me
the nervous Crack... crack... crack-crack-crack! of rifle and
machine-gun fire.

We went to sleep to the tune of it, moved a few miles down the coast in
the night, and crawled out into a world of dusty brown--brown hillsides
and camels and soldiers and sacks of wheat piled on the flat, immersed
in an amber dawn. This was the destination of the side-wheeler, and by
sunup we were loaded into a machine with a horse, several goats, three or
four passengers, and four barefooted boatmen, who pushed us over the
strait to Chanak Kale.

We were now at the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, behind us, on the
European side, the old round tower of Kilid Bahr and Medjidie Fort, in
front Fort Hamidie, and on the horizon to the south, where the strait
opened into the sea, the tiny silhouettes of several of the Allies'
ships. Chanak was smashed like the towns in west Belgium, and, but for
the garrison and the Turkish and German commandants tucked away in the
trees, all but deserted, except by flies and half-starved cats. These
unhappy creatures, left behind in the flight, were everywhere, and in
front of the bake shop they crowded in literal scores--gaunt, mangy,
clawed and battered from constant fights. It was hot, there was little
to eat, and after hours of wrangling it appeared that our precious
scratches of Turkish took us to the Gallipoli instead of the Asiatic
side.

The two were under different jurisdictions; though the fault was not
ours, the local commandant had the right to ship us back to
Constantinople, and after a sort of delirium of flies, cats, gendarmes,
muggy heat, and debates, night descended to find us going to sleep in
the middle of a vegetable farm, in a house lately inhabited by whirling
dervishes, with two lynx-eyed police-men in gray lamb's-wool caps seated
at the gate. By them we were marched next day to the wharf and suddenly
there translated into the upper ether by the German admiral and his
thoughtful aid, who, on their way to the headquarters of the land forces
across the strait, whirled us over in style in a torpedo-boat.

We landed at the same place at which we had touched in the dark two
nights before--busy and blazing now in the afternoon sun, with gangs of
stevedores shuffling to and from the ships at the brand-new wharfs,
Turkish officers galloping about on their thick-necked, bobtailed, fiery
little stallions, and the dusty flat, half a mile across, perhaps,
between its encircling hills,