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I have every confidence, however, that the bicycle will prove an effectual safeguard against any undue familiarity on the part of these frisky citizens. Since reaching Constantinople the papers here have published accounts of recent exploits accomplished by brigands near Eski Baba.
I wondered which of those would have fallen when the knitting women should count "Three." It was not difficult to prophesy. Monty, though he was as venturesome as any combatant, could never quite share the dangers of the men who lived in the trenches. His dug-out, back in the Eski Line, was safe from everything but a howitzer shell. And I ye gods!
Seeing who can get the most telling kicks at the dogs seems to be the regular evening's pastime among the male population of Eski Baba unbelievers, and everybody seems interested and delighted when some unfortunate animal comes in for an unusually severe visitation.
Perhaps the Turks were not without pity for the tough little British Divisions that, depleted, exhausted, and unreinforced, lay at their mercy on the extremities of the Gallipoli Peninsula. We knew they were coming, and joked about it. "It's getting distinctly interesting, Captain Ray," said Doe, as we sat drinking tea in Monty's dug-out in the Eski Line.
The trunk-line passes by Angora, Kaisarieh, Diarbekr, Mardin, and Mosul; and a loop-line leaves it at Eski Shehr, which, going by Konia, Marasch, and Orfa, rejoins it at Diarbekr. It was said that the strong competition placed the Government in the position of the man in the Eastern story who went to the bazaar to sell an old camel, and a young cat of rare beauty.
There were Bulgarian notables caring apparently to speak their own language only Spanish Jews from Eski Zaghra, Greeks, Turks, Germans, Italians, Armenians, Englishmen, native volunteers for the Polish legion then forming, and a Croat gentleman with bejewelled handles to his private arsenal of lethal weapons, and starched expansive white petticoats.
The pasha is very likely possessed of more intelligence than I have been giving him credit for; anyhow he has in ten minutes proved himself equal to the situation, which the mulazim and several prominent Eski Babans have puzzled their collective brains over for an hour in vain, and, after he has inspected the bicycle, and resumed his cross-legged position on the carpet, I doff my helmet to him and those about him, and return to the mehana, well satisfied with the turn affairs have taken.
One graceful figure points to a sarcophagus, close to which a female sits in tears; in a word, a remnant of the antique of that harmony which dies not away, but swells on the finer organs of perception. "Eski, Eski. Very old," said the Disdar Aga, who accompanied me. "It is Roman," said I. "Roumgi?" said he, thinking I meant Greek.
Side by side, Ken and Roy stumbled forward, while their captors cursed or jeered them in language which Roy fortunately could not understand, although to Ken every word of it was only too plain. From something the corporal let drop, he learnt that they were being taken, not to Kojadere, but to Eski Keni, which lies in the middle of the peninsula, about half-way between Gaba Tepe and Maidos.
A round score of dogs, great and small, and in all possible conditions of miserableness, congregate in the main street of Eski Baba at eventide, waiting with hungry-eyed expectancy for any morsel of food or offal that may peradventure find its way within their reach.
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