Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 4

This badgering of the poor brute continued, until finally the Arab opened his hands and said something in a resigned tone; whereat a thrill of excitement pa.s.sed through the gathering. The Turkish officer, before leaving us, wrote several lines on some official papers carried by the Arab's guard.

The Unteroffizier then turned his attention to me, and finding that I could speak German, talked of many things, from Hindenburg's advance in France to his own home in the former German colony at Jaffa.

"You have a pleasant companion," he said, nodding toward the Arab.

I asked who the pleasant companion might be and heard in reply a strange tale. The Arab, it appeared, had been found wandering in the rear of the Turkish trenches. The garment he wore was found to be a relic of what was once an overcoat of Turkish military pattern; so that he was arrested as a deserter, and possibly a spy. He told a rambling tale of how he had been a soldier in an Egyptian battalion fighting for the British, but, after being tortured by his officers, had escaped across the lines.

Even the Turks could not be convinced that British officers tortured their men; and the Arab having shown himself to be a liar, they were more than ever convinced that he was also a spy.

The Turkish officer, in the conversation I overheard, had threatened to hang him unless he confessed to being a spy. Finally the Arab (who, in my opinion, was not a spy, whatever he might be), terror-stricken at the threat that he could only save himself from hanging by a "confession," let himself be badgered into a declaration--true or false--that he was a spy. So they hanged him, as I learned afterward, at Damascus.

For several hours we remained on the platform, where the Arab and I were rival attractions for general curiosity. Then, late in the evening, we were hustled into a truck, marked in German: "12 horses or 40 men." As a matter of fact, more than fifty Turkish soldiers must have crowded into the truck before the train started.

Our party kept together in one of the corners, where we found just room enough to sit down without being trampled upon. I placed the kit bag between myself and the Arab, as a barrier against lice; although, for that matter, most of the Turkish soldiers were verminous.

That night I performed the first of many nightmare journeys on Turkish railways. Although each side of the truck was open for about three feet the atmosphere was intensely stuffy, so that it was difficult to breathe when seated on the floor. The crowd of Turks spat all over the place, and exuded dozens of different smells. The train jolted unevenly, with many a b.u.mp and halt, up the badly kept track. Sleep was impossible; and by the time I was hauled on to the platform at Afuleh, nine hours later, I was heavy-eyed and faint with wakefulness, weakness, and disgust.

Afuleh is but a few miles from Nazareth (then the Turco-German General Headquarters on the Palestine front); and to Nazareth we trudged. This beautiful little town is on a high hill around which the road to it winds upward at a steep angle. With its white buildings and its pleasant setting Nazareth offers a magnificent view as one climbs the hill. But really to enjoy it the conditions should be other than, when weak and ill and scarcely able to walk by reason of a bad leg, one must climb painfully up the steep slope under an oppressive sun and with a retinue of half-savage guards.

The Arab and I were led through the old, winding streets to the Turkish Platzkommandant's office. The Platzkommandant--a swollen balloon of a man--asked a question, and the Arab's reply drew all eyes in my direction. Having understood only a few words of the Arabic I wondered how I could be concerned in the charge of spying.

The Platzkommandant glared at me, and after examining my papers, spoke with somebody on the telephone. Then, although not a word had been spoken to me, we were both led outside and through some narrow streets to a stone building. Not until we were inside it did I hear, from a police officer who spoke a little French, why I was there.

Having noticed that rather more consideration was given to me than to him, and thinking he might obtain better treatment by hanging on to my coat-tails, the Arab had elaborated his story by saying that I brought him from the British Army in my aeroplane. Evidently the Platzkommandant, without giving me the chance to deny this fantastic tale, had telephoned to Turkish General Headquarters which had ordered that the spy and I, as accomplices in crime, should be kept together.

And here we were, inside what I learned was the civil criminal jail.

I protested with vehemence and ridicule against belief in the Arab's absurd statement. I pointed out that as my machine was a single-seater, his story must be impossible. The police officer promised to forward these protests to military headquarters; but as for him, his orders were that the Arab and I were to remain together. In any case, he added, I was probably being punished for having tried to escape.

Remain together we did, in a superlatively filthy cell. I would rather live in an American jail than in most of the poorer dwellings of the Turkish provinces, where donkeys and dogs and hens and men and women and children herd together in mud huts. As for most Turkish jails, I would rather live in an American pigsty.

Even after my experience on the train from Tul-Keran I was surprised by the first sight of that cell. The walls were neither stone nor wooden, but of hard earth, with holes and cracks all over the surface. The various kinds of dirt that crusted the stone floor, which must have been left uncleaned for years, had mingled and intermingled until they became a thin layer of slime, which gave forth a dank odour. The room was partly underground, although the small, iron-barred window, on a level with the floor of the yard and two feet below the stone ceiling, let in a certain amount of light. Through it crawled all sorts of insects. Hundreds of vermin were to be seen moving in and out of the fissures in the walls.

Unadulterated bravery, without any trace of suppressed or subconscious fear, does not exist; wherefore, if a man who fought in the war tells you that he never felt the least bit afraid, call him a liar of the goriest. But my experience has convinced me that ordinary bravery--the sort of bravery which is self-control in the face of danger--is one of the most ordinary of qualities, possessed by most people of every race, s.e.x, and age. But endurance is another matter. To all but the lion-hearted there comes the point at which the will to endure breaks down under abnormal strain.

Being far from lion-hearted, this now happened to me. When the gendarme banged and bolted the door I became morally dead, and past caring about surroundings or events. Physical weakness, mental agony, a terrible dizziness that resulted from having been bareheaded in the Palestine sun, the succession of privations and revolting surroundings--all these combined to break my spirit.

I grabbed the shrinking Arab, who evidently had not reckoned on being left alone with me, and flung him across the cell. I then sat down in the nearest corner, and, physically and mentally sick, remained inert for many hours.

The next three days I remember as a semi-conscious nightmare. Yet a dreadful nightmare is easier to bear than a dreadful reality, because the horror of it is confined to subconsciousness, and does not touch the surface brain. I sat through hours of inertia, without comprehension, energy, or a sense of my surroundings; so that I cared little for the dirt, the stench, and the general beastliness of the cell, because I scarcely realized them.

Three times I tried to pa.s.s the door, so as to protest to the police officer; but each time I was pushed back by the guard, who made frequent use of the words that every prisoner in Turkey knew so well--"_yok_" and "_ya.s.sak_" ("not," and "forbidden"). I gave up the attempt, and relapsed into a state of moral lethargy.

The changes from night to day, from stuffy heat to damp cold, pa.s.sed unnoticed, and I cared not whether I lived or died. I felt no hunger and very little thirst. This was fortunate, for hunger could not have been satisfied.

Each morning the guards gave each of us a small loaf of bad bread in which pieces of straw, string, and wood were plentiful. A carafe was filled with bad water once a day. In the evening a basin of thin soup, with mysterious chunks floating on the surface of it, was placed between us. Without being influenced by its unsavouriness, I felt not the least desire for the greasy liquid, the small loaf of bread being quite enough food for the day in my then state of unreal detachment from bodily needs and sensations.

As for the Arab, as soon as the basin was brought he squatted on his haunches, dug his hands into the soup, and having grabbed some floating morsel, stuffed it into his mouth. Afterward he lapped up the liquid itself, after the manner of a dog.

On the morning of the third day we were led from the jail to be interrogated at Turkish Headquarters. Although my ferocious headache still remained, the change from the dimness and closeness of the cell to the bright sunlight of the street revived me, and I sniffed the fresh air in gulps.

I was pa.s.sing through Nazareth, watched with evident sympathy by the sad-faced crowd, when I saw an officer of the German Flying Corps. He looked at my pilot's badge and stopped, whereupon I broke away from the guards and approached him. In violent language I protested against the outrageous treatment, and asked the German as a fellow-aviator and a fellow-European, to see that the Turks moved me from the criminal jail.

The aviator happened to be a friend of Oberleutnant Wolff, who fired the shot that brought me down near Shechem; and, having already heard the details of my capture, he recognized at once the absurdity of the Arab's story that I had brought him across the lines to spy for the British. He himself was furious at my bad treatment, for apart from their air combats the relations between German and British aviators in Palestine were of the best. He promised to go straight to German Air Headquarters and enlist its influence for me.

I left the German and was led by the guards to Turkish Headquarters.

For two hours we waited in a corridor; and then, before I had been interviewed, there arrived my friend the German pilot with two staff officers, a monocled major and a lieutenant. I shook hands--and was offered apologies for the brutalities I had suffered. It would all be right now, said the major, as the trio disappeared through the doorway of an office.

They returned with a Turkish colonel, who likewise shook hands and apologized. Finally, escorted by a different guard, I was sent away without having been questioned. The last I saw of the Arab was as he staggered and cringed under a box on the ear delivered by the colonel.

Once again I was led before the Turkish Platzkommandant. Evidently his knuckles had been telephonically rapped as a result of my treatment, for he scowled wickedly as he took my papers and ordered a room to be prepared for me in the barracks.

At first this room seemed a paradise after the slimy cell; but after a few days of utter loneliness its tiny dimensions--ten feet long by six feet wide--seemed to be closing in to crush me. The furniture was a bed with one greasy blanket and a rickety little table on which stood an earthenware jar.

Next morning I was again taken to Turkish Headquarters for interrogation. The Intelligence Officer who questioned me was very far from intelligent in his methods. He began by saying outright that since I had been moved to better quarters he expected me to show grat.i.tude by giving information. I replied that instead of showing grat.i.tude, I ought to receive compensation. He hinted that it was in his power to move me back to the criminal jail.

"Do as you like," I replied. "But since it is obvious that you are highly civilized, you will do nothing of the kind." Whereupon he smiled fatuously, and proceeded to ask leading questions, speaking in French.

"Is the report true that General Allenby has left Palestine for France?"

"I really don't know. Possibly. Possibly not."

"Have you seen General Allenby lately?"

"No. But I have a friend who once saw him driving along a road in France. But that was two years ago."

"Are the British preparing an attack near the coast?"

"Possibly. Possibly not. I really don't know."

These illuminating replies were noted down, word for word, by the Intelligence Officer. His desire for details about myself was inexhaustible. I did my best to satisfy it by telling him that I was aged eighteen; had been an aviator for five years and a soldier for six; had come from England on a ship named the _Hogwash_; had been flying the type of aeroplane known as the Jabberwock; had belonged to No. 1 Training Squadron, the best fighting squadron in Palestine; and thought the war would continue for fifteen and a half years longer.

Having presented the Turk with this medley of misinformation, and watched him transfer it to his notebook, I grew tired of invention and protested a lack of knowledge in reply to every question.

That chat and backchat with the wooden-headed Intelligence Officer was my only conversation, except a few whispered words, with a fellow-human for nearly a week. The Platzkommandant took his revenge for my complaints in two ways--by feeding me very badly, and by inflicting solitary confinement upon me.

Solitary confinement makes a man utterly wretched. Left all alone, and with nothing to distract his mind, a prisoner can only think and think and think--and all his thoughts are morbid.

I had six matches in my pocket and with these I invented all sorts of games and puzzles. But after a few hours my brain, refusing to concentrate on them, drifted back to the sea of bitter despair. At night-time the great difficulty was to keep my mind, not from drifting, but from _racing_.

After four days of solitary confinement I was fast losing all sense of balance and normality. At times I regretted not being back in the criminal jail with the repulsive Arab for company.

The few words I managed to exchange with the Christian woman who tidied my room each morning were an unspeakable joy. This woman--ragged, bootless, and gaunt--would whisper fierce questions in broken French as she threw water on the dusty floor, or stabbed with a hairpin some of the bed-bugs, while a guard watched through the open door to see that we did not conspire.

"Why come not English? We hungry. Pigs of Turks!"

And I had to whisper back that the English would come and drive the pigs of Turks out of Nazareth.

When she had taken her stooping back and her patchwork clothes out of the room, I would probably not have the chance to speak with anybody, even in a whisper, for the next twenty-four hours.