Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 12

"_Kronprinz_--_jabber jabber jabber_--_Sarajevo_-- _Jabber jabber jabber_--_automobil_-- _Jabber_--_Pouf! pouf! pouf! pouf! pouf!_-- _Kronprinz automobil halt boum!_-- _Jabber jabber jabber_--_Kronprinz aa-ee!_-- _Damen aa-ee! aa-ee!_--_jabber jabber_--_aa-ee!_-- _Jabber jabber jabber jabber jabber jabber._"

Lifting his arm as if aiming with a revolver.

We pa.s.sed a vote of thanks to Alfonso, together with a cigarette and a fig.

The departure from the mud village was as absurd as the rest of our experiences in it. On my ninth visit to him the commandant announced with pride that he had arranged for us to leave by the evening train, and that the station-master at Bosanti would leave an empty truck for us.

Twenty minutes before the train arrived we trudged through the rain to the station, carrying our parcels of disreputable kit. All three gates leading to the platform were guarded by sentries, who offered to bayonet any one who tried to pa.s.s without papers stamped by the local gendarmerie. To each sentry in turn Cuthbert explained frantically who we were and what the commandant had said, only to be met with an invariable "_Ya.s.sak!_" and a fingering of the rifle.

The _bimbashi_ himself was absent, and so was the Armenian interpreter--the only other person, apparently, who knew our orders.

Alfonso, despatched to the commandant's house, returned with the news that he could not be found. We stood in the rain puffing at damp cigarettes and cursing. H. returned to his old refrain, "To h.e.l.l with the Turks!", to the great wonder of the tatterdemalion men and boys gathered round us.

When the train steamed away from Alukeeshla, taking, no doubt, the empty truck reserved for us, we startled the guards and sentries with yells of uncontrollable laughter.

M. and I opened next morning's visit to the _bimbashi_ with bitter protests, but had to end it in helpless acquiescence before his suave lies. He had given strict orders that the sentries were to let us pa.s.s, he pretended, and they would be punished severely for their failure to do so. Meanwhile, he was charmed that we were to accept the hospitality of the village for one day longer. He himself would be present to see us off by the next train that same evening.

For once the commandant kept his promise. He led us to the station himself. But this time no accommodation had been provided for us on the train. The trucks were full of Germans, the first- and second-cla.s.s carriages of Turkish officers, the third-cla.s.s carriages of Turkish soldiers. As it would be difficult to crowd the Turkish officers and impossible to dislodge any Germans, the only alternative was to clear out some of the Turkish privates.

The _bimbashi_ selected a carriage, entered it, and ordered its occupants to descend to the platform. There were only nine of us, with the guards, while the soldiers numbered more than forty. Yet the _bimbashi_ turned them all out. He hurled their packs through the open windows, and by candlelight drove them before him to the doorway. Some, who were reluctant to leave, he struck. It was astonishing to see the little man smacking and kicking burly brutes twice his size; though he knew well that they would never dare to hit back.

When the carriage was quite empty he took us inside and placed us in a corner. The Turkish rabble, swearing and grumbling, returned with their packs and their rifles, and scowled at us as they packed themselves into the remaining seats. The whole matter could have been arranged, with a twentieth of the fuss, by merely moving nine Turks from one end of the carriage to the other.

"Good?" asked the commandant, proudly, after we were seated.

"Magnificent!" I replied, while we tried hard not to let our self-control be blown over by gusts of laughter.

"Then, au revoir, my friend."

"Adieu, mister the commandant."

He strutted down the platform; and we pa.s.sed from Alukeeshla to whatever weird experiences might be waiting for us elsewhere.

This chapter is but an amplification of an inscription signed by H. and myself before we left our mud home. When pa.s.sing toward Alukeeshla from the station, take the second turning to the right beyond the gendarmerie, then the first to the left, and enter the fifth house in a row of buildings that stare at you from the bottom of a blind alley.

Climb some rickety stairs to the back room on the first floor, and you may still find these words on one of the walls:

"In memory of some bad days and good yarns, spent and told in this dirty room of this verminous hut in this G.o.d-forsaken village. To h.e.l.l with the Turks!"

CHAPTER VII

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLACK ROCK

Moored under a willow tree, we were clearing what was left of the cold chicken and salad from the middle of a punt. I filled the Chambertin bottle with water and dropped it overboard. It plashed and sank noiselessly to the bottom of the Thames. From the far side of our island came the metallic strains of a gramophone, made less blatant by the soft atmosphere of the river. A pa.s.sing punt-pole clacked, rose from the surface, stabbed the water and clacked again. Flies danced from the hot sunlight into the shade of the willow, and hovered over the remains of our lunch. I composed the cushions and lay down, opposite Phyllis.

But the cushions became harder and harder, and the breeze merged gradually into a stuffy, dark oppressiveness. I opened my eyes, and sat up. The head cushion, it appeared, was a sackful of kit, my white flannels were a uniform in creased and dirtied khaki, Phyllis was Alfonso the Turkish guard, and the Thames the military baths at Afion-kara-Hissar, in the centre of Anatolia.

Some ragged Turks arrived through the stone pa.s.sage that led to the hot room, and began undressing. Cuthbert was talking to the bath attendant, while Alfonso lay opposite me and snored. H. and W. also snored in dissonant notes. R. was sorting out his kit. The rest of the party still slumbered silently, stretched out in twisted att.i.tudes on the stone floor.

Then I remembered how we were dragged from the train in the early hours of the morning, and had wandered through the streets of Afion-kara-Hissar, looking for the prison camp. Finding it closed to night arrivals, Cuthbert and Alfonso led us to the Madrissah _hammam_, in the courtyard of a mosque. Weary with want of sleep and the hardships of a long journey, we had slept for several hours on the floor of the outer bath-room.

Only R. had risked taking off his boots; and these had evidently disappeared, for as he searched his loud curses echoed from the domed roof. As was to be expected, all the Turks in the room disclaimed volubly any knowledge of the missing boots, so that when we moved to the prisoners' camp R. clattered along the streets in a pair of wooden sandals borrowed from the bath attendant.

A Turkish officer met us at the barrier which divided the street of prison-houses from the rest of the town, and sent us to meet the British adjutant of the camp. Cuthbert and Alfonso waved a good-humoured farewell and disappeared. With them they took our cooking pots--although we did not discover this fact until later in the day. By that time they had left Afion-kara-Hissar. We swore long and loud at the memory of the two guards, for in those days any sort of a cooking utensil was in Turkey worth at least two pounds.

Pa.s.sing up the narrow street we were greeted by groups of weirdly clothed Britishers. Some wore torn and creased uniforms and a civilian cap or a much-dented billyc.o.c.k; some a military hat and ill-fitting suits of shoddy mufti; some were in khaki shorts surmounted by shirts of violent colours open at the neck; some wore heavy boots, some wore bedroom slippers, some wore sandals.

Many of them were survivors of the Kut-el-Amara garrison and had been prisoners in Turkey for two and a half years. Their uniforms had long since become scarecrow relics of better days, since when they had depended for clothing on the supplies forwarded by the Dutch Legation at Constantinople. The productions of the Turkish tailors and shirt-makers, as issued to the prisoners at Afion, were entertaining but rather anarchic.

Afion-kara-Hissar contained the largest prison-camp in Turkey, although there were others at Yozgad, Broussa and Geddos--the last-named being for the fifty or sixty of his Majesty's officers who had been persuaded to give parole not to attempt an escape. When the first batch of British officers arrived at Afion the Turks turned some Armenian families out of their homes, confiscated the furniture, and told the captives from the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia that they were to live in the empty houses.

"Beds? Furniture?" said the commandant. "We have none, and it is impossible to supply any."

"Food?" he said in reply to another demand. "It is well known that all British officers are rich. You have money enough to buy food for yourselves."

And so it had to be. At first the British officers lived on their pay as captives; which, according to rank, was at the rate of seven to ten Turkish pounds a month. But food prices soon expanded to extraordinary proportions, while the exchange value of the Turkish pound continued to decrease. By the beginning of 1918 it was worth less than two and a half dollars; while sugar, for example, was four dollars a pound. Tea was fifty dollars a pound, and real coffee was un.o.btainable. Under these conditions, it became almost impossible to obtain even a bare subsistence on seven Turkish pounds a month without outside help. The Dutch Legation, therefore, supplemented each captive officer's pay to the extent of five, then fifteen, Turkish pounds a month, taken from the Red Cross funds at their disposal.

Even thus the food difficulties could not have been solved without the help of parcels from home. These arrived either seven or eight months after they left England, or never. Many were delivered only after the Turks had looted from them such articles as were scarce, including boots, clothes, and good tobacco. Letters from England needed from two to five months for transit.

The lack of furniture was overcome by amateur carpentry. With string, nails, and planks of wood each newly arrived prisoner constructed a bed, a table, and a chair. Profiteers in the bazaar naturally took advantage of the demand for wood, and, by the time of which I write, the price of it had soared to two Turkish pounds a plank.

Besides the officers there were at Afion about two hundred Tommies shut up in a Greek church. Their daily rations from the Turks were one small loaf of bad bread and one basin of thin soup. For the rest, they existed on the tinned food which they received from time to time in parcels.

As for the Russian soldiers, who were herded into the Madrissah buildings, they were literally starving, and most of them had sold part of their clothing to buy extra food. Weak and ragged, they pa.s.sed the time in walking round and round the courtyard. During the bitter months of winter scores of them died from hunger and cold.

Conditions in the prison camp varied according to the character of whoever happened to be the Turkish commandant. For a time the officer in charge was one Muslum Bey, who was reported to have committed several executions for Enver Pasha during the turbulent days of the Young Turk _coup d'etat_ in 1908. He was a brute, a swindler, and a degenerate, and during his reign unspeakable outrages were committed.

He himself gave a Russian officer who had committed some minor offence more than a hundred strokes of the bastinado. When his arm was tired he made his sergeant-major continue the flogging until the Russian fainted. The unconscious body of the victim was then thrown into a cellar, where a part of his face was burned by contact with quick-lime.

Muslum Bey not only stole food parcels from England but made a practice of deducting part of the monthly pay which helped to procure for the British Tommies a bare existence. In addition, he made an arrangement with bazaar traders whereby a monopoly in certain articles of food came into being, so that the prisoners had to pay incredible prices, or go hungry.

It was not until the visit of a Swiss Commission that was investigating the prison-camps of Turkey that the British officers at Afion-kara-Hissar heard of Muslum Bey's worst outrage. The brutal commandant had taken great care that there should be no communication between the captive officers and the captive men, and severe punishment was inflicted if a Tommy tried to speak with a British officer whom he chanced to pa.s.s in the street. Scenting that something was wrong the officers induced members of the Swiss Commission to take with them the senior British doctor when they visited the Tommies in the Greek Church. Almost the first words that Colonel B., the doctor in question, heard on entering the building were the equivalent of "I've been outraged, sir." He then learned the story of how two British soldiers, thrown into jail for some trivial offence, had been forcibly outraged, first by the commandant and then by his sergeant-major.

The Swiss Commission itself was not immune from Muslum Bey's criminality. An Australian officer took a member of it aside, and told him the full story of the awful death-march from Kut-el-Amara, on which the captured garrison, already reduced by hunger, were forced to trek over 800 miles of desert and mountain, being left to die in the scorching sun if they fell out owing to weakness--a death-march which is responsible for the fact that less than 25 per cent. of the men captured at Kut-el-Amara are alive to-day.

"Yes, we know all about it," said the Swiss, "and we had it in our notes. But most of our papers were stolen the other day."

When I reached Afion, in May, 1918, the conditions had improved. As a result of a secret report by the senior British officer, smuggled to the headquarters at Constantinople of the Ottoman Red Crescent, Muslum Bey had been removed from his position and imprisoned. He was put on trial for his many crimes; but owing to _baksheesh_ and to political protection the sentence was but a few months' imprisonment. He had already served this period while awaiting trial, and was therefore released immediately after sentence. He went into business as a shopkeeper, and sold among other things tinned food bearing British labels--tinned food of the kind that anxious people in England and India lovingly bought and lovingly packed for their husbands, sons, and relatives who were prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, although Muslum Bey had been given only the travesty of a punishment by the Turkish judges, instructions were sent from the Turkish War Office that life at the prison-camps of Afion-kara-Hissar was to be made more pleasant. We were, for example, allowed the run of a portion of the hillside. In cold print such a concession seems unimportant enough, but to men who had become staled and unspeakably bored by months of captivity during which their only exercise was to walk up and down a narrow street, it was a G.o.dsend. Cricket and football matches were also allowed, and two or three times a week long walks were arranged.

Members of these walking parties would study the flat plain that surrounded Afion-kara-Hissar and the succession of hill-ranges beyond it, and would dream of an escape to some point on the coast.

From this town in the centre of Anatolia, however, escape seemed an impossibility, for the nearest point of the coast was 150 miles distant, and the intervening country, wild and almost trackless, was full of brigands and starving outlaws of every description, who would cheerfully kill a chance traveller for a pair of boots, a loaf of bread, or merely for practice. In any case, a tramp to the coast must extend over at least five weeks, and it was difficult to see how food for this long period could be carried.