o this. But was it overhead? If
behind, and travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would
carry forward--just enough probably to bring it over; and if apparently
over, still the bomb would have been several seconds in falling--it
might be right on top of us now! Should we run backward or forward: Here
was a place, in between some grain-bags. But the grain-bags were open
toward the wharf, and the wharf was what he was aiming at, and a plank
blown through you--No, the trench was the thing, but--Quick, he is
overhead!

The beach, the bags, the ditch, all the way round the camp, and Suydam
galloping after. Somewhere in the middle of it a hideous whiffling wail
came down the sky: Trrou... trrou... trou!--and then a crash! The bomb
had hit the water just off the end of the pier. I kept on running.
There was another Trrou... trrou! another geyser of water, and the bird
had flown on.

I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that strange afternoon
ended, when one of a gang of ditch-diggers, swathed in bright-colored
rags, addressed me in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora,
who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been
hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in
Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get,
him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on
board ship. There were crowds like him--Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not
wanted as soldiers but impressed for this sort of work. They were
unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our boat at last
got under way. We paused till sunup at Lapsaki, crept close to shore
through the Marmora, and once through floating wreckage--boards and a
galvanized-iron gasolene tank--apparently from some transport sunk by a
submarine, and after dark, with lights out as we had started, round the
corner of Stamboul.

Chapter XIII

A War Correspondents' Village

The press department of the Foreign Office in Vienna duly presented the
application to the press bureau of the Ministry of War; the latter
conveyed it to the "Kaiserliche und Konigliche Armee-Oberkommando
Kriegs-Presse-Quartier," a day's railroad journey nearer the front; the
commandant made his recommendation to the chief of the General Staff.
The permission itself percolated back to Vienna presently, and early
next morning I took the Teschen express.

It was one of those semi-militar