attempt to reduce fortifications on the Hudson. Men who were in the
Gallipoli forts during the bombardment told me that, though they were
prevented by the rocky ridge which forms the spine of the peninsula from
seeing the British warships, and though, for the same reason, the
gunners on the ships could not see the forts, the great steel
calling-cards of the British Empire came falling out of nowhere as
regularly and with as deadly precision as though they were being fired
at point-blank range.

The successful defense of the Dardanelles, one of the most brilliantly
conducted defensive operations of the entire war, was primarily due to
the courage and stubborn endurance of Turkey's Anatolian soldiery,
ignorant, stolid, hardy, fearless peasants, who were taken straight from
their farms in Asia Minor, put into wretchedly made, ill-fitting
uniforms, hastily trained by German drillmasters, set down in the
trenches on the Gallipoli ridge and told to hold them. No one who is
familiar with the conditions under which these Turkish soldiers fought,
who knows how wretched were the conditions under which they lived, who
has seen those waterless, sun-seared ridges which they held against the
might of Britain's navy and the best troops which the Allies could bring
against them, can withhold from them his admiration. Their valor was
deserving of a better cause.




CHAPTER V

WILL THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE RECOVER?