A Prisoner in Turkey Part 10

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 people and only one of them wrote a book. One of them, however, read through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" three times, besides devouring every other history he could obtain, and we had many books. We had a large library of general fiction, recruited from parcels, and we had a fairly large reference library of solid works, partly from parcels and partly from the Education Department at home. And, between them, the French must have read nearly all of those hundreds of books, ranging from "The Way of an Eagle" to Mahan's "Sea Power."

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 cla.s.s. With only one exception they could all speak English fluently long before most of us learned much French.

Our p.r.o.nunciation 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 allowed out farther than that strip of street, sunless and frozen in the winter, dusty in the summer, and crowded all the year round. The pretext was a reprisal for some imagined wrong done to Turkish prisoners in France. We suffered from a continual threat of reprisals like this. Six Englishmen were once imprisoned for months in a loathsome hole in Constantinople for some crime of our Government, probably invented, and one of the six died as a result. And there were other minor cases of the same kind. It is useless for a civilized people to swap reprisals with savages: the savages will win every time.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y English!

You do not understand." But no real quarrel ever resulted. The most frequent offender was an Irish major, who a.s.siduously studied French.

His joy was to lead his tutor to the verge of hysterics by calculated callousness regarding German victories. The poor tutor would scream at him, but they were really the best of friends. "Unless I rouse him," the major would say, "he won't speak fast enough to give me the practice in conversation that I require."

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 c.o.c.ked 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.

Utterly different were the Russians. To begin with, a great many of them were not prisoners of war at all, but the officers and engineers of Black Sea trading vessels. These unfortunates had not been allowed to leave Constantinople when they wished to, about a week before war was declared, and they were older prisoners than any of us. "Comme vous etes jeune!" said one to me when I told him I had just completed my third year. He had done nearly four. Then they belonged to many nationalities, some of them peoples one had hardly heard of before the war: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles, Polish Jews, Cossacks, Georgians, Russian Armenians, Russian Greeks, Russian Italians, Great Russians and Little Russians, and others I forget.

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 Commander Burikoff! I hope he has found some haven of refuge.

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 Emba.s.sy money, for they had no protecting Emba.s.sy. 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 quant.i.ties and ate them; it was about the only meat they got: and they caught crayfish, which they sold to the British. They did not emulate some of the British, who caught frogs and ate them, so far as I know. Perhaps there was no sustenance in frogs. I ate one one day, but he must have been the wrong kind. It was said that they ate cats and I'm sure I hope they did. The French used to eat the tortoises that scour the plains of Anatolia.

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 Maslum 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. Not very long afterwards, a sort of commission of Turkish officials, accompanied, I believe, by a member of the Spanish Emba.s.sy, visited Afion to look into the question of the Russian prisoners' treatment. Maslum Bey did not wish his conduct to be exposed, so he visited the colonel and had the effrontery to offer him a bribe of an oke (2 lb.) of sugar to say nothing about it. The little man was furious, and swore that if ever he met that man with arms in his hand he would kill him on sight. I sincerely trust he will be robbed by the British of any such opportunity. When the commission came he spoke up at once, but nothing came of it except that the colonel was locked up for about a week. He had a little house to himself up a side street, and I often used to visit him there and devise ways of persuading him to accept little presents of tea or other things from parcels; for he never got parcels, and was miserably poor. It was really quite a dangerous thing to do, and I had never to let anyone else see. He was about as safe to handle as a live bomb with the pin out. The head of the commission referred to above accused him of secretly handing a doc.u.ment to the Spaniard. The Colonel had not done so, and he said so, expecting his word to be accepted. But the fool of a Turk, who had probably never met an honest man in his life, expressed himself still unsatisfied. Up flared the colonel. "Search the man!" he said. "If you find it on him I will commit suicide. If not, you shall." The Turk apologized.

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 paper, and told me a tale about him. The Grand Duke was a parallel, in position only, to the Duke of Connaught, for he was an uncle of the Tsar, and he was Governor of Turkestan. At the Tsar's coronation, it was his privilege to hold the crown during part of the ceremony, and, while doing so, he became enamoured of a vast ruby which it contained--call it the Kohinur to complete the parallel. The stone glistened, and he desired it very greatly, so he bit it from its setting and hid it in his cheek. But he was observed, and brought to book. He was required to take up his residence in Siberia; and here the story ought to end, "and he lived happily for long afterwards." Perhaps he did, for the colonel told me that, being already married, in Siberia he committed bigamy, to annoy his nephew.

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 chose the hill-side to do it on. There he would lie in the sun without a single st.i.tch of clothing on his great body, which must have been nearly a rood in area, and he would turn himself round and round so as to make the colour even all over. We used to climb the hill on purpose to see him, and he was always pleased to meet us. He was a venerable figure. You might have taken him for an archdeacon.

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 they maintained. And when I asked whether they did not find it difficult to avoid th.o.r.n.y subjects, now that their country was giving birth to republics almost daily, and was torn in pieces by internal war, they said No; they had all been taken prisoner as allies of each other and of us, and allies they still were. The only exceptions, among the officers, were a hybrid anarchist who joined the Turks, and the Russo-Armenian sneak-thief.

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 XIII

THE BERNE CONVENTION

After 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 words on their lips and chill in their hearts. Of the 300 British we could not all hope to be, but for the others there was a further hope, for, according to the Convention, periodical medical boards were to be held, and all those suffering from any of a given list of disabilities were to be exchanged too.

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 boards to sort out those who were incapacitated for further fighting.

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 a.s.sembled 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 know, for the excitement was intense. British excitement, hardly admitted at all, but gnawing at the vitals, like the Spartan boy's fox. So no one knew whether he had been pa.s.sed or not, though all were agreed that the senior Turkish doctor was an unpleasant creature, jocular and offensive, and very hard to satisfy. The fact was that he knew little or nothing of his job, found difficulty in understanding the terms of reference, hated the British, and distrusted everyone in the world.

That day pa.s.sed 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 Maslum Bey had sent officers to gaol for knowing Turkish; and this was perfectly true, though it was not my reason. I did not want to lumber my brain with Turkish. Also, as a writer of codes, and in order to avoid suspicion generally, it had never been my object to display much intelligence to Turks. It was too dangerous, as I said. Not that I pretended to be mad, as did two officers of another camp who were successful in bamboozling the best Turkish doctors, on the contrary I pretended to be sane. I did not "w.a.n.gle," to use the term in vogue, one particle. The doctor further cross-examined me. Whey did I wish to leave Turkey? he asked. I said I wanted to see my wife and daughter. We came to a little bickering, and, in spite of my deficient French, repartee came to me quicker than to him, and I won.

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 pa.s.sed unfit on the score of being mad.

The senior Turkish doctor failed to understand my simple nature, and turning to his colleague, he said, "I think he is mad." The colleague duly responded "Peki"; the British officer, who understood Turkish and acted as interpreter told Startin, and that best of men said I had been very queer for some time back. He was perfectly right. We were all as queer as queer could be. The good fellow took the first chance of rea.s.suring me, but it was no good. I used to get people on whom I could rely, privately in corners (bystanders were b.u.t.tonholed and prayed with, as the _War Cry_ used to print), and ask them as man to man whether I was really mad. They all said no. But it was no good. I thought that, even if not mad, I must at least have very shaken nerves, and continued to think so until, months after, at Alexandria, a kind-hearted pilot took me up in an aeroplane, and stunted me scientifically, loops and double loops, spinning nose dives, and side slips, and other glories of the air. Never having been within half a mile of an aeroplane before, this convinced me that my nerves were still fairly sound; for I came down half drunken with the splendour of it all, ate a hearty meal, and went through it all again the same afternoon. It was like drinking champagne on top of a mountain; and for the first time since being a prisoner I was glad not to have lived a century earlier.

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 pa.s.sed 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 through secret messages from England, and partly by a hope of joining the exchange train and mixing unnoticed with the lucky ones. There were several sorts of would-be escapers. The best sort thought things out thoroughly, kept their mouths shut, and went. The worst sort talked about it frequently, for years, and did not go. The first were greatly to be admired; but the second were a pest to the whole camp in a land where the whole community suffered for the escapade of one. All the escapers who actually started were brave men, and I wish more of them had got through.