In the evening the Consul, Mr. Calvert, came on board, when it turned out that no instructions whatever had been sent to prepare for the reception of the force, except that two commissariat officers, without interpreters or staff, had been dispatched to the town a few days before the troops landed. These officers could not speak the language. However, the English Consul was a man of energy. Mr. Calvert went to the Turkish Governor, and succeeded in having half of the quarters in the town reserved. Next day he visited and marked off the houses; but the French authorities said they had made a mistake as to the portion of the town they had handed over to him. They had the Turkish part of the town close to the water, with an honest and favourable population; the English had the Greek quarter, further up the hill, and perhaps the healthier, and a population which hated them bitterly.
Sir George Brown arrived on Wednesday, the 5th of April, but it was midday on Saturday the 8th, ere the troops were landed and sent to their quarters. The force consisted of only some thousand and odd men, and it had to lie idle for two days and a half watching the seagulls, or with half averted eye regarding the ceaseless activity of the French, the daily arrival of their steamers, the rapid transmission of their men to shore. On our side not a British pendant was afloat in the harbour! Well might a Turkish boatman ask,{16} "Oh, why is this? Oh, why is this, Chelebee? By the beard of the Prophet, for the sake of your father's father, tell me, O English Lord, how is it? The French infidels have got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven ships, with fierce little soldiers; the English infidels, who say they can defile the graves of these French (may Heaven avert it!), and who are big as the giants of Asli, have only one big ship. Do they tell lies?" (Such was the translation given to me of my interesting waterman's address.)
The troops were disembarked in the course of the day, and marched out to encamp, eight miles and a half north of Gallipoli, at a place called Bulair. The camp was occupied by the Rifles and Sappers and Miners, within three miles of the village. It was seated on a gentle slope of the ridge which runs along the isthmus, and commanded a view of the Gulf of Saros, but the Sea of Marmora was not visible. Sanitary and certain other considerations may have rendered it advisable not to select this village itself, or some point closer to it, as the position for the camp; but the isthmus was narrower at Bulair, could be more easily defended, would not have required so much time or labour to put it into a good state of defence, and appeared to be better adapted for an army as regards shelter and water than the position chosen. Bulair is ten and a half miles from Gallipoli, so the camp was about seven and a half from the port at which its supplies were landed, and where its reinforcements arrived.
On Thursday there was a general hunt for quarters through the town. The General got a very fine place in a beau quartier, with a view of an old Turk on a counter looking at his toes in perpetual perspective. The consul, attended by the dragoman and a train of lodging seekers, went from house to house; but it was not till the eye had got accustomed to the general style of the buildings and fittings that any of them seemed willing to accept the places offered them. The hall door, which is an antiquated concern — not affording any particular resistance to the air to speak of — opens on an apartment with clay walls about ten feet high, and of the length and breadth of the whole house. It is garnished with the odds and ends of the domestic deity — empty barrels, casks of home-made wine, buckets, baskets, c. At one side a rough staircase, creaking at every step, conducts one to a saloon on the first floor. This is of the plainest possible appearance. On the sides are stuck prints of the "Nicolaus ho basileus," of the Virgin and Child, and engravings from Jerusalem. The Greeks are iconoclasts, and hate images, but they adore pictures. A yellow Jonah in a crimson whale with fiery entrails is a favourite subject, and doubtless bears some allegorical meaning to their own position in Turkey. From this saloon open the two or three rooms of the house — the kitchen, the divan, and the principal bedroom. There is no furniture. The floors are covered with matting, but with the exception of the cushions on the raised platform round the wall of the room (about eighteen inches from the floor), there is nothing else in the rooms offered for general competition to the public. Above are dark attics. In such a lodging as this, in{17} the house of the widow Papadoulos, was I at last established to do the best I could without servant or equipment.