Part 20

"Kusum!" ("My lamb!").

For a moment the woman stared into the fabricated eyes. They were not those she had given her boy. They were glass, immobile. She closed her own eyes and then wept on the broad chest of the son. The son, glad that his walideh was near him once more, found it easy to be the stronger of the two. He kissed his mother and then caressed the hair under the cap of the yashmak.

When the doctor had been thanked, the mother led her boy off.

Blind beggars are not unkindly treated in Constantinople. There is a rule that one must never refuse them alms. The least that may be given them are the words:

"Inayet ola!" ("God will care for you!").

Not long after that I sat on the shambles at Suvla Bay, the particular spot in question being known as the Kiretch Tépé--Chalk Hill.

Sir Ian Hamilton had just thrown into the vast amphitheater to the east of the bay some two hundred thousand men, many of them raw troops of the Kitchener armies.

Some three thousand of these men had been left dead on the slopes of the hill. As usual, somebody on Gallipoli had bungled and bungled badly. A few days before I had seen how a British division ate itself up in futile attacks against a Turkish position west of Kütchük Anafarta. The thing was glorious to look at, but withal very foolish. Four times the British assailed the trenches of the Turks, and each time they were thrown back. When General Stopford finally decided that the thing was foolish, he called it off. The division he could not call back, because it was no more.

It was so on Chalk Hill.

A hot August night lay over the peninsula. The crescent of a waning moon gave the dense vapors that had welled in from the Mediterranean an opalescent quality. From that vapor came also, so it seemed, the stench of a hundred battle-fields. In reality this was not so. The Turkish advance position, which I had invaded that night for the purpose of seeing an attack which was to be made by the Turks shortly before dawn, ran close to the company graves in which the Turks had buried the dead foe.

There is little soil on Gallipoli. It is hardly ever more than a foot deep on any slope, and under it lies lime that is too hard to get out of the way with pick and shovel. The company graves, therefore, were cairns rather than ditches. The bodies had been walled in well enough, but those walls were not airtight. The gases of decomposition escaped, therefore, and filled the landscape with obnoxious odor.

I had been warned against this. The warning I had disregarded for the reason that such things are not unfamiliar to me. But I will confess that it took a good many cigarettes and considerable will-power to keep me in that position--so long as was absolutely necessary.

When I returned to Constantinople everybody was speaking of the stench in the Suvla Bay terrain. There were many such spots, and returning soldiers were never slow in dwelling on the topic they suggested. The war did not appear less awesome for that.

But the shambles that came closest to the general public was the casualty lists published by the German government as a sort of supplement to the Berlin Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the semi-official organ of the German Imperial Government. At times this list would contain as many as eight thousand names, each with a letter or several after it--"t" for dead, "s v" for severely wounded, "l v" for lightly wounded, and so on.

It was thought at first that the public would not be able to stand this for long. But soon it was shown that literally there was no end to the fortitude of the Germans.

I was to spend some time on the Somme front. I really was not anxious to see that field of slaughter. But certain men in Berlin thought that I ought to complete my list of fronts with their "own" front. Hospitals and such no longer interested me. Wrecked churches I had seen by the score--and a ruined building is a ruined building. I said that I would visit the Somme front in case I was allowed to go wherever I wanted. That was agreed to, after I had signed a paper relieving the German government of all responsibility in case something should happen to me "for myself and my heirs forever."

The front had been in eruption three weeks and murder had reached the climax when one fine afternoon I put up at a very unpretentious auberge in Cambrai.

The interior of the Moloch of Carthage never was so hot as this front, nor was Moloch ever so greedy for human life. Battalion after battalion, division after division, was hurled into this furnace of barrage and machine-gun fire. What was left of them trickled back in a thin stream of wounded.

For nine days the "drum" fire never ceased. From Le Transloy to south of Pozières the earth rocked. From the walls and ceilings of the old citadel at Cambrai the plaster fell, though many miles lay between it and the front.

Perhaps the best I could say of the Somme offensive is that none will ever describe it adequately--as it was. The poor devils really able to encompass its magnitude and terrors became insane. Those who later regained their reason did so only because they had forgotten. The others live in the Somme days yet, and there are thousands of them.

I could tell tales of horror such as have never before been heard--of a British cavalry charge near Hebuterne that was "stifled" by the barbed wire before it and the German machine-guns in its rear and flanks; of wounded men that had crawled on all-fours for long distances, resting occasionally to push back their entrails; of men cut into little pieces by shells and perforated like sieves by the machine-guns; and again of steel-nerved Bavarians who, coming out of the first trenches, gathered for a beer-drinking in an apple orchard not far from Manancourt.

But that seems de trop. I will leave that to some modern Verestchagin and his canvases.

There is a "still-life" of death that comes to my mind.

Not long after that I was in the Carpathians. General Brussilow was trying out his mass tactics.

The slaughter of man reached there aspects and proportions never before heard of. It was not the machine murder of the West Front--that is to say, it was not so much a factory for the conversion of live men into dead as it was a crude, old-fashioned abattoir.

On the slope of a massive mountain lies an old pine forest. In the clearings stand birches, whose white trunks pierce the gloom under the roof of dense, dark-green pine crowns. Where the clearings are, patches of late-summer sky may be seen. Through the pale blue travel leisurely the whitest of clouds, and into this background of soft blue and white juts the somber pine and the autumn-tinged foliage of the birch.

The forest is more a temple of a thousand columns than a thing that has risen from the little seeds in the pine cones. The trunks are straight and seem more details of a monument than something which has just grown. There is a formal decorum about the trees and their aggregate. But the soft light under the crowns lessens that into something severely mournful.

The forest is indeed a sepulcher. On its floor lie thousands of dead Russians--first as close together as they can be packed, and then in layers on top of one another. It would seem that these bodies had been brought here for burial. That is not the case, however. The wounds in the tree trunks, cut by the streams of machine-gun bullets from the red trenches at the edge of the forest, indicate what happened. The first wave of Russians entered the forest, was decimated, and retreated. The second one met a similar fate. The third fared no better. The fourth came. The fifth. The sixth--twice more the Russian artillery urged on the Russian infantry.