seemed more than half American, indeed, and when he spoke of the old Chelsea Hotel, just across the street from the Y. M. C. A. gymnasium in which I had played hand-ball, we were almost back in Twenty-third Street.  He took us up to his tent on the hill, overlooking the men and stores, and, he explained, reasonably safe from the aeroplanes which flew over several times a day.  Over his cigarettes and tea and bottled beer we talked of war and the world.

It was the captain’s delicate and arduous duty to impose his tight German habits of work and ship-shapeness on camel drivers, stevedores, and officials used to the looser, more leisurely methods of the East.

He could not speak Turkish, was helpless without his interpreter, at best a civilian among soldiers—­men have got Iron Crosses for easier jobs than that!  He talked of the news—­great news for his side—­of the Triumph, and, opening his navy list, made a pencil mark.

“She’s off!” he said.  The book was full of marks.  In methodical sailor fashion he had been crossing them off since the war began:  British and German—­Blucher, Scharnhorst, Irresistible, Goliath, and the rest—­ millions of dollars and hundreds of men at a stroke.

“Where’s it going to end?” he demanded.  “There’s seven hundred good men gone, maybe—­how many did the Triumph carry?  And we think it’s good news!  If a man should invent something that would kill a hundred thousand men at once, he’d be a great man...  Now, what is that?”

The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr—­they might try to make another Gibraltar of it.  Their aeroplanes came up every day.  There was a French-man with a long tail—­he only came to the edge of the camp, and as soon as the batteries opened up turned back, but the Englishman didn’t stop for anything.  He dropped a bomb or two every time he passed—­one man must have been square under one, for they found pieces of him, but never did find his head.  It wasn’t so much the bomb that did the damage; it was the stones blown out by the explosion.  If you were standing anywhere within sixty feet when it went off, you were likely to be killed.  The captain had had trenches dug all over camp into which they could jump—­had one for himself just outside the tent.  All you hoped for when one of those fellows was overhead and the shrapnel chasing after him was that the next one would take him fair and square and bring him down.  Yet that fellow took his life in his hands every time he flew over.  “He’s fighting for his country, too!” the captain sighed.

It was our first duty to present ourselves to the commandant of the peninsular forces, Field-Marshal Liman von Sanders—­Liman Pasha, as he is generally called in Turkey—­and the captain found a carriage, presently, and sent us away with a soldier guard.  Our carriage was a talika, one of those little gondola-like covered wagons common in the country.  There is a seat for the driver; the occupants lie on the floor and adjust themselves as best they can to the bumpings of the hilly roads.