Caught by the Turks Part 8

After a month of "special treatment" the Commandant learnt that Turkish Army Headquarters, fearing reprisals, no doubt, would not support his bluff in punishing us if we did not give parole. He had to climb down completely.

We were transferred to another house, in the Armenian quarter, already occupied by some R.N.A.S. officers, who were all determined to escape if opportunity arose. A very cheery house-party we made.

The time was now the year of grace 1917, and our life was organised to some extent. Once or twice a week we were allowed to play football, or go for a walk. On Thursdays we used to troop down in a body to visit the officers in the other houses, and on Monday mornings we were sometimes able, with special permission, to attend the weekly fair of c.o.ke and firewood held in the market-place. All this gave an interest to our lives, and money, so long as one was prepared to write cheques, was not a source of difficulty. The Turks, in fact, encouraged us to write cheques, exchanging them for Turkish notes at nearly double their face value (190 piastres for a pound was the best I myself received), because they rightly thought that our signature was worth more than the guarantees of the Turkish Government. I heard afterwards that our cheques had a brisk circulation on the Constantinople Bourse. But one was loth to write many. Five pounds is five pounds--and in Turkey it represented only a packet of tea or a kilogram of sugar. . . . I saved as much as I could for bribes when escaping.

A microscopic, but not unamusing, social life was in full swing. There were parties and politics, clubs and cliques. Each prisoner, according to his temperament, took his choice between grave pursuits and gay.

There were lecturers (really good ones) who discoursed on a wide range of topics, from Mendelism to Mesopotamia. There were professors of French, Italian, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindustani, and I daresay all the languages of Babel, ready to teach in return for reciprocal instruction in English. Our library contained many luminous volumes, kindly sent out by the Board of Trade. Law and Seamanship, Semaphoring and Theology, Carpentry and the Integral Calculus, Gardening and Genetics--such is a random selection of the subjects on which there were experts available and eager to impart information.

But, personally, my mind resisted the seductions of learning. I learned only how to waste time. And sometimes, perhaps, I touched the hem of Philosophy's garment, and stammered a few words to her. Otherwise I did nothing except try to forget things . . . things seen.

Yet one enjoyed oneself, occasionally. The football was great fun. So also were some of the lighter sides of our indoor life. Poker used to pa.s.s the time. So also, though more rarely, did reading. The plays which a dramatist--soon to be eminent, I expect--presented to enthusiastic audiences are delightful memories. His revues and topical verses were worthy of a wider audience, and I am sure his work--unlike the most of our labours--will not be wasted.

But best of all, I think, was to sit in a circle on the floor round a brazier on a winter's evening, and sip hot lemon _'araq_, and listen to songs and stories. It was a relief to laugh, and forget the fate of those we could not help.

"Sweet life, if love were stronger, Earth clear of years that wrong her . . ."

sang a soft Irish voice, whose melody seemed to melt into the cold of one's captivity. . . . Then there were the fancy dress b.a.l.l.s held on New Year's Eve in 1917 and 1918. So good were they that for the night one completely forgot one's surroundings. A very attractive barmaid dispensed refreshments behind a table. There were several debutantes, and at least one chaperone. Pierrot was there, and Pierrette, and Mephistopheles, and Bacchus, and a very realistic Pirate. If some reveller in London had looked in on us at midnight he might easily have fancied himself at an Albert Hall dance. He would certainly not have guessed that all the clothes and furniture and food were home-made, and that everyone in the room was a British officer. The self-confident flapper, for instance, who could only have given him "the next missing three" was a Major in the Flying Corps. And the girl at the bar, with big brown eyes, who would have offered him _'araq_ so charmingly was really a submarine officer of the Navy, and a well-known figure at "The Goat."

After functions such as these, the morning after the night before found me wondering where it would all end. If the war lasted another ten years, would I ever be fit to take a place in normal life? How long could I keep sane in this topsy-turvy world? . . .

The weather in the winter of 1918 was absolutely arctic. For a month there was a very hard frost, and during all this time, had it not been for festivities such as the foregoing I should have stayed stupidly in bed and hibernated until the spring. Intenser cold I have never felt. In the room in which we dined the water froze in our gla.s.ses on several occasions while we were eating our evening meal. Icy winds howled through the house, and the paper windows we had improvised (to replace un.o.btainable gla.s.s) had burst, through weight of snow. Also, the plaster of the outer walls of our mansion had peeled off, so that cold blasts penetrated through the walls. With few clothes and only one pair of leaky boots it was impossible to keep warm and dry-shod. Fuel, of course, was very scarce. In my bedroom some precious quarts of beer, which I was preserving for Christmas, froze and cracked their bottles. I invited a party to taste my blocks of amber ice, but they were better to look at than to swallow.

Under these climatic conditions washing was a labour that took one the best part of the morning, and until I caught a chill I used to economize time and fuel by rolling in the snow on the flat roof of my house. This amused me, and surprised the neighbourhood, but it was a poor subst.i.tute for a bath. That winter was a black, bleak time.

During the hard frost it was impossible to escape, but we used occasionally to reconnoitre the sentries outside our house after lock-up. I have spent some amusing moments in this way, especially in watching one sentry (generally on duty at midnight) who used to warm himself by playing with a cat. With p.u.s.s.y on one arm and his rifle on the other, he formed a delightfully casual figure. It would have been quite easy to pa.s.s him, but the difficulties lay beyond. . . .

I then thought, wrongly I dare say, that the only reasonable hope of success lay in starting from Constantinople, and it was to this end that my real schemes were shaping. But I thought it well to have two strings to my bow, and besides, I considered no day well spent which did not include some practical effort towards escape.

A complex of causes contributed to this idea, which became almost an obsession. First, I dare say, was boredom. Second, the feeling that one was not earning one's pay or doing one's duty by remaining idly a prisoner. And thirdly--or was it firstly?--the condition under which our men were living and the crimes which had been committed against them made it imperative that someone should get to England with our news. It was high time, and past high time, that the civilised world should know how our prisoners fared.

I have already written the savage story of our life at Mosul, where the men died from calculated cruelty. The history of the Kut prisoners is even worse, for the crime was on a greater scale.

That garrison, debilitated from the long siege and the climatic conditions of Mesopotamia, were marched right across Asia Minor with hardly any clothes, no money, and insufficient food. Their nameless sufferings will never be known in full, for many died in the desert, clubbed to death by their guards, stripped naked, and left by the roadside. Others were abandoned in Arab villages, when in the last stages of fever or dysentery. Others, more fortunate, were found dead by their companions after the night's halt, when the huddled sleepers turned out to face another day of misery. Hopeless indeed the outlook must have seemed to some lad fresh from the fields of home. The brutal sentries, the arid desert, the daily deaths, the daily quarrels, the bitterness of the future, as bleak as the acres of sand that stretched to their unknown destination, the dwindling company of friends, the grip of thirst, the pangs of hunger, and the pains of death--such was the outlook for many a lad who died between Baghdad and Aleppo. Ghosts of such memories must not be lightly evoked amongst those alive to-day, friends of the fallen, but always they will haunt the trails of the northern Arabian desert.

Through it all our men were heroes. To the last they showed their captors of what stuff the Anglo-Saxon is made. The cowardly Kurds, who were the worst of the various escorts provided between Baghdad and Aleppo, never dared to insult our men unless they outnumbered them four to one. Even then they generally waited until some sick man fell down from exhaustion before clubbing him to death with their rifle-b.u.t.ts.

In the middle of the desert, between Mosul and Aleppo, a friend of mine found six half-demented British soldiers who had been propped up against the wall of a mud hut and left there to die. There was no transport, no medicines. Nothing could be done for them. They died long before the relief parties organised at Aleppo could come to their rescue.

At Aleppo the hospital treatment was extremely bad.

All men who were fit to move (and many who were not) were sent on in cattle trucks to various camps in the centre of Anatolia, and when at length they reached these camps after vicissitudes which were only a dreary repet.i.tion of earlier experiences, they came upon the plague of typhus at its height, and naturally, in this weakened state, succ.u.mbed by scores and hundreds.

To see a body of our soldiers arriving at Afion-kara-hissar, pushed and kicked and beaten by their escort, was terrible.

Our men were literally skeletons alive, skeletons with skin stretched across their bones, and a few rags on their backs. This is an exact statement of things seen. They struggled up the road, hardly able to carry the pitiful little bundles containing sc.r.a.ps of bread, a bit of soap, a mug, all, in short, that they had been able to save from systematic looting on the way.

In silence, and unswerving, they pa.s.sed up that road to the hospital, and all who saw those companies of Englishmen so grim and gallant in adversity must have felt proud their veins carried the same blood.

Once in hospital our prisoners fared no better. There were no beds for them, and hardly any blankets or medicines. They died in groups, lying outside the hospital.

It was a common sight to see sad parties of our men pa.s.sing down this same road, away from the hospital this time, and towards the cemetery.

Those weary processions, consisting of four or five emaciated men, with a stretcher and a couple of shovels, used to pa.s.s underneath our windows going to bury their comrade. They were a party of skeletons alive, carrying a skeleton dead.

[Footnote 1: Afion = opium.]

[Footnote 2: _Pekmes_: a subst.i.tute for jam and sugar, made from raisins.]

[Footnote 3: The _Hilal_: a Moslem morning paper, published in French.]

[Footnote 4: _Sakuska_: Russian for hors d'oeuvres--such as sardines, frogs' legs, onions, bits of cheese, or indeed anything edible.]

[Footnote 5: _Posta_: a Turkish sentry.]

CHAPTER VI

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRISON

The contrast of tragedy and farce and the incidents, and the lack of incident, which I have attempted to sketch in the foregoing chapter, had a marked mental effect on all of us. But each felt the effects of confinement differently. With me, I came to look on my life in Turkey as something outside the actuality of existence. I did not feel "myself" at all. I was disembodied, left with no link with the outer world, except memory and antic.i.p.ation. I was in a dark forest far from all avenues of activity such as the sanity of society and the companionship of women.

My world seemed make-believe, and my interests counterfeit.

I worked at a novel with a friend of mine, and for a time that seemed something practical to do. But there was always the fear that it would be taken from us by the Turks, and the possibility that we would never publish it.

Doubt and indecision lay heavy on me. I did not know how long captivity would last. A criminal's sentence is fixed: not so a prisoner of war's.

He is dependent on matters beyond his control, and a will beyond his narrow ambit. To reach that outside will, and to form a part of it again, was my dominating wish. Through the gla.s.ses of captivity the world was colourless and distorted. Only freedom could make me see it again aright. And when freedom seemed remote, the world was very colourless.

The novel amused me by s.n.a.t.c.hes. Learning languages amused me at times.

But these things were really the diversions of a child, who dreams through all its lesson-time of another and a fairer world.

But, unlike a child, I became absorbed in self. I a.n.a.lysed my moods, and thought gloomily about my health. I mourned my youth, as my hair turned grey. The sorrows of the spinster were mine and the griefs of the middle-aged. The value of material things was magnified. The pleasures of the palate, I confess, a.s.sumed an exaggerated importance. I found a new joy in food, and sometimes I dreamed that I was eating. Also I contracted the habit of smoking cigarettes in the middle of the night.

And I learnt that the effect of alcohol, when one is very depressed, is like putting in the top clutch of the car of consciousness, so that one runs forward smoothly on the road of life. In short, I enjoyed eating and drinking and smoking in a way that I had never done before, and never will again, I hope. But I know now why public-houses flourish.

After my own experience of deathly dullness, I heartily sympathise with those who seek relief in alcohol and nicotine. They may be poison, but in this imperfect world the deadliest poison of all is boredom.

Prohibition, as I saw it in Turkey, when tobacco was short, or food was scarce, or alcohol was forbidden, did not impress me as being beneficial. The fact is, we all need stimulant of one sort or another.

Normally our work, our home, or our hopes supply this need. Almost everyone in the world is struggling (however carefully they may disguise the fact) to be other than they are, and better (or worse) than they are. We strive after superlatives and are rarely satisfied by them. But in captivity, as in other circ.u.mstances of distress, this stay in life, this hope of something different and wish for something _more_, is suddenly removed. We are left without _stimuli_. Nothing seems to matter. One's mental and material habits inevitably relax. A muddy idea seems as good as a clear one--a sloppy suit of clothes serves as well as a tidy one. Energy wanes.

But why? The reason is that the average mind cannot live on abstractions. It must grapple with something practical. One must sharpen one's wits on the world, and it is just this that as a prisoner one cannot do. One cannot "lay hold on life," because there is no life to lay hold of, except an unnatural and artificial existence, where the sympathy of women and the dignity of work are absent. That was the crux of the matter. Sympathy and dignity were lacking in our life. We heard of advances and retreats as from another sphere. We read of great heroisms and great sorrows without being close to them. We had no part in the quarrel. We were in a squalid by-way, living out a mean tragedy, while the fate of all we loved was in the balance. Never again would we go fighting.

From the moment of our capture we had pa.s.sed into a strange narrow life, where the spirit of man, while retaining all its old memories and hopes, could not express them in action.

Captivity is a minor form of death, and I was dead, to all intents and purposes.

Often, lying a-bed in the early morning, I used to feel that my body was completely gone, and that only a fanciful and feverish intelligence remained. I remember especially one dawn in the spring of 1917, when I watched two figures pa.s.sing down the station road. Slouching towards the station, and all unconscious of the beauty of the waking world, came a soldier with his pack and rifle. He wore the grey Turkish uniform, his beard was grey, his cheeks were also grey and sunken. Slowly, slowly he dragged his heavy feet towards the train that would take him away to the war. The train had been already signalled, I knew (for I kept notes of the traffic in those days), and I found myself hoping anxiously that he would not be late. The sooner he was killed the better. He was old and ugly and ill. If only such as he could perish. . . . Then my thought took wings of the morning. From the soldier, plodding onwards devotedly, as so many men have gone to their deaths, my eye ranged across the plains, lying dim and dark to eastward, to the horizon mountains of the Suleiman Dagh, whose snow had already seen the messengers of morning hasting from the lands below our world. And man seemed mean and minute in the purposes of Nature. So ugly was he, such a blot on the landscape with his trains and soldiers, that I wondered he continued to exist.

There was a life above our life in the dawn. The powers of the world knew nothing of this soldier's hopes and fears. To them his endeavours were a comedy. A huge mountain-back, with the gesture of some giant in the playtime of long ago, seemed shrugging its shoulders at this ridiculous straying atom of a moment's s.p.a.ce. The train came in, and I saw its smoke above the tree-tops of the station. It whistled shrilly, and the soldier quickened his pace. No doubt he was late. Perhaps he still survives, and is toiling even now towards some trench. Anyway he pa.s.sed from my ken, but I still stood at the window, looking towards the mountains and the sky.