Europe—Whither Bound?. Stephen Graham
Читать онлайн книгу.
more than is generally understood. Turkey does not stand where it did in the nineteenth century, and cannot do so again. The vital capital of Turkey has become Angora. The Kemalists are the force of Turkey, and they are Asiatic. In fact, Turkey has now been turned "bag and baggage" out of Europe, and the Turks are playing a new rôle in politics and international life.
Pierre Loti, in his book entitled "La Mort de notre chère France en Orient," gives a sentimental defence of the Turk, deplores our English rule, and urges France to endeavour to take charge, making the whole Mediterranean what it has been once before, a French lake. The air of the many blue soldiers in Constantinople, and the continual clash of British and French authority in the city suggest that Loti really speaks for France. There are, therefore, at least four powers which wish to have the key of Europe and the control of the ways of life between Asia Minor and the West. The one power which now does not enter into men's considerations is the one which both traditionally and economically is most concerned—and that is Russia.
LETTERS OF TRAVEL:
III. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (II)
A night's journey in a trawler brings you to the Dardanelles—the outermost vital significance of dominion at Constantinople. By the use of mines an invincible protection is easily thrown out. By the simple closing of the straits Russian trade is throttled, and even all the powers of imperial Russia before the great war could not open a way. No wonder that all ambitious Russians desired Constantinople and the Straits. If it ever becomes possible for some small power to stand in Russia's way again, there is bound to be a recrudescence of Russia's passion to go south. At the Dardanelles, however, there remains Allied control—British men-of-war, French black troops, Greek governors, and the rest. All boats are challenged coming in, none going out, and otherwise there is freedom of the seas.
A sentimental interest which is more than usual directs Britain's gaze, and especially the gaze of the Empire, to Gallipoli, and that is the interest of sacrifice. Here is the scene of a great and glorious attempt in war, and here lie many thousands of our dead.
The flag of Britain flies over Anzac, and every 25th of April (Anzac Day) at Anzac Bay and throughout Australia and New Zealand, services are held to commemorate the landing in 1915, and the bold attempt to win through, to beat the Turk and liberate the Russian. It is all pure poetry now, the wrecked lighters stuck in the sand, the sweep of Ocean Beach, the rounds of Suvla Bay. You see it one day, and all the sea is impotently angry, raging against a shore which does not reply; you see it another, and it is lapped in an eternal peace; you see it as it is going to look hundreds of years hence, when all the cemeteries are fitted out in stone, and the cypresses have grown around them, and the British have gone home, and no one visits Gallipoli any more—serene, untroubled.
You run from the once bullet-swept water's edge to the slight shelter of a sand-bank, and walk by the narrow sap into "Shrapnel Valley," still strewn with old water-bottles and broken rum-jars, by a trench then to "Monash Valley," and there probably you start coveys of partridge, which abound now in great numbers, or you start the silver fox or ever-present hare. Wild life has returned as if there never had been a sound of gun. You walk the path up which the rations went in the old days, and see the litter still. You see the great charred patches where stores were burned before the evacuation. How untouched all seems between these giant crags! How vividly you see all that they saw, the grandeur of Nature, the glimmer of the sea! You can still smell the Dardanelles expedition, and tread in old footsteps which hardly have been worn away.
It is an astonishing position, dominated by vast inaccessible ridges. Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair. In an hour or so you may walk all the way we ever got. And we did not need to have got much further than Chunuk Bair. Down below on the one hand is the sea where the men-of-war lay and thundered with their guns. But across and in front gleams in the sunlight what was the Promised Land, the roofs of Chanak and the purple narrows of the Hellespont.
The New Zealanders will have their special monument here beside the cemeteries where their many dead are lying. They took Chunuk Bair, and unsupported, pressed on to win the day, only to be outnumbered and met by terrible odds of swarming Turks. You may pause now and pick an anemone in that terrible no-man's land, where the skeletons of our old dead, picked clean by the jackals, were found otherwise untouched when we came again in the November of '18. You can see the damped, slightly discoloured patches where dead men lay, and even find still now and then a human bone—of friend or foe, who now can tell?
We have gathered together the bones and have buried them all, be they English or Turk, and have decently cleaned up Gallipoli—as Englishmen would. Australians and New Zealanders work there now with simple devotion and energy, and are astonishing the Turks, who ask, "If they do so much for the dead, what will they do for the living?"
A few army huts on the height above Kellia Bay mark the headquarters where Col. Hughes and his Anzac staff are living. From ever-windy hills they look across the Narrows to the wan house where Byron lived. Gangs of Greeks are working for them. The extremity of Gallipoli Peninsula is as it were an imperial estate, and every day a round of work goes on at Helles, at Greenhill, at Suvla, and the rest. With the coming of summer the ships are coming with the marble, and the stone slabs will climb the hills where once our fellows struggled upward. It is a fine undertaking. No ranks are distinguished in the gravestones, and all are equal in sacrifice. But dominating everything will be a tall white obelisk to be put up on the highest point of Helles, visible to all ships passing through the Gate and going forth upon the seas. Australia will be there. England might lose its interest in the Dardanelles—but the Empire never. The younger men have their eyes upon it. And what a contrast the Laodicean atmosphere of G.H.Q., and the frankness of an Australian and New Zealand mess!
A certain widow of a brave general who died in the attack, has, through wealth and influence, obtained permission to erect a personal monument to her husband on Gallipoli. If this is carried out it will be greatly resented by the Australians, who say, "If wealth can purchase a monument, there are plenty of rich Australians who would readily erect memorials to their gallant kith and kin who perished here." A pity if the equality and simplicity of the Gallipoli cemeteries is broken into.
An exchange of hospitality with H.M.S. "Tumult," standing off Chanak, kept us in touch with the outside world, giving us the wireless messages each day. Thus we heard of the application of the "sanctions" to Germany, the conclusion of the trade treaty with Soviet Russia, the fall of Batum, and other items of world interest. The first officer told us how they stood off at Sevastopol and took on Russian wounded, the most appalling cases of suffering where there was never a murmur from the men, and the Russian sisters sat with them all day and all night with a never-tiring devotion. The Commander and every one were strongly Russophile—won to them by personal contact with the Russians, and that although the ship "stank like a pole-cat" before it could bring the refugees to port.
The Commander very kindly gave me a passage to Gallipoli, where a large part of Wrangel's army was encamped. We tore up the channel at an unexampled pace, the cleft north wind driving angrily past as the destroyer rived its way through. And in an hour we came to the ramshackle capital and main port of the peninsula, where a host of khaki-clad soldiers stared at us from the quay.
General Wrangel's army numbered about eighty thousand men when it was transported from the Crimea, and about ten thousand had left him for one cause and another at the time when the French presented the ultimatum—"Go to Brazil or back to Soviet Russia, or we shall cut off the rations on April the first." Wrangel's war material, his guns and machine-guns and ammunition, were given mostly to the Georgians, who promptly lost it to the Bolsheviks or sold it to Kemal. The Greeks certainly complain that the Kemalist army, after being almost devoid of artillery, suddenly became possessed of it in a mysterious way, and shelled them with French shells. The Greek set-back at Smyrna is no doubt partly attributable to the disposal of Wrangel's weapons. His ships and stores were mostly commandeered by