rom the south, and all
at once the world is warm and sea and sky are blue--so soft, so blue, so
alive with lifting radiance that one does not wonder the Turk is content
with a cup of coffee and a view.

Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli--then the war came, and everything
happened at once. It was a still May morning, a Sunday morning, when
the English and French sent some of their ships up into the Gulf of
Saros, on the Aegean side of the peninsula, over behind Gallipoli.
Eight or ten miles of rolling country shut away the Aegean, and made
people feel safe enough. They might have been in the other wars which
have touched Gallipoli, but a few miles of country were nothing at all
to the guns of a modern battleship.

An observation-balloon looked up over the western horizon, there was a
sudden thunder, and all at once the sky above Gallipoli rained screaming
shells and death. You can imagine--at any rate remembering Antwerp, I
could very well imagine--how that hurricane of fire, sweeping in without
warning, from people knew not where, must have seemed like the end of
the world. You can imagine the people--old men with turbans undone,
veiled women, crying babies--tumbling out of the little bird-cage houses
and down the narrow streets. Off went the minaret, as you would knock
off an icicle, from the mosque on the hill. The mosque by the
water-front went down in a cloud of dust, and up from the dust, from a
petrol shell, shot a geyser of fire. Stones came rumbling down from the
old square tower, which had stood since the days of Bayazid; the faded
gray houses squashed like eggs. It was all over in an hour--some say
even twenty, minutes--but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, to
kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the rest into the caves
under the cliffs by the water, or across the Marmora to Lapsaki.

Now, while the bombardment of Gallipoli may not appear from a merely
human point of view, a particularly sporting performance, yet, as most
of those killed were soldiers, as Gallipoli had been a staff
head-quarters not long before and always has been a natural base for the
defense of the Dardanelles, the attack was doubtless justified by the
rules of war. It happens, however, that people who live in defenseless,
bombarded towns are never interested in the rules of war. So a new and
particularly disturbing rumor went flying through the crowded streets of
Constantinople.

It is a city of rumors, this be