A Prisoner in Turkey Part 4

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 w.a.n.k 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 w.a.n.k. 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 characters which we could not read; but, among them we found to our surprise quite a number of European graves.

There were several Danes buried there, a few Frenchmen, and half a dozen British, Scots for the most part. The earliest of these, so far as I recollect, was that of a certain William Black, Mercator Angliae, who had died at Angora in the year 1683 A.D. I have often wondered what brought old William Black so far afield, and whether he was the ancestor of any of the red-haired children we used occasionally to see in the town. We had a theory that it was he who had taught the inhabitants how to make shortbread, for there was a bare-legged boy who used to hawk shortbread in a gla.s.s box along the streets of Angora.

So in small things we found great interest, as prisoners do. Almost every day we used to see Turkish recruits training. They were a st.u.r.dy 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 subst.i.tutes they had to learn the beginning of their drill.

The knowledge they acquired was literally kicked into them by the chaouses, brutal ruffians trained on the Prussian model. I have seen one of them haul a man out of the ranks, box his ears first on one side and then on the other, and then turn him round and kick him savagely.

The recruit would stand it all stolidly, and salute before he returned to the ranks. In the evening parties of recruits who had been training out on the hills used to march back to barracks past the w.a.n.k, singing their marching song, a simple thing with a very primitive tune to it, said to have come into popularity at the time of the last Bulgarian war.

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 was a man with a stick and a kerosine oil tin doing machine-gun. The grey lines advanced from among the distant willows, attacked right across the open, and apparently won the day. They were as full of the fun of it as children playing at soldiers. Chukri Bey then made another speech, pieces of which he translated in French for us, and the show was over.

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 schoolboys, and four British officers were invited to take part. Two played on either side.

Games followed, rather like the games that children play at village school-feasts in England, bearing to those the same resemblance that baseball does to mixed rounders. Then there was some bayonet fighting, one of the rules of which was that the winner of a bout had next to take on two opponents simultaneously. A very up-to-date Turkish officer, girt with stays, and beautiful beyond the power of words, condescended to engage the winner in sword v. bayonet. I don't think he was very seriously pressed. The bayonet fighting was quite amusing to watch, but the great item of the day was the wrestling. All compet.i.tors, and there were about forty of them, strolled out into the arena and stretched themselves. They mingled together, and moved slowly about looking for mates, like young men and girls at a seaside place. Apparently anyone could challenge any other. Then there came a preliminary hug, in which each in turn just lifted his adversary off the ground, seemingly like our boxers' handshake, to show there is no ill-feeling. After which they fell to, and wrestled until one was beaten. Often there were half a dozen pairs struggling at one and the same time. Some of the grips were very severe; a favourite method was to reach along each other's arms and seize each other's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, digging in their fingers like claws. It looked as though it must hurt horribly, but these hardy men seemed to enjoy it. One of the best was a negro, but the champion was a Turk. At the end Chukri Bey gave away prizes, simple and useful articles, no gold medals or silver cups; a pair of socks, a tobacco box, a knife, and a pleasant word for each winner.

It was not long after this that our sojourn in the w.a.n.k 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 V

ANGORA

The 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 still rears high walls near the bottom of the town. So beautifully was this temple built that it still defies the efforts of those who would destroy it in order to mend their houses with its marble blocks. A mosque is built against its wall, and the cornice is built on by the storks, but the temple still preserves much of beauty. Higher up in the town, one of the Turkish mosques carries its roof on Roman pillars; and wherever you go in the town there are traces of olden days.

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 pa.s.sage 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, through Sivas, to the Caucasus. In the plain to the north-west of the town there are barrows much like those on Salisbury Plain.

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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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, and as a rule their broad belts were stiff with daggers and pistols, with generally a rifle slung across their shoulders as well. I often used to think what a wonderful experience it was for our untravelled men to see these strange people from the back of beyond. Strings of camels used to penetrate the dim, winding lanes of the city, and nasty, snarling, tusky creatures they were to dodge about among. But the real gathering place of the caravans was a trampled s.p.a.ce of many acres which lay out beyond the railway station. A Golgotha it was, a place of skeletons and skulls. For centuries, for millenniums, perhaps, it had been the place where men and camels met and exchanged the news of Asia, mostly of wars and rumours of wars, of invasions, murders, ma.s.sacres, the sack of cities, and tales of brigands in the hills. For all these mountain roads are infested by armed bands, even to the present day.

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 with one shoulder thrust out, facing half-right one side of the street, half-left the other, and enabling the windows to collect some of the light which falls along the lane.

I think, between us, we explored the whole town. Under Chukri Bey's benevolent _regime_ 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 day, even when it still is four bob, is not much to set up house on. So we shopped much but bought little. There was a large store in the main street, run by Spanish Jews, and we used to swarm in there in a gang. A very funny sight we must have been, dressed all sorts of ways, some of us with shorts on, one young Australian, I remember, wore long pink drawers under and below his shorts and a fur cap on his head. For we wore the headgear of the country. We were advised to, to avoid exciting too much attention; and some of us wanted to acquire a set of disguise.

Personally I had no other headgear of any kind, except a sort of Glengarry made of pieces of puttee st.i.tched together. My helmet had been lost soon after I was captured. But the towns-folk did not seem to think us strange. They were remarkably polite. Several officers out for a walk one day met a man with a shot-gun, and asked to be allowed a shot. He handed over the gun; they tossed for the shot; a naval officer won, put up a woodc.o.c.k and killed it.

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 a gun in his hand is a brigand. The lower orders of the town are straightforward, simple people, but come a ma.s.sacre, and they take their part. Probably things in France were not a bad parallel at the great St. Bartholomew's Eve. And it must always be remembered that the great drive of the Armenians was a Government affair, a national policy. Turks cannot stand having power. A private soldier who becomes an N.C.O. becomes, nine times out of ten, a black-guard. An ordinary citizen who becomes an official becomes, ten times out of ten, a thief. A common man who is invited to kill his Christian neighbour, free of all danger of punishment, does so. Throughout captivity the guards were faithful mirrors of the powers above. In the time of Chukri Bey they were kind, faithful dragomen who did their best to save us from being swindled in the bazaars. In the days of his successor, their vocabulary was limited to "Yok" and "Ya.s.sak"--"no" and "forbidden."

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 marching out between their guards to work on the railway. Thin, grey, starved creatures, dying on their feet. Later on our men suffered in exactly the same way and about four-fifths of them died.

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. There was no garden, but a narrow s.p.a.ce, cut off from the road by palings, was planted with half a dozen small trees, and used as an outdoor cafe.

The whole fifteen of us, from the w.a.n.k 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 to whisper tales of the horrors of the preceding months. All the town was whispering them, all, that is to say, who were not Turkish. And they whispered in the greatest fear and trembling. Even Turks sometimes referred to the murders, and even they were impressed by slaughter upon so grand a scale; for it was the murder of a nation. It was as though England had tried to destroy the whole of the Welsh race, and was still whispering about the deed. I remember one day we visited what had been the headquarters of the merchants of tiftik, the hair of the Angora goat. It was battered about and locked up, for with the death of the Armenian traders the tiftik trade had died. The Turkish guard who accompanied us grinned and drew his hand across his throat. Armenian refugees from Constantinople were interned in Angora. For the most part they were professional men, and they were all Russian subjects. They appeared to have no occupation, except to play backgammon all day long in a cafe they frequented. Most of them spoke French and a few English, and they, too, whispered sometimes as we sat near and sipped our coffee.

Greeks whispered of the ma.s.sacres, they did not know if their turn would come next. I remember a laborious conversation two of us held with a Greek boy, by the aid of a Turkish vocabulary. He had seen much that took place in Angora.

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 pa.s.sers-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 _seance_. 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 sufficiently pure to let in the light that would be vouchsafed us. Our hearts were not pure at all, but our merriment was.

We got a manifestation of sorts, well thought out beforehand. But there was a lot of heartburning about ill-timed levity.

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 of the size proper to colonels. That evening the Frenchman collapsed. He fainted and was carried off to bed by our stalwart Bill, the medical student of the party, a splendid person who was better than all the Turkish doctors in the world rolled in one. Much do we all owe to Bill, and none more than I do, for he nursed me through several bad illnesses; although, as he frankly stated on one occasion when I had paratyphoid, he hadn't "done fevers." A real wonder was our Bill, and I hope he will read this some day. From about that time until about a year later, when the doctors from Kut-el-Amara joined up with us at Afion, Bill was the camp physician-in-chief, and were I ill now I would as soon go to Bill as to anyone. He was a born healer. French was not his forte, but in the chemists' shops he always got what he wanted: went on until he did, or turned out on the counter the whole of the proprietor's stock. "Avez-vous ammoniated tincture of quinine?" he would ask. And if the man said "No," then Bill would counter with, "Avez-vous aucun else that will do similaire?" And in the end he would get it. As a linguist he had a natural perception of which words could be left out, or put in in English, without destroying the sense.

Two events happened to me about this time which were landmarks in that desert of dullness. It was in the Greek hotel that I received my first letter from home. A very great day indeed. And it was soon afterwards, in late November, that I spoke for the first time in Asia Minor to a woman. She was an old Roumanian in a cake-shop, and to her I said, "Bu kach para," being Turkish, my Turkish at least, for "What is the price of this?" I commend this sentence to the notice of those about to visit Turkey. It is one of the few worth knowing. It may seem strange that this should be noted as a landmark, but as a matter of fact I only spoke seven words to women between the 9th of August, 1915, and the 10th of September, 1918, and these were three of the seven. It is no small part of the mult.i.tude of causes that make prisoners queer, this deprivation of women's society. Men sink back into barbarism very rapidly when unbuoyed by the influence of women. They do not want the feminist, the creature doomed to the sterile affection of a little lamp-post-loving dog dragging at a lead. But they want to be helped by talking to mothers, lest they forget that motherhood is by far and away the greatest thing on earth.

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 officers arrived from Constantinople. They were not newly captured. One had been taken on the same day as Bill, at Suvla Bay, and the other two were the oldest British prisoners of war in Turkey. I specify British, because we learned later on that there were Russian naval officers taken before war was officially declared, and prisoners of war because there were civil prisoners of earlier date. These two were members of the Egyptian police who had been given commissions in the army and sent out to test the disposition of the Arabs in that territory shown upon Old Testament maps as inhabited by the Philistines. The Arabs had turned upon them and handed them over to the Turks, and the ten or eleven months which elapsed before they joined us had been most eventful. I will not antic.i.p.ate their story, for I do not know whether they will ever write it, further than to say that whereas we had seen the Armenian women and children setting forth on their fatal pilgrimage, these had seen it near its end. Their tale was truly ghastly. But there is one thing about one of them that I must write. He was an Egyptian, and by upbringing a Mohammedan, his name was Selim Zaki Kenawi (he will forgive me if it is spelt wrongly). From the very start the Turks had tried their utmost to seduce him from his loyalty, and from the first to the last he had openly defied them. He was the most ardently loyal British person I have ever known. His plan was simply for Great Britain to own the whole earth and run it justly. I forget how many times he had been court-martialled on the charge of being a rebel, but it was several.

They had tried the religious business too, and a venerable personage whom Zaki irreverently termed "a holy b.l.o.o.d.y religious man" had taken off his turban and solemnly asked, "Will you fight against this, Zaki Effendi?" But Zaki stood fast, and became more British than ever. It took some doing in his position, but he had the guts of a man. After he had been a couple of months with us he was sent for to Constantinople and again tested, both by intimidation and bribery. Enver Pasha, the Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish Army, the adventurer, the murderer, both privately and wholesale, the biggest scoundrel unhanged--I regret he is still unhanged--even himself sent for Zaki and offered him a choice between death and a commission in the Turkish Army. But Zaki never even thought which to choose. He chose death. But he did not die, although they sent him in the winter on the awful march to Sivas in its frozen mountains to be imprisoned among the Russians. There was typhus raging there, and there was more than a chance that his throat would be cut by the way. But he came safely through, and eventually rejoined us at Afion. An Egyptian tested as was Zaki should have a fine future in his own land.

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 blown up by a sh.e.l.l, and seeing his regiment almost wiped out, came through alone to us suffering from what is now known as sh.e.l.l-shock. Such as d.i.n.kie, disabled by a bullet through the foot, who had to sham death while bayoneted ever so many times, and who had fort.i.tude enough to sham it long enough. Such as Bill, who was shot through the neck; and who, long before he was well, was cast with other sick and wounded into a den in Constantinople, where he spent whole days wrestling single-handed with wounds and disease.

This was the place where Enver visited the prisoners, and smiled and said it was good enough for the British. Very many died. Very many were saved by Bill.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST WINTER

It 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. Behind us was a dark, damp, narrow pa.s.sage, beloved of dead cats, bounded on the one side by the school and our house, and on the other by the city wall. The hill was so steep that the entrance from the pa.s.sage was two stories higher up than the main entrance from the street. We used the back door, for the main entrance was nailed up.

The two bottom stories were uninhabitable, and by us unused. They contained stables and store-rooms. In the floor of one of the rooms there was a well, and beneath the floor there was the usual cess-pit.

The next floor was on a level with our entrance, and contained a small kitchen and four bedrooms, one of which Derrick and I shared. The floor above that contained another kitchen, three bedrooms, and a large hall we used as a mess-room. Above that again was a small room containing a jumble of more or less useless articles, a sort of lumber-room, in fact, and a great many cubby-holes and recesses in the walls and under the roof. Above that again was an unwalled, roofed s.p.a.ce used for hanging clothes to dry.