The beach, the bags, the ditch, all the way round the camp, and Suydam galloping after.  Somewhere in the middle of it a hideous whiffling wail came down the sky:  Trrou... trrou... trou!—­and then a crash!  The bomb had hit the water just off the end of the pier.  I kept on running.  There was another Trrou... trrou! another geyser of water, and the bird had flown on.

I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that strange afternoon ended, when one of a gang of ditch-diggers, swathed in bright-colored rags, addressed me in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora, who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get, him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on board ship.  There were crowds like him—­Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not wanted as soldiers but impressed for this sort of work.  They were unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our boat at last got under way.  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.

Chapter XIII

A War Correspondents’ Village

The press department of the Foreign Office in Vienna duly presented the application to the press bureau of the Ministry of War; the latter conveyed it to the “Kaiserliche und Konigliche Armee-Oberkommando Kriegs-Presse-Quartier,” a day’s railroad journey nearer the front; the commandant made his recommendation to the chief of the General Staff.  The permission itself percolated back to Vienna presently, and early next morning I took the Teschen express.

It was one of those semi-military trains which run into this region behind the front—­officers and couriers, civilians with military passes, just before we started a young officer and his orderly saying good-by to their wives.  He was one of those amiable, blue-eyed young Austrians who seem a sort of cross between German and French, and the orderly was much such another man, only less neatly made and sensitive, and there were the same differences in their wives and their good-bys.

The orderly saluted his officer, turned, clicked his heels, and saluted his officer’s lady before he embraced his solid wife.  The latter, rather proud to be in such company, beamed like a stove as the two men looked down from the car steps, but the girlish wife of the captain bit her lips, looked nervously from side to side, winked faster and faster until the tears began to roll down her cheeks.  Then the train started, the orderly waving his hand, but the young officer, leaning quickly forward, drew his wife toward him and kissed her on one of the wet eyelids.