The Secrets of a Kuttite Part 24

_July 25th._--We were up at 6 a.m. The horses were very done, but their drivers goaded or thrashed them with thick sticks and made them gallop, and there were no brakes to help them. To pull up they ran into the bank, or into another cart. We had, on the previous day, pa.s.sed through hilly country dotted with villages and fairly well cropped. Everywhere we saw grazing the herds of Angora goats with their gaily-dressed goatherd standing over them blowing his pipes.

The Angora goat is a most beautifully fleeced animal with twisted horns and snow-white curly locks of fleece. The animals are kept for their wool as well as milk, and often supply the chief means of the people's subsistence in these parts. Besides milk, b.u.t.ter, and cheese, and sometimes the meat, the wool is woven into various garments, and the hide, laced with string, forms their shoes. These goatherds are very picturesquely dressed with coloured jackets and caps, and a bright red-striped k.u.mmerbund, in which is stuck the eternal Turkish knife. The arms and legs are criss-crossed with coloured cord.

The hills here and there are covered with herds, and at the head of these moving white dots moves their picturesque goatherd, blowing quaint sounds from his pipes. We pa.s.sed lots of these fellows marching as impressed recruits between Turkish soldiers, and shoved on to fight in the forlorn hope.

We have left the peak El Divan far behind. It is 4900 feet, so we must have climbed some 3000 feet above Angora. The country has now changed again to the more barren higher hills. A thunder shower surprised us on the top of one, but it cleared the air immensely. Then our cart broke down, and they repaired the pole with a pine tree growing near.

My wonder at these carts increases daily. Rattling and loosely bolted and wobbling, they appear to be on the point of breaking down every minute. Sometimes three of the tyres of our cart simultaneously were almost off, and the pole hung between the body of the cart and the tree often quite detached.

If the wheel slips off they bash it on with a rock or lump of wood, and, like Turkey itself, it just goes on.

At 3 p.m. we reached the small town of Changrai, the only place of any importance between Angora and Kastamuni.

We were frightfully done, but luck ordained it that we were bivouacked by a stream and under some trees quite close to the town.

Changrai is a pleasant little town with ten mosques on the steep hillside, heights all round, and many green orchards all about. We got honey, apples, and apricots, fairly cheap. I saw the Angora goat at close quarters. He is a cla.s.sy little fellow, small, and prettily shaped, with fine bright eyes and carrying the most spotless silken white fleece in the world.

_July 26th._--We left Changrai about 9 a.m. I had managed to change to another broken cart which would support me. It was more comfortable, and I travelled alone with the choush, enjoying my own thoughts and amusing myself by watching the antics of the goats or weaving romance around the feet of every goatherd. I could stretch my limbs, and I thanked G.o.d I was left to enjoy the peace of the mountain heights alone with a pipe. My cart being broken we were far in the rear of the column. At the hills I drove, and so escaped walking, the driver, a huge fellow, walking to watch his cart, and perhaps not unduly strain his repairs. As for me, my weight had fallen from ten stone twelve pounds to considerably under nine stone, so this came in convenient just now. In the afternoon we followed a track fringed by deep precipices crossed only by goat tracks. We camped in a gully near a village, to which we were not permitted to go. A few loaves arrived for us. We were very hungry in this spot, and the cold night sharpened up one's craving for food. We made some cocoa and soup, and after a spot of cognac like nothing quite else on earth we slept--for a time--until we discovered we were on ant-hills. I have since decided to back a squadron of red ants on the war-path against two battalions of Angora bugs. It was very cold, but the ants kept us moving.

_July 27th._--We made an early start just after the dawn.

We went down, down, down for 2000 feet, and then gradually up again over hills and gullies. We pa.s.sed some well-worn Hitt.i.te caves, like watch-keepers of the valley below. These quaint people that sprinted about among primaeval dews, and about whom so little is known, must have had a queer life of it in those high detached and lonely caves. They selected inaccessible places, like the eyrie of the eagle.

We rested at midday from eleven till one. Two goats were killed, but as we had no money we did without. The note is of no value in the country, and of little value in the town. No change can be got for any, however big the note is. Two of our officers we had to leave behind at Changrai sick with fever.

We subscribed some cash for them. I was glad to be able to keep going still, although I often felt fearfully nauseous and weak, with a thundering headache, at which time the cart generally started some of its gymnastic tricks. Malaria was still on me.

The big climb now lay ahead of us. We pushed on. The scenery became much more interesting. The forest thickened, and instead of chestnut and beech appeared the _pinus insignis_ and the mountain fir. We went up and up. Again I was reminded of Thuringen in Germany, and this time it was much more like it. The road grew steeper, the ravines larger, and the courses of winter's mountain torrents were now dry rocky boulder paths. The mountain fir with its drooping branches stood erect in marshalled battalions on the mountain slopes in the valleys, the tops swaying to the eternal music of the mountains. We quenched our thirst at excellent falls and springs on the way. It grew from chilly to very cold. Our blood was in a very poor condition, and the biting wind bit clean through one. We were now at the last climb of (Mount) El Ghaz Dagh, 5481 feet high, the ridge of which we were to cross being 4500. At five o'clock other horses gave out, and ours were taken, so I cramped up in another vehicle with the choush, from whom I understood by signs that we had in our turn invested Kut. Our heavy guns will soon shake it to pieces if we do invest it.

It was slow work to the top of the peak, but once over we descended rapidly in the face of an icy wind for two hours.

Tiny log-built hamlets lay cl.u.s.tered up together for warmth on the sides of the valleys. We followed the main valley until the stream widened at a saw-mill. There we lit fires and made ourselves warm and cooked some soup. We slept inside dark empty rooms in the mill, and here struck a new pest. They were swarms of lice and fleas, and we did a _shikar_ for them most of the night. I arose early feeling a rhythm of returning health. The cold bracing air of the mountains had undoubtedly done me a lot of good, and I felt stronger, although colitis and malaria still troubled me, and everything we ate was followed by sharp abdominal pains--a legacy of the siege.

I washed in the icy stream by the light of dawn. What a magnificent morning it was! The last mists of night floated away, and left the terraces of bronze-green firs shimmering in the morning sun and climbing up to the blue of heaven on the white sheets of El Ghaz Dagh. This would make an excellent trout stream. My last tin of milk and sugar which had kept me going so far was finished. My own cart had appeared in the night, and I left in it at 7 a.m. After a few miles of fern-edged brooks that tumbled along quite New Zealandy, we reached the plain again, and followed a road among scantily cropped stretches until three o'clock, when my driver pointed away to the right and said the one word.

"_Kastamuni!_" Turning around I beheld far away in a treeless basin a reddish-brown patch which proved to be the clay tiles of houses. In the distance it appeared as a brown-carpeted dip sunk down beneath the almost treeless gra.s.sy plain. This, then, was my first glimpse of our immediate bourne.

We were divided into two columns outside the town--evidently intended for different houses. I now learnt that in previous columns the officers of British regiments, including the R.F.A., my own regiment, had gone to Yozgard, due east from Angora. This was rather bad luck in a way, as among them were most of the officers I knew best.

We strolled down into a town larger than Changrai, with plentiful minarets arising above the brown roofs. The houses line the sides of the basin, which is merely the broadening out of a fertile little valley watered by a small stream that in the town is crossed by an interesting looking old stone bridge.

In the background and overlooking the town is a picturesquely situated fort, now in ruins.

We were rattled through the town, the people all gazing at us very interestedly. The shops, we observed, actually had in them such things as local tobacco (dreadful stuff, but better than nothing), sugar, and rice, and even sardines. We walked behind the carts that climbed and climbed to the further side of the town, which was the Greek Christian quarter, and on pa.s.sing a long row of dirty houses saw some of the other officers on the look-out, including Square-Peg. There were two groups of houses, Upper and Lower. We were to occupy a new house, the highest of all, attached to the Upper House. We swarmed into a front door down along an alley flanked by a wall, and found ourselves in what appeared a decent house for Turkey.

On going upstairs I found a landing, off which led four doors.

I opened one of them, and found myself inside a small room fourteen feet by ten feet, containing two beds, and, on going to the windows, saw a glorious view of the whole of Kastamuni and of the valley reaching out to the blue ranges in the distance, beyond which lay, somewhere near by, the Black Sea. A fresh breeze, seemingly straight from the hidden sea, drifted towards me as I stood by the open window. That decided me. I slung my things down and fell on the bed nearest the window, thanking G.o.d that the trek was done. I am now writing at the corner facing the same hills. It seems that here we must rest until we have done with these chains.

Our brother officers had put the Turks up to preparing a meal for us. Heavens! how we ate! There was white bread, boiled eggs, honey, b.u.t.ter, fresh milk. We ate and drank and drank and drank. There was a hot compet.i.tion now for bedrooms, and as mine had to be shared, I was fortunate enough to get a quiet stable companion to share with me.

We were not allowed out of the house until 7.30, when we were taken to a large two-storied Upper House--Mektub they called it, as it had previously been a school, and there a large room had been turned into a restaurant, and was run by a Turkish caterer. He gave us soup, and what we called toad-in-the-cuc.u.mber, or tomato as it happened, rice _pilau_, and a fried meat dish all heavily reeking with fat. A coffee shop was opened, which ran extra supplies of b.u.t.ter and honey, and also cognac, _mastik_ (the Turkish drink tasting of aniseed), and local thin German beer at 5_s._ a bottle. We got back after a lengthy wait, which we beguiled by comparing our experiences with those of other officers, and then hastened to bed. A few celebrated our arrival by a carousal, but I slept. Oh! the ecstasy of that night with the breeze playing over one's face--sleep that would not be broken at any unearthly hour by a "_Yallah_" for donkeys or by dust-storms or by a stampede.

At intervals in the night I awoke startled. Once I imagined I had fallen asleep on my donkey again, that we were pressing on in darkness over the desert, and, again, that an order had been given to move. But each time I found myself in bed beneath the cool night wind laden with scents of the mountains and the sea, and heard above the deep silence the sound of splashing water from some spring below. And I thought how very life-like was the trek that had led we knew not whither, and how, as in life also, we had craved for a sight beforehand into the future for a glimpse at our destiny. But one sees now the greater wisdom of G.o.d's plan that denied us a vision into the future which might have lessened our motive power and removed the need for trust or hope, but which demanded of us instead the virtue of patience to await the evolution of G.o.d's ways. And now more than that priceless perfect gift of being able to say honestly, "Thy will be done," would I desire to achieve the patience to overcome the difficult stretches of any road, patience to wait and await. We are told that whatever sorrow one has, it must exist in one's mind _only_ at the present. In this sense only the Present can be sorrow, and it is often a joy. But carrying us on from Present to Present, from Sorrowful Present to Happy Present, be it near or far, there is the Stream of Time, which the Divine Giver has placed by us all. To await, then, is merely to make a friend of this Stream of Time, the Happy Carrier, and pray for the patience to endure until....

_July 29th._--No words could describe my unbounded joy at receiving to-day news from the outside world. There was a postcard from friends in Camberley, saying that our defence has at last been understood, and asking what one wanted. It was such a cheery word. There was also a tiny letter three and three-quarter lines in length, which came many thousands of miles congratulating us on the siege, and announcing that parcels had already left for me. We hear they cannot arrive for months. There is yet, however, no word from my dear mother, or from home. I am now practically without socks, shirt, vests, or anything else, my boots in ribbons, and with one blanket.

We are to get seven liras a month, and our board and lodging costs nine liras at the least, as we have to pay an unjustified rent. What with tobacco and medicine, not to mention English food with which we must reinforce this Oriental provender, it will be at least fourteen liras and possibly eighteen a month.

_July 30th._--The intervening hours we have slept. One eats and then goes back to bed. We are all still extraordinarily done. To-day we visited the Turkish bath. One enters a large dilapidated vestibule with tiny sitting-up beds about four feet long arranged around the room. One undresses and wraps oneself up in a towel and shuffles in clogs into other rooms where hot water pours from a jet. Here one douses oneself, and then sweats heavily. A bucketful of cold water completes the bath, and then arrayed in clean towels we retreat to the bed, and over a cigarette and black coffee (awful stuff) watch the spiders in the great dome of the roof, or by counting the dozen layers of clothes with which the Turks hide their iniquities. We lie at full length, letting our legs stick out, feet beyond the beds, or c.o.c.k them up on the nearest wall.

All the people here seem well disposed towards us. They know we represent cash to them. At least they think so.

After the bath we were allowed to visit the bazaar for a few moments under the charge of a _posta_. There was an awful climb back to our house, to which we shall no doubt get accustomed in time.

We have written four postcards home, chiefly about what to send us. I am anxious to hear from my parents and sisters.

Their letters must have been returned, and I suppose they have had anxious times, not hearing from me for so long or knowing whether I was still alive. The cheerful four-lined letter I received from Camberley must have been written after newspaper announcement of the fall of Kut.

CHAPTER IX

LIFE IN KASTAMUNI--THE FIRST SUMMER, 1916

_July 31st._--Yesterday was two months since leaving Baghdad, a journey I shall always a.s.sociate with sorrow and fort.i.tude. It was already a trail of dead and dying from other columns, and we freshened it up with contributions of our own. But time flies. It is already three months since we left Kut. During that time I cannot recall one Turkish promise that they have kept. This is a performance, but for us to have so far survived it and also their indifference, is an achievement.

After a time we hope news will leak through, but at present there is none. We are to be allowed a German-inspired daily written in French and published in Stamboul, called the _Hillal_. According to it fighting still proceeds in France in the same old zone, while in Mesopotamia the front is near Amara--which one doubts. It is almost two years since the war started. Great movements in the national life of most European nations seem to be merging into international.

With peace, I believe fresh and wonderful Gulf Streams will circulate in the new political world that must arise.

_August 1st._--I have met Haig of the 24th, whom I knew at Hyderabad, and whom I saw last in the retirement. We have so far almost no liberty, not being allowed to go even to the second part of the house. But we understand this will change very soon. Once a week we are permitted to go to the Turkish bath, and once a week to the bazaar, where the prices are exorbitant. b.u.t.ter or honey is 30 piastres an oke, or 2_s._ 6_d._ a pound, sugar 40 to 50 piastres, or 4_s._ 6_d._ a pound, and tea, bad tea at that, 10_s._ a pound. There is little else to be had, and clothing is a fict.i.tious price. However, one's credit in the bazaar is practically unlimited. The shopkeepers prefer to trust us rather than their own people, and take cheques rather than paper money. Medicines are more or less unprocurable.

_5 p.m._--Turned in with rising fever. Several officers in our house have been down with it already, and I hoped I was to have escaped. A strong physical reaction has set in with many of our column, and all sorts of sicknesses are going about. For one thing, we have practically starved for half a year, and now these fatty foods of the Turks rather try one's weakened digestion. We negotiate huge quant.i.ties of fresh milk and lebon.

_August 2nd._--Lieut. Locke died in the Turkish hospital last night, and, as a result, a scare started among the Turkish officials. One of their doctors came around to see all those in bed, and I was ordered, much against my will, to the Turkish hospital. They don't understand malaria at all, or that, for colitis, the only thing to do is to diet. And, from what we hear, the last place for diet is a Turkish hospital.

However, one is in the hands of these interpreters, and for the most part they are lying, frightened, Greek or Armenian knaves. Ours required me to leave everything--even mere requisites--and set out for the hospital a "few moments away."

Extraordinarily weak, I shambled off and followed him on a considerable trek, for a sick man, all around the town.

Then he bolted for his dinner, leaving me in charge of the soldier, who, poor chap, couldn't read his papers. On arriving at the place we were refused admittance, and there was no one there to read the admission paper. A wait of hours I spent by sitting out on the roadside in the hot sun, near a cafe; a delightful occupation for a man shivering with ague and with a temperature of 103. Then I discovered a patient who spoke some French, and he got the only Turkish orderly there to show me a bed. I was taken to the bed whereon poor Locke had just died from enteritis and dysentery.

They had not even removed the sheets. How I loathed the Turks at that moment. However, I was so tired that I got into bed. In the same room were three Turkish civilians, and two British officers I found next door.

No one appeared. I had left my room in the morning, but by night I had only succeeded in getting some water. By evening the ague had gone, and I wanted some nourishment, and set to prowl around the place to get it. I had plenty of violent scenes, but did not succeed in finding the pantry.

I began to believe that I had come to a huge automatic healing establishment where by a series of Christian Scientific brain waves one imagined oneself fed and convalescent. I heard that Locke had been left unattended in his house, after request, four or five days before he was even inspected by the Turkish doctor, and then, on his moving to this hospital, had a reception similar to mine. He died the same evening as he entered.

After my unsuccessful shikar for food through the great building I returned in no amiable mood, and it was then that the humorous G.o.ds held high council, and, remembering my opinion on Angora bugs, provided a little joke for themselves afresh. These new bugs were for shock tactics. There was no artillery preparation or demonstration from flank battalions, but suddenly I was awakened from a doze by bitings in fifty places. Leaping out of bed I gathered them up in threes and fours. Tearing my clothes off I caught the rear files before they could get to cover. Undismayed, they renewed the attack as soon as I again tried to sleep. This became too ridiculous. Finally, my language attracted a crowd of laughing Turks, and one informed me in French that the hospital was famous for bugs. The pillow and mattress I discovered to be their first line, but their reserve lines were in the wooden frieze. "Ye G.o.ds!" I thought, "this is too much. Here am I starving and curing myself and doing my best to smile over it when I'm expected to put up a regular hunt!" I slung the mattress away and, seizing some clothes from a wardrobe outside, with the orderly hanging on to me the while, remade the bed. Still on they came. I decided that if I were Napoleon I would change the Turkish crescent to a bug pa.s.sant, with that half-comical grin the lions pa.s.sant have, the near fore paw in the air and face screwed around at you. I collapsed towards dawn with sheer irritation. But in my sleep on they came, on from every wall, from every point of the horizon, from the sky, from beyond the confines of the universe--I myself was becoming a bug--when I awoke with a roar, and saw the Turkish orderly standing beside me grinning. I gave him cigarettes for appreciating a situation I no longer could myself, and he taught me some more Turkish "Zorari yok" (never mind), and "Yawash" (gently).

I awaited the dawn with an increasing hunger, having now devoured about a handful of lump sugar I had put into my pocket as an emergency ration. The hours crawled by until eleven, when the visiting doctor came.

Now, by this time I had begun to find out a thing or two about the Turk. Unless you ask, he never does anything; if you do, he merely promises he will. Your only chance is to be demonstrative and impress him. This fellow was a robust, bouncing, overfed, callous, perpetual-smile-sort-of-fellow.

Waiting until he wished me good morning, I leaped clean out of bed, with a frightful roar that brought a dozen people into the room, and showed him pints of blood--mine and the bugs'--all over the wall, bed, mattress, etc., etc.

Then I cursed the place in German, in English, and terrible French, and applied my word, "fenner," vigorously, ending up my objecting to my treatment with gestures, etc., etc.

For the first minute or two he laughed, and then he sat down and mopped his forehead and explained he came only once a day, and without an order from him it might have been risky to give me any food, etc. He wrote out a beautiful diet sheet, and sent me some medicine for the colitis. This did me good, certainly, but I waited all day for the milk and cornflour and soup. At five o'clock one small cup of the weakest imaginable tea arrived. Nothing else. It now appeared that an order by the doctor on one day did not take effect until the following day, as they had to send out for supplies. I was really terribly ravenous. That evening, about 8 p.m., when two orderlies brought round a trench table filled with loaves of bread and plates of soup, I waited until they were gone a second and seized a loaf, which I plunged in the soup, and returned to my bed, where I devoured most of it. The other Turks in the room, I believe, informed the orderly, who searched for the remainder of the loaf in my bag; but we had a wrestle for it, and while he sent out for a posta, I finished it. Later he appeared, laughing, and took some more cigarettes.

The situation developed along these lines until the next morning, when the doctor came again. This time I was coldly indignant, and showed him a letter of complaint to the American Amba.s.sador at Stamboul, and requiring to be sent back to my house. The result was he put me on an enormous diet at once of bread and buffalo meat that would have killed any Englishman, certainly a siege-battered, starved, feverish, colitis-stricken sick man.

I distributed my rations among the two officers next door, one of whom was a most congenial person, named Fox--an officer I didn't know in Kut, as he had been in Woolpress most of the time. We had long discussions on Turks and bugs. The next morning another doctor came, and, seeing my diet sheet full, evidently thought the Turkish commissariat couldn't stand this, and discharged me from hospital.

The medicine had done me some good, but otherwise I was weaker on leaving the hospital than entering it. Fox and I trekked back. How glad we were to get out of it! I had expected an interesting girl in a purdah to look after me, and all kinds of delicacies. One learns apace in these days.

On the way we pa.s.sed Captain Martin, I.M.S., recently arrived, and he sympathized with us, and promised us that in future he would look after us all. I was very glad to regain my room once more. Another small party of relicts had arrived from Angora, amongst whom were Blind Hookey, who was at the Christmas dinner in Kut, and Young Lacy, whom I had left at Samarra. He had had great luck. When he was quit of the fever he had managed to join a small party and was driven the whole way. Our column, including as it did the native officers, and travelling in the wake of the whole division, seems to have had probably the worst time of any, and certainly one saw most of the tragedy of the trek.

Our whole house is now pretty full.

_August 7th._--Malaria returned. The ague was more severe this time. Quinine we have at last procured in small quant.i.ties at the rate of five piastres a cachet, which means that one's malaria medicine bill will be fifteen shillings daily. A cold snap in the weather has sent several others here down with malaria. Kastamuni is said to have a cold winter, so we hope to get this fever quite out of our system. It is raining steadily--the first rain since arriving here.