Caught by the Turks Part 4

CHAPTER III

THE TERRIBLE TURK

One draws a long breath thinking of those days of Mosul. But bad as our case was, it was as nothing compared with that of the men.

Some two hundred of them lived in a cellar below our quarters, through scenes of misery, and in an atmosphere of death which no one can conceive who does not know the methods of the Turk. Even to me, as I write in England, that Mosul prison begins to seem inconceivable.

Huddled together on the damp flag-stones of the cellar, our men died at the rate of four or five a week. Although the majority were suffering from dysentery they not only could not secure medical attention, but were not even allowed out of their cells for any purpose whatever. Their pitiable state can be better imagined than described. Many went mad under our eyes. Deprived of food, light, exercise, and sometimes even drinking water, the condition of our sick and starving men was literally too terrible for words.

It is useless, however, to pile horror on horror. Sixty per cent. of these men are dead, and this fact speaks for itself. No re-statement can strengthen, and no excuse can palliate, the case against the Turks.

Our men in this particular instance were killed by the cynical brutality of Abdul Ghani Bey, the commandant of Mosul, and his acquiescent staff.

There is an idea that "the Turks treated their own soldiers no better than our prisoners"; but this is a fallacy--at any rate with regard to h.e.l.l-hounds such as Abdul Ghani Bey. He took an especial pleasure in inflicting the torments of thirst, hunger, and dirt upon the miserable beings under his care. Animals, in another country, would have been kept cleaner and better fed.

Never shall I forget the arrival in January 1915 of a party of English prisoners from Baghdad. About two hundred and fifty men, who had been captured on barges just before the siege of Kut, had been taken first to Baghdad and thence by forced marches to Kirkuk, a mountain town on the borders of the Turko-Persian frontier. Why they were ever sent to Kirkuk I do not know, unless indeed it was thought that the sight of prisoners suitably starved would re-a.s.sure the population regarding the qualities of the redoubtable English soldier. After being exhibited to the population of Kirkuk our men continued their journey, through the bitter cold of the mountains, barefoot and in rags, arriving at last at Mosul shortly after the New Year. Only eighty men then remained out of the original two hundred and fifty, but although their numbers had dwindled their courage had not diminished.

First there marched into our barrack square some sixty of our soldiers in column of route. They were erect and correct as if they were marching to a king's parade. Surely so strange a column will never be seen again.

All were sick, and the most were sick to death. Some were barefoot, some had marched two hundred miles in carpet slippers, some were in shirt-sleeves, and all were in rags; one man only wore a great-coat, and he possessed no st.i.tch of clothing beneath it. But through all adversity they held their heads high among the heathen, and carried themselves with the courage of a day "that knows not death." Silently they filed into the already crowded cellar, out of our sight, and many never issued again into the light of the sun.

After these sixty men had disappeared the stragglers began to stagger in. One man, delirious, led a donkey on which the dead body of his friend was tied face downwards. After unstrapping the corpse he fell in a heap beside it. Dysentery cases wandered in and collapsed in groups on the parade ground. An Indian soldier, who had contracted lockjaw, kept making piteous signs to his mouth, and looking up to the verandah, where we stood surrounded by guards. But no one came to relieve those sufferers, dying by inches under our eyes.

That night we managed, by bribing the guards, to have smuggled upstairs to us at tea-time two non-commissioned officers from among the new arrivals. Needless to say, we spent all our money (which was little enough in all conscience) in providing as good a fare as possible, and our famished guests devoured the honey and clotted cream we had to offer. Then one of them suddenly fainted. When he had somewhat recovered he had to be secretly conveyed below, and that was the end of the party--the saddest at which I have ever a.s.sisted. The officer who carried the sick man down spent several hours afterwards in removing vermin from his own clothes, for lice leave the moribund, and this poor boy died within a few days.

Sometimes, when our pay was given us, or there occurred an opportunity to bribe our guard, it was our heart-breaking duty to decide which of the men we should attempt to save, by smuggling money to them out of the slender funds at our disposal, and which of their number, from cruel necessity, were too near their end to warrant an attempt to save.

Something of the iron of Cromwell enters one's mind as one writes of these things. If we forget our dead, the East will not forget our shame.

Sentiment must not interfere with justice. Abdul Ghani Bey, who shed our prisoners' blood, must pay the penalty. He is the embodiment of a certain type--perhaps not a very common type--of Turk, but common or not, he is one of the men responsible for the terrible death-rate among our soldiers. A short description of him, therefore, will not be out of place.

He was a small man, this tiny Tamerlane, with a limp, and a scowl, and bandy legs. His sombre, wizened face seemed to light with pleasure at scenes of cruelty and despair. He insulted the old, and struck the weak, and delighted in the tears of women and the cries of children. This is not hyperbole. I have seen him stump through a crowd of Armenian widows and their offspring, and after striking some with his whip, he pushed down a woman into the gutter who held a baby at her breast. I have seen him pa.s.s down the ranks of Arab deserters, lashing one in the face, kicking another, and knocking down a third. I have seen him wipe his boots on the beard of an old Arab he had felled, and spur him in the face. I hope he has already been hanged, because only the hangman's cord could remove his atavistic cruelty.

His subordinates went in deadly fear of him, and while it was extremely difficult to help our men, it was practically impossible to help ourselves at all in the matter of escape. Yet escape was doubly urgent now, to bring news of our condition to the outer world.

After much thought I decided that a certain wall-eyed interpreter who came occasionally to buy us food was the most promising person to approach. My friend and I laid our plans carefully. After a judicious tip, and some hints as to our great importance in our own country, we evinced a desire to have private lessons with him in Arabic, enlarging at the same time upon the great career that a person like himself might have had, had he been serving the English and not the Turks. Gradually we led round to the subject of escape. At first we talked generalities in whispers, and he was distinctly shy of doing anything of which the dear commandant would not approve; but eventually, softly and distinctly, and with a confidence that I did not feel, I made a momentous proposal to him, nothing less than that he could help us to escape. He winced as if my remark was hardly proper, and fixed me with a single, thunder-struck eye. Then he quavered:

"This is very sudden!"

We could not help laughing.

"This is no jesting matter," he said. "I will be killed if I am caught."

"But you won't get caught. With the best horses in Arabia and a guide like you. . . ."

"Hush, hush! I must think it over."

For several days he preserved a tantalising silence, alternately raising our hopes by a wink from his wonderful eye, and then dashing them to the ground by a blank stare.

We lived in a torment of hope deferred.

But time pa.s.sed more easily now. The nights took on a new complexion, flushed by the hope of freedom. From our little window I could see across a courtyard to a patch of river. Beyond it, immense and magical under the starlight, were the ruins of former civilisation--the mounds of Nineveh, the tomb of Jonah, and the rolling downs that lead to the mountains of Kurdistan. To those mountains my fancy went. If sleep did not come, then there were enthralling adventures to be lived in those mountains, adventures of the texture of dreams, yet tinged with a certain prospective of reality. . . . We had bought revolvers, our horses were ready, we had bribed our guard. We rode far and fast, with our wall-eyed friend as guide. By evening we were in a great forest. . . .

But reality proved a poor attendant on romance. A sordid question of money was our stumbling-block, and a high enterprise was crippled--not for the first or last time--by want of cash. We had already given the interpreter five pounds (which represented so much bread taken out of our mouths), but now he stated that further funds were indispensable to arrange preliminaries. This seemed reasonable, for arms and horses could not be secured on credit in Mosul. Unfortunately, however, funds were not available. We could not, in decency, borrow from other prisoners to help us in our escape. At this juncture our guide, philosopher, and friend lost--or embezzled--a five-pound note that had been entrusted to him by another prisoner to buy us food. Whether he lost it carelessly or criminally I am not prepared to state, but the fact remains he lost it.

Our fellow-prisoner very naturally complained to the Turks, as the absence of this five pounds meant we could buy no food for a week.

The Turks arrested the interpreter. He grew frightened, invented a story about the complainant having asked him to help in an escape, then recanted, vacillated, contradicted himself, and got himself bastinadoed for his pains.

The bastinado, I may as well here explain, is administered as follows: the feet of the victim are bared, and his ankles are strapped to a pole.

The pole is now raised by two men to the height of their shoulders. A third man takes a thick stick about the diameter of a man's wrist, and strikes him on the soles of the feet. Between twenty and a hundred strokes are administered, while the victim writhes until he faints. No undue exertion is necessary on the part of the executioner, for even after a gentle bastinado a man is not expected to be able to walk for several days.

The wall-eyed interpreter was brought limping to our cell about three days after his punishment. He was brought by Turkish officers, who wished to hear from our own lips a denial of his story that we had been plotting an escape.

It was a dramatic, and for me rather dreadful, moment. Indignantly and vehemently we denied ever having asked his help. Only myself and another, besides the interpreter, knew the truth. To the other officers at Mosul (there were nine of us then, sharing two little cells) this black business is only now for the first time made known. Their indignation, therefore, was by no means counterfeit.

"The man must be mad. No one ever dreamed of escaping," I stated, looking fixedly into the interpreter's one eye, which, while it implored me to tell the truth, seemed to hold a certain awe for a liar greater than himself.

"But----" he stammered, cowed by the circ.u.mstance that for once in his life he was telling the truth.

"But what?" we demanded angrily. "Let the villain speak out. His story is monstrous."

"Besides, we are so comfortable here," I added parenthetically.

Eventually the wretched man was led gibbering to an underground dungeon.

What happened to him afterwards I do not know. I publish this story after careful thought, because, if he was "playing the game" by us, why did he talk to the Turks about escape? If, on the other hand, he was a prison spy, then his punishment is not my affair.

The treachery of the interpreter was an ill wind for everyone, for our guards were sent away to the front (which is tantamount to a sentence of death) and the vigilance of our new guards was greater than that of the old. Intrigue was dead and our isolation complete.

In these circ.u.mstances it may be imagined with what excitement I received the news that the German Consul wanted to see me in the commandant's office. It was the first time for a fortnight that I had left my cell.

I entered slowly, and after saluting the company present, first generally, and then individually, I took a dignified seat after the manner of the country. Ranged round the room were various notables of Mosul--doctors, apothecaries, priests, and lawyers. On a dais slightly above us sat the Consul and the commandant. For some time we kept silence, as if to mark the importance of the occasion. Then a cigarette was offered me by the commandant. I refused this offering, rising in my chair and saluting him again.

At last the German Consul spoke.

He had been instructed by telegraph, he told me, to pay me the sum of five hundred marks in gold. The money came from a friend of my father's.

I begged him to thank the generous donor, and a whole vista of possibilities immediately rose to my mind.

The money would be given me next day, the Consul continued, and a _kava.s.s_ of the Imperial Government would go with me into the _bazaar_ to make any purchases I required.

This conversation took place in French, a language of which the commandant was quite ignorant, and I saw that here was an ideal opportunity for bringing the plight of our prisoners to light. But the Consul, I gathered, wanted to keep on friendly terms with the Turks.

Some of the things I told him, however, made him open his eyes, and may have made his kultured flesh creep.

"I will come again to-morrow," he said hurriedly--"you can tell me more then."

After this he spoke in Turkish at some length to the commandant, while the latter interjected that wonderful word _yok_ at intervals.

_Yok_, I must explain, signifies "No" in its every variation, and is probably the most popular word in Turkish. It is crystallised inhibition, the negation of all energy and enthusiasm, the motto of the Ottoman Dilly and Dallys. Its only rival in the vocabulary is _yarin_, which means "to-morrow."

"Yok, yok, yok," said the commandant, and I gathered that he was displeased.