RECONNOITRING BY TAXL
THE war correspondent had arrived from Peking too late to go to the front. The front, however, seemed to be making its way as fast as it could to the war correspondent. It was near enough, at any rate, to make him feel a certain independence of permits, passes, and other pieces of paper of which the War Office is now exceeding chary. What could have made the situation more patent than that a war corre- spondent should engage a taxi-cab, a common Pere taxi, striped red and black, and presumably not infallible as to its mechanism, and should invite an amateur and a British resident to help him ascertain whether the Tchatalja lines were as unapproachable as they were reported P Our first plan was to strike north-west in the hope of coming out somewhere between Hademkeui, the headquarters of Nazim Pasha, and the forest region of Derkos, which local rumour had lately peopled with Bulgarians. I may as well say first as last that this plan did not succeed. Before we were halfway to the lines our road petered out into a succes- sion of quagmires and of parallel ruts with heather growing so high between them that it threatened to scrape off the underworks of the car. Into one of the quagmires we sank so deeply that only a pair of hairy black water-buffalo could haul us out. For an irresponsible amateur, however, the attempt had its impressions. The most abiding one was that of the Constantinople campagna. It rolled away to the west so desolate in its autumn colour, so bare, save for a few tawny clumps of wood, so empty and wild, that no one would suspect the vicinity of a great capital. We met almost no one. A few Greek peasants came or went to market, apparently oblivious to wars or rumours of them. Not so a convoy of Turkish refugees toiling up a hill with all they had in the world piled under matting on ox-carts with huge ungainly wheels. We ran through one village inhabited by Greeks, who gave us anew a sense of the strange persistence of their type through so many vicissitudes. Among them were girls and women with big double-armed amphorae on their shoulders that might have come out of a museum. As we rammed the furze a mile or two beyond, we saw the minaret of a Turkish village, and heard a muezzin call to noonday prayer. We heard a shot, too, crack suddenly out of the stillness. It had to do duty with us for an adventure— unless I mention a deserter we met, who drew his bayonet as we bore down upon him. But I must not forget the fine Byzantine aqueduct under which we stopped to lunch. As we stood admiring the three tiers of arches marching magnifi- cently across the ravine, we heard a sound of bells afar. The sound came nearer and nearer, until a string of camels wound into sight. They took the car as unconcernedly as the car took them, disappearing one by one through the tall gateway that Andronicus Comnenus built across that wild valley.
Our second attempt was more successful. It led us through Stamboul and the cemetery cypresses outside the walls, into a campagna flatter and more treeless than the one we had seen in the morning, but not so void of humanity. In the neigh- bourhood of the city the refugees made the dominant note,
with their clumsy carts and their obstinate cattle and their veiled women and their own coats of many colours. Other refugees were camped on the bare downs. The children would run toward us when they caught sight of the car, laughing and shouting. For them war was a picnic. Further out the soldiers were more numerous than the refugees. Every time we met one, at first, we expected to be stopped. Some of them were driving cattle and horses into the city. Others were going out with carts of supplies. Once we overtook a dark mass of redifs making in loose order for an isolated barracks. We knew them by their blue uniforms piped with red of Abdul Hamid's time. They looked mildly at us as we charged them, and mildly made room. So did the officer who rode at their head. On the ascent beyond him we saw two men in khaki waiting for us. We concluded that our reconnaissance was at an end. But we presently perceived that the men in khaki wore red crescents on their sleeves and carried no rifles. They merely wanted to see us pass. It was the same at a gendarmerie station a little further on and at the aerodrome behind San Stefano.
We found the road unexpectedly good, after the heather and quagmires of the morning. There were bad bits in it, but they only gave us occasion to bless the French syndicate that had been at work when the war broke out. After dipping through one wide hollow we came in sight of the Marmora. A battleship making for the city drew a long smudge of smoke across the vaporous blue. The German Goeben' we afterwards learned she was. On the low shore the Russian war monument of 1878 lifted its syringe dome. Through all the region behind it a faint odour of carbolic hung in the air, a reminder of the place of horror that San Stefano has become since cholera broke out. We had passed a few dead cattle. A huge dog was tearing at one carcase, a creature that twilight would have made a hyena. Some new-made graves, too, had their own story to tell. But it was nothing to the story of the war correspondent, who had seen dying men among the dead on the ground at San Stefano, without shelter, without food, without water, without anyone to put so much as a stone under their beads.
Suddenly, on the brow of a hill, we came upon the sunset picture of Kiichiik Chekmejeh. Below us, at the left, was a bay into which the sun was dropping. To the right stretched a shining lake. And between them ran a long bridge with one fantastically high and rounded arch that looked at its own image in the painted water. I do not wonder that that arch is mentioned in the epitaph of the great Sinan, the architect who built the SuleImanieh mosque in Constantinople and the Selimieh in Adrianople, and romantically likened to the Milky Way. A village made a little mass of red-brown roofs at the right end of the bridge. As we ran down to it we encountered more soldiers, guarding the railway line. In front of us a cart crossed the metals with an empty stretcher. Near it two men were digging or filling a grave. The village itself was full of soldiers, who also guarded the bridge. We skimmed across it, no one saying a word to us, and up into another high rolling country bordered by the sea.
We decided to spend the night in Bouyouk Chekmejeh- the Great Drawbridge. Soldiers grew thicker as we ran on. Presently a camp was pitched beside the road. Fires were burning between the tents, and soldiers went to and fro carrying food. Then we looked down on another picture, in composition very much like the first. The bay and the lake were bigger, however, and linked by no arch of the Milky Way. The centre of interest this time was a man-of-war and half a dozen torpedo boats. They and the twilight in which we saw them, and the high black shores beyond, had an unexpectedly sinister air. Nevertheless we began picking our way slowly down towards the invisible village. Soldiers were all about us. A line of them were carrying big round platters. Another line of them were sitting beside the road, in what I took to be a gutter until the war correspondent told me it was a trench. We began to ask ourselves questions. We also asked them of a soldier, inquiring if we should find room in the village to spend the night. He assured us that we would find plenty of room ; everybody had gone away. Oh! And where were the Bulgarians ? He pointed over to the black line of hills on the other side of the bay. We decided that we would not after all spend the night in Bouyouk Chekmejeh! It was just as well, for the battle of Tchatalja began the next day. Our taxi, that had behaved irreproachably all day, chose that inauspicious moment to balk. While the chauffeur was tinkering with it an officer rode up and recommended him to be off as quickly as possible. That officer was the first member of his army who had addressed a question or a remonstrance to us all day. The chauffeur stated our plight. "Never mind," said the officer, "you must go back. And you must be quick, for after six o'clock no one will be allowed on the roads." It was then half-past five. Before long, however, the car made up its mind to go on. We sputtered slowly up the long hill, passing lighted tents that looked cosy enough to the irresponsible amateur. But once in open country a tyre gave out and we lost our half-hour of grace.
As we coasted down the hill to the bridge of the Milky Way our lamps illuminated a hooded giant with a rifle in his hands. "It is forbidden, my child," he said pleasantly to the chauffeur, barring the road with his bayonet.
"What shall we do ?" asked the chauffeur.
"In the name of God. I know not," replied he of the hood. "But the bridge is forbidden."
Personally I did not much care. A southerly air warmed the night, a half-moon lighted it, and while there was not too much room in the taxi for three people to sleep, still the thing could be done. The British resident, however, who had grey hairs and a family, asked to be taken to the officer in command. The gentleman in the hood did not object. The British resi- dent was accordingly escorted across the bridge, while we waited until he came back with his story. The point of it was that the officer in command happened to know the name and the face of the British resident, and agreed with him that if stopping was to be done it should have been done earlier in the day. The Colonel, therefore, let us through his lines. But he gave strict orders that no one, thereafter, was to cross the bridge of Kiichiik Chekmejeh without a pass from the War Office.
I forbear to dwell too long upon the rest of our return. We were stopped once more by sentries, who were somehow softened by the eloquence of the chauffeur. We broke down again, and hung so long on the aide of a hill that we made up our minds to spend the night there. We fell foul of bits of road that made us think we were crossing the Channel on a bad night ; and in turning off a temporary bridge into a temporary road we stuck for a moment with one wheel spinning over eternity. We passed many military convoys, going both ways. Our lamps would flare for a moment on a grey hood, on a high pack saddle, on a cart piled with boxes or sacks, and then the road would be ours again. Lights were scattered vaguely over the dark downs, where camp fires flickered. Sometimes we would overtake a refugee cart, the head of the house leading the startled bullocks, the women and children walking behind. As we began to climb out of the last dip toward the cypresses and the city wall, the road was one confusion of creaking wheels, of tossing horns, of figured turbans, of women clutching a black domino about their faces with one hand and with the other a tired child. Under the dark trees campfires burned murkily, lighting up strange groups. of grave peasants. And all the air was aromatic with burning cypress wood.
At the Top Kapou gate—where Mohammed II. made his triumphal entry in 1453—the press was so thick that we despaired of getting through. "It is no use," said a peasant when we asked him to lift his cart to one side. "They are letting no one in." It was true. A line of grey hoods stood outside the gate and kept back the carts. But our infidel car they allowed to enter the city of the Caliph, although his true children, fleeing from an unknown terror, waited outside among the graves. Stamboul was almost deserted as we sped through the long silent streets, save for an occasional patrol or a watchman beating out the hour on the pavement with his club. Twice we met a company of firemen, pattering half naked after a white paper lantern with their little hand pump on their shoulders. Then came the parallel lights of the new bridge, and dark Galata, and Pere that never looked so urban or so cheery after those desolate downs. On the comfortable leather cushions of the club—somehow they made me think of the refugees among the cypresses—we told the story of our day. "Then," said another war correspondent who had come back from the front, "you saw nothing at all ? " "No," I said. "Nothing a all."
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