Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 27

Stimulated by the knowledge that Varna was occupied by the British we walked the decks openly, flaunting our protean roles of British officers, highly contented men, first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, and third-cla.s.s scarecrows.

Like the _Batoum_, the Red Cross ship brought others who began the voyage as semi-stowaways. Commodore Wolkenau had told us in Odessa that among our shipmates would be a certain General from Denikin's army. We found him--a tall, bearded, Grand-Duke-Nicholas-like man--dining in the second-cla.s.s saloon, and wearing a suit of clothes nearly as shabby as our own. To dodge investigation by the Austrian port authorities he had a.s.sumed, with the connivance of the ship's captain, the character of an engineer's mate. The "engineer" who owned him as mate was in reality a commander of the Russian Imperial Navy, also attached to Denikin's forces. The pair of them were travelling to Salonika, as emissaries of General Denikin, to ask the Franco-British command for arms, ammunition, and financial support.

Another fellow-pa.s.senger was a former lieutenant of the Russian navy, who, since the German occupation of Sevastopol, had been acting as an agent of the Allies. He carried a complete list of the German and Austrian ships and submarines in the Black Sea, and details of the coast defences.

The three days' voyage was uneventful. The Black Sea remained at its smoothest. A pleasant sun harmonized with the good-will and friendliness of all on board, and with our deep content, as we continued to tread on air and impatient expectation. A Bulgarian destroyer pranced out to meet us, and led the vessel through the devious minefields and into the miniature, toy-like harbour of Varna.

The Bulgarian authorities imposed a four days' quarantine upon all pa.s.sengers; but the general, the naval commander, and the Franco-British agent joined with us in avoiding this delay by sending ash.o.r.e a collective note to the French naval officer who controlled the port. As at Odessa, we rowed ash.o.r.e with our complete luggage wrapped in two newspapers, each of which contained a toothbrush, a revolver, some cartridges, a comb, a razor, a spare shirt, a spare collar, and a few handkerchiefs.

Outside the docks a British trooper in dusty khaki, shoulder-badged with the name of a famous yeomanry regiment, pa.s.sed at a gallop. The sight of him sent an acute thrill through me, for he was a symbol of all that I had missed since the day when I woke up to find myself pinned beneath the wreck of an aeroplane, on a hillside near Shechem.

White looked after him, hungrily. He had been among the Turks for three years, and since capture this was his first sight of a British Tommy on duty.

"How about it?" I asked.

"I don't know. Somehow it makes me feel nohow in general, and anyhow in particular."

We reported to the British general commanding the force of occupation, and gladly delivered ourselves of information about Odessa for the benefit of his Intelligence Officer. At the hotel occupied by the staff there were preliminary doubts of whether such hobo-like ragam.u.f.fins could be British officers; but our knowledge of army shop-talk, of the cuss words fashionable a year earlier, and of the chorus of "Good-bye-ee" soon convinced the neatly uniformed members of the mess that we really were lost lambs waiting to be reintroduced to rations, drinks, and the field cashier.

For many days our extravagant shabbiness stood in the way of a complete realization that we were no longer underdogs of the fortune of war, but had come back into our own. Bulgarian officers, their truculence in no way impaired by their country's downfall, wanted us to leave our first-cla.s.s carriage on the way to Sofia. Outside Sofia station it was impossible to hire a cab, for no cabman would credit us with the price of a fare. The staff of the British Mission, to whom we gave reams of reports, tried their politest not to laugh outright at our clothes, but broke down before the green-and-yellow check waistcoat, many sizes too large, which White had received from a British civilian in Odessa.

Even the real Ford car, lent us by the British Mission for the journey to Salonika, failed to establish a sense of dignity. Once, when we stopped on the road near a British column, the driver was asked who were his pals the tramps.

We drove joyously down the Struma valley and through the Kreshna and Ruppel pa.s.ses, still littered with the debris of the Bulgarian retreat.

Rusted remnants of guns lolled on the slopes descending to the river.

Broken carts, twisted motor-lorries, horse and oxen skeletons--all the flotsam of a broken army--mottled the roadside. In the rocky sides of the mountain pa.s.ses were great clefts from which dislodged boulders had hurtled down on the Bulgarian columns when British aeroplanes helped the retreat with bomb-dropping. We pa.s.sed through the scraggy uplands of Lower Macedonia, and so to Salonika.

The real Ford car halted in the imposing grounds that surrounded the imposing building occupied by British General Headquarters at Salonika.

As we climbed the steps leading to the front door, warmly expectant of a welcome by reason of our information from South Russia, an orderly pointed out that this entrance was reserved for Big Noises and By-No-Means-Little Noises. We swerved aside, and entered an unpretentious side-door, labelled "Officers Only."

"Wojer want?" asked a c.o.c.kney Tommy, who sat at a desk inside it.

"We want to report to Major Greentabs, of the Intelligence Department."

The Tommy looked not-too-contemptuously at our sunken cheeks, our shapeless hats, our torn, creased, mud-spotted tatterdemalion clothes, and almost admiringly at White's check waistcoat.

"Nah, look 'ere, civvies," he instructed, "yer speak English well inuf.

Carncher read it? The notice says 'Officers Only', an' it means only officers. Dagoes 'ave ter use the yentrance rahnd the corner, so aht _yew_ go, double quick."

That day Salonika gave itself up to revelry by reason of an unfounded report that an armistice had been signed on the Western front. One of the celebrators was a certain 2nd-cla.s.s air mechanic of the Royal Air Force. We stopped him in the street, and asked the way to R.A.F.

headquarters. Beatifically he breathed whiskied breath at me as he stared in unsteady surprise.

"George," he called to his companion, "the war's over--_hic_--and here's two English blokes in civvies. Want to join the Royal Air Force, they do." Then, tapping me on the chest--"Don't you join the Royal Air Force. We're a rotten lot."

Armed with signed certificates of ident.i.ty we went to the officers'

rest house to demand beds.

"Speak English?" said a quartermaster-sergeant as we entered.

"Yes."

"Been expecting you. The Greek contractor's sons, aren't you?"

Later, not long before the bulletin-board showed the rumoured armistice with Germany to be premature, an orderly in the rest house wished to share the great news that wasn't true with the nearest person, who happened to be White. He stopped short on seeing a dubious civilian.

But his good-fellowship was not to be denied. French being the _lingua franca_ of the multi-nationalitied troops in Salonika, he slapped White on the back and announced: "_Matey, la guerre est finie_!"

Metamorphosed by ordnance uniforms from third-cla.s.s scarecrows to the regulation pattern of officer, we spent glorious days of rest and recuperation. Then, by the next boat for Port Sad, we left Salonika the squalid for Cairo the comfortable; and so to the world where they dined, danced, demobilized, and signed treaties of peace.

EPILOGUE

A DAMASCUS POSTSCRIPT; AND SOME WORDS ON THE KNIGHTS OF ARABY, A CRUSADER IN SHORTS, A VERY n.o.bLE LADYE AND SOME HAPPY ENDINGS

Of all the cities in the Near and Middle East Damascus is at once the most ancient, the most unchanged by time, the most unreservedly Oriental, and the most elusive.

Constantinople is Byzantium--c.u.m Mohammedan l.u.s.t for power--c.u.m Ottoman domination--c.u.m Levantine materialism--c.u.m European exploitation and Bourse transactions, in a setting of natural andarchitectural magnificence; a city that expresses itself variously and inharmoniously by a blendless chorus from an unmixable mixture of creeds and races; a charming, feminine city with a wayward soul; a cruel, unstable city of gamblers; a city of pleasant, vine-trellised alleyways, delightful waterways, fear-haunted prisons and extravagant rogueries; to my mind the most intriguing city in the world.

Cairo is a compound of sphinx-and-pyramid antiquity, modern opulence, degenerate Arab touts, Arab Babudom, reserved and Simla-like officialdom, the cosmopolitan gaiety of four great hotels, sordid and curious vice, sand-fringed suburbs, traffic in tourists and fake scarabs, and the compelling, changeless charm of the Nile.

Alexandria is b.a.s.t.a.r.d Byzantine-Levantine, with a wonderful past, an insistent Cotton Exchange, a lovely harbour, a crooked racecourse where crooked races are run, and a summer colony for Cairo's white-ducked Westerns.

Port Sad is a dull, heat-heavy h.e.l.l, at which the traffic to the Far East calls of unwelcome necessity, pays its tolls, skirts the green-gray statue of De Lesseps, and gladly glides down the turquoise-toned Suez Ca.n.a.l.

Suez is a hard-faced ex-courtesan, formerly famed for outrageous spectacles, but now converted by that missionary of war-time expedience the British Provost-Marshal into an unreal, uninviting, hypocritical respectability; a harbour landlady for squat-sailed, dancing _dhows_.

Mecca is the pilgrim city _in excelsis_, with a Holy Stone, overpowering heat, much colour and squalor, a reputation for impenetrability, and no traditions earlier than the birth of the Prophet.

Jerusalem has a stupendous history and is yet the most disappointing city in the world; a small, gilded-gingerbread city with no beautiful building except the blue-tiled Mosque of Omar, no first-cla.s.s view except that of the walls and roof-tops from the Mount of Olives; a city trading its past for Western charity; a city with a rebuilt Tower of David masquerading as the original, a probably authentic relic in the Tomb of Absalom, and many dubious ones where, within the s.p.a.ce of fifty square yards of beflagged church-floor, mumbling guides point out to pilgrims in pince-nez the supposed tombs of Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus, hard by the supposed site of Calvary, strewn with supposed fragments of the Cross; a city sacred to three great religions, exemplified locally by scheming town-Arabs; ring-curled, lethargic Jews aloof from their Western kindred; and swarthy, lethargic Christians educated and largely supported by Euro-American subsidies; a city of narrow, denominational schools that ignore the Fellowship of Man; a city whose Church of the Holy Sepulchre should be an epitome of peace and good-will, but yet is a place where, in the name of Christian charity, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian, and various kinds of Protestant priests intrigue and squabble over claims to guard relics, windows, and corners, and defray the cost of holy candle-light by collecting from visitors enough money to burn a hundred and one candles for one and a hundred years; a city better read about than examined.

Bagdad is a city with a romantic name, some fine Arabian architecture, and an impressive western gate whence the Damascus-bound caravans move dustily across the desert; a city fallen from greatness to the date and grain trade, minor bazaars, and the steamer and dhow traffic of the broad-bosomed Tigris; a city redolent of all that Haroun-al-Raschid was and modern Mesopotamia's opportunist sheikhs emphatically are not; a city with a prosperous future, thanks to the British engineers who have irrigated the Tigris-Euphrates basin into the way it should go.

Mosul is an unlovely mud city that straggles around the ruins of Nineveh the Magnificent.

But Damascus is indescribably a city with an unfathomable soul. In its complex ancestry are the strains of many ancient civilizations. The crooked alleys and decrepit buildings of its oldest quarter, perched on a mountain projection high above Damascus proper, have an origin lost in the conjectural mists of an epoch when the written word was not.

Another part of it was co-incident with Baalbek and sun-worship. The plain facade of many a house (purposely plain to divert the cupidity of Turkish pashas) hides a wide, white courtyard soothed by fountains, the plashing of which is coolingly heard in divanned rooms precious with rugs and hangings, and ornamented by minutely detailed designs in fancy arches and miniature cupolas--houses exactly as they were when tenanted by rich merchants who flourished under the greater Arabian caliphs. The Street called Straight, the gla.s.s-roofed, unique bazaar and a dozen other city-marks are bafflingly suggestive of contact with a dozen periods of greatness. And last year, when the demoralized Turks marched out of the city under the Arab flag that flew defiantly from the city gate, Arab thinkers began to dream of yet another period of greatness, in which Damascus was to be the centre of a re-united Arabian Empire....

My motive in returning to Damascus was threefold--certain minor work at Air Force Headquarters, an unpraiseworthy resolve to buy carpets and knick-knacks before other officers of the Palestine Army chose their pickings from the merchants' war h.o.a.rds, and a sneakingly benevolent desire to see George, the mongrel interpreter who had been bullied into betraying my escape plans in Baranki Barracks, but who was yet such a pathetic little nondescript.

With a pa.s.senger I left Ramleh aerodrome in a Bristol Fighter; for with an aeroplane available who would think of travelling by train or automobile over the disordered rails and roads of Syria? It was a sun-shimmery day, pleasantly cool in the early part of a Palestine November. Everything suggested peace as we flew northeastward--the calm cloudlessness, the silent, sparkling countryside, the rhythmic purring of the motor. The ground mosaic was radiant with that acute clearness which makes flying so much more interesting in the East and Middle East than elsewhere.

Far away to the right we could see from our height of 6,000 feet the ghostlike outline of the Dead Sea behind the bleak-ridged hills beyond Jericho. To the left were the shining sea, white-roofed Jaffa, and the lines of sand dunes that curved in and out of the coloured country-side. Ahead and around were brown surfaces of grain land and green blotches of woodland, inters.p.a.ced with gray-gleaming villages.

Soon the Bristol Fighter droned over what had been the old front of Allenby's left flank, with uneven trenches snaking southeastward from the sand-bordered coast to the Jordan basin. The Jordan itself twisted and writhed through its green-and-gold valley, over which occasional trenchworks zigzagged. Then came the hill desolation of Lower Samaria.