World War I

At the end of the village the road climbed again from the ravine and emerged on open fields. A wall of timber, dark and impenetrable as the woods round an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields - the road cutting through it like a tunnel - and on the brow of the ravine, commanding the road and the little plain, was a line of trenches. Here evidently they had fought.

The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked their doors and fled.

These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France. I had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away from the front instead of toward it - down to see Bordeaux while it was still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the French provincial towns in war time.

They were playing "The Categorical Imperative" that evening at the Little Theatre in Unter den Linden. It is an old-fashioned comedy laid in the Vienna of 1815 - two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told, across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as he.

Visiting a prison camp is somewhat like touching at an island in the night - one of those tropical islands, for instance, whose curious and crowded life shows for an instant as your steamer leaves the mail or takes on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a few twinkling lights and the sound of a bell across the water. You may get permission to see a prison camp, but may not stay there, and you are not expected, generally, to talk to the prisoners.

We had come down from Berlin on-one of those excursions which the German General Staff arranges for the military observers and correspondents of neutral countries. You go out, a sort of zoo - our party included four or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian, a diminutive Spaniard, and a tall, preoccupied Swede - under the direction of some hapless officer of the General Staff.

Rumania and Bulgaria

The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania.

Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the Dardanelles.

The little side-wheeler - she had been built in Glasgow in 1892, and done duty as a Bosporus ferry-boat until the war began - was supposed to sail at four, but night shut down and she still lay at the wharf in Stamboul. We contrived to get some black bread, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and helva from one of the little hole-in-the-wall shops near by, watched Pera and its ascending roofs turn to purple, and the purple to gray and black, until Constantinople was but a string of lights across Galata Bridge, and a lamp here and there on the hills.

Next morning, after news had been telephoned in that the submarines had got another battleship, the Majestic, we climbed again into the covered wagon and started for the south front. We drove down to the sea and along the beach road through Maidos - bombarded several weeks before, cross-country from the Aegean, and nothing now but bare, burnt walls - on to Kilid Bahr, jammed with camels and ox-carts and soldiers, and then on toward the end of the peninsula.