One continually hears similar comments, and there can be no doubt of the Turkish soldier’s bravery, and his unusual ability to endure hardship.  No one who has wrangled with a minor Turkish official, and experienced the impassive resistance he is able to interpose to anything he doesn’t want to do, will underestimate what this quality might become, translated into the rugged physique and impassivity of the common soldier.

Westerners have heard so long of the Sick Man of Europe and his imminent decease that they are likely to associate political with physical weakness, and think that the pale, brooding, official type, familiar in photographs, is the every-day Turk.  As a matter of fact, the every-day Turk is tough-bodied and tough-spirited, used to hard living and hard work.  The soldiers you see swinging up Pera Hill or in from a practice march, dust-covered and sweating, and sending out through the dusty cedars a wailing sort of chant as they come—­these are as splendid-looking fellows as you will see in any army in Europe.

They are dressed in businesslike fashion in dust-colored woollen tunics and snug breeches with puttees, and wear a rather rakish-looking folded cap—­a sort of conventionalized turban not unlike the soldier hats children make by folding newspapers.  This protects the eyes and the back of the neck from the sun.  They are strong and well made, with broad, high cheek-bones, a black mustache generally, and hawk eyes.  Some look as the Tartar warriors who swept over eastern Europe must have looked; some, with their good-natured faces and vigorous compactness, remind one of Japanese infantrymen.

During the early fighting on the peninsula the wounded came up to Constantinople, after days on the way, in wagons, perhaps, over horrible roads, in commandeered ferry-boats and freighters, yet one scarcely heard a sound, a murmur of complaint.  Gray and gaunt, with the mud of the trenches still on them, they would be helped into ambulances and driven off to the hospitals, silent themselves and through crowds as silent as those which had watched them march away a few weeks before.

From that little oasis in the pines we drove with a pass, signed by the field-marshal himself, taking us to the heights above Ari Burnu, to a point near the south front, a hill in the centre of the peninsula, from which we could see both the Dardanelles and the Aegean, and to a camp beneath it, where we were to spend the night.

It was dark when our wagon lurched into this camp, and a full hour passed before the baffled Turks could convince themselves that our pass and we were all that they should be, and put us into a tent.  Nevertheless, an orderly poked his head in good-naturedly enough at seven next morning with tea and goat’s cheese and brown bread, and our captain host, a rather wildish-looking young man from the Asiatic interior, came to say he had telephoned for permission to take us to the heights above Kaba Tepe and Ari Burnu.