Frank Forester: A Story of the Dardanelles Page 12

  CHAPTER XII

  IN THE HILLS

  In the hills of Gallipoli, between Uzundere and Biyuk Anafarta near theSalt Lake, a platoon of Kurdish troops had just joined a half-company ofAnatolians. They were taking their midday meal on a level stretch ofturf some seven hundred feet above sea-level. It was the only clearspace of considerable size in a wilderness of scrub. Below them ran therough track from Biyuk Anafarta to Boghali. The hill of Sari Bair,nearly three hundred feet above them, blocked the direct view to thenearest part of the sea; but north and south of that eminence the bluewaters were clearly visible. The horizon was dotted with dark shapes,no doubt warships and transports of the Allied fleet. To the south,over the lower hills between them and Boghali, they looked down upon theNarrows, with Kilid Bahr on the European shore and Chanak on theAsiatic. To the north-east stretched the Dardanelles above the Narrows,and here too vessels, but Turkish, were passing up and down.

  It would have been apparent to the most casual observer that the arrivalof the Kurds was not welcome to their Anatolian brethren-in-arms. TheKurd has a habit of assuming a swaggering air of superiority. TheAnatolians were in charge of a captain and a lieutenant, the Kurds of alieutenant only; but this latter officer, seated with the others alittle apart from the men, was treating the captain as though he were asubaltern. Ignoring his inferiority in rank, he had questioned andcross-questioned in a bumptious way that raised the captain's gall. Asthe captain remarked in an undertone to his lieutenant, this barbarousKurd could not have been more insolent if he had been a German. And asit was with the officers, so with the men. They ate their simple foodtogether, but the Anatolians maintained a sullen silence amid the loudtalking of the Kurds. When it was a question of fetching water from thestream that flowed through the rocky bottom below, it was two of theAnatolians who were told off to the job by the Kurdish sergeant, andwent sulkily to obey.

  The Kurdish lieutenant was holding forth to the other officers.

  "Wallahy!" he said. "Here I am, but it is not where I would wish to be.The fight against odds is the breath of his nostrils to a Kurd. Ifthere had been a few squadrons of Kurds in Egypt the other day we shouldhave been in Cairo by now."

  "But there were Kurds--many Kurds," the captain ventured to remark. "Itwas told me by my cousin in a letter."

  "Ahi! Are we in Cairo? In truth we are not. I repeat, if there hadbeen Kurds we should have been in Cairo. Therefore there were no Kurds.Mashallah! Did not Liman Pasha whisper in my ear, the day after we setfoot in Gallipoli, 'With ten thousand Kurds, noble Abdi, we couldconquer the world. Therefore take me now twenty of your excellent menand catch this Englishman. Have we not had for ten days half a companyof Anatolian asses on the trail?'"

  This was more than even an Anatolian captain could stand.

  "You wish to insult me?" he cried.

  "Wallahy! What is this? Insult you? I do but repeat the Alman Pasha'swords. Mayhap I understood him wrongly; but it seemed to me that hespoke of Anatolian asses. Who am I to correct him? But come now, tellme what you have done and where you have been; what caves you havesearched, what woods you have beaten."

  Unwillingly, sulkily, the captain gave particulars of his doings duringthe past few days. He felt that though nominally in command as seniorofficer, the Kurd was in reality superseding him. And he resented theimplication that he had failed in what was at best a thankless task.

  Some ten days before, his information had been, an Englishman disguisedas an Armenian had been recognised in Gallipoli as a fugitive fromErzerum. How he had contrived to reach Gallipoli was a mystery. Beforehe could be arrested by the person who had discovered him, he had made aviolent attack on that person, and escaped to the hills. When the alarmwas given, the Anatolian captain had been sent in pursuit. About sunseta peasant had seen an Armenian who answered to the description of thefugitive crossing the Karaman river near the Bergas road. Darknessprevented his being followed up, but the hunt was resumed at dawn nextmorning. It had proved fruitless hitherto. The captain complained thatnot a hundred, but ten thousand men would be required to beat thoroughlythose rugged brush-covered hills.

  "Think of it!" he said. "Climbing up and down these almostperpendicular hill-faces; through dense scrub; down one side of avalley, across a stream or a swamp and up the other side; beatingbushes; exploring hill caves; searching secluded farms--and all the timewithout proper food. We were sent away in a hurry. 'Hunt till you findhim,' was the order. We had two days' rations, and since then have hadto depend on what we could pick up at the farms, and they, as you know,are in lonely places far apart. And we have not so much as caught sightof this elusive Englishman, though we have heard of him often enough.Wallahy! a farmer at Taifur Keui told me that a young Armenian hadwalked uninvited into his house and demanded food, holding a revolver tohis head. Stricken with amazement and terror at this boldness on thepart of an Armenian dog--but in truth a famished dog is bold as alion--the farmer gave him bread and honey, and having satisfied himself,he paid for his entertainment and went away composedly and withouthaste, threatening to shoot any man that followed him. This being toldme, I hunted diligently for two days through the Taifur district, andbehold, it was then related that the fugitive had appeared at Kum Keui,ten miles away on the high-road, and there he had waylaid a supplywagon, and taken for himself a great quantity of the good things itcontained, and forced the driver to unyoke the mules, and when this wasdone in fear and trembling because of the revolver, this bold brigandcaused the wagon to run down a sloping place and over a precipice intothe Ak Bashi river."

  "Mashallah! These are marvels indeed," said the Kurd, "and there is notruth in them. But say on, captain; let my ears feast on these fairytales."

  "I speak what I have heard; as for the truth, Allah knows. It was toldme also that the dog was seen at Kachili and Kuchuk Anafarta, but when Icame to those places and was searching every nook and cranny, behold,one brought me word that he had been seen elsewhere. Yesterday, as Ilive, a major of artillery came wearily into Maidos, sick with shame atthe garments he wore, which in very truth were the rags of an Armenian.And he told me that when he was riding without escort on the Gallipoliroad near Boghali yonder, a young giant that was Armenian in dress but avery devil in mien and bearing leapt forth suddenly from the bushes ofthe wayside, and laying a mighty hand upon him, dragged him from hishorse, and compelled him there and then to exchange his uniform forthose filthy tatters the Armenian wore. Yet did the major confess thathis ravisher was not without courtesy, for even as he put on the major'sheavy coat he prayed his pardon for the robbery, saying that he wouldfain have left him the coat, but that he could not, because the nightsin these hills are bitter cold. And that this is truth I tell is sure,for that same day--yesterday in the afternoon--an officer of artillerywas seen, alone, above Baghche Keui, the hamlet you see below us yonder.And I came last night in haste to Biyuk Anafarta, and rose with thedawn, and for six hours I have been scouring these hills, and not aglimpse of that bold Englishman have I seen."

  "Wallahy! Truly it was time I came," said the Kurd. "Know you that itwas I, Abdi, that found the Englishman searching for treasure in theruins of a house in Gallipoli which an English shell had smitten. It wasI, Abdi, whom the dog, taking me unawares--who can contend againstdeceitfulness?--hurled fainting to the ground. To me should have beengiven the task of hunting the dog; now to me it is given; and by thebeard of the Prophet I will catch him and flay him; I, Abdi, say it."

  While the others were thus conversing, some of the men, having finishedtheir meal, had got up and begun to stroll about the hillside. Othershad gone down to fill their water-bottles at a spring that bubbled outof the rock some two hundred yards from the spot where the officers weresitting. Abdi, lighting a cigarette, watched them with a speculativeeye.

  "Your Anatolians may stray too far," he said. "That will not my Kurdsdo. Come now, let us make our plans. We must beat these hil
ls as webeat for bear in Kurdistan. See, here and there below us are clearspaces in the scrub. Into the scrub between them I will send my ownmen; them I can trust to let nothing pass, not a rabbit nor a stoat norany small creeping thing; they are not plainsmen, blind and deaf. YourAnatolians shall move six paces apart towards the spot where mymountaineers are posted: even they, surely, cannot let anything throughso small a mesh. You will form them up in a crescent line, the hornspointing to where my men lurk in the scrub. So shall we beat a largecircle, and if our quarry is not started there, we will go on and dolikewise farther afield."

  They flung away the ends of their cigarettes, rose to their feet, andblew their whistles. From various directions the men hurried back, theAnatolians lining up on one side of the open space, the Kurds on theother. When the ranks were formed and numbered off, a Kurdish sergeantcalled out:

  "There is a man short. Where is Yusuf?"

  The men looked up and down the line, as if seeking their missingcomrade; then one of them said:

  "I saw him go down to fill his bottle."

  The sergeant blew his whistle, and took a few paces in the direction ofthe stream. A few minutes passed. The absentee did not appear. Thesergeant reported his absence to Abdi.

  "Take a couple of men and look for him," said the Kurd, twirling hismoustache.

  The three men went off and disappeared over the brow of the hill.Presently there were shouts from below, and one of the men came back ata run, saluted his officer, and cried excitedly:

  "We have found Yusuf, effendim, lying on his back, with his hands andfeet tied with his own straps, and his cap thrust between his teeth."

  Abdi scowled, and would not meet the Anatolian captain's eye. Inanother moment the missing man appeared over the crest, led between thesergeant and his comrade.

  "What is this, Yusuf?" demanded Abdi roughly, going to meet the man,whose bare head was streaming with water.

  "Wallahy! I have been most grievously entreated. I was filling mybottle at the stream there below when there came a step behind me, whichI heeded not, thinking one of my comrades had come to fill his bottlelikewise. And then, behold, a strong hand seized me, and thrust my headunder the water, and held it there until I well-nigh burst for want ofbreath; and when all the strength was gone out of me I was cast upon theground, and my wet cap was thrust between my teeth, and my hands andfeet were tied, and I was left half dead."

  "Who was it did this thing?" asked Abdi.

  "Truly I know not, but he had the form of a major of our army, if in theconfusion of my senses I could see aright."

  "Where is your rifle?"

  "It was taken from me, together with my pouch and the hundred cartridgestherein."

  Abdi spat and cursed, twirling his moustache more fiercely than ever.His fury was increased by a look of amusement on the faces of theAnatolian officers. Aggrieved that a Kurd should have been sent to makegood their deficiencies, and enraged by his insolent and overbearingmanner, they took no pains to conceal their delight in the discomfitureof the boaster at the hands of the man whose rumoured exploits he hadderided and whom he had declared his intention of flaying. His chagrinalmost reconciled them to the escape of the fugitive whom they had beenvainly hunting for a week.

  But the incident spurred them to activity. The fugitive could not be faraway. Here was an opportunity of proving whether Kurd or Anatolian wasthe better man. Abdi's deliberate dispositions were forgotten orignored. While Abdi led his men at a furious pace in the direction ofthe stream, the Anatolian captain ordered his party to extend andadvance methodically through the scrub. The hunt was up.

  Some two hours later a young man in the uniform of a major of Turkishartillery, but carrying a rifle, might have been seen threading his waythrough the dense scrub on the northern slopes of Sari Bair. Reaching apoint where it was possible to obtain a good view to the north-east, helooked cautiously around, halted and listened. There was no sound butthe whistling of the wind through the bushes. After a moment's hurriedsurvey of his surroundings, he discovered a spot where he could seewithout being seen, unslung his field-glasses, and swept the oppositeslope of Karsilar. For some little time the glasses moved slowly fromleft to right, then the watcher held them stationary and took a long andsteady gaze. A line of figures was moving like ants across a clearspace and disappearing into the scrub beyond. A little later theyreappeared in another break in the vegetation, working towards BaghcheKeui.

  Apparently satisfied, he shut up the glasses, and returned them to theircase. The name of the maker caught his eye.

  "Good English glasses!" he murmured, as men do who have lived for sometime alone. "I am uncommonly obliged to you, my dear major. I neededsomething to equalise the odds."