ted their movements. They were forced, owing to
the vigilance of British warships, to send their troops and munitions
over the Giaur Dagh by the pass called the Syrian Gates, between
Cilicia and northern Syria, a rough, mountainous region, with bad
roads, that made progress extremely difficult.

At the beginning of the allied operations against the Dardanelles, the
observation of the Syrian coast was taken over entirely by the French
fleet.

On April 19, 1915, the Turkish intrenchments at El Arish were
bombarded by the French battleship _St. Louis_. The Turks had some
fifteen or twenty field guns, and replied vigorously, but only one
shell hit the battleship, which did no damage. The Turks suffered some
losses. In the early part of May the big camp at Gaza, where numbers
of Ottoman soldiers were gathered to be reviewed by Djemal Pasha, was
shelled by the _St. Louis_, when some fifty Turks were killed by
French shrapnel, and perhaps as many more wounded.

On April 29, 1915, the cruiser _D'Entrecasteaux_ worked effectively on
the Cilician coast, shelling the trenches at Taruss, while her
hydroplane, dropping a bomb on the railway tracks, blew up trucks
laden with high explosives and wrecked the railway station. On May 10
the Turks at El Arish were again shelled by the guns of the _Jeanne
D'Arc_.

On Ascension Day, Alexandretta was the scene of some spirited work, in
which the cruiser _D'Estrees_ played the leading part. M. de la
Passadiere, her commander, demanded of the Kaimakam that the German
flag should be hauled down that was flying over the German Consulate.
The Turkish commander sent no reply, and it was pretended that he was
ill or absent. M. de la Passadiere having fixed a time limit when the
flag must be hauled down, cleared his decks for action and trained the
ship's guns on the consulate building. At the expiration of the time
limit he opened fire, and the consulate was reduced to ruins. The only
casualties were three Turkish soldiers, who, in spite of warning, had
remained near the building.

The captain of the _D'Estrees_ on May 14, 1915, destroyed a petrol
depot which might be used to supply hostile submarines, and which
contained over 1,000 cases. A few days earlier a much larger depot
containing some 20,000 cases at Makri on the southern coast of Cilicia
had been destroyed by the cruiser _Jeanne D'Arc_.

[Illustration: The Turkish Attack on the Suez Canal.]

Budrum on the southwest coast of Asia