We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread and ripe olives and tea, and walked with him round the camp, through a hospital and into an old farmhouse yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, while the bees left behind in some clumsy old box hives buzzed away as of yore.  Wiser than men, the colonel observed.  There were English Enfields and French rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which the Turks had fitted a new wooden base.  There were rifles with smashed barrels, with stocks bored through by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on through the men who held them—­live men like ourselves; quick choking instants of terror the ghosts of ——­ which we were poking and peering into there in the warm sunshine!

We said good-by to the colonel, for our passes took us but to the valley, and he had stretched a point in sending us down the plateau the evening before, and I bumped back to Kilid Bahr.  We did not want to leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, and as we had duly presented ourselves in Gallipoli, and were now by way of coming from it rather than Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the orderly took us wrote, without question, a permission to cross to Chanak Kale, we sailed with no misgivings.  Alas for Troy and looking down on a modern battle from the heights of Ilium!  A truculent major of gendarmes hurried us from the Asiatic shore as if we had come to capture it.  We might not land, we might not write a note to the commandant to see if the permission to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to Constantinople the day before, had arrived; we might not telephone—­we must go back to Europe, and write or telephone from there.

So back to Europe, and after consultation and telephoning, back to Asia again, and this time we succeeded in effecting a landing and an audience with the commander of the defenses of the Dardanelles, Djevad Pasha.  He was sitting under a tree in a garden looking out over the sea gate, which, with the aid of his two German colleagues, Ousedom Pasha and Merten Pasha, it was his task to keep shut—­a trim Young Turk, more polished and “European” than the major of gendarmes, but no less firm.  An American’s wish to see the Troy he might never be so near again bored him excessively.  We could not stay—­we might not even spend the night.  There was a boat that evening, and on it we must go.

Gendarmes guarded us while we waited—­we who the night before had slept in a scarlet-lined tent!—­and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and three patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignominiously through Chanak Kale’s ruined streets.  The boat we went by was the same little side-wheeler we had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches across the water, with no place to lie but the bare deck.  The stifling hold was packed with them;