OF HILL’S TERRIBLE MONTH IN GUMUSH SUYU HOSPITAL

Hill and I braced ourselves for the six weeks of acting that lay between us and July. We were under no delusions as to the cause of our success so far. Our acting had no doubt been good, but we knew quite well that by itself it would have availed us little. The decision of the doctors had been based on our “medical history,” as edited by the Spook and presented to them in the reports of the Commandant, the Pimple, the sentries Bekir and Sabit, and the two Turkish doctors of Yozgad.

We have no desire to injure, by our story, the deservedly high professional reputation of Mazhar Osman Bey. We would very much regret such a result, and it would indeed be a poor return for the unfailing courtesy and the gentlemanly consideration that was always shown us by him and indeed by nearly all the doctors of Haidar Pasha Hospital. For to them we were not enemy subjects but patients on the same footing as Turkish officers, to be tested for malingering and treated in exactly the same way as their fellow countrymen. It is only fair to them to say that we attribute our success not so much to our acting as to the manner in which, under O’Farrell’s directions, and with the aid of the Spook, our case was presented.

The evidence Mazhar Osman Bey had to consider was the following:

All this evidence was brought forward by the Turkish authorities themselves, who had apparently no motive for seeking to prove us insane. Mazhar Osman Bey was told that the English doctor at Yozgad (O’Farrell) had tried to prevent us being brought to Constantinople and that he refused to admit we were suffering from anything more serious than mild neurasthenia. This certainly did not look like collusion between us and our own medical man. We ourselves strenuously claimed to be quite well and contradicted many of the assertions the Pimple made against us. My resolute denial of the hanging and Hill’s very reluctant admission of it particularly impressed the doctors. So did my apparently inadvertent admission of previous incarceration in an asylum under M—— (another suggestion of O’Farrell’s), and subsequent denial of all knowledge of M——.

The position, so far as Mazhar Osman Bey could see, was that the Turks were trying to prove us mad while we were both anxious to be considered sane. He had not the vestige of a reason for disbelieving any of the statements made by the Pimple and the Turkish officials of Yozgad. For while, in our speech with the doctors, we sought to deny the salient points in the evidence against us, the whole of our conduct in hospital was aimed at corroborating the Pimple’s story. The fact that Hill’s behaviour was so absolutely different from mine was another point in our favour. The only theory that could hold water at all was that we had bribed the Turks, but against such a theory was first the large number of people who had given evidence against us and second the Commandant’s apparently hostile conduct towards us at Yozgad—Mazhar Osman knew we had been “imprisoned on bread and water” for telepathy.

Only a medical man can decide whether or not the evidence of the Turks and our answers in the preliminary examinations justified Mazhar Osman Bey in being predisposed to a belief in our insanity. We ourselves believed then, and we still believe, that so long as we could avoid traps and keep up our acting on the lines O’Farrell had dictated, no doctor on earth could prove we were malingering. And we had one tremendous asset on our side: Mazhar Osman was too busy a man to be able to devote much of his time to observing us. We never avoided him—indeed I did rather the reverse, and used to rush up to him on every possible occasion—but except for what he saw of us during his morning visit he had to depend on the reports of his subordinates. Had things been otherwise, we think we would have been “caught out,” but as it was we had to deal mainly with men who believed their Chief infallible, and who knew of his inclination to consider us mad. That knowledge probably affected their judgment and their powers of observation.

Our task was “to keep it up” until the exchange steamer arrived. It was a desperate time for both of us. We were watched night and day. We knew that a single mistake would spoil everything for both. The junior doctors (acting no doubt under instructions from Mazhar Osman), set traps for us, tested us in various ways, and reported the results. We did not take it all lying down. In order to find out what they thought from time to time, and how the wind was blowing, we in our turn set traps for the junior doctors.^[57]

In my own case the doctors began by suspecting General Paralysis of the Insane, a disease commonly due to syphilis. I knew the diagnosis was bound to be upset by the negative results of the Wassermann tests, and did not feel at all comfortable until they began showing me off to visiting doctors as a rara avis. What Mazhar Osman Bey’s final diagnosis was I never discovered, because it was written on my medical sheet in technical language, and my small Turkish dictionary did not contain the words used; but I think from the interest shown in me by students and strange doctors, it was something pretty exceptional. I also think that for a long time Mazhar Osman Bey was not a little dubious about it. Indeed I believe that out of the kindness of his heart—for he was a kindly and humane man—he decided to risk his professional reputation rather than do me a possible injustice, and gave me the benefit of the doubt.

About Hill, I think none of the real experts were ever in two minds. He was quite an ordinary case of acute Religious Melancholia. But he went through a terrible month in Gumush Suyu Hospital, where the treatment meted out to him by the doctors there was such as nearly killed him. To all appearances Hill was a genuine melancholic, or he could never have deceived men like Mazhar Osman Bey, Helmi Bey, ChouaÏe Bey, and our own British doctors, as he did. Yet, merely because he was a prisoner of war, these doctors at Gumush Suyu jumped to the conclusion that he must be malingering, and on this supposition they treated him not as an ordinary malingerer is treated, but with a cruelty that was unspeakable.^[58] That they took no trouble to acquaint themselves with the history of his case may be excused on the ground that it was ordinary Turkish slackness, though it was slackness such as no doctor should be guilty of. But at this time Hill was not merely a malingering melancholic. He was genuinely ill from a very severe bout of dysentery, and was sick almost unto death. The most ordinary microscopic examination would have revealed the nature of his complaint. Whether the Gumush Suyu men made it or not I do not know. But this I know: they showed a callousness and a brutality in their treatment of Hill which drew violent expostulations from the British patients in the hospital, and for which the doctors deserve to be horsewhipped. Whatever their suspicions as to the melancholia may have been, they have no excuse for their utter neglect of a man who was obviously in the throes of severe dysentery; they cannot be pardoned for leaving him for days without medicine or proper diet; and they should answer in Hell for sending him back by a springless donkey cart to Psamatia Camp (the journey took Hill five hours) when he was too weak to walk downstairs without assistance. All these things they did. Captain Alan Bott, then a prisoner-patient in the hospital, protested vigorously, but in vain, against the cruelty of that journey. One thing only his protests achieved—the donkey cart. Without Captain Bott’s assistance Hill would have had no conveyance whatsoever, and some idea of the man’s condition may be gathered from the fact that though his normal weight is 12 stone, at this time he weighed less than 100 lbs.

It amounts to this: the doctors in charge at Gumush Suyu took advantage of Hill’s sickness to try to break his spirit by mal-treatment of what they knew was a genuine disease (dysentery) and by putting his life in danger. No British doctor—no doctor of any nationality worthy of the name of doctor—however much he suspected a man, would do such a thing. I believe a genuine melancholic would have died under their hands. Hill’s life was saved by the fact that he was not a melancholic and by the care taken of him by Captain T.W. White, a prisoner-patient in the ward. Hill confided in White, who smuggled medicine and milk to him, and helped him in many ways. It was not till after the worst of the dysentery had been mastered by these means that the Turks began to treat him for it. But even with White’s help, Hill only just got through alive. On reaching Psamatia after his terrible journey he nearly collapsed, but he set his teeth and carried on. He deceived not only the Turkish and the British doctor^[59] there (both of whom were intensely indignant at the treatment to which he had been subjected) but also the medical representatives of the Dutch Embassy at Constantinople,^[60] and was sent back to Gumush Suyu and thence a few days later to Haidar Pasha for “proper treatment by mental specialists” and “to await the exchange boat.” For all their cruelty the Gumush Suyu doctors were fairly outwitted, and in sending Hill back for “proper treatment” by mental specialists they admitted not only defeat but their own black ignorance.

Hill and I blame no doctor for suspecting us of malingering. Every one of them had a perfect right to his own opinion. We expected to be “put through it” and we bear no grudge against any of the doctors—and there were plenty of them—who tried their legitimate tricks on us. Thus, when Hill was “fasting,” a thing he often did for days at a time, Mazhar Osman Bey instructed the attendants to leave his meals standing on the table by his bedside, and also drugged him to excite his appetite. What such temptation means to a starving man (even without the drugging) only those who have themselves starved can guess; but it was a fair, a perfectly fair and honourable trick. Or again, when Talha Bey offered to provide me with “an anti-toxin against the poison in my parcels” and gave me a couple of ounces of ink to drink, I downed it with a smile and said “I liked it, for it tasted powerful”—didn’t I, Talha? (And I overheard Talha tell a friend about the “experiment” afterwards, and express his sorrow for doing it, like the good-hearted fellow he was.) These, and many things like them, were legitimate tests enough, and all “in the game.” But to withhold medicine from a man in Hill’s state, to give him wrong diet, to turn him out of hospital on that wicked journey and to put his life in danger, as those disgraces to their profession undoubtedly did at Gumush Suyu—that was unfair and unpardonable. Hill is twelve stone again to-day. He is not a vindictive man, but I think it might be advisable for the Gumush Suyu doctors who “treated” him to keep out of his reach.

Had we known that our acting was to be kept up not for six weeks but for six months, I think we would have lain down and died. The delay was not due to any mistake on our part, but to a series of postponements of the arrival of the exchange ship, due, I believe, to Lord Newton’s inability to obtain from the Germans a satisfactory “safe conduct” for the voyage. No doubt the British authorities were right to hold back until the safety of the ship was assured, but there was not a prisoner of war in Turkey, sound or sick, who would not have voted cheerfully for running the gauntlet of the whole German Fleet.

To Hill and myself the wait seemed interminable. Each postponement was just short enough to encourage us to “carry on,” and somehow or another carry on we did. Indeed we had no choice. We dared not confess we were malingering, because it would have thrown added suspicion on any genuine cases of madness which might crop up amongst our fellow prisoners, and the one point in which O’Farrell had neglected to instruct us was how to “get better” without rousing suspicion. But even had we known how to “recover” I think we would still have kept it up, for Freedom was our lode-star.

It would be easy to fill another volume with the things we saw and did and suffered during those six months in the mad wards at Haidar Pasha. My own task was hard enough. I had to be ready to “rave” at a moment’s notice whenever anyone cared to bring up one of my half-dozen fixed delusions; I had to suspect poison in my food; get up at all times of the night to write the History of my Persecution by the English and my Scheme for the Abolition of England; form violent hatreds (Jacques, the unhappy Jew chemist at Haidar Pasha, used to flee from me in terror of his life), and equally violent friendships; be grandiose; sleep in any odd corner rather than in my bed; run away at intervals; be “sleepless” for a week at a time; invent mad plans and do mad things without end. I refused to answer to my own name and became either “Hassan oghlou Ahmed” (Hassan’s lad Ahmed) or “Ahmed Hamdi Pasha,” as the whim seized me. I wore a most disreputable fez, boasted of being a Turk, cursed the English, and ran away in terror from every Englishman who happened along. All the time I talked nothing but Turkish and to all appearance lived for nothing but to become a Turkish officer. The biggest criminal in Eastern Europe—Enver Pasha—was my “hero,” and I fixed a photograph of him above my bed.^[61] And every minute of the day or night I had to be ready for a trap, and have an answer pat on my tongue for any question that might be asked. Yes! I had a hard task and a wearing one.

But hard as my task was it was nothing—it was recreation—compared to what Hill had to do. For all those terrible six months my companion in misery sat huddled up on his bed, motionless for hours at a time, crying if he was spoken to, starving (“fasting” he called it) for long periods, reading his Bible or his Prayer Book until his eyes gave out (as they used to do very badly towards the end), then burying his head on his knees, presenting to all comers a face of utter misery and desolation, and speaking not at all except to pray. By the end he had read through the Bible seven times, and could (and did) recite every Prayer in the Prayer Book by heart. To him one day was exactly like another. The monotony of it was dreadful and his self-denial in the matter of food was extraordinary. Partly from this self-imposed starvation and partly from dysentery, ‘flu’ and maltreatment in Gumush Suyu hospital, he lost over five stone in weight. His emaciation was terrible to look upon, for he became a living skeleton; yet still he kept up his acting and his courage. It was the most wonderful exhibition of endurance, of the mastery of the mind over the body, I have ever seen. Many a time I have returned of an evening to the ward, worn out by the unending strain of my own heartbreaking foolery, and ready to throw up the sponge. Always I found Hill resolutely sitting in that same forlorn, woe-begone attitude in which I had left him hours before, and always the sight of him there renewed my waning courage and steadied me to face at least “one more day of it.”

But our doings and sufferings as madmen, and the adventures, grave and gay, through which we passed when, under the cloak of insanity, we collected information of military and political interest in the hope that we would reach England before the end of the war—these things, and what we learned of the Turks and the Turkish character, are another story. I must return to the Spook and what happened at Yozgad after our departure.