Edwin or Edmund Dear. That gentleman
remained throughout the war, and may perhaps still remain in the dusty
archives of some government cellar, as an English adventurer who had
successfully outwitted conscription. But perhaps the most elusive figure
of all was Hagios Taxiarches who was included in a list of suspected
smugglers sent to me from Mudros in 1917, with a demand to know why
nothing had been done about putting a stop to their activities. I
replied that I should do my best with the means at my disposal to deal
with every smuggler mentioned except Hagios Taxiarches, but that for him
I should require the help of aircraft. An indignant letter came back
from Mudros to say that it was quite impossible to spare any seaplanes
for this kind of work. Whereupon I wrote to point out that inasmuch as I
had been told to put a stop to the activities of the Archangel Michael I
thought my request for the help of aircraft a not unreasonable one.
Hagios Taxiarches or the Holy Brigadier is the Greek name for the
Blessed Archangel, and it is also a favourite name for boats, his
patronage being much esteemed even by smugglers. Of course, what had
happened was that a smuggler’s boat had crept into the list as the name
of another smuggler.
However, to return to the Vassilaki family who were at any rate not such
Boojums of the underworld of war. The telegram from Thompson was sent on
July 23d. On the following night the _S. S. Macedonia_ reached Mytilene,
too late, however, for the passengers to go ashore on arrival. I was
disabled by a sharp attack of sciatica, so I was not sorry to hear that
they would remain on board. Early on the Sunday morning, being July
25th, Heathcote-Smith’s secretary, Mr. Zecchini, and Solon, his general
utility man, went down to meet the passengers. I gave orders that Vedova
was to come up at once to the hotel and that the members of the
Vassilaki family were to be taken somewhere until I could interview
them. As soon as Vedova saw me lying on the bed, he wanted to begin a
course of massage, and when I crushed that idea he became voluble over
the large number of spies he had discovered on board the _Macedonia_.
“Never mind about the other spies,” I told him irritably. “The Vassilaki
family will keep us busy enough for the present.”
“But they will soon be gone to Athens. They will go to the Piræus when
the _Macedonia_ will leave Mytilene. They have not come ashore.”
“Go to the Piræus? But they have only permission from Tenedos to land
here.”
Vedova shrugged his shoulders, twisted his moustaches, and assumed an
attitude of conspiratorial scorn for every conspirator except himself.
His protruding globular eyes were glazed with an expression of sinister
derision as he stood with folded arms at the head of my bed and nodded
his mandarin-like head.
“Don’t stand there blithering! Why didn’t you tell me at once they
intended to give us the slip?”
“Captain Mackenzie, Mr. Thompson must always treat me like dirt, and
that is the truth. He has said nothing to me that I must watch Vassilaki
because he has wished to degrade me in all ways which can be possible.
Since I am in Tenedos he has treated me with such haughty disgustingness
that my heart is quite sick inside me. It is perhaps not all Mr.
Thompson’s fault because he is always listening to that Manoli, a man
whose head is full of beans and who is yellow with jealousy for me
because he can never find any spies at all nowhere, but I can find
hundreds everywhere.”
Here he paused for breath, and I told him to get back to the steamer
immediately and insist on the Vassilakis’s landing. No sooner had Vedova
pranced off than Zecchini arrived with the news that Stavro Vassilaki
had gone ashore with a parcel and a packet of letters.
“Was he followed?”
“I told Solon to follow him.”
I sighed. Solon was a dear amiable creature but as stupid as a dodo. He
could not have followed a coffin and been certain of reaching the right
grave.
“Solon!”
Zecchini now began to shrug his shoulders. He, too, suffered from a
conviction that his ability, energy, and devotion were not appreciated.
“I can only carry out the instructions given to me by Mr.
Heathcote-Smith,” he said with a suggestion that if he were allowed to
manage these affairs for himself they would never go wrong.
Presently Vedova returned with Stavro Vassilaki and his three sisters,
Marika, Calliope, and Atalanta. I found that the beauty of these young
women, which had become a siren legend by now among the islands, had
been much exaggerated. Marika and Calliope were thickset and
spinsterish, all stays and bombasine, while their complexions naturally
muddy had not been improved by the voyage from Tenedos. Atalanta, the
youngest, was not bad looking; but she, too, was waxy and sallow. Stavro
Vassilaki, who was the same type of American Greek as his younger
brother Yanni, was so full of raucous swagger at first that I had to be
rather rude to him. This set his sisters off chattering in his defense.
I ordered them to be quiet, whereupon they began to weep and were led
out into the corridor by Vedova, whose face had taken on the expression
of an old family nurse.
“Look here, Mr. Vassilaki, this kind of behaviour is going to get you
into trouble,” I told Stavro, who was sitting back in my armchair with
an attempt at sulky nonchalance. “Where’s your brother?” I asked him
angrily. “He applied for a post in the British service. I told him to
come to Mytilene, and you arrive instead, or rather you ask for a pass
to Mytilene and calmly propose to go on to the Piræus.”
“You can’t stop me going to the Piræus,” said Vassilaki insolently.
“Can’t I? Very well, my friend, you’d better try to go there. Only, if
you do, I warn you that something most unpleasant may happen to you. You
seem to forget that the moment you leave this harbour you’ll render
yourself liable to arrest.”
“Arrest?”
“Arrest.”
“Arrest by who?”
“By a British ship.”
He pondered this eventuality for a moment or two and then changed his
truculent manner for one of servility.
“Well, what do you want me to do, Captain?” he asked, rubbing his hands.
“You’ll stay here, at any rate till the next boat, while I make
inquiries.”
“But I got business in Athens.”
“Why did you ask for a pass for Mytilene then?”
He was silent.
“And why didn’t your brother Yanni come as he promised?”
“I cannot speak for my brother, Captain.”
In the pain I was fighting I could not concentrate properly upon my
questions. I told him to go and wait in the corridor while I was
deciding what to do about his immediate future. My idea was to hand him
over to Heathcote-Smith for a searching examination in his own language.
Two minutes after Vassilaki had left my room, Vedova came prancing in,
his long drooping waxed moustaches waving with excitement like the
antennæ of a lobster.
“Captain, Captain, Vassilaki is now in the W. C. and I can hear him
tearing up letters like a mad bull. Can I have your authorities for
break the door? Mr. Zecchini is listening to the keyhole, and he is
tearing up papers with furiousness. But I say what is the damn’ good to
listen? Only Mr. Zecchini says, ‘No, we cannot break the door.’ This man
is stubborn like a pig and cowardly like a grasshopper.”
However, Vedova’s more forward policy was rendered unnecessary by the
sudden reappearance of Stavro Vassilaki himself, and, Heathcote-Smith
arriving at the same moment, I handed him over for examination and
retired to lie down. Besides the neuritis I had been having intermittent
dysentery, and was feeling pretty rotten. Darwin was ill, too, and that
morning, while he was helping me to put on my Sam Browne, I remember our
knees were so groggy that after several vain attempts to fasten it we
both collapsed into chairs and sat staring at one another helplessly.
After his examination of Vassilaki, Heathcote-Smith came in to tell me
that he was convinced he was a genuine spy and that he thought the best
plan was to let him leave to-morrow morning on the _Macedonia_ and have
him arrested at sea. By this time I was in such pain that I did not care
what happened to him. Meanwhile, the amiable but half-witted Solon had
taken Vedova to the house where he said Vassilaki had left some letters
on first landing. Whether it was the right house or not, the inhabitants
denied indignantly that anybody had left a packet of letters there. So
Vedova pranced back to ask my authority to break in and search the house
and its inhabitants at the point of the pistol.
“I shall strip them all naked,” he announced. “That is the only way I
can have these letters.”
His eyes rolled like an angry wizard’s, and when I tried to explain that
some of the amenities of neutrality must be preserved he said he at last
understood how ill I must be feeling. Later on he came back much more
cheerful to say he had found an elderly female clairvoyant who as soon
as I was better was anxious to have a séance in the course of which she
hoped to be able to give me the exact whereabouts of a German submarine.
I spent a wretched afternoon of terrific heat and pain trying to write
my contribution to the Vassilaki dossier which was to be forwarded to G.
H. Q. with the prisoner.
That evening I asked Heathcote-Smith to fetch a doctor and showed him
Jack Higgins’s note on my case. He returned with a nice little blinking
doctor, a native of Lampsacus where the Garden God came from, who gave
me an injection and sat beside the bed to see how it worked, uttering
the while a long string of inanities in tinny French. The pain grew
worse and worse instead of better, and I asked the doctor how much
morphia he had given me. He told me half a grain. This was depressing
news because until now half a grain had always been enough. So I told
him he would have to give me another half grain, and blinking
ceaselessly he gave me a second injection. It had no effect, and I was
presently in such agony that my temperature began to rise. The doctor
stood looking down at me, blinking compassionately.
“Look here, you must stop this pain,” I gasped. “Give me a grain.”
So he gave me a third injection. Not a sign of alleviation! The spasms
of pain were now ghastly beyond words, and after watching me for another
few minutes the little blinking doctor suddenly burst into tears.
“I am very sorry,” he said in French. “But I have not yet given you any
morphine. Monsieur Ettecotte-Smeet has told me that I must only give you
water because it is not good for you to have morphine. But now I will
give it.”
And then we had to make a long calculation with the help of the minute
print in Belot’s Pocket Dictionary to express grains in terms of grammes
and find out how many of them went to a half a grain. Anyway, this time
the drug worked, and in five minutes I had relief from torture. The
little blinking doctor was much upset by his earlier treatment of me,
and we became good friends. He had had a beautiful young sister of
fourteen carried off by the Turks into the interior, and he wept again
when he told me the horrifying tale. He said that she would be put into
some harem, and that he must never expect to hear of her again. The
story told me by my doctor on that long hot night in Mytilene still
haunts me. I see again the Keating’s powder on my sheets caked into a
paste by my sweat. I hear again the noisy clatter of the guests on the
terrace, for none of them went to bed before three. But more vividly I
see the expression in the blinking eyes of the little doctor, and more
vividly I hear the tone of his voice as he says in his tinny French:
“_Elle était tellement jolie. Mieux si la fillette avait été laide._”
Heathcote-Smith soon got over his mild attack of consulitis, for to that
must be ascribed his experiment of injecting cold water to assuage
agony. Perhaps he thought my visit to the nomarch was clear evidence of
a propensity for drugs. Anyway, my disabled condition allowed him to
take full charge of the Vassilaki case.
On the morning of the twenty-sixth of July the _Macedonia_ left
Mytilene. A few miles out she was stopped by _H. M. S. Honeysuckle_,
and brought into Port Iero. Heathcote-Smith reached the sloop at
half-past four in the afternoon and found Stavro Vassilaki under guard.
The officer who had made the arrest handed over some documents and said
that the prisoner had tried to pass under a false name. When asked why
the certificates and papers of nationality varied Stavro declared that
they belonged to his brother Yanni. Heathcote-Smith had the prisoner
removed to the _Omala_ and then in the presence of one of the
_Honeysuckle’s_ lieutenants he searched the Vassilaki luggage on board
the _Macedonia_. The cabin, too, was searched carefully but without
result. After this Heathcote-Smith had a short conversation with the
three sisters; but the only fact he got out of them was that they had a
number of friends in Mytilene, whereas the prisoner had declared he knew
nobody in Mytilene except Vedova. The sisters were cool and unconcerned
until the _Omala_ was getting ready to leave for the shore, when
Calliope, the second of them, wept for a while. Stavro Vassilaki was
taken to the _Canopus_ under arrest, and the three sisters went on to
the Piræus in the _Macedonia_, which was calling on the way at Kastro in
the island of Lemnos. Heathcote-Smith put a young man on board who was
to do his best to make up to the sisters on the way to the Piræus.
However, the sisters decided at Kastro to return to Mytilene, and as for
Heathcote-Smith’s agent he was arrested by the British naval authorities
and taken to Mudros. This may strike the reader as odd; but I have
already pointed out that it was far easier for the agents of the enemy
to move freely about among the fighting forces than for our own agents,
who if they escaped arrest by the military usually fell to the navy,
while the few that survived both were always accounted for by the
French. I shall have one or two stories about that when my memories are
focussed on the year 1917, and when the Salonica army was wrestling with
the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron for supremacy in Intelligence.
Here is the examination of Stavro Vassilaki in the _Canopus_ on the day
after his arrest:
_Question._ What is your exact name?
_Answer._ Stavro Vassiliou Xanthaki.
_Q._ Why did you call yourself Vassilaki?
_A._ Because they made a mistake with my name in America.
_Q._ How old are you?
_A._ Thirty.
_Q._ What subject?
_A._ Greek.
_Q._ When did you leave America?
_A._ Last autumn.
_Q._ When did you arrive in Greece?
_A._ In September.
_Q._ To what town did you go?
_A._ To Athens. I was in Athens from September to April without leaving
it. All my family including my father and mother, my brother Yanni, my
three sisters Marika, Calliope, and Atalanta, and three younger brothers
were with me all the time. We were none of us doing any work. We had two
thousand dollars to live on. By April we had about nine hundred dollars
left. We went to Tenedos to try to set up a restaurant there. Both my
brother and I were in the restaurant business in Jamestown, New York.
That was in the year 1911, and the restaurant was the Divan Restaurant,
near Market Street.
I went first to Tenedos toward the end of April, and about four weeks
later I brought the whole of my family from Athens.
During the first twenty-five days I did nothing about getting a
restaurant. After their arrival I approached a man called Constantinides
but failed to come to terms. This took me four days. I then approached
two priests, one of whom was a refugee from Asia Minor; but after two
days these negotiations also ended unsuccessfully. We did nothing more
about getting a restaurant. Five weeks later my youngest sister Atalanta
fell ill, and I brought her to Mytilene. This was about the middle of
June. I also brought my mother with me. Five days later we all returned
together.
While in Mytilene I purchased eggs, onions, and potatoes to the value of
£24 for sale in Tenedos.
While in Mytilene I slept each night at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, my
mother and sister being there also.
My sister was taken to the doctor by her mother. I paid my mother some
money for the doctor’s bill.
A week later, about June 22d, I came back alone by steamer from Tenedos
to Mytilene, loaded two sailing boats at Dip in the Gulf of Iero for
Tenedos and returned by steamer. While I was at Mytilene my brother
Yanni came down to see me and returned to Tenedos before I did.
The only purpose of his visit was to hurry me back. He telegraphed to
me, but the telegram never reached me.
From that day until now none of us has done any kind of business at
Tenedos, although we tried several times to do business.
Our living at Tenedos was costing about ten shillings a day, and we now
have about £80 to £90 in hand. Our total income from outside since April
was about 60 napoleons on the two Mytilene transactions.
Our reason for going to Tenedos was solely to make money and save
expenses, and it was expected that the whole family would help because
my sisters had worked previously in hotels.
As regards my journey to Mytilene with my sisters, at the moment of
leaving Tenedos I knew nothing of my brother Yanni’s having volunteered
to work as agent for the British. I myself had never volunteered to work
for the British.
I asked for a pass from Tenedos to Mytilene, which was granted me, my
three sisters’ names being mentioned on it, too. I said that the object
of my journey to Mytilene was for the benefit of the health of my
younger sister Atalanta and for a change of air for the other two. On
arrival at Mytilene I tried to go on to the Piræus without disembarking
because once on board my sisters insisted on going to the Piræus.
I did not know that my brother Yanni was expected to come to Mytilene to
see Captain Mackenzie, nor did I know that I was. I never asked when at
Tenedos to be employed as a secret agent. I deny the fact that I ever
asked Lieutenant Thompson or Captain Mackenzie if I could be employed as
a secret agent.
On leaving the boat I went to Captain Mackenzie’s hotel without
previously going to any other house. I did not go anywhere and hand any
letters or anything else to anyone. Mr. Vedova, who brought me from the
boat, never left my side until my arrival at Captain Mackenzie’s hotel.
In the hotel I destroyed no letters at all.
While there I went to the lavatory, but I did not tear up any letters.
A letter addressed to Yorghi and ending “I will write to you secretly” I
know nothing about.
Except for the address Antoniades Lapsikou, whom I admit I know, I do
not know the names of any others mentioned on the fragments of letters
found in the lavatory. I may have torn up some of my letters, but I deny
having torn up any of them into small fragments. As regards the letter
signed Nicolas Imbriotis after long reflection I declare that I do not
know the name.
I went to the lavatory several times and I tore up my own letters for
this purpose.
Up to this time I had not been searched.
The principal people I know at Mytilene are ... [here followed a list of
names]. In the Piræus I know no one at all.
In Athens I know ... [here followed another list of names].
If we go to Athens this time we should go first to a hotel and then to
22----, the house we lived in when last in Athens.
If offered work by the British government I should refuse it because I
wish to go in a month’s time to America. I have enough money to take my
three sisters and three young brothers to America.
I now state that I would accept work as an interpreter at six pounds a
month.
* * * * *
To this examination I append a shortened version of the case for the
military authorities at Kephalo whither Stavro Vassilaki was to be sent
by the next trawler.
1. Telegram from V at Athens to G. H. Q. denounces whole Vassilaki
family as possible suspects.
2. Object of Vassilaki family in going to Tenedos.
(a) Version of Vassilaki.
Object was to make money by setting up a restaurant or any means of
commerce.
(b) Comment.
By April the family’s resources were reduced to £180. There were
ten people to keep. Despite the undoubted ability of Yanni and
Stavro, only two transactions were carried out by them between
April and to-day (end of July).
Further attempts to get a restaurant by their own showing appear to
have been very half hearted. In a word they acted like people who
had some other source of livelihood.
3. Financial resources of Stavro Vassilaki appear illustrated by
the following:
On July 25th he told Mr. Heathcote-Smith at Mytilene he would only
accept work under the British government at £20 sterling a month.
Previously Lieutenant Mackenzie had been approached by Yanni
Vassilaki, the other brother, to enter the British service as a
secret agent; but Yanni had subsequently failed to follow the
matter up, further illustrating the security they feel about money
questions.
4. The apparent necessity of the family to be in frequent
communication with the outside world.
As will be noticed in Lieutenant Mackenzie’s memorandum, not a week
elapsed without either one of the Vassilakis or an employee of
theirs (as Vassili Zervaki) getting a pass to leave Tenedos.
Whenever these passes were refused to one member of the clique,
then another asked for a pass, and their anxiety was always
immediately allayed as soon as any one of them, irrespective of
whom it might be, obtained the permit that enabled them to
communicate with outside.
5. Visit of Stavro Vassilaki to Mytilene to buy wood at Dip.
Considering the difficulty of obtaining permits to leave and
reënter Tenedos and the facility with which telegrams could be sent
on ordinary commercial business, this visit to the elder brother by
the younger merely to “hurry him up” is remarkable.
6. Visit of sister and brother to Mytilene about June 15th.
The sister in question is the third sister, Atalanta. Mr.
Heathcote-Smith questioned her at Mytilene on July 25th about this
visit. She said she saw no doctor at all the first time because her
brother had no money, and thus she gave her brother’s evidence the
lie direct.
Further, she declared, and her eldest sister Marika confirmed this
statement, that Stavro had preceded her to Mytilene and that on the
arrival of Atalanta Stavro returned from Athens where he had been
on business.
Stavro himself, be it noted, declares that he was the whole time in
the Grande Bretagne Hotel at Mytilene.
What had he been doing in Athens?
7. Acquaintances in Mytilene and Athens. Stavro and each of the
three sisters separately affirmed that they had absolutely no
acquaintances either in Mytilene or in Athens. The deposition of
Stavro under arrest in the _Canopus_ completely upsets this
statement.
Also Mr. Vedova saw the family, when at Mytilene on July 26th,
exchange salutes with the lawyer of the German consulate.
8. Disposal of letters by Stavro on arrival at Mytilene.
(a) Mr. Heathcote-Smith’s employee, Solon, affirms that he saw
Stavro just after his arrival hurriedly emerge from a house in a
small side street and that he had seen him two minutes previously
enter this side street with a packet of letters in his hand. Mr.
Vedova states that to his regret he left Stavro all alone for
twenty minutes after he had landed. Indeed during this time Mr.
Vedova was with Lieutenant Mackenzie.
(b) Letters destroyed in the lavatory.
These which are forwarded as an enclosure are perhaps the most
damaging proof that we hold against Stavro. His behaviour was that
of a man very nervous and fearful about what was going to happen
when he was first brought to the Grande Bretagne. He suddenly went
to the lavatory, and Mr. Zecchini, following him there quietly,
heard the continuous tearing of paper as though into small
fragments. Immediately Stavro left the place Mr. Zecchini found the
fragments which form this enclosure. Their subject matter is in
itself damaging, as for instance the letter which states that the
writer “will write secretly” owing to our censorship. The fact that
Stavro owns to knowing one of the addresses and pretends not to
know anything about the others or why the letter addressed to the
man he does know “Antoniades Lapsikou” is written on the back of a
Turkish letter appears most suspicious. It may be added that there
is always a sufficiency of toilet paper in this place.
9. Object of journey to Athens.
When examined by Mr. Heathcote-Smith at the hotel on July 25th,
Stavro disclaimed any idea of doing business in Athens. His
conversation fluctuated between emphatic assertions that he had
plenty of money and equally emphatic assertions that he did not
know how he should be able to keep his sister in Athens if we did
not help him with his fare. Since starting this memorandum, Stavro
was called in to hear his deposition read over and added the last
two lines to it, in which he states he would accept work at £6 a
month. This is a further contradiction of his earlier statements
about money, especially that made on July 25th, when he said he
could only accept work as a secret agent provided he were paid £20
a month because of the heavy charges on him his family represented.
This last change of face on his part appears to be dictated by a
nervous desire to show his readiness to serve the British.
10. Small details arousing suspicion.
Lieutenant Thompson’s memorandum states that the family were
brought to Tenedos from Volo. Stavro says they came from Athens.
Stavro evidently knew that Yanni had proposed himself to Lieutenant
Mackenzie as a secret agent, for though in his deposition Stavro
pretends that he knew nothing of this, on the other hand he stated
to Mr. Heathcote-Smith on July 25th at Mytilene that he considered
it quite reasonable he should be detained by us at Mytilene, since
Yanni had not come to Lieutenant Mackenzie as he had promised.
11. When the three sisters reëmbarked Mr. Heathcote-Smith placed a
secret agent on board to get into contact with the three sisters
and follow them to Athens, where, after the arrest of Stavro, they
would arrive alone and if they really were acting in any capacity
for the enemy would probably reveal to Mr. Heathcote-Smith’s agent
the people with whom they were getting into contact. As Stavro, who
had 600 francs on him when leaving Mytilene, had found an
opportunity to hand this money to his sisters, Mr. Heathcote-Smith
telegraphed to the S. N. O. Mudros asking that this money should be
taken from the sisters and returned to him for Stavro, so that the
sisters arriving stranded in Athens would be more likely to give
themselves away by getting into immediate touch with their German
or Turkish employers.
It is submitted that the house of the Vassilakis in Tenedos should
be suddenly and really ruthlessly searched and that Yanni Vassilaki
should be arrested and examined. It is further submitted that no
communication should be allowed between those members of the family
on Tenedos and those elsewhere.
The search, to prove effective, would have to be much more thorough
than those usually carried out. It should be noted that in the
arrest of Stavro on the _Macedonia_ opportunity was given him to
hand over to his sisters the 600 francs. He could with equal ease
have disposed of incriminating documents.
It should also be noted that Mr. Wilfred Vedova, who was supposed
to be utilized for Secret Service work on Tenedos on Mr.
Heathcote-Smith’s recommendation, was never told, so he declares,
by Lieutenant Thompson that he was to shadow the Vassilaki party
which left Tenedos on July 24th, and it was largely owing to this
that a closer watch was not kept on the people on their arrival.
I have given the Vassilaki case at this length, because it is typical of
hundreds of cases that came the way of Intelligence officers during the
war, and because it illustrates the difficulties with which they were
faced. The curtain now falls on the second act as Stavro Vassilaki
departs under arrest in the trawler for Kephalo and the three mournful
sisters return from Lemnos to Mytilene.
Heathcote-Smith after the excitement of the case was filled with
missionary zeal over my plaguy leg and suggested as an excellent way to
complete the cure a drive in a motor car to the other side of the island
on some matter connected with smuggling. All I can remember of the
investigation is an endless drive in an antique car over a dusty road
full of holes, throughout which Heathcote-Smith was trying to relate a
synopsis of the intricate plot of a French novel he had recently read.
In the most comfortable circumstances and surroundings I find the
narration by an enthusiastic reader of the plot of a novel or a play one
of the major penances of this mortal life. What I found it, trying to
keep my leg clear of the hard seat of that car on that dusty road which
bumped and twisted along through endless groves of olives, may be
imagined.
I hear Heathcote-Smith’s smooth voice now, though I am probably not
reporting his exposition quite correctly.
“And then Alphonse discovers that his wife had left the pearls in a
railway carriage ... or, no, wait a minute, I forgot to tell you that
Eugène, the brother of Alphonse, had some time ago had a love affair
with the ... now wait a minute, I’m wrong, that was after....” but all
plots sound the same when they are related by an enthusiastic reader. In
this case it was the punctuation of the narrative by an exacerbated
sciatic nerve which distinguished it from others in my memory, though
the details of what happened at the end of that long drive have faded
from my mind.
Meanwhile, E. C. Hole[52] had arrived from Athens to take up the post of
acting vice consul at Mytilene, much to the relief of Heathcote-Smith,
for whom the strain of Intelligence work was quite enough without having
the petty worries of consular routine as well. It must be remembered
that practically all the effective espionage on Turkey was now dependent
on his efforts. Much good work had been done from Athens earlier; but it
was growing daily more difficult for an agent to get from there into
Turkey and out again, and it looked as if it would soon be impossible
except at lucky intervals. Consequently, with our sources of information
depending to this extent on Heathcote-Smith’s organization, the nervous
anxiety of landing messengers or agents followed by the even more acute
nervous anxiety of getting them off again, was sometimes overwhelming.
The man in charge of the active side of Intelligence is likely to have
plenty of what is called imagination, and the responsibility of men’s
lives always lies as heavily upon his conscience as it does on that of
an officer in the field. Money for the work was in these earlier days of
the war hard to come by. Not that the men who risked their lives to spy
upon the Turks were so much tempted by money. They were nearly all of
them patriots who believed that they were serving the cause of a greater
Helles by their activities. But the most patriotic Greek is not
indifferent to a proper reward for his services, and the rewards we were
able to offer were always inadequate to the risk that was run, whatever
the quality of the information supplied; while for some of the
information they were ludicrous in their meanness. However, I shall not
prolong this volume with details of espionage, for there will be more
suitable opportunities to discuss the whole question later on.
Hole was a quiet and humorous bird--I use the colloquialism because it
exactly suits him--and he took refuge in a kind of pawkiness from a
decided inclination on Heathcote-Smith’s part to treat him as very much
the junior subaltern. The boat on which he had travelled from the Piræus
had been stopped by one of our ships, and for some reason or other
probably connected with the bashfulness of the navy, Hole had been
called upon to search a female Serbian refugee of according to him an
indescribable hideousness and squalor. I forget the details of that
high-seas drama, but I remember we found it diverting at the time, which
is a comment on the change of values that war effects. It seems strange
now to remember that we once thought the miseries of this wretched
creature something to laugh at. Yet pondering that last remark I ask
myself whether the priggishness of the present masquerading as
compassion gets any nearer to objective truth than the brutality of the
past disguised as duty.
It was high time Hole had arrived to take over Heathcote-Smith’s
consular work, for Vedova had by this time put the clerical staff of the
vice consulate in a phrenzy. His failure to obtain permission to enter
any house in Mytilene he chose and search it at the pistol’s point for
Vassilaki’s missing correspondence was attributed by him to a plot of
the consulate staff to belittle his position and smirch his patriotism.
I never did find out what either his technical or his actual nationality
was. There used once upon a time to be a divergence between the two in
the Levant where a man usually for trading purposes would become a
national of whatever country’s consul was most likely to help him. This
mixture of nationalities for commercial ends is well illustrated by the
Müller memorandum.
I have a note of a letter written by one of the Greek clerks of the vice
consulate to Heathcote-Smith, which indicates the kind of catfish Vedova
was proving in Mytilene.
SIR:
Mr. Wilfred Vedova called to the British vice consulate yesterday,
and before a great number of good people begun swearing the Greek
nation and blaspheming the Greeks of their origin.
This not being a proper manner of a civilized man I shall be glad
if you will kindly give a good lesson to him as he is almost
deprived of education.
Heathcote-Smith lectured the offender, and I lectured him. I do not
remember what excuse he made to Heathcote-Smith, but to me he said:
“Captain Mackenzie, I love and estimate you as though you were being my
brother, and if you tell me that I must not say to these dirty vagabonds
and stinking double faces what are my thoughts for them, why, then I
must obey. Thank God, I know from my service with the glorious British
navy what obedience can mean. I only ask to serve Great Britain while I
am alive and able for service, which cannot be long because I have a
bad kidney and must be in hospital before many weeks. I only ask you to
put your hand here.”
With this he seized my hand and held it to his back.
“You can feel my kidney jumping about, I think?” he inquired.
I told him I could not feel anything jumping about, which seemed to
mortify him. However, on feeling the small of his back with his own hand
he declared that the kidney was pulsating like a mad thing, and that
when it behaved in such a way it was a sure sign he was suffering from
acute mental distress.
“And that is because I have allowed myself to forget in my excitements
that you have always treated me as a gentleman, and it is because I have
for you an undying love that to-night I shall mesmerize a woman who will
tell us where we may find a submarine, though for me to make
mesmerizations when I am sick is terrible.”
So that night Vedova took me to a house in an outlying part of the town,
and I sat under a vine-wreathed trellis in a blaze of moonlight while he
gyrated round a doughy woman of most unsibylline aspect.
“I have no force to-night,” he declared at last, sinking down exhausted
upon a chair and calling for retzinato wine, which, though to the
prejudiced tasting like a mixture of claret and eucalyptus, bears to the
lover of Greece every time he drinks it an increasing resemblance to his
conception of nectar. The doughy woman was better suited by the rôle of
Hebe than the Sibyl, and it was in no trance that she filled our glasses
with the wine and set before us plates of almonds.
“It was coming over me,” said Vedova sadly, “when my kidney made such a
bumping that I could not put her to sleep. It is a terrible pity, for
she would have surely told us where we may take a submarine.”
However, if Vedova failed to produce a submarine, he produced on the
following evening something that was much more welcome. I was walking
round the band stand in the gardens after dinner, and that meant
half-past ten or eleven when Lesbos was parched by the Dogstar, walking
round and telling myself I was a fool to stay out in the nocturnal damp,
but as much unable to forgo that dreamy circumambulation as a goldfish
in a bowl. Suddenly, from one of the bypaths which radiated from the
central illumination into pine-soft and pine-scented darkness, I heard
my name uttered in the hoarse whisper of melodrama, and looking round I
saw Vedova signalling to me with his moustaches behind a bush. I drew
near, and he told me that somebody wished to speak to me. By the mystery
in his voice it might have been the Vali of Smyrna himself whom on a
magic carpet he had transported from the mainland to Mytilene.
“Can I bring this person to speak to you?” he breathed heavily into my
ear.
“But who is it?”
“I think it will be better for me to bring him to you.”
“Very well, go and bring him.”
“I have your orders, Captain?” he asked with portentous solemnity.
“Yes, yes, yes.”
Vedova salaamed like an obliging genie and pranced away into the
blackness beyond the music. The moon nearly a week past the full had not
yet risen. A minute or two later he beckoned to me from the corner of
the path and produced Aubrey Herbert, who came peering up to me. I need
hardly add that Vedova took all the credit of this delightful surprise.
“Excuse me, Captain,” he said complacently, “I think you will not want
me now. I have very important business in the boat from Tenedos.”
“Go along, then.”
“Captain,” he hissed in my ear, “they have tried to bribe me for let two
hundred bags of raisins come through. Captain Mackenzie, the whole boat
is stinking of raisins.”
“I don’t wonder.”
“Captain Mackenzie, they shall not land these damn’ raisins! If I sit
all night for guarding them, do not be afraid. There will not come one
raisin ashore when I have my pistol to say ‘No.’ I am completely furious
that they think I am a dirty blackguard who can be bribed to give
license to make what they like with raisins. I am not such a man,
Captain Mackenzie.”
I was really too much charmed by the prospect of Aubrey Herbert’s
company for a few days to pay attention to Vedova’s denunciation of the
raisins, and so I suppose I must bear a portion of the blame for the
panic he created that night on the unlucky steamer. Anyway, next morning
he was still standing on guard over the bags of raisins with a pistol in
either hand, while the officers and crew were still arguing with him, so
far, that is, as it is possible to argue with a man who counters every
logical hit of his opponents by ordering them to put their hands above
their heads. I forget the sequel. No doubt the affair of the raisins was
one of the first major operations of consular diplomacy which Hole in
his new post was called upon to conduct.
Aubrey Herbert was on sick leave, which he had only accepted in the
islands to avoid being sent to Egypt. He had left Anzac last Sunday, had
spent a few days in Tenedos, and was to stay here till the trawler
should leave on the fourth of August for Imbros, so that we were likely
to go back together. He was wearing a uniform of faded canary yellow. I
had never seen that shade of khaki before and commented on the
attractive novelty.
“It was made from some stuff my wife got,” he told me vaguely, though
whether for casement curtains or uniform he did not add. There were only
three buttons left on the tunic, two being the proper brass buttons of
his regiment, the Welsh Guards, the other like one of the brown crinkly
variety of the streets known as burnt almonds. One shoulder strap had
the three stars of his rank as captain, but the other one bore only the
single star of a second lieutenant. He had no belt, and instead of
wearing boots or shoes he shuffled along in a pair of red Turkish
slippers. His sun helmet had received a heavy dent somewhere which gave
it rather the look of a dissolute and bloated Homburg hat, and as a
final contribution to the unusual in his military equipment he was not
wearing a tie.
“Is that your luggage?” I asked, eying the small battered case he was
carrying.
“No, no, that’s somewhere. I think my man Christo is looking after it
probably. This is only a typewriter.”
He had taken a room at the other hotel, but he moved up to the Grande
Bretagne the next day.
“Oh, and by the way,” he said to me, “I think I rather want a tie.”
So in the morning I took him to the leading hosier of Mytilene, who had
a selection of the most gaudy cravats imaginable, for they were such
cravats as had defeated even the sartorial courage of Mytileniote youth.
“These look rather bright for uniform, don’t they?” suggested Aubrey,
putting his eyes to within six inches of the glass-encased exhibition.
“Yes, I think they are a little bright.”
“Ah, but here’s the fellow I want,” he said, pointing to one whose
ground was certainly khaki, though the fact that it was sown with vivid
purple lozenges rather detracted from its appropriateness to a military
uniform.
“But that’s covered with purple lozenges,” I protested.
“Is it?” He leaned over the counter and made what seemed a microscopic
examination of a rock-pool. “Oh, I think it’s all right. I really must
have a tie. _Posos?_” he inquired of the salesman, who replied in
English, rubbing his hands:
“Fourdrachmasthankyouverymuch!”
“You realize, Aubrey, don’t you, that the tie you have chosen is covered
with purple lozenges?”
“Yes, my dear, but they’re hardly noticeable.”
How remote now seemed my embarrassment in Alexandria over uniform just
over two months ago, how utterly remote!
Aubrey Herbert had heard so much about the Vassilaki family in Tenedos
that we felt he was the one to deal with the emotional crisis of the
three sisters who were back in Mytilene after being held up in Mudros.
When I broke the news to him, he was sitting out in the first-floor
corridor of the Grande Bretagne, his eyes close to the folio he was
covering with his sprawling hand, or was he using the typewriter?
“Do you think you can take on the Miss Vassilakis for a bit, and try to
calm them down? They simply will not stop crying.”
“Well, just let me read you first what I’ve written to Bob Cecil[53]
about the situation out here.”
And I can see him now, his eyes scarcely a couple of inches from the
paper, reading out to me a letter full of passionate pleading for the
Turks. We never argued the Turkish question. Neither of us was likely to
convert the other. It was sad for me that so many of the people I loved
best out there--Aubrey Herbert, Wyndham Deedes, George Lloyd, to name
only three--were utterly pro-Turkish, whereas I would have put every
Turk in Europe to the sword and would now had I the chance. I listened
while Aubrey Herbert read me his letter to another great idealist, then
Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
“You don’t agree with that?” he asked when he had finished.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
He sighed.
“Well, what do you want me to do with the Miss Vassilakis?”
“I think you’re the only person who can reassure them.”
“They’re very beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but they don’t look their best just now after crying incessantly
for about a week.”
“Poor creatures! Well, I’ll see what I can do to help them.”
So Vedova brought them up, and for an hour they wept forth their woes to
a Bayard, whose courtesy never flagged.
“But why can’t we go home?” they moaned.
“It’s the admiral,” Aubrey Herbert announced finally. “We can’t do
anything with him. He’s a most severe man.”
One of the three sisters declared he was evidently not a man but a
butcher, and we did not contradict her. We must have made that so
amiable Admiral de Robeck appear a kind of Moloch in his indifference to
human misery. Vedova led the three weeping women away for a while, and
the squire of dames turned reproachfully to me.
“I thought you said they were beautiful?”
“Did I give you that impression? I believe I did tell you that Atalanta
wasn’t bad looking. But you must have got the idea that all three were
beautiful from Thompson in Tenedos. He gave me the same impression.”
“I think they’re hideous,” Aubrey Herbert groaned.
“Well, you didn’t see them at their best. They’ve evidently not stopped
crying ever since their brother was arrested. Their eyes were their best
feature, and of course they’ve spoiled them completely.”
Later on that night Vedova brought the weeping sisters back to the
Grande Bretagne. We asked him why he had done so and he told us that
since their interview with Captain Herbert they had talked of nothing
but his chivalry and would not be consoled until they saw him again.
Aubrey was as kind and gentle as ever with them; but even he had had
enough of them by midnight and insisted that Vedova should without delay
escort them back to their hotel. They said they could not feel secure
against further outrages by the admiral (we had successfully landed him
with the entire burden of responsibility) unless they were allowed to
stay in the same hotel as Monsieur Herbert. He told them that there was
no room vacant and even fetched up the proprietor to confirm our
statement. It was no use, they would not budge.
“But really, my dear ladies, you cannot stay here,” Aubrey Herbert
protested.
At this one of them (I think it was Calliope) went off into hysterics.
She sat back in her chair, laughing and screaming and sobbing and
drumming her heels on the floor. This scene was taking place in the big
corridor, for neither Aubrey nor I would allow them into our rooms. I
took Vedova downstairs and asked him if he could not mesmerize them into
tranquillity.
“Captain Mackenzie, give me time and I shall mesmerize for you any
woman. I have mesmerized once a woman in Smyrna and she has come to our
front door and taken off all her clothes until she was naked like a
savage. She has run about the street mad with wanting me until my wife
has said she cannot be scandalized like this. But I cannot mesmerize
three womens all together, and if I make to take one away all three are
screaming like hell.”
I do not remember what time it was when we got them out of the hotel and
the sound of their sobbing died away along the street.
“I wish I was already away to the mainland in the _Omala_ with
Hadkinson,” Aubrey sighed.
We had lunched with Hadkinson in the narrow little quayside restaurant.
The apple-cheeked pirate’s joy at seeing his friend again was
tremendous. They had last met in Aubrey Herbert’s house in Somerset,
where the outbreak of war had interrupted Hadkinson’s visit.
“My God, it’s a strange ting, Aubrey, dat you have come to Mytilene. I
have felt it in my bones dat you were coming for some days now, and I
have told them to kill a lamb, which we shall eat on our island.
Mackenzie, you are coming too, eh?”
“I wish I could, but I must wait here in case Sir Ian arrives.”
“I have a machine gun now in the _Omala_,” Hadkinson went on pensively.
“By God, I tink we will go to Thasos and give those damned Greek
officials there something. They have arrested two of our agents. They
badly want a good lesson.”
Thasos was an island that I was several times going to visit on a
desperate adventure; but somehow an obstacle always presented itself,
and when I left these waters in September, 1917, it was still unvisited.
The pine woods and babbling streams of Thasos have always haunted my
mind since, and, if the island be as fair and green as I fancy it, I
have missed a classic strand.
However, Hadkinson did not take Aubrey Herbert to Thasos, which would,
indeed, have been too much of an Odyssey even for the _Omala_; but he
took him the next night to the island of Moskonisi, whence news had
reached us of a woman who had volunteered to be put ashore near Aivalik
and bring us back information.
On that Sunday, being the first of August, Aubrey Herbert,
Heathcote-Smith, and I lunched with the Aristarchis. Aristarchi Bey was
in a terrific state of excitement on account of the arrival of the
_Andania_, the _Alaudia_, and two other transports in Port Iero with a
brigade and a half of the Tenth (Irish) Division of Kitchener’s army.
Officers had been seen walking about Mytilene, and everybody was asking
indignantly what kept King Constantine from marching beside the British
and the French.
“Captain Herbert, I tell you I would sooner die than live to see the
Germans win this war,” he declared.
We ate with relish one of those huge and delicious Aristarchi lunches.
Aubrey was severe on the stupidity of attempting a landing on the Asia
Minor coast from here. Heathcote-Smith, too, thought that the project
was ridiculous without more careful preparation. After lunch Aristarchi
Bey took me into his library, locked the door, and begged me almost
with tears to dissuade them from letting the troops encamp round Port
Iero, where the malaria was virulent, especially at this season of the
year.
“I don’t want to pry into secrets,” he barked. “But unless they are
going to land at once, it is absolute madness to stay round Port Iero.
Why wouldn’t the authorities accept the camping ground we found for
them?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” I told him, “Sir Ian Hamilton is coming
here himself soon, and then everything will be decided.”
That evening a telegram arrived from G. H. Q. to tell Heathcote-Smith
that Sir Ian would arrive at Port Iero to-morrow morning and that he and
I were to meet him.
“No Moskonisi for you, Heathcote,” I said.
“Ha-ha twice!” Aubrey chuckled. “I shan’t be here.”
“With the herbs I have made them bring, dat lamb is going to be
splendid, Aubrey,” Hadkinson declared. “I tell you it is going to be
something you will always remember.”
“I’ve just heard,” said Heathcote-Smith, looking remote but with a note
in his voice that was meant for me, “I’ve just heard that a German
submarine was sitting outside the entrance to Port Iero waiting for the
transports and nearly got both the _Andania_ and the _Alaudia_. That
shows the Germans knew they were coming.”
“I wonder if they really did,” I murmured.
“The nomarch is back,” said Heathcote-Smith pointedly.
I never obtained absolute confirmation of that German submarine’s
attempt on the transports; but I should like to think that it was there
in consequence of information received, for if it was it would mean that
my attempt to lure any submarines southward was successful.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NEW ARMY
H. M. S. “Chatham” with Sir Ian Hamilton on board arrived in Port Iero
about half-past five on the morning of the second of August. George
Lloyd accompanied him, and also George Brodrick as A. D. C., while to
lend a touch of added significance to his visit Admiral de Robeck came
too. Luckily the Vassilaki sisters did not hear of the admiral’s
presence. If they had had a suspicion that this despot of sea and land
was within reach of their lamentations, all three would certainly have
flung themselves at his feet and inundated the quarter-deck with tears
in an attempt to secure the restoration of their brother Stavro to
liberty.
In the transport _Andania_ were the Fifth Royal Irish Fusiliers and the
Sixth Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers; in the _Alaudia_ were the Sixth and
Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers. These four battalions composed the
Thirty-first Brigade of the Tenth Division under the command of
Brigadier General F. F. Hill. In addition to them there were the Sixth
Royal Irish Fusiliers in H. M. T. _Canada_ and the Fifth Royal
Inniskilling Fusiliers in H. M. T. _Novian_. These made up half of
Nicol’s Thirtieth Brigade, the other two battalions of which, the Sixth
and Seventh Royal Munster Fusiliers, were at Mudros with Sir Bryan Mahon
and his divisional staff.
The commander-in-chief spent the morning inspecting these six
battalions. It was a pity that the rest of the Thirtieth Brigade with
the general commanding the division could not have been sent to Mytilene
instead of to Mudros. One may speculate that some of the heartrending
confusion later might have been avoided if Sir Bryan Mahon could have
been in closer touch at any rate with two of the brigades of his
division. Cooper’s Twenty-ninth Brigade, consisting of the Sixth Royal
Irish Rifles, Fifth Connaught Rangers, Sixth Leinsters, and Tenth
Hampshires had already been landed at Anzac.
My memory of the details of that morning is clouded. I seem to recollect
that about noon we crossed the bay in a motor launch and met two of the
battalions returning from a route march; but the first definite incident
and conversation I recall is of walking with George Brodrick along a
steep wooded bank overhanging the water and of Brodrick’s saying to me
in a voice heavy with gloom:
“Well, what do you think of them?”
“They seem all right.”
“Do you think so? I think they look a very weedy lot.”
“That’s only because they haven’t had time to get sunburnt. You must
remember that you’re used to the sight of men who have been out here for
some time.”
“Well, I hope you’re right,” said George Brodrick pessimistically. “But
I can’t say I feel more cheerful about this new landing, now that I’ve
seen some of the troops who are going to be engaged in it.”
If Sir Ian himself felt any doubts about the fitness of these troops for
the task in front of them, there was no sign of it in his manner. He was
outwardly his courteous, confident, cheerful, intrepid self, and though
looking back on that grilling August day from the present I am tempted
to wonder if there may not have been a deliberate accentuation of his
optimism and enthusiasm, as if he were trying in the style of Coué to
defeat the nervous strain of the last few months, that is inevitable now
that I can turn over the pages of the chronicles and read what happened
at the end of that week; for never again can I or any writer who lived
through those days before Suvla recapture the mental attitude of faith
in the success of our enterprise. Not that I can claim ever to have
possessed it. Down in my heart I was always positive that the Suvla
landing would fail. I lacked faith in it from the start not, let me
hastily add, because I had weighed the logic of our position but merely
because I had an intuition that we should fail. I tried to convince
myself intellectually, and I think I succeeded in doing so, but
emotionally I remained a skeptic.
We probably lunched with Captain Grant in the _Canopus_, but if we did
the memory of it has completely faded. Nor can I recollect how George
Lloyd spent most of his time. I cannot recall his taking any part at the
inspection, and my most vivid memory of him that day is of the disgusted
expression on his face when I offered him a vanilla ice at tea. We
talked about Aubrey Herbert, however, and to my remark that I did not
see how Aubrey could avoid being killed or badly wounded much longer I
recall his reply:
“Oh, well, I think most of us feel that there is a special little cherub
up aloft who looks after dear Aubrey.”
“Perhaps there is, and if there is he has kept him over on the coast of
Asia Minor to-day.”
I was thinking of the cold way in which Sir Ian had replied, “Is he?”
when I had informed him that Aubrey Herbert was in Mytilene. It is
difficult to believe that Aubrey ever irritated anybody; but I do not
think it is an exaggeration to say that he irritated Sir Ian extremely.
Discussions on the beautiful nature of the Turk are obviously likely to
irritate a man who is hoping to take Constantinople.
That hot afternoon (and how hot it was!) Heathcote-Smith was waiting by
the landing stage with the car that was to drive Sir Ian into Mytilene,
where he wished to call on both the military commandant and the civil
governor.
The view from the crown of the hill above Port Iero was of exceptional
loveliness that afternoon. We left the car and stood beside it for a
minute or two to gaze at the flickering play of sunlight on the roofs
and walls of the city, which gleamed in the azurine sea haze like the
star in the heart of a pale cabochon sapphire. Heathcote-Smith seized
the opportunity to push his scheme for landing ten thousand irregulars
at Aivalik, but what reception his arguments had from Sir Ian I cannot
remember. Indeed, I only remember that I grew more and more utterly
tired, more and more sticky with heat. The climb up to the castle was a
weary grind, and the conversation first between Sir Ian and the Cretan
colonel who commanded the troops and then between him and the nomarch
made no impression on me except of futility. I do not know what Monsieur
Venizelos had said to the porous, pasty-faced little man, but he was in
a state of servile obsequiousness, and Sir Ian in his desire to be
friendly and courteous adopted with him the manner of a sixth-form
prefect in the Eleven condescending to a grubby little junior boy who
had been recommended to his notice.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached the Grande Bretagne where
Heathcote-Smith and I had ordered the best tea we could procure. The
ices, so despicable to George Lloyd, were a success with the others.
Heathcote-Smith fluttered round Sir Ian like a dark silky moth: Sir Ian
walked into his ice appreciatively. George Lloyd pulled my leg about the
Greeks, and George Brodrick found an opportunity to murmur that Mr.
Winston Churchill had been on his way out to Imbros, but that at
Brindisi he had been dissuaded from going on. I wonder what influence he
would have had in shaping events after Suvla had he come. What rubbish
one writes! As if Destiny ever contemplated any alternative!
It was nearly seven o’clock when our guests left us to drive back to
Port Iero and go on board the _Chatham_, which would be in Kephalo early
next morning.
In that same light cruiser eleven weeks later Sir Ian Hamilton was to
leave Kephalo forever. It was on her quarter-deck that he took his last
salute as commander-in-chief from the warships in the roadstead. Even
for a mere junior officer it is a moving experience to stand on a
quarter-deck and be carried past manned ships saluting at anchor. The
emotion of it for that commander-in-chief whose career fortune not folly
was darkening on that drear October afternoon must have been of a
poignancy almost intolerable.
I wondered whether I could stand the strain of seeing Imbros,
Kephalos, the camp, fade into the region of dreams--and I was
hesitating when a message came from the Captain to say the Admiral
begged me to run up on to the quarter-deck. So I ran, and found the
_Chatham_ steering a corkscrew course--threading in and out amongst
the warships at anchor. Each as we passed manned ship and sent us
on our way with the cheers of brave men ringing in our ears.
With these words Sir Ian Hamilton’s _Gallipoli Diary_ comes to an end.
Aubrey Herbert came back after dinner. He was full of air and sun and
sea, and I envied him his twenty-four hours of adventure by the Asiatic
shore. As he and I were to dine on board the _Andania_ with General Hill
to-morrow and after sleeping in the _Canopus_ leave very early in the
morning in Strange’s trawler for Tenedos and Imbros, I decided to go to
bed early, for I was feeling completely exhausted by my day, and there
were signs of a return of neuritis. I had hardly reached my room when
Vedova came prancing in, much excited, to say that a party of
bluejackets had started to break up the town, that the police had all
been called out, that the rioters had been arrested, and that they were
all now in the police station.
“Then they’d better stay there,” I told him irritably.
“No, but please to excuse me, Captain Mackenzie, you must come and give
orders that they can be sent back to Port Iero because I have a wagon
which can take them. And I think if you will come to the police station
they will do how you say.”
I felt less confident; but I supposed it was my duty to wrestle with
these tiresome fellows, so I accompanied Vedova to the police station.
The party of bluejackets turned out to be three R. N. V. R. seamen with
scrawny moustaches, as unpleasantly drunken and mutinous a trio as ever
I hope to meet.
“Look here,” I told them, “if you don’t stop using that filthy language,
you’ll get no help from me to pull you out of this mess.”
“We don’t want no bloody help from you, guv’nor,” one of them
hiccoughed. “We’d sooner help our bloody selves. We’ve been got out here
on false pretenses. We’ve been treated like dogs by His Majesty’s bloody
navy and we’re just about sick of it.”
“’Ear! ’Ear!” belched his companions.
“Fed up, d’year what I’m telling you, guv’nor. We ain’t been paid what
we oughter be paid. And the country oughter know how we get served by
the bleedin’ navy.”
“Well, that’s enough of it,” I said sharply. “You won’t listen to
reason, so I can do nothing for you. You’ll be taken back to your ship
to-morrow under arrest by the local police, and I hope your captain will
be glad to see you.”
“Now, don’t you bully us!” the biggest of them growled, lurching toward
me with his fist above his shoulders.
“Look here, my man, I advise you to keep a distance, or you’ll find
yourself in trouble. There’s a war going on, you know, and it’s not a
good idea to strike a superior officer on active service.”
“Who’s my superior bloody officer?” he demanded indignantly. “I don’t
reckonize nobody as my superior officer. My union knows who I am, and I
don’t want no muckin’ mouth wash from the likes of you.”
They were too drunk for argument, and yet it was only by persuasion that
I was likely to get them quietly on to the wagon and out of the town. So
for half an hour I sat there trying to reason with the swine, so
successfully, indeed, that by the time I had induced them to believe
that my plan for their transport was the best one they had become too
friendly, and my next difficulty was to convince them I did not want to
spend the rest of the night shaking hands with them. However, I escaped
from their cordiality at last, and after thanking the chief of the local
police for the tactful way in which he had managed to make the best of
what might have been an occasion for ill will I left Vedova to stow them
away in the wagon.
The next morning a telegram came from G. H. Q. to say that Stavro
Vassilaki had escaped and telling me to warn the senior naval officer at
Port Iero. Hard on the heels of this sensational dispatch the three
sisters of the missing prisoner arrived to say that they had heard
Captain Herbert was going to Tenedos and to implore him, who was the
only man they had met in uniform with any claim to honour or decency, to
let them accompany him.
“I really cannot take you, my dear ladies,” said Aubrey. “The admiral
would be absolutely furious.”
I thought of the admiral’s kindly and florid countenance as I had seen
it yesterday; but there was nothing else for it, we had to give him the
reputation of a bloodthirsty and irrational tyrant. And we did.
“_Mais il est terrible, cet homme_,” the eldest sister gasped after I
had tried to convey the appalling punishment which he might visit upon
Aubrey Herbert, should he of his chivalry and gentleness be persuaded to
surrender to the sisters’ prayers.
“_Vous avez raison, mademoiselle. Il est un Caligule_,” assured her.
“_Un quoi?_” she cried in justifiable bewilderment.
“_Un Néro ... un tyran acharné ... enfin il est un vrai Turque, eh,
voilà!_”
The sisters stared at one another. I think they were fancying
themselves being tossed about the Ægean presently in the harem of a
Flying Dutchman.
“They are much safer where they are, aren’t they, Aubrey?”
“Much safer,” he agreed fervidly.
“But our poor brother,” they moaned. “What will the admiral do to him?”
It was clear that their brother had not succeeded in communicating with
them since his escape.
“If your brother asks your advice what he shall do,” I told them,
“persuade him that the best chance he has will be to tell the exact
truth.”
Perhaps the prospect of persuading Stavro to do this dismayed their
courage. Anyway, all three of them burst into fresh tears, and half an
hour of crisis upon crisis of hysterical lamentation went by before
Vedova was able to get them out of the hotel.
When I looked from my window to watch Vedova in his dingy white naval
interpreter’s uniform shepherding those three woebegone females in black
down the sunny street, it was the last time I was to see him upon an
active errand. In October when I was in Athens he paid me a visit, still
in that dingy white uniform, and I told him a little crossly that he had
no business to be wearing it about the streets of a neutral capital.
“Captain Mackenzie,” he announced, “I must now go into some hospital to
have a bad operation for my kidneys.”
After this I lost sight of him, and as I write these words I do not even
know whether he be still alive. I was to meet many figures as eccentric
and several as comic as Wilfred Vedova before my experience of life in
war time came to an end, but he had one quality which distinguished him
from many of the others: he was brave.
“They may sneer at Vedova,” Heathcote-Smith used to say, “but though
he’s maddening sometimes and gets one into all sorts of trouble by his
idiotic behaviour, he is loyal to those he likes and he _is_ brave. I
don’t believe it’s possible to frighten him. Thompson doesn’t know how
to get the best out of him. If they don’t want him in Tenedos, I can use
him here.”
It frets me that I do not know what ultimately happened to Vedova. I
believe that he was a genuinely sick man, and yet it would have been
impossible not to laugh at that kidney of his. Perhaps it was as well
that he did not work under me in Athens. As it was, I had enough
indiscretions by subordinates to cover up to the best of my ability. Yet
I still regret the two or three more fantastic chapters he might have
added to my memoirs, though I have an uneasy notion that characters like
him are, like those absurd characters one meets in dreams, exquisitely
diverting to the dreamer but incommunicable to others. Even in the case
of the most successful comic figures I have drawn I am always left with
a desire to say to my reader, “Ah, yes, but if only you could have seen
him or heard him or known him as I did.” The trouble with comic
creations is that the reader so seldom helps their reality by imparting
to them some of his own life. Draw a romantic young man or a romantic
young woman, and you may be sure that, however much you may regret the
failure of your pen, you will always have a few readers who will
identify themselves with your creations or inventions or portraits. The
real difference between the flat and the round portrait, of which a good
deal of nonsense has been written lately by literary critics who have
read much but lived hardly at all, is that what is called the flat
portrait must exist without the help of the reader, whereas the round
portrait absorbs from him a certain amount of life. Nobody will feel
inclined to perceive a breath of himself in that figure of an emaciated
Chinese conjurer who has flickered with grotesque gestures across the
sheet of a shadow show.
And in that last comparison I draw nearer to the essential Vedova. One
evening he and I were watching one of those immemorial entertainments
which possessed such a much profounder reality than any of the
cinematographs which by now must almost everywhere have superseded them.
The theatre was a booth hung with blood-red draperies. The audience was
the audience of the old penny gaff. The drama revolved round the
misdoings of a malignant and a turbaned Turk with snaky moustaches and a
tremendous scimitar. The lovers, of course, were Greek. The thrill of
the unsophisticated audience who were seated on those rough benches, not
to cuddle and to hold hands but to see the play, gave a tenseness to the
atmosphere in which during the most exciting moments even the
click-click of the big amber beads would stop and an emotional silence
would prevail. Any discomfiture of the Terrible Turk was always effected
with bizarre humiliations that made the audience shriek with laughter.
Vedova and I were seated in the front row, and once when I turned round
to make some remark to him the light from the sheet was flickering over
his sallow face and glimmering in his pale, protruding globular eyes. As
I gazed at him I could fancy that he was one of those grotesque shadows
waiting to play his part in the drama and that he would presently go
prancing across the sheet to the accompaniment of apprehensive gasps
from the audience, which would turn to shrill laughter when the turbaned
head of him who had struck off the heads of so many noble Greeks was
kicked round the stage at last like the shadow of an ignominious melon.
Vedova was a genuine inhabitant of that fantastic world behind the
sheet: and I look back at him now as I might look back at the antics of
a marionette I had clapped in childhood.
* * * * *
In the late afternoon Aubrey Herbert and I drove over to Port Iero.
Hadkinson had taken charge of Darwin, who was to spend the day in a
Turkish bath and sleep on board the _Omala_, joining the trawler at
daybreak. I remember having a great tussle to climb up the side of the
_Canopus_ with my kit bag. I do not know what is the technical name for
those inadequate ridges for ascending the side of a battleship; but I
have never felt so much like Sisyphus as I did on that blazing
afternoon until a kindly bluejacket leaned over and relieved me of the
kit bag, after which with both hands available for clawing I reached the
deck.
The dinner that night in the _Andania_ is something to which the
survivors of that gallant Thirty-first Brigade may look back as to the
ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. I still have the menu card.
Here it is without accents as printed:
CUNARD LINE.
Brig.-Gen. F. F. Hill, C. B., D. S. O.
and Party.
H. M. T. “Andania,” Mitylene.
August 3rd, 1915.
MENU.
Melon Glace
Creme de Tomate
Red Mullet--Mitylene
Supreme de Volaille--Jeannette
Cotelettes de Mouton a l’Anglaise
Petits Pois
Pommes Croquette
Compote of Victoria Plums
Dessert Cafe
Many of those who sat down to eat that dinner were attending the last
formal occasion of their lives. This was Tuesday evening: on Friday
night Hill’s Brigade was northward bound for Suvla in the darkness,
having been transhipped from their transports into ten small steamers
and trawlers. They arrived in the fatal bay an hour before the dawn of
Saturday: by nightfall those who survived to sleep on Chocolate Hill
had lived through the longest day since they were born.
The guest of honour at dinner was the nomarch, who sat on General Hill’s
right, wriggling and smirking as obsequiously as though an embarrassed
waiter had been included among the guests by mistake. Every officer
present believed that the brigade was going to land somewhere in Asia
Minor. I would not be sure that even General Hill himself knew the real
objective. The group of officers seated near me were anxious not to ask
awkward questions; at the same time they hungered for information.
“Of course, I don’t want to put you in a difficult position, but if you
could give us a hint of the kind of country before us, that would be
something,” one of them opened.
“Well, honestly, I do not know. I do know more or less where you are
going to land; but the country itself is as strange to me as it will be
to you.”
“Is this show to be anything like the landing in April?”
This question came sharply from a young subaltern opposite.
“I should say there was no chance at all of its being anything like
that.”
The mention of the original landing set everybody off, and a number of
questions followed, among which I remember one asked of me in a low
voice by my immediate neighbour, a captain of mature age:
“Tell me; what _is_ the effect of machine-gun fire? I mean to say, are
you aware of each bullet or does it seem more like a hose? How many
bullets, for instance, do you reckon come in a minute?”
I said I had been lucky enough to remain ignorant of the effect of
machine-gun fire at close quarters, but that shrapnel--and then I
hesitated, for I was aware that the officers all around were waiting for
my reply. I decided that whether they thought me a braggart or not the
effect of shrapnel had somehow got to be minimized. And by the time I
had finished with shrapnel it sounded as refreshing as a spray of bay
rum in a hairdresser’s shop on a hot August afternoon.
Presently those round me returned to the details of the landing in
April.
“You all seem to have been reading those dispatches of Sir Ian
Hamilton’s very carefully.”
“Well, my God,” somebody exclaimed, “we’ve had nothing else to read on
the voyage out.”
Incredible though it must sound, the pudding-brained censorship at home
had held up Sir Ian Hamilton’s dispatch about the April landing until
the very day[54] these new troops were sailing, so that the whole of
that voyage from England they had been brooding over the story of it. It
was literally the last news they had read in an English paper.
When it is proposed to abolish the death penalty for cowardice in the
field those in favour of its retention always argue that the ultimate
penalty must be paid by the individual for the sake of the many. If that
argument is to be considered valid, then stupidity must be punished with
equal rigour. The oaf that chose such a moment to publish Sir Ian’s
dispatch of the April landing was probably never even told by anybody
that he was an oaf. He probably never knew that he had done his wretched
bit to help the hostile gods who were fighting against the success of
the Suvla landing.
“So you’ve no idea what kind of country we shall be in?” the elderly
captain repeated.
“Well, wherever you land,” I told him, “you may expect rough and
difficult country.”
“Shall we have any guides?”
I thought of the men for Cheshme sent down to me from Helles by Deedes.
They were hanging about Mytilene now, being paid at the rate of a pound
a week until their services should be required in Asia Minor. I saw no
reason to add to my neighbour’s preliminary anxiety, and I told him I
had been engaging guides during the last fortnight.
“It would help if one could study a map beforehand. One doesn’t like the
responsibility of having to lead one’s men into the unknown. This is a
queer way of fighting a campaign.”
“Success will depend on surprise,” I told him. “We don’t want to repeat
that April business.”
“You think we really shall surprise the Turks this time?”
“I feel fairly confident.”
“No barbed wire entanglements in the sea?”
“I don’t think so.”
He laughed hollowly.
“A jolly thing to look forward to all the way, sweltering across the
Mediterranean.”
And then perhaps he felt he had made too much of the effect on their
imagination of that first dispatch, for presently he was supposing that
they would be kept hanging about in Mytilene, practising embarkation
indefinitely.
“It’ll be a damn shame if they do make us hang about here,” said
somebody.
Indignation at the prospect of being kept waiting became general, but
presently it subsided in the genial ceremony of drinking healths all
round.
I seem to remember a speech from the nomarch in his tinny French. People
were passing round their menu cards to be signed. I felt nervously
exhausted, and a black depression fell upon me. I tried to stretch my
leg, wincing with the effort.
“Game leg?” asked somebody sympathetically.
“Yes, rather.”
“Bad luck!”
I was on the point of passing my menu card round for signatures when I
seemed to hear a voice whisper over my shoulder:
“They will soon be the signatures of ghosts.”
I shivered and put the card in my pocket.
In the ship’s smoking room I had to do my best to evade the questioning
of various officers who had been too far away to hear my replies during
dinner. Luckily Aubrey Herbert began to hold forth on the virtues of the
Turks and drew the attention of the audience away from myself.
“Who’s that fellow?” somebody asked me.
I told him.
“Member for Yeovil? I always thought politicians were rather ticks. He
sounds a pretty good sort. There are a lot of Somerset men in this
division.”
“The Irish Division, eh?”
“Oh, it’s only about forty per cent. Irish.”
Soon after this Aubrey and I left the _Andania_, for we had to be off
early in the morning.
Captain Grant asked me what was the matter, and when I told him
“sciatica” he at once insisted on my taking his bed for to-night. I
protested against putting him to such inconvenience,--but he was firm.
“My dear fellow, I’ve had sciatica myself, and I know what it means.”
And nothing I could say would make him change his mind. The surgeon in
the _Canopus_ was an Anglo-Hellene called Vlasto, and he put my leg
quiet for the night, though I felt groggy when I went on board Strange’s
trawler about five o’clock next morning. Darwin was already looking
wistfully round the pale turquoise expanse of Port Iero for an
esplanade.
“Well, Darwin, enjoy your Turkish bath?”
“Yes, thank you, sir, moderately. Though I found it a bit hot.”
“But that’s the point of a Turkish bath.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that. Only I think they worked it up a bit more
than was quite necessary. I thought somebody had hit me on the head with
a blessed hammer when I went through the door into one room. Still, it’s
what anyone would call very thorough. I suppose those Turks wear turbans
so as to mop up their perspiration. I noticed the fellow inside wore his
towel after the style of a turban.”
The anchor chain rattled. A minute later, while we remained motionless
it seemed upon the glassy water, the wooded slopes of Port Iero began to
glide past. Mytilene was turning to a dream before my eyes, melting away
from me with Heathcote-Smith and Hadkinson, with Vedova and the rare Ben
Hodder, with Our Special Correspondent and the three tearful sisters,
with the kindness of Captain Grant and the music of those pine-scented
gardens, with the exuberant hospitality and good will of the Aristarchi
household, with that so fateful dinner on board the _Andania_; Mytilene
with her figs and olives and pomegranates, her moonlight and starving
refugees, her poets, her beauty, and her dust.
The narrow dark green waterway along which we were gliding, actually
able here and there to touch with a cane the overhanging trees on either
bank, had a Lethean solemnity this August morning. I was wondering sadly
whether I should ever see Lesbos again. Could I have foreseen the comedy
that would be played nearly two years later while sailing in the armed
yacht _Aulis_ up this same dark green channel once again, I believe I
should have had to laugh even upon this August morning.
We had for fellow passengers two midshipmen from the _Canopus_ who were
going to join the _Lord Nelson_. They seemed ridiculously young to be
veterans of the Falkland Islands. One of them who might have been a
fourth-form boy asked me if I would mind his consulting me on a rather
important matter.
“The fact is, I’ve got rather a problem before me, sir.”
“You have?”
“Yes, I’m really in a bit of a difficulty. You see, in my last term at
Osborne, a fellow lent me ten bob, and this fellow’s now the senior
snotty in the _Lord Nelson_. Now do you think he’ll expect me to pay him
back as soon as he sees me?”
“Well, I should think he’d give you time. He’s not likely to want the
money very much at once.”
“You don’t think he will? It’s beastly awkward, isn’t it? Because I
simply haven’t got a halfpenny till I get my pay. I spent an awful lot
on ices and other things last month.”
“Oh, I’m sure he will be quite willing to wait till you get your pay. In
fact, I don’t see what else he can do.”
“It is beastly awkward for me though, sir, isn’t it?”
“Well, I shouldn’t worry too much about it. You couldn’t very well pay
him back from the Falkland Islands.”
“And there is one thing,” the boy continued more hopefully. “I never
asked him to lend me this ten bob. He offered to lend it to me. I think
that makes a difference, don’t you, sir?”
“I do emphatically. Moreover, it shows that the senior snotty in the
_Lord Nelson_ is blessed with a generous nature. I feel quite confident
in prophesying that he will give you time to pay your debt.”
“Thanks very much, sir. I think you’re right.”
“I’m sure I am.”
“You didn’t mind my bothering you about this problem of mine?”
“Not a bit.”
“I was frightfully worried at first when I heard I was going to the
_Lord Nelson_. I thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened
to me in all my life.”
And this boy was one of that ship’s company which had expected to meet
Von Spee’s victorious squadron and die, when, her decks cleared for
action, her gun crews at their stations, the old _Canopus_ steamed into
Port Stanley on that November morning in 1914. I do hope he will be an
admiral one day. I feel sure that he will, and the senior snotty in the
_Lord Nelson_, too.
We reached Tenedos about four o’clock that afternoon. Aubrey Herbert had
intended to go on in the trawler to Imbros, but when he hurried ashore
to obtain authentic news of the state of affairs on the peninsula
somebody told him that the “great push” had begun. He came tearing back
on board in a state of intense excitement just before we were casting
off.
“Look here, this push has started, and they tell me there’s a chance of
getting to Anzac from here. I don’t want to miss any of it. Good-bye!
Good-bye!”
He leaped ashore with his typewriter, followed by his man Christo with
the kit. I never saw him again on this earth. And as I look back to that
hurried parting I seem to see him suddenly engulfed in the roar and dust
of battle. There was in his voice so urgent a note, as the echo of it
comes back to me over the years, that I could almost swear he was
already hearing the thunder of the guns on that tranquil quay in the
shadow of the great castle walls. He had of all the many gallant
gentlemen I have met the most endearing personality, and I have often
compared him in my mind to Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland,
who was killed at the battle of Newbury in 1643, the reading of Matthew
Arnold’s essay on whom was one of the great literary experiences of my
youth. Aubrey Herbert had the same “awkward gait,” and I think his
countenance, too, might be described as of “no intellectual mark” and
certainly, as I fancy it was Philemon Holland who wrote of his pupil, he
too was “of gentlest courtesy, of invincible courage, and of the purest
sincerity. All mankind could not but love and admire him.” And like
Falkland, Aubrey Herbert had in the words of Clarendon a “flowing and
obliging humanity, a primitive simplicity and integrity of life.”
By leaving the trawler at Tenedos Aubrey missed the beginning of the
Anzac attack; but he was in the thick of things as he always wished to
be by Saturday morning, and how he survived these battles on the
peninsula is a marvel. He did survive them, however, and in 1916 he was
in Mesopotamia. He died in England some years after the war was over.
I look at the inscription in his book, “Mons, Anzac, and Kut” and read
in his sprawling hand “from the Author in memory of much kindness and
blue seas”; and turning the pages I find he writes of these days at
Mytilene I have been describing:
It was pleasant once again to be lord of the horizon, to have space
through which to roam, and lovely hills and valleys to ride across
in the careless scented air of the Mediterranean summer, with the
sea shining a peacock-blue through the pines. It is this space and
liberty that men cramped in a siege desire more than the freedom
from the shelling of the enemy’s guns. There was much, too, that
was opéra bouffe in the Islands, that made a not unpleasant
contrast to the general life at Anzac.
I am as reluctant now to leave off writing about Aubrey Herbert as I was
to leave him that afternoon of the fourth of August; but the trawler
glides away from the crystal harbour of Tenedos. It will be idle to wave
to him, for he would not see me if I waved to him across a room, so
shortsighted is he. I watch him shuffling about on that quayside in his
red slippers, peering up into the face of anyone who looks likely to be
able to offer him the hope of a swift passage to Anzac. And if the
likely informant be an officer, he will be staring in bewilderment at
Aubrey’s mock-khaki tie and asking himself if the amethyst lozenges with
which it seems to be infested are the creation of the _mastika_ he has
been drinking instead of tea this afternoon.
It was already dusk when we reached the roadstead of Kephalo, which was
crowded with shipping, portent of the hour now at hand. We dropped
anchor near the _Lord Nelson_, and I watched the two snotties go aboard
their new ship. I tried to see how the creditor greeted his debtor, but
I could not distinguish him in the fading light among the throng on
board. And then for three hungry hours Darwin and I waited on the
trawler, shouting appeals to passing small craft to take us off and land
us anywhere even at K beach, a couple of weary sand-dogged miles from
home. Strange had light-heartedly gone off to dine in the _Lord Nelson_,
never supposing that we should be marooned in his trawler. I forget how
we did eventually manage to reach the tents at G. H. Q.; but I know that
it was an inky night and that I began to wonder if it still was G. H.
Q., so many strange faces were there about and so much altered were the
shapes and arrangement of the tents. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, and I
could have asked myself if that sojourn of three weeks in Mytilene had
been, in fact, a century’s dreaming.
CHAPTER XVIII
BACK AT G. H. Q.
The office tents and mess tents at G. H. Q. were now of the double-fly
Indian variety with an inner lining of dark yellow and consequently much
more comfortable. Nowadays, instead of the various members of the I tent
being huddled together in a burning dust-blown draughty sack and writing
at a rough trestle table, we worked in a comparatively tepid seclusion
that was almost cloistral. As one faced the harbour the first tent on
the left was Colonel Ward’s, in a corner of which sat Graves, now a
happy warrior, compiling with passionate zest what must have been one of
the best summaries of Intelligence kept during the war. In the next tent
adjoining, Ian Smith and I sat opposite to one another, each with a
table and a chair of his own, while beyond us at right angles sat George
Lloyd and Deedes at their tables, Lloyd and Smith constituting I-a,
Deedes and myself I-b. On my right sat an orderly in a perpetual state
of being about to be sent on a message. The next tent along housed Eddie
Keeling and a second cipher officer called Bass. Beyond them was a tent
with eight clerks typing away on those Oliver machines that resemble the
small organs played by romantic St. Cecilias. The old I tent had but one
entrance, and the only way to obtain a breath of air was to reef it at
the bottom. The new tents had four doors with curtains which could be
pulled across and four windows like bird cages. Opposite the line of I
tents was the line of O tents. The result of the arrival of these
shelters had been to break up the sociable diphthong of the OI mess into
separate vowels; but I fancy that one or two people getting on each
other’s nerves had been as much responsible for the diæresis as the
more spacious accommodation. No doubt the reason why it was only now
that we were enjoying these double-fly tents had been the slowness of
their arrival; but the effect of them just before Suvla was of trying to
propitiate the perversity of the gods. It looked as if we were hoping to
kid them that we had made up our minds to remain indefinitely on Kephalo
so that we might tempt them into driving us off it in the wake of a
victorious advance.
The I mess included Maxwell, and much to Lloyd’s indignation dear old
Major Delacombe, whose courteous and amiable presence he still regarded
as a slight on the dignity of the Intelligence, and a serious menace to
its effectiveness. Personally I found the new mess a little depressing.
Deedes and Lloyd both ate as if food were a waste of time and rarely
spoke at meals; Colonel Ward was a sick man and unlikely to last out
here much longer; Maxwell was always on the look out for insults to his
catering; Ian Smith was by nature silent; Eddie Keeling was beginning to
find military life a bore. So conversation at meals chiefly consisted of
my attempts to dam with stories of my own Graves’s unending flow of
consular reminiscence, and this not because I was particularly anxious
to be chattering myself, but because my sense of a flagging audience
insisted on trying to make the piece go. Yet Graves’s stories were all
excellent. I remember one particularly good one about his walking in his
garden when he was consul general at Salonica and of a match box being
flung over the wall and falling at his feet and of his picking it up and
opening it and finding a human ear inside. I say I remember the story,
but of course I do not, for the sequel which had something to do with
brigands I completely forget. What I more perfectly remember is that the
others, who had let Graves’s reminiscences get on their nerves, thought
it was not a dinner-table story. For them that severed ear in a match
box detracted from the flavour of the severed leg of sheep with which we
were teasing the flies at the time. All this sounds as if I were trying
to represent myself superior to human weakness, but it must be
remembered that I had just come back from three entrancing weeks at
Mytilene; the others had been languishing all that while on the sandy
slopes of Kephalo.
There was a small brown volume published in 1866 which I commend to
everybody who enjoys reading as much as I do, by a warm fire, of
dreadful hardships. It is called _Castaway on the Auckland Isles_: “A
narrative of the wreck of the _Grafton_ and of the escape of the crew
after twenty months’ suffering. From the private journals of Captain
Thomas Musgrave.”
Suffering is a mild word for what that shipwrecked crew endured in those
storm-swept islands of the Southern Hemisphere. Finally they managed to
knock together a rickety craft, with which by incredible good luck they
managed to make Invercargill in safety. The craft, however, was so
“tender” that two of the crew had to be left behind in what will seem to
the reader the most real abomination of desolation he has ever imagined.
Yet this is how Captain Musgrave describes the situation of George and
the cook when he came back six weeks later in a cutter to rescue them:
“They have been very much pinched for food since I left them, and on one
occasion they were obliged to catch mice and eat them. Moreover, it
appears that they could not agree, and, strange as it may seem, although
there were only the two of them on the island, they were on the point of
separating and living apart!”
This has remained in my mind as the classic instance of men getting on
each other’s nerves. Even Captain Musgrave, a sober writer, was driven
into using a note of exclamation. Amateurs of shipwrecks and hard
voyages who succeed in finding this little volume in a secondhand book
catalogue will be grateful to me for the advice not to let the occasion
slip.
I am not suggesting that people at G. H. Q. were getting on one
another’s nerves to the extent that George and the cook did; but the
signs of nervous strain were most apparent when I came back from
Mytilene after an absence of three weeks. Even the indomitable optimism
of Sir Ian was having its bad moments. On the fifth of August he was
writing in his diary: “The day before the start is the worst day for a
commander. The operation overhangs him as the thought of another sort of
operation troubles the mind of sick men in hospitals.”
As I read through the last few pages it is coming back to my memory that
I have anticipated the break up of the joint OI mess. On reflection I
remember that this had not taken place before Suvla; but that in trying
to convey the atmosphere of G. H. Q. at this date I should have supposed
it had is significant, and so I shall not cancel what I have written
about that diæresis. The incident which fixes for me with certainty that
the original mess was still in existence is my finding myself seated at
lunch on either the fifth or sixth of August next to one of the new
generals and opposite another of them. The one next to me was Sir
Frederick Stopford,[55] a man of great kindliness and personal charm,
whose conversation at lunch left me at the end of the meal completely
without hope of victory at Suvla. The reason for this apprehension was
his inability to quash the new general opposite, who was one of the
brigadiers in his army corps. This brigadier was holding forth almost
truculently about the folly of the plan of operations drawn up by the
general staff, while Sir Frederick Stopford appeared to be trying to
reassure him in a fatherly way. I looked along the table to where
Aspinall and Dawnay were sitting near General Braithwaite; but they were
out of earshot, and the dogmatic brigadier continued unchallenged to
enumerate the various military axioms which were being ignored by the
Suvla plan of operations. For one thing, he vowed, most certainly he was
not going to advance a single yard until all the divisional artillery
was ashore. I longed for Sir Frederick to rebuke his disagreeable and
discouraging junior; but he was deprecating, courteous, fatherly,
anything except the commander of an army corps which had been entrusted
with a major operation that might change the whole course of the war in
twenty-four hours.
Later that afternoon I told Val Braithwaite about the depressing
conversation at lunch and tried to turn what was now more than a mere
intuition of impending calamity into a feeble joke.
“Stopford, Sitwell, and a brigade major called Bask! Ominous names, Val.
By the way, who was the general opposite to me at lunch?”
He told me, and I only refrain from giving the name because I am relying
entirely on my recollection of the conversation and might be mistaken in
the particular brigadier, for there were so many new faces about during
those two days.
“Well, General Dash is not going to advance a single yard until all the
divisional artillery is ashore. He doesn’t seem to grasp the elementary
principles of this push as we’ve had it explained to us.”
“Oh, well, he’s a four-letter-man, anyway,” said Val loftily; and,
William of Wykeham having disposed of General Dash in a phrase, there
was no more to be said.
Besides the new faces of the various generals and their staffs there had
been additions to the general staff itself. One of these was Major
Hore-Ruthven, V. C.,[56] who was not long afterward severely wounded at
Suvla. He did once give me a momentary conviction that, after all, we
really should take Constantinople. Mention has already been made of the
horses which had been sent out for the staff to ride onward in the wake
of an irresistible advance to the shores of the Golden Horn. Those of
the staff who could ride and some of those who were less able (among the
latter Orlo Williams who took a toss on the fifth of August which
bruised every bone he had) used to exercise these horses during their
brief leisure. One afternoon I saw “Sandy” Hore-Ruthven riding back into
the lines. He was wearing Jodhpur breeches, and the picture of him on
that horse against the sky line of a sand dune remains in my memory like
a figure of supreme sculpture. At the moment, it was seeming to me that
nobody could look so well as that on a horse and not be destined to ride
on to some historical event, that so much ease and grace of bearing
could not be wasted merely on finding a few hundred yards fit for a
gallop among the desiccated scrub and herbage of the promontory during
the first day of that pregnant but so inscrutable August.
Another new face was Captain Vitale, an Italian officer, to whom Orlo
Williams, who had him under his wing, made haste to introduce me. Vitale
had been in Egypt and was at the stage of speaking English correctly and
even fluently but of not understanding more than one word in ten that
were said to him. Before my return he had only been able to speak his
own language with Orlo Williams and Eddie Keeling, and he welcomed my
Anglo-Neapolitan accent, for he was himself from Campania. He was
greatly worried about his position at G. H. Q., having been sent out
here rather casually to be a liaison officer between General Cadorna and
Sir Ian Hamilton. Sir Ian had not received the news of his appointment
with much enthusiasm, and he asked me to explain for him how
uncomfortable he felt in obtruding himself at such a time. I took an
opportunity to lay poor Vitale’s embarrassment before Sir Ian, who said
he had no objection at all to his being at G. H. Q., though he would
have welcomed one of Cadorna’s Divisions a good deal more heartily.
Vitale felt, too, that the other members of the staff were inclined to
look askance at his presence. I assured him it was only the suspicious
shyness of the Englishman which gave him that impression of coldness. I
did not add that probably some of the manner was due to the
Englishman’s dread of being bored by a foreigner, through having to
exert himself by talking less indistinctly than usual and about more
general topics than he cares to discuss. Poor Vitale really suffered
acutely from our insular coldness. I remember his going over to visit
French G. Q. G. and his coming back full of smiles and sunlight like a
child who has been to a jolly picnic to say how much he had enjoyed his
day at Helles. The _déjeuner_ had been most _simpatico_. Glasses had
been raised to Italy. Everybody had drunk his health and expressed his
pleasure at the visible token he offered that Italy was fighting beside
her sister nation. For quite an hour or two after he had come back from
that lunch Vitale was ready to believe that perhaps Italians were
inclined to misjudge the arrogance of the French. Later in the autumn
Vitale was taken seriously ill; but he recovered, and in the summer of
1917 he was appointed military attaché to the Italian legation in
Athens. His brother was a distinguished sinologue, professor of Chinese
at one of the universities. This brother some time after the war met his
death in a tragic way, being shot in the Galleria at Naples by a man who
was aiming at somebody else.
The French liaison officers got on well at G. H. Q. They all spoke
English fluently, and one of them, Captain Bertier de Sauvigny, knew
exactly what to say to please Englishmen. Not that it required any
special tact on his part, for he was a man of the world and a member of
that small and exclusive society which has somehow managed to preserve
through the Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Empire, the Commune,
and the Republic a flavour of the old régime. It was felt at G. H. Q.
that Bertier was the right sort of person. Bertier recognized that the
English set the mundane standard for sport and men’s clothes, and he
allowed to both the importance they deserved in civilization. He could
not prove at G. H. Q. his _savoir faire_ either over clothes or sport,
but the general feeling was that he would not tuck a white tie under the
wings of his collar or pepper a beater or ride over hounds. Val
Braithwaite would not have hesitated to introduce him to William of
Wykeham: Powell would have felt safer with him at a shoot than with a
poet. As one brother officer said to me, “When you do meet a gentleman
in France, it’s extraordinary what a good fellow he can be,” and as
another brother officer declared, “What I like about Bertier is that
you’d hardly think he was a Frenchman at all if he didn’t wear those
boots.” No, even Bertier had not succeeded in getting the right kind of
field boots. However, perhaps the cut and colour of his boots warmed up
his English colleagues with a consciousness of their own tolerance.
“Morning, Bertier!” and behind the sincere geniality of the greeting
there was perhaps an intention to help him feel more at ease about those
boots, as if he were being assured that it was not he but the French
bootmakers who were being blamed for them, and that in spite of wearing
the wrong boots none of his English colleagues suspected him of being
likely to commit any solecisms in mufti.
Of the other two French liaison officers Lieutenant Pelliot was a savant
and Lieutenant La Borde was a bluff burly fair man who spoke English so
perfectly and who had so completely the manner of a stout-hearted Rugby
forward that any failure of cordiality toward him would have had to be
ascribed not to his nationality but to a feeling that his school, though
good at games, was otherwise not quite in the first rank.
It would be absurd to pretend that the general staff credited French G.
Q. G. at Helles with as much military ability as themselves. They did
not. They regarded French fighting much as Dr. Johnson regarded a
woman’s preaching. Like a dog walking on his hind legs it was not done
well, but they were surprised to find it done at all. The French and
English were never intended by nature to fight side by side in joint
expeditions. As early as the Third Crusade you get this attitude of
mutual contempt for one another’s method of warfare. At Gallipoli,
chiefly owing to the personal esteem in which Sir Ian Hamilton held
General Gouraud, this contempt was not at first so obvious; but after
General Gouraud was wounded and left the peninsula it was less carefully
concealed. No doubt it was the same before Sebastopol; and as for
Salonica, why, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, the chronicler of the _Itinerarium
Regis Richardi_, might have been serving on the Intelligence at Army
Headquarters, in such a similar spirit of criticism does he write about
the French at Acre.
I feel that this chapter halts. It seems more than usually difficult to
put together a clear portrait of anybody during these days just before
Suvla. Perhaps we were all so much preoccupied with the future that the
present was blurred. Luckily I had plenty of work to do in getting my
Newgate Calendar into order. I had returned from my stay in Mytilene
with a mass of new material, but it now numbered nearly four hundred
names. Every brief biography had to be checked and all the papers
connected with it cross-indexed with the papers of other cases.
But there was one figure who during that time did make a most definite
impression. This was Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey,[57] the
Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense, to become next year
Secretary to the War Cabinet, and the year after Secretary to the
Imperial War Cabinet, the only man throughout the war for whom I never
heard anybody suggest a better substitute. He had arrived here about the
thirtieth of July, having been sent out by the Prime Minister instead of
Mr. Winston Churchill. This change of plans had been a severe
disappointment to Sir Ian Hamilton who had hoped for much from Mr.
Churchill’s personal survey of the situation. So when Colonel Hankey
arrived instead he was not too cordial. His attitude may be judged from
an excerpt from his diary on July 29th:
Hankey is now busy going over the peninsula. I have not seen much
of him. A G. S. officer has been told off to help him along and
see that he does not get into trouble. I am not going to dry nurse
him.
This sounds ungracious; but it must be remembered that it was the
fashionable thing at this date to sneer at Johnny Hamilton and his
staff. The feeling at Kephalo was that France among the heads would
always be right, and Gallipoli always wrong. One or two of the King’s
Messengers had curried favour at G. H. Q. St Omer by their tales of G.
H. K. Kephalo. The state of mind in France is well expressed by Sir
Henry Wilson, who had noted in his diary on July 17th that he had just
given Foch his latest Dardanelles news and told him that he thought a
success there would be a disaster. They were obsessed in France with the
pathetic notion that they were only prevented from immediately breaking
through the German lines because the Tenth, Eleventh, and Thirteenth
Divisions of Kitchener’s army had been sent out to Gallipoli. Yet
earlier in the year Sir Henry Wilson had been writing of “Kitchener’s
ridiculous armies,” three divisions of which were now to make the
difference between success and failure in France. Moreover, about the
same time as Colonel Hankey arrived at Gallipoli there arrived what Sir
Ian calls a professional gossip from G. H. Q., France. As Sir Ian has
withheld his name, I shall not give it here. But he was an exasperating
and discouraging influence and a mischief maker of the first water.
Ashmead-Bartlett’s visit to London had given everybody at G. H. Q. the
idea that the press was hopelessly prejudiced against the whole
operation. There was creeping into the minds of all on Kephalo the
feeling that they were in the wrong theatre out here. None of them
supposed that the war was going to last for more than three years yet
and that he would have plenty of time to distinguish himself elsewhere
should the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force dissolve. His military
future now seemed to depend entirely on the outcome of Suvla. It was
not that Colonel Hankey was regarded as an enemy of the new landing; but
his visit of inspection for the Prime Minister was considered an
infringement of professional privileges by an amateur. However, he was
not looked upon as a serious danger, for nobody supposed that this
little marine, who for so many years had been out of uniform that he
used to admit how strange he felt in it, was likely to achieve much one
way or the other. His bald bulging benevolent head, his slow quiet voice
and cautious movements seemed to belong to a man dug out from an
obscurity and retirement even more profound than that of some of the
officers of the new divisions. Colonel Hankey was, as a matter of fact,
still two years on the sunny side of forty when he visited Gallipoli,
but I always heard him alluded to as if he were trembling on the verge
of eighty. If sagacity had counted he might easily have been credited
with four score, but I am afraid that nobody thought him particularly
sagacious when he first arrived. It was probably the slowness of his
gait, the gravity of his expression, the quiet earnest modulation of his
voice which made him seem so old.
My own meeting with him came about through my longing to possess a set
of marine buttons, which not even yet had I been able to satisfy.
Hearing that a dugout marine colonel who had had something to do with
the Prime Minister was roaming round the peninsula, I determined to
approach him on the subject of buttons and extract from him a promise to
send me a set when he got back to England.
“Buttons?” Colonel Hankey gently echoed when I had entered his tent on
Kephalo and asked him if by any chance he had with him a spare set he
could make over to me. “Well, I’m the last person to apply to for
buttons. But before I go back I’ll let you have the set I’m wearing if
you can find any kind of substitute for my own. Any kind,” he went on
with a grave and courteous kindliness of assurance that seemed to imply
he would accept some pebbles from the beach if anybody could bore the
necessary holes to sew them on his service jacket.
“I say, that’s really most awfully good of you.”
“Not at all. I’ll be only too delighted to help you in any way.”
And then my face fell, for eying his uniform covetously I saw that his
buttons were the spherical buttons of a Blue Marine, whereas I was a Red
Marine, or perhaps I should say a Pink Marine, being, after all, but a
pale edition of the genuine article. I remember somebody’s once asking,
“Oh, were you one of Eddie Marsh’s marines?” in the same way as old
regulars talked about the new army as Fred Karno’s army or laughed at
the A. S. C. as Ally Sloper’s cavalry.
“I’m afraid you’re marine artillery,” I sighed. “So your buttons won’t
do for me.”
“You’re an R. M. L. I. man?”
“Well, I’m really only a temporary officer. Just R. M.”
“In that case I don’t see why you shouldn’t wear R. M. A. buttons with
as much propriety as light infantry ones.”
I told him I did not feel convinced that it would not be a breach of
marine etiquette to do so, and he laughed gently.
“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s so long since I wore uniform that
these things have come to seem tremendously unimportant. I really don’t
see why you shouldn’t have my buttons, and I’m going to bequeath them to
you. But when I get back to London I’ll make inquiries and send you out
a correct set.” He was mopping his big benevolent forehead and
struggling out of a Sam Browne belt after a long toilsome day on the
peninsula in uniform of a khaki that was meant for a cooler climate in
summer than Gallipoli. Supposing that he wanted to rest before dinner, I
thanked him for his kindness and was going to leave him to himself when
he asked me to sit down and have a talk.
“Now, look here,” he began, fixing me with that earnest regard of his,
“I want you to tell me quite frankly what you think about the situation
out here.”
Hankey-Pankey they used to call him at Versailles when he was holding
together the Peace Conference, and if he managed to impress and charm
the great men there as easily as he charmed an unimportant subaltern of
his own corps at a critical hour in the destiny of their country I am
not surprised by his nickname, though let me add it was an affectionate
nickname. As I have said, he was the only man of mark in the long
procession of notables that moved across the stage of the war for whom I
never heard anybody propose a substitute or even an understudy.
“And look here,” Colonel Hankey continued still more earnestly, his bald
head--or was it not baldness, but a high bulging forehead?--becoming to
my fancy more amply domed every instant. “I want you, when you are
talking to me quite frankly, to remember that you are not talking to the
average soldier man. I have imagination.”
Set down like that, such a remark may sound pretentious, but the reader
must have a little imagination himself and supply the tone of gentle
reassurance in which it was uttered.
“First of all, do you think Sir Ian Hamilton is the right man to command
out here?”
I looked at him, I suppose, suspiciously.
“I know such a question will sound odd, and I shall perfectly understand
if you tell me that you would rather not answer it. But I have a theory
that one only arrives anywhere near the truth by trying to reach it
through all kinds of channels.”
I told him that for me to attempt to estimate Sir Ian Hamilton’s
military capacity for the task before him was out of the question.
“For instance,” I said, “for me to express an opinion about the
comparative advantages of Bulair and Suvla for a landing would be
ridiculous. But I have a definite opinion about the ultimate aim of
this expedition, and the fact that Sir Ian believes so passionately in
the vital importance of taking Constantinople prejudices me at once in
favour of him as commander-in-chief. Then again he has always been
opposed to conscription, and I am so strongly against conscription that
if we have to use it to win the war I shall consider the war lost. It
seems to me that if this expedition fails it will fail because Sir Ian
has been set an impossible task, not because he has made mistakes. If
the expedition fails, many will blame Winston Churchill; but they will
blame him for every reason except the one reason for which it might be
possible to blame him, and that is for carrying it through in the teeth
of obtuse and unimaginative opposition.[58] It may, I think, be possible
for a future historian to say that, though Winston Churchill was
entirely right about the strategic necessity to take Constantinople, he
was wrong not to perceive that everybody else in high position and power
at home had no will to make the attempt succeed. And I think if I were
to criticize Sir Ian it would be because he has to some extent done the
same in the field as Winston Churchill at his desk. He has, I think,
sometimes been too optimistic about the second-best with which he has
been provided when he should have resigned rather than allow this
expedition to be treated as a sideshow. He is perhaps too much aware
that he is regarded with suspicion for what one may call the Celt in
him, and perhaps that leads him to accentuate too much the man of mere
action. I doubt if he has forced with enough pertinacity the larger
issues of this expedition upon the people at home. He has left that job
to Winston Churchill, who in his turn has concentrated too much in his
persuasiveness of the simplicity of the naval and military operation.
In his heart Sir Ian must know that Lord Kitchener has no grasp at all
of the situation out here, but he cannot bring himself to tell him as
much in so many words. All our leaders suffer from an exaggerated
sensitiveness over the feelings of other leaders. In fact, the whole
nation suffers from an excess of politeness. We are afraid of hurting
the feelings of the French, and so we compromise. Either it is vital to
force the Dardanelles or it is not. If it is, then this must not be
regarded as a sideshow. But I can’t help feeling that Sir Ian, rather
than hurt Lord Kitchener’s feelings, is inclined to acquiesce in its
being regarded as a sideshow. I have heard it said cynically here that
somebody--I shall not mention a name, but you will guess to whom I
refer--that somebody has so worked things that if the expedition succeed
he will have all the credit and that if it fail Sir Ian will have all
the blame. That it should be possible for an acute observer to say this
may indicate a line of criticism; but my own belief is that Sir Ian with
marvellous troops has achieved the impossible, and I doubt if any other
general could have done it, for whatever may be the feeling now, due to
hope deferred, there is no doubt that Sir Ian did look like a leader,
sound like a leader, and act like a leader last April.”
“And this new landing?”
“It ought to come off. It will be a complete surprise to the enemy.”
“You don’t sound very positive.”
“It’s nothing but a presentiment, and I’d rather not argue from
presentiments.”
This of course is only the gist of what I said to Colonel Hankey. It
represents what I thought at the time and it represents what I think
now. Doubtless during the several talks I had with him both before and
after the Suvla landing I said a lot more, for every time I talked with
him he gave me fresh hope that he would when he got back to England put
Gallipoli into proper perspective. It was useless, however, for me to
try to persuade the general staff that his visit out here was likely to
help the future of the expedition when he got home. They wrapped
themselves up in prejudice and would not hear a word in his favour.
There comes back to me the expression on Val Braithwaite’s face as I met
him walking along and flourishing the draft of a telegram.
“Listen to this,” he spluttered indignantly. “‘For the Prime Minister.
Am getting astride of the situation here. Suggest staying on for few
more days. Hankey.’ Getting astride of the situation!” Val repeated
scornfully, for the metaphor was too much for his Wykehamist sense of
what was permissible language in a military telegram.
“But the phrase is quite an ordinary one, Val.”
“Yes, it might be all right for that fellow Guy in your book, but dash
it! Getting astride of the situation! Why, it sounds ridiculous, and
anyway, how can he know whether he has got astride of the situation, as
he calls it?”
“Well, I think you’re all making a mistake in being so prejudiced
against him.”
But Val would not listen, and went snorting off to have the offensively
“affected” phrase enciphered.
Sir Ian Hamilton, who had started by being as much prejudiced against
Colonel Hankey as anybody at G. H. Q., learned to respect that
sagacious, somewhat grubby, clear-eyed, bald, big-headed little man, for
when he left Kephalo on the nineteenth of August he wrote in his diary:
Hankey ... has been a real help. The Staff has never quite cottoned
to the chiel amang us takin’ notes, but that is, I think, from a
notion that it is not loyal to Lord K. to press the P. M.’s P. S.
too closely to their bosom. From my personal standpoint, it will be
worth anything to us if, amidst the flood of false gossip pouring
out by this very mail to our Dardanelles Committee, to the Press,
to Egypt, and to London Drawing Rooms, we have sticking up out of
it, even one little rock in the shape of an eyewitness.
I only wish that, when Colonel Hankey passed on from Mr. Asquith to be
the confidant of Mr. Lloyd George, he had been sent out to take a look
at the state of affairs in Athens about the middle of 1916. It would not
have been my fault if after such a visit the same hesitating course had
been steered by Great Britain through the cross-currents of the Balkan
situation.
CHAPTER XIX
THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SUVLA LANDING
At half-past three on the afternoon of the sixth of August the thunder
of the guns on Helles travelling across the clear air to Kephalo
proclaimed that the general attack ordered there had begun. This was
intended to occupy the Turks in the Southern Zone and prevent their
moving northward to reinforce the defenders above Anzac, where the
Australians and New Zealanders launched their attack at half-past five.
The gunfire pulsated on the still air, and by seven o’clock the whole
length of the long line of tawny cliffs was twinkling with starry
shells. All through the afternoon the troops of the Eleventh Division
had been embarking in the new armour-plated motor lighters that from
their appearance were known as beetles. Ten thousand troops embarked at
Imbros; six thousand were on the way from Mudros. From Mytilene four
thousand more were steering northward into the unknown out of the
unknowable; for half an hour after the last trawler had left Port Iero,
_Canopus_ had deliberately fouled the cable so that no news of their
departure could be signalled from enemy agents in Lesbos.
The evening was brilliantly clear: the sea was calm. About half-past
seven I stood above the G. H. Q. camp and looked down across the waters
of Kephalo to where on the level land beyond K beach hundreds of
evacuated tents clustered like ghosts in the twilight. The roadstead was
thronged with shipping; and the smoke of many funnels belching into the
clear air and making turbid a sky slashed with the crimson of a long
slow sunset suggested the glimpse of a manufacturing town in a hollow
of the Black Country beheld from some Staffordshire height. One after
another the ships moved out of the harbour: great liners like the
_Minneapolis_ with the newspaper correspondents on board, destroyers,
trawlers, beetles, battleships, and many others. By half-past seven the
roadstead was empty. The metallic blues and greens and blood reds in the
water had turned to a cold dull gray. Eastward the ever increasing surge
and thunder of the guns: here an almost horrible quiet. At ten o’clock
the new landing was due to begin. Hardly anybody spoke at dinner. Jan
Smith had gone over to Suvla, so George Lloyd, Deedes and I drew lots
for the three shifts of sitting up for Intelligence signals. Lloyd drew
ten to one, Deedes four to seven, and I to my great pleasure the middle
shift from one to four. This was the time, we reckoned, when we should
be hearing of important events at Suvla. By now the heavy presentiment
of failure had vanished. I was feeling positive that during my shift
great news would come through which I should remember to my dying day. I
was too much excited to go to bed, and from ten till twelve I worked at
that absurd memorandum on the Müller family in Mytilene, and my proposed
scheme for their elimination. At midnight I went across with George
Lloyd to the O tent, where we drank cocoa. No news of any kind had yet
arrived, but we told ourselves that we really must not expect any quite
as soon as this. Lloyd was listless and downhearted. I urged him to go
to bed, such a headache had he, and as I walked with him to his tent he
told me how much he hated being here and doing nothing while this push
was on.
“I’m doing no good at G. H. Q. to anybody,” he said bitterly. “If I were
with my regiment I should feel more respect for myself.”
It was difficult to reassure George Lloyd when he succumbed to these
self-searching moods of despair. I left him and walked back to the O
tent after telling the orderly in I to bring across any telegrams. By
one o’clock there was nobody left in the O tent except Guy Dawnay,
Cecil Aspinall, Barttelot, and Cipher Major Orlo Williams with his code
books. Sir Walter Barttelot was a Coldstreamer who had joined the staff
while I was at Mytilene. He was a quiet attractive man, the head of one
of the most ancient families in England. His father had been killed in
South Africa: he himself was to be killed in 1918. I felt that
depression was setting in here under the strain of waiting for news, and
I tried to amuse them by enacting a series of imaginary scenes between
various members of the general staff. Apparently I was successful in
being funny, for Orlo Williams told me the other day that one of his
memories of Suvla night was trying not to laugh, because in the bruised
condition of his bones after falling from his horse two days before
every laugh was an agony. However, I could not go on being funny
indefinitely, and we were soon sitting anxiously waiting for news.
A telegram arrived from Bulgaria. I do not recall what it said, but
after looking up this date in Colonel Napier’s[59] book _A Military
Attaché in the Balkans_ I surmise that it may have given some account of
Sir Valentine Chirol’s visit to Serbia with Mr. Gregory[60] of the
Foreign Office and of their pessimistic departure from Sofia to
Bucharest. The sixth of August was the day when the Tsar of Russia, the
King of England, the King of Italy, and the President of the French
Republic, each sent a note to Serbia appealing to her to surrender
Macedonia to Bulgaria for the common good. How futile such heavily
gilded diplomacy now seems! To force the Dardanelles was the way to keep
Bulgaria from signing that military convention with Germany, Austria,
and Turkey, which was now reported imminent. Possibly Colonel Napier,
the military attaché at Sofia, telegraphed to know what the situation
was at Gallipoli. It seems to be coming back to my memory that this was
the gist of his telegram, for I seem to hear Aspinall saying with a
curt laugh that he should very much like to be able to tell him. Anyway,
the telegram from Bulgaria was tossed aside to be dealt with in the
morning.
A few minutes later another telegram came in about stores; but there was
no word of any landing by the Tenth and Eleventh divisions of the Ninth
Army Corps. Then at last a signal from Anzac was brought in. Aspinall
tore it open and flung it down on the table, frowning. I read it:
When does the next hospital ship come? This one is full.
A picture of the wounded men lying on the beach under the stars of that
dark night, whose darkness was so vital to the success of the operation,
must have been in the minds of all of us. I was longing to do something
and suggested taking the telegram along to General Birrell, the Director
of Medical Services. His tent was easy to find, for he had managed to
secure for himself one of those double-fly Indian tents, which were a
different shape from the hot cones in which the rest of us slept.
“Who’s there?” came the general’s muffled voice as I stood in the
entrance and waved my lantern at him.
“I have a cable from Anzac, General. It says: ‘When does the next
hospital ship come? This one is full.’”
I heard the breath of General Birrell, whose conversation with me about
books in an earlier chapter may be remembered, coming in puffs of
indignation from the bedclothes.
“Tell them General Birrell does not know,” he answered fretfully.
“I really cannot send a signal like that,” I told him. “I’m sitting up
to take the Intelligence telegrams. I have nothing to do with any
others. If you wish to send such an answer, sir, you must really send it
yourself.”
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Close on two o’clock.”
“And do you mean to tell me I’ve been woken up at such an hour to answer
a question like that? I never heard of anything so completely ridiculous
in my life.”
“Ridiculous or not, you must either get up and answer this telegram
yourself, or let it go unanswered till morning.”
“It’s perfectly abominable,” the old gentleman groaned.
“Well, I can’t stay any longer,” I said. “Do you wish me to go back to
the operations tent and tell Colonel Aspinall that you resent being
woken up to answer stupid questions?”
“I feel most strongly that I have been woken up in a totally unnecessary
way,” General Birrell insisted.
“I expect they are feeling rather strongly about things on the beach at
Anzac just now.”
“But what can I do? I haven’t the least idea when the next hospital ship
is coming to Anzac.”
“Really, General, I must ask you to take this telegram without further
discussion. If you do not intend to get out of bed and send a reply, you
can initial it and put the time it was shown to you. Then I will take it
back to the O tent.”
“Well, I suppose I’d better send a reply myself.”
I heard a creaking of elderly limbs as the D. M. S. got out of bed.
After fumbling about with an electric torch he managed to cover his long
lean figure with a woolen dressing gown. Then he lighted his lantern and
snatching the telegram from me he started off to send his reply. I left
him threading his way by lantern light among the tent ropes and
grumbling to himself as the night air played round his ankles.
When I got back to the O tent I found that Cecil Aspinall after giving
moustaches and beards to all the ladies in the weekly illustrated papers
was now drawing wooden lady after wooden lady of his own invention on
sheets of foolscap. Guy Dawnay made himself some cocoa. I sat listlessly
reading stale _Tatlers_ and _Sketches_. The matter in them seemed almost
as fatuous as poor old muddle-headed General Birrell.
Two o’clock went by without further news. Guy Dawnay and I walked out
to listen for firing northward. The night was utterly still. General
Birrell had gone back to his disturbed sleep. Over the peninsula the
blood-red horn of the waning moon just risen was clawing up at the sky.
A rocket flamed on the horizon. A ship was hooting mournfully while it
waited to be allowed in through the Kephalo boom. At half-past two
somebody in the O tent produced a bottle of Horlick’s Malted Milk
Lozenges, and we all sat sucking them in a melancholy. Aspinall must
have drawn forty ladies by now, each one becoming a little more wooden
than her predecessor. I tried to cheer up things by reading out my
scheme for kidnapping the Müller family. Guy Dawnay suggested that I
should submit a scheme for kidnapping some of the brigadiers of the new
divisions.
“Good God!” Aspinall rapped out suddenly. “They must be ashore by now.”
A telegram came in to say the fouled cable had been mended. That brigade
and a half from Mytilene should be nearly off Suvla at this moment.
At half-past three I went outside again to listen for gunfire. The moon,
clear of the mirk of the peninsula heights by now, was shining very
yellow in the eastern sky. But there was no news yet of the Ninth Army
Corps, though the first gray of dawn was perceptible.
Then at ten minutes to four an orderly came in with a signal.
“At last,” cried Aspinall, tearing open the envelope. Then, “Damn!” he
groaned, tossing the piece of paper down.
“Bamboozled 800 punctured,” said the message.
It was only a code message for the quartermaster general’s department,
but it seemed as if some mocking demon had chosen those two words to
tell us that the Suvla landing had failed.
“But they must be ashore by now,” said Aspinall miserably.
It was now four o’clock and time to wake Deedes for the shift from four
to seven. But before I woke him I ran down under the paling sky to the
signal tents and asked the sergeant in desperation if there was still no
news from Suvla.
“Only this, sir,” he said, “from the signaller on the new landing. It
was in reply to us, for it seemed so funny not hearing anything from
over there.”
He wrote out on a form that the signaller of the new landing reported he
could now hear hot musketry and the sound of bursting shells behind him.
I hurried back with this message to the O tent.
“Well, they’ve landed anyway,” said Guy Dawnay grimly.
“Yes, they’ve landed,” Aspinall agreed. “But this is what we ought to
have heard three hours ago.”
I left them to discuss for the twentieth time what could have been
holding up the operation and went along to wake Deedes, whose tent was
at the top of the lines. The moon was now much higher, a frail silver
slip of a moon turning to ivory in the pale eastern sky. The little wind
of dawn was lisping through the withered herbage and ruffling the sand
here and there with cat’s-paws. The guns had started to growl again. I
found Deedes already in his dressing gown, and as he moved nattily about
his tent he would stop from time to time to listen if the kettle on his
spirit lamp was beginning to boil. In the glimmering twilight of dawn he
looked more than ever like a pious church-worker getting up to attend
early service. I told him about the disappointments of the night. He
made no comment but advised me to get off to bed. So I left him and
walked down through the rows of tents which stood out against the wan
air of dawn as black as the night fast receding into the west.
It was a long time before I fell sound asleep, for I kept waking to
clutch at phantoms. There was no vestige of hope left in my mind that
the Suvla landing could now succeed. I felt as if I had watched a system
crash to pieces before my eyes, as if I had stood by the deathbed of an
old order. The guns I could hear might have been a growling that
foretold the murderous folly of the Somme. The war would last now until
we had all turned ourselves into Germans to win it. An absurd phrase
went singing through my head. “We have lost our amateur status
to-night.” It was foolish for me who had been old enough to appreciate
the muddle of the South African War to go on believing in the practical
value of the public-school system. I had really for long mistrusted it,
but since coming out here I had fallen once more under its spell as I
might have fallen under the spell of a story by Rudyard Kipling. Yes,
the war would go on now. I must remember to write home to-morrow for
more woolen underclothes. We should be here indefinitely now. Queer that
a man like Sir Ian Hamilton, so perfectly cut out to ride into
Constantinople at the head of a victorious army, should be thwarted of
his hope. He would appear so Wellingtonian, charging up Achi Baba on a
black horse and looking back over his shoulder to wave on ... the
picture faded as I woke up fully again ... and then I trembled once more
upon the verge of sleep with a vision of Sir Ian Hamilton standing
beside a drum, the smoke of battle beyond his slim eager form, a field
marshal’s baton grasped tightly in one hand, the injured hand by his
side lending an added dignity to his appearance like Nelson’s missing
arm ... the smoke of battle ... and along the horizon the domes and
minarets of Constantinople. People years hence would stare at the heroic
picture and never know what the man himself would have suffered before
he could stand proudly up like that as a conqueror ... once more I was
fully awake, and that heroic battle piece had faded. There were no domes
and minarets along the horizon. There was only the long line of tawny
cliffs and the sun fast overtaking a frail moon in the bland sky of
morning. There were only the flies wandering over my mosquito net, and
an overwhelming desire to sleep while the day was still cool. Last night
must somehow be separated from any other night by sleep. It had been
too profoundly moving an experience to melt irritably into another dusty
day. It must be enshrined in sleep and remembered all the rest of my
life as a dream in which I had beheld so many other people’s dreams
topple over and crash. And away in London they would be getting up
presently, unaware that during the night the old London had vanished.
I had intended to take the opportunity of this chapter to narrate the
long tale of misfortune which culminated in the disaster of Suvla; but I
should add nothing to what has already been told. Those who wish to see
the hostile gods marshalled against the Mediterranean Expeditionary
Force are recommended to read the first hundred pages of General
Aspinall-Oglander’s account of the Military Operations at Gallipoli. The
reader who follows my advice may picture the future historian sitting
that night of the sixth of August in the operations tent and giving
beards and moustaches to all the pretty ladies in the illustrated
weeklies. Probably the last picture that crossed his mind was that of
himself years later sitting down to write the history of that
expedition, the objective of which was to be finally lost during those
three hours he was giving ladies beards or drawing beauties of his own
invention. He was not a historian then but a heartbroken staff officer
who was realizing that all his work during the last month was going to
count for nothing.
I slept on through the morning, and at lunch in the mess tent I found
the depression less general than I expected. The sound of gunfire was
ceaseless. In the great vacuum of news from Suvla, Deedes received word
that Stavro Vassilaki hiding among the hills of Imbros had been
recaptured and was now again under arrest. It was decided that I should
walk over to the rest camp on Sunday and examine him.
CHAPTER XX
AFTER SUVLA
Vitale accompanied me to the rest camp on that heavy hot Sunday. I was
feeling ill, and the soft seaweed-matted sand seemed endless in its
bistre monotony. The feet of a camel would have contented me: I did not
demand the wings of a dove. I do not remember clearly what we talked
about; but probably Vitale asked me once more to tell him quite frankly
if his presence at G. H. Q. was resented, and if he did, I would have
assured him, as we went pounding along through the loathsome softness of
the sand, that any lack of warmth he had fancied in the staff’s attitude
was due entirely to the notorious English reserve. He would have told me
how much embarrassed he felt whenever he sent telegrams in code to
Italian Headquarters and how much he hoped that people out here would
feel certain that he should send no information they would not wish to
be sent. And in telling me this he would have left on my mind an
impression of sincerity and delicacy, which, before he was to be struck
down with a temporary paralysis on this very road we were now walking,
was to impress equally his brother officers, so that all at G. H. Q.
were sorry to lose him when he was invalided back to Italy, not to
recover his health for many months.
The rest camp was not to be recognized as the same place of even a month
ago when I had pursued hence Pascalides across the roadstead; as for the
straggling little hamlet of two months ago through which Orlo Williams
and I had passed on our way to Panaghia, that was no longer imaginable.
Its idyllic peace and Arcadian squalor had given way to rows of tents
and huts and a noisy procession of traffic. At the provost marshal’s
office I inquired where the prisoner was lodged and was directed to a
barbed-wire entanglement on the left of the wide central road of the
camp, along which stirring up the dust went backward and forward a
ceaseless stream of men and mules and carts. Four guards with rifles and
fixed bayonets stood at the four corners of this wired enclosure, in the
middle of which was the canvas prison cell of Stavro Vassilaki. One of
the guards stepped forward and unfastened the high wire gate. He had the
air of a keeper admitting me to the den of a wild animal.
“Do you wish me to be present while you examine the prisoner, sir?” he
inquired in the confidential voice of a butler ascertaining one’s taste
in wine.
“No, I think I’ll probably get out again with my life,” I told him.
He grinned broadly, and then feeling that perhaps his smile had widened
beyond the mark of perfect respect he gave me an extra ceremonious
salute as he stepped aside for me to pass within.
The change in the appearance of the wretched Vassilaki since I had last
seen him in the Hotel Grande Bretagne at Mytilene shocked me. Nothing at
all was now left of the self-confident, raucous, flashily dressed, oily
American Greek. Instead of the bouncing dago I saw a dejected creature
seated on an empty petroleum tin, his head bowed between his knees. In
one corner of the stifling tent was a horrible-looking loaf of bread, in
another a pannikin of water in which were floating a dozen drowned
flies. He was dressed in trousers and shirt much torn and soiled. One of
the buttons at the back of his trousers was missing, and the lopsided
appearance of his braces added a last touch to his air of miserable
caducity. His bearing and attire were melancholy enough, but his face
when he looked up at me was worse. He had not shaved for several days.
His cheeks were scratched with brambles. His eyes were ringed. The
sweat had dried upon his dusty cheeks. His unbrushed hair was full of
bits of twigs and withered herbage. His lips were cracked and blistered.
On seeing who it was he jumped up and effusively offered me the
petroleum tin, on which I balanced myself while he squatted on the
ground opposite.
“Well, Vassilaki, you’ve got yourself into a nice mess.”
“Oh, my Gard, Captain, don’t I know what a mess I’m in! But, Captain, I
guess you’re going to save me. You know I never done no spying. You’ll
speak for my good character, Captain. You couldn’t do otherwise, for I’m
a man who never hurt nobody or nothing in all his life.”
“Well, what on earth did you go and escape for?”
“Captain Mackenzie,” moaned the wretched creature, bursting into tears,
“I thought I was going mad. You see, the gentlemen outside with the
guns, they kept telling me I was going for be shot to-morrow morning
early, and I didn’t know maybe I wouldn’t be, and I scratched away the
sand under the wire and I got clear of the camp and I was hid some days
and nights up in the hills and I hadn’t nothing to eat, though I
wouldn’t have ate if I had because I was all the time retching and
vomiting, and it was through me retching like that they found me at last
and brought me back and shut me up here. But, Captain, I swear before
Gard I won’t escape no more. That’s honest, Captain.”
“No, I don’t think you’ll escape again,” I agreed. A panther might have
found it difficult to escape from the entanglement in which he was now
imprisoned.
“Oh, my Gard, Captain, I don’t know what I done to get in such trouble.
I never hurt nobody in all my life. Mr. Vedova will speak for me. I know
he will. Mr. Vedova always guessed Mr. Thompson was hard on me.”
For two hours I questioned the wretched creature in that stifling tent
until what with the reek of his stale body and the torment of the flies
I began to feel as completely degraded a specimen of human nature as
the prisoner himself. I have not mentioned that the Vassilaki house in
Tenedos had been thoroughly searched, that Yanni, the younger brother,
was now under arrest at the marines’ camp, and that nothing in the least
incriminating had been found either on him or in the house. To be sure,
this was no proof of innocence, for there had been plenty of time to
destroy incriminating documents or other evidence. Still, the fact
remained in the prisoner’s favour that nothing had been found. And
gradually, as I went over and over again the suspicious circumstances,
questioning him each time more closely and finding each time that these
circumstances were susceptible of an alternative and innocent
explanation, I began to decide in my own mind that the behaviour of the
Vassilaki family had been entirely prompted by a low kind of commercial
cunning, and that the more sinister motive attributed to their
activities had no basis in fact. The several discrepancies in the
various explanations Stavro had already given of his conduct were not,
when gone into more fully, really damning. I was inclined to think that
most of them could be put down to the Southerner’s invariable conviction
that he is a cleverer man than the Northerner, to that and a natural
instinct of Mediterranean humanity never to part at first with the whole
of the exact truth. The spirit of getting the better of a commercial
adversary would always be uppermost in such a man. His desperate attempt
to escape, which superficially might be taken as an indication of guilt,
to my mind argued rather that the man was a much stupider fellow than he
thought himself. Not that he still thought himself so smart. I never saw
any man nearer to complete self-abasement.
Gradually the old conception of the Vassilaki family vanished, and
whatever element of doubt still remained in their case I decided could
be met by having Stavro and the rest of the family expelled from the
Area of Operations. I was thankful to feel convinced that it would not
be my duty to recommend a course of procedure which might end in the
firing squad, and though higher authorities might decide to intern him
in Malta for the duration of the war I had made up my mind by now to
advise Deedes that there was not even enough evidence against him for
that, provided, of course, I was able to demonstrate successfully to
Deedes that the numerous small links which seemed to form a chain of
guilt could, by not presuming that guilt, just as easily combine to form
a chain of innocence. The weakest point of our case was that no further
evidence against him had been provided by the Athens Bureau to support
its original denunciation. We had not even been able to obtain the name
of the informant whose allegations had led to the dispatch of that first
telegram. Luckily for the Vassilaki family Deedes was already as
skeptical as I was learning to become myself of the value of such vague
denunciations, and if I advised the expulsion of the Vassilakis from the
Area of Operations he was not the one to fight for a man’s death or his
internment in Malta merely because in a fit of desperate terror he had
escaped from his guards. As for Colonel Ward, with whom the final
decision about Vassilaki would rest, he would merely grunt:
“Well, I could have told you a month ago that it was probably nothing
but a lot of bloody rot. All telegrams about spies are, in my opinion.”
And after swatting a couple of flies he would return with puckered brow
to the more congenial task of finding some elusive Turkish regiment.
I suppose something in my manner had put hope into Stavro Vassilaki’s
heart, for suddenly he knelt down in front of me and seizing my hand
began to kiss it rapidly.
“Captain Mackenzie,” he sobbed, and, hot though the inside of that tent
was, his tears falling upon my hand were hotter. “Captain, I think you
know I’m not a spy. Captain, you’re going to save my life, and my poor
old father will remember you when he prays in church. He’s a most Gar
damn’ religious old man, my poor old father is, and he won’t never
forget your goodness. Oh, Captain Mackenzie, I suffered something
terrible. When they took me away in that ship I sure thought I was dead.
And I retched all the way up from Mytilene, and when they shut me up
behind that wire and the gentlemen with the guns begun swearing me and
telling me I was no Gar damn’ good and must be shot to-morrow morning I
was going mad. I thought of my poor old father and what would happen to
him if I was shot, and my sisters who I give six hundred drachmas on
board the steamer ... and whether I’ll ever see the value for that six
hundred drachmas I don’t know, because you know what girls are, Captain.
Give them six hundred drachmas and they’ll go and spend them just like
they was nothing at all. But now I’ve seen you, Captain, I don’t feel so
bad because I know you’ll be my protector and the protector of my
family.”
“Well, don’t assume too much,” I said, rising to go. “I may accept your
explanation of all the stupid things you’ve said and done, but it by no
means follows that other people will. You’re not out of the wood yet.”
“No, but, Captain, I swear before Gard, and may I be shot to-morrow if
I’m not saying the truth, that wood I sold to the aërodrome was only
because I saw an occasion for making a little bit of money, and which I
needed badly, Captain, for I was not earning hardly nothing in Tenedos,
and those Tenedos people, they’re not properly civilized peoples,
Captain; they’d steal from you and laugh behind your back. I don’t know
what put me into the way to come to Tenedos. But they were telling such
stories down in Athens of the money to be made up at the Dardanelles
that I----”
“Well, don’t go over it all again. What I want you to realize is that
you’re not clear yet. And don’t go trying to escape again, or I’ll be
able to do nothing for you.”
“No, Captain, I won’t. I wouldn’t have escaped before, only those
gentlemen told me I must be shot to-morrow morning. They didn’t meant
to frighten me, but I was feeling so sick, it kinda got me all upset.”
We were outside the tent now, and the sentry by the gate was wearing an
expression of injured but always quite rigid dismay at the prisoner’s
suggestion about the conversation of his guards. Along the wide road in
front of the entanglement the stream of men and mules and carts went
past unceasingly, raising a perpetual cloud of acrid dust. The flies
sizzled round the stale sweat of the haggard unshaven prisoner. I
thought that never in my life should I perceive again such a complete
expression of human misery and degradation as he presented, nor such
detestable discomfort as his surroundings. No wonder the poor wretch had
in desperation tried to escape. No wonder tears had choked him when he
tried to tell me what he had suffered in body and mind since he had left
Tenedos on that unlucky day in July. I was filled with a sudden warmth
of compassion for this battered creature who with agonized face was
watching me depart. The sentry lowered his rifle to prevent the
prisoner’s approaching the gate, and he shrank back into the aperture of
the stifling tent, the flies in a black multitude round his head. Then
the sentry unfastened the gate and came to the salute as I passed out. I
stopped a moment to admonish him on the subject of jesting with the
prisoner’s apprehensions.
“Look here, I know you don’t mean to be cruel, but it is rather cruel to
torment the poor devil in there by telling him he’s going to be shot at
dawn.”
“We only said that in a manner of speaking for a joke, sir.”
“I know, I know. But leave him in peace now. He’s had a pretty poor time
of it, and, after all, he has not been found guilty.”
“I’m sure we had no idea of upsetting him when we passed one or two
joking remarks, sir.”
“All right, all right. Only don’t tease him any more.”
I had just turned away from the entanglement when I heard the eager
excited voice of Vassilaki. I looked round and saw him standing with his
face close to the barbed wire, dancing up and down like a captive bear
who wants another bun.
“Well, what is it?”
“Captain Mackenzie, I have just a small thing to ask you. Captain
Mackenzie, if I must not be shot to-morrow morning, and I don’t think
now when you have heard everything that I must be shot.”
“I’ve made no promises.”
“No, but you will put things so that I am not shot. Captain Mackenzie,
if I am soon free again, will you ask if I can have a license for sell
Turkish delight and chocolate and perhaps some ices? While I am sitting
here, the most miserable creature in the world, I am always thinking to
myself if I am not shot what a fine place this is for business. Captain
Mackenzie, I would make splendid business with Turkish delight if I can
have a small canteen where I now am.”
I turned away quickly to hide my laughter; and as I walked on to pick up
Vitale I told myself I had been right in ascribing the suspicious
behaviour of Stavro Vassilaki entirely to motives of gain. He had almost
sublimely revealed the truth about himself in that last request.
And thus the curtain falls on the third and final act of the Vassilaki
drama. I may add for the benefit of those who want happy endings that
the whole family were excluded ever afterward from the Area of
Operations, but what happened to them after that I do not know. Let us
hope they are now making money in America. To the lay reader my
readiness to believe in the innocuousness of the Vassilakis may sound
premature and perhaps ingenuous, but I have never doubted for a moment
since that he was the victim like many others out there of commercial
jealousy. I have given the case at length not on account of its
intrinsic importance but because it served the construction of this
volume and because it was sufficiently typical to represent a hundred
others. I came back from Mytilene with a notebook full of suspicious
characters into whose past or present investigations were being made, if
we can dignify with such a name the few haphazard inquiries that our
overworked Intelligence representatives might remember to make in the
intervals of the more important business of obtaining information about
the enemy. Stavro Vassilaki was only one among many. However, by
escaping like that he provided us with an all too fugacious illusion
that we really had captured a genuine spy this time, and that alone
entitles him to the prominence I have given to his case. It was lucky
for him that he was not arrested by the French: he would probably have
paid with his life for escaping in that access of terror.
I felt an ineffable weariness that afternoon when Vitale and I were
toiling back to G. H. Q. over that flaccid beach. The long wrestle with
Vassilaki for the truth had left me utterly exhausted mentally and
physically. However, in spite of what seemed an incapacity to respond
ever again to any pleasure or pain, to any surprise or fear, to any
tragedy or comedy or farce, to anything, indeed, except the prospect of
annihilation, I was abruptly startled into fresh receptivity, just as we
reached the first slope of the camp, by a picture which will never fade
from my memory. I have written earlier in this book of twice seeing Sir
Ian Hamilton at the mercy of the Furies. This was the second time I had
an impression of his thin eager form thus tormented. He was striding
down the slope toward the beach at such a pace that little George
Brodrick was half running to keep up with him, while even long-legged
Kenny carrying a couple of coats over his arm and taking immense strides
was gradually falling behind and would have to run yet if he wished to
be at the water’s edge in time to assume the correct attitude of an A.
D. C. when his general embarks. Sir Ian returned our salutes
mechanically. Those tormented eyes were seeing not us but Suvla and the
heights beyond, not us but the Aja Liman Anafarta Ridge beyond, not us
but the silver Narrows, not us but the cupolas and domes and minarets of
Constantinople, which with every wasted moment were becoming more and
more remote and nebulous and unattainable.
The lack of any news from Suvla had been preying upon the
commander-in-chief’s imagination, and that morning he had decided to
avail himself of the admiral’s offer to put the destroyer _Arno_ at his
disposal. Thereupon one of the hostile gods at once tampered with her
boilers, and Rear Admiral Nicholson, S. N. O. at Kephalo, ordered her
fires to be drawn. This “d----d amphibious hitch” as Sir Ian calls it
in his diary had kept him marooned at G. H. Q. There was usually a
destroyer on patrol between Imbros and Helles; but if there was one
to-day another hostile god put her wireless out of order, for she did
not respond to an urgent summons. There was not even a spare trawler to
make the vital journey to Suvla. It was not until half-past three that a
signal came from the _Exmouth_ to say that the _Triad_ was sailing for
Suvla at a quarter-past four and would give Sir Ian Hamilton a passage.
Admiral de Robeck himself was over at Suvla in the _Chatham_, and the
_Triad_ was a yacht which he and his staff had used since the freedom of
the _Lord Nelson_ was paralyzed by the German submarines. So it was to
go aboard the _Triad_ that I saw Sir Ian striding down the slope that
afternoon. Aspinall was over at Suvla and had sent this cable:
Just been ashore where I found all quiet. No rifle fire and
apparently no Turks. IXth Corps resting. Feel confident that golden
opportunities are being lost and look upon the situation as
serious.
By the look in his eyes Sir Ian might just have received that ominous
message; but, as a matter of fact, he did not receive it until the next
day. The staff work of the hostile gods was indeed thorough. They had
held the message up, but they took care to run no risk of its reaching
the commander-in-chief by keeping him a prisoner on Imbros.
I was ill during the next few days. Some kind of neuralgic cystitis was
added to dysentery and sciatica, and necessitated a painful operation by
Hare, the G. H. Q. doctor, all of whose various genial inoculations I
had managed to avoid. This business had to be performed by lantern
light, with a gale blowing the sand through the tent and putting his
instruments out of action one after another by sticking to the vaseline.
Remembering the circumstances in which they were written, I hesitate to
print the following extracts from a letter I managed to scrawl day by
day about this time, because they may reflect too much of a state of
mind that was due to sickness of body. And yet they do manage to reflect
something of the state of mind which ran right through G. H. Q. during
this disastrous week. So with the caution that I do not put them forward
as a just commentary on the Suvla landing I shall give them.
August 9th.
This has been a day of disappointments. The Ninth Army Corps failed
to push on, and all our advantage seems lost. Sir Ian went off to
curse the general commanding. It seems that he actually let his men
bathe when by an effort the peninsula might have been straddled.
It’s really heart rending. We still hope that they’ll get to a
certain ridge, but there is no news, and in military operations no
news is bad news. Guy Dawnay and the C. G. S. are over there to-day
and I shall hear more this evening.
The Australian and New Zealand casualties are about 6,000: they
have done splendidly. The casualties before Achi Baba were about
the same. Probably before this battle is over we shall have lost
20,000. God, it’s ghastly!
Later.
There is still no good news of the Ninth Army Corps. I’m afraid
they’ve ruined the show. It’s absolutely damnable. Dawnay was
almost weeping when he came back from Suvla to-day. There were only
eight hundred Turks and we had more than fifteen thousand men.
They actually bathed, and George Brodrick told me that on one
beach, whenever a shell burst within four hundred yards, all the
men lay down. If this is Kitchener’s army (and the best three
divisions at that) give me the good old Territorials....
Hunter-Weston has been invalided home. If he had commanded that
army corps we should have had the Bulair lines by now. Everything
had gone well. In spite of great difficulties I-b had managed to
keep Imbros water tight.[61] The enemy was absolutely surprised:
they thought we were attacking in the old place: their best troops
were in the Southern Zone.[62] It is believed that my own little
stunt at Mytilene really did draw the submarines south to wait for
phantom transports that never came.[63] And the Ninth Army Corps
bitches the whole thing. There were forty ships with their guns
pointing at the Anafarta ridge, and the general wouldn’t advance
because there had been no artillery preparation. He had been
reading about artillery preparation in France, and his men were
digging themselves in three hundred yards from the shore. There was
the chance of open fighting: there was no need of artillery
preparation: there were no Turks to fire at, and the aëroplanes
said only three guns, which would have been captured. It’s a
tragedy.
Later.
I don’t see much chance of my standing a winter campaign unless we
have reached a city. This is a very trying climate in winter--the
very abode of the winds.
August 10th.
Feeling pretty rotten. I’ve done a cross reference index raisonné
of 370 names to-day.... I see no chance of standing a winter
campaign and no chance of forcing the Dardanelles before
winter....Some generals will get stellenbosched over this business.
August 11th.
Feeling rather cheap this morning after that long day with the
index and flies.... To-day is really, I think, the hottest we’ve
had. I rather sigh this morning for green England, Hampshire, and
some childish August days.
August 12th.
No grouse except a mental one! Some sickness in O yesterday. The
brigadier major of a certain brigade had wired to the brigadier:
“Two Turkish shrapnel burst over the battalion this morning. Glad
to report that battalion kept quite calm and that there were no
casualties.”
I wonder what they would have said to this telegram at Lancashire
Landing!
Much of the bitterness in these extracts may be unfair; but whatever
modifications a clearer knowledge of events might have led one to make,
the inertia of that Sunday must be held responsible for the failure of
the Suvla landing. Even H. W. Nevinson was driven to write harshly
during that horrible week. In _Last Chances and Changes_, the third
volume of that noble and adventurous autobiography which reflects in
such enviable prose the mind of a paladin, a scholar, and a veteran
lover of humanity, even he writes:
That night I was recalled to Imbros, and sailed in a trawler full
of Staff officers, who discussed polo and eatables all the way,
perhaps to take their minds off the situation. I never knew why I
was recalled, unless it was to witness how gloomy, jealous and
ill-tempered a Headquarter Staff can become when times are bad.
They must have given that impression if Nevinson says so; but I do think
that the polo and the eatables were like the ladies that Aspinall drew
on the dark night of the landing. Either they had to talk about such
remote things as polo and decent food, or they had to show themselves
gloomy and ill tempered, but for one or the other they will have to be
excused. It was a searing week, without even the minor consolation they
always had at St. Omer of being able to blame the French when things
went wrong.
The twelfth of August was to be a critical day for my future. I had
finished some pages of I-b stuff and was taking them across to the
office tent to be typed out when, in the short space between it and the
tent in which I worked, I met Sir Ian face to face as he was hurrying
across probably to consult the C. G. S. about a cable from Lord K. which
arrived that day to ask him why he could not ginger up the Tenth and
Eleventh divisions! I had saluted and was passing on, papers in hand,
when he stopped me.
“You’re looking very ill, Mackenzie.”
“I’m not absolutely fit, sir.”
“The usual trouble out here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re looking wretchedly ill,” he repeated. “I’ll tell you what you’d
better do. You’d better go to Athens for the week-end. The _Imogen_
leaves to-night. Go to Captain Mitchell and get him to make arrangements
for you to sail in her. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to come back.
Take the whole of next week. I dare say Sir Francis Elliot will ask you
to stay with him out at Cephissia. Glorious air. Do you no end of good.
I don’t want to lose another of you young writers.”
With this allusion to the death of Rupert Brooke, he hurried on.
Had I left the tent a couple of seconds later, I should not have met Sir
Ian face to face like that and I should not have gone to Athens that
week-end. I should probably have dragged on at G. H. Q. until I was sent
on board a hospital ship to Malta; and what, when I was well again,
would have been my next job? Probably office work in Cairo with perhaps
the Palestine campaign ultimately. However, I was not two seconds later,
and so out of those two grains of mustard seed grew like a mustard tree
the next two years of my life. Yet, when I was back in the I tent, this
was the way I finished off that laborious letter, from which I have
given extracts:
I’m going to-night with the boat that goes to meet the King’s
Messenger. I shall be back here on Monday evening.
CHAPTER XXI
HELLAS
Confident as I was that I should return to Kephalo if not by the
beginning of next week, at any rate by the week after, my farewells were
casual. Deedes entrusted me with the material for a long, confidential
talk with the still mysterious V, a meeting with whom was next to a
sight of the Parthenon, what I most looked forward to in Athens. He also
commissioned me to procure for him a bottle of the thickest brilliantine
obtainable and some methylated spirits for his morning tea. Dear old
Colonel Ward wanted a writing pad, lime juice, and a shaving brush. I
was never to know if the writing pad proved a success, for when I came
back to G. H. Q. in September to be carried away at the end of a week on
a stretcher for the last time, he had already been invalided home. It
has always been a regret to me that I did not thank that gruff old
gunner, whose sense of humour was sometimes almost apoplectic in the
violence of its expression, for his infinite kindness to myself. Guy
Dawnay commissioned sweets, a pair of strong shoes, and some manilla
cheroots. And manilla cheroots were what Graves wanted together with a
Jaeger blanket. Pears’ soap for Major Delacombe, Vinolia for General
Braithwaite; thus I find their respective tastes in lather scribbled in
my notebook. Powell was exigent. He required fly papers, a bottle of
Kutnow, a cup and saucer, a pair of string, not strong, shoes, a small
bottle of hairwash, and if Kutnow was not procurable, why then Eno was
to be the substitute. The navy in the person of Captain Mitchell was
content with a mug and fly papers, but Cecil Aspinall wanted a cup and
saucer, a toothbrush, tooth powder, Odol, and hairwash. He had just
adorned the peak of his cap with the extra row of gilded oak leaves that
celebrated his brevet as lieutenant colonel, not to mention putting up
the ribbon of the D. S. O. to take precedence on his breast, and though
I would not connect these glories with a last minute request to bring
him back from Athens a new looking glass, I took sympathetic care in
choosing it to insure him as large a field as possible for reflected
splendour. Eddie Keeling demanded a kilogram of plain chocolate and
added severely that if I did not come back at the next week-end I was to
arrange without fail that his chocolate was sent off by the King’s
Messenger. A diplomat like Eddie knew the proper way to use a King’s
Messenger; and his demand for chocolate sounded like an ultimatum backed
by warships of the Great Powers. I felt as Crete must have felt in the
first years of the Twentieth Century. Having impressed on me the need
for the prompt dispatch of the chocolate, he relaxed his severity and
gave me a letter for presentation to Her Imperial Highness the Princess
Nicolas of Greece. I find in my notebook many other commissions, but it
is significant that nowhere do I find the name of George Lloyd. He
wanted nothing.
Immediately after dinner I walked down with Patrick Shaw-Stewart to the
landing pier at Kephalo. He was on his way back to the rest camp at the
other side of K beach, but he waited to chat with me until Captain Potts
of the _Imogen_ came down with the mails to go aboard. We sat on a
couple of barrels under the lee of the low sandstone cliff, which jutted
out at this point for twenty yards or so and gave a certain amount of
shelter to the small pier that had lately been erected. The young moon
had set, and a cool gusty wind which seemed to be increasing gave me one
or two premonitory qualms over the passage. However, I soon forgot to
bother about these in the joy of talking about Oxford and about books.
Patrick Shaw-Stewart was one of the most brilliant of a brilliant
Balliol group that came up soon after I had gone down. He did not look
much like a Fellow of All Souls now in his R. N. D. uniform and long
pointed red beard, of the privilege to grow which he had as a Naval
officer availed himself. He inquired tenderly after _Guy and Pauline_
and told me how much Rupert Brooke had been looking forward to reading
my next book. He told me, too, something I had not known, and this was
that a criticism of _Carnival_ which had received second prize in a
_Saturday Westminster_ literary competition for the best criticism of
the best novel of 1912 and had been printed in those sea-green and
incorruptible pages had been written by the dead poet.
“And Charles Lister is always asking when your next book is coming out
and to hurry up with it so that he can read it before he’s killed,” he
added.
But I think Charles Lister was killed before _Guy and Pauline_ reached
Helles.
It was strangely exhilarating to hear from Patrick Shaw-Stewart on this
dark and gusty Kephalo night that there were people over on the
peninsula who genuinely looked forward to my next book. I had begun to
forget until I sat on that barrel talking to him that I had another
existence to which one day I might return. And then we talked about
Oxford. I told him how in order to check some reference in the second
volume of _Sinister Street_ I had gone up there at the end of July,
1914, and how Sligger[64] had been sure that it would never come to war,
and how I had walked along Holywell in the emptiness of the Long
Vacation, presage of a longer emptiness which would never again be
filled in quite the same old way, and how I had met Ronnie Knox[65]
coming round the corner from the Broad. And then we talked about Ronnie
Knox and wondered which road he would ultimately take. It seems to me
that above the splashing of the water against the side of the pier I
hear Patrick Shaw-Stewart saying that he did not think Ronnie Knox was
very happy at Trinity, of which he was then Fellow and Chaplain. I
remember, too, telling him that Cyril[66] had written to me after
reading the second volume of _Sinister Street_ to say that it marked the
end of an epoch and that Oxford could never be the same again.
“But if six nights ago things had gone differently at Suvla,” I added,
“the continuity might not have been broken. But now it must be, for the
whole spirit of the war will change as it goes on, which it must do now
for God knows how long.”
Patrick Shaw-Stewart agreed with this, adding how glad he was to be in
the R. N. D., because it was jealous of the past. The thought of people
like him and Charles Lister and “Ock” Asquith and Kelly, the Balliol
pianist, who had just been wounded in the foot, and many others glowed
in the darkness. And I have lived to hear Rupert Brooke sneered at for a
romantic by the prematurely weaned young sucking pigs of the next
generation. It was welcome to find a year or two ago the sanest pages I
had read about literature and the war written by an R. N. D. survivor,
Douglas Jerrold, at the close of his excellent book, _The Hawke
Battalion_. I commend them to any people who are as much nauseated as I
am by the Teutonic hysteria which is the intellectual vogue of 1929.
But the long talk with Patrick Shaw-Stewart draws to an end. Wavering
lanterns are seen coming down the slope from the camp. Presently, like
the burliest, brawniest figure of Punch imaginable, arrives Captain
Potts, and behind him in whites a naval commander, with a sizable nose
himself, a tall man whose hair at the back could do with a trim and who
is saying genially that he hopes we have not been cursing him for
keeping us waiting so long. The bags are flung into the cutter, the crew
of which have been hanging on to the pier with boat hooks for the last
hour. The passengers for the _Imogen_ follow the bags. Captain Potts
takes his seat astern. We push off into the gusty murk of the harbour.
I wave farewell to Patrick Shaw-Stewart, who reminds me in that moment
of the Pied Piper of Hamelin as he stands there in the flickering
lantern light. It was the last time I saw him. He was killed at Salonica
not many months later.
The _Imogen_ before the war had been the yacht of the British embassy at
Constantinople. She was a stout-hearted little packet and, in her gray
war paint, she put her dainty nose into seas she had never on the Sweet
Waters dreamed of having to face one day. She saw plenty of service and
in 1916 was on the Tigris. I felt seasick that night and did not manage
to sleep much, for though the sea was not really rough there was enough
motion to keep such a small craft lively, and my various ailments
resenting the whole business of travelling combined to pay me out for
it. However, the next morning was radiant, with a sea like pale blue
velvet, and so long as I could be sitting in a chair on the after deck I
felt all right.
The tall naval officer in white whom I had hardly seen the night before
proved to be Commander W. F. Sells,[67] the naval attaché of our
legation in Athens, and this morning was the beginning of an intercourse
between him and me which was never marred by a single misunderstanding
throughout two topsy-turvy and difficult years. He had been sunk off
Lowestoft on September 22d, 1914, in the _Aboukir_, had, as I remember,
been taken on board the _Hogue_, sunk in her, been taken on board the
_Cressy_, sunk in her, and finally had waded ashore as naked as the
dawn. But better than the precise details of his experience of a
submarine’s torpedoes I recall that some months after this he received a
communication from the Admiralty to say that his watch had been found on
the beach and that the five pounds’ compensation he had been granted for
it would be deducted from his next pay. I do not propose to write any
more about Sells now because he plays no part in this volume beyond
that of a shipmate for a brief voyage down through the Ægean. So I shall
keep him for my _Athenian_ Memories.
The other passenger in the _Imogen_ this thirteenth of August was
Lieutenant H. A. Simpson, R. N., who was as good a companion as one
could wish to find for a week-end’s leave. He was only twenty-one, but
he commanded T. B. 063 and the torpedo-boat flotilla as well, and I
always heard him spoken of as a most competent young officer. Apart from
his professional abilities, he had a tremendous zest for life, a sense
of humour, and to the gaiety of youth he added sympathy and charm. How
we laughed when the wife of a distinguished fellow countryman in Athens
asked him if he did not find it very hot in his little boat when the
windows were shut to keep out the waves.
Potts Bey, who in real life had commanded the khedivial yacht, was a
splendid host. I have described him as burly and brawny, but actually
his strength was alarming. If Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran had
bent _his_ poker, he would not have been content to straighten it like
Sherlock Holmes. He would have hanged the doctor with the poker by tying
a slip knot in it. He could tear a pack of cards across twice with his
fingers; he could pick up a metal ash tray and crumple it up in his hand
like a piece of paper. Once, when we were crossing the road together in
Athens, a horse and carriage seemed inclined to run us down, whereupon
Potts stopped, raised his eyebrows at the driver, put out his arm, and
pushed the horse back on to its haunches. On another occasion we went to
a cinema in Athens, where against the rules of the establishment he
lighted a large pipe. An attendant came bustling along the row to forbid
this breach of decorum, and Potts, after brushing him aside once or
twice like a fly, at last without taking his eyes off the screen or
rising from his seat picked him up with one arm and tossed him back
into the aisle. Even that Punch’s chin of Captain Potts had a muscular
vigour of its own. I remember at the same cinema becoming aware that my
shoulder was beginning to ache and realizing that it was because Potts
was resting his chin upon it and digging it in to me at poignant moments
of the drama. I was reminded of Alice’s experience with the Duchess at
the Queen’s croquet party. Even on that voyage down through the Ægean he
was continually astonishing us with casual feats of superhuman strength.
Perhaps Heracles kept the Argonauts amused in this fashion when they
were voyaging northward over this course. Potts was always hoping to
catch sight of a periscope so that he might take a shot at it with the
Japanese three-pounder of which he was, appropriately, as proud as
Punch. Three times he vowed he could see one, and three times it turned
out to be the leg of a poor swollen horse that was drifting past. Sells
was a gunnery man, but he had to be careful to treat Potts’s
three-pounder with respect, for, though it would have been about as
useful as a pea shooter, had we really sighted a submarine, we did not
want Potts to think it was one and start tapping us on the head with it
in playful argument.
I have written enough perhaps of light blue velvet seas and radiance of
lucid air; but the spell of that Ægean summer weather is still potent,
and when I look back across the years to that cerulean voyage I
surrender anew to the drowsy enchantment of it and would fain dream away
the pages of this chapter as I dreamed away the soft sea miles that
rippled past like the play of light in a precious stone. Our course was
southwest, and the illusion was that we were not making it by steam but
rather, as the arid hills of Lemnos slowly merged with the sky astern,
that we were being drawn along by the laughing Oceanides.
Once on my way back to the deck chair and the conversation of Sells and
Simpson and Potts, I stopped to rest for a moment and fell into a mood
of somewhat solemn retrospection. It was exactly thirteen weeks ago to a
day that I had sailed northward from Alexandria in the _Franconia_ over
this same sea. Pictures from those crowded three months, isolated
visions of incidents mostly trivial, rushed through my mind. I was
standing in the bows of the transport and beholding for the first time
the girdle of poppies round Achi Baba’s hunched and sullen shape,
poppies bright as redcoat battalions on old field days at Aldershot. I
was turning to see General Gouraud wave a farewell from the doorway of
the domed fort at Sedd-el-Bahr. I was sitting by George Lloyd’s camp bed
on a stifling afternoon and hearing him say that he had a wretched
headache. I was laughing at Eddie Keeling’s undiplomatic language while
we tried to loosen the ropes of our tent on a night of sudden storm. I
was hearing the frogs croak on and on through the nocturnal stillness of
Kephalo. I was seeing Darwin gravely lifting the side of my mosquito net
to hand me my morning egg covered with black finger marks. I was walking
with Val Braithwaite along the beach in the amber of a still evening and
planning the details of that dinner at the end of the war. I was
trudging in the dusty wake of Orlo Williams past a boscage of pink
oleanders beside a rocky watercourse on the road to Panaghia. I was
galloping with Captain Loring down a deep Tenedos lane and revelling in
his jovial laughter. I was being jostled on the crowded quayside of
Mytilene as I turned back to look over my shoulder at officers from the
new army being rowed ashore in small boats, some with the gray panache
of the Inniskilling Fusiliers in their sun helmets, others with the blue
and green of the Dublins. I was meeting Admiral de Robeck with Bowlby,
his flag lieutenant, glass under arm, as they came out of Sir Ian
Hamilton’s tent after tea, and thinking to myself how like a jovial
farmer at some agriculture show the admiral looked when he dug his heavy
walking stick deep into the sandy ground and waited a minute for
Commodore Keyes to overtake him. I was crossing the lines at G. H. Q.
to go to dinner and stopping to listen to a piper’s lament skirling
along the dusky air while a score or so of battle-weary Scottish
Borderers came marching very slowly and very heavily up from the water’s
edge to be rested for a week by guarding the camp.
And then these pictures of the past abruptly faded in what seemed either
mirage or magic of the present, when far away to starboard I saw
apparently floating imponderable as smoke above the horizon a stupendous
equilateral triangle, the colour of chalcedony. Awed by this vast aërial
vision, which it was impossible to link with any ordinary landfall, I
rejoined my companions and asked Potts what it could be.
“Why, that’s Mount Athos,” he told me.
And so incredibly it was. This subtile shape was Mount Athos, the holy
mountain, dreaming like a titanic sail more than ninety miles away, the
rest of Europe hull down below the horizon and Asia invisible. Almost
imperceptibly the mountain receded into the azure north. We looked, and
the mighty shape was still there. We looked again, and it was not.
The _Imogen_ sailed along the austere coast of Scyros during the
afternoon. On that craggy island Achilles was hidden by his mother among
the daughters of Lycomedes, and hence by sight of arms and sound of
trumpet Odysseus lured him away to join the expeditionary force against
Troy. Here was murdered Theseus, whose ghost in full armour led the van
at Marathon. And in April a new legend had touched the island with
immortality, for Rupert Brooke was buried there.
Σἡμ’ οὐκ ἀλλοδαπὴ σὸν ἔχει κόνις,
No foreign earth it is that holds thy tomb.
We left Scyros astern and sailed on into the southwest across a
shimmering sea of golden blue, until with the shutting in of dusk we
approached Eubœa. The young moon was hanging over the mountains in the
last green glow of the sunset and by the time we entered the Doro
Channel it was deep starry night.
At dawn, too much on fire with the thought of at last beholding Greece
to care about illness or pain, I dragged myself up on deck, and I have
never ceased to thank God I did so, for I was granted the perfect
expression of a lifelong dream.
The _Imogen_ was passing below Cape Sunium; and there, white and light
as a sea bird on the cliff’s edge, I saw the marble columns of the
Temple of Poseidon, a legend-haunted world of famous mountains beyond.
This work of man washed by lustral air achieved under the faded blue of
the morning sky a serene and virginal aloofness not to be matched even
by that young moon of yesterday’s dusk. In the first excitement of this
apparition I wanted to shout and fetch everybody up on deck to wonder at
it; but I found that I was crying, for in that moment all my youth was
in my eyes. So I just stood there and watched in a rapture the white
columns grow warm as ivory when the great sun came glancing up out of
the sea.
At about nine o’clock the _Imogen_ berthed in the little harbour of
Phaleron. The first view of the Acropolis of Athens glittering in the
morning sunlight four miles away set my pulses racing again, for it,
too, was fulfilling the fancies of years in a way that I had never dared
to suppose would ever really happen; and to the Acropolis was added the
first vision of the hill Lycabetus, the shape and height of which I had
somehow never pictured to myself. The glory of the Acropolis has always
been so bright that the value of Lycabetus to that classic landscape has
not been sufficiently emphasized. Yet Athens without Lycabetus would be
like Edinburgh without the Castle Rock.
I think we took the train from Phaleron that morning; but I remember
more clearly the hush of decorous existence which seemed to enfold
Simpson and myself when we stepped out of the blazing sunshine into the
cool marble entrance hall of the legation, the murmur of pleasant
civilized voices and the look of the owners’ civilized clothes.
“Are you going right off into hospital?” Simpson asked.
“Not till we’ve had lunch at the best hotel.”
“Do you think you’d better? You’re looking pretty rotten.”
“I’m feeling like death. But I’m going to see Athens first.”
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Now the President of the United States.
[2] Sir William Goode, K.B.E.
[3] Edward Howard Marsh, C. B., C. M. G., C. V. O.
[4] Brigadier General C. J. Hawker, C. M. G., C. B. E.
[5] Naval Transport Officer.
[6] Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable Sir Eustace Fiennes, Bt.,
Governor of the Leeward Islands.
[7] Major General R. C. Temple, C. B., O. B. E., R. M. A.
[8] Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable Clive Bigham, C. M. G., now
Viscount Mersey.
[9] Lord Lloyd of Dolobran, G. C. S. I., G. C. I. E., late High
Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan.
[10] The late Sir Mark Sykes, Bt.
[11] Lieutenant Colonel Addis Delacombe, D. S. O.
[12] Sir Robert Windham Graves, K. C. M. G.
[13] Major General C. G. Fuller, C. B., C. M. G., D. S. O., R. E.
[14] The late Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable Aubrey Herbert, M. P.
[15] I feel nearly positive that it was Sikinos, but it may have been
Siphnos.
[16] Brigadier General H. L. Beynon, C. M. G.
[17] Major General Sir Edward Woodward, K. C. M. G., C. B.
[18] Major General Sir Archibald Paris, K. C. B., R. M. A.
[19] Lieutenant Colonel S. H. Pollen, C. M. G.
[20] The late Major General Sir W. T. Bridges, Commander First
Australian Division.
[21] General Sir Walter Braithwaite, K. C. B.
[22] Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood, Bt., G. C. B., G. C. M. G., K.
C. S. I., C. I. E., D. S. O.
[23] Major General G. P. Dawnay, C. B., C. M. G., D. S. O., M. V. O.
[24] Brigadier General C. F. Aspinall-Oglander, C. B., C. M. G., D. S.
O.
[25] Brigadier General Sir Wyndham Deedes, C. M. G., D. S. O.
[26] The late Captain Sir William Maxwell, K. B. E.
[27] I had just written this sentence when I thought I would refer to
Sir Ian Hamilton’s _Gallipoli Diary_ lest I should be misrepresenting
his state of mind, and under the date of June 2d I read:
“De Robeck and Keyes are quite as much at sea as Braithwaite and
myself about this original scheme of the British Government for
treating a tearing ranging crisis; i. e., by taking no notice
of it. I guess that never before in the history of war has a
Commander asked urgently that his force might be doubled and then
got no orders; no answer of any sort or kind!”
[28] Commander G. B. Palmes, D. S. O., R. N.
[29] Viscount Dunsford.
[30] Lieutenant Colonel E. B. Powell, D. S. O.
[31] Mr. John Freeman, in a carnivorous study of my work written at
a time when the _London Mercury_ was trying without success to keep
post-war poets alive by feeding them on the reputations of novelists,
found this dedication conspicuous, which shows that poets may preserve
an even vaguer conception of what soldiers are than the conception
soldiers often used to have of poets.
[32] Printed by permission of the trustees of the estate of the late
Henry James.
[33] Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, K. C. B., D. S. O.,
M. P.
[34] Only last year, 1928, seated in a dim corner of a London club, I
overheard two junior members of the Conservative party muttering to one
another “Baldwin must go.” A quarter of a century had written not one
wrinkle on the azure brow of Conservatism.
[35] Air Commodore C. R. Samson, C. M. G., D. S. O., R. N.
[36] By permission of the Controller of H. M. Stationery Office.
[37] Lieutenant Colonel Ian M. Smith, D. S. O., M. C.
[38] I have since done so, and my instinct was right. Barra is another
island in the superlatively grand style.
[39] Vice Admiral E. K. Loring, C. B.
[40] P. N. T. O. (Principal Naval Transport Officer).
P. M. L. O. (Principal Military Landing Officer).
[41] H. E. Major General Sir Frederick Sykes, G. C. I. E., G. B. E., K.
C. B., C. M. G., Governor of Bombay.
[42] Pronounced Védova.
[43] Pronounced Manóli.
[44] The Scottish novelist.
[45] From _Gallipoli Diary_ by General Sir Ian Hamilton, G. C. B.
(London: Edward Arnold & Co.), by permission.
[46] Admiral A. Walker-Heneage-Vivian, C. B., M. V. O., R. N.
[47] General G. J. H. Mullins, C. B., R. M. L. I.
[48] Rear Admiral F. H. Mitchell, C. B., D. S. O., R. N.
[49] Admiral Sir Heathcoat Grant, K. C. M. G., C. B., R. N.
[50] C. E. Heathcote-Smith, O. B. E., H. B. M.’s consul general at
Alexandria.
[51] More “Alice Through the Looking Glass” mentality.
[52] H. B. M.’s consul at Damascus.
[53] Viscount Cecil of Chelwood.
[54] I began to doubt my memory after I had written this sentence;
but I am right. On looking up the date of the publication of Sir Ian
Hamilton’s first dispatch I find it was actually the seventh of July.
There is no doubt that from the first to last the censorship did as
much to prolong the war as anything, and for all the good it did
beyond catching a few cargoes of contraband and a few unimportant and
inefficient spies those engaged in it might just as well have been
playing “Hunt the Slipper” or “Kiss in the Ring.”
[55] Lieutenant General the Honourable Sir Frederick Stopford, K. C.
B., K. C. M. G., K. C. V. O.
[56] Brigadier General the Honourable A. G. A. Hore-Ruthven, V. C., K.
C. M. G., C. B., D. S. O.
[57] Lieutenant Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, G. C. B.
[58] When I was waiting at Capri in a state of agitation over the
delay in getting out to Gallipoli, I tried to engage the interest of
Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson (who was a cousin of my wife’s) to obtain my
orders. He wrote curtly in answer that he had nothing to do with the
Dardanelles expedition and knew nothing about it. That was the first
inkling I had of the feeling against it at home.
[59] Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable H. D. Napier, C. M. G.
[60] J. D. Gregory, C. B., C. M. G.
[61] This feat reflects much credit on Thomson. He was ubiquitous. It
would have been difficult for an Imbriote peasant to light a cigarette
without having to satisfy Thomson afterwards that he had not been
signalling to the enemy.
[62] As a matter of fact, they were on the point of making a general
attack in Helles the very day we made one first. This must have doubled
our casualties there.
[63] There seems reason to suppose this was not fancy. Certainly no
submarine showed his periscope near Suvla.
[64] F. F. Urquhart, Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford.
[65] Father Ronald Knox.
[66] Cyril Bailey, Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford.
[67] Captain W. F. Sells, C. M. G., R. N.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
aërdrome at Tenedos=> aërodrome at Tenedos {pg 37}
put is alongside=> put us alongside {pg 40}
might paraphase=> might paraphrase {pg 107}
by the cliffs edge=> by the cliff’s edge {pg 118}
The simpest thing=> The simplest thing {pg 128}
the Howe Battlion arrived=> the Howe Battalion arrived {pg 129}
but the minature Sisyphus=> but the miniature Sisyphus {pg 134}
the Hotel Hajestic=> the Hotel Majestic {pg 159}
heavy bombardmbent=> heavy bombardbent {pg 161}
he was so anxious=> he was so anxious to get there. {pg 227}
C. E. Heatcote-Smith=> C. E. Heathcote-Smith {pg 264}
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