utton, stewed green beans, new-baked
bread, stewed plums, and a particularly appetizing pilaf, made out of
boiled whole wheat and raisins. Everything was good, and the beaming
colonel declared that the first thing in war was to keep your soldiers
well fed. We dined with him in his tent: soup and several meat courses,
and cherry compote, and at the end various kinds of nuts, including the
cracked hazelnuts, commoner in Turkey than bananas and peanuts at home.

He hoped to come to America some day, and thought we must soon develop
the military strength to back our desires for peace, unless there were
to be continual wars. New York's climate, the cost of fruit in Germany,
and other peaceful subjects were touched on, and the colonel said that
it was an honor to have us with him--ours we brilliantly responded--and
a pleasant change from the constant talk and thought of war.

He had been six years in the field now, what with the Italian and Balkan
campaigns, and that was a good deal of war at a stretch.

After excusing ourselves, though the amiable Turk said that he was in no
hurry, we were led to a sort of tent de luxe, lined in scarlet with
snaky decorations in white, and when the young aid discovered that we
had brought no beds with us, he sent out and in a moment had not only
cots and blankets, but mattresses and sheets and pillows and
pillow-cases. He asked if we had fathers and mothers alive at home, and
brothers and sisters, and if we, too, had been soldiers. It surprised
and puzzled him that we had not, and that our army was so small. He was
only twenty-two and a lieutenant, and he had a brother and father also
in the army. With a great air of mystery he had his orderly dig a bottle
of cognac out from his camp chest, and after we had drunk each other's
health, he gave us his card with his name in Turkish and French. He
brought a table and put on it a night candle in a saucer of water, a
carafe of drinking water, and gave me a pair of slippers--in short, he
did for us in that brush-covered camp in the Gallipoli hills everything
that could be done for a guest in one's own house.

You can scarcely know what this meant without having known the
difficulties of mere existence once you left Constantinople and got into
the war zone, and Colonel Shukri Bey and Lieutenant Ahmed Akif will be
remembered by at least two Americans when any one talks of the terrible
Turk.

I awoke shortly after daylight, thinking I heard