Caught by the Turks Part 7

Sh! Shh! Shhh! Chk! Chk! Chk! Bang! Swish!! We take our seats amid a perfect pandemonium. Then the train whistles--louder and louder--and we move off--faster and faster and faster and _faster_, until no one can make any more noise, and the dust of our stamping has risen like incense to the roof, in a grand finale of freedom.

Strange doings in a church, you say? But what would you? We had nowhere else to go. There is a time for everything after all, and it is a poor heart that never rejoices. I feel sure Solomon himself would have sung with us, and proved most excellent company.

On Sunday mornings Divine Service was always well attended. Perhaps by contrast with my usual methods of pa.s.sing the time, those Sabbath hours are set as so many jewels in the tarnished shield of idleness. The fadeless beauty of our Common Prayer brought hope and consolation to all of us who were gathered together. We repeated the grand old words; we sang "Fight the Good Fight" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers." We shared then, however humbly, in the tears and triumph of our cause. We were not of that white company that was to die for England, but we could share the sorrow of the women who mourned, and of the old who stood so sadly outside the fray.

And as through a magic door, I pa.s.sed from that barren room to a country church where the litany for all prisoners and captives went up to Heaven, mingled with the fragrance of English roses.

CHAPTER V

THE LONG DESCENT OF WASTED DAYS

Afion-kara-hissar means "Black Opium Rock" in Turkish, but it is not as interesting a place as it sounds. The only romantic visitors are the storks, who use it as an aerodrome on their bi-annual migrations. They blacken the sky when they come, in flights a thousand strong, swooping and circling over the plain and alighting finally near the black rocks that give the town its name. With one leg tucked up, and pensive beak back-turned, they form arresting silhouettes against the sunset. And curiously enough, the Turkish children know that they bring babies to the home.

We lived in four cottages, connected by a common garden. They were quite new--so new that they had no windows or conveniences. We fitted frames and panes, we erected bathrooms, installed kitchen ranges, made beds out of planks and string, and tables out of packing-cases. We made everything, in fact, except the actual houses.

I daresay that at this time we were better treated than the officer prisoners in Germany. Not so the men. We officers had plenty to eat, though it cost a great deal, but the men were always half starved when for any reason they could not supplement their ration from Amba.s.sador's money, or private remittances from home. Every month the American (and later the Dutch) Emba.s.sy used to send a sum of money to our prisoners to help them buy something more nourishing than the black bread and soup provided by the Turks. When this relief did not arrive in time, or the Turks delayed in distributing it, our men suffered the greatest hardship. Treatment in Turkey was all a question of money. The officers could, and did, cash cheques while in captivity, and were able to pay for the necessities (and sometimes also the minor luxuries) of existence, but the men were entirely dependent on what was given them.

Although some had bank balances, no one except an officer was allowed to write a cheque.

Here it is fitting to say a word in praise of those organisations who sent out parcels to our prisoners. No words can express our grat.i.tude to them. To us officers, parcels were sometimes in the nature of a luxury, though none the less welcome. But to the men, who starved in dungeons of the interior, they came as a very present help in time of need. The prisoners' parcels saved many lives, and I hope the kind people who worked so hard at home against all sorts of difficulties and disappointments realise how grateful we are, and what a great work they did. Besides the material relief of provisions, the moral effect of a parcel from home on the mind of a sick prisoner cannot be over estimated. To open something packed by English hands was like a breath of home to him.

We were allowed no communication with the men, so it was very difficult to help them. Whether the worst done to our prisoners in Germany equals the worst in Turkey I do not know. To compare two horrors is profitless.

But I do know something of the sufferings of our men, and when I write of my own petty amus.e.m.e.nts and comedies of captivity I do not for a moment forget the tragedy of their lives.

Light and shade, however, there must be in every picture, else it is not a picture at all. And there must be colour in the canvas, however grim the subject.

The poppy fields, which give the town the first part of its name,[1] lay right underneath our windows, across the station road. In June, when they were white with blossom, and the farmers' wives came out to drain the precious fluid from the buds, I used to gaze and gaze at the beauty of the world, and long for freedom. To be cooped up in a little room when the world was green and white, and the sky a flawless blue, and summer rode across the open lands, was miserable. It was unbearable to be growing old and immobile, like the hills on the horizon, when one might be out among the poppy blossoms. Of what use to be alive, if one did not share in the youth of the world?

But we were closely guarded in our cottages and rarely allowed out, except into the back garden--a bare s.p.a.ce some hundred yards by thirty, which was the scene of most of our small activities, from early morning skipping to the mid-day display of our washing, and from the occasional amateur theatricals of an evening to the rare but tense moments of an attempted escape.

A diary of my days might run as follows:

_Monday._ Up at 6 a.m. Skipped 200 times. Two eggs for breakfast, tried my new _pekmes_.[2] Read _Hilal_.[3] Looked out places on my hidden map.

Long argument about the use of cavalry in modern war. Walk in garden.

Mutton cutlets for lunch. Completed my new hammock. Argued about Free Trade. Played badminton in garden. Read philosophy with ---- and ----.

_Sakuska_[4] party with ---- and ---- at 7.30. Watched Polly picking opium. Dinner at 8. Soup, eggs, suet; very satisfactory. Bridge and bed.

_Tuesday._ Up at 6.15. Skipped 250 times, and had a boxing lesson.

Painful. Two eggs for breakfast, but one bad. _Hilal_ did not arrive.

Argued about yesterday's cavalry news. Walk in garden. No meat for lunch. Bitten by mosquitoes in my hammock. Argued about Protection. Ran round the garden ten times. My wind is getting worse. _Sakuska_ party at sevenish with ---- and ---- in my room. Polly was seen out walking with a _posta_.[5] Dinner at 8. Mutton cutlets. Chess and bed.

And so on, _ad infinitum_.

I had at that time come to the conclusion that I could not reach the coast from Afion-kara-hissar, so for some time I sought a mental rather than a physical escape from my surroundings. Philosophy seemed an ideal subject under the circ.u.mstances, and in the company of two friends of like mind, I made some study of "Creative Evolution." Every afternoon we used to forgather for tea, in a little room I had built, where our joint contributions provided a well-selected pabulum of cakes and jam and Bergson, so that the inner and the outer man were Platonically at one.

But to plunge from _le tremplin de la vie_ is not easy in captivity.

Lack of employment cripples imagination. The average mind works best when it has practical things to do, and mine, such as it is, boggles at abstractions more quickly than it tires of talk.

When this occurred the best thing to do was to laugh. A friend and I used to laugh for hours sometimes over weak and washy stories that would hardly pa.s.s muster, even in the small hours of the morning. But they did us good. Generally, however, the time between tea and dinner was spent in learned and weighty discussions on appearance, reality, and the problems of Being and Not-being.

With my two friends

". . . the seed of Wisdom did I sow And with my own Hand arboured it to grow, But this was all the Harvest that I reaped-- I came like Water and like Wind I go."

Only unfortunately I did not go. I remained firmly at Afion-kara-hissar.

When philosophy failed me, the hours spent in planning escapes and concocting cyphers were those which pa.s.sed most easily. But the craft of cyphers, interesting though it be, cannot be discussed in print. Like the preparation of poisons, it must remain part of the unpublished knowledge of the world, until the millennium. As regards escapes, some of us thought a great deal, and did very little. There were, however, some ingenious attempts made to get to Constantinople. One officer conceived the idea of going there to be treated for hydrophobia, and, after inflicting suitable wounds in the calf of his leg with a pair of nail scissors, he a.s.serted that a certain dog, well known in the camp, had exhibited strange symptoms of insanity, amongst others, that of suddenly biting him in the leg. This ruse would have succeeded but for the fact that the Turks did not treat hydrophobia with any seriousness.

Kismet takes no account of the Pasteur system. Short of actually snapping at someone, the officer could not have established a belief in his infection. He found it simpler to feign another ailment. Two other officers, however, of a still more picturesque turn of mind, declared that they themselves were mad, and actually hung themselves as a proof of insanity. They were found one morning by their astonished sentries suspended from a rafter, and apparently in the last stages of strangulation. Convinced that they were "afflicted of G.o.d," the Turks sent them to hospital, and carefully watched for any symptoms of suicidal mania. After various astonishing experiences, in their role of madmen, amongst real madmen in a Turkish lunatic ward, they were eventually exchanged.

In sheer manual dexterity, our prisoners also showed great resource. The soldiers who were employed on making a tunnel through the Taurus, to take one example, succeeded in purloining various odds and ends from the workshops where they laboured under German supervision, until they eventually were able to build for themselves a complete collapsible boat. This boat they actually tested at dead of night on a river near their camp, before setting out to reach the coast. That success did not crown their efforts was sheer bad luck. Luck, also, was against most of the forty officers who concerted a simultaneous escape from Yuzgad, and prepared for it in absolute secrecy, down to the smallest detail, for months beforehand. Some of them even made their own boots. Only eight out of the original party actually got out of the country, however.

Their story, surely one of the most remarkable ever written, has recently been published.

The two great difficulties in any attempt to escape were: firstly, that the Turks, by spies or otherwise, studied the psychology of every individual prisoner, setting special guards on the more enterprising among them, and, secondly, that the distance of the camp from the coast, and the number of brigands infesting every mile of that distance, was such that it was extremely difficult to gain the sea, let alone embark upon it.

The spies made some very bad guesses about the intentions of the prisoners. One harmless and elderly officer was seen greasing a pair of marching boots, and this gave rise to the most sinister suspicions.

Where could the officer want to march to, except the coast? He was immediately asked for his parole, and gave it.

Exercise in any form was a sign of incipient madness in the eyes of the Turks. Why, they argued, should anyone in his right mind skip five hundred times, and then splash himself with ice-cold water? If he did such things, he ought certainly to be placed under restraint. Boxing, again, was a suspect symptom. A man who bled at the nose for pleasure might commit any enormity. In order to circ.u.mvent suspicion it was necessary to adopt the utmost caution. The method I myself employed is described in a later chapter. One friend of mine, while training for a trip to Blighty, habitually carried heavy lead plates hung round his waist, to accustom himself to the weight of his pack. Such were the internal difficulties. But outside the camp the problems were even more puzzling. How to avoid the brigands--how to carry food enough for the journey--how to elude our guards and get a few hours' start--what clothes to wear and what pack to carry--how to find one's way--how to get a boat once the coast was reached--here were well-nigh insoluble questions, which provided, however, excellent topics for talk.

I talked about these things for eighteen months. But I will ask the reader to skip that dismal procession of moons, and come directly to the day when I was asked by the Commandant to sign a paper stating that I would not attempt to escape. I naturally refused, as also did another officer to whom the same request was made.

Our negotiations in this matter, while interesting to us at the time, and involving the composition of several n.o.ble doc.u.ments in French, led to the sad result that we were both transferred, at an hour's notice, to a little box of a house in the Armenian quarter. Once inside the house, with the various belongings we had collected during a twelve-month of captivity in Afion-kara-hissar, we two completely filled the only habitable room. And although habitable in a sense, this room was already occupied by undesirable tenants.

I must here, rather diffidently, introduce the subject of vermin. But, saving the public's presence, bugs are the very devil. Other insects are nothing to them. Lice the gallant reader may have met at the front.

Fleas are a common experience. Centipedes and scorpions are well known in India. But bugs are Beelzebub's especial pets, and Beelzebub is a ruler in Turkey. It is quite impossible to write of my captivity there without mentioning these small, flat creatures who live in beds. I cannot disregard them: they have bitten into my very being.

Imagine lying down, after a sordid day of dust and disagreeableness. One thinks of home, or the sea. One tries to slide out to the gulfs of sleep, where healing is. But rest does not come: there is a sense of malaise. One's skin feels irritable and unclean. Presently there is an itching at one's wrists, and at the back of one's neck. One squashes something, and there is a smear of blood (one's own good blood) and one realises that one's skin (one's own good skin) is being punctured by these evil beasts. Almost instantly one squashes another. A horrible odour arises. One lights the candle, and there, scuttling under the pillow, are five or six more of these loathsome vermin. They not only suck one's blood. They sap one's faith in life.

"If one could dream that such a world began In some slow devil's heart that hated man,"

indeed one would not be mistaken. In them the powers of Satan seem incarnate.

Having killed every bug in sight, one lies back and gasps. And then, out of the corner of one's eye, creeping up the pillow, and hugely magnified by proximity, another monstrous brute appears. It runs forward, horribly avid, and eager, and brisk. All the cruelty of nature is in its hideous head, all the activity of evil in its darting body. Presently another and another appear. There is no end to them. You kill them on the bed, and they appear on the walls. You search out and slaughter every form of life within reach, but the bugs still drop on you from the ceiling. No killing can a.s.suage their appet.i.te for a healthy body.

Reckless of danger, they batten on the young. Regardless of death, they swarm to silky skin. Of two victims, they will always choose the one in best condition.

After being eaten by bugs for some time, one feels infected with their contamination. It is almost impossible to rise superior to them. In one night a man can live through the miseries of Job.

It may be imagined therefore that our confinement in that little house was not amusing. My companion in misfortune and myself lived in that box for a week with the bugs, without once going out of the door. Now, to stay in a room for a week may not seem a very trying punishment (I was later to spend a month in solitary confinement); but when the punishment is wholly undeserved, and when, moreover, one is wrongly suspected of something one would like to do but has not done, and when one is bitten all night, and when from confinement one sees other officers walking about in comparative freedom, one naturally begins to fret.

There were compensations, however. Firstly, a friendship grew between my companion and myself which I hope will endure through life. Secondly, as a prisoner, any sort of change is welcome. And, thirdly, we felt we were doing something useful. The Commandant did not dare to force us to sign parole. Neither could he keep us permanently in special restraint.

It is rarely that one gets the chance, as a prisoner, of putting the enemy on the horns of such a dilemma.

This Commandant, an ugly, drunken beast, who is now, I hope, expiating the innumerable crimes he committed against our men, caused a search to be made one day amongst the effects of all the prisoners at Afion-kara-hissar. One of the most interesting things he found was a diary kept by a senior British officer, with the following entry:

"New Commandant arrived. His face looks as if it was meant to strike matches on."

No better description could possibly have been written. He was a vain man, and it must have cut him to the quick to see himself as others saw him.