Shadows come a’ creeping;Little stars are peeping;Church bells distantly sound.Lie still, my babe, in your cot gently sleeping,Dreaming while the world spins round.Dream of your mother, her watch gladly keeping,Smiling while the world spins round.Through the curtains gleaming,Moonlight comes a’ beaming;Hush! My Baby, we’re found.Deep in the night the old moon sees you dreaming,Sleeping while the world spins round.Bright kind old face, like a sentinel seeming,Smiling while the world spins round.
Shadows come a’ creeping;Little stars are peeping;Church bells distantly sound.Lie still, my babe, in your cot gently sleeping,Dreaming while the world spins round.Dream of your mother, her watch gladly keeping,Smiling while the world spins round.Through the curtains gleaming,Moonlight comes a’ beaming;Hush! My Baby, we’re found.Deep in the night the old moon sees you dreaming,Sleeping while the world spins round.Bright kind old face, like a sentinel seeming,Smiling while the world spins round.
Russian Lullaby
Towardsthe latter end of May the great “strafe” ended. The Turks informed us that our punishment was fulfilled, and that we were to return to normal times again. For several days the senior officers of the different nationalities were very busy examining our new quarters and arranging matters generally, and then we began to move by masses out of the church. The French went first, to an Armenian house in the town. Soon afterwards the Russians followed to other houses in the same part of the Armenian quarter. And then the British officers, of whom there were now about forty, moved into a completely new block of jerry-built houses down by the station road. So new were the houses that the one I was in had no doors or windows when we went into it, and was not really completed the whole time we were there.
This block of four houses was known as the Lower Camp, for the Armenian quarter, or Upper Camp, was on higher ground and about a mile distant from it.
The Lower Camp consisted of a row of four houses under one continuous roof. Each house contained a kitchen and two rooms on the ground floor, as well as an open space in the centre, and three bedrooms upstairs, grouped round a central landing which served as a mess-room. The orderlies lived downstairs, and the officers upstairs, two in one small room at the back, and four in each of the two larger rooms in front.
Behind the houses was an open space, of rather over a quarter of an acre in extent, bounded by the backs of the houses on one side and by walls on the other three. This was known as the garden; for, when first we got there, it contained a couple of dozen cherry-trees about as big as walking-sticks. But these did not long survive, for a quarter of an acre is not a large playground for forty active officers and a dozen equally active orderlies, to say nothing of dogs and Turkish guards.
From the upper rooms we had wide views in both directions, out across the plain and far away into the distant hills. The front facedapproximately south-east, and thirty miles away we could see the fine range of mountains known as the Sultan Dagh, capped with snow until far on into the summer. From the back windows we could see the Kara-Hissar, and a number of other rocky hills, like islands in the plain; and, in the distance, rolling hills and mountains one behind another. A good deal of the plain visible between the rocks was saline, and in early summer was blue with masses of a wild flower we knew as sea lavender.
It was really a beautiful view, especially in the spring, when the land was not so colourless as at other times. The soil of the plain was very soft and friable, and much dust used to hang in suspension, giving very vivid colours to the sunsets; sunsets of golden pheasants and peacocks’ tails, and sunsets of red-hot copper. I have seen every shadow on the wall in the evening as blue as the bluest sea.
In the late summer great dust-storms used to roll up across the plain. We could see them gather on the distant hills, and come speeding towards us like banks of fog. And, as we hurriedly closed all the windows and fixed them tight, the storms would break upon the rocks, towering up high into the air in waves of brown, while the main body drove furiously towards usand lashed at the windows. A high wind would blow furiously for a few minutes, and then the storm would pass on across the plain, and rain would sprinkle the dust.
Some day that plain will be a great natural aerodrome, where people will halt on their way from Europe to the Far East.
The inhabitants of the house I was in, No. 3, were practically the same as in the house by the city wall in Angora. No. 1 was principally Mesopotamian, No. 2 chiefly the old Afion crowd, and No. 4 largely composed of the second Angora house. During the next two and a-half years many new prisoners came, and the old inhabitants had periodical times of restlessness when they shifted round, but the nuclei of the houses remained more or less constant, and the characteristic tone of each house remained practically unalterable. It is a very curious thing this tone or soul of each small subdivision of a community. I suppose every home in England has its own personal tone. Certainly each house in a public school has. Each ship has, and each regiment; and, in a larger way, each nation has, and will retain it despite Bolshevism.
We had not long been in the Lower Camp when new prisoners began to arrive. I cannot pretend to remember the order of their coming,for I kept no diary and have not a single note to help me; it does not, in any case, matter.
The yeomanry taken at Katia in the Sinai peninsula passed through on their way to a town in the north of Anatolia. We only had a glimpse of them as they passed; but we were able to supply them with a few books.
Other prisoners came in who stayed with us. The earliest to arrive were a very few who had been taken, one or two at a time, in the attempt to relieve Kut. One of these had been kept for several days in a small tent with a number of Arabs condemned to death. The Arabs were not allowed out of the tent for any purpose whatever.
Another had been chained to an Indian, and had dysentery while so chained. He and the Indian both got typhus, and the Indian died. After weeks in hospital the Britisher pulled through typhus, malignant malaria, and chronic rheumatism. He is now pulling through phthisis. Before that he had had sunstroke, and he was shot through the chest; not a bad record for a constitution to have pulled through.
Another British officer had been housed in the public gaol at Mosul, among the Turkish criminals, whose habits were so filthy that he asked to be allowed a privy to himself. Hisrequest was met by an order calculated to humiliate a clean Englishman in the eyes of the people of Mosul; for, after that, he was taken out each day by an armed guard and graciously permitted to make use of the street in the open bazaar. As I said before, Turks are a disgusting people.
Gradually, as more prisoners arrived, we overflowed into the Upper Camp. The Russians were sent away to another part of Anatolia, and their houses given over to British.
One other visit we had, from a German Staff-Colonel and several subordinates. “When will the war end?” we asked the great man.
“When we have taken Verdun,” was his reply.
We had not much liberty at this time. A certain number of officers were allowed to go shopping on several days in the week. A piece of rocky ground was assigned to us to play cricket on. Each officer was allowed to go to the Turkish bath once a week. And once a week the camps visited each other.
For the rest, we had the garden, and the Upper Camp had a part of the street between their houses.
The chief game in the garden was a sort of badminton, played over a net with tennis rackets and balls made of stitched-up lumps of old sock.It went by the name of Bufru, coined by a cunning forger of Turkish.
But indoors there were many activities, both mental and physical. I should be afraid to say how many people wrote books. But the number of those who wrote plays must have been even greater. Some of them were very well produced. Several officers, notably one of the Australians, showed themselves to be quite expert designers of costumes, and most efficient needlemen. And some of the youngsters made very pretty women. The art of the female sex, in dressing as they do, was borne in upon me when I saw how quite plain young men could be made to look most attractive girls.Afor a day,Bfor a week, andCfor a life partnership, as someone wickedly compared the attractions of the three leading ladies. Some of the plays were very funny indeed, but the wit was not of that order which makes you pride yourself that you can see it. As a rule, it flew up and struck you all of a heap.
Another trial of the times was the debating society, in which all things on earth were discussed in due form, with a chairman, a proposer and seconder, an opposer and his second, a butter-in, and a ribald gallery. For days afterwards I used to hear the points argued and re-debated by the orderlies in the kitchen beneath my room. Andtwo of the officers took themselves as future Public Men so seriously that they used to practise elocution on each other, each in turn suffering himself to be addressed by the other as “Gentlemen.”
There were lectures, too, some of them very good ones. The subjects dealt with were catholic and included cocoanut-planting, Mendelism, flying, submarines, Singhalese history, Greek coins, Egyptian irrigation, and a host of other matters.
Besides these public efforts, there were men studying all manner of things in little cliques, or by themselves. One officer who knew no Arabic tapped Zaki to such good purpose that he (not Zaki) wrote an Arabic grammar. One old Australian of fifty, who had always lived, and would continue to live, in the back of beyond, studied simultaneously French, Norwegian, and Esperanto. There were teachers of mathematics, teachers of German, Tamil, Italian, Turkish and Russian. There were people teaching themselves to draw, or to play musical instruments. There were people studying law and medicine. I am sure that, at that time, we were the greatest centre of intellectual endeavour in the whole of the Turkish Empire.
In addition to the more purely intellectual occupations there were a number of really skilled carpenters, an officer who made himself an excellent little forge, where he turned out some very clever work, after having first manufactured the needful tools out of scrap steel; among them I remember a pocket-knife with various implements in it, and a stethoscope. The latter was for Bill.
Then there were cunning adorners of rooms, and still more cunning mixers of cocktails, in which a number of nauseous ingredients was made to taste good, as two negatives make an affirmative.
There were also breeders of dogs. Quite a rage there was for keeping dogs, on a quarter of an acre of land. Hilda and Gumush, the two original hounds of the Church days, presented their owners respectively with twelve and eleven puppies all in one week. At first it was very pretty to watch Bart training the young greyhounds, and teaching them to jump; he was a notable trainer of dogs. But when they all grew up, the overcrowding became intolerable. Public opinion revolted. Feelings were very deeply stirred, and people voted anti-dog or pro-dog, or pro-two-dogs, or pro or anti every possible combination and permutation of dogs.In the end the dogs were treated much as the Armenians. Some were slain, more were deported, and only three remained: Hilda, Gumush, and a funny little animal called Roger, who had a long body on the smallest legs, with the lowest gear, that I have ever seen.
In addition to dogs there were other pets: ducks, pigeons, chickens, enormous eagle-owls, a vulture, magpies, and finally a wolf. Cats were tried, but were somehow not a success.
There was also the native fauna. In my room I caught mice, voles, and shrews. Also smaller and more unpleasant creatures. Quite a feature of the spring awakening was the almost universal “bug-strafing” of beds. Our beds were all home made: a frame of pinewood, strung with thin rope, and carried on four legs. The joints and the holes where the rope passed through were the chief haunts of the foe. After breakfast, on a warm morning, officers in shirt sleeves, with kettles of boiling water and pots of Stockholm tar, might be seen carrying out that bold military measure known as a bug-strafe.
In summer I slung my bed by four ropes from the ceiling, and was fairly immune. They did not climb down the ropes, and they could not reach up from the floor, even standing on tip-toe.It was not only secure, but uncommonly comfortable.
Occasionally the Turks searched through our belongings to see if we had disguises, or diaries, or food stored for escape.
The first time they did it they caught us properly; but made an awful muddle of their triumph.
We were all ordered out into the garden, for what purpose we did not know; and, once out, sentries were placed at all the doors, and we were not allowed back again. But we asked as a favour that one cook in each house might be permitted to return, as otherwise our dinners would be spoiled. This was allowed. They began by searching No. 1 house, and as they were doing so our noble cook hid everything of any importance that he could lay hands on. Some under the charcoal, and some under the straw in Roger’s kennel. Roger was very snappy with Turks, like all good dogs he detested them; and he sat tight on all my MSS. among other things. Everything in writing that a Turk cannot understand is to him abominable. What he can understand is rare above rubies.
Despite the efforts of the cooks, they did find a great deal of written matter, some of which it had been very unwise to keep: such things asdiaries with descriptions of acts of atrocity in them, and plans for escape. There was nothing, so far as I ever heard, of the slightest military value. But there was a great deal that might have done us much harm. Perhaps the church over again. Fortunately the whole mass of literature was so enormous that it could not possibly be dealt with on the spot, so everything, plays, books, mess accounts, and the notes of study, as well as the more dangerous things, was stuffed into two or three sacks, and put in a small house in the garden. In addition to the sentry permanently in the garden, another, with a loaded rifle, was placed to guard the small house. This consisted of one room, with a barred window at one end, and a barred window and a locked door at the side. The side opposite to the door was blank, and was part of the garden wall. But the end facing No. 4 house had a tiny window in it which had no bars. There were no blinds to any of the windows, and the sentry had only to look in to see that the sacks were still there.
The matter was very serious indeed. There was some very incriminating stuff there, and we did not at all desire another two months of the church. All sorts of measures were proposed and rejected. Burning the whole place down was mooted, but decided to be impossible, for paperburns so slowly that the sacks would certainly be saved. Then Bart did a very daring thing. He had slim shoulders, but a great heart, and he thought his narrow body might squeeze through the unbarred window. He waited an opportunity and dived through. Once in, squatted on the floor, the sentry would have to come right up to the window in order to see him. But the sentry only watched the door. And while he watched, Bart went through the lot as swiftly as a post office sorter, and removed more than half of the most dangerous items. He got safely out again, while the sentry still watched the door.
In No. 3 house, an officer named Budd was less fortunate. Trying to explain that he wanted to keep the mess accounts, he lost his temper and damned the interpreter. He was at once searched personally, and sent away into the town, where he was confined in a cellar. When he asked for bread, the gaoler said, “Para yok, ekmek yok,” which means, “No money, no bread.” Fortunately, Budd had money; but he had a very unpleasant five or six days before he was released. In the cell next to his he heard a poor, miserable little Chaldean priest, who had bravely but unwisely kept some record of the Armenian girls enslaved in various Turkishfamilies, being mercilessly flogged, and screaming in his agony.
Bart had collected some of the diaries, but there were still others, and at least one plan of escape most unwisely committed to writing. A community would be incomplete without its salt of folly.
A few days later the remaining documents returned to us too. The Turks had bungled over the cooks, bungled over guarding their spoil, and now they bungled again worse than ever. They had a positive genius for incompetency: a masterly faculty for determining the wrong way to do a thing, and for doing it. After a few days, a sack of papers and note-books was returned to the camp. To our surprise, it was found to contain all those documents which we had feared the Turks might discover and keep.
But the puzzle was elucidated by a letter which followed, a rather abject letter from the interpreter, stating that he had returned the wrong sack by mistake, and, if we would not tell the Commandant of his error, would now send us the right one! So we recovered everything.
In the Upper Camp they were not so lucky. There, the Turks adopted the simple method of destroying all written matter. It was things likethat which made it so difficult for officers to keep any account of the treatment of their men.
The only person, besides Budd, who suffered actual penalty from this raid, so far as I remember, was the celebrated French cook, late of the Jockey Club. He had kept a diary, and in it had stupidly written the use to which he thought the Turkish flag should be put by a French sailor. It might be thought, after some of our treatment, that this was merely tit-for-tat, six of one and half a dozen of the other. As a fact, it was twelve dozen of one and very gross of the other. So the French cook went to gaol, and we saw him in Afion no more.
In this gallery of portraits I think Porter is more than worthy of mention. He was an orderly in No. 4 house, a slight, fair-haired young fellow from the Isle of Wight. Before the war he had been a barber, and he used to cut our hair and trim our beards: for many of us grew beards. But his claim to fame was that he was the most wounded man in Afion. In an attack on Gallipoli he had been shot through the body, and while lying on the ground had been terribly wounded again by shrapnel. To finish him off the Turks had cut his head open with a shovel, and bayoneted him many times. He had in alltwenty-one wounds. But he resolutely refused to die, and when last I saw him was as merry as a cricket, and able to play quite a good game of football. I sometimes wonder how many wound-stripes he is entitled to, and whether he is trying to grow fat enough to wear them all. He told me once that what he disliked most was being stabbed in the stomach; and he certainly is an authority to be respected.
Having no diary, I shall certainly not tempt critics by trying to fix a date for the total eclipse of the moon. But one occurred while I was in the lower camp, some time between June of 1916 and November of 1917. It was either just before or just after the entry of Greece into the war. Elston and I, who occupied a small room at the back of the house, had gone to bed early and were nearly asleep when we were roused by repeated firing away in the town. We sat at the window and watched flash after flash; some in the streets, some on the hill-side, and some apparently from the windows. There were the shots of modern rifles, of revolvers, and the duller boom of old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns. We thought at first it was brigands attacking the town. Then we remembered the Greeks, and we feared that a great massacre had begun, for there were many Greeks in Afion.They must be putting up a good fight, we thought, as we listened to the continuous crackling, and watched the flashes. So we went across the mess-room to see if the others in the front rooms, had heard it, too. We found them all gathered at the windows, watching the eclipse of the moon. The whole town was blazing away at the dragon who was swallowing the moon. In the road before the house our sentries stood anxiously, all blazing away Government ammunition in the good cause; ammunition that was meant for us. They just flung their rifles to their shoulders and opened rapid fire, loaded up, and did it again.
In No. 2 house there was an officer who had lived for years in Turkey and knew the language well; so, when the N.C.O. in charge of the guard addressed his troops, we had a ready interpreter. “We are all ignorant men,” said the chaous. “I am ignorant myself. But I know that the moon has not gone for ever. It will return. Still, I don’t like that blood-red colour, so fire away.” And they did.
Toa large extent, the events chronicled in the last chapter overlap into the second year. Some have been recorded as the natural sequels to others, and some generalisations cover the whole of captivity. But, broadly speaking, I am trying to make the record as continuous as possible, and to preserve chronological order.
We had been in Turkey for less than a year when we first established code correspondence with England. All our letters were censored in Vienna as well as in Constantinople, and perhaps locally; but, so far as we know, our code was never discovered. It was suspected, at least, some means of communication was suspected, because the Turkish Government was requested, through the Dutch Embassy, to set right certain urgent wrongs, and they knew that some one of us must have reported those wrongs. Lettersfrequently used to arrive with the marks of a hot iron on them, showing that they had been tested for at least one form of invisible writing. There are many forms of invisible writing, but we did not use them. We used a plain, straightforward code, and our letters might have been read by anyone on earth. It was curious that none of us should have arranged a code before leaving home, but no one had, and I never yet met a prisoner who had even contemplated the idea of being captured.
Since our correspondence, after passing through several hands and various different addresses in England, eventually reached the War Office, it is obviously impossible for me to describe it. But I should like, however anonymously, to pay a tribute to the clever person who received the first code letter, realized that it was code, discovered the key to it, knew what to do with it, and acted as our central post office for the two and a-half years. He (she) had no idea that a code message was coming, and had no clue beyond what his (her) brain afforded.
It is a pleasure, too, to be able to claim that, though immobilized, we were not altogether useless.
What exactly they would have done with us if they had brought home to us a charge of conveyinginformation of military value, I do not know. The most probable fate would have been a dungeon until the end of the war, or for as long as one could stand it. But, though I am unable to make further reference to the system we actually used, it may not be completely without interest to give an example of what can be done in the simplest possible way. For instance, a prisoner writes the following letter:—
Dear ElijahIt is four months now since you wrote to me about the proposed division of Dad’s property, and I have not had a single line since. If I am passed over because I am away it will be very hard, through no fault of my own. I don’t think that Gwendoline will be greedy enough to treat me as you say. And anyhow I rely upon you to do your best to bag the old hall clock for me. Dear old Dad always meant it for me, and it seems only yesterday that he promised me it, &c. &c.
Dear Elijah
It is four months now since you wrote to me about the proposed division of Dad’s property, and I have not had a single line since. If I am passed over because I am away it will be very hard, through no fault of my own. I don’t think that Gwendoline will be greedy enough to treat me as you say. And anyhow I rely upon you to do your best to bag the old hall clock for me. Dear old Dad always meant it for me, and it seems only yesterday that he promised me it, &c. &c.
That is simple enough. It would pass any censor. But it contains military information. It is not the code we used, but it was, as a matter of fact, one which was held in reserve as a possibly useful one. It was never communicated home.
Read it again in the light of the key, which is the Greek letter π. Every schoolboy knows π. It is something or other to do with the relation of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. I am no mathematician, but I know that π means 3·14159. Take the third wordof the first line, the first of the second line, the fourth of the third line, and so on right through the letter following π. It will then read: “Four division passed through to Bag Dad yesterday.”
In addition to writing codes, I took to studying cypher, and of all the nine or ten varieties of cypher given me by various prisoners never found one for which a method of solution could not be worked out. An average piece of Playfair took me about three and a-half hours: probably an expert would do it in half that time. This is not written as an advertisement for the study of cypher, but to show the straits to which a prisoner may be driven for want of occupation. Few occupations are more detestable than poring over cypher, but total inaction is worse. It is an occupation for a slave, and now I am no longer a slave I hope never to do it again.
Enough has been said of prisoners’ occupations now for the rest to be left to imagination. Here endeth the Arts and Crafts section.
Towards the end of the summer of 1916 some of the generals taken in Kut passed through Afion. None of them made more than one night’s stop there. But after them there came some officers who did stop; and from them we heard how the men had suffered on their deadly trek over the desert. The road from Bagdad to Aleppo isstrewn with the bones of the British and Indian soldiers of Kut. We used to see gangs of men arrive and walk up from the station to the town, almost too weak to look up at our windows as they passed. And hundreds, thousands, have died or been killed on the way, long before they reached Afion. At Afion itself they were not badly treated then, but they reached that comparative refuge so weak and worn out that very many of them died there. We used to see their bodies by twos and threes and half-dozens being carried to the Armenian cemetery where they were buried. We were not allowed to go to their funerals, but later, when we had a padre, he was allowed to read the burial service over the Christians.
The senior British officer was allowed a little, a very little, communication with the men. The other officers were allowed none at all. But through our shopping orderlies we kept in touch with them. Those shopping orderlies became masters of intrigue. I am sure that each successive senior officer did every single thing that he could for the men. It was uphill work the whole way through. The unfortunate officer who had to deal direct with the Turkish officials found himself baffled at every point by lies, and lies, and lies; by cheating and by bare-faced robbery.Whatever he could do he did do, but it was absolutely heart-breaking. Thank goodness, I was a very junior officer, and one who trembled in the presence of more than three stars.
I have been to that cemetery, not so very bad a place as cemeteries go. There is a stone wall round it, and in it are a number of Armenian tombstones of white marble. Many of them have carved upon them little pictures of the implements proper to the deceased’s trade: scissors for a tailor, a hammer and a chisel for a stonemason, and so forth. A very large number bear the image of a small basin with a very fat caterpillar in it. I thought it was the worm which dieth not, but others have held it to be a chalice containing the spirit of the departed rising in vapour.
It was a sad place, and many good fellows lie there, both officers and men, who need not have died.
Afion was looked upon by the Turks as a rest camp. The church and the Medrisseh were used as barracks for the sick and for worn-out prisoners. But when the men gained strength again they were sent out in working parties: some to cut timber in the forests near the Black Sea, some to work on the railway then being built through the Taurus mountains, and some even beyond the Taurus. There were good places and there werebad; and in the worst of them life was Hell, and death came swiftly.
The only prisoner we ever had who had been a prisoner in Germany too during this war—he had escaped from there and been recaptured—said that the difference in treatment between the worst places in Germany and Turkey was this: in Germany the men were ill-treated until they became ill, and were then put into hospital; in Turkey they were ill-treated until they became ill, and were then ill-treated more until they died. Before the end we used to reckon, so far as we could get smuggled figures, that seventy-five per cent. of all men who had been taken prisoners two years or more earlier were dead. Three out of every four. It was not only the Kut prisoners who had gone on short rations before they were captured. It was all the prisoners, all those who were not officers. For the Turks thought that if they sent back to England most of the officers, no inquiry would be made about the men by the British nation, any more than, in the opposite case, the Sublime Porte would have seriously objected. I have met people who thought it was only the Kut prisoners who were ill-treated, but, once that tragic march across the desert was over, the prisoners from Kut, officers and men alike, mixed with the other prisoners from all the other frontsand were in no way distinguished from them, either by the Turks or by themselves.
There were places where working parties were treated well. We heard the most extraordinary tales of places where British N.C.O.’s were running the whole show themselves, running the prisoners and running the Turks too: men who had come to the top by sheer force of character. It is very greatly to be hoped that some account of this will see daylight. I wish the details were in my hands. But these places were rare. There were other hells upon earth where the men were beaten and starved, robbed of the money sent them from home, robbed of their parcels, frozen in the winter and overdriven in the summer until they died, either from sheer collapse or from one of the many diseases that a dirty country breeds.
People who have no special knowledge of Turkey-in-Asia hardly realize what the winter is like there. The last winter we were in Afion snow fell at the end of November and did not melt until the middle of March. The temperature ranged round about zero for a good many weeks. What this meant to the men in some of the bad places can easily be imagined. Clothes were provided for them by our Government, acting through the Protecting Embassy; but, exceptwhere British officers were stationed and were permitted to issue them, these clothes were nearly always stolen. So were their boots. One of the orderlies in the house I was in latterly had twice been to hospital—before he became an orderly—and each time he had been looted of every stitch he possessed and of his boots. Both times he had to start again in Turkish rags.
It is not my aim to complain about the lot of the officers. We were lucky to be alive, and we did not really have a very bad time. But most of the men were so unlucky that they are now dead, and while they lived they suffered all manner of ill.
This book would indeed be incomplete were I to fail to tell of the plight of the men.
I expect they are forgetting it. People do forget things.
But I must go back to our own history, the history of the Lower Camp in 1916-17.
That winter was a mild one. We played football about two or three times a week on a small ground about half a mile from the camp. Association was the rule that year, but the following winter we played Rugby. The football ground was a long, rather narrow strip between two ploughed fields, and the reasons it was not ploughed up were two. It sloped toward theroad, and all the lower portion was used as a threshing floor at harvest time. The Turkish method of threshing is a very remarkable one, very early, I imagine. When the straw stacks have ripened sufficiently they are broken up, and large circular mats of straw with the grain in it are arranged upon the ground. On these mats sleds made of three planks, and, drawn by horses, are driven round and round, as though in a circus. Under the sleds are grooves containing rows of sharp flints which cut all the straw up into chaff and separate the grain from the husk. Then the whole mass is winnowed in the wind, and divided into two heaps, one of food for man and the other of food for beasts. Which of the two our bread was made of I forget.
This threshing naturally requires a good deal of space, and it protected the lower part of our football field. The upper half was conserved in quite a different way, for it was a Hebrew cemetery.
There was a large slab or soft rock in it, roughly squared and conveniently situated for those who wished to watch the game.
Three of us were sitting on this one day when a Turk, driving a cart along the road, turned his horse and drove up to this stone. He asked us to move to one side, and then gravely led the horsethree times round the stone, after which he dug out a piece of earth from under the stone and gave it to the horse to eat. The only thing we could get out of him was that the horse was ill and that it would now get well. To prove his point he beat it all the way back to the road and made it canter. There was only one thing remarkable about the stone, and that was that it was pierced all over by nails hammered in, nails of all shapes and sizes, and some of them entirely rusted away, leaving only a stained hole. But just think of the plight of that poor horse! Officially speaking, it was now well, registered as A1. Any further weariness would be put down to malingering, and treated accordingly.
In the spring of 1917 we began to get a little more liberty. For some time the Commandant answered all applications to be allowed to go out for walks by saying that the weather was not yet fine enough, a subterfuge so transparent that I suspect he was laughing at us. His sense of humour was a very grim one. He appeared one morning and told the senior officer that three British soldiers were to be hanged that day. Of course there was a vigorous protest made; but, after a while, the Commandant smiled and went away. He then visited the senior French officer and told him that three Frenchmen were to behanged. After he had enjoyed his joke sufficiently, it came out that three Turks actually were hanged on that day. There was nobody to protest for them, poor devils! The Turkish method of hanging is to erect a tripod, rather like a strong, high camera-stand. The victim stands below the centre of this, a noose is passed round his neck, and the legs of the tripod are pushed closer and closer in until the man is lifted from the ground and strangled. The men at the Medrisseh often saw public execution take place, I believe.
But when spring grew fine enough we actually did go for several long walks, and saw the little yellow crocuses thrusting their heads up on the hill-sides. It was good to see flowers grow again. The wild flowers were wonderful round Afion. But that spring we saw little of them. The policy was changed again, and instead of being allowed out for walks in the country, we were allotted a little corner of one of the hills overlooking the town. Here we used to march, twice a week, and sit for an hour or two on the grass. It was steep and rocky, and there was nothing else to be done there. People used to take books out there, or pencils and paper and try to draw the one view. Then we would walk back to tea, through the slums of Afion, down narrow roads, past hutsand graveyards, past kitchen middens where dead cats’ and horses’ skulls lay, and where children played: sturdy, grimy little urchins who used to abuse us, and make their favourite cutthroat sign, drawing their baby hands across their necks.
I forget when the policy was changed again. It was always being changed. Capricious and wavering as thistledown. But in the summer we had quite a lot of liberty. We used to gather huge armfuls of purple larkspur, pink orchis, and yellow dog-roses. It was a good time for most of us, but early in the summer five officers were suddenly taken from their friends and shut up in a separate house in the Armenian quarter. They were allowed a short time twice daily for exercise in about 50 yards of the street, but for the rest were no better off than if they were in gaol. They were not released until about Christmas time. All this was because the Commandant suspected them of planning to escape.
The Upper Camp grew a great deal larger that year. All the Russians came back again, and with them a great many more Russian officers who had been interned at Sivas for several years previously. From Yozgat, too, a large number of British officers came, among whom were two of the three who had escaped in March, 1916.From being a camp of one British house and one French, the Upper Camp now spread the whole length of one street, and into two neighbouring by-streets. The whole community of prisoners in that camp lived in Armenian houses.
My personal opinion is that the camps as a whole lost interest a great deal after this. They certainly became more respectable, but the character of the place altered. It improved on the whole, but it was duller. In the old days we had at least this in common, that we were all different; we had all come into Turkey in different ways and at different times. Now that queer distinction disappeared, for most of the new-comers were from Kut, the senior officers in nearly all of the houses were from Kut, and Kut rather dominated the conversation. We old-timers were a little sick of Kut. They were mostly old regular soldiers, and senior to the rest of us. Let me hasten to say that I have never met a nicer lot of men. That was part of the difficulty. They were nicer than we were. But they had all led the same sort of lives before the war, and during the war. They had all fought in the same battles, and been in the same siege. They had all the same adventure to tell. I have great friends among them, and I hope they will smile if ever they read this. But the old-timerswill smile, too, and recognize the truth that is in me.
One result of this influx was that we all became very unsettled. The fact was that we had stagnated too long, and were growing very queer. We were used to new prisoners dropping in one or two at a time, and trying to teach us how to be prisoners. We knew how to be prisoners; we had learned it in a bitter school; so we smiled at these new babes in the wood, let them kick against the pricks a little, and took them to our bosoms. They made no difference. But you can’t take old regular lieutenant-colonels to your bosom, you have to wait until they take you to theirs. They do in time, at least these did. But they unsettled the whole place, and it was probably very good for us.
The result was a break up of many happy homes, a great deal of arrangement and rearrangement of houses, and when we settled down again it was like a new Parliament with a different cleavage of parties, and a strange Government.
At the end of all this I found myself in the Upper Camp, in a house of twelve almost equally divided between Kut and non-Kut. It was a very happy house. I don’t think anyone in it really hated any of the others; and, inprison, that means that you like each other very much, and will always be glad to meet each other again for the rest of your lives.
It was a very respectable house. Much too respectable to be popular. Indeed it was a byword for respectability, until Good Friday, 1918; but that is anticipating.
We thought, a lot of us, that the war was going to end that year, so who can say that we were downhearted?
Anaccurate description of all our ups and downs, of liberty enlarged and liberty snatched away again, and of all the fluctuating fortunes of the camp would be as dull as our lives were, and as little likely to be voluntarily undergone as was our captivity. That gem of time cannot be polished in all its facets, lest the observer should be dazzled. All that will be attempted here is some account of the main events. Another man, looking at that time from a different angle, might write a book that would hardly parallel this upon a single point, and yet be as true a picture.
We were all growing very weary indeed of being prisoners. Prices had continued their inexorable rise, and frequent mass meetings were held to discuss ways and means, for of course there were poor among us who could not afford to get money sent from home, and the pace ofthe convoy had to be that of the slowest ship. The only alternative would have been to break up into houses where men lived by bread alone, and houses where plutocrats resided who were able to import money at the disastrous rates obtainable. For it cost a very large sum to import money. A cheque on an English bank for £20 would produce a draft of £Tq.26. This would be paid in paper, and to find its true value must be divided by six; so by spending £20 a prisoner could obtain the value of £4 6s.8d.[2]
Of course we did import money, whatever it cost, even the poorest of us practically had to, unless he would freeze in the winter. The actual necessaries of life, food, fuel, and clothes of sorts, were always obtainable in Turkey; at a price. The country was so completely unorganized, and the railway so congested that food-stuffs might be plentiful in one district and almost unobtainable in another not far away.But where the food was grown it was always obtainable, and fortunately for us, Afion was in an agricultural district.
The winter of 1917-18 was a very severe one. Late in November the street that was our only playground and space for exercise was filled with snow. It ran east and west, overhung by a steep hill on the south, and deprived of sun by the opposite row of houses. No sunlight at all reached that street for quite three months, and during the whole of that time it was paved with snow that had been trodden hard.
There were refugees in the town that winter, people of strange appearance to us who were used to the Turks. They were said to be Kurds mostly, but there were certainly several tribes represented. For some reason or other they had been evacuated from some part of the Turkish Empire further east, and dumped down at Afion. Their clothes were those of a warm climate, and many of the little children had but one thin garment apiece. Nominally, I expect, they were supposed to be fed by their predatory Government: actually they were on or over the verge of starvation. We used to see them from our windows, and on our comparatively rare passages through the town.
There is no sanitation in a Turkish town.All refuse is cast upon middens, which in the course of ages become great mounds. Houses do not last long in Turkey; they are but flimsily built and fires are very frequent. They decay or are destroyed by fire, and they are rebuilt upon these middens. I picked up a Roman coin once where a midden had been disturbed, for they are very old.
And one of the uses of these middens is to provide food for the utterly poor. These poor refugees used to haunt those hideous piles of decaying matter and pick food from them. Dogs and donkeys, children and buffalo calves, old women and cats, used to scramble and scrape for the last pieces.
We had a Rugby football that winter, and in a field by the river, another of the wide threshing floors, we began to play when the snow melted. There were some very good players, and we had one new prisoner who held, and I believe still holds, the ’Varsity record for both the 100 yards and the quarter-mile. There were several matches, and one very great triumph, when The Dardanelles played The World and beat it. There were so few to pick from that I played for the Dardanelles. Until that winter, the last game I had played was in Ceylon in 1902; and I went to bed for three daysafter the match. But we, the old-timers, beat the World and rejoiced exceedingly.
One other thing that happened that winter must be told, though it is painful to write it. There was a Russian named Constantine B., who had become estranged from the other Russians for a fault of his own. He was afterwards forgiven, and taken back, so it would not become me to say anything about it. For the time, however, he lived separately in a small house with a Russian anarchist and a Russo-Armenian thief, and the three of them were outlaws. Also they hated each other, and used to quarrel. One of their quarrels became acute enough to attract the attention of the Turkish Commandant, the infamous Maslûm Bey, who visited their house to make inquiries, and there lost his temper and struck Constantine B. Constantine was not really a bad fellow. He had done one bad thing, but he was out of place in that house. He was a man of about thirty, tall, well built, with very fair hair. A brave man, and quick-tempered. He put up his arm to protect himself, and he was lost. The Commandant accused him of trying to reach for his, the Turk’s, sword, and had him arrested.
Constantine B. was taken away from theofficers’ camp to the church where were some British soldiers; in the little courtyard where we used to box he was stripped and tied head downwards with his feet in the air. The Commandant stood by while Constantine was beaten upon the soles of the feet with raw hide whips until he fainted. An hour later he was beaten again until he lost consciousness once more. As they grew tired the Commandant called new hands to beat him; every Turk there had a turn at beating him. And, when he could feel no more, Maslûm Bey kicked and struck him all over, everywhere on his body, and spat upon him. Then he was taken into a dungeon and thrown upon a heap of quicklime where his face got burnt.
Maslûm’s cup was not yet full. Constantine recovered in time, though he is lame. Maslûm went on to his worst offence. He had flogged our men and the Russians. He had imprisoned British officers in filthy holes, for little or no cause. He had lied, and swindled, and stolen, and grown rich. He now proceeded to overstep even the line which a Turkish officer draws. All through the writing of this book there has loomed ahead of me the grave difficulty of dealing with Maslûm Bey’s greatest offence. It ought to be recorded, but I loathe doing it.Let those who can read between the lines. Some of the British soldiers were very young, fair-haired Saxon boys from Wessex. They had seen a vast deal of cruelty, and they knew how easy it was for Maslûm Bey to flog them, even to kill them, or to send them to places where they would almost certainly die. Four of these became the victims of the abominable wickedness of Maslûm. Under the shadow of a raw hide whip, in the hands of Turkish non-commissioned officers, they were his victims.
All these offences of Maslûm Bey, from the tragedy of Constantine downwards, were duly reported to England by code. The very names of the offences were squeezed into that code. I had the pleasure of sending the messages myself, and the framing of them. They got home safely, and our Government acted at once.
In the end we got rid of Maslûm Bey. He was court-martialled by a commission of utterly corrupt Turkish officers. The British soldiers bravely told their stories. I say bravely, for their lives hung by a hair. A British officer who knew Turkish equally bravely conducted the prosecution for our side; and his life hung by a hair too. But we got rid of Maslûm Bey. He was given five and a-half months’ simple imprisonment. Not six months, for that wouldhave involved loss of rank. His judges did not think he had deserved to lose rank.
That is why I watch the papers to see if Maslûm Bey has been hanged.
We used to stick up for ourselves in Turkey. At one time I knew how many commandants of prison camps were broken by the British in three and a-half years. But my memory is a prison-memory. It is like fishing in a well-stocked stream with a torn landing-net. When you have got a fish, there you see him plain enough; but more often you see but a gleam, and he is gone. The first Commandant of Afion was broken for swindling; the second broke himself by letting prisoners escape; the third was Maslûm Bey; and the fourth was a gentleman. British prisoners broke one Commandant at Kastamouni, and I believe another at Broussa, Russians broke one at Kutahia. And down the line, in the Taurus or beyond it, where there were no British officers, I believe our men broke more than one.
After Maslûm had gone we were very well treated. I don’t think that any prisoners could have expected to have a juster man to deal with than our new Commandant, Zeir Bey. Just think what an opportunity of regeneration Turkey lost in this war. Had the OttomanGovernment selected men like Zeir Bey to command each camp, they would have made friends for themselves not only all over the British Empire, but in France and her colonies, in Russia, in Italy and in Rumania. Instead of which they have made bitter enemies.
Our Indians had the greatest contempt and hatred for the Turks, all but a few who were traitors. There were some, a few, real traitors among the Indians; but there were many more who are much more to be pitied than blamed for some of the things they did. Their position was an exceedingly difficult one. Very many of them died, thousands of them; but the Turks were always trying to seduce them from their allegiance. There was even a paper printed in Hindustani by the Germans and given free to the Indians. The Sultan sent for Indian Mohammedan officers and gave them swords. One sturdy Pathan, Kutab Gul, went to prison rather than accept a sword. For the most part the Indians were kept at different stations from the British, at Konia and other places where they could get no guidance from their British officers, where no one knew their tongue, and where they could get no news of the war except such as was faked, and the usual bazaar rumours. And this went on for years. As they would themselvesadmit, Indian officers are in some respects very child-like people. They believe a lot of what they hear. We had our own means of communication outside, and we knew how to read between the lines of Germancommuniqués. Also we could read French, and in Turkey there are many papers printed in French for the polyglot peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. But the Indians had none of these means. For instance, if we read “The enemy attacked near Braye and was heavily defeated. By their self-abnegation our brave umteenth regiment of Bavarians threw the enemy back with bloody losses,” we knew what it meant. It was the obituary notice of the umteenth Bavarians, who had been wiped out. If thecommuniquéwent on to say, “Our line, according to a pre-arranged plan, now stretches from X to Y,” we knew just how far the Germans had retreated. If our maps did not show the places, someone among the officers, either British or French, generally knew them. But how were the Indians to know that? They learned Turkish and read the Turkish papers, but that was no good. The Turkish method of camouflaging news is not the same as the German. It is better. They just say nothing. They never admitted the fall of Bagdad. They just kept on saying nothing. So skilled were we ininterpreting the German news that I really believe we knew just as much about the war as the average officer outside. Our naval officers reconstructed the Battle of Jutland, boomed as a great German victory, so accurately that the real account we got at last seemed stale news. We certainly knew more about the war than the Turkish officers did locally; and they used to come and look at our great war maps drawn out on a large scale by Capt. Sandes, R.E., from innumerable scraps and pieces out of newspapers.
Sandes did three things. He wrote a book upon the Mesopotamian campaign, now with a publisher. He made maps, and he was the bandmaster. Among the later prisoners there were a number of musicians, and at least one really ambitious composer who wrote many songs and an oratorio. There were three violins and a guitar in the orchestra, and there used to be excellent Sunday concerts in the Yozgat house at the top of the street, which was our Albert Hall. There were also several prisoners who sang really well. This last year saw a great renaissance in the theatrical world too. There was a revolt against the bondage of the old border-line jokes, and an attempt to substitute wit for wickedness. The men in the churchused to get up plays, too. Maslûm Bey was a great patron of the theatre, and would save the best actors from being sent away on working parties. He used to bring parties of veiled Turkish women to watch their plays from the gallery. Behind the altar were dark passages on either side, built in the thickness of the wall, and well adapted for the wings of the stage. What he liked best were love scenes, and he used to send down messages in the middle of the acting commanding the performers to make love more briskly.
With the passing of Maslûm we came to the end of our worst troubles. The new Commandant was not so incurably Asiatic. He realized that prisoners, like other men, love life, and freedom, and the open sky. That summer we had a wide and high hill-side made free to us. We could spend the whole day there if we liked. The Lower Camp had an even better recreation ground in a rocky hill just beyond their houses. We were allowed out in smaller parties and for longer distances. Smaller parties was a very great gain, for to walk out in a “crocodile” is so unpleasant that it is almost better to stay indoors. We used to get a sentry, and go off into the hills with our lunch, and picnic all day. And as we could go in several directions therewas not much crowding. There was fishing in the stream, and bathing in a big pool, and sketching along the valley above the pipe-line. It was by far the best time we ever had in Turkey, and all because England and her Allies were winning the war. For it certainly was that consideration which caused them to send us Zair Bey.
Among the prisoners there were some who said, “When we win the war the Turks will massacre us all.” But those among us who knew the East said, “When we win the war the Turks will lick our boots and feed out of our hands.” We were right. Had welostthe war it would have been quite another matter, and this history would never have been written.
It was different now from the old days when Toomy and I used to sit by a charcoal brazier and plan revenge. Our great scheme was to introduce rabbits into Anatolia: the country was suitable, and they were to overrun the whole land, worse than in Australia, and eat up all the young crops. We also thought of water hyacinth in the Tigris and Euphrates. But we were winning the war now, and these guerilla operations would not be necessary. But we never thought the end was as near as it proved.
Whilein Turkey I only saw Italian prisoners once. They were locked into railway wagons, and when they tried to peer out through the barred windows a German N.C.O. brutally thrust at their faces with his stick. They were stated to have elected to come to Turkey rather than to remain in Austria, where food was short. They were on their way to work in a mine in the vilayet of Aidin.
At one time there were a good many Serbs in Afion, but we saw very little of them. Those I saw were apparently dying of starvation but they seemed to be cheerful folk.
There were nine French officers at Afion, and, except for one who spent a long time in a Constantinople hospital, they were with us the whole time. They and the English were on the best of terms throughout, and they were a very nice lot of fellows indeed. They were most studiouspeople and only one of them wrote a book. One of them, however, read through Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” three times, besides devouring every other history he could obtain, and we had many books. We had a large library of general fiction, recruited from parcels, and we had a fairly large reference library of solid works, partly from parcels and partly from the Education Department at home. And, between them, the French must have read nearly all of those hundreds of books, ranging from “The Way of an Eagle” to Mahan’s “Sea Power.”
The French were extraordinarily generous, too, in giving up their time to teach their language to Englishmen. Very few, if any, of them had not several English pupils, and one ran a large class. With only one exception they could all speak English fluently long before most of us learned much French.
Our pronunciation was, of course, a mystery to them, nor was it to be wondered at. Their house was too large for them alone, and Britishers who wished to study French joined their mess. They had at one time Australians, a Canadian, a Lancashire man, and a Scot, and each of them spoke English in a different way. No wonder the French found it difficult.
For a whole year once the French were notallowed out farther than that strip of street, sunless and frozen in the winter, dusty in the summer, and crowded all the year round. The pretext was a reprisal for some imagined wrong done to Turkish prisoners in France. We suffered from a continual threat of reprisals like this. Six Englishmen were once imprisoned for months in a loathsome hole in Constantinople for some crime of our Government, probably invented, and one of the six died as a result. And there were other minor cases of the same kind. It is useless for a civilized people to swap reprisals with savages: the savages will win every time.
The French temperament was totally different from the English. They used to get extraordinarily elated at times, and at other times they became desperately depressed. We did both of these things too, but our pendulum was longer and did not swing so suddenly. In the great German offensive of the spring of 1918 we refused to be downhearted. “They will take Paris!” the French would cry. “Very likely,” we would reply; “perhaps we are leading them on.” There was unpleasantness over this kind of divergence, and they would say despairingly, “Oh! you bloody English! You do not understand.” But no real quarrel ever resulted. The most frequent offender was an Irish major, who assiduouslystudied French. His joy was to lead his tutor to the verge of hysterics by calculated callousness regarding German victories. The poor tutor would scream at him, but they were really the best of friends. “Unless I rouse him,” the major would say, “he won’t speak fast enough to give me the practice in conversation that I require.”
I shall never forget a scene in the church, where, by the way, the French beat us at all points in quiet endurance of a detestable experience. A certain French officer resented having his belongings searched, and certain articles of Turkish clothing “stolen” from him. In revenge he shaved off his moustache, fitted a large newspaper cocked hat upon his head, and strutted fiercely up and down the central aisle, looking the very personification ofrevanche. He was a tiny man, very clever, and a great mathematician. Why he did it the Lord alone knows, but he did; and he felt as one embarking upon a forlorn hope. There was not a smile in the affair—on his side—from beginning to end.
The French senior officer was a very fine man, one of the best-read and all-round best-informed men I have ever met, and he ran his rather difficult mixed French and British house tactfully and well.
Utterly different were the Russians. To begin with, a great many of them were not prisoners of war at all, but the officers and engineers of Black Sea trading vessels. These unfortunates had not been allowed to leave Constantinople when they wished to, about a week before war was declared, and they were older prisoners than any of us. “Comme vous êtes jeune!” said one to me when I told him I had just completed my third year. He had done nearly four. Then they belonged to many nationalities, some of them peoples one had hardly heard of before the war: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles, Polish Jews, Cossacks, Georgians, Russian Armenians, Russian Greeks, Russian Italians, Great Russians and Little Russians, and others I forget.
Their senior officer was a Commander in the Black Sea fleet, a very nice, quiet, friendly man of about fifty. He had lost every single thing in the world except the few articles of clothing remaining to him in Turkey, and he knew not where to turn after the war. All his money had gone: he received no pay from his Government, for there was no Government. He had had no news of his relations since the revolution swallowed them up, and he said he knew no way of earning his living except on a ship of war; yet he was cheerful in a rather plaintive way. PoorCommander Burikoff! I hope he has found some haven of refuge.
On the whole, the Russians, as I must continue to call them, kept very much to themselves, though there were exceptions to this general rule. They spoke many tongues, but few of them knew any English, and not very many of them French. Uncle Vodka used to talk to us in pigeon-Turkish, and a few of the British knew a little Russian, notably two young Australians. Australians beat all varieties of British in their search for knowledge. The Russians were bitterly poor. They had no Embassy money, for they had no protecting Embassy. How they managed to live at all was very wonderful. The sailors had started with full kits, unlike prisoners of war, who were taken in what they have on; but they had gradually sold their clothes for food until they had not much left. The Turks did not actually let them starve, but they went very near it, and in the winter they nearly froze. We helped them sometimes, but they were too proud to be helped much, and we had not much to give, there were so many of them. In the summer of 1918 they used to go in gangs to the river, armed with every conceivable kind of drag-net, and sweep that river clean. Fish they caught in large quantities and ate them; it was about the onlymeat they got: and they caught crayfish, which they sold to the British. They did not emulate some of the British, who caught frogs and ate them, so far as I know. Perhaps there was no sustenance in frogs. I ate one one day, but he must have been the wrong kind. It was said that they ate cats and I’m sure I hope they did. The French used to eat the tortoises that scour the plains of Anatolia.
My best friend among the Russians was a colonel, a Georgian prince. He got me to teach him English, and he would write down the equivalent of a word in Russian, French, German, Polish, or Georgian quite indiscriminately. He was a fine, brave little fellow; dark, muscular, and astonishingly fiery. I expect he is with Denikin’s army now, fighting Bolsheviki. “Ces sales types,” as he used to call them. Years ago, during some minor outbreak in Russia, his squadron had arrested Lenin and brought him in, and the colonel spent vain hours in wishing he had slain him then and there. Europe would probably echo his lament.
If Maslûm escapes the gallows, woe betide him if ever he meets the Russian colonel. He will be killed inevitably. After the frightful punishment of Constantine B. the colonel protested vigorously, and got the poor fellow put into hospital.Not very long afterwards, a sort of commission of Turkish officials, accompanied, I believe, by a member of the Spanish Embassy, visited Afion to look into the question of the Russian prisoners’ treatment. Maslûm Bey did not wish his conduct to be exposed, so he visited the colonel and had the effrontery to offer him a bribe of an oke (2¼ lb.) of sugar to say nothing about it. The little man was furious, and swore that if ever he met that man with arms in his hand he would kill him on sight. I sincerely trust he will be robbed by the British of any such opportunity. When the commission came he spoke up at once, but nothing came of it except that the colonel was locked up for about a week. He had a little house to himself up a side street, and I often used to visit him there and devise ways of persuading him to accept little presents of tea or other things from parcels; for he never got parcels, and was miserably poor. It was really quite a dangerous thing to do, and I had never to let anyone else see. He was about as safe to handle as a live bomb with the pin out. The head of the commission referred to above accused him of secretly handing a document to the Spaniard. The Colonel had not done so, and he said so, expecting his word to be accepted. But the fool of a Turk, who had probably never met an honest man in hislife, expressed himself still unsatisfied. Up flared the colonel. “Search the man!” he said. “If you find it on him I will commit suicide. If not, you shall.” The Turk apologized.
There was a Russo-Armenian, a sneak-thief, and he robbed an Indian officer of some tobacco. The Indian suspected him and laid a trap into which he fell. I saw the Russian colonel tell him off in the street, while the man trembled and went pale green, and afterwards the Colonel told me what he said.
“Have you a revolver?” he asked. “No, sir.”
“Have you a good razor?” “No, sir.”
“Then borrow a rope and hang yourself. You have brought shame on the Russian officers. If you are alive at the end of the war, I shall send you a pistol. Use it. If you fail, I shall send a man to kill you, for you are too base for me to fight.”
He was a dangerous little man, but he had many friends among the English, and his ambition was to ride in the Grand National. May he win through!
He had been in the Imperial Guard, and knew all the Petrograd Court gossip. One day, during the English lesson, he saw the announcement of the death of a certain Grand Duke in thepaper, and told me a tale about him. The Grand Duke was a parallel, in position only, to the Duke of Connaught, for he was an uncle of the Tsar, and he was Governor of Turkestan. At the Tsar’s coronation, it was his privilege to hold the crown during part of the ceremony, and, while doing so, he became enamoured of a vast ruby which it contained—call it the Kohinur to complete the parallel. The stone glistened, and he desired it very greatly, so he bit it from its setting and hid it in his cheek. But he was observed, and brought to book. He was required to take up his residence in Siberia; and here the story ought to end, “and he lived happily for long afterwards.” Perhaps he did, for the colonel told me that, being already married, in Siberia he committed bigamy, to annoy his nephew.
Russians are very direct people. When they desire a thing they straightway pursue it. There was a very large Russian officer in Afion who went by the name of Uncle Vodka. He was an old man, a dug-out, and he fought at the siege of Plevna in 1877-79. He was about 6 ft. 5 in. high, and very huge. He had a long, broad beard, and looked like a picture of the Tsar’s coachman. He was a direct person. He conceived the ambition of colouring his body, as a man might colour a meerschaum pipe, and hechose the hill-side to do it on. There he would lie in the sun without a single stitch of clothing on his great body, which must have been nearly a rood in area, and he would turn himself round and round so as to make the colour even all over. We used to climb the hill on purpose to see him, and he was always pleased to meet us. He was a venerable figure. You might have taken him for an archdeacon.
Among all these Russians, differing as they did in caste and kind, there was one thing they held in common. Despite the mother revolution and all its children, they still held their belief in Russia, great and united. Technically speaking, many of them were the subjects of countries now at war with each other and with us. But, although the conditions they lived in were far worse than ours in the matter of overcrowding, they clove together as Russians. I studied this question, and used to get one to interpret for others, so that my survey might be based broadly; and in that one respect I found them all the same. There are no boundaries, they would say, between Russia and Ukrainia, or between Russia and the Cossacks. Poland they excepted, and, to some extent, Georgia; but they denied that the new divisions of the rest of Russia could endure. There was neither racial, physical, nor lingual frontierthey maintained. And when I asked whether they did not find it difficult to avoid thorny subjects, now that their country was giving birth to republics almost daily, and was torn in pieces by internal war, they said No; they had all been taken prisoner as allies of each other and of us, and allies they still were. The only exceptions, among the officers, were a hybrid anarchist who joined the Turks, and the Russo-Armenian sneak-thief.