crowded with ox and horse carts, camel
trains, and piles of ammunition-boxes and sacks of food.

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

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

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

"She's off!" he said. The book was full of marks. In methodical sailor
fashion he had been crossing them off since the war began: British and
German--Blucher, Scharnhorst, Irresistible, Goliath, and the rest--
millions of dollars and hundreds of men at a stroke.

"Where's it going to end?" he demanded. "There's seven hundred good men
gone, maybe--how many did the Triumph carry? And we think it's good
news! If a man should invent something that would kill a hundred
thousand men at once, he'd be a great man... Now, what is that?"

The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr--they might try to make
another Gibraltar of it. Their aeroplanes came up every day. There was
a French-man with a long tail--he only came to the edge of the camp, and
as soon as the batteries opened up turned back, but the Englishman
didn't stop for anything. He dropped a bomb or two every time he
passed--one man must have been square under one, for they f