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Philip, uneasy at the emptiness of the town and leisurely fashion in which things were likely to move, started for Lapsaki, across the Marmora, for food and blankets, and Suydam and I strolled about the town. We had gone but a few steps when we observed an aimless-looking individual in fez and civilian clothes following us.
It was nine o'clock before we sat down with the mutessarif, his secretary, and the voluble journalist to a whole roast kid, a rather terrifying but exceedingly palatable dish, stuffed with nuts, rice, and currants, and accompanied by some of the wine of Lapsaki, rice pudding, and a huge bowl of raw eggs, which were eaten by cracking the shell, elevating one's head, and tossing them down like oysters.
We saw Kilid-Bahr, Chanak-Kaleh, Gallipoli, Lapsaki in ruins; at the last place I landed, leaving her in the boat, and walked a little way, but soon went back with the news that there was not even a bazaar-arch left standing whole, in most parts even the line of the streets being obliterated, for the place had fallen like a house of dice, and had then been shaken up and jumbled.
I did not leave Imbros after that during four years, except for occasional brief trips to the coast to Kilid-Bahr, Gallipoli, Lapsaki, Gamos, Rodosto, Erdek, Erekli, or even once to Constantinople and Scutari if I happened to want anything, or if I was tired of work: but without once doing the least harm to anything, but containing my humours, and fearing my Maker.
We paused till sunup at Lapsaki, crept close to shore through the Marmora, and once through floating wreckage boards and a galvanized-iron gasolene tank apparently from some transport sunk by a submarine, and after dark, with lights out as we had started, round the corner of Stamboul. A War Correspondents' Village
We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get blankets and buy or order mattresses, and found it much what Gallipoli must have been a few days before sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretchers and Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting streets, noisy with traders and refugees.
The Marmora narrowed, we passed Gallipoli on the European side, where the English and French hostages had had their curious adventure the week before, and on into the Dardanelles proper and the zone of war. On the left were Lapsaki and the green hills of Asia, cultivated to their very tops; on the right Europe and the brown hills of the peninsula, now filled with guns and horses and men.
Greek traders, Jews from the Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths in fez and American clothes, with recommendations from American Y. M. C. A.'s it was a great afternoon for Lapsaki! A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her hospital.
It was all over in an hour some say even twenty, minutes but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, to kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the rest into the caves under the cliffs by the water, or across the Marmora to Lapsaki.
The north wind held; directly the sun went down it was cold again, and, only half fed with the provisions Philip brought over from Lapsaki, they spent a dismal night, huddled on the bare floor, under their suitcases or whatever they could get to cover them, and expecting another bombardment at dawn.
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