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Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them
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Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them
Arthur Ruhl
Chapter I. The Germans Are Coming!
Chapter II. Paris At Bay
Chapter III. After
The Marne
Chapter IV. The Fall Of Antwerp
Chapter V. Paris Again—And Bordeaux:
Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs
Chapter VI. “The Great Days”
Chapter VII.
Two German Prison Camps
Chapter VIII. In The German Trenches At La Bassee
Chapter IX. The Road To Constantinople
Chapter X. The Adventure Of The Fifty
Hostages
Chapter XI. With The Turks At The Dardanelles
Chapter XII. Soghan-Dere
And The Flier Of Ak-Bash
Chapter XIII. A War Correspondents' Village
Chapter
XIV. Cannon Fodder
Chapter XV. East Of Lemberg—Through Austria-Hungary to the
Galician Front
Chapter XVI. In The Dust Of The Russian Retreat
ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI
A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them
by Arthur Ruhl
Chapter I. The Germans Are Coming!
The Germans had already entered Brussels, their scouts were reported on the
outskirts of Ghent; a little farther now, over behind the horizon wind-mills,
and we might at any moment come on them.
For more than a fortnight we had been hurrying eastward, hearing, through cable
despatches and wireless, the far-off thunder of that vast gray tide rumbling
down to France. The first news had come drifting in, four thousand miles away,
to the little Wisconsin lake where I was fishing. A strange herd of us, all
drawn in one way or another by the war, had caught the first American ship, the
old St. Paul, and, with decks crowded with trunks and mail-bags from half a
dozen ships, steamed eastward on the all but empty ocean. There were reservists
hurrying to the colors, correspondents, men going to rescue wives and sisters.
Some were hit through their pocketbooks, some through their imaginations— like
the young women hoping to be Red Cross nurses, or to help in some way, they
weren't sure how.
One had a steamer chair next mine—a pale, Broadway tomboy sort of girl in a
boyish sailor suit, who looked as if she needed sleep. Without exactly being on
the stage, she yet appeared to live on the fringe of it, and combined the slangy
freedoms of a chorus girl with a certain quick wisdom and hard sense. It was she
who discovered a steerage passenger, on the Liverpool dock, who had lost his
wife and was bringing his four little children back to Ireland from Chicago,
and, while the other cabin passengers fumed over their luggage, took up a
collection for him then and there.
“Listen here!” she would say, grabbing my arm. “I want to tell you something.
I'm going to see this thing—d'you know what I mean?—for what it'll do to me—you
know—for its effect on my mind! I didn't say anything about it to anybody—they'd
only laugh at me—d'you know what I mean? They don't think I've got any serious
side to me. Now, I don't mind things—I mean blood—you know—they don't affect me,
and I've read about nursing—I've prepared for this! Now, I don't know how to go
about it, but it seems to me that a woman who can—you know—go right with 'em—jolly
'em along—might be just what they'd want—d'you know what I mean?”
One Russian had said good-by to a friend at the dock, he to try to get through
this way, the other by the Pacific and Trans-Siberian. The Englishman who shared
my stateroom was an advertising man. “I've got contracts worth fifty thousand
pounds,” he said, “and I don't suppose they're worth the paper they're written
on.” There were several Belgians and a quartet of young Frenchmen who played
cards every night and gravely drank bottle after bottle of champagne to the
glory of France.
Even the Balkans were with us, in the shape of a tall, soldier-like Bulgarian
with a heavy mustache and the eyes of a kindly and highly intelligent hawk. He
was going back home—“to fight?” “Yes, to fight.”
“With Servia?” asked some one politely, with the usual vague American notion of
the Balkan states. The Bulgarian's eyes shone curiously.
“You have a sense of humor!” he said...........
A fascinating behind the scenes account of WW1.....Arthur Ruhl was privileged to
see the Dardanelles and Gallipoli fronts from behind Turkish lines.
A keen observer his reports make fascinating reading.
-o-
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