There does not seem to be any reason
why the hills should go where they do:
the land crouches like a badly broken
loaf of bread, the spoon-shaped ground
pretty as an English park
with larkspur and mustard flowers.
A corner of Thrace. Across the Hellespont
a high, straggling cliff upshoulders
white tents spread under sheltering
plane trees. Whirling windmills
crown the crest
of the ridge of Gallipoli.
Bullock carts with ungreased wheels
toil across Kodja Chai bridge.
Clean cattle with heads bent low
pull rectangular ammunition boxes,
black water buffaloes
drag flour bags, kneeling camels
untangle their necks and limbs
to prop themselves and begin
their side-wheel march.
It is not lack of rifles that worries
General Liman von Sanders
as he rides along the trenches
from the Dardanelles to the Aegean.
In the bar of the Salonika Hotel
a squad of German marines drink
Constantinople beer and sing
Fatherland songs:
the Majestic was sunk at daylight,
shaking the Sea of Marmara
with a deep prolonged roar
where an officer takes an inventory now
of the wrecked submarine.
Here and there, drab soldiers
straighten out short lengths of barbed wire—
the Turkish kind is oversharp
and thick as your little finger.
Brown-barrelled guns point south-west
where time and again I turn back
to the grey hulk forsaken
on the water. Two thousand
shells per hour fell, the battleships
splashing high fountains
till the mosque at Chanak was a ruin.
Before me cranes swing outward
and inward, a destroyer with a dark green band
flies the French flag astern.
A seaplane circles over.
The turbanned chaplain gazes past
the Red Crescent Hospital
to the plains of Troy and the hills
of Ilium, where Argive Helen
saw the brass-clad Greeks arrive
in their beaked boats. A giant
yellow balloon directs the gunfire,
and only the wounded under a rain
of copper-coated lead leave
these oddly shrinking, shell-swept
shores. And it so happened
that a fog came on, in the afternoon
the bush caught fire, forcing the troops
to move in single file
along goat tracks through the scrub.
Some strayed in search of water,
some pricked holes in the hoses with their knives.
On Hill 10 they had no artillery,
no stores, on C Beach only one
Field Ambulance. A commanding officer,
sixteen officers, and two-hundred-and-fifty
men charged into the forest,
were lost to sight or sound,
and never seen again. Many
were frozen to death as they stood,
the earth below the hospitals became infected,
before the season of the south winds,
mourning cards were sent, lamenting all five sons.