  CHAPTER ITHE DARDANELLESAt dawn on the 9th of August, 1915, the 6th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment received an order to attack the great hill that towers above Anafarta. The order was late, hours too late, for the messenger had lost his way; so, although we did not know it at the time, we had already forfeited our chance, and were launched upon a forlorn endeavour. The rampart of hills to the east of us was black against the chill, pale sky as we moved out across the grey flats that led up to the foot of Teke Tepe, towering up to nearly 1,000 feet ahead of us. And we came under fire from our right flank almost from the very start. The foot-hills of the range were rough with boulders, and deep cut by rocky ravines. As we moved on and on, up and up, men got lost in the prickly scrub oak, holly they called it, and it In that hour my admiration for the splendid courage of the men rose to a pitch of exaltation. They were Yorkshire miners for the most part, dogged, hard men of the sturdiest breed on earth. Those who were hit stayed where they fell, and those who were whole climbed on. The only complaint heard upon that hill-side was that no enemy could be seen to fire upon. So there was but little reply from our rifles as we went on up. About thirty of us reached the top of the hill, perhaps a few more. And when there were about twenty left we turned and went down again. We had reached the highest point and the furthest point that British forces from Suvla Bay were destined to reach. But we naturally knew nothing of that. All that we knew was that the winding ravine down which we retreated alternately exposed us to rifle fire from the enemy above and protected us. Hid us and revealed us. A sapper major who walked with me, after a long silence said, “Are you married?” “Yes,” I replied. “It it were not for that this would be good fun,” said the major. So we agreed that We hoped that the foot of the ravine would bring us out among our own supports at the bottom of the hill. But the enemy held it. Five out of all those who had gone up got down again alive. We reached the point where the ravine ended, and in the scrub ahead of us we saw a number of men who fired upon us. For a moment we thought they were our own, firing in ignorance. Then we saw that they were Turks. We had run into the back of an enemy battalion which held the lower slopes against our supports. They had crossed the range at a point lower than that we had attacked, and had cut in behind our climbing force. We could do nothing but surrender. When we held up our hands some dozen or more of the enemy charged towards us with fixed bayonets. And we began to experience that strange mixture of nature, so characteristic of the Turks, from which we and our fellows were to suffer much in the years to come. The man who took possession of me searched my pockets and annexed everything of military Of those taken with me, one was not molested; one was fired at from five yards’ distance, missed, and quietly captured; one was beaten and fired at. Thank God the man who fired at him hit the man who was beating him and broke his wrist. The fourth, my Colonel, was bayoneted. Then, for the moment their fury ceased. I was permitted to tend the Colonel. He did not seem to suffer pain at all, only to be intensely thirsty. He drank the whole of the contents of my water-bottle as well as his own. They even allowed me to carry him on my back; and on my back the Colonel died. May he rest in peace! He was a brave man, and a good friend to me. Brief though my personal experience of battle was, it has left two lasting convictions. One that For a time that ranks in my memory longer than some years, and which may have endured for an hour, we were held prisoners just behind the Turkish fighting line. We had been joined by one other captured private and were again five. It was not a pleasant time. Several times we were apparently condemned to death. Once My slight wound was tied up, and we received at last an order to move to the rear. An order from an Asiatic when you have lived for eighteen years in Asia is a strange experience. I disliked it. Two guards with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets took us back over the hill once more. We wound wearily and painfully up a ravine more or less parallel to the one we had come down. All the way we were meeting enemy reinforcements hurrying to the fighting-line, most of them carrying cardboard boxes of cartridges. Rough, brigand-like fellows they seemed, but very fine infantry. They were the pick of the Ottoman army. Twice our guards had to stand Near the top of the hill the ravine grew steeper, and at last ended. An aeroplane, one of our own, was circling round the summit of Teke Tepe, spotting for the naval guns; and we all lay low while British shells burst on the rocks about us. The only Turks they seemed likely to harm were our guards. For, far below we could see that a battle was in progress. We could see the white crusted salt on the lake, and the pinkish-brown of Lala Baba hill, from which I had watched, three days before, the storming of Chocolate Hill, like a scene in a theatre. There were British transports in the bay, and outside were British warships cruising slowly while puffs of smoke broke from their sides. These were the last British ships we were to see for more than three years. We had to run over the crest of the hill, and down a little way into safety on the other side, safety from our own guns. And for the first time I think we felt the pang of lost children. Out of sight of our ships seemed somehow much We halted in safety and sat down, out of breath, while our guards fraternized with a small party of Turkish soldiers and smoked cigarettes. Then we moved on again, and passed away into Turkey. Worn and very, very thirsty, we were taken that afternoon to the headquarters of General Liman von Sanders, Commander-in-Chief of the enemy forces on Gallipoli; and there we found some more of our men with one more officer. Von Sanders was looking at the samples he had drawn. He has been accused of many things since then, for all I know quite justly; but to us he was not unkind. His staff gave us a meal in their quarters, and he gave two Turkish pounds to our men. But the kindness to the men did not extend far beyond his sight. When next we saw them, some ten days later, they described how their Turkish guards had robbed them of their boots and made them run for several miles barefoot over rough ground. Still, to us the General was civil, though he did say that International Law no longer existed. One of his staff, a German naval officer, told us that they found it almost impossible to get the Turks to take prisoners, or, having taken them, to keep them alive. We, too, had observed this reluctance. We were kept in a tent for three days at the Turkish G.H.Q., and were not troubled with many questions. Our interrogation came later. Various officers came to see us. To look at us, I think. For we were samples, and on their valuation of us would depend their reports on Kitchener’s Army. The four of us aggregated about twenty-four feet four inches in length, and about fifty-three stone in weight, but I do not suppose they went much on that. General von Sanders had said to our youngest, “Eton? and Oxford?” and seemed pleased to find that his conjecture was right. He knew England well, and said that he had been in Ireland not long before the war. But the Turks were different. They looked at us a good deal, but ventured no overt guesses as to our antecedents. One Turkish officer, an Arab rather, and a descendant of the Prophet, as he told us, had lived in London, and spoke English perfectly. Indeed, he boasted that in his veins there ran some drops of English blood, and told me the well-known family that had lent it. Being I liked to listen to this friendly enemy’s conversation. He had an idea that we had two submarines in the Sea of Marmora based upon the islands and supplied by the Greeks there. It was impossible, he said, that our submarines should pass up and down the straits through all their nets and mines. But was it? Ask the E 7 or the E 11. Another favourite topic was the recuperative power of Islam. After this war, the Arab maintained, Turkey would recover much more quickly than the Western nations. “For,” said he, “we are polygamous. We use the whole breeding power of our race, which resides in the women. Women are not being killed. They will all find husbands and bear children. We shall build up again our full power while you are still suffering from the deaths of your young men.” There may be much truth in this. I think that all the enemy staff were very anxious at that time. They thought the Greeks The Turkish staff officers, even as the Germans, told us how hard they found it to get their allies to take prisoners. The fact was that they only went in for taking prisoners when they wanted to study our newly-landed forces. At all other times they murdered them. It is easy to demonstrate, as I think the following facts will show. On Gallipoli, I believe something like 700 officers and 11,000 men were posted as missing. Many of these were dead, of course, but certainly nothing like all. Of the 700 officers only 17 were taken prisoner, one in every forty-one; of the 11,000 men about 400 were taken prisoner, one in every twenty-seven. The details regarding
That clearly shows that the prisoners were taken only to gain information as to the types of our new forces. But I have further evidence. I was one of four British officers who crossed the Sea of Marmora in a Turkish torpedo-boat, six days after we were captured. In the engineers’ quarters with us was a sick Turkish officer, a Circassian, who spoke French. Of the four British, I happened to be the only one who could converse with him. He seemed pleased to see Major-General Sir Charles Townshend has stated publicly since returning to England that the Turk is a sportsman and a clean fighter. This must have been said in complete ignorance of the whole series of damning facts which are now in the hands of our Government. I have brought out one of these facts, and others will appear as the book proceeds. Major-General Townshend is to the best of my belief singular on this point among those officers, non-commissioned officers and men who were his fellow-prisoners in Turkey. The Turk is a master of the game he plays. A hospital-ship lying off the coast is secure from his artillery, because of the publicity, not because it is a hospital-ship. A wounded soldier behind a ridge, hid from the eye of the world’s Press, has about as much chance with the Turks as he would have with a pack of wolves. An article I once read in a Turkish paper published in French, an article upon the damnable There were good Turks; there are good wolves, for I have known one; but their rarity was above that of rubies. There is one other question concerning Gallipoli which may fitly come into this chapter. I do not ask the question, but one of us four was asked it by General Liman von Sanders, and we did not then, and we do not now, know the reply. Von Sanders asked, “Why did General Hamilton send a handful like yours to attack the great hill that commands all my position. Did he think that I could be so blind as not to defend it against even a much stronger force?” On the early morning of the 16th of August we reached the Quay of Stamboul. CHAPTER IICONSTANTINOPLEWe were rather thankful to reach Constantinople. We crossed the Marmora by night in a rickety little torpedo-boat with something wrong with her screw, and we hoped to escape being sunk by one of our own submarines. The danger was a very real one, for it was only a few weeks after this that a Turkish transport with a number of British prisoners on board was sunk by one of our E-boats. But in that case they all escaped to barges alongside. We were sealed up like bully beef in a tin, and would have had no chance. At the quay, our escorting officer left us. He bore the euphonious name of Fa’at Bey, but was not a bad fellow. And, unlike the majority of Turks, he had travelled and picked up a little English. Many Turkish officers speak French, and a few German; but knowledge of English From the quay we were driven in carriages through the streets of Stamboul, up the hill to the Ministry of War, and there confined in a fairly large room with blue-tiled embrasures and a very dirty floor. Heretofore we had lived in tents; we were now to begin our painful studies of Turkish domestic fauna. Various Turkish officers came to see us; one tremendous swell, apparently made up to take a leading part in “Arms and the Man,” was very impressive. He had the most complete appearance of gilded villainy that I have ever seen. He was the first, so far as I recollect, to play the favourite Turkish confidence trick upon us. It is a simple performance, and we were simple enough to be taken in by it—once. The procedure is thus: Enter: Gorgeous official, Interpreter with a mean, shifty face, and other incompetent perverts who look as though they were “walking on” for five piastres a performance. Probably they actually are. Interpreter: “His Excellency wishes me to tell you that you are not prisoners, your country and mine are at war, but we are all soldiers. You are our honoured guests; is there anything that you require? All will be given you; in a few days you shall have complete liberty.” Senior Prisoner: “Please thank the—General, Pasha, Excellency, Bey, Effendi, or whatnot; the title does not affect the procedure—We should like to write letters, to have a bath, to have the beds disinfected, and to be able to purchase soap, tooth-brushes, underclothes, etc., etc.” Interpreter (after collusion with the great man): “Certainly, all these things will be allowed. Is there anything more you require?” Prisoners make various suggestions. Exeunt omnes, except prisoners. And that is all. That is the whole trick. The keynote is the interpreter’s final word “perhaps.” Nothing whatsoever happens. The one hour spins out to many hours, to days, to months, to years. Nothing whatever comes of the interview. But in the course of time prisoners learn other means. Our “other means” in the Ministry of War was a cultivated person, the editor of a newspaper, who was serving in his country’s army as a private soldier, and who had so far escaped fighting. He was put on to do us, and he did. But he did, at any rate, see that our meals were fairly regular, and he bought us tooth-brushes and a chess-board. Judged by the new standard we were fast assuming, he was not a bad fellow. I wonder to what extent it is a good thing to alter one’s standards in that manner. Degradation of principles versus breadth of mind. It is one of the many undermining influences a prisoner has to combat if he would come back to the world a decent man. The month was August, still warm, but with autumn and winter ahead of us. One autumn and winter, we thought. We had been captured in khaki drill, thin stuff only suited for tropical On the second day our numbers were doubled, for two officers of the Worcesters and two from On one side of the Ministry there was a long, narrow garden, and as our room was a corner one we looked out both over the garden across the city and through the end windows. The view over the garden was magnificent. We could see a corner of the Bosphorus, and the buildings of Pera stretching away up the opposite hill-side. From the end windows there was a prospect in two stories, typical of the land of the Turk, a mixture of squalor and display. The upper storey was a very handsome grey stone mosque with four slender and very beautiful minarets, reaching up into the blue sky where birds for ever circled as emblems of the liberty we longed for. The lower storey was a paved In the garden there used to promenade a number of Turkish officers who apparently had nothing else to do. We thought, of course, that they were government servants passing away the time until pay-day came along once more. It was only a natural supposition; but it was completely wrong. They were, as a matter of fact, prisoners like ourselves. People who had infringed the Turkish military code, or had been convicted of swindles sufficiently considerable to I did not mean to digress into Turkish law, but having done so I will go one step further in order to describe the procedure which is followed when a private soldier makes an accusation against an officer. My authority is the official interpreter who was for a time the bane of our lives at Afion-Kara-Hissar. On hearing the accusation, the senior officer determines what the sentence would be for that particular offence. Having done this justly and with an open palm, he arrests the accused and condemns him. The accused serves the sentence, whatever it may be—I believe one hundred and one years is the maximum for serious charges; and at the expiration of the penalty, the case is tried. The officer is then found either guilty or not guilty. If the former, he is politely informed that as he has already paid the price, probably in every sense of the word, he is now at liberty. The man who accused him is commended. If, on the other hand, he is found not guilty, he is reinstated in his former position, and the man who accused him wrongfully is beaten. And, indeed, why should it not be true? Institutions as well as animals, even that greatest of animals, man, must subscribe to the natural law of the survival of the fittest. As already pointed out when describing the way in which a Turkish officer avoids loss of rank when convicted for theft, perhaps this arrangement is wise, in the circumstances; perhaps it fits those circumstances. For in the majority of cases a Turkish soldier is a more honest man than his officer, and in a high percentage of cases the accusation must be justified: in the remainder the officer is probably only paying the penalty of one of his undiscovered crimes. What with the four new officers and the other ranks, we were by this time a considerable body, quite large enough to become the living illustrations of a national triumph. So, in due course, we were paraded in the square on the opposite side of the Ministry to our outlook, and were passed before a cinematograph. I do not remember how many times we circled round that infernal machine while the operator ground the handle, but it was a good many. By the time he had exhausted the roll of film we must have At the end of the square, where it abutted upon the street, there was an arched gateway, something like a Roman triumphal arch, and in the room above it there resided an arch-villain. We had been in Constantinople about a week when we were commanded to his presence. He was a very great man indeed, popularly supposed to be Enver Pasha’s remover-in-chief at a time when removals of political opponents were frequent. But we did not know that then; we only knew that he was a magnificent, tawdry and detestable person. That room lives in my memory as the gold and purple room. It was hung with velvet and decked with gilt, and the man sat in it like a frog in an orchid. We were given cigarettes, and were then informed that the British Government was ill-treating its Turkish prisoners so disgracefully that reprisals would have to be started. The infamous English, we were assured, made their Turkish officer prisoners march naked through the streets as a sport for the populace. What had we to say about it? Of course we denied the possibility of such a thing being true. The next day we received orders to move to a new barracks over in Pera. When first in Turkey one is inclined to look upon all moves as desirable. Monotony and stagnation grow upon a prisoner very rapidly, and the first six months are much the hardest to bear. Any move rumoured or ordered shines like a light ahead. It must be an improvement, one thinks, it will in any case be an event, something to mark the passage of time. But after a year the average prisoner hates moves. By bitter experience he knows their cost and discomfort, the loss of his small, painfully-acquired property, and the trouble of settling down again. Also he knows that, much as he may hate the place he is in, there are many places worse. Still, we were at the beginning of things then, and we rejoiced in the move. We were marched down the streets of Stamboul, with our men, across the bridge over the Golden Horn, and up the steep street that leads to the top of Pera. We passed on the way the small French hotel where I had stayed nearly eight years before, and listened to the howling of the dogs at night. At the very top of the hill, where it bends down again towards the Bosphorus, we were led into the Taxim barracks. The men were given several large dormitories; the officers had a small room to themselves. This did not seem very bad. It was a smaller room than before, and it had no blue tiles, but otherwise not much worse. Our disillusion came with the fall of dusk. That night we fought a battle. We put up a tremendous struggle against impossible odds and we did not win. When the sun set and the light in the room turned grey, forms were seen stealing down the walls, up the walls, out of the walls, and all over the walls; but mostly down the walls. Small, brown, flat creatures, easy to kill with anything hard, even with one’s fingers. They began in tens, and ended in tens of thousands. And each one of every one of those thousands was a famished bug. Each one could wake a clean European by crawling over him, and keep him awake long after it was dead by the venom it injected into him. We were not very clean There were three nights like that, and seven of the eight of us hardly slept a wink the whole time. We slept a little by day. But had we stayed there long it would have been a hard fight for sanity. As it was, our nerves got very much on edge, and we were not the cheery companions we might have been. It may seem childish and hypersensitive to make a fuss about a few insects, but it was a very real horror; not only the actual itching, or even the odour, but there is something disgusting and degrading in being covered with beastly creatures of that sort, and I have heard pretty rough private soldiers say they felt the same when first afflicted by lice. “Private” was, I believe, originally short for “Private Gentleman,” and the old meaning is not infrequently brought home to one. It was about this time that I began to realize what a very severe trial captivity would prove. It did prove so, and in ways I had not then foreseen. But it became apparent even then that work of some sort would have to be done if normality of mind were to be conserved. By the end of the war we had blossomed forth in all sorts of directions, but we were only feeling our way then. Without saying or meaning one word against my fellow-prisoners, or even against myself, it must be clearly understood that first and foremost among the trials of captivity comes the unavoidable close proximity of other people. It is the prisoners themselves who are each other’s principal discomforts. We were all so close to each other; so permanently in evidence to each other, and so different from one another that weariness of spirit grew to a pitch no outsider can comprehend. Bugs are bad, Turks are worse, About the Taxim barracks there was one good thing. There is good in everything: in a bug it is his squashableness; in a Turk it is his stupidity; in Taxim it was the orchestra next door. At the end of the narrow ground we were allowed to tread there was a sort of public garden, and in the afternoons the band played there. Twice we were conducted by a Turkish officer, a kindly old thing, to a bench facing this place of joys, and were allowed to watch the Levantine society that gathered there. We were even allowed to hail the waiter as he passed and have coffee handed up for ourselves and our janitor. It was a good time. We could hear music; we could watch children; and we could feel very nearly free. Except for this narrow space, the grounds of Taxim barracks, so far as I observed, were a graveyard. Tall stones with carven turbans to indicate men’s graves, flat stones for the graves of women, and gloomy cypress trees. And through the trees gleamed the Bosphorus. CHAPTER IIITHE ARMENIANSAfter three days of Taxim we were told that it had been decided to send us to Angora, where we would enjoy perfect liberty. None of us had a very clear idea where Angora was, but we knew it must be a pleasant change from Taxim. There were not many preparations to make; no packing. My own luggage consisted, I remember, of a bit of soap, a tooth-brush, and a few other odds and ends, all contained in a paper bag tied up with a bootlace: the sort of bag you buy buns in. And I was one of the richest of the prisoners. I was rich in another respect, besides this wealth of luggage, although at that time I did not know it: for my prison hobby, art, industry, or whatever it may be called, had already started. For some reason or other the spirit moved me to write verses while a captive, and the first of all, a short poem entitled “Captivity” was written before we left Constantinople. This strange, We left Taxim early in the morning of the 25th of August and were ferried across the Bosphorus to Haida Pasha station. Technically speaking, we stood now for the first time in Asia, though, morally speaking, where the Turk rules there is Asia. We knew that Angora was a long journey: two days they told us, and it actually took thirty-six hours. But I think the vast size of Anatolia was rather a surprise to us all. In all ordinary atlases Asia Minor is shown on such a tiny scale that its hugeness is lost to mind. Several officers and an armed guard accompanied us in the train, but only two individuals remain in my memory. One was a thick-set, short, fierce man of early middle age. He had one eye only, and his neck was almost circled by a frightful scar as though he had been operated upon by a blunt guillotine and then healed up again like the wolf in the fairy story who becomes a prince when you cut off his head. Only he had not gained the true, handsome, debonair appear I wonder if such people ever pursue their thoughts to an ultimate conclusion! After wiping out all who were not of their own way of thinking, there would remain a depleted race in a vast undeveloped territory where no immigrants would dare to settle, even if they were welcomed. All capital would be frightened away: labour would be scarce: and the strongest of their neighbours would swallow them up. At the time I knew no name for this intense feeling, this mental obsession. But in the light of time it now looks like pure Bolshevism. It seems that I have drawn a very revolting character. But the interpreter’s was not wholly that. On the whole, he was the best man I met among the many interpreters who dealt with us during the next three years. He was fond of some of the beautiful things of life, a lively critic of literature, a reader of poetry, both English and Turkish, and, from his own account, a personal friend of those among his compatriots who were foremost in striving to rouse their countrymen to intellectual endeavour. I loathed the man’s ideas but rather liked the man. It seemed that he suffered from the absorption of a wrong tone; almost from a disease of the soul, but an infectious For the first part of the journey we skirted the Sea of Marmora, along the flanks of bare hills, now tunnelling through promontories, and now looking down upon blue bays. There were trenches dug all along the coast, and armed guards at every bridge and culvert. Far away, to the south-east, we saw forest-covered hills. Then the line turned inland, past the town and lake of Ismid, through a valley of orchards where the apples were almost breaking the trees, and up into the foot-hills. This part of Anatolia is exceedingly fertile wherever the slopes are not too steep to dig. But the hills are very barren, only fit for the most part for the nomad life of the Turkish sheep- and goat-herds. We travelled through hills and valleys all that afternoon, and by dusk had begun the climb that leads up to the great plateau of Asia Minor. The railway followed the line of a river up the valley it had cut through the hills. Followed it up until it became a stream, and followed it on until it became When dawn broke the engine was panting up the last few miles of the incline, and we ran out into a wide land of rolling downs and farm country, three thousand feet above the level of the sea. Having lived in mountains before I foresaw a very cold winter. It was not very long after this that we began to see the Armenians. As everyone knows now, the late summer and the autumn of 1915 saw organised, State-supported massacre of the Armenians carried out in Turkey on a scale unknown previously in modern history, perhaps unparalleled in all history. I shall not attempt any comprehensive account of this national crime, for the whole story is already contained in the blue book on the subject, printed by the British Government, and edited by Viscount Bryce. Those who wish to hear the details of how somewhere about one million men, women and children were outraged, tortured and done to death can refer to that book. I will only say that the many isolated facts gathered from many sources during my three years in Turkey all piece together in that book so completely that no doubt exists in my mind regarding its truth. The blue book is a sincere and unexaggerated The first sight we had of the Armenians who were being deported was a large straggling camp of women and children close beside the railway line. We had no idea at the time that their men folk were already dead, or that they were almost all doomed to death or domestic slavery. It looked merely like a very large, very ill-organised gypsy encampment. Those women and children were awaiting trains to convey them hundreds of miles from their homes into the most inhospitable regions of Asia Minor. Ahead of them they had days of travel in trains, camps where the girls would be sorted out again and again until only the ugliest were left; and, at the end, a march where nearly all of them would die from fatigue. For the Turkish way is to drive, on and on, wearily on, until almost all are dead. They did it to the Armenians in 1915, and in 1916 they did it to the captured garrison of Kut-el-Amara. We passed several trainloads of these wretched refugees. They were in trucks mostly, terribly overcrowded, and some of them were in sheep trucks in two stories, the lower tier only able to crouch. The interpreter told me they were being sent There were a few boys among them, and a few old men. The rest had been murdered. Englishmen don’t like Armenians. I don’t myself. Turks loathe them. Greeks dislike them. In the Caucasus the Georgians hate them. This almost universal unpopularity is no excuse at all for massacre, but—in Turkey—it helps to explain it. Where the European avoids, the Turk, having a different standard, slays. To him they are vermin. Here is a story told by an Armenian woman to a British officer. It is the story of a “good Turk”; the expression was the woman’s, not the officer’s. There was a batch of Armenian women and girls driven on until their drivers grew weary that they would not die. Sick at heart they grew of the perpetual driving of these weeping creatures. There were no pretty ones left, for the most comely will lose their pitiful beauty when starved long enough. So there was no interest left in being their custodians. The drivers grew to hate the work, for there was no end to it, and no reward. So they were herded together and slain. But two survived, a woman and her daughter. They hid among the corpses and remained there until the corpses began to crawl. The corpses of their Why do these people hate the Armenians so much? I think it is partly because the Armenian is usually a successful merchant, outclassing the Turk in commerce, competing on more than equal terms with the Greek, and at least rivalling the Jew. But it is chiefly because the Armenian race has been ground under the heel of a people naturally their inferiors for so many centuries. It is a survival of the fittest, and it is the Turks who have made the conditions which the survivors have had to fit. The whole race has been moulded by the hand of the Turk. For centuries he has slain all those who displayed the more When the great massacres took place there was, among the Armenians, one strange exception to the universal peril. Most Armenians belong to the Armenian Church, but a certain number of them are Roman Catholics. I do not know what happened elsewhere, but in Angora the Roman Catholic Armenians were not killed, or deported, which is the same as being killed only slower. They were not well-treated, but they did survive. It is a very remarkable thing to find the power of Rome exerted in so wonderful a way in a In contrast to the present-day power of the Pope in Turkey it is interesting to remember that a large percentage of the Jews who are subjects of the Ottoman are the descendants of Spanish Jews who fled into the Sultan’s dominions to escape from the Spanish Inquisition. Many of them still speak Spanish. They are not often ill-treated by the Turks, I believe, though how they manage to avoid it is a miracle. We reached Angora long after dark and were met by a Bimbashi who conveyed us in carriages to our new quarters. The men marched, but to the same destination, and it was after our arrival We drove through the squalid streets of a corner of the town, and out about a mile into the country. I think we all shuddered as we drew near a large barrack and remembered Taxim, and breathed more freely when we had left it behind. Our destination was not a particularly sweet place, but it was better than that. We crossed a bridge, passed a mulberry plantation, and the carriages halted at the foot of a slope leading up to a group of buildings surrounded by a high wall. A small, low, iron-studded door, guarded by a sentry with a fixed bayonet, was opened. We stooped through it, walked beneath an arched gateway, and came out in a paved courtyard surrounded by buildings black against the starry sky. As we came in heads popped out of the windows, and we heard people speaking in French. That sounded civilized at any rate. Have you who read this ever considered what the word “civilized” means? It means a good deal when you are in the middle of Anatolia. Through a door to the left and up a flight of steps we went, and at the top we were met by three French naval officers, headed by Commander Fabre, who welcomed us Everything that a fellow-prisoner could do they had done. And when the Turks had gone and the gate was locked once more, we sat down with them to an excellent meal. Our friends were the officers and crew of the submarine “Mariotte,” sunk in the Dardanelles rather more than a month before. Two of the officers spoke English fluently, and the third was a dogged striver who had mastered a great deal of our language before the end of the war. From them we learned what this strange building was. It was called the Wank (pronounced Wonk) and was an Armenian monastery, half farm, half stronghold. What had happened to the monks they did not know, save that they had been turned out. As a matter of fact they were dead. Very nearly everything they had had been moved by the Turks, looted by officials and officers, but we came into joint possession with the French of a few beds; enough for the officers, the men were not allowed beds; a divan round three sides of a fairly comfortable room, a shower-bath, and some framed photographs of various high dignitaries of the Armenian Church. There were also lamps and a stove. This was a very great advance on any We found, too, that the French had managed to establish the custom of taking in a newspaper, “The Hilal,” a German edited, Levantine rag, which did, at any rate, publish the German communiquÉs. So we began once more to look upon the war and the outside world through that dim glass which was our only window. Later on we had various other means, but not up till then. In addition to the large central sitting-room, where four of us had to sleep, there were three small bedrooms on the same floor, also a kitchen, a latrine, and a tiny paved room where the shower-bath hung. This was an amateur one made out of a kerosine oil tin, and its existence argued virtue in one Armenian at least. The Turks had not stolen it. It was of no use to them. Derrick and I, who had been taken together, were now in a mess of eleven persons, quite a sizeable community. We began to wake up and make plans to learn French and to teach English; but that night we slept like logs. CHAPTER IVTHE WANKWe had now a breathing space. We had reached the place where the Turks meant to keep us, and though we had yet to learn that Turks never continue to follow the same policy for very long, we now had time to settle in as comfortably as circumstances permitted. Our space was strictly circumscribed. There was the series of rooms already described as belonging to the officers, and there was the paved courtyard, perhaps thirty yards square. This was common to the officers and about 150 N.C.O.’s and men. Officers were not allowed to visit the men’s dormitories. On the east side of the courtyard was a church, locked up and sealed. Through its windows we could see that a quantity of books were stored there. On the north were further monastic buildings in two stories. We were not allowed upstairs, but the men were allowed the use of a kitchen on the The Wank being built on a hill-side with the ground falling away to the south, the officers’ quarters got no sunshine, for their only window which looked in that direction was in the landing at the head of the stairs. From there we could see the town of Angora covering its steep hill, and crowned by a great rambling castle. Below the southern window there was a second courtyard, into which a wide gate opened, which was apparently used as a pen for the monastic flocks at night; and below that again was a third yard, probably used as a pound for their cattle. The whole group of buildings and yards was surrounded by a high wall. One very marked feature of the Wank was its awful smell. In Turkey there are drains, but they are perhaps worse than none at all. I shall not attempt to describe this disgusting feature of all the houses in Asia Minor I have ever been in, further than to mention that the cesspool is invariably buried underneath the house itself, preferably beneath the kitchen floor. It is, as a rule, ill-made of rough stone masonry. Further comment is unnecessary. The men had little to complain of while they were here. Their food was not particularly good, but it was not inadequate for men who could get no exercise. The only ill-treatment they had received was being robbed of their boots while on the peninsula, and they now appeared in every form of Turkish footgear, from rough army boots to thin slippers. When they began to travel again those were lucky who had boots. The Turkish Government fed the men, but the officers were supposed to cater for themselves. One of the French officers who had already picked up a few words of Turkish acted as mess secretary, and a chaous, or Turkish sergeant, used to make Things were extraordinarily cheap then. The war had not yet affected country places like Angora, and paper money had not yet come into circulation. When it did so, gold and silver first, and copper and nickel next disappeared entirely from the shops and bazaars; and before I left Turkey a golden pound would purchase six paper pounds, while the exchange for silver was little lower. But at first things were cheap, and we managed quite well on our four shillings a day. Some explanation of the system of supporting officer prisoners is necessary. The British Government refused to pay Turkish officer prisoners at the rate of pay given to equivalent British ranks. This was the old convention, but it could not be carried out with a country like Turkey, where the rates of pay were so much lower than ours. So Turkish officer prisoners were given 4s. a day for subalterns and captains, while field officers got 4s. 6d. But, in addition to this, Turkish prisoners were catered for at wholesale contract rates, were given firing, light, beds and bedding, as well as all necessary furniture. They were, for prisoners, exceedingly well off. I know this for a fact, for on my release I went over the P. of W. camp near Alexandria This excursion into the realms of finance is not meant as a complaint, but it seemed to me necessary to explain how we managed things. For the first few weeks in the Wank we had no further glimpse of the outside world. In Angora one night there were a number of shots fired, and the next day two or three people were buried in the graveyard outside the walls. That is about the only event I can remember. Probably it was The old fellow had a fad of teaching us Turkish at one time. He used to call us into the room with the settees round it, sit down at a table, and begin to exchange languages with us. As we I have racked my brains to think what else we did in those dull weeks, but almost in vain. The gramophone records in my convolutions were so badly scratched that I can hardly decipher a line of them. Chess I remember, for Fabre and I used to play most evenings, and we taught some of the others. I remember reading the paper to the men in the yard. I also remember two awful rows, things inevitable among prisoners, one English and one French. The English row was personal and particular, it culminated in a friendship that will endure. The French row was political, about Caillaux, and they talked so fast that there was a distinctly visible rainbow round the two principals. It did not culminate at all. How wonderful a siren is memory! As a boy at Winchester I suffered untold pangs. This much is an intellectual conviction to me. Yet it is all set in a golden haze of distance, and there are few pleasures I prize more than to return there. And if I have a son he shall go there, where his father, and my father, and his father and grandfather went. And he will suffer the same pains that they all suffered, and will remember as little of them as I do and they did. To-day is the 15th of April, 1919, and already memory has weeded out the pains of that dolorous year, 1915, to a very great extent. In course of time, in second or third childhood, I shall look back to Angora with tears of joy, and wonder why I did not settle there. But things did begin to happen at last, and the first of them was that we obtained the privilege of promenading for an hour in the afternoon along the bank of the little stream that flowed in the bottom of the valley. There were willow trees there, and we used to peel their branches and make walking sticks carved with snakes, regimental badges, and other rivalries to Grinling Gibbons. We used to watch the ants, too, and I regret Then something really important occurred, for a new Army Corps Commander came to Angora, and he was a gentleman. His name was Chukri Bey, and I remember it as that of a man of honour. He was an Arab, not a Turk. The first time he came it was in state, and he made a personal inspection of that awful drain and gave orders to abate the nuisance. The second time he came it was alone on a surprise visit. Again he made a personal inspection, and great was his wrath that nothing had been done. After this we got much more liberty and better treatment all round, but that I will describe later. And soon after this another important thing happened, for some more prisoners arrived, six officers among them. They were established higher up on the hill-side, in a temporarily disused agricultural college; and after a few days we met. Rather an amusing incident occurred on their journey up, which I am sure they will forgive my repeating. They had been kept separate in Constantinople, the three naval officers in an It was not long after this that we lost two of the French officers. The Turkish Government used, about twice a month, to make laborious lists A few days later all the Protestant non-commissioned officers and men were ordered off to a place two days’ march over hills to the north, Changri by name. Many of them had only thin slippers to walk in, and their bad times began from then, poor fellows. Their bones lie along the highways of Asia Minor, where they built roads and tunnels for their captors, yoked in a slavery as complete as any could be. At the last moment, just when they were starting, it was discovered that they were two short. They had been counted wrongly. Turks find it hard to count beyond the number of their fingers and toes which number is the same as with human beings. This was a horrible dilemma. Red tape demanded x men, and the officer in charge could only produce x-2. But even as a ram in a thicket was sent to Abraham when about to sacrifice Isaac, so did the god of Anatolia provide even for this emergency. At this time two sick French sailors returned from hospital. They were only just convalescent: they were Roman Catholics; they were expected at Afion-Kara-Hissar. But all this was of no avail, and the poor protesting fellows were sent off with our poor British. After they had departed the Wank seemed empty and lonely. We now explored it through and through, but found nothing of interest. The trees were changing their colour; the evenings drew in and grew cold. We became acutely aware that on this upland, winter would be very severe, perhaps terrible. Firewood became a problem, and, to feed the stove, Then there came a real change. The Army Corps Commander decided to give us very much more liberty. Sentries’ faces changed with the times; even the old veteran of Plevna began to realize that prisoners were human beings, and life grew bright once more. Accompanied by guards with sidearms only we used to visit the town and the shops, and we began to explore the neighbouring country. It was all hills, range behind range of hills; a most difficult country to travel through without good maps or a guide. Just over the hill behind the Wank there was a valley full of little farms; nice houses with vineyards attached. But all were empty, except such as were full of Turkish soldiers. They had been owned by Armenians, and their owners had gone, never to return. Another place that we were free to explore at this time was the cemetery which lay on the east of the Wank. It was not without interest, for most of the tombstones had been filched from some Roman or Byzantine ruin, and still bore many traces of their former adornment. The great majority bore inscriptions in Armenian So in small things we found great interest, as prisoners do. Almost every day we used to see Turkish recruits training. They were a sturdy lot of rough young countrymen, splendid material either for war or peace, if only their Government were not so corrupt and inefficient. For the most part they were armed with sticks cut from the willows by the stream, and with these rude substitutes they had to learn the beginning of their drill. The knowledge they acquired was literally kicked into them by the chaouses, brutal ruffians Some time in October a festival drew near, a public holiday called Kurban Bairam. The troops were to have a great sham fight, and sports were to be held. Chukri Bey, the Army Corps Commander, very kindly invited us to attend, and we stood behind him to watch the sham attack develop. He was a fine figure of a man and a splendid horseman. When the troops were drawn up preliminary to the show he rode at full gallop along their line, turned, rode back to the centre and pulled up short. Then he made a speech, no word of which we could understand, and they all cheered. The attacking force marched off, and we took up our positions behind the defenders of a low abrupt ridge. Just on our left I remember there I have fought in the Great War, but that is the only sham fight I have ever seen in my life, for my training was marred by a period in hospital. The next day was the sports, and we were given good seats in the official enclosure, just behind the Army Corps Commander and the Vali—the Governor of the Province. Chukri Bey continually turned round and explained things to us in French. He had made arrangements for two or three of our men who had been left behind in hospital to have seats in a good place. We saw the Turk at his best that day. His hospitality, his simplicity, his tough, rugged endurance were all to the fore. And we owed the whole of it to Chukri Bey. When, soon afterwards, he was sent elsewhere, we realised how rare a character his was among enemy officers. He was an Arab and we were told that his wife was an Egyptian princess. One of the items was a football match played by It was not long after this that our sojourn in the Wank came to an end. The building was wanted as a barrack, and they wished to have us more safely housed in the town itself. So one fine day we were moved into Angora, and housed temporarily in a Greek hotel. CHAPTER VANGORAThe town of Angora is built round a hill. Originally there was a large castle on the top of the hill, with walls conforming to the rocky nature of the site, and outside the castle a walled town. The walls still remain, but the town has burst its bonds and overflowed down the slopes and out on to the plain below. At many points among the rocks, at all levels, springs gush out, and this water is very clear and good, a thing that Orientals attach great value to. The walls themselves are full of interest. When they were built, and whether by Byzantine Greeks or by the Turks themselves, I do not know. But they contain innumerable fragments of an earlier civilization. There are sculptured figures which once ornamented Roman altars, the capitals of Greek pillars, very many inscriptions in Greek and Latin, and a number of carved stones stolen from the fine marble temple of Augustus which On three sides the town flows down into the valleys round it, but the fourth side is one wall of an almost precipitous gorge, where a stream has cut through the range, and separated off this hill for men to build on. The place has the usual legend of a secret passage connecting the castle with the neighbouring hill. Afion-Kara-Hissar, too, has the same legend; and I have found it generically wherever rocks have been crowned with castles, in many lands. At the bottom of the gorge is the evil-smelling quarter of the skinners and tanners, men who proved their value when it was resolved to slay the Armenians. From very early times, indeed, Angora must have been occupied. It is well supplied with water, very defensible, and situated at the junction of great caravan routes which penetrate northwards to the Black Sea and eastwards, Many battles have been fought in the plain before Angora, and the city has often been sacked and burnt. No place I have ever known has such an atmosphere of evil history looming in its streets. Should some prophet (or is it profit?) of psychometry venture to sleep there, she would probably die in horrible agony. Even to the present day Angora is a great rendezvous of caravans. When we were there it was still the terminus of the railway stretching out toward central Asia, and we used to see long strings of laden camels approaching the town from far away. They pass with silent step along their wide, worn routes, tied in strings of four or five, each one’s nose to the saddle of the one ahead, and with a donkey to lead the procession. They looked as if they had walked straight out of the Old Testament, and many of the men with them looked much more like what the Patriarchs must have been than the benevolent old gentlemen in stained glass windows can do. Kurds we used to see, and Turks, and men of tribes we could not place. Generally they wore huge astrakhan hats of black, curly lamb’s wool, In the town itself there are two or three fairly good streets, paved with cobble-stones, and flanked by small boutiques, but most of the streets are narrow gullies; steep, winding, and dim. The houses have usually stables on the ground floor, while the stories above project and shut out the light; so much so that it is quite a feature of these thread-like lanes to find each house built I think, between us, we explored the whole town. Under Chukri Bey’s benevolent rÉgime we had almost complete liberty, very much more than a prisoner could expect. Save that we had to be accompanied by guards, we were free to wander where we would, in the town and out of the town. We used to go shopping in the covered bazaar, where whole streets were shut up, their owners murdered. We used to explore the castle, and climb its crags. We used to take walks down the valley among the irrigated vegetable gardens. We used to walk among the hills. And through those hills some of us intended one day to walk to the sea. Not now, but in the spring. The people were not at all hostile to us. I think they rather liked us. We used to shop a great deal. Our power to buy was limited only by our purse. But we used to shop for hours, like a pack of women in Kensington, all shopping no buying. For we had practically no money, and we had not only to buy blankets and clothes for the winter, but also to set up house, buy crockery, cutlery, cooking pots. Four bob a Who, then, it may be asked, were the murderers, the people who killed about a million Armenians and quite a lot of Greeks? Well, just anybody and everybody. A Turkish peasant with a plough in his hand is a generous, open-hearted, simple fellow. A Turkish peasant with Beneath the surface of life in Turkey there was always a grim undercurrent of cruelty. And in that land there is more unnecessary human suffering than in any land of the world. There were dens in the town of Angora where Christian deserters—Conchies, perhaps—were kept, sometimes in chains. We used to see them When the men went to Changri we kept our orderlies, and throughout captivity our orderlies were safe. But the rest of the men worked on the roads and railways all over Turkey, hundreds of miles from their officers, and the greater part of them died. For the first two or three weeks of this season of exploration we lived in a Greek hotel at the bottom of the town. As hotels go in that part of the world, it was a good one. Downstairs there was the public eating-room on one side of the entrance and the coffee-room on the other; and upstairs there was a landing with a settee and a few chairs, and nine bedrooms. The beds were quite comfortable, but were infested with vermin, and the smell from the drain was perfectly awful. This was not the whole of the premises, for it formed one side only of a hollow square. The other three sides were occupied by Turkish soldiers, and the hollow square was really a caravanserai. Those rooms which faced the rear, into the hollow square, were the most infested, but the smell was the same everywhere. The whole fifteen of us, from the Wank and from the Agricultural College, were established here. A certain number of sentries were at our disposal for explorations, shopping, etc., but we were not allowed to go out alone except within the palings, and there was a guard on the gate. We took our meals in the public room downstairs, together with the general public who patronized the hotel, Turkish officers for the most part. There were plenty of things to eat, not bad either when once one had got used to their greasy way of cooking, and they were cheap. But even so they were for the most part beyond our slender means, and it became quite a work of art to select so wisely as to fill one’s stomach without emptying one’s purse. All we had was paid for in cash at the time, and there were so many clamant uses for cash. Clothes, for example. An Armenian tailor came and measured us for suits, and used to come and try them on. He was a Roman Catholic and it was from him that we first learned that the Roman Catholic Armenians had been spared. He spoke a little French, and while trying on our clothes he used It seems, in writing this account, as though the greater part of our time was spent out of doors; but this was not really the case. For a few hours a day we got out, and we made the most of it, but for very many weary hours a day we were shut in. We had no books except a few French plays lent to us by a Turkish officer; one was “La Foi,“ by Brieux, and I occupied myself by translating it into English. We had chess, and that was all. When it was warm enough we used to sit in the chairs outside and watch the passers-by, and in the evenings we sat in the common room upstairs and talked. On the whole, we got on pretty well together, though things got very strained one evening when we had a thought-reading sÉance. It really must have been exceedingly annoying for the true believers to find that the whole affair was faked. I know I got behind a naval man in a corner and laughed until I nearly burst, but dared not let my face be seen. Things were so electric just then that a laugh might have brought about a thunderstorm. Especially when one of the most ardent spirits made the rest of us a perfectly solemn and heartfelt speech, beginning with “Gentlemen” and ending with a hope that our hearts were There was a certain amount of illness among us, from time to time. The officer with the pink drawers was really quite bad for a long time, and the remaining French officer nearly died, killed by kindness. That is before we had discovered that it was fatal to call in a Turkish doctor. As a rule, a Turkish doctor’s one anxiety is to get you off to hospital where he may make money on your keep, and steal your boots. And from a Turkish hospital all escape is miraculous, all recovery is marvellous. If you were to go into a Turkish hospital with a broken leg the odds are that you would die of typhus. But we did not know that then. Our French friend was ill, so we sent for a doctor. Three came, at intervals during the day. The first was a captain, and he gave the patient a purgative of the right size for captains to give. The second was a major, and, as was only fit, he gave a much larger purgative, of the size that majors give. The third was a colonel, and whether his mission was to finish the job his subordinates had begun I do not know, but he strove manfully, and gave a similar dose Two events happened to me about this time At the beginning of November we moved into our house, up in the town, against the city wall. But a few days before that happened three more The third new arrival, he from Suvla Bay, had suffered a curious adventure. In an attack he had been shot, and when he came to it was to find himself built into a temporary rampart of corpses. He was one of the corpses, and a Turk, with his rifle resting across his head, was firing away at our trench. He flapped about a bit, and was so fortunate as to become one of the seventeen officers who were kept as samples on Gallipoli. I do not propose to give many personal histories, but without a few it would not be easy to convey to others what a strange selection from fate’s claws we earlier pre-Kut prisoners were. Until Kut brought up our numbers to a large figure, every one of us, officer or man, was the survivor, perhaps the sole survivor, of some great adventure. Such as one I will refer to as the Squire: the day he was captured at Suvla Bay one hundred and two officers were “missing” on Gallipoli, and he alone came through. Such as Chok, our gigantic Yorkshireman, who, after braining a Turk with an axe, being CHAPTER VITHE FIRST WINTERIt was in the first week of November that we moved into the house allotted to us in the town. It was in a good quarter, about half-way up the hill, and it was a very good house as houses go in Asia Minor. In front there was a narrow street, and the building opposite to us was popularly supposed to be the Angora University. It was, at any rate, a school of large boys or small men; and I think we must have looked right into the University Museum, for there was a mouldy-looking stuffed owl there. On our left was another large house, at first used as a military hospital; but, when all the patients had died, restored to its purpose of a boys’ school, small boys who used to make cutthroat signs to us. Our right flank rested upon a dunghill, or, rather, a kitchen midden, a public store of all manner of beastliness and the playground of the little schoolboys. The house was owned by an Armenian woman who had found some means of adapting herself to terrible circumstances, and of conciliating the Turks. There were a number of such forlorn To this lady, who lived further down the street, we paid rent. So the Turkish Government was actually providing us with nothing at all except our four shillings a day. For we rented the house furnished, very little furnished. The first fortnight of our stay here I passed in bed with persistent fever. We had not long been in residence when some more prisoners turned up; the officers of a second submarine, and two or three others. They stayed for a while in the hotel, and then we divided forces and made two houses of it. Our house was already rather overcrowded, and it was impossible to take in half a dozen more. The new house was a couple of hundred yards away from the old one, and was rented from a Turkish cavalry officer who kept a small bootshop in the town. There was great friction over the division, but the less friction is emphasised the better. It is inevitable among prisoners. Early in December Chukri Bey left Angora to go as Military AttachÉ to Berlin. We never met his like again. Swiftly and surely our privileges were stripped from us, and about the middle of December we were locked up for good and all. In that house we could not afford to have charcoal braziers in our rooms, as is the custom in Turkey and as we did later at Afion. The kitchen fire had to be kept from failing, but the kitchen was far too small to sit in, it would hold two people standing up. We had a stove in the mess-room, and we used to light it about tea-time Entire lack of exercise is bad for Britons, and looking back to that winter I marvel that we quarrelled so little. Once the split of houses was over we practically did not disagree at all. We played cards, and chess, and backgammon. We had a few books. We talked. And we were silent. Sometimes we had concerts. We were not much in the singing line, but we made plenty of noise. Also there were alleviations. Those must not be left out, or this chapter would seem more gloomy than is true. A few parcels came, a few home letters, some food, and some books. Several of us accomplished the reading of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” which probably we should never have done except in prison. And extraordinarily interesting we found it, especially the later volumes which deal with the history of the Crusades and the Turks. And I There was a sheet of ice on the floor, where water had been spilled, when I went to bed, and twelve days later, when I got up, there was the same ice still there. So cold it was. It was too cold to hold a book, so I used to lie all day and devise meetings and dinners with my most loved friends after the war. From the tiles we had a widespread view of snow-covered plain and range beyond range of mountains. The ground floor, so to speak, of Asia Minor is about 3,000 feet above sea level. That is the average elevation of the plains, and from that level rise the mountains. They are bare and bleak, unclothed by woods, white in the winter, green for a brief and beautiful spring, and for the rest of the year the colour of dust. Even in the tropics I have not seen more gorgeous sunsets than those we used to watch from the roof top, while below us lay the dark streets of the town, channeled through the white roofs, and half-obscured by a mist of smoke. In the daytime those roofs were not altogether without interest. Sometimes we saw people on them, but more often cats; real Angora long-haired cats, basking, fighting, and love The street, too, was sometimes blocked by camels; sometimes fierce-looking, armed ruffians strode along it; and there were a few pretty girls who had a kind eye for the prisoners. And while the house on our left was still a hospital, the town band used to come two or three times a week and play excruciating music. But that can hardly be ranked as an alleviation! The University, too, was a source of joy to us, thoroughly pharisaical joy that we were not as they. For they were a slimy crowd of undersized semi-demi-educated creatures not to be compared with the stalwart murderers of the tanneries down below in the gorge. They loved processions and patriotic demonstrations. I remember once they carried out in procession a huge lath and paper ship meant to celebrate some Turkish naval victory: it was about the time that the “Hilal” newspaper announced that the Turkish navy still consisted of over 300 units which floated. They must have included life-buoys. All through that winter the news was bad for us, heartening for the Turks. Russia was driven back. Bulgaria came in against us. We evacuated the peninsula of Gallipoli, and a spirited, but wholly imaginary, account appeared in the This officer was of the East Eastern, dyed as to the skin only by a smear of the West. Once he had been as far West as Sophia, and on that, fortified by pornographic French literature, he based his claim to civilisation. When I was ill We had been locked up just long enough to hate it by Christmas, and we determined to have as merry an evening as we could. We were helped in this in several ways. First by ourselves, for we succeeded in buying some rum in the town. Secondly, by the American Ambassador, may his name be praised, who sent us a real generous Christmas hamper, with a ham, whisky, rum, There was rivalry between the two houses, just as there is at school, just as there was rivalry between the two separate camps at Afion two years later. But we sank it for the feast, and pooled all our resources. Before dinner we sat round braziers and absorbed much alcohol: very much: so much that one officer missed his dinner, although we shouted in his ear that the war was over. Even that he could not hear. Even the word “Peace” failed to rouse him. But he came round later, and ate a huge dinner all by himself. We had turkey, and ham, and plum-pudding, real American Embassy plum-pudding. “Little pigs lie with their backs all bare, umph bare,” etc. The Army Corps Commander was a dignified person. He was the swine who had locked us up. But except in his own person he loathed swine as a true Mohammedan should. All mention of the pig family, or of those good things, ham and bacon, were anathema to him. The Commandant of the Place was likewise a person of very great dignity. Some effort was made to stop the song, for these people had come on a state visit; to see their Christmas trees, perhaps. But the Army Corps Commander waved all interference aside with a superb gesture of benignity. “Let the song of welcome proceed,” he said, What the interpreter thought I don’t know. He was an Armenian who had embraced Islam to save his skin, and he did not matter anyhow. The grandees did not wait long. We hoped to be able to “tank them up,” for very nearly all Turkish officers drink pretty heavily, despite Islam. But they were too cautious. They and the interpreter departed. But our officer remained, and he was our reward. Him we rendered completely tight. So tight that at the end he stood upon a table and sang “God save the King” in English; though, up to then, he had always denied all knowledge of English. Zaki still wanted to cut his throat, and was with difficulty restrained. Thus passed the Christmas of 1915; and it was just as well we did not know that two more Christmases would have to pass in the same way. We all walked home to our house unaided. But the officer in charge of us slackened off his unwelcome camouflage friendship from that day, for he knew what a fool he had been. January was very cold, and we were pleased to
It follows that in Turkey there are no standing orders. None, that is to say, that live long. There are files, rooms, whole houses full of dead ones. But can you call orders “standing” when they do not stand? In a small way, this conflict between ideas of government made life troublesome for us in Turkey, and even more troublesome for the Turks. But we were a small matter. If the main facts of their history were similarly plotted as a diagram, it would be found very like my line T.: and the result is the ruination of one of the most fruitful lands on the face of the earth; the production of nothing, save only cruelty and unnaturally debased races; and the present-day collapse and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Although we expected to hear at any moment that we were to pack up and go to Afion, the date of our departure continued to recede. We really had some things to pack now. It is extraordinary Personally I had given up the idea; my continual bad health had forced me to abandon all hope of escape. In Turkey all moves happen as did our move to Afion. You are told that you will go, and nothing happens. Having been lied to consistently on all possible occasions, after a time you conclude that this is just one more lie. Then, quite suddenly, you are told that you are to go now at once. Hastily you pack up, sell off what you can, take what you can of the rest with you, and go. At the other end you find that nobody expects you at all. Either they have never been informed that you are coming; or they have been informed of it so long ago that they have forgotten; or, most likely of all, they, too, have thought it was just one more lie. How the dickens this people ever managed to run an empire is a holy mystery to me. I don’t believe they did. I believe that all real organisation, They put up a wonderful fight in this war, despite the dearth of roads and railways. But they were staffed by Germans, and nobody denies that Germans can organize. But how the Turks hated them! With German organization the Turkish infantry can do very well indeed. They are tough and hardy to a degree hard to conceive. They can live on nothing and march all day. And they are brave. Poor devils, they need be. They are operated upon without anÆsthetics, which were only kept for officers. They are half-starved, and they are mercilessly flogged and bastinadoed. I have seen recruits coming in chained in gangs; and I have seen the sick and wounded crawl with grey, leaden faces up from Angora station to the rough accommodation provided for them in the town. I have seen them leave their hospitals, too, generally in corpse-carts. If all else fails to kill them, typhus does not fail. As practically all Turks of the lower orders are lousy from birth to death, typhus rages among them. Lice give them typhus, bugs convey relapsing fever, and fleas the plague. Turks abound in all these insects. They may be said to be their natural fauna. But the toughness At last, late at night on the 13th of February, 1916, we left Angora by train for Afion-Kara-Hissar. And to the station there came, to bid good-bye to us, the most mysterious person in Angora: so mysterious that I dare not mention him for fear, if he is still there, it might bring him into peril. CHAPTER VIIAFION-KARA-HISSARAfter about twenty-four hours in the train, a train that stopped at every station, I looked out into the night and saw a strange place where huge rocks rose up against the sky. The train was slowing down while I looked, and I thought to myself that it would be an interesting place to see by daylight. Afterwards I saw it by daylight: by the light of nine hundred and thirty-eight days and by the moonlight of many nights, and it no longer seemed so interesting. It was like the old legend where the fortunate man is given three wishes and each recoils upon his head. For this was Afion-Kara-Hissar. Afion-Kara-Hissar means Opium Black Fort. Miles of white opium poppies are grown in the fields about the town, and the black fort—the Kara-Hissar—is a huge solitary rock rising up out of the town as out of a sea. The great plain, which stretches away for miles in every direction The Kara-Hissar is precipitous on all sides, hung round by cliffs, and there are few places where it can be climbed. The walls of an old fort grin along its rim like broken teeth; and there is a tradition that it was once besieged in vain for many years. In the days before gunpowder, provided that food and water did not fail and the garrison was faithful, it is hard to see how it could ever fall. We used to argue about its height, without result, but it cannot have been less than 600 feet from the town to the coronet of walls. Afion is a natural junction among the highways of the mountains. The plain is ringed by the hills, and the passes through them lead to Afion. Xenophon crossed the plain, and Alexander the Great. The first crusade streamed past the mighty rock. And at the present day the Smyrna line joins on at Afion with the Constantinople—Bagdad railway. During the war all troops from Constantinople or Smyrna proceeding to either the Mesopotamian or Palestine fronts passed through Afion. And we watched them. The only aeroplane I saw during my captivity, flown by a German officer from Constantinople to Jerusalem, passed through Afion. It was an interesting place, true enough. But when is captivity interesting? After we had been there a year and a half we found that it had another title to fame, for we read in a book that it possessed perhaps the best known mosque of Dervishes in Turkey. The Dervishes we knew well enough by sight, with their long robes and high felt hats, like elongated brimless toppers. And we knew the mosque, too. It was well built; but it was modern and did not somehow look famous. Well, if the place was famous before, it is infamous all right now. We arrived at about ten o’clock on a cold night and found that no one expected us. At any rate, they had made no preparations for our disposal. After some delay we were marched up from the station, about a mile, through the town, and ushered into a house that would have been better if it had been empty. For it had been used as a hospital, and had never been cleaned since. There were filthy bandages and other oddments about the floors. As usual, it was an Armenian house; for, although the Armenians of Afion were not actually massacred in or near the town, as at Angora, they had nearly all been deported at the time of the great Armenian drive. It was When we woke up next morning we found we were quarantined on account of the typhus at Angora, as well as locked up in the ordinary way. But soon a cheery-looking Englishman with a pointed beard marched up the road outside and hailed us through the windows. This was a naval officer, the senior officer among the British prisoners at Afion, and from him we learned that much more freedom was to be expected here than we had known for a long while. I forget how long our quarantine lasted, not more than a day or two, and then we were free to go out, accompanied by guards, to visit the other prisoners. There was one house, just on the opposite side of the Kara-Hissar, with, I think, nine French officers in it; and four or five hundred yards further on there was another house with nine or ten British officers, mostly naval, and about the same number of Russians. Of the Russians, four or five belonged to the Imperial Navy, and the rest were Merchant Service men, not really prisoners of war. In the Medrisseh, the large old Mohammedan school in the town, there were a lot more Russian merchant sailor The French-Anglo-Russian community had the very great privilege of permanent permission, by daylight, to use a generous slice of rocky hill-side as a playground, and the Anglo-Russian house had a large garden in addition. They kept turkeys and chickens, and seemed to us to be extraordinarily fortunate people. And we shared their good luck to a large extent, for, though we had not the hill-side always at hand, we were allowed to come over with a guard every afternoon. A few days after our arrival at Afion the three original naval officers of Angora moved from our rather crowded quarters into the French house. The skipper had marked it down as a good place to escape from, and in two of the naval officers of the Anglo-Russian house he had found men as daring as himself. For five or six weeks things went smoothly. A good many parcels arrived, and letters from home, which mean so much. Altogether, captivity was as tolerable as could be expected. Spring was early that year, and snow fell only once after we had settled in. I embarked upon an awful career of writing verses, a regular orgie We had arrived at Afion so completely penniless that the Turkish Commandant, at our request, sent a wire to the American Ambassador asking for money. The Ambassador rose to the occasion and sent up £Tq.3 a head. Prices had already begun the giddy climb I have already indicated, and our Turkish pay was already hardly enough to keep body and soul together. The three pounds became a monthly grant, later it was increased to five, and before we left Turkey it had become eighteen. Let no one think that on this we were rich. But it was a great thing to feel that our plight was not forgotten. Some of the adventures that had landed prisoners at Angora have been briefly described. In the last week of March we had exciting news. The skipper and two other naval officers had gone. They simply got out of their windows at night, rendezvoused on the hill-side, and struck for the coast. They had made ample preparation in the way of training, and they carried enough food to last them for two weeks. The skipper In Turkey it was not the guards that kept the prisoners in, but the country. Guards there were in plenty, but they were often lax and until this escape there were no regular roll calls. But the country is a terrifically hard place to get out of. To begin with, it is no easy matter to find one’s way through mountains with only a small-scale map. I doubt if the country has ever been properly surveyed. Then there is the language difficulty and the cutthroat character of the inhabitants. Water, too, is scarce, and food unobtainable. And the size of the country is vastly greater than most people seem to imagine. Asia Two days after this escape had taken place, and two days before the Turks discovered it, a new party of prisoners arrived in Afion. It was hard luck that they should have come at such a time, for they were very worn and required good treatment. There were a few men and about nine officers, all from the Mesopotamian front. They had been taken at different times, and had joined up on the way. It was always the prisoners from the Mesopotamian front who had the worst time on the journey. For, in those days, the Bagdad railway stopped short hundreds of miles from the fighting line, and prisoners had to make the awful desert marches as best they could. Six of these To live among us was a liberal education, and some of us were boys who had hardly left school when war began. And the setting of this drama The new-comers had nothing but what they stood up in. One, a short, stout man, had been stripped naked when he was captured, and had been led before the Turkish general dressed only in a sack given him in charity. Since that, however, he had succeeded in getting some clothes more suitable to his considerable dignity: “The Admiral,” we used to call him: he was a member of the Royal Indian Marine. Several were unwell, and all were in need of good food and a rest. One of them used to tell a story of the attention received on the journey from a Turkish doctor; a story of the kind we grew to know as typically Turkish. This officer attended a Turkish hospital to have an ulcer in his leg dressed. The bandage seemed a bit more than secondhand, and the officer asked for a clean one. But the Turkish doctor refused, assuring him, in French, that it was tout À fait stÉrilizÉ, absolutely sterilized. So it was applied. But on the way home the officer felt it crawl, and, removing it, found that it contained nine lice. Is it any wonder that typhus was rife? In so far as it was possible, we had to fit our new friends out, for, of course, the Turks gave We shared out whatever few articles of clothes, pipes, tobacco, and food we could spare, and the new-comers prepared to take a rest cure. But they were doomed to disappointment. The next two months were certainly the most trying I have ever spent in my life. When at last the Commandant did discover that three officers were missing, there was a tremendous uproar. The first thing that happened was that the Commandant, whose duty it was to safeguard the prisoners, telegraphed to Constantinople resigning his job, and stating that he had handed over to a vicious old gentleman, known as the Kolassi, who was second in command. He hoped in this way to land the Kolassi with the responsibility of the escape. But the Kolassi was not fool enough to take over short measure, and the Commandant was obliged to retain his command pending inquiry. Of course, we were all locked up, and inter-house communication completely prevented. The place bristled with bayonets. Then we were all ordered to When we had hastily packed up we were mustered Right under the Kara-Hissar, so close that a stone thrown strongly out from above might crash through its roof, was an Armenian church. A fairly large building of grey stone with iron-barred windows and an iron door. Outside the door was a very small courtyard paved with rough slabs of stone, and along one side of the church ran a stone-flagged pathway, flanked by a narrow strip of ground on which grew two pear trees and an acacia. Opposite to the church, on the other side of the tiny courtyard, was a tall white building which had been an Armenian school. This church was selected as our prison. It was the only place in the town which could have held us, except the Medrisseh. As we approached the church, up a steep street and a flight of steps, we passed a number of unfortunate Armenian women and children who We all, officers and orderlies, marched into the church, and the iron door was closed. There were guards outside the door and inside the door, and guards on the flagged path without. At the western end of the church were two galleries, one above the other; one was given to our orderlies, and the other had an armed guard in it. There were over a hundred of us in the church, most of us with home-made beds, some with chairs, tables, basins, boxes, and cooking pots. The older prisoners had by this time made benches and mess tables and other pieces of furniture, and there were two dogs and a cat. By the time that carts had brought up the last of our things, the place was so full that one could hardly move. We kept a clear passage way down the centre, from the door to the altar, and the remainder of the space was thronged with all manner of men and all manner of objects precious to their owners. Four Russian naval officers were the luckiest, for they were given a vestry to themselves. That night, while the French and British slept, patrols of Russians took it in turns to keep watch CHAPTER VIIITHE ARMENIAN CHURCHFor the next two weeks we were not allowed out of the church at all, not even into the little courtyard. Three at a time we were escorted by sentries to the latrine beneath the school opposite, and that was the only momentary glimpse we had of the outer world, save what little could be seen through the barred windows. We were treated exactly as the Turks treat their criminals. And after a few days even that small crossing beneath the sky was denied us, for they built a new latrine, a most slipshod, amateur affair, up against the wall of the church, where there was a small door. Fortunately, the building was high in proportion to its floor space, and some of the windows were broken. Typhus broke out among us, and two people died; one Russian, and one British orderly. But, by the grace of God, the plague stopped there, as though by magic. Fortunately, we The Commandant was superseded by a hard-faced man whose service had been chiefly in the wilds of Southern Arabia. This person’s name was MaslÛm Bey, and I watch the newspapers daily to see some notice that he has been hanged, but so far I have watched in vain. The charges against him are in the hands of the Government, and I trust his doom is sure. But of that later, if indeed it can be put into a book at all. Roll call was now held daily, twice a day at first, and in the beginning it was, as it ought to be, very strict. Each person, as his name was called, had to walk up and be recognized. But later on, like all things Turkish, it lapsed into a matter of form, satisfied by an incoherent “Hullo!” and an arm waved from behind a crowd. Each group of friends formed a mess, which had its table in some corner of the church, or on the altar platform; and on the floor beds were grouped in rows or square kraals, with their owners’ belongings ranged close by. Order of a sort grew out of chaos. The orderlies were luckier than the officers, for they cooked against the wall of the church outside, and a certain number of them were allowed to go shopping so many There never was such a pandemonium as that church! You can’t lock up a lot of hot-blooded men and starve them of everything that living means without outbreaks of a sort. Not that there were many quarrels among officers: they were very rare indeed, but the noise, and uproar, and shouting, singing, and drinking until all hours of the early morning made the place like a thieves’ kitchen in an old story-book. Hogarth could have painted it, but I don’t know who could have described it. Certainly I can’t. Except The worst feature was the heavy drinking. A good many of us thought that the Turks would, in the circumstances, have been wise to forbid liquor. But they could not resist the chance of making money, and it flowed in. Beastly native spirit for the most part, and synthetic violet-flavoured Greek brandy: some good stuff, too, ordered from Constantinople, and paid for by cheque. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” was the motto of that place. And, by There was one man, not an Englishman, who slept all day. But if one awoke in the silent hour one could see him with a little lamp by his side, smoking pipe after pipe of opium. I think the other way was better than that. It must be added that the French, as a body, behaved extraordinarily well. And with that I will change the subject. Apart from the noise, the place was intensely irritating to live in. We were so very close to each other. It is unpleasant to be cooped up with too much of one’s fellow man. The sweetest temper would revolt in time. And we were of such wide varieties as regards personal habits. It is the small habits that are sharp enough to prick. But, looking back at captivity, I have often felt horribly small-minded, and I daresay a lot of others have too. After two weeks’ complete confinement, one day the doors were opened, and we were made free of the tiny courtyard and the flagged path outside. When we were all out at once there was hardly room to turn round, but it was a very great improvement. The yard, about ten yards square, was used for I remember George, a Russian Pole with a fiery nature, sitting on a stone by me one day and watching a ferocious but perfectly good-tempered round which drew much blood. He was intensely interested and thought it a noble sport—for Britishers. For, as he said frankly, if anyone were to hit him on the nose like that he would not feel his honour satisfied until he had exchanged shots with the aggressor. This shows what different angles of view different people in that church had. Meanwhile, two things hung in the balance, and we hungered for news of both. The three daring escapers had not yet been rounded up, and Kut was still besieged. After eighteen days of marching through mountains, the three came within sight of the While we were in the church, Kut fell. Some of us could hardly believe it at first, especially those who had belonged to the 6th Division. It seemed too bad to be true. After what we had heard from those few who had already made the march from Mesopotamia to railhead, it was plain that the march of thousands of exhausted men along those desert ways would be a very terrible tragedy. But how terrible it was going to be I don’t think even the men who had made it quite realized. The story of that march from Kut is not for me to write. But the impression that the arrival of the survivors made upon us earlier prisoners will be told in its time. It was a long while yet before they reached us. To me personally there came a great piece of news while we were in the church, for a letter dated a couple of months back told me that I was the father of a daughter. The telegram dispatched upon the same day reached me just three weeks after the letter. At that time I was singular in having so close a relation as yet unknown, but before the end came, as new prisoners Beside the flagged path there were two Armenian tombs of some pretension, built of marble and carved with the usual imaginary fauna of heaven, all heads and wings. Further East, by the way, these things are flora, and grow on trees. They were crude affairs, of no interest except to their owners, but there was a space between them, and that was of interest to me. For, when the iron door was first opened in the morning, I used to come out and hide myself there and write verses. This is so largely a personal record that I make no apology for the recurrent references to my own method of killing care. It meant very much to me, as each man’s method did to himself. In this quiet nook, before the path was thronged, I wrote a long description in verse of a Russian concert held in the church and of the riotous feast that followed it. Far from the riot I wrote it. But in the church itself, in the very vortex of hellish sound, I wrote a long poem on the great forests of Northern Ceylon. Far from peace, I wrote of the most peaceful place I know. And this paradox holds good, held good with me at least, all through. For in the next winter, with my feet in the Arctic and my head in the Tropics, with a freezing hand I used to write of Those hours before the multitude awakened were great hours. Even the smelly courtyard was attractive then. For one could look up from it, right up into the air, and see the great cliff that towered above the church turn gold in the light of the early sun. And the cliff was a great place for birds. Rock pigeons nested there in thousands, and swallows, and scores of beautiful little kestrels; and swifts flew, screaming out over the roofs below. Vultures brought forth their young there, whose first steps were on five hundred feet of empty air. There is a rock in Ceylon very like the Kara-Hissar, a huge upstanding stump of granite called Sigiriya, the lion rock, and I had spent many happy months there, years before, delving into ruins of fourteen centuries ago. But the Kara-Hissar was good to look upon, apart from the memories it awakened, though memories are intensified in prison. In ordinary life one lives chiefly for the present: but in prison one lives almost entirely on the past and for the future. It was not long before the pear trees came into blossom, and the white acacia. The sentries had kept us rigorously to the flagged path at first, while they used the garden space beneath the pear While we were in the church, before the potatoes had been abandoned, there was quite an exciting episode connected with an attempt at escape. The hero was a cheery Irishman, whom I will call Bart, the owner of one of the dogs, a beautiful Persian greyhound that he had acquired in Angora. He made up a bundle of food-stuffs and concealed it behind one of the Armenian tombs, where it would be handy when he required it, and so that he could come out of the church empty-handed and unsuspicious in appearance. But one of the guards noticed it, and a special sentry was put on to keep it under observation. It was obviously impossible to start like this, and for the time, at any rate, the attempt had to be abandoned. But it still remained to recover the precious pack and its contents. A Turkish sentry pretending not to watch anything is the most transparent thing in the world. It was easy to see what he was at: he wanted to identify the owner so that he might be cast into a dungeon. I have mentioned the noise in the church, and it is only fair to tell of the music, real soul-stirring music. It was not made by the English; with a few exceptions they were not a musical lot as far as performance went. But the Russian sailors had a choir, and they sang like angels. It must have made the angels painted on the ceiling envious to hear them. Their music was of a kind quite distinct from Western European music. Very sad and melancholy as a rule, in a minor key. Generally about eight of them would sing together, taking parts, The singing of the Russians was the best thing there was in that church. There were several Indians in Afion at that time, survivors of the Bagdad consular guard; and while we were in the church the last, or one of the last, died. When war broke out there was a As I tell this tale, as I thread this rosary of months and years, there runs throughout a strand of the blackest tragedy, and it will come out, do what I can. I am trying to put in all the funny things that happened, too, for there are things too sad to be serious about. But the tragedy is there, and it must be seen. Still, it is a bad note to end a chapter on. As a crowd we were not downhearted, so I will pass to the tale of the frightened sailor man. There was a certain sailor man who had heard strange tales about the Turks on his journeys round the world. He had heard how they bastinado men for small faults, and he had probably THE RUSSIAN LULLABYShadows come a’ creeping; Little stars are peeping; Church bells distantly sound. Lie still, my babe, in your cot gently sleeping, Dreaming while the world spins round. Dream of your mother, her watch gladly keeping, Smiling while the world spins round. Through the curtains gleaming, Moonlight comes a’ beaming; Hush! My Baby, we’re found. Deep in the night the old moon sees you dreaming, Sleeping while the world spins round. Bright kind old face, like a sentinel seeming, Smiling while the world spins round. CHAPTER IXTHE LOWER CAMPTowards the latter end of May the great “strafe” ended. The Turks informed us that our punishment was fulfilled, and that we were to return to normal times again. For several days the senior officers of the different nationalities were very busy examining our new quarters and arranging matters generally, and then we began to move by masses out of the church. The French went first, to an Armenian house in the town. Soon afterwards the Russians followed to other houses in the same part of the Armenian quarter. And then the British officers, of whom there were now about forty, moved into a completely new block of jerry-built houses down by the station road. So new were the houses that the one I was in had no doors or windows when we went into it, and was not really completed the whole time we were there. The Lower Camp consisted of a row of four houses under one continuous roof. Each house contained a kitchen and two rooms on the ground floor, as well as an open space in the centre, and three bedrooms upstairs, grouped round a central landing which served as a mess-room. The orderlies lived downstairs, and the officers upstairs, two in one small room at the back, and four in each of the two larger rooms in front. Behind the houses was an open space, of rather over a quarter of an acre in extent, bounded by the backs of the houses on one side and by walls on the other three. This was known as the garden; for, when first we got there, it contained a couple of dozen cherry-trees about as big as walking-sticks. But these did not long survive, for a quarter of an acre is not a large playground for forty active officers and a dozen equally active orderlies, to say nothing of dogs and Turkish guards. From the upper rooms we had wide views in both directions, out across the plain and far away into the distant hills. The front faced It was really a beautiful view, especially in the spring, when the land was not so colourless as at other times. The soil of the plain was very soft and friable, and much dust used to hang in suspension, giving very vivid colours to the sunsets; sunsets of golden pheasants and peacocks’ tails, and sunsets of red-hot copper. I have seen every shadow on the wall in the evening as blue as the bluest sea. In the late summer great dust-storms used to roll up across the plain. We could see them gather on the distant hills, and come speeding towards us like banks of fog. And, as we hurriedly closed all the windows and fixed them tight, the storms would break upon the rocks, towering up high into the air in waves of brown, while the main body drove furiously towards us Some day that plain will be a great natural aerodrome, where people will halt on their way from Europe to the Far East. The inhabitants of the house I was in, No. 3, were practically the same as in the house by the city wall in Angora. No. 1 was principally Mesopotamian, No. 2 chiefly the old Afion crowd, and No. 4 largely composed of the second Angora house. During the next two and a-half years many new prisoners came, and the old inhabitants had periodical times of restlessness when they shifted round, but the nuclei of the houses remained more or less constant, and the characteristic tone of each house remained practically unalterable. It is a very curious thing this tone or soul of each small subdivision of a community. I suppose every home in England has its own personal tone. Certainly each house in a public school has. Each ship has, and each regiment; and, in a larger way, each nation has, and will retain it despite Bolshevism. We had not long been in the Lower Camp when new prisoners began to arrive. I cannot pretend to remember the order of their coming, The yeomanry taken at Katia in the Sinai peninsula passed through on their way to a town in the north of Anatolia. We only had a glimpse of them as they passed; but we were able to supply them with a few books. Other prisoners came in who stayed with us. The earliest to arrive were a very few who had been taken, one or two at a time, in the attempt to relieve Kut. One of these had been kept for several days in a small tent with a number of Arabs condemned to death. The Arabs were not allowed out of the tent for any purpose whatever. Another had been chained to an Indian, and had dysentery while so chained. He and the Indian both got typhus, and the Indian died. After weeks in hospital the Britisher pulled through typhus, malignant malaria, and chronic rheumatism. He is now pulling through phthisis. Before that he had had sunstroke, and he was shot through the chest; not a bad record for a constitution to have pulled through. Another British officer had been housed in the public gaol at Mosul, among the Turkish criminals, whose habits were so filthy that he asked to be allowed a privy to himself. His Gradually, as more prisoners arrived, we overflowed into the Upper Camp. The Russians were sent away to another part of Anatolia, and their houses given over to British. One other visit we had, from a German Staff-Colonel and several subordinates. “When will the war end?” we asked the great man. “When we have taken Verdun,” was his reply. We had not much liberty at this time. A certain number of officers were allowed to go shopping on several days in the week. A piece of rocky ground was assigned to us to play cricket on. Each officer was allowed to go to the Turkish bath once a week. And once a week the camps visited each other. For the rest, we had the garden, and the Upper Camp had a part of the street between their houses. The chief game in the garden was a sort of badminton, played over a net with tennis rackets and balls made of stitched-up lumps of old sock. But indoors there were many activities, both mental and physical. I should be afraid to say how many people wrote books. But the number of those who wrote plays must have been even greater. Some of them were very well produced. Several officers, notably one of the Australians, showed themselves to be quite expert designers of costumes, and most efficient needlemen. And some of the youngsters made very pretty women. The art of the female sex, in dressing as they do, was borne in upon me when I saw how quite plain young men could be made to look most attractive girls. A for a day, B for a week, and C for a life partnership, as someone wickedly compared the attractions of the three leading ladies. Some of the plays were very funny indeed, but the wit was not of that order which makes you pride yourself that you can see it. As a rule, it flew up and struck you all of a heap. Another trial of the times was the debating society, in which all things on earth were discussed in due form, with a chairman, a proposer and seconder, an opposer and his second, a butter-in, and a ribald gallery. For days afterwards I used to hear the points argued and re-debated by the orderlies in the kitchen beneath my room. And There were lectures, too, some of them very good ones. The subjects dealt with were catholic and included cocoanut-planting, Mendelism, flying, submarines, Singhalese history, Greek coins, Egyptian irrigation, and a host of other matters. Besides these public efforts, there were men studying all manner of things in little cliques, or by themselves. One officer who knew no Arabic tapped Zaki to such good purpose that he (not Zaki) wrote an Arabic grammar. One old Australian of fifty, who had always lived, and would continue to live, in the back of beyond, studied simultaneously French, Norwegian, and Esperanto. There were teachers of mathematics, teachers of German, Tamil, Italian, Turkish and Russian. There were people teaching themselves to draw, or to play musical instruments. There were people studying law and medicine. I am sure that, at that time, we were the greatest centre of intellectual endeavour in the whole of the Turkish Empire. Then there were cunning adorners of rooms, and still more cunning mixers of cocktails, in which a number of nauseous ingredients was made to taste good, as two negatives make an affirmative. There were also breeders of dogs. Quite a rage there was for keeping dogs, on a quarter of an acre of land. Hilda and Gumush, the two original hounds of the Church days, presented their owners respectively with twelve and eleven puppies all in one week. At first it was very pretty to watch Bart training the young greyhounds, and teaching them to jump; he was a notable trainer of dogs. But when they all grew up, the overcrowding became intolerable. Public opinion revolted. Feelings were very deeply stirred, and people voted anti-dog or pro-dog, or pro-two-dogs, or pro or anti every possible combination and permutation of dogs. In addition to dogs there were other pets: ducks, pigeons, chickens, enormous eagle-owls, a vulture, magpies, and finally a wolf. Cats were tried, but were somehow not a success. There was also the native fauna. In my room I caught mice, voles, and shrews. Also smaller and more unpleasant creatures. Quite a feature of the spring awakening was the almost universal “bug-strafing” of beds. Our beds were all home made: a frame of pinewood, strung with thin rope, and carried on four legs. The joints and the holes where the rope passed through were the chief haunts of the foe. After breakfast, on a warm morning, officers in shirt sleeves, with kettles of boiling water and pots of Stockholm tar, might be seen carrying out that bold military measure known as a bug-strafe. In summer I slung my bed by four ropes from the ceiling, and was fairly immune. They did not climb down the ropes, and they could not reach up from the floor, even standing on tip-toe. Occasionally the Turks searched through our belongings to see if we had disguises, or diaries, or food stored for escape. The first time they did it they caught us properly; but made an awful muddle of their triumph. We were all ordered out into the garden, for what purpose we did not know; and, once out, sentries were placed at all the doors, and we were not allowed back again. But we asked as a favour that one cook in each house might be permitted to return, as otherwise our dinners would be spoiled. This was allowed. They began by searching No. 1 house, and as they were doing so our noble cook hid everything of any importance that he could lay hands on. Some under the charcoal, and some under the straw in Roger’s kennel. Roger was very snappy with Turks, like all good dogs he detested them; and he sat tight on all my MSS. among other things. Everything in writing that a Turk cannot understand is to him abominable. What he can understand is rare above rubies. Despite the efforts of the cooks, they did find a great deal of written matter, some of which it had been very unwise to keep: such things as The matter was very serious indeed. There was some very incriminating stuff there, and we did not at all desire another two months of the church. All sorts of measures were proposed and rejected. Burning the whole place down was mooted, but decided to be impossible, for paper In No. 3 house, an officer named Budd was less fortunate. Trying to explain that he wanted to keep the mess accounts, he lost his temper and damned the interpreter. He was at once searched personally, and sent away into the town, where he was confined in a cellar. When he asked for bread, the gaoler said, “Para yok, ekmek yok,” which means, “No money, no bread.” Fortunately, Budd had money; but he had a very unpleasant five or six days before he was released. In the cell next to his he heard a poor, miserable little Chaldean priest, who had bravely but unwisely kept some record of the Armenian girls enslaved in various Turkish Bart had collected some of the diaries, but there were still others, and at least one plan of escape most unwisely committed to writing. A community would be incomplete without its salt of folly. A few days later the remaining documents returned to us too. The Turks had bungled over the cooks, bungled over guarding their spoil, and now they bungled again worse than ever. They had a positive genius for incompetency: a masterly faculty for determining the wrong way to do a thing, and for doing it. After a few days, a sack of papers and note-books was returned to the camp. To our surprise, it was found to contain all those documents which we had feared the Turks might discover and keep. But the puzzle was elucidated by a letter which followed, a rather abject letter from the interpreter, stating that he had returned the wrong sack by mistake, and, if we would not tell the Commandant of his error, would now send us the right one! So we recovered everything. In the Upper Camp they were not so lucky. There, the Turks adopted the simple method of destroying all written matter. It was things like The only person, besides Budd, who suffered actual penalty from this raid, so far as I remember, was the celebrated French cook, late of the Jockey Club. He had kept a diary, and in it had stupidly written the use to which he thought the Turkish flag should be put by a French sailor. It might be thought, after some of our treatment, that this was merely tit-for-tat, six of one and half a dozen of the other. As a fact, it was twelve dozen of one and very gross of the other. So the French cook went to gaol, and we saw him in Afion no more. In this gallery of portraits I think Porter is more than worthy of mention. He was an orderly in No. 4 house, a slight, fair-haired young fellow from the Isle of Wight. Before the war he had been a barber, and he used to cut our hair and trim our beards: for many of us grew beards. But his claim to fame was that he was the most wounded man in Afion. In an attack on Gallipoli he had been shot through the body, and while lying on the ground had been terribly wounded again by shrapnel. To finish him off the Turks had cut his head open with a shovel, and bayoneted him many times. He had in all Having no diary, I shall certainly not tempt critics by trying to fix a date for the total eclipse of the moon. But one occurred while I was in the lower camp, some time between June of 1916 and November of 1917. It was either just before or just after the entry of Greece into the war. Elston and I, who occupied a small room at the back of the house, had gone to bed early and were nearly asleep when we were roused by repeated firing away in the town. We sat at the window and watched flash after flash; some in the streets, some on the hill-side, and some apparently from the windows. There were the shots of modern rifles, of revolvers, and the duller boom of old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns. We thought at first it was brigands attacking the town. Then we remembered the Greeks, and we feared that a great massacre had begun, for there were many Greeks in Afion. In No. 2 house there was an officer who had lived for years in Turkey and knew the language well; so, when the N.C.O. in charge of the guard addressed his troops, we had a ready interpreter. “We are all ignorant men,” said the chaous. “I am ignorant myself. But I know that the moon has not gone for ever. It will return. Still, I don’t like that blood-red colour, so fire away.” And they did. CHAPTER XTHE SECOND YEARTo a large extent, the events chronicled in the last chapter overlap into the second year. Some have been recorded as the natural sequels to others, and some generalisations cover the whole of captivity. But, broadly speaking, I am trying to make the record as continuous as possible, and to preserve chronological order. We had been in Turkey for less than a year when we first established code correspondence with England. All our letters were censored in Vienna as well as in Constantinople, and perhaps locally; but, so far as we know, our code was never discovered. It was suspected, at least, some means of communication was suspected, because the Turkish Government was requested, through the Dutch Embassy, to set right certain urgent wrongs, and they knew that some one of us must have reported those wrongs. Letters Since our correspondence, after passing through several hands and various different addresses in England, eventually reached the War Office, it is obviously impossible for me to describe it. But I should like, however anonymously, to pay a tribute to the clever person who received the first code letter, realized that it was code, discovered the key to it, knew what to do with it, and acted as our central post office for the two and a-half years. He (she) had no idea that a code message was coming, and had no clue beyond what his (her) brain afforded. It is a pleasure, too, to be able to claim that, though immobilized, we were not altogether useless. What exactly they would have done with us if they had brought home to us a charge of conveying Dear Elijah It is four months now since you wrote to me about the proposed division of Dad’s property, and I have not had a single line since. If I am passed over because I am away it will be very hard, through no fault of my own. I don’t think that Gwendoline will be greedy enough to treat me as you say. And anyhow I rely upon you to do your best to bag the old hall clock for me. Dear old Dad always meant it for me, and it seems only yesterday that he promised me it, &c. &c. That is simple enough. It would pass any censor. But it contains military information. It is not the code we used, but it was, as a matter of fact, one which was held in reserve as a possibly useful one. It was never communicated home. Read it again in the light of the key, which is the Greek letter p. Every schoolboy knows p. It is something or other to do with the relation of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. I am no mathematician, but I know that p means 3·14159. Take the third word In addition to writing codes, I took to studying cypher, and of all the nine or ten varieties of cypher given me by various prisoners never found one for which a method of solution could not be worked out. An average piece of Playfair took me about three and a-half hours: probably an expert would do it in half that time. This is not written as an advertisement for the study of cypher, but to show the straits to which a prisoner may be driven for want of occupation. Few occupations are more detestable than poring over cypher, but total inaction is worse. It is an occupation for a slave, and now I am no longer a slave I hope never to do it again. Enough has been said of prisoners’ occupations now for the rest to be left to imagination. Here endeth the Arts and Crafts section. Towards the end of the summer of 1916 some of the generals taken in Kut passed through Afion. None of them made more than one night’s stop there. But after them there came some officers who did stop; and from them we heard how the men had suffered on their deadly trek over the desert. The road from Bagdad to Aleppo is The senior British officer was allowed a little, a very little, communication with the men. The other officers were allowed none at all. But through our shopping orderlies we kept in touch with them. Those shopping orderlies became masters of intrigue. I am sure that each successive senior officer did every single thing that he could for the men. It was uphill work the whole way through. The unfortunate officer who had to deal direct with the Turkish officials found himself baffled at every point by lies, and lies, and lies; by cheating and by bare-faced robbery. I have been to that cemetery, not so very bad a place as cemeteries go. There is a stone wall round it, and in it are a number of Armenian tombstones of white marble. Many of them have carved upon them little pictures of the implements proper to the deceased’s trade: scissors for a tailor, a hammer and a chisel for a stonemason, and so forth. A very large number bear the image of a small basin with a very fat caterpillar in it. I thought it was the worm which dieth not, but others have held it to be a chalice containing the spirit of the departed rising in vapour. It was a sad place, and many good fellows lie there, both officers and men, who need not have died. Afion was looked upon by the Turks as a rest camp. The church and the Medrisseh were used as barracks for the sick and for worn-out prisoners. But when the men gained strength again they were sent out in working parties: some to cut timber in the forests near the Black Sea, some to work on the railway then being built through the Taurus mountains, and some even beyond the Taurus. There were good places and there were The only prisoner we ever had who had been a prisoner in Germany too during this war—he had escaped from there and been recaptured—said that the difference in treatment between the worst places in Germany and Turkey was this: in Germany the men were ill-treated until they became ill, and were then put into hospital; in Turkey they were ill-treated until they became ill, and were then ill-treated more until they died. Before the end we used to reckon, so far as we could get smuggled figures, that seventy-five per cent. of all men who had been taken prisoners two years or more earlier were dead. Three out of every four. It was not only the Kut prisoners who had gone on short rations before they were captured. It was all the prisoners, all those who were not officers. For the Turks thought that if they sent back to England most of the officers, no inquiry would be made about the men by the British nation, any more than, in the opposite case, the Sublime Porte would have seriously objected. I have met people who thought it was only the Kut prisoners who were ill-treated, but, once that tragic march across the desert was over, the prisoners from Kut, officers and men alike, mixed with the other prisoners from all the other fronts There were places where working parties were treated well. We heard the most extraordinary tales of places where British N.C.O.’s were running the whole show themselves, running the prisoners and running the Turks too: men who had come to the top by sheer force of character. It is very greatly to be hoped that some account of this will see daylight. I wish the details were in my hands. But these places were rare. There were other hells upon earth where the men were beaten and starved, robbed of the money sent them from home, robbed of their parcels, frozen in the winter and overdriven in the summer until they died, either from sheer collapse or from one of the many diseases that a dirty country breeds. People who have no special knowledge of Turkey-in-Asia hardly realize what the winter is like there. The last winter we were in Afion snow fell at the end of November and did not melt until the middle of March. The temperature ranged round about zero for a good many weeks. What this meant to the men in some of the bad places can easily be imagined. Clothes were provided for them by our Government, acting through the Protecting Embassy; but, except It is not my aim to complain about the lot of the officers. We were lucky to be alive, and we did not really have a very bad time. But most of the men were so unlucky that they are now dead, and while they lived they suffered all manner of ill. This book would indeed be incomplete were I to fail to tell of the plight of the men. I expect they are forgetting it. People do forget things. But I must go back to our own history, the history of the Lower Camp in 1916-17. That winter was a mild one. We played football about two or three times a week on a small ground about half a mile from the camp. Association was the rule that year, but the following winter we played Rugby. The football ground was a long, rather narrow strip between two ploughed fields, and the reasons it was not ploughed up were two. It sloped toward the This threshing naturally requires a good deal of space, and it protected the lower part of our football field. The upper half was conserved in quite a different way, for it was a Hebrew cemetery. There was a large slab or soft rock in it, roughly squared and conveniently situated for those who wished to watch the game. Three of us were sitting on this one day when a Turk, driving a cart along the road, turned his horse and drove up to this stone. He asked us to move to one side, and then gravely led the horse In the spring of 1917 we began to get a little more liberty. For some time the Commandant answered all applications to be allowed to go out for walks by saying that the weather was not yet fine enough, a subterfuge so transparent that I suspect he was laughing at us. His sense of humour was a very grim one. He appeared one morning and told the senior officer that three British soldiers were to be hanged that day. Of course there was a vigorous protest made; but, after a while, the Commandant smiled and went away. He then visited the senior French officer and told him that three Frenchmen were to be But when spring grew fine enough we actually did go for several long walks, and saw the little yellow crocuses thrusting their heads up on the hill-sides. It was good to see flowers grow again. The wild flowers were wonderful round Afion. But that spring we saw little of them. The policy was changed again, and instead of being allowed out for walks in the country, we were allotted a little corner of one of the hills overlooking the town. Here we used to march, twice a week, and sit for an hour or two on the grass. It was steep and rocky, and there was nothing else to be done there. People used to take books out there, or pencils and paper and try to draw the one view. Then we would walk back to tea, through the slums of Afion, down narrow roads, past huts I forget when the policy was changed again. It was always being changed. Capricious and wavering as thistledown. But in the summer we had quite a lot of liberty. We used to gather huge armfuls of purple larkspur, pink orchis, and yellow dog-roses. It was a good time for most of us, but early in the summer five officers were suddenly taken from their friends and shut up in a separate house in the Armenian quarter. They were allowed a short time twice daily for exercise in about 50 yards of the street, but for the rest were no better off than if they were in gaol. They were not released until about Christmas time. All this was because the Commandant suspected them of planning to escape. The Upper Camp grew a great deal larger that year. All the Russians came back again, and with them a great many more Russian officers who had been interned at Sivas for several years previously. From Yozgat, too, a large number of British officers came, among whom were two of the three who had escaped in March, 1916. My personal opinion is that the camps as a whole lost interest a great deal after this. They certainly became more respectable, but the character of the place altered. It improved on the whole, but it was duller. In the old days we had at least this in common, that we were all different; we had all come into Turkey in different ways and at different times. Now that queer distinction disappeared, for most of the new-comers were from Kut, the senior officers in nearly all of the houses were from Kut, and Kut rather dominated the conversation. We old-timers were a little sick of Kut. They were mostly old regular soldiers, and senior to the rest of us. Let me hasten to say that I have never met a nicer lot of men. That was part of the difficulty. They were nicer than we were. But they had all led the same sort of lives before the war, and during the war. They had all fought in the same battles, and been in the same siege. They had all the same adventure to tell. I have great friends among them, and I hope they will smile if ever they read this. But the old-timers One result of this influx was that we all became very unsettled. The fact was that we had stagnated too long, and were growing very queer. We were used to new prisoners dropping in one or two at a time, and trying to teach us how to be prisoners. We knew how to be prisoners; we had learned it in a bitter school; so we smiled at these new babes in the wood, let them kick against the pricks a little, and took them to our bosoms. They made no difference. But you can’t take old regular lieutenant-colonels to your bosom, you have to wait until they take you to theirs. They do in time, at least these did. But they unsettled the whole place, and it was probably very good for us. The result was a break up of many happy homes, a great deal of arrangement and rearrangement of houses, and when we settled down again it was like a new Parliament with a different cleavage of parties, and a strange Government. At the end of all this I found myself in the Upper Camp, in a house of twelve almost equally divided between Kut and non-Kut. It was a very happy house. I don’t think anyone in it really hated any of the others; and, in It was a very respectable house. Much too respectable to be popular. Indeed it was a byword for respectability, until Good Friday, 1918; but that is anticipating. We thought, a lot of us, that the war was going to end that year, so who can say that we were downhearted? CHAPTER XI.THE LAST YEAR IN AFIONAn accurate description of all our ups and downs, of liberty enlarged and liberty snatched away again, and of all the fluctuating fortunes of the camp would be as dull as our lives were, and as little likely to be voluntarily undergone as was our captivity. That gem of time cannot be polished in all its facets, lest the observer should be dazzled. All that will be attempted here is some account of the main events. Another man, looking at that time from a different angle, might write a book that would hardly parallel this upon a single point, and yet be as true a picture. We were all growing very weary indeed of being prisoners. Prices had continued their inexorable rise, and frequent mass meetings were held to discuss ways and means, for of course there were poor among us who could not afford to get money sent from home, and the pace of Of course we did import money, whatever it cost, even the poorest of us practically had to, unless he would freeze in the winter. The actual necessaries of life, food, fuel, and clothes of sorts, were always obtainable in Turkey; at a price. The country was so completely unorganized, and the railway so congested that food-stuffs might be plentiful in one district and almost unobtainable in another not far away. The winter of 1917-18 was a very severe one. Late in November the street that was our only playground and space for exercise was filled with snow. It ran east and west, overhung by a steep hill on the south, and deprived of sun by the opposite row of houses. No sunlight at all reached that street for quite three months, and during the whole of that time it was paved with snow that had been trodden hard. There were refugees in the town that winter, people of strange appearance to us who were used to the Turks. They were said to be Kurds mostly, but there were certainly several tribes represented. For some reason or other they had been evacuated from some part of the Turkish Empire further east, and dumped down at Afion. Their clothes were those of a warm climate, and many of the little children had but one thin garment apiece. Nominally, I expect, they were supposed to be fed by their predatory Government: actually they were on or over the verge of starvation. We used to see them from our windows, and on our comparatively rare passages through the town. There is no sanitation in a Turkish town. And one of the uses of these middens is to provide food for the utterly poor. These poor refugees used to haunt those hideous piles of decaying matter and pick food from them. Dogs and donkeys, children and buffalo calves, old women and cats, used to scramble and scrape for the last pieces. We had a Rugby football that winter, and in a field by the river, another of the wide threshing floors, we began to play when the snow melted. There were some very good players, and we had one new prisoner who held, and I believe still holds, the ’Varsity record for both the 100 yards and the quarter-mile. There were several matches, and one very great triumph, when The Dardanelles played The World and beat it. There were so few to pick from that I played for the Dardanelles. Until that winter, the last game I had played was in Ceylon in 1902; and I went to bed for three days One other thing that happened that winter must be told, though it is painful to write it. There was a Russian named Constantine B., who had become estranged from the other Russians for a fault of his own. He was afterwards forgiven, and taken back, so it would not become me to say anything about it. For the time, however, he lived separately in a small house with a Russian anarchist and a Russo-Armenian thief, and the three of them were outlaws. Also they hated each other, and used to quarrel. One of their quarrels became acute enough to attract the attention of the Turkish Commandant, the infamous MaslÛm Bey, who visited their house to make inquiries, and there lost his temper and struck Constantine B. Constantine was not really a bad fellow. He had done one bad thing, but he was out of place in that house. He was a man of about thirty, tall, well built, with very fair hair. A brave man, and quick-tempered. He put up his arm to protect himself, and he was lost. The Commandant accused him of trying to reach for his, the Turk’s, sword, and had him arrested. Constantine B. was taken away from the MaslÛm’s cup was not yet full. Constantine recovered in time, though he is lame. MaslÛm went on to his worst offence. He had flogged our men and the Russians. He had imprisoned British officers in filthy holes, for little or no cause. He had lied, and swindled, and stolen, and grown rich. He now proceeded to overstep even the line which a Turkish officer draws. All through the writing of this book there has loomed ahead of me the grave difficulty of dealing with MaslÛm Bey’s greatest offence. It ought to be recorded, but I loathe doing it. All these offences of MaslÛm Bey, from the tragedy of Constantine downwards, were duly reported to England by code. The very names of the offences were squeezed into that code. I had the pleasure of sending the messages myself, and the framing of them. They got home safely, and our Government acted at once. In the end we got rid of MaslÛm Bey. He was court-martialled by a commission of utterly corrupt Turkish officers. The British soldiers bravely told their stories. I say bravely, for their lives hung by a hair. A British officer who knew Turkish equally bravely conducted the prosecution for our side; and his life hung by a hair too. But we got rid of MaslÛm Bey. He was given five and a-half months’ simple imprisonment. Not six months, for that would That is why I watch the papers to see if MaslÛm Bey has been hanged. We used to stick up for ourselves in Turkey. At one time I knew how many commandants of prison camps were broken by the British in three and a-half years. But my memory is a prison-memory. It is like fishing in a well-stocked stream with a torn landing-net. When you have got a fish, there you see him plain enough; but more often you see but a gleam, and he is gone. The first Commandant of Afion was broken for swindling; the second broke himself by letting prisoners escape; the third was MaslÛm Bey; and the fourth was a gentleman. British prisoners broke one Commandant at Kastamouni, and I believe another at Broussa, Russians broke one at Kutahia. And down the line, in the Taurus or beyond it, where there were no British officers, I believe our men broke more than one. After MaslÛm had gone we were very well treated. I don’t think that any prisoners could have expected to have a juster man to deal with than our new Commandant, Zeir Bey. Just think what an opportunity of regeneration Turkey lost in this war. Had the Ottoman Our Indians had the greatest contempt and hatred for the Turks, all but a few who were traitors. There were some, a few, real traitors among the Indians; but there were many more who are much more to be pitied than blamed for some of the things they did. Their position was an exceedingly difficult one. Very many of them died, thousands of them; but the Turks were always trying to seduce them from their allegiance. There was even a paper printed in Hindustani by the Germans and given free to the Indians. The Sultan sent for Indian Mohammedan officers and gave them swords. One sturdy Pathan, Kutab Gul, went to prison rather than accept a sword. For the most part the Indians were kept at different stations from the British, at Konia and other places where they could get no guidance from their British officers, where no one knew their tongue, and where they could get no news of the war except such as was faked, and the usual bazaar rumours. And this went on for years. As they would themselves Sandes did three things. He wrote a book upon the Mesopotamian campaign, now with a publisher. He made maps, and he was the bandmaster. Among the later prisoners there were a number of musicians, and at least one really ambitious composer who wrote many songs and an oratorio. There were three violins and a guitar in the orchestra, and there used to be excellent Sunday concerts in the Yozgat house at the top of the street, which was our Albert Hall. There were also several prisoners who sang really well. This last year saw a great renaissance in the theatrical world too. There was a revolt against the bondage of the old border-line jokes, and an attempt to substitute wit for wickedness. The men in the church With the passing of MaslÛm we came to the end of our worst troubles. The new Commandant was not so incurably Asiatic. He realized that prisoners, like other men, love life, and freedom, and the open sky. That summer we had a wide and high hill-side made free to us. We could spend the whole day there if we liked. The Lower Camp had an even better recreation ground in a rocky hill just beyond their houses. We were allowed out in smaller parties and for longer distances. Smaller parties was a very great gain, for to walk out in a “crocodile” is so unpleasant that it is almost better to stay indoors. We used to get a sentry, and go off into the hills with our lunch, and picnic all day. And as we could go in several directions there Among the prisoners there were some who said, “When we win the war the Turks will massacre us all.” But those among us who knew the East said, “When we win the war the Turks will lick our boots and feed out of our hands.” We were right. Had we lost the war it would have been quite another matter, and this history would never have been written. It was different now from the old days when Toomy and I used to sit by a charcoal brazier and plan revenge. Our great scheme was to introduce rabbits into Anatolia: the country was suitable, and they were to overrun the whole land, worse than in Australia, and eat up all the young crops. We also thought of water hyacinth in the Tigris and Euphrates. But we were winning the war now, and these guerilla operations would not be necessary. But we never thought the end was as near as it proved. CHAPTER XIIOUR ALLIESWhile in Turkey I only saw Italian prisoners once. They were locked into railway wagons, and when they tried to peer out through the barred windows a German N.C.O. brutally thrust at their faces with his stick. They were stated to have elected to come to Turkey rather than to remain in Austria, where food was short. They were on their way to work in a mine in the vilayet of Aidin. At one time there were a good many Serbs in Afion, but we saw very little of them. Those I saw were apparently dying of starvation but they seemed to be cheerful folk. There were nine French officers at Afion, and, except for one who spent a long time in a Constantinople hospital, they were with us the whole time. They and the English were on the best of terms throughout, and they were a very nice lot of fellows indeed. They were most studious The French were extraordinarily generous, too, in giving up their time to teach their language to Englishmen. Very few, if any, of them had not several English pupils, and one ran a large class. With only one exception they could all speak English fluently long before most of us learned much French. Our pronunciation was, of course, a mystery to them, nor was it to be wondered at. Their house was too large for them alone, and Britishers who wished to study French joined their mess. They had at one time Australians, a Canadian, a Lancashire man, and a Scot, and each of them spoke English in a different way. No wonder the French found it difficult. For a whole year once the French were not The French temperament was totally different from the English. They used to get extraordinarily elated at times, and at other times they became desperately depressed. We did both of these things too, but our pendulum was longer and did not swing so suddenly. In the great German offensive of the spring of 1918 we refused to be downhearted. “They will take Paris!” the French would cry. “Very likely,” we would reply; “perhaps we are leading them on.” There was unpleasantness over this kind of divergence, and they would say despairingly, “Oh! you bloody English! You do not understand.” But no real quarrel ever resulted. The most frequent offender was an Irish major, who assiduously I shall never forget a scene in the church, where, by the way, the French beat us at all points in quiet endurance of a detestable experience. A certain French officer resented having his belongings searched, and certain articles of Turkish clothing “stolen” from him. In revenge he shaved off his moustache, fitted a large newspaper cocked hat upon his head, and strutted fiercely up and down the central aisle, looking the very personification of revanche. He was a tiny man, very clever, and a great mathematician. Why he did it the Lord alone knows, but he did; and he felt as one embarking upon a forlorn hope. There was not a smile in the affair—on his side—from beginning to end. The French senior officer was a very fine man, one of the best-read and all-round best-informed men I have ever met, and he ran his rather difficult mixed French and British house tactfully and well. Their senior officer was a Commander in the Black Sea fleet, a very nice, quiet, friendly man of about fifty. He had lost every single thing in the world except the few articles of clothing remaining to him in Turkey, and he knew not where to turn after the war. All his money had gone: he received no pay from his Government, for there was no Government. He had had no news of his relations since the revolution swallowed them up, and he said he knew no way of earning his living except on a ship of war; yet he was cheerful in a rather plaintive way. Poor On the whole, the Russians, as I must continue to call them, kept very much to themselves, though there were exceptions to this general rule. They spoke many tongues, but few of them knew any English, and not very many of them French. Uncle Vodka used to talk to us in pigeon-Turkish, and a few of the British knew a little Russian, notably two young Australians. Australians beat all varieties of British in their search for knowledge. The Russians were bitterly poor. They had no Embassy money, for they had no protecting Embassy. How they managed to live at all was very wonderful. The sailors had started with full kits, unlike prisoners of war, who were taken in what they have on; but they had gradually sold their clothes for food until they had not much left. The Turks did not actually let them starve, but they went very near it, and in the winter they nearly froze. We helped them sometimes, but they were too proud to be helped much, and we had not much to give, there were so many of them. In the summer of 1918 they used to go in gangs to the river, armed with every conceivable kind of drag-net, and sweep that river clean. Fish they caught in large quantities and ate them; it was about the only My best friend among the Russians was a colonel, a Georgian prince. He got me to teach him English, and he would write down the equivalent of a word in Russian, French, German, Polish, or Georgian quite indiscriminately. He was a fine, brave little fellow; dark, muscular, and astonishingly fiery. I expect he is with Denikin’s army now, fighting Bolsheviki. “Ces sales types,” as he used to call them. Years ago, during some minor outbreak in Russia, his squadron had arrested Lenin and brought him in, and the colonel spent vain hours in wishing he had slain him then and there. Europe would probably echo his lament. If MaslÛm escapes the gallows, woe betide him if ever he meets the Russian colonel. He will be killed inevitably. After the frightful punishment of Constantine B. the colonel protested vigorously, and got the poor fellow put into hospital. There was a Russo-Armenian, a sneak-thief, and he robbed an Indian officer of some tobacco. The Indian suspected him and laid a trap into which he fell. I saw the Russian colonel tell him off in the street, while the man trembled and went pale green, and afterwards the Colonel told me what he said. “Have you a revolver?” he asked. “No, sir.” “Have you a good razor?” “No, sir.” “Then borrow a rope and hang yourself. You have brought shame on the Russian officers. If you are alive at the end of the war, I shall send you a pistol. Use it. If you fail, I shall send a man to kill you, for you are too base for me to fight.” He was a dangerous little man, but he had many friends among the English, and his ambition was to ride in the Grand National. May he win through! He had been in the Imperial Guard, and knew all the Petrograd Court gossip. One day, during the English lesson, he saw the announcement of the death of a certain Grand Duke in the Russians are very direct people. When they desire a thing they straightway pursue it. There was a very large Russian officer in Afion who went by the name of Uncle Vodka. He was an old man, a dug-out, and he fought at the siege of Plevna in 1877-79. He was about 6 ft. 5 in. high, and very huge. He had a long, broad beard, and looked like a picture of the Tsar’s coachman. He was a direct person. He conceived the ambition of colouring his body, as a man might colour a meerschaum pipe, and he Among all these Russians, differing as they did in caste and kind, there was one thing they held in common. Despite the mother revolution and all its children, they still held their belief in Russia, great and united. Technically speaking, many of them were the subjects of countries now at war with each other and with us. But, although the conditions they lived in were far worse than ours in the matter of overcrowding, they clove together as Russians. I studied this question, and used to get one to interpret for others, so that my survey might be based broadly; and in that one respect I found them all the same. There are no boundaries, they would say, between Russia and Ukrainia, or between Russia and the Cossacks. Poland they excepted, and, to some extent, Georgia; but they denied that the new divisions of the rest of Russia could endure. There was neither racial, physical, nor lingual frontier Russians all call each other by their Christian names. I once asked a Russian midshipman what he called the captain of his ship. “George,” he replied. “And what on the quarter-deck?” I asked. “George, son of Dmitri,” he said. I should like to be present to hear Admiral Beatty called David by a midshipman on the quarter-deck of the “Queen Elizabeth.” CHAPTER XIIITHE BERNE CONVENTIONAfter hanging fire for a very long time, the Berne Convention between Great Britain and the Sublime Porte was signed, and in the course of time copies reached Afion-Kara-Hissar. It seemed to us to be framed so that a coach-and-four could be driven through every one of its clauses. But, we were winning the war, and a great many of its provisions were applied. It was our Magna Charta. Under this convention a large number of prisoners were to be exchanged at once, 300 British and 700 Indians against 1,500 Turks, as far as I can remember. Of course we all wanted to be included. We had not known how mad we were to be included until that ray of hope appeared. It seemed as though we suddenly saw ourselves as we were, as new prisoners saw us when they arrived, men grown listless and almost hopeless, with brave There was a great deal of heart-burning, and the camp was the prey of winged rumours, most of them discouraging ones. I can scarcely bear to think of that time even now. The Kut prisoners thought that their five months’ siege ought to be included in the period of their captivity. It was only natural that they should. But even so, we old-timers had been far longer confined than they had. Then there was the question of age, and the older of us did boast of our years, and wish inwardly that we had added to their number when first registered by the Turks. Were married men to have, other things being equal, any consideration? That was another question, and men added to the number of their children, if not of their wives. These are but a few of the questions that troubled us. But, in the end, the Turks ignored much of the Convention, and began to hold medical On the 8th of August, 1918, the first board sat in Afion. There were two Turkish doctors on it, and one British, Capt. Startin, R.A.M.C. But as one of the Turks made his own decisions, and the other merely said “peki,” which means “I concur,” and as the decision went by a majority of votes, the British member did not have much chance. Still, he did succeed in steering most of the really deserving cases through, and he did his very best for all of us, seizing every slightest opportunity and displaying both diplomatic skill and doggedness to a high degree. Of course everyone wanted to be tested. “You can’t win a lottery unless you take a ticket,” as someone put it. And when the day came, and the board assembled in a room at the Medrisseh, there was far more of us than could be got through in a day. We sat in the shade of the poplar trees, in front of the mosque, and when each officer who had been examined came out he was bombarded with questions, and surrounded by an anxious crowd. But no decisions were announced, and the British representative was sworn to secrecy, which oath he kept. How he managed to I am sure I don’t That day passed in hidden agony. The next day, the third anniversary of my capture, my turn came. I did not think there was much chance, but had faint hopes that some hidden doom might reveal itself to the trained skill of a doctor. Really the only things wrong with me were that I had lost three and a half stone in weight and had lumbago. So when asked to strip and to state what my claim was based on I said lumbago. The senior Turkish doctor never glanced at my lumbago region at all. But he laid me down and performed some of the mysteries of his craft. And all the time he kept on talking to me. We had quite an argument in French. He asked me why I knew no Turkish, and I replied that it was too dangerous, that MaslÛm Bey had sent officers to The verdict did not come until some days later. Several of the most necessitous cases had been rejected; for instance, an officer with a double hernia and an officer suffering from genuine fits. One man who had lost an eye was included, another rejected. And several perfectly able-bodied officers and men had been included. I was included myself. But not for lumbago. I was passed unfit on the score of being mad. But once I was a certified lunatic, and have never been uncertified since. After the medical board came a few dreadful weeks. Every day brought forth a new rumour. We heard that the Germans had refused safe-conduct to the repatriation ship, and it was true. We heard that the medical board at Broussa, which had passed some of the generals there, had been squashed, and that a new board had rejected them; and it was true. We heard that the sickest men of all, who had been sent to Constantinople for exchange some time back—an old R.C. padre with a bad heart, a youngster with nearly every disability a man may have and live, and others—had been rejected. And that was true, too, for they came back to us again. It was a perfectly awful time, and won’t bear writing about. At last, on the 9th of September, we received orders to leave for Smyrna by the evening train. There had been a perfect epidemic of escape projects recently. It was partly caused by sheer weariness of spirit, partly by a leading mind recently installed among us, partly by encouragement The day we started for Smyrna, for we did start, a party of three escaped; and the escape was not discovered by the Turks until we were in the train. There were thirteen officers, and I forget how many men, and we were counted and recounted several times. Then all the luggage vans were searched through and all the large boxes opened, and the train was searched from end to end. But the three were not found, they were far away in the hills. So we left Afion under suspicion, and with armed guards in every carriage to prevent anyone from boarding the train. Our last view of the camp was most affecting. There was a spontaneous outburst of noble good I had been there two years and seven months. CHAPTER XIVSMYRNAOur first night in the train was rather uncomfortably crowded, but we would not have minded being piled in heaps on that journey. In the morning we reached a place called Ushak, and there had rather a shock, for all thirteen officers were ushered into a dirty shed and informed that it was a hospital, and that we were all to be examined for cholera. This was more serious than appears on the face of it, for two of our party were rather out of sorts, and a Turkish doctor would be quite liable to mistake this malady for cholera. Then good-bye to hope for them. They would have been put in some disgusting place with all manner of afflicted people, and it is by no means improbable that they would have died. The Turkish doctor had an assistant with a microscope, but we didn’t trust either of them one bit: so we refused to be examined. I can’t enter into details, but we refused unanimously to do what The men were detained for examination, despite all we could do, but they reached Smyrna a day later without mishap. As it turned out, they were lucky to be late. We were travelling in comfort now. Our second night had been passed in a truck, rather hilariously, I am afraid, for three of us celebrated an Old Wykehamist dinner and sang “Domum” most of the night through. For the last few hours of the journey we had the company of a Roman Catholic priest, a quiet, gentle, young man from Austria, very sad about the condition of his country and very much concerned at all the excesses of the Turks. He found his hard life a very hopeless struggle against corruption and cruelty of every kind. I had not up to then met so thoroughly pro-British an enemy. We reached the Point station at Smyrna early in the afternoon. Where we were to be lodged we did not know. The Turkish officer in charge of us had treated us well; he was the only member of the staff of MaslÛm Bey who had come through the inquiry without a single charge against him. But he had no influence, and he was very junior; moreover, he laboured under unjust suspicion of having assisted the three officers who escaped the day we left Afion. We heard their fate later on, Guided by the Turkish officer, we walked through the streets of Smyrna to the military headquarters, a large building that faced a public garden, where the band played in the afternoons and children disported themselves with their nurses. Our reception was very chilly. Our friendly It was a dark and very dirty room, with a broken wooden floor that long experience warned us against lying on, and there were no chairs or furniture of any kind. Five Indian officers were thrown into it with us, and were as indignant as we. There was no one to appeal to. Our senior officer, the only one who spoke Turkish, had remained at the station to watch our baggage, and the officer who had escorted us had gone back to him. After a while an interpreter came to us, and we urged him to fetch a senior officer who could hear our complaint. A long time after this a very hard-faced and thoroughly Prussianised We looked out through the bars rather dolefully, and watched the rank and fashion of Smyrna in the garden. There seemed little hope of getting out, or of getting any food in, and our bedding was at the station. Again a typically Turkish thing occurred. There was a privy just outside the door, the other side of the sentries. One officer was compelled to ask permission to go to it. The request was passed out by the sentries, and the officer was led out into the garden, before all the women and children. This was the more unnecessary because the proper place was there, just across the passage. It may be that Turks do not consider this sort of exhibition objectionable, but to an Englishman or to an Indian officer it is more humiliating than any private cruelty. It was a studied policy of the Turks to play upon our sensitiveness to indecency. The unspeakable Turk: with all our languages and vocabularies we never found a Suddenly the “strafe” ended. The British chaplain had got to know of our plight, and had gained the ear of someone in authority. After having paced the streets of Smyrna as comparatively free men on the way from the station, we were taken in close marching order between guards with fixed bayonets to a very dirty Turkish officers’ hotel and given rooms. A sentry with a fixed bayonet sat on a chair at the end of the passage. We of the Old Wykehamist dinner shared a room, and I slept like a top: the others tossed and moaned, and in the morning slew a vast number of intruders, many hundreds. But this hotel was our very last experience of these pests, for life, I hope. The next day the Vali came to see us, Rahmy Bey, the governor of the province of Aidin. After his visit all the frowns turned to smiles, for he was known to favour good treatment of the subjects of the Entente. A day or two later we moved once more, this time in the greatest comfort. Can you but gain one gesture of protection from a great man in an Eastern country, you may go in peace, for the underlings are but looking-glasses to reflect his mood. We were established in the fine buildings of the International College, an American foundation with a Canadian in charge of it as principal. Dr. Maclachlan was his name, and he and Mr. Reed, an American gentleman who is second in command, gave us the warmest, kindest welcome in the world. They and the ladies of the staff had a sumptuous tea awaiting us, and everything that man or woman could do they did. We had not known the like for many years. There is a little colony of British and Americans at Paradise, and everyone of them deserves to be there. The whole great building was at our disposal: dormitories for the men, small rooms for the officers, a school conduit to wash in, shower baths, electric light, a fine library, and perfect cleanliness. It was the cleanliness of the building and the kindness of their hearts that appealed to us. I confess without any shame that it almost broke me down. And there were children to play with, bright, merry, little American and English children. As our men came in, some on crutches, some limping, all of them thin and weary, I saw one of those kind hosts of ours pick It must not be imagined that all our troubles were over. We were still in Turkey. The officer who had charge of us was a Cretan Turk, a kind-hearted but rather diffident man. He received his orders from one army corps, and the officer in charge of the guard from another. The result was chaos: for while the Cretan gave us very considerable privileges, his plans were defeated by the officer of the guard, a conceited little puppy of about nineteen, who did nothing but swagger about with a sword. He was wholly malicious and possibly a little bit wrong in the head. He tormented the good lady who nursed our worst cases by telling her the bloody deeds he itched to do; the finest sensation on earth, he said, was to feel your steel pass through an enemy’s body. But she turned upon him and told him that in a few months he would be selling melons on the street for a living. When the Cretan, who was a senior captain, gave us leave to go out into the ample There was a very large playing field attached to the college, twenty acres, I think it was; there was a chapel with an organ in it, an auditorium with a grand piano, and a large, well-equipped gymnasium. We began by using a few rooms of the main building, and ended by filling the whole establishment, even the chapel. For parties were coming in almost daily from all over Turkey. At first they were nearly all sick men, some of them at the very point of death. We lost sixteen men in Smyrna, who died before they could be exchanged, almost within sight of home. But later on, when the Turks found they could not make up the thousand in any other way, all the camps were combed through again, and a great many of the later arrivals had nothing whatever the matter with them except the awful disease of prison weariness: a disease that, fortunately, few people know, but which none who have known it will ever forget. It was astonishing at first to realize how few really sick men there were, but the explanation was not far to seek: the sick had died. Some Another large contingent came from Afion, others from Broussa, Constantinople, Gedos—the parole camp, where officers who chose to give their parole could go and enjoy almost complete liberty; from Angora, and from all the camps in the Taurus mountains. These last were the weakest of the whole. They were the survivors of a terrible slavery. The European community of Smyrna, save for about a week near the beginning of the war, had been allowed to live in their own houses and to go where they pleased in Smyrna and its widespread suburbs. They will perhaps disagree with me when I say that they had been very well treated. This was due to the political sagacity of the Vali, Rahmy Bey, who seems to have realized from the beginning that Turkey was on the wrong side. He has been accused of vast speculations, and he Many of the French and British subjects came to visit us, and, later, when we were free, we enjoyed much hospitality at their hands. One of them told me that the dearth of news was so great during the beginning of the German retreat that smuggled copies of the Times newspaper had commanded the enormous price of one pound per hour of perusal. We waited on and on. The college was filled to overflowing, and another camp was started in another part of Smyrna. Nobody knew when the ship would come, or even where it would come to. But the resistance of the enemy was crumbling. Turkish officers told us that their armies were mere skeleton forces. They estimated that there were six hundred thousand deserters in the hills. A story was told of a battalion ordered from Smyrna to the Palestine front, which melted on the railway journey until there was only one man left besides the C.O. Exactly two weeks before Turkey actually signed the Armistice we were set free, absolutely free. Some officers were received into the houses of residents in Bournabat, the chief suburb of Smyrna; some went into hotels where meals cost whole fortunes; some stayed on in the College; and, with three others, I rented a small furnished house just outside the College gates. It belonged to a Mrs. Constantine, the wife of a Greek gentleman, a master at the College. He was a man who had travelled, and lived in America, and he was heartily on our side. But the conscription had netted him in as a transport driver, and he was believed to be now a prisoner in British hands. We tried to console poor Mrs. Constantine by telling her that he would be quite safe there, much safer than with the Turks; but she wanted him back, poor soul, and so did little Chloe and Aeneas, his children. During this fortnight we did as we pleased, and enjoyed life. More than one family among the European It was also my good fortune, through Mrs. Reed, to make the acquaintance of some Greek ladies, and more whole-hearted fiery patriots I have never listened to. The Peace Conference is now, as I write, ponderously considering the future of Turkey, and their fate still hangs in the balance. The Smyrna Greeks long for union with Greece, long for it as a sailor longs for the sea, although they know that it may bring them poverty; for the district of Smyrna is rich in comparison with Greek proper, and would perhaps be bled to feed Athens. They know that, but they burn to throw off the tyranny of the Turks. Who can but sympathize with them? The European permanent residents, on the other hand, wish for the Turks to remain, for by accommodating the chief Turkish officials they can make much money. But they are in a vast minority to the Greeks; they are aliens, and the Greeks were there two thousand years before the Turks were. They should have no say in the matter, beyond what is just. Their say in this matter should be governed by the extent to which they aided the war, on the Entente side. This I may say without a breach of Whether the Turks’ own claim to Smyrna is a just one I am not competent to judge. The mere fact that they have hideously misgoverned should not invalidate their claim provided that they are in a genuine majority, not a majority obtained by deportation and massacre. For their system of Government can be improved and kept watch over. That they should hold no subject countries is obvious. But in their own country, where they do actually form the majority of the population, what is their future? Their official classes are abominable people. They can oppress, but they have no aptitude for the wider forms of business and banking, building and organizing, or any form of creative work. A Turkish financier is more Hooligan than Hooley. They cannot compete with the Christians in bloodless ventures. We used to dream of various fates for them, but the fate that is coming is worse than we dreamed. They are bankrupt; there will soon be neither pay nor pension for most of them. While they still ruled Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the coasts of Arabia, their system was simple. The “educated” Turk got a post in some branch of the Government service, with small pay, but a large income. The pay came from the Government, and the income from the subject peoples. But that time is gone, and, as the Turkish officer was told, they will soon be selling melons on the streets. Metaphorically that is what they will be doing. They will be driven to trade; and wherever a Turk sits down to trade an Armenian will sit The Turks tried to govern by an absolute king, and it failed. They tried to govern by a soi disant representative assembly, and that failed; it degenerated into a tyranny by a small clique, and that tyranny failed too. An oligarchy is out of the question, for there are no families in Turkey from which it could be recruited. There remain soviets, but the Turkish peasant is not nearly advanced enough for that. It is even doubtful if any race on earth is. The Turkish peasant is to the full as backward as, or more backward than, the Indian peasant, and he has much fewer brains. It seems to be more a question of evolution than of revolution for the Turks. From our little way up the cliff of civilisation we look down to the Turk, and he seems too far away for us to lend him a helping hand. The Turkish people do not include a middle class or an aristocracy. The reasons will be found in any good history of their slave theory of government, but the reasons concern Europe less than does the fact. With a small margin of error, all Turks may be described as falling in one of two categories, namely, officials and The only future for Turkey seems to be for the whole race to go back to the land until from the soil there rises a middle class able in the course of time to produce rulers of men. In the meantime, some European Power or America should have a mandate, not only the League of Nations’ mandate, but the Turks’ own mandate, to do for them the things they cannot do; to provide judges and governors, railway and postal controllers, and to officer a police force. Personally, I believe they would, by I must write one word on our other enemies, the Germans in Turkey. There was a German in the Taurus who boasted that, by his treatment of British prisoners, he had killed more enemies than anyone on the Western front. But he was almost alone in that respect. With few exceptions, Germans in Turkey treated Britishers in misfortune as brother white men in an Eastern land. Especially was this so in the air service, where chivalry ran higher than in any other branch of the fighting. German airmen who had brought a Britisher down always treated him well; very often they went over our lines and, at the risk of their machines or their lives, dropped a note from the captured one asking that his kit might be sent along. Then one of our machines would fly back, unmolested, and drop the kit. There were several officers in Afion who had received their kit in this way. There was also an officer who had been defeated in a fight in the air, and to whom his victor gave his own silver watch with an inscription engraved upon it commemorating the combat. The German passed through Afion long afterwards, and came to see if he could do anything more to help his late enemy. Another CHAPTER XVTHE SHIPAt last the ship came, and lay off Phokea, outside the Gulf of Smyrna. We went off in tugs, out of that lovely bay, more beautiful, to my mind, than the bay of Naples, and we went on board the Australian hospital ship “Kanowna,” where they gave us a royal welcome. This was the 1st of November, 1918. August the 9th, 1915—November the 1st, 1918. They had many cots prepared, expecting many sick and cripples. They asked as we came on board where the sick were, and we replied that they were dead. Phokea was a beautiful little Greek town when war broke out; it has vineyards and olive groves behind it, and it looks out on the bluest of bays. It had once been inhabited by Greek subjects of the Turks, but now it lay bare and empty, There our last sun set on Turkey, and we steamed away to the South. FOOTNOTES:British Prisoners of War in Turkey.
“To do our difficulties justice I think you ought to say that besides the loss of value of paper against gold, the rise of prices reduced the purchasing power of the £Tq to one-twentieth of what it was in the summer of 1915. This is strictly true. I have a list of the prices of ordinary commodities up to Spring, 1918. Actually the purchasing value of £20 from England was between twenty and twenty-four shillings in the winter 1917-18 as compared to the early Autumn, 1915.”—A.D.P. BY THE SAME AUTHORPOEMS IN CAPTIVITYCrown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.John Still was captured by the Turks in Gallipoli in 1915, and remained in captivity for over three years, during which he found it essential to have some absorbing mental occupation to preserve his sanity. He discovered in himself then, for the first time, the power of writing verse. For many years before the war he lived in Ceylon, and the latter part of the book is taken up with poems on its peoples and lost cities, the first part containing the poems inspired by captivity. Morning Post.—“The poems have a quiet power that grows on the reader.” JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST., W. 1THE ROAD TO EN-DORBeing an Account of how two prisoners of War |
|
